Unfigurable
(Editor's Note: This is the first of several End-of-Decade journal entries. This particular one is also my weekly Patreon update. If you want to support my work, that is the place to do it!)
Welcome to my last update of the month, the year, and the veritable decade. And let us never mind those pedants who insist that, technically, decades-like centuries and millennia-begin on years that end in 1. Let's say we rounded it all off somewhere back in the Dark Ages, so that now things go where they intuitively ought. Here then are my final thoughts to you from the 2010s:
For most my life, I have found other people annoyingly easy to figure out. First it was the fictional characters who had minimal development. Stereotypes, in other words. Then it was the archetypes. Gradually, I began to see the patterns in real people, most of whom turn out to be fairly predictable.
This is where I stood when After The Hero: A Curious Tale began, twenty years ago this past June. My exegesis of fantasy (trans)genre tropes and character types was one of the key provocateurs that had begun to greatly frustrate me about fantasy, whose modern storytelling sensibilities I had come to see as degenerate. This in turn set me on the road of a story told after heroes had had their turn, a tale of villains who were perhaps not villains after all-and not in the flaky “morally gray” sense that has become so popular nowadays, but in the far more grandiose act of rejection of the entire premise of the conflict of heroism versus villainy as the fundamental axis of fantasy storytelling.
The subsequent passage of adult years led me to further refine my ability to figure out real people, until eventually I realized what it was I was doing: I had built the means to detect rigid, fixed minds versus supple, far-ranging ones.
I had learned that there were essentially three components that make up a person: the contextual minutiae, the degree of intelligence, and the underlying temperament:
The contextual minutiae-dialect, hobbies (for the most part), tastes and distastes, color preferences, etc.-are quite hard to predict, but they also don't really matter most of the time, acting more like cosmetic skins on a product. And if we all learned to tolerate these minutiae in one another without feeling personally threatened, the world would be a lot better off.
The degree of intelligence, surprisingly, also doesn't really matter most of the time. I have met extremely intelligent people who were exceedingly easy for me to categorize into some highly specific box-these people tend to be repulsive-and, likewise, there have been simpler-minded people whose nature eluded me-making a good case for expanding my definition of “intelligence” (which I eventually did but which I am withholding now so as not to confuse things for you). Nor are these cases the exceptions that prove the rule.
It is the final component, the underlying temperament, that solely determines whether a person is going to be easy to figure out-because in the depths of temperament is the presence or absence of a proclivity to maintain awareness and generate different states of mind in similar circumstances. Now, what do I mean by “figure out”? It's when I can characterize a person's behavior and style according to a very small number of variables, and make reliable predictions of that person's future behavior and interests based on those few variables. I'm not talking about the prediction of specific actions per se, but rather the overarching purpose or thrust of those actions. To put it in simpler terms, figuring a person out means being able to say something like “His deal is making money,” or “She's always got her 'politics' mode switched on.” It' about summing a person up. Furthermore, there is the expectation that a person so figured will, upon leaving their well-worn roads by the occasion of some external force, swiftly and irresistibly revert back toward them. Circumstance may press them into other modes of thinking and acting, but it isn't stable and doesn't last.
Essentially, this figuring lets me collapse a person-a person!-down into a much smaller box, almost like that of an automaton. And I don't get punished for this insulting act. In fact it is incredibly useful. And that's what annoys me: A person shouldn't be that condensable; Heinlein's speech about humans as generalists, not specialists, applies. Yet most people are.
This goes farther still, getting into the realm of the tension of possibility versus actuality. Once a person dedicates themselves to something, once they truly commit to something, that is usually what history will end up defining them by. Have you ever wanted to be eulogized and remembered by, say, the amateur astronomy people? Then you're going to have to become a part of them, or otherwise make some major contribution to their subculture. The only thing I remember about William Jennings Bryan-because it was one of the only things about him that was taught to me-was his obsession with the gold standard. That's a petty thing to be remembered for.
This is also why it is a double-edged sword to wear the colors of a particular career, or even of a particular passion.
Always-and I haven't talked about this very much, ever, but it has always motivated me explicitly-I have resisted being so condensable myself. I feared becoming such a caricature. I very much never wanted to be someone who could be condensed this way down to just a couple of sentences. I wanted anyone so forced to try to find their verbiage utterly inadequate. I don't want to be figured out: not by others and not even by myself. I want to always have the plausible expectation of saying or doing something fresh. Because to be such a creature-figurable, condensable-means my future is written for me. It's a prison. This is no doubt one of the particular colors on the palette that paints the picture of my lifelong difficulty in finishing creative projects.
I certainly do have modes, but there are many of them. I have behavioral styles, but these are numerous too. And different modes and behaviors can be applied to the same circumstances. To single out any one or two or three of the facets of me doesn't come close to describing the full, Joshalonian condition. Perhaps I haven't succeeded as well in this in the years since leaving the Mountain, becoming known in shorthand by my depression and so forth, but in years past, and maybe years to come, you would have been hard-pressed to sum me up succinctly. Just consider the sheer breadth of subject matter in my journal. Though there are many topics I return to time and again, it is usually to add new thoughts to what I have already said.
In my association over the years with subcultures dedicated to my various interests, I've noticed just how often the people there are defined and bounded by our shared interest to a much greater extent than I am. One example is my interest in politics, which I mentioned. I have incredible political immersion; there isn't much that I can't converse on with at least a passing knowledge, or usually better. But I can turn that off, or at least remove the associated conceptual framework from being the operative framework for interpreting all of my experiences in life. I can enjoy driving my gasoline-fueled car the Discovery as a life experience of another sort rather than in terms of my shilling for the oil industry and my contributions toward climate change. And I often engage in political debates not simply because I am being a good citizen in so doing, but for other reasons altogether. Another example is my interest in all things fat. I am an adipophile. I love fat partners, I love the aesthetics of fat people in general, and I am always trying to get fatter myself-and usually failing hilariously, owing to my body's incompatibility with the venture. But on the fat positive political or cultural or dating sites I have frequented in the past, most of the people there carry this element of themselves into the other aspects of their life with far greater pervasiveness than I do. It's like they can't help themselves. In both of these examples, and all else besides, the persistent presence of a given preoccupation in people's minds diminishes their capacity for having productive encounters with others, because they keep getting tied up in this stuff needlessly. It can make life quite unpleasant for those around them.
It's not that my interest or commitment in these things and others isn't as strong as theirs. It's that I have a bigger mental landscape to operate in. It is as though most of humanity lives marooned on islands defined by some particular thing, and I am a voyager who travels between them. I affine, but I don't belong.
Eventually I realized of course that there was no need for me to resist being figured out. I am a generalist; I have many modes, many interests, many capacities. It just comes naturally to me to have all these different ways of thinking and being. I wrongly feared that the figurability of others was an implication of my own commensurate susceptibility to smallness, or fixedness if you like.
Speaking of implications, there is a faulty one here that I want to preempt: I don't mean to say that specialists are easily figured and generalists aren't, even though it looks that way, because I have in fact met unfigurable specialists and condensable generalists. The fault here lies in the difference between circumstance and temperament. Unfigurable specialists are generalists at heart, with curious, probing, eager, wandering minds, minds that naturally take on many interests and many modes of being, even if for some reason these people end up pouring most of their energies into one or two things. And condensable generalists...well...in these cases I suspect that the generalism is more a function of either intellectual immaturity or else great inner dissatisfaction and restlessness.
(Here I must also say, as a disclaimer, that I make no general disparagement of “figurable” people, except for the unavoidable inherent offense of suggesting that I know something about them that they don't. Anyone who is happy with their life, provided they are not knowingly extracting torment from others, has done rightly, no matter the suppleness of their mind. It would not be the life for me, but that is a Josh thing, not a universal truth.)
As I alluded to, there is a strong, negative association between awareness in the mind and the figurability of that mind. I think, at the end of the day, everything that I have described here is a creative consequence of the process and fact of awareness. An unaware mind will recapitulate in what it is familiar with. An aware mind will recognize other features on the landscape of the psyche and travel to them, with all the variation in thought and action this entails.
It's a small club. Erudition is no guarantee of awareness. Age is no guarantee. Experience is no guarantee. I don't know whether there is truly a binary of some kind here-certainly many poets and philosophers throughout the ages have believed that there is-but I can at least say that, even if it is a spectrum and not a binary, this end of the spectrum is quite sparsely populated. Analogically a form of literacy, perhaps, where most people have little or none, and a few have comparatively vast proficiencies therein. I rather wish more people were out here, and I am quite vividly drawn to the few who are. It's a small, small club.
This of course has its share of intersections with my creative writing. Just as I have feared in the past for my own figurability, so do I still fear today of writing works that can be easily condensed into a couple of sentences. The tagline I use myself is “Stories about power, wonder, and the beauty of living and dying,” which is perhaps indicative of the magnitude of my task: That's a very unspecific description. The near-fractal degree of depth that has emerged from what began as (and still technically is) a mere Interlude, a side story, Mate of Song, testifies to the challenge facing me in the 2020s as I endeavor to write these books once and for all.
I would be remiss to close out an entire decade without a least a word or two on my literary alter-ego, Silence Terlais, the character who has embodied my spark in every season of my adult life, whose fullness of presence is a dreamer's own far-flung imagination of their personal best, and who could never be summed up except to be called curious: Some of us have a god, or gods. Some of us have family. Some of us have a sense of duty. Some of us possess a sense of belonging. I don't have any of those things. What I do have is an imagination unto itself. With time and troubles the world pushes on me to grow weary, and cynical, and I understand now what Tolkien was trying to say. But I do have something to fall back on. When we're young, and learning the world, we rule out all the modes of thought that aren't compatible with the reality that is imparted to us. Consequently we are bound to those few lines of reality quite tightly. What a loss! But me, my imagination, never quite got negated this way, never got absorbed into the mundane. Silence is the brightest star in that constellation of what else could be-not simply different places, to visit in our star-ships, but whole different manners of perception altogether! There's no figuring that one, that left-handed wanderer, not in my lifetime and not in yours. Maybe someday.
Happy New Year, and I'll see you on the other side.
Welcome to my last update of the month, the year, and the veritable decade. And let us never mind those pedants who insist that, technically, decades-like centuries and millennia-begin on years that end in 1. Let's say we rounded it all off somewhere back in the Dark Ages, so that now things go where they intuitively ought. Here then are my final thoughts to you from the 2010s:
For most my life, I have found other people annoyingly easy to figure out. First it was the fictional characters who had minimal development. Stereotypes, in other words. Then it was the archetypes. Gradually, I began to see the patterns in real people, most of whom turn out to be fairly predictable.
This is where I stood when After The Hero: A Curious Tale began, twenty years ago this past June. My exegesis of fantasy (trans)genre tropes and character types was one of the key provocateurs that had begun to greatly frustrate me about fantasy, whose modern storytelling sensibilities I had come to see as degenerate. This in turn set me on the road of a story told after heroes had had their turn, a tale of villains who were perhaps not villains after all-and not in the flaky “morally gray” sense that has become so popular nowadays, but in the far more grandiose act of rejection of the entire premise of the conflict of heroism versus villainy as the fundamental axis of fantasy storytelling.
The subsequent passage of adult years led me to further refine my ability to figure out real people, until eventually I realized what it was I was doing: I had built the means to detect rigid, fixed minds versus supple, far-ranging ones.
I had learned that there were essentially three components that make up a person: the contextual minutiae, the degree of intelligence, and the underlying temperament:
The contextual minutiae-dialect, hobbies (for the most part), tastes and distastes, color preferences, etc.-are quite hard to predict, but they also don't really matter most of the time, acting more like cosmetic skins on a product. And if we all learned to tolerate these minutiae in one another without feeling personally threatened, the world would be a lot better off.
The degree of intelligence, surprisingly, also doesn't really matter most of the time. I have met extremely intelligent people who were exceedingly easy for me to categorize into some highly specific box-these people tend to be repulsive-and, likewise, there have been simpler-minded people whose nature eluded me-making a good case for expanding my definition of “intelligence” (which I eventually did but which I am withholding now so as not to confuse things for you). Nor are these cases the exceptions that prove the rule.
It is the final component, the underlying temperament, that solely determines whether a person is going to be easy to figure out-because in the depths of temperament is the presence or absence of a proclivity to maintain awareness and generate different states of mind in similar circumstances. Now, what do I mean by “figure out”? It's when I can characterize a person's behavior and style according to a very small number of variables, and make reliable predictions of that person's future behavior and interests based on those few variables. I'm not talking about the prediction of specific actions per se, but rather the overarching purpose or thrust of those actions. To put it in simpler terms, figuring a person out means being able to say something like “His deal is making money,” or “She's always got her 'politics' mode switched on.” It' about summing a person up. Furthermore, there is the expectation that a person so figured will, upon leaving their well-worn roads by the occasion of some external force, swiftly and irresistibly revert back toward them. Circumstance may press them into other modes of thinking and acting, but it isn't stable and doesn't last.
Essentially, this figuring lets me collapse a person-a person!-down into a much smaller box, almost like that of an automaton. And I don't get punished for this insulting act. In fact it is incredibly useful. And that's what annoys me: A person shouldn't be that condensable; Heinlein's speech about humans as generalists, not specialists, applies. Yet most people are.
This goes farther still, getting into the realm of the tension of possibility versus actuality. Once a person dedicates themselves to something, once they truly commit to something, that is usually what history will end up defining them by. Have you ever wanted to be eulogized and remembered by, say, the amateur astronomy people? Then you're going to have to become a part of them, or otherwise make some major contribution to their subculture. The only thing I remember about William Jennings Bryan-because it was one of the only things about him that was taught to me-was his obsession with the gold standard. That's a petty thing to be remembered for.
This is also why it is a double-edged sword to wear the colors of a particular career, or even of a particular passion.
Always-and I haven't talked about this very much, ever, but it has always motivated me explicitly-I have resisted being so condensable myself. I feared becoming such a caricature. I very much never wanted to be someone who could be condensed this way down to just a couple of sentences. I wanted anyone so forced to try to find their verbiage utterly inadequate. I don't want to be figured out: not by others and not even by myself. I want to always have the plausible expectation of saying or doing something fresh. Because to be such a creature-figurable, condensable-means my future is written for me. It's a prison. This is no doubt one of the particular colors on the palette that paints the picture of my lifelong difficulty in finishing creative projects.
I certainly do have modes, but there are many of them. I have behavioral styles, but these are numerous too. And different modes and behaviors can be applied to the same circumstances. To single out any one or two or three of the facets of me doesn't come close to describing the full, Joshalonian condition. Perhaps I haven't succeeded as well in this in the years since leaving the Mountain, becoming known in shorthand by my depression and so forth, but in years past, and maybe years to come, you would have been hard-pressed to sum me up succinctly. Just consider the sheer breadth of subject matter in my journal. Though there are many topics I return to time and again, it is usually to add new thoughts to what I have already said.
In my association over the years with subcultures dedicated to my various interests, I've noticed just how often the people there are defined and bounded by our shared interest to a much greater extent than I am. One example is my interest in politics, which I mentioned. I have incredible political immersion; there isn't much that I can't converse on with at least a passing knowledge, or usually better. But I can turn that off, or at least remove the associated conceptual framework from being the operative framework for interpreting all of my experiences in life. I can enjoy driving my gasoline-fueled car the Discovery as a life experience of another sort rather than in terms of my shilling for the oil industry and my contributions toward climate change. And I often engage in political debates not simply because I am being a good citizen in so doing, but for other reasons altogether. Another example is my interest in all things fat. I am an adipophile. I love fat partners, I love the aesthetics of fat people in general, and I am always trying to get fatter myself-and usually failing hilariously, owing to my body's incompatibility with the venture. But on the fat positive political or cultural or dating sites I have frequented in the past, most of the people there carry this element of themselves into the other aspects of their life with far greater pervasiveness than I do. It's like they can't help themselves. In both of these examples, and all else besides, the persistent presence of a given preoccupation in people's minds diminishes their capacity for having productive encounters with others, because they keep getting tied up in this stuff needlessly. It can make life quite unpleasant for those around them.
It's not that my interest or commitment in these things and others isn't as strong as theirs. It's that I have a bigger mental landscape to operate in. It is as though most of humanity lives marooned on islands defined by some particular thing, and I am a voyager who travels between them. I affine, but I don't belong.
Eventually I realized of course that there was no need for me to resist being figured out. I am a generalist; I have many modes, many interests, many capacities. It just comes naturally to me to have all these different ways of thinking and being. I wrongly feared that the figurability of others was an implication of my own commensurate susceptibility to smallness, or fixedness if you like.
Speaking of implications, there is a faulty one here that I want to preempt: I don't mean to say that specialists are easily figured and generalists aren't, even though it looks that way, because I have in fact met unfigurable specialists and condensable generalists. The fault here lies in the difference between circumstance and temperament. Unfigurable specialists are generalists at heart, with curious, probing, eager, wandering minds, minds that naturally take on many interests and many modes of being, even if for some reason these people end up pouring most of their energies into one or two things. And condensable generalists...well...in these cases I suspect that the generalism is more a function of either intellectual immaturity or else great inner dissatisfaction and restlessness.
(Here I must also say, as a disclaimer, that I make no general disparagement of “figurable” people, except for the unavoidable inherent offense of suggesting that I know something about them that they don't. Anyone who is happy with their life, provided they are not knowingly extracting torment from others, has done rightly, no matter the suppleness of their mind. It would not be the life for me, but that is a Josh thing, not a universal truth.)
As I alluded to, there is a strong, negative association between awareness in the mind and the figurability of that mind. I think, at the end of the day, everything that I have described here is a creative consequence of the process and fact of awareness. An unaware mind will recapitulate in what it is familiar with. An aware mind will recognize other features on the landscape of the psyche and travel to them, with all the variation in thought and action this entails.
It's a small club. Erudition is no guarantee of awareness. Age is no guarantee. Experience is no guarantee. I don't know whether there is truly a binary of some kind here-certainly many poets and philosophers throughout the ages have believed that there is-but I can at least say that, even if it is a spectrum and not a binary, this end of the spectrum is quite sparsely populated. Analogically a form of literacy, perhaps, where most people have little or none, and a few have comparatively vast proficiencies therein. I rather wish more people were out here, and I am quite vividly drawn to the few who are. It's a small, small club.
This of course has its share of intersections with my creative writing. Just as I have feared in the past for my own figurability, so do I still fear today of writing works that can be easily condensed into a couple of sentences. The tagline I use myself is “Stories about power, wonder, and the beauty of living and dying,” which is perhaps indicative of the magnitude of my task: That's a very unspecific description. The near-fractal degree of depth that has emerged from what began as (and still technically is) a mere Interlude, a side story, Mate of Song, testifies to the challenge facing me in the 2020s as I endeavor to write these books once and for all.
I would be remiss to close out an entire decade without a least a word or two on my literary alter-ego, Silence Terlais, the character who has embodied my spark in every season of my adult life, whose fullness of presence is a dreamer's own far-flung imagination of their personal best, and who could never be summed up except to be called curious: Some of us have a god, or gods. Some of us have family. Some of us have a sense of duty. Some of us possess a sense of belonging. I don't have any of those things. What I do have is an imagination unto itself. With time and troubles the world pushes on me to grow weary, and cynical, and I understand now what Tolkien was trying to say. But I do have something to fall back on. When we're young, and learning the world, we rule out all the modes of thought that aren't compatible with the reality that is imparted to us. Consequently we are bound to those few lines of reality quite tightly. What a loss! But me, my imagination, never quite got negated this way, never got absorbed into the mundane. Silence is the brightest star in that constellation of what else could be-not simply different places, to visit in our star-ships, but whole different manners of perception altogether! There's no figuring that one, that left-handed wanderer, not in my lifetime and not in yours. Maybe someday.
Happy New Year, and I'll see you on the other side.