On ideas
One of the first things I found when I sat down to write is that it’s necessary to have something to say, that is: ideas. This sounds quite obvious, but I didn’t feel like I had anything to say. So, I set off in search of ideas. Mostly this meant thinking about other peoples’ ideas and trying to find my own thoughts in the space around them.
It made me consider the way we relate to ideas, what it means to have ideology. There’s one way that feels common. Someone finds a belief, decides it’s right, choose their evidence, and begin to debate for it. It’s confrontational. Someone wants to win. It’s most obvious in our politics, but I can point it out in a lot of conversations around tech, etc too. I do not like this model.
The point, in my mind, is to seek Truth and I’ve always learned a lot more when I was listening, even when I thought I knew the answer. There’s always a bit more gray area than I originally thought. This is, in part, why I feel drawn to poetry and fiction. In them, I see the possibility of sitting with unanswered questions and failures. No one has to win the conversation.
Still, novels are about ideas, are made with ideologies. But something about the way they approach the ideas feels expansive. For example, I was interested in Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting after it opened with the description of a photo being edited by the government after one of the politicians fell out of favor. Then he had this quote: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. It made me think the book was about the forgetting of the past that’s necessary to create powers of state. I thought I’d be able to reflect on the ways my country, the USA, has forced the forgetting of cultures and languages. Instead, the book focused on humans struggling with their issues of love and sex and family. And it was good.
Hmm… I made it this far into these thoughts, but I don’t think I’ll be able to find a nice conclusion. I guess I’ll leave you with the fact that the word ‘essay’ comes from the French word for attempt. And this was an attempt. It would’ve been nice if I could’ve also talked about ethics and ‘cancel culture’ and grace and how I’m kinda concerned about putting stuff up here without editing too much because I’m unsure if I’m missing the mark (right now it just feels more important to work towards that mark à la Audre Lorde’s The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action). Oh well.