I spent the last 11 weeks drawing the same still life. My marks trying to pin down what I saw. Each day for the first several weeks I’d come to it only to find my marks of the previous day not quite depicting what I saw in front of me. Only after frustratedly re-rendering the piece again and again did I realize my light source changed as the sun rose and fell. I could not hold a constant view on these objects.
So, then, the questions I posed to myself changed. How might I drawing something that changes? Everything changes. What about change is important to my drawing? How do changing conditions influence my ability to see? How might I become more attuned to changes as they influence the way I am seeing something? What about my reactions to changes as I view something is worth making into a mark? All these thoughts I found to parallel your musings about writing today.
In the end, I am trying to learn a nonverbal language to help me think about life. And, I’m just beginning…
I loved reading this, and it's such a beautiful way of making the abstract belief "writing helps you think more clearly!" into a sharper, clearer process. Making one's tentative, early, provisional ideas more concrete in writing ("unfolding" those ideas and beliefs) forces intellectual rigor—and it's a form of rigor that can't really exist as long as things are just sitting in the mind, unactualized and unarticulated.
I like this quite a bit, but kept wanting your examples to go deeper, showing a longer time slice of the progression from vague mental idea to initial written version to discovery of flaws to further improvement. You touched on this with regard to schooling but I kept wanting more / longer examples to illustrate the points. Perhaps fodder for a subsequent post?
I've just finished reading Michael Lewis' "The Undoing Project", about the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tverskey, and I thought of it while reading this wonderful essay, especially where you quote Lakatos:
"You are interested only in proofs which ‘prove’ what they have set out to prove. I am interested in proofs even if they do not accomplish their intended task. Columbus did not reach India but he discovered something interesting."
Lewis writes that, while Tversky enjoyed destroying bad arguments, Kahneman looked for places where a bad argument might actually be a good one. That is, the argument is flawed in this context, but it works in this other context; or (and this speaks to what you wrote about localised vs global problems) the argument has these specific flaws, but is there anything that stands up as true and therefore worth holding onto? This is how Lewis puts it:
"Danny would tell his students: 'When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.' That was his intellectual instinct, his natural first step to the mental hoop: to take whatever someone had just said to him and try not to tear it down but to make sense of it."
I like the idea that putting your thinking into writing forces to you make it rigid … you temper your thinking by forcing it to stand up to the application of thought over time, strengthening it as a result. And not just your thought, but the thought of your editor/reader. Putting it that way, I wonder if “rigid” is really the right word, or if “strong” might work better?
I'm so glad you're writing a series on this, Henrik. I've been long reckoning with the written word (especially through the vein of Leonard Shlain's Alphabet vs. the Goddess, Paul Kingsnorth's Savage Gods and David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous -- the possibility that my writing complex is divorcing me from 'real life') but all the while I've been using this process, the one you're writing about here, without fully knowing it. "Unsystematically," as you say. It seems to me that through this process, one can actually deepen into the stuff of one's real, lived life.
I'm finding myself especially interested in the softer elements of this process. For example, eyes "fog[ing] over" when rereading a passage where "something" is off. And of course, through unfolding, you find *what* is off -- it isn't some nebulous thing, you can pin it down. But that subtle pre-ception is very interesting.
I'm also interested in the value systems that are at play below the surface of this process, and the way "warring" values might shift and settle into integrated parts of a whole as we pin things down and unfold them. Through this process, we might find the authentic pearl that is that value (e. g. our children's deep personal development) and orient towards it, rather than getting stuck on single images of that value (e. g. a school that uses self-directed learning methods).
While the written word might be static, the thought that is produced by reading those words might not be (and that's the key). Let those words be a starting point for better communication and connection.
I spent the last 11 weeks drawing the same still life. My marks trying to pin down what I saw. Each day for the first several weeks I’d come to it only to find my marks of the previous day not quite depicting what I saw in front of me. Only after frustratedly re-rendering the piece again and again did I realize my light source changed as the sun rose and fell. I could not hold a constant view on these objects.
So, then, the questions I posed to myself changed. How might I drawing something that changes? Everything changes. What about change is important to my drawing? How do changing conditions influence my ability to see? How might I become more attuned to changes as they influence the way I am seeing something? What about my reactions to changes as I view something is worth making into a mark? All these thoughts I found to parallel your musings about writing today.
In the end, I am trying to learn a nonverbal language to help me think about life. And, I’m just beginning…
I loved reading this, and it's such a beautiful way of making the abstract belief "writing helps you think more clearly!" into a sharper, clearer process. Making one's tentative, early, provisional ideas more concrete in writing ("unfolding" those ideas and beliefs) forces intellectual rigor—and it's a form of rigor that can't really exist as long as things are just sitting in the mind, unactualized and unarticulated.
I like this quite a bit, but kept wanting your examples to go deeper, showing a longer time slice of the progression from vague mental idea to initial written version to discovery of flaws to further improvement. You touched on this with regard to schooling but I kept wanting more / longer examples to illustrate the points. Perhaps fodder for a subsequent post?
I've just finished reading Michael Lewis' "The Undoing Project", about the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tverskey, and I thought of it while reading this wonderful essay, especially where you quote Lakatos:
"You are interested only in proofs which ‘prove’ what they have set out to prove. I am interested in proofs even if they do not accomplish their intended task. Columbus did not reach India but he discovered something interesting."
Lewis writes that, while Tversky enjoyed destroying bad arguments, Kahneman looked for places where a bad argument might actually be a good one. That is, the argument is flawed in this context, but it works in this other context; or (and this speaks to what you wrote about localised vs global problems) the argument has these specific flaws, but is there anything that stands up as true and therefore worth holding onto? This is how Lewis puts it:
"Danny would tell his students: 'When someone says something, don’t ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of.' That was his intellectual instinct, his natural first step to the mental hoop: to take whatever someone had just said to him and try not to tear it down but to make sense of it."
I really enjoyed this piece! I found the suggestions really clear and tactical. Can't wait to try them. Thank you and excited for Part 2 :)
I like the idea that putting your thinking into writing forces to you make it rigid … you temper your thinking by forcing it to stand up to the application of thought over time, strengthening it as a result. And not just your thought, but the thought of your editor/reader. Putting it that way, I wonder if “rigid” is really the right word, or if “strong” might work better?
I'm so glad you're writing a series on this, Henrik. I've been long reckoning with the written word (especially through the vein of Leonard Shlain's Alphabet vs. the Goddess, Paul Kingsnorth's Savage Gods and David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous -- the possibility that my writing complex is divorcing me from 'real life') but all the while I've been using this process, the one you're writing about here, without fully knowing it. "Unsystematically," as you say. It seems to me that through this process, one can actually deepen into the stuff of one's real, lived life.
I'm finding myself especially interested in the softer elements of this process. For example, eyes "fog[ing] over" when rereading a passage where "something" is off. And of course, through unfolding, you find *what* is off -- it isn't some nebulous thing, you can pin it down. But that subtle pre-ception is very interesting.
I'm also interested in the value systems that are at play below the surface of this process, and the way "warring" values might shift and settle into integrated parts of a whole as we pin things down and unfold them. Through this process, we might find the authentic pearl that is that value (e. g. our children's deep personal development) and orient towards it, rather than getting stuck on single images of that value (e. g. a school that uses self-directed learning methods).
While the written word might be static, the thought that is produced by reading those words might not be (and that's the key). Let those words be a starting point for better communication and connection.
Yes, it seems that paradox is key. The way we think is being challenged…