Want, worry, and telling our story
Riffing of George Saunders a bit
Again, here is a link to George Saunders’s newsletter and a specific post on worry and artistry. This guy is a hero.
Sometimes I wake up and I can’t tell if I really feel awful or if I just want to feel that way. It’s as if I am two selves: a “being-self” who knows how to live and a “wanting-self” who gets in the way of the “being-self” with constant roadblocks of narration, rumination, and worry. And it is true that want is always bound up in worry. Worry can express itself as care or it can rear its head as something uglier: disingenuous judgement, insincertiy, paralysis.
In the short-term, if the wanting-self were right about the actual state of affairs, I would have reason to lay in bed a little longer, postpone my run until the afternoon,, avoid those small, important activities of daily life. Children who fake illness to skip school know this intuitively. They also know that if they exploit this wanting-self for his charm too frequently, he will soon be seen through, exposed for what he truly is: a phony. Psychologists, too, will point out that if we want something to be true badly enough its almost as good (or bad) as the real thing. Tread lightly in wanting because if the wanting-self always wins, we might never get on with our live. We’d all be Tristram Shandy, trying to tell a story of ourselves but perpetually stuck at the beginning.
There are many analogs for this divided self. My favorites come from W. Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, the short fiction of George Saunders, and certain strains of Zen Buddhism. Gallwey’s Inner Game was particularly impactful for me as a distance runner in college for its emphasis on the ideas of relaxed concentration and flow. Now, in my “writing-life” I am reminded of Gallwey's wisdom on the divided self which pits a subconscious player against a conscious thinker. In writing terms, I suppose the subconscious is the writer and the conscious is the writer’s own reader who is sometimes a quiet voice whispering revision advice and is sometimes a bullying critic casting doubt on even the act of putting pen to paper. Saunders is especially smart on this as well. It’s not a matter of killing the conscious self, hushing the voice of worry, but setting the “dial to find the right setting for us.”
Because, try as we might, we cannot get rid of this voice, a voice my college coach called the voice of limitation. All we can do is raise the volume of the other voice, the voice of possibility. Accept the advice from the worrying voice of limitation and then cast it aside as nothing more as another thought which we have little control over. In experiences of both CBT and meditation, I have come to realize (again and again, because it often takes constant reminders) that we might not be able to control these thoughts of want and worry, but we can choose how we respond to their inputs. The point is not to become unthinking automatons who just simply exist, but to see clearer the thoughts as thoughts and not determinations of our life and its story.
What’s this all about
These stories we tell ourselves, be them tales of triumph or woe, pose an interesting metaphysical problem; namely, who is telling the story? When Gallwey writes about tennis players talking to themselves, who are these athletes really speaking with? Which is the real self, the one playing or the one talking? For me, this is another misleading dichotomy and the feeling like we need to separate the two out only amplifies voice the distracting, wanting-self at the expense of the being-self. Call attention to their differences and all you’ll get is an argument. Acknowledge both of their contributions with equal weight and you’ll hopefully engage in a more generative dialogue. And that’s what story-telling is all about right?
We all want our lives and our actions to be about something, to some extent. A quick Google search of The Inner Game will provide you with links that claim to answer questions such as “What is the main point of the book?” You’ll read everywhere how a surface-level interpretation of the book as about tennis will miss a deeper reflection on the divided self. Thus, the book is supposed to be about much more than just tennis. And to large extent it is. But the more we mine for meaning the more we expose ourselves to the risks the book seeks to avoid. That is, we want a nice, neat, straightforward message instead of an extended metaphor about tennis, but by insisting on narrative we miss the natural unfolding of the story and its wisdom is eclipsed.
The other night I watched Wong Kar-wai’s heartbreaking romance Happy Together and then quickly indulged my favorite and, indeed, my worst post-screening habit, which is, reading the Wikipedia article about the film as the credits are rolling. This need to know that the film is “about” is both entirely normal and totally insane. In one sense, I knew exactly what the film is about; I had just finished watching it not moments ago. It’s about two ill-fated lovers, trapped in a cycle of love and betrayal who can neither live happily together nor successfully be apart. A classic trope, as old as time, plus it was so beautifully painted on the screen with cinematographer Christopher Doyle’s lush style, all of this being enough for me to say to myself “good flick” and go to bed.
But instead, I had to know more and when I read that the movie could be seen as an allegory for the British handover of Hong Kong I felt at once the electricity of discovery and the gut-punch of regret. I was charged with the feeling excess and sorry for having reduced the work of art into something more practical, more mundane. And yet, is it not also an act of love to want to know more, to attach and ascribe more meaning than is obvious? We do this all the time with other objects of our affection. The St. Christopher I wear is more than just metal around my neck. For one thing, it was a gift, an it therefore carries a reminder, the presence of its giver, my mother. But more than that, it affords me a story of “this and not that.”
Likewise, our friends and loved ones are dear to us, yes out of biochemical necessity, but also for the stories we share in. Italo Calvino writes, early in If upon a winter’s night a traveler, “everything they say is the continuation of things already said.” Sometimes I feel like more than 50% of the talking I do with my friends is just the retelling of old jokes or remembering things we’ve done before, even if the math on this doesn’t add up. Yet this constant rehashing of old material is what sustains our bonds and it’s also a hell of a lot of fun to take part in. Just get us going on the time we got pulled over at 1 AM in the middle of Ohio or the night we slept our cars outside Birmingham.
The stories we tell ourselves are iterative, like the fish that grows in size each time the angler recounts the story of his catch. We make something new of what is already there. Even if it implies a wanting of sorts, a nostalgic glossing of the faded reality. So, too with worrying and writing. We want to get as close to thing itself as it will allow us but each sentence inevitably narrows our horizon of possibility and we fret over the stories ability to say “what we really mean.” Again, a false dichotomy. We try to say something about which nothing (or anything) can be said and in doing so create something entirely new.
In a somewhat apocryphal story, T.S. Eliot, when asked what he meant by a certain line of poetry, replied simply “I meant what I said.” If he had meant something else, he would have written something else, or he wouldn’t have chosen poetry as his medium. In this way, to quote Marshal MacLuhan, “the medium is the message.” When we reach for more as in self-narration or in Wiki-splaining, we do some damage to the work of art and its meanings. We singularize them, turning their ineffable qualities into something more universally legible.
When we demand explanations and justifications for our own behaviors a similar thing happens. We confuse the story of our life for the thing itself and in so doing chase ourselves with judgements, positive or negative. I am a creature of habit, as any one close to me can attest, so any deviation from my routines begs the question of why. Think of the emotional exhaustion inflicted when a worrier such as myself has to provide answers for every departure from his normal routine. In this way, worry feeds on worry. And so too with running, writing, tennis, or watching great films. The more we worry the more we indulge the impulse to transcribe, to justify, to give voice to the wanting-self.
If on a winter’s night a tennis player
Italo Calvino’s anti-novel If on a winter’s night a traveler exploits this tension between the wanting-self and another, reading-self. Exploits might seem too harsh a verb but read it and see for yourself just how frustrating it is to get hung-up on the narrator’s interjections and interpretations while you, the reader, care to get on with the story. The interruptions frustrate our expectations (a nasty word, expectations) refusing to tell one cohesive story even to the point of playing tricks on the reader like leading them to believe they are in control of the story or that the narrative will unfold one way only to demonstrate neither of these promises are true. This is in part a function of the intermittent second-person narration and in part the result of our informal training which teaches us to think in stories and of ourselves as protagonists.
However, out of these frustrations and that feeling of want for cohesion, a new story emerges, a story of the story, in which we do play an active role. The book is no longer about a traveler in a train station two families at Kudgiwa, but about each reader’s experience of the text. On a whole other level of meta, we become a character, transcending that line between wanting-self and being-self. To return to The Inner Game, there is no longer the game and the player but they are one in the same. They are Yeats’s dancer in “Among School Children” who’s artistry cannot be parsed into creator and creation but are inseparable.
Calvino’s thesis is that we the reading-self is as much as a character, a participant in any story’s creation as the one’s only extant on the lines of the page. “There is a boundary line: on one side are those who make books, on the other those who read them…This boundary line is tentative, it tends to get erased.” When we read, we merge with the story and it becomes as much about our experience as it is about the plot, whatever that might be.
This morning, I did as I sometimes do on lazy weekends and I went for a walk to the hill that overlooks town. I usually do this to wake up and energize myself for the day ahead. Sometimes, though, I’ll pick up a stone from my neighbor’s lawn and carry it to the top to deposit in a mound of other carried stones. Today (for no particular reason) was a stone-carrying day. Immediately, the walk transforms into a story by virtue of its task, its action that needs to be carried out. Where I would normally notice whatever came into my view as I strolled, I now focused solely on the weight of the stone in my hands and delivering it to the mound at the top of the hill. I am no longer simply a walker, but a stone-carrier, I have an objective and am inviting judgement on my ability to execute it.
When I wake up with thoughts of feeling awful, the task then becomes trying to put the stone down and getting to work living.
Ramble on!
Here is a corny little playlist I used to get this post done.