what-a-novelty

[what-a-novelty]

On incommunicability

I recently came across this footnote in The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

"The point is that Buddhahood, Enlightenment, cannot be communicated, but only the way to Enlightenment. This doctrine of the incommunicability of the Truth which is beyond names and forms is basic to the great Oriental, as well as to the Platonic, traditions. Whereas the truths of science are communicable, being demonstrable hypotheses rationally founded on observable facts, ritual, mythology, and metaphysics are but guides to the brink of a transcendent illumination, the final step to which must be taken by each in his own silent experience..."

This reminded me of some recent conversations I've had with D, one while watching the Neuralink announcement, and the other while we were sitting on the porch, looking out at the trees and clouds. I asked if he thought it was possible to think without language, since when I try to conceive of a thought that is inexpressible, I find myself grasping at the nebulous form of something I'm not even sure is there.

I've seen two dominant perspectives in popular discourse: (1) what is truly sublime, important, and of meaning, lies beyond the realm of rationality, therefore does not lend itself to linguistic expression and communication; (2) the material world is all there is, there is nothing transcendent, everything can be understood (eventually).

Within the first camp, there's a dramatic insistence of something outside the realm of ordinary experience. In myth, in poetry, in religion and all our ancient stories, we speak of an unseen world. Dmitry in The Brothers Karamazov touches it. William James' definition of mystical experiences includes ineffability: that "no adequate report of its contents can be given in words".

One finds shades of this in mental breakthroughs and epiphanies: you can convey your path, but the emotional weight, the revelation itself, is lost. Likewise for value judgements that don't arise from articulable first principles: how does one explain why beauty, justice, and truth are important? It's baseless assertions all the way down.

The latter belief (let's call it, the rationalist's belief) still lends itself to the possibility that some things are incommunicable, or at least, hard to communicate, whether for lack of understanding (something to be discovered and refined, or proven wrong) or due to the limitations of language (low bandwidth; multiplicity – and fluidity – of definitions, meanings, and interpretations; contextual limitations).

One of my favorite short stories by Greg Egan describes a technology that can rapidly and precisely communicate one's position in conceptual space to another, thus circumventing this:

"But at the leading edge, now, we're creating words for concepts, emotions, states of mind, which might once have defied description altogether. With TAP, ultimately there's nothing a human being can experience which needs to remain ... ineffable, mysterious, incommunicable. Nothing is beyond discussion. Nothing is beyond analysis. Nothing is 'unspeakable'... And maybe in the long run, all the trial-and-error and misunderstandings, all the folk remedies of smiles and gestures, all the clumsy imperfect well-meaning attempts to bridge the gap, would be swept away by the dazzling torrent of communication without bounds."

Since this technology doesn't exist (yet), we use alternative means to demarcate the boundaries of our thought: offering example after example to encircle our positions, providing heaps of context and definition, using metaphor and poetry to convey the true weight of something...

I withhold judgement on whether all things will eventually fall into the communicable. At the least, I think it would require an evolution of our communication technologies and (probably) our epistemology. Time will tell whether we keep saying the same things over and over, in hope that one day we may finally say what we mean.

“In reality it is just the clearest, the most concrete, and most indubitable realities which escape language: not because they are vague but because language is… Poetry I take to be the continual effort to bring language back to the actual.” (CSL)

#thoughts #bookmarks

[what-a-novelty]

Freedom / Awe

the existentialist’s creed is freedom; the religious man’s is awe

#thoughts

[what-a-novelty]

Selves, in time

(5.10.20)

Late last night, I received a message from a name I didn't recognize. The notification bubble read,

"Hey Rachel, super random but I just saw this message that has been sitting in my message request box for like the last 7 years??? So sorry I never responded —"

I paused, trying to remember what message my younger self could have sent to a stranger on the internet. Instead of clicking on the message – which would mark it as read, which would make irreversible this confrontation of my past – I instead looked up this unfamiliar name on the internet, trying to guess from who they are now what I could have wanted to do with them all those years ago.

Seven years ago I still lived in Singapore, the city I grew up in, and in my memory I had scant contact with strangers on the internet on Facebook. The mental exercise proved futile.

I braced myself to read the message I sent in 2013:

"Hi <person>! I saw your comments on the post in the <college A> 2017 group regarding <college A>-<college B> cross admits...I'm wondering if you have any idea which school would be better for an (international) student...? I'm really torn between the two schools right now and both seem super awesome, but I can't fly over to the US to attend the admit weekends/<college A> days so I have no idea how to make my decision yikes :\ all help is appreciated THANK YOU :)"

Even now, on my third or fourth read, even after I've decided to share the message above with others in its blatant, barefaced expression, I feel my eyes skip over some of the words. I am reluctant to look at my past self squarely. Temporal distance separates us, and I wonder how I could have been so gauche, so sincere. It strikes me that embarrassment hinges on the perception of others, and is precipitated when, in a moment of self-awareness, I see myself as others see me. Or in this case, I see my past self through new eyes.

The feeling of self-mortification is not unfamiliar to me. I've kept a continuous streak of blogs from the age of 11 until now, and I joined Facebook earlier than I should have. My Goodreads account has traced 10 years of reading history. All that is to say, I have time and again stumbled into my past. Tracks all over the internet evince the evolution of my psyche.

Seeing my nieces' posts on Instagram gives almost the same effect. The people and platforms may have changed, but something feels familiar about the unbridled sentimentality they've afforded to friendship, that immoderate enthusiasm for pop culture, those unself-conscious attempts to memorialize feelings and moments that feel like they may escape us. As was the case for me, I suspect that this fervor correlates little with how long these passions will endure.

But I also recognize that I take their posts out of context: these were not crafted with an audience of older relatives in mind. Their audience of friends, peers, and admirers see them differently than we do. They participate in a conversation we are not privy to. In the same way, when I read the words of my past self, I can no longer hear the chorus of voices around her whose echoes have long died off. Perhaps the multiplicity of facades we erect is the cause of embarrassment: we are caught in the wrong context, with the curtains down. Perhaps the people who look on their past selves without embarrassment are the people whose selves have the most integrity across audiences and spanning time. Or perhaps they are the ones whose audiences never leave. [1]

As for me, things change.

For one, what seemed so uncertain years ago is now part of the irreversible, irrefutable past. In an post on Livejournal dating back to January 2013, I wrote,

I just wanna be somewhere unfamiliar and exciting and experience ~*adventure*~. WHO KNOWS, since I probably won't be studying overseas (or will I...? only time will tell haha sigh) y'know NOW IS THE TIME

This was four months before I made the decision to fly across the Pacific for college.

Retrospectively it feels like I walked only one path, but my old writing reveals a more variegated texture, reminding me that the past that feels so unequivocal now was at some junctures still in doubt, urgent, and insisting on resolution. Do I identify with past me? Can I take on her fears, anxieties, fragile hope? Futures forked endlessly beyond what I could imagine then. With time, we see potentialities collapse into realities.

Friends, hobbies, relationships, values - these too change, and at different tempos. I've had a strange, almost masochistic, addiction to the feeling of starting over for much of my adult life. There's something electrifying about wiping the slate clean, shedding prior associations, beginning again, knowing full well you may never again attain to what peaks you scaled before. Moving across the Pacific. Changing fields of specialization. Quitting jobs. Death and rebirth in its many forms. My adult life has been as much defined by the moments of renewal, of restarts, as it has been about the nondescript days in between that consist most of my hours. [2]

Once, home for winter break, I met up with friends from high school for dinner. Towards the end of a conversation which danced circles around who from our high school was dating whom (a subject I had no interest in), S set down her chopsticks and looked across the table to me. Doe-eyed, she asked, "Rach, do you think you've changed?"

I recall feeling my stomach drop, like she wanted me to say no, I'm still the person you knew before. As if any other response would signify the end of a beatific era of our lives, would make real the ephemerality of everything we held dear. And in spite of that I said, "yes, of course I've changed," followed by a feeble "but it's good change!" when I saw her dismay.

Not that it's possible to categorically pass judgement on something that can take on so many shades and textures. I wonder if the fact that older iterations of me come across as naive and crude means that I've grown, that something fundamental in me has changed. Or is it simply that in these intervening years, I've acquired a sheen of self-consciousness that moderates my intensity and sincerity? Have I become more authentic, or less?

In a past life where I conducted serious inquiries into Christian theology, I often daydreamed idly about the concept of eternity. What does eternity feel like? Would we still move, act, and exist as we know ourselves? People say that God resides outside of time, that to him there is no past, present, and future. So when he judges us, does he do so by a frozen slice chosen capriciously, an integral of our characters over time, or some other method he dreams up to aggregate all our persons? My time-bound mind cannot comprehend it. [3]

Perhaps the residue of these thoughts is why I'm still reluctant to disavow my past self entirely. She feels other than me – she reads different books, she has different friends, she likes and believes different things. But when I read her words I remember again that sincerity...

"How can you even understand it," I would answer, "if the whole world has long since gone off on a different path, and if we consider what is a veritable lie to be the truth, and demand the same lie from others? Here for once in my life I have acted sincerely, and what then? I've become a sort of holy fool for you all, and though you've come to love me, you still laugh at me..."

(BK)

[1] As Sartre said, hell is other people.

[2] You may be unsurprised to learn that Begin Again is the movie I’ve watched the most times.

[3] I recommend Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman, a wonderful and dreamy book about our odd relationship with time.

#thoughts

[what-a-novelty]

“We require an assertion of value, we are frightened.”

This interview with Ted Chiang led me to a wonderful and fastastic Barthalme short story and this relevant exposition by George Saunders. 

#bookmarks

[what-a-novelty]

Recollections of the early internet

I recently picked up Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror, a collection of essays as good as people say it is. In the first essay of the book, The I in Internet, she writes about her early explorations on the internet, and how the web has since evolved into the complex tangle of incentives that it is, where virtue is inextricable from self-promotion and people dance elaborate dances of identity.

It strikes me that this is an essay that can only be written by someone of my generation, and a search confirms that Jia Tolentino is only five years older than I am. After all, the horde of us were naive enough when all this began to embrace it, but old enough to see in retrospect the changing of the tide that was all too subtle and slippery to notice then.

I recall the creating my first email address in ICT class in primary school, my username suffixed with the year, 2003.

I recall being 10 and sitting in the computer lab, and my classmate B telling me about this site called Youtube where I might be able to find anime episodes. I recall being disappointed when my search for Inuyasha turned up nothing.

I recall when I got Facebook, too young. My friend Z, who first told me about it, demanded that I write on her wall in return. Hyperlinks predated the internet, but in those days, discovery of new platforms were driven primarily by real world connections. My friends were how I learned about Neopets, Google, Youtube, Blogspot, MapleStory, Facebook, Livejournal. 

I recall, as a 12 year old, writing on my blog indiscriminately and unselfconsciously, with an exaggerated sense of self-importance. When word came around to one of my teachers that I complained about her on my blog, I got into trouble, and I hid the blog at a new address behind a password I can no longer remember. Of course, had I realized how insignificant anything on it was (does what transpires in a classroom interest anyone beyond then-me?), I probably wouldn't have gone to the trouble. And I sometimes wish I could still find it, if only in hope that enough time has passed that I can laugh at my younger self.

I recall participating enthusiastically in Livejournal fan communities for TV shows I liked then; the validation and the community of strangers.

The internet was where both where I learned to reveal myself, and where I learned to be conscious of myself. Anyway – I wasn't really going anywhere with all this nostalgia. When did this all get away from us?

#thoughts

[what-a-novelty]

On intentions

There's a passage in The Glass Bead Game that describes a society where intellectual pretensions have lost their esteem in the eyes of the public:

The young people who now proposed to devote themselves to intellectual studies no longer took the term to mean attending a university and taking a nibble of this or that from the dainties offered by celebrated and loquacious professors who without authority offered them the crumbs of what had once been higher education... Moreover, they had to learn to renounce all those benefits which previous generations of scholars had considered worth striving for: rapid and easy money-making, celebrity and public honors, the homage of the newspapers, marriages with daughters of bankers and industrialists, a pampered and luxurious style of life. The writers with heavy sales, Nobel Prizes, and lovely country houses, the celebrated physicians with decorations and liveried servants, the professors with wealthy wives and brilliant salons, the chemists with posts on boards of directors, the philosophers with feuilleton factories who delivered charming lectures in overcrowded halls, for which they were rewarded with thunderous applause and floral tributes–all such public figures disappeared and have not come back to this day. Even so, no doubt, there were still plenty of talented young people for whom such personages were envied models. But the path to honors, riches, fame, and luxury now no longer led through lecture halls, academies, and doctoral theses. These deeply debased intellectual professions were bankrupt in the world's eyes. But in compensation they had regained a fanatical and penitential devotion to art and thought. Those talented persons whose desires tended more toward glory or comfortable living had to turn their backs on the intellectual life, which had become so austere, and seek out occupations which still provided opportunities for comfort and moneymaking...

We live in the earlier society, where an active life of the mind is correlated with a prestigious career, material abundance, fame, and societal success by most measures. This is especially true in the bay area, where people attend lectures for pleasure*, boys read poetry to you in the dark, and colleges take pride in branding themselves Nerd Nation**.

Consider an inverted society. If learning and creating were seen as bankrupt in the world's eyes, if intellect and creativity were not endorsed by the flows of capital and status in society, which of us would still be doing the things we're doing; who among us would start espousing more convenient values? In Hesse's 25th century, those talented persons whose desires tended more toward glory or comfortable living had to turn their backs on the intellectual life...

I'd like to think that in another world, I'd still be spending my evening writing. But in considering this question, the appeal of this Hesseian future makes itself clear. That one continues to love a thing even when it is not esteemed in the eyes of others, merits no status, signals for nothing. This faithfulness suggests a purity of intention, a righteousness. (Charity seeketh not her own...) Of course intentionality may be an illusion of our minds, and regardless of whether one does things for status or for joy the same outcome may hold. But in the latter case the action and the outcome are less contingent on society's capricious choice of values, less arbitrary. It's an exercise of freedom: doing a thing because you choose to– in spite of, rather than because of, the contingencies. There's something to be said for consistency with parallel selves, that in all possible worlds, you'd still act the same.

*Not always though, when I invited P to a lecture, he said:

**Once, on a date, a guy called me a nerd, and not in an adoring way, when I mentioned having multiple books in flight at once. Did he really dare use the word nerd disparagingly? Of course I made an excuse to get out of there immediately.

#bookmarks #thoughts

[what-a-novelty]

Tear it all down

Warning: brain dump. Cohesion may come in the future.

Something feels unresolved in my reading of A Brief History of Thought. I follow the arc: the harmonious cosmos of the Greeks, giving way to the personal logos of Christianity, to a defiant humanism in wake of the scientific revolution: humanity provably special for our perfectibility (see: Rousseau), and salvation in ideology (socialism, democracy, scientism, and so on). And then comes Nietzsche to tear it all down: down with the idols, let there be a harmony of active and reactive forces, fully actualized if only one has sufficient strength, can bear the intensity. Yet this anti-idolatry too feels like an idol, feels like an unattainable ideal – perhaps no one attains to the measure of strength that Nietzsche demands. And from anti-idolatry falls out Heidegger's world of technology (where the means becomes the ends) and materialism. In a philosophy without idols and transcendent values, how does one live? In practice we cast moral judgements, we have values, and there are real stakes. The dissonance is jarring. Amor fati only works if all goes according to plan.

Luc Ferry recommends: transcendence within immanence (see: Husserl). Search within yourself and reflect on what values feel necessary, inescapable. This reminds me of Christianity's natural law, yet without the external grounding – is it more hollow or less? Less, in that you don't have to believe in an external reality; more, in that our sense of values, too, can at the end of the day be rationalized away too as illusions that serve evolutionary fitness. There is no true transcendence. I suppose one can say, they don't need to be truly transcendent, I will live by them because I believe in them and they feel valuable. But this feels almost like begging the question – these are my values, and eo ipso, they are my values. Transcendence within immanence never gets to the bottom of the why. Do or do not - there is no why. Perhaps our whys are all illusions anyway?

Dreyfus says, similarly: live according to the moods. I read: pick a delusion and run with it, and make your decisions by it, and choose. Commit to the delusion fully... until it’s time for new delusions.

Feels like after all this reading and thinking we're back to the default mode of existence.

#thoughts

[what-a-novelty]

How to write in another voice... in another voice

Voice is identity:

Vocabulary (tf-idf, etc)

Metaphors / imagery (choice of)

Density of ideas

Examples (presence of, choice of)

Narrative (or lack of)

Characters

Dialogue

Sentence length, paragraph length, etc

Attention

Inwardness / outwardness

Authority, control, relentlessness

Meta-ness

Optimism / pessimism

Humor

--

Context: for the next creative writing group meeting, we’re writing in a voice that’s not our own. D suggested I try writing about how to write in another voice... in another voice. This is my attempt to “idea list” like my friend J. It’s silly, but here we are. :-)

I also tried to write this as prose, and failed even harder.

#thoughts

[what-a-novelty]

What is existentialism?

(Catalysed by a lunchtime conversation with Sherry. Warning: This was written in 30 min. I'm practicing writing more quickly!)

I've been learning about existential philosophy recently. I can't claim to know much: I read some Camus last year, a bit of Kierkegaard a long time ago, and I adore Dostoyevsky. Regardless, it seems like people who've studied it agree that it's a way of life that isn't easily defined. There is little in the way of commonality between known existential philosophers (Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Beauvoir, ...), who vary widely in religious and political inclinations. So far I've distilled it down to this: an insistence on personal freedom. And the corollary: freedom means choice. Existential angst refers to the dread one feels towards taking responsibility for our choices.

Sherry says, isn't that how everyone lives? Why is there a need to philosophize about this? She makes a good point. People often without thinking much about it default to an existentialist way of living (even if they don't name it), by which I mean they define their own meaning. And many do it beautifully [1]. But most also do so unthinkingly, whereas the philosophers strive to justify why one ought to do so, and how. (Not to mention: Kierkegaard et al are revolting against traditional philosophy, with its obsession with metaphysics, theology, and other lofty things.)

Existentialism seems to be about noticing the contingent factors that play into our senses of freedom. Simone de Beauvoir famously writes in The Second Sex, "one is not born, but rather, becomes a woman," referring to the fact that societal factors are at play to create to one's sense of our responsibilities and expectations as a member of a particular sex. (We can extend this analysis to any other identity to which one belongs.) Freedom means recognizing that we have a choice about whether we conform to these standards, whether they are imposed externally or internally. And the choice may have consequences. Failing to conform to social norms is likely to have repercussions such as unpopularity or exile. But saying "I have no choice" is what Sartre calls bad faith: you have a choice, and you do choose, even when the scales are so imbalanced there seems to be only one "reasonable" option. Now, take responsibility for your choices.

I was thinking about this recently when I was visiting home, talking to a friend who recently graduated from medical school. He was complaining about the long hours he keeps as a house officer, and how he has no choice but to conform to the expectations others' have of him, and even exceed them, so that his extraordinary work ethic can merit him a place in some hyper competitive medical specialty. I recognize now that it's a matter of frame: whether or not he thinks he has a choice, he makes the same one (i.e. being hardworking). But saying you have no choice feels like a copout, it frames you as without agency. He could have said, "I choose to work hard because I care about becoming the best doctor I can be for my patients," or, "I choose to work hard because I want to get into this rare specialty and in the future be able to give the people I love a good life," or any other variation on the theme. How much more powerful would it be to acknowledge your freedom here?

[1] Some favorites: Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl) and Wind, Sand, and Stars (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

#thoughts

[what-a-novelty]

On writing

I notice people in the bay area often talk about wanting to write more, and many think of themselves as writers.  This makes sense: you have an idea, you see something differently than those around you, you've scoured reality and distilled something true – sharing your writing on the web is scalable in a way that most other communication media is not. Further: to make manifest in words what was before vague intimations requires refining and clarifying the nebulous and abstract –– after all, writing is thinking; it changes you.*

Yet, when I say I want to write, and I'm starting a creative writing group, that's not exactly the type of writing I'm talking about. Last week, a close friend asked why I hadn't already added him to the group, insisting, "I have so much desire to write! I write every day!" I believed him, but I struggled to explain why I thought we were talking about different types of writing.

I think that "creative writing" is an unfortunate phrase because of what it seems to imply about the set complement. I want to be clear: when I say that some writing isn't creative writing, I'm not saying it isn't creative. Most writing involves– perhaps even requires– creativity.  But not all writing that is creative is creative writing. Perhaps a more judicious name for the representation I mean is poetic writing or aesthetic writing, but even these modifiers feel limiting, insufficient.

Form matters. A list is not an essay is not a novel. You can reduce The Brothers Karamazov to a list of events, a map of themes, or otherwise deconstruct it along some dimension you care about, but whichever way you slice it, something essential is lost.

The combination of form and content gets at something emergent and unique to that expression -- it has something to do with narrativity, and something to do with emotion, but that isn’t all. Art is necessity.

When I think about how I want to write, I think about the first poem that made me howl.

When I think about how I want to write, I think about the books that made me want to yell this is it, this is what I've meant all along--

CS Lewis writes, "In reality it is just the clearest, the most concrete, and most indubitable realities which escape language: not because they are vague but because language is… Poetry I take to be the continual effort to bring language back to the actual."

If I have to explain why listicles are not creative writing, perhaps we're not talking about the same kind of writing.

*Alternative, cynical take on Silicon Valley “thought leadership”: if what a person reads constitutes cultural capital, signaling your ability to create and not just consume merits one yet higher status

#thoughts

[what-a-novelty]

I took these pictures of Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl) when I first read it in 2015. These words came to mind again yesterday as I was writing an essay on impermanence, an essay that feels like it’s been in me for a while. I hope to share it some day when the words feel right.

#bookmarks

[what-a-novelty]

On the recurrence of ideas

The ideas I wish to describe are old ideas. There is practically nothing that I am going to say tonight that could not easily have been said by philosophers of the seventeenth century. Why repeat all this? Because there are new generations born every day. Because there are great ideas developed in the history of man, and these ideas do not last unless they are passed purposely and clearly from generation to generation.

(The Meaning of It All, Richard Feynman)

This was a reminder: originality depends on context, things repeat at various timescales, and there is value still in saying what has been said before

#bookmarks

[what-a-novelty]

A declaration of intentions

Earlier today, while thinking about the year ahead, I decided that I wanted to write more, and perhaps publicly.

The goal here is to put my thoughts to the test of expression. Those that come to me in the course of a day are often left in their nascent state –– at best, filed away as a short note somewhere and at worst, briefly entertained then forgotten. Some consequences: (1) I never find out if the idea is worth anything (allowing me to maintain delusions, perhaps); (2) cyclical thoughts; (3) lack of awareness of cyclical thoughts. If I ever find the note again, I’ve probably already forgotten the context.

Earlier today, I jotted down, “It’s turtles all the way down! And up! And sideways…!“ obviously referring to recursive nature of goals. But nothing about this is obvious, and until I try to articulate what I mean exactly, I can continue to hide half baked ideas behind mixed metaphors and non-sequiturs. Writing forces clarity; not writing is my copout.

The caveat here is that I’m not practiced in this, so this may be nonsensical or illogical or ignorant at times. But I expect to grow.

Over the years, I’ve gone back on forth on whether to have a public online persona. My blog in primary school got me in all sorts of trouble, and in the intervening years I’ve created and deleted multiple twitter accounts. I’m a different person now, and blogs these days are different, especially in the valley, but I still can‘t help but say the phrase "thought leader” with a tinge of sarcasm in my voice.

I consume many of these blogs, and have benefited from those before me who shared their knowledge freely. And sharing means accountability; vulnerability. Since I’m also trying to become less afraid of looking stupid, doing more things that expose me to judgement is better, right?

Yet something in my Asian sensibilities still cringes at the idea of me indulging in this manner of self-promotion. It feels too visible, ostentatious. Descartes, quoting Ovid, said, to live well you must live unseen.*

I want to live a good life, and I want to create beautiful things. I also want to... be better. This is the middle ground I’ve settled on for the moment: a blog that’s in the public domain but not widely shared. I might tell close friends. And others might discover it, and that would be okay.





*(For completeness I think I should mention the possibility that I might be just making excuses here — perhaps I’m afraid of looking stupid, or worse, looking like a wannabe. And Descartes is remembered centuries later, so maybe he wasn’t that unseen after all?)