I like a problem to solve and, as a friend of mine said recently, there’s nothing quite like being posed a problem and finding an elegant solution for it. Troubleshooting the world is a function of observation, but really, one could say writing is largely problem-solving, too, so these faculties—the solitary work of writing and the communal work of building and fixing—are not so different as they first appear.
But what if in fact consciousness itself were solving the problem of existence every instant, just to keep the organism aware and, well, conscious? In this piece on the NY Times Stone blog by William Eggington, he traces how Borges in his Ficciones foresaw future developments in quantum physics, realized how the brain perceives and processes as a unity (“motion, distance or velocity — namely, change over time”) what in fact are not unified at all. Our brains, in other words, are constantly at work weaving a fiction for us we call being-in-the-world. Eggington quotes Borges:
“we have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time; but we have left in its architecture tenuous and eternal interstices of unreason, so that we know it is false.”
This William Eggington is the same one who has written (and is writing) on Quixote, the master-fabulist-who-doesn’t-know-it, the man who is living a narrative in which he doesn’t realize he is but a character.
In his other Times blog piece on Quixote, he describes the usefulness of fiction in these terms, as a tool for building consciousness, as it requires readers to “occupy two opposed identities simultaneously: a naïve reader who believes what he is being told, and a savvy one who knows it is untrue.”
In order to achieve this effect the author needs to pull off a complex trick. At every step of the way, a fictional narrative both knows more and less than it is telling us. It speaks always with at least two voices, at times representing the limited perspective of its characters, at times revealing to the reader elements of the story unknown to some or all of those characters.
So our brains keep us working in multiple planes all the time, so much so if you want to get work done you need to conserve your energy and focus on the few things worth focusing on. I was in a meeting today and afterwards someone asked me why I was quiet. The best answer should have been: I’m saving myself (for grading, in my instance). This little TEDx talk by Chris Suave is pretty good, and in it he talks dissects the boringness of highly productive people. He boils the borings’ secrets down to 3 tricks: write things down, simplify to the essential, stop and question.
He starts out his talk with an old Flaubert quote made an impression on me, too, when I first heard it and I’ve quoted it for years when some drama was needed. He uses a translation that goes: “Be boring and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” But I recently made my own translation of the sentence, with a tip from Erin McGraw, that goes: “Be settled, be ordinary, day-to-day, like a bourgeois, so that you may, in your work, be violent, be original, archangel-like.” FWIW.
In that vein, I like this video of boatmaker Andy Stewart talking about the craftsmanship of building and repairing wooden boats, called “Shaped on All Six Sides.” As he says: “Why do I work on wooden boats? There is nothing else I can do now.”