a map
To begin with intentions is terribly important — by setting intentions for my writing, I see myself as marking the landscapes and the boundaries of the territory that I am embarking into. To set my intentions is to attempt to create the map of my mind as I know it now — undoubtedly incomplete and fated to be rearranged and re-rearranged, but it will be a starting point because no one begins with a blank map. We all have copied bits and pieces from others, imitating and making up geographies from everyone we have ever met or read. The making of my map consists of conversations under late night kitchen lights describing the contours of a road that resembles friendship and opinions passed around through so many mouths that I wonder if the shape of the conclusion I have received on some political matter that I know nothing about even resembles the original. It feels like playing a long game of picture telephone, passing pieces of drawings around to be mimicked where the entire world is participating and the end result is something horrifically, comically inaccurate and distorted.
And yet I think about this map of mine that isn’t physical but has been charted over the course of my twenty two years with a soft love for all of the experiences that have created this work of art. Most of the maps we interact with these days are boring: digital, bland, flattened and stripped of character, concerned only with geographic accuracy and user friendliness. Can it efficiently get me from point A to B? Can it do it with the most minimal design? But they haven’t always been that way — browsing the history of cartography reveals beautiful designs embellished with marks of everything from cultures, religions, foods, even constellations. Cardinal directions could be oriented any which way and each map could choose to center any location, theme, or figure that could have no bearing on the usefulness of the map. I like that idea, centering what is important but not necessarily useful. I want my map, my writing, to resemble these gorgeous maps that defy conventional notions of utility: generously including the odd constituents that are important to me in an aesthetic that I define. Right now, at least, I wouldn’t need it to make much sense to anyone else. I would be the only one navigating with this map, responsible for updating it and exploring the missing areas. I could take whatever detours I wish getting lost in the terrain. I wish to spend days in damp caves chewing on ideas and let currents smash my arguments into heavy cliff sides.
“Cartography then, in regard to the essay, is an act of discovery, of transcribing text to ultimately determine or even define context. In doing so, one creates a map, or mirror, of an imagined place, culture, and people as well as their boundaries, then changes it with every alteration of (or event at) its margins” — former writing prof
Maps will change. They will always change, whether because we learn more or because the earth is constantly shifting underneath our feet, sometimes by our own hands. They also attempt to answer a question, whether it is as simple as how to get from one place to another, or as impossible such as what is the best way to represent the multidimensional in a flattened form. How do I represent the dimensions of my life in words?
My intentions as of now: I wish to explore the corners of my map, find the spaces that only I know, exchange and compare maps with others, marvel at our different interpretations, and mark them down with the care of a 17th century cartographer.
a lens
The inspiration for 100 days of posts came from this 100-day project by Suleika Jaouad whose writing is warm and prompts never let me down. The simple tagline is “one tiny beautiful thing each day.” It’s such a small ask, devoid of any pressure to unearth any meaning in the process of living. A few weeks ago I was on a mountain in the Alps watching the sun settle behind rock and felt a strong sense of writer’s block. It was a beautiful view, pastels being thrown against mountainsides and no sight of civilization as far as I could see; I was taking myself too seriously, wondering how can I share in words this with others? Focusing on the words that could convey an experience that I myself was not truly appreciating. It felt grand, but not as grand as I was thinking it should have felt. I often think about the Rilke’s observation “there is much beauty here, because there is much beauty everywhere” whenever I fail to feel appreciation in the small pieces that connect to make up a day, and lately I’ve found it difficult to feel what is beautiful around me. It’s basically a more poetic way of saying that the problem is me, and not my environment. I still find joy in the applause of leaves swaying in the sun and the laughter of bouncing children on the train but I feel the immense purposefulness that it takes — life just does not flow into me the way it once did as easily. So I’m lowering the expectations. One tiny beautiful thing each day, and I do intend to find the tiniest. Today it is the light green socks I bought with corgis embroidered on them. Yesterday it was the double milk chocolate bar straight from the fridge. Sometimes I will write them down, sometimes it will be a text to a friend, and sometimes it is simply an unwritten thought that goes through my head. I want to use these words as the new lens through which I will experience the world.
“Walking around, even on a bad day, I would see things – I mean just the things that were in front of me. People’s faces, the weather, traffic. The smell of petrol from the garage, the feeling of being rained on, completely ordinary things. And in that way even the bad days were good, because I felt them and remembered feeling them. There was something delicate about living like that – like I was an instrument and the world touched me and reverberated inside me.” - Sally Rooney in Beautiful World, Where Are You
I want to feel the reverberations again, to be touched.
an experiment
Last December I started a daily(ish) creative coding sketch practice, promising to “show up for myself” and work on a skill that I wanted to improve. It was fun. It lasted two months with thirty-odd sketches. I came into that project having an idea of what the process would look like and what I wanted to learn and learn I did but at some point motivation began leaking and I eventually called it quits. Now that I find myself again searching for motivation to keep up with a creative endeavor, I’ve settled on this post about the value of experiments. Change something in your life and see how it goes. It’s deceptively simple and relieves the pressure of wanting to pass judgement on progress until the experiment is over. Instead of showing up each day based on the belief in some delayed fulfillment, the gold at the end of the rainbow, I am showing up out of curiosity wondering what I will find on the other side. Writing 100 posts is an experiment because I imagine that there will be a very real change from the person I was before to the person I’ll be after and I have no guarantees for what that change will look like.
Along the lines of not taking myself too seriously, I don’t have many expectations or goals. I’m just experimenting with writing itself as another form of experimentation and trusting that the change affected will be interesting. There’s no consistent form to my posts, not thinking about how to save or share or consume efficiently. I want to try on voices and opinions like trying on clothes. At the end of the year I’ll have a closet full of half-baked arguments and thoughts. I want it to feel a bit chaotic and just a little more unhinged. So that is what this 100 days is: more than a pledge to show up for myself or targeted practice for writing, it is an experiment. And if I’m experimenting, why not be a little crazy?
a piece of toast
Or a jackhammer or a stained glass window or a purple seagull. That’s what I love about writing - it’s just a bunch of words strung together and even the craziest combinations can have meaning. Metaphors help us relate the unrelated to reach better understandings. What about metaphors that don’t make sense? Could we reach new understandings? I can make comparisons randomly and hope one of them sticks. A teacher once complained that students have the erroneous belief that poetry “doesn’t have to make sense!” And while I agree with that for the most part, that a good poet should wield words with all the purposefulness and skill of a craftsman and that not trying to make sense is often an excuse for laziness, there is a part of me that also believes that some things truly do not have to make sense. One of my favorite exercises to write surrealist poetry is known as the substitution poem. Find a poem and take out a few words for each line, noting the part of speech. Then pick random words to fill in those spots. It’s a literary version of mad libs — a little ridiculous to do and even more so when a line that has been generated randomly strikes something into your heart. I can do this just for the fun of it. Sometimes I look and laugh at the absurdity of trying to find meaning in all of it and other times I can cry over the truth in the absurd.
So what if writing was a piece of toast? I don’t even know what that would mean to me, or what it could mean for you. But what if?
*** A note on maps
Though intentions are important, at times, it’s fun to throw it all in a dumpster fire and start with a blank map, reinterpreting everything that exists. New directions, new orientations. Redefining again and again.
Proust said it well: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”