inlooking #016: In communication
20240129: talking, laughing, forgetting
That’s Mt. Shasta beneath those clouds.
classes
proximity
five books
1,000 words
three more books
your pledge to me, and mine to you
Teaching
I mentioned last time that I would be teaching a short class in the personal essay. Turns out I’m teaching not one but three of these over the next few months, two at the Grotto and one at an extension program run through San Francisco State University. Very quickly, some details:
Feb. 6 & 13 at the Writers Grotto, I’m teaching A Crash Course in the Personal Essay, which is just what it says on the tin. We’ll spend two sessions of two hours each unpacking a few great personal essays and looking at what makes them tick. Students also receive a critique of one of their essays after the class.
On Sunday, April 28, I’ll be doing a kind of one-shot version of this class, also at the Writers Grotto, as part of their Craft & Career lecture series—though I’m hoping for more student participation than the word “lecture” implies.
In April and May it looks like I’ll also be teaching a longer, six-week look at essays and personal writing, a deeper dive titled Intimate Landscapes: Readings in the Personal Essay. (No listing for this one yet.) This class is through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at SF State University, which is geared toward the 50+ crowd. (That’s me!) I taught my class on To the Lighthouse there last year, and had a great time. Classes are held during the day, rather than evening or late afternoon, so the students are mostly retirees—which means they bring a lifetime of learning and experience to the classroom discussions, making for a really rich experience.
Besides all being about the personal essay, these classes are also all in person. There is, of course, something about sitting in a classroom with a group of people that’s very different to doing so online (besides the fact that it can limit the audience somewhat). There’s so much more information that passes between people in physical proximity, so much more to be seen and heard and felt, and so there’s so much more one can learn and get out of the experience. When I used to give talks about this stuff, back when I was spending a lot of time looking at virtual worlds and other online interactions, I had a slide of concentric circles that illustrated how much richer communication gets when you move from text to audio to video to face-to-face (with virtual worlds, in their most ideal iteration, falling somewhere between video and face-to-face), each being a superset of what’s possible in the previous mode, a broader bandwidth over which to communicate. Looking back, it occurs to me that my slide did not include still pictures on its spectrum of communication modes. These are said to be worth 1,000 words, so perhaps they appear early on the chart—somewhere between “text message or short email” and “essay or book”?
Thousands and thousands
Speaking of physical proximity: I took a couple of long drives with my friend L the other weekend. On Friday we drove from the Bay Area to Portland, and Sunday we drove back. (More about what we were doing in Portland in another letter—probably.) We were in an electric car, which made the drive take a bit longer than it might have otherwise, what with stopping to charge along the way. And there were a couple of bookstores we felt obligated to look in on (specifically: Book Exchange in Ashland and Smith Family Bookstore in Eugene). On the way back we were deluged with rain, and took a food detour that was longer than it should have been (but also quite satisfying). The upshot of all this is that we spent around 30 hours in a car together over the course of three days, sometimes listening to a podcast or an audiobook, but mostly just talking.
That’s a lot of conversation. Many thousands of words.
If a picture’s worth a thousand words, the reverse is not necessarily true. Not every thousand words can be captured in a picture. Thousands and thousands of words passed between L and myself in those thirty hours, and I would say that very few of them were susceptible to picturing. That’s because most of them described internal states: states of mind, states of being, states of feeling or knowing. These states have effects in the world, of course, and this was a lot of what we spoke about. The world, as well, has an impact on these states of mind, and this question was also central: Phenomena like depression, anxiety, loneliness, nostalgia, avoidance, addiction, spirituality—to what extent do these things arise from within, and to what extent are they products of our actions and the actions of the world around us? How much control do we have over these things? Which of these constitute our identity, and which are merely transitory, temporary deflections from a path that has too much momentum to divert for long? And, another important question: Are there things in the world (drugs, therapies, friendships, undertakings, events) that can give us access to the more essential things within us—if there even are any essential things? What constitutes our essence, anyway, and how malleable can it be and still be part of the core of who we are?
Words about words
I want to find a way to write about our conversation. This isn’t it (this is too filled with abstraction), this is just a flyer, a gesture, a teaser of sorts, a practice run, maybe only a pin stuck in something to be examined later. Part of the problem is that I’m not sure of the model such writing would take. I am reminded of being in graduate school (which was not so long ago), and discovering, in all the voluminous reading I was doing then, new models for personal writing. One I encountered early on that very much opened my eyes to a range of possibility was Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby. Not that this would necessarily look like that, but only to say there are models for everything—or there can be, once we invent them.
There’s another interesting model in a book I just finished reading: Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which—at least tangentially—touches on some of the concerns mentioned above: the tension between memory and exile, the struggle to retain some essence of a place or person (whether oneself or another) in the face of personal and/or political upheaval, how we form connections and what those may mean.
The novel is also concerned with language and the shape of story, which of course puts it right up my street. I love books about writing and about saying things, about expression of whatever kind, especially when they masquerade as books about something else—about memory and exile and sex and innocence and joy, in Kundera’s case. Or are those only other words for expression?
One more great book about expression before I’m out of here and on to whatever I think I’m actually supposed to be doing. In my class on To the Lighthouse (itself a book about nothing if not about perspective, perception, and expression, if you ask me) I always try to talk about James Lord’s book on sitting for the great Swiss painter and sculptor Alberto Giacometti, A Giacometti Portrait. Really it’s a book about how tormented Giacometti was in trying to get his vision onto the canvas. This is a book I first read probably thirty years ago, and it seems to contain just as many insights as it ever did, perhaps more. It’s a book about nothing but expression, about the struggle to convey one’s impressions in an accurate way—true, that is, to themselves, not necessarily to life, for aren’t our impressions of our experience more true than the experience itself? These start to sound like silly questions. But aren’t those the most fun to contemplate?
I have so much more to say about this (as have so many before me), and perhaps it will be a letter of its own at some point, but for now I’ll leave you with this brief passage from Lord’s book:
…one began to feel that, indeed, the entire future did depend on the possibility of reproducing exactly by means of brushes and pigment the sensation of vision caused by a particular aspect of reality. This, of course, is by definition an impossibility and yet for that very reason is endlessly enticing and valid…
Pay, pal
Like the rest of the right-thinking world, I have been considering moving off Substack because of its moderation issues. (Or should that be “left-thinking world”?) I am still considering it. In the meantime, a kind friend recently took advantage of a feature I didn’t realize Substack offered: you can apparently pledge a paid subscription that’s only activated one the author turns on paid subscriptions (which I haven’t done yet). I had no idea! So perhaps I’ll turn on monetization at some point—although I suspect the posts will also continue to be available for free. I’m pretty sure I won’t be making a mint anytime soon, but it would be interesting to get a free cappuccino every month out of writing this thing. Or perhaps I’ll move to a different platform before that happens.
Regardless, I hope to be putting this out more regularly: at least once a month, possibly twice. It takes me a hopelessly long time to write, though, I think because it doesn’t have much of a format. (There’s that problem with models again.) I’d be interested to hear what people want to hear. Any ideas welcome.
Til next time,
Wallace