Argument

Argument has rules. Argument is not a game – the rules are more in spirit than in letter – but there are rules. Certain moves – certain appeals – appeals to personal experience, to scripture, to studies and statistics, even to logic – break the rules and make argument impossible. Of course these are all useful instruments of judgment. But judgment and argument are different things. Judgment ends argument, but arguments do not want to end.

“Arguments want?” Arguments want what we want. Sometimes we argue selfishly, to win. Sometimes we argue selflessly, to keep the conversation going. But mostly we argue precisely to prevent judgment: to reassure ourselves that some matter is open to question, that equivocation is not irresponsible.

Argument has rules, but agreeing to definitions is not one of them. That is putting the cart before the horse. Definitions are liquid: when they meet, they mix. These triboluminescent encounters are what argument is for. All the valid moves in argument – making a distinction, putting in context, elaborating, unpacking – these are all ways to make definitions meet, merge, and mature. Definitions are always at the center of arguments because shaping definitions is what arguments are for.

Argument is harder than it looks. In large part this is because, while contradictions, fallacies, and biases break the rules, pointing them out is a far worse offense. Argument at the level of fallacies and biases is boring. Argument about argument is not argument. Whatever the point at stake, the opponents are in the same old ring, trading the same old jabs and blocks.

Argument is not a way of deciding. It is a way of not deciding, of doing something else instead: learning, wondering, waiting. You know it is the real thing when it is unpredictable – irreducible – and, therefore, nontrivial. Argument wants; and more than anything else, argument wants surprise.

Knots

Are knots technology? Knots were never invented: like fires, knots happen naturally. But unlike fire they cannot not be made useful by propagation: they have to be translated. Like language, knots are immaterial, passed on by example and subject to regional variation. Unlike language, knots are finite – there are only so many – and eternal – the same knots recur worlds and ages apart.

Like tools, knots are useful and increase our power over nature; but unlike tools, we carry them in our heads, not our hands. When they parallel tools, it is on a different level of abstraction. The trucker’s hitch is an image in cord of a block and tackle. It is no more a tool than a picture of a tool is – and yet it has the power of a tool.

Knots are a form of mathematics, but math with a difference. Arithmetic has a history of progress: but before history began, knots already embodied the highest level of mathematical abstraction. Knot theory is a twentieth century invention. Only in the twentieth century, only after thousands of years of development, did exoteric mathematics finally equal the mathematics esoteric in knots.

Knots are magic. With a piece of cord and a sequence of gestures we produce direct results in matter. “The rabbit jumps out of the hole, runs around the tree, and jumps back down the hole”: what is this but an incantation? Reasoning from knots, we get magic; reasoning from tools, we get technology. Technology works, magic doesn’t; nonetheless, the existence of knots violates the order of nature that technology presumes.

Animals

The facts of life cannot be hidden from people whom live among animals. Birth and death are as open and current among them as weather. Human beings cannot learn much from one another; we conceal too much in shame and pride. The short and unreserved lives of animals are the true parables. They enact life back to us on a scale we can grasp. The horse, the cow, the dog, the cat, the chicken (like the llama, the camel, and others) – these are the truly ancient sages.

Sometime in the nineteenth century it became possible for masses of people to live away from animals. Deprived of its foundation in the shared witness of animal life – left untethered – culture became a castle in air.

Victorian prudery came first. Bowdler only becomes possible once he may suppose readers who do not know the way of a dog with a bitch. But his overthrowers were equally unworldly. Freud could only have lived in the city. (Animals, despite their undivided minds, are as neurotic as people.)

But Freud’s city was still a city of horses. When the automobile replaced the horse and left animals with zoos and field trips for their habitats, pathology became derangement. It was the analogies that the observation of animals implicitly afforded us that made reasoning about life possible. We have lost the animals, but we still need the analogies; so we grub them where we can. The machine served until it threatened to master – to remake us in its image, machines, not people. The net may yet make nodes of us.

(Of course analogy is not explanation, but a real explanation would have to explain us all, human and animal: developing a theory of human nature and trying to work animals into it parenthetically is a dead end every time.)

I invite the accusation of anthropomorphism; so be it. The dangers of anthropomorphism are abstract; the dangers of anthropocentrism are practical. It is not a question of dominion; it is a question of definition. We are the rule, not the exception: since we can no longer learn it by observation, we must be told, and trust.

Generations

Why should generations be interesting? There are two questions here, because generations have two kinds of interest. They have historical interest: a succession of generations from Lost to Greatest to Silent to Boomer to X to Millennial. And they have personal interest: the generation in the first person, what separates us from our parents and divides us from our children – “my generation,” “our generation.”

As a unit of historical analysis the generation is worse than useless. The biologist’s refutation of race applies: since variability within a generation equals or exceeds the variation supposed to divide generations, generations are supposititious.

Of course generations really are different. Every generation has its own distinctive patterns of behavior – but distinctive is not the same as characteristic. Nothing is more distinctive of a generation than its common names – but, remember, the fact that some names are common does not mean that most people have common names.

The generation is unreal, but unreal is not absurd; unreal things can exist formally, like lines on a map. The generation is likewise formal: consensual, not demonstrable. But why this consensus?

It is a pleasure to be sorted into a particular generation because being sorted, if it is not discriminatory, is inherently pleasant. Advertisers know this. They know that offering to tell you “Which x are you?” or “What kind of x are you?” tempts you, for all x.

And something loves to displace the faults of human nature to contingent aspects of it. Sentences that begin by naming “these days,” “this country,” or “our society,” generally become intelligible only once they are universalized, and referred to human beings as such. The generation provides another means for such displacements. Then such awful questions as “Why are we here?” can be rephrased in cozier terms like “My generation has no sense of purpose.”

What is it that we share when we share a generation?

Sharing a generation is the least two people can have in common (who have anything in common at all): thus we are most attached to our generation when we have few other attachments. Those who have something more definite to be loyal to – nation, religion, community, cause – they would never number their generation among the things that define them. And, inversely, those who expect their generation to define them tend to lack particular loyalties.

Sharing a generation is the weakest hold two people can have on each other, who have any hold on each other at all. It is because it is so weak that is so hard to shake off. Say: my generation is my blind spot. I think there is nothing so utterly mysterious to me as my own generation. Because I must draw lovers and friends from it, I want to believe it is better than it is, and when it disappoints me, I see mystery instead of accepting the fact of disappointment.

If it is to take hold at all, generational solidarity takes hold in childhood. Sometimes I would have to explain and defend to adults the things that I and my friends did – defend them to members of other generations. At those times I did not feel as if I were speaking for myself: I felt like an ambassador, charged with a heavy responsibility and answerable to my peers. Suddenly I was not only included, but important. Under threat of scorn from another generation people who would not otherwise speak to me leaped to my defense; people who hardly spoke at all surprised me with the capacity to form complete, reasonable, and persuasive sentences on my behalf.

To embrace the undemanding solidarity of the generation, to build life and work around this experience of inclusion and importance, is understandable. We writers are most susceptible. The generation is our fallback – once we have, for fear of prejudice, abstained from everything else. The temptation is always present: why speak for yourself, when you can speak for your generation? Why stand alone, when you can recruit their implicit support behind everything you say, or make, or do? Why be objective when at last, after everything, you could have them all on your side?

Ivory Tower

So here we lie at last, having arrived,
Upturned, unraveled, undisturbed.
Here we lie where there is no more hurry,
Here we lie where there is plenty of time.
No more alarms, never early or late,
No more errands, nothing to muddle our thoughts.
Free between earth and sky, picked men,
Sweetly discoursing, attended by nodding birds.
And what is soft and dark in us must fly,
But what is hard and bright in us can stay.
For here in the tower of ivory, brilliant and bare
We are the men of ivory, with nothing to fear.

Ebooks

I just spent five days in the hospital; I beguiled them by reading ebooks. I bought a Kindle recently. I had the chance to try one, and was immediately taken with the idea that if I could transfer the reading I do onscreen to the device, my eyes would have an easier life. Once I confirmed this was possible, I bought it.

It immediately paid for itself in canceled magazine subscriptions. With exceptions, I dislike magazines as physical objects: glary, bulky, ad-ridden. Why pay for the piles, when I could get what I want for free, in a more legible form? And I soon relieved my perennial browser session of all the things I kept open to read in fragments. Besides articles and posts, I had also been thinking of books that were unavailable or exorbitant in print (or only available in those dubious POD reprints with the generic covers) but free on the net. I found myself pilfering the treasure-house of Project Gutenberg.

I have a history with ebooks. I was an enthusiast in the false dawn of ebooks, about ten years ago. Back then the idea was not to save publishers, but to destroy and replace them: to behead the behemoths of New York, to throw open the gates and welcome the multitudes in, to replace the stagnant world of editors and exploitation with something brighter and more breathable. This was the mission of the ebook publishers. For a time I seriously meant to become one. This ambition was twice cured. I assisted a judge in an ebook contest; this was my first contact with the slush pile, and it has never washed off. And I realized I spent far more time reading about ebooks than I did reading ebooks. I excused my disaffection with the argument that ebooks would never be practical without the then-speculative technology of e-ink. By the time e-ink showed up, disaffection had become distaste.

But in the hospital, while I was too weak to hold a paper book open, I read ebooks, and was engrossed. Or, better, I was not reading ebooks; I was reading.

I am not a convert. I will always shun anyone who thinks paper is just dead trees. But I must recant a witticism I was formerly proud of. “I cannot remember who said, ‘The world exists to end up in a book’¹; but I am sure no one will ever say, ‘The world exists to end up in an ebook.” The world exists to be written and read; what we read it on is no more decisive than what we write it on.

Footnotes:

¹

Mallarmé

Stupidity

“People are stupid” is a non-answer, like “God made it so.” It is a dead end. What are you missing? You misunderstand what they are trying to do. You overestimate the resources available to them, or you underestimate how hard the things you take for granted are for them. They are not deluded, but deceived; or you are deceived. They choose not to see what they cannot bear to see; or you are choosing not to see something unbearable. The system in which they are caught perversely rewards stupidity; or the system is not perverse, but malicious. Or they just made a mistake. Assume people are not stupid and you may learn something; assume people are stupid and you will never learn anything. Of course stupidity is real. But truly stupid people do not lack intelligence: they reject it. True stupidity is a skill: a kind of aikido that deftly unbalances the most powerful arguments and sends them sprawling on their faces.

Audience

All writing has a sense of audience. The sense may be latent or explicit, attenuated or definite, but it is always there. The more explicit and definite this sense, the fewer the choices the writer must make, and the better-informed those choices are. To have a public is to have it easy. A circle of the likeminded, something the writer can be a member of, is also helpful. But the audience does not have to be real to be sensed. Just to have something to prove and someone to prove it to – whether or not they are paying attention – is a great help. Even the voice in the wilderness has the wicked world to harangue.

The writers of the Dark Ages read the classical authors and tried to do what they did; but they lacked the classical audience. Their work has a feral, furtive quality. No matter how they tried – and some of them were brilliant, had great minds – something was always missing, always off-key. You do not know their names because their work has little value in itself. The interest it keeps is in tokening what might been – without the thrall of priestcraft, without the isolation of monkhood. I think of them often, and with sympathy.

Still, failing all others, there is a true audience, the true one because it is the only inevitable one – yourself, plus time. The hardest and therefore the worthiest thing to write is the thing you can reread – now, later, ten years later – without embarrassment or frustration.

Of course you hope to improve, and improving to see flaws that were invisible to you before. But the visible flaws are enough. The audience you write for may not notice your omissions and exaggerations. You may get them on your side. They may forgive you for being glib or hasty. You may learn the tone of their voices so well that in your head you can hear them defending you even as you cut the corner. Audience excuses a lower standard. But just because you can write does not mean you should. You will never stop seeing the flaws. They will always be there; they will accuse you forever. Anticipating your own retrospect is the only antidote to so attractive a complacency.

I built a shed over the summer. It is easily the largest thing I have ever built. Naturally I made mistakes, and naturally I learned from them. Having built one shed, I could build a much better one. But a shed is a physical object. Because I am not willing to waste the materials I used, because it works well enough that I cannot justify the effort and expense to replace it, I am stuck with all its crooks and gaps and rough edges.

As a writer you do not have to compromise. You can learn by doing and apply the lessons to what you have done, without losing anything. Style is only the quality obtained by this adaptation of means and ends. The vaunted ability to write without reading, to get it right the first time and let it go, to write altogether efferently, to remove yourself from your audience: this is nothing to be proud of; this is missing the point.

True, self-criticism is a dangerous habit. You know where all the knives are in, and how to twist them. And there is a deadness to self-inspection that deceives. The worst you will ever look is to yourself in the mirror. But I am not talking about criticism. There is always something to criticize, something to change. I am talking about recognition and responsibility: about being able to say, without hesitation or qualification: “Yes, that is mine.”

The Year of Temptation

[Somewhere I read how a Teutonic Knight, to prove his chastity, chose a beautiful woman and lay beside her every night for a year without touching her.]

I

The night she lay beside him first was dark;
But now the moon slips through the arrow loop.
The blade of moonlight finds a fatal mark
Only the hair that has shed its raveling loop.
A child will watch the clouds before the storm
And thrill to thunder’s footsteps in his bones
While strength and wisdom huddle safe from harm.
Her hair uncoils. He watches back to stone.
Her hair is silvered wire where each strand is loose,
The sheets as white and hot as steel in coals:
All winter’s breath and summer’s clouds reduce
To floating, knotless waves and shining shoals.
 The knight has never touched the lady’s hair;
 But he is wound about and captured there.

II

He left to preach for Christ with sword and lance.
In the way he saw her shadow stand demure,
As soldiers still await the hostile advance
As hoodless hawks await the word to soar.
Behind him sun, before her blinded gaze.
He watched her hope all down the faceless file
The scrim that furled before the morning haze.
The heat of her eyes on his back did not fade with the miles.
He felt no fear before the howling rush,
No fury when he swung his fist to kill,
No pain to bear a pagan’s lucky touch.
Half-through the door of death his heart was still.
 If he put out his hand in the dark and pulled her close beside
 Her flesh could not heal the wound of the love in her eyes.

III

Her breath is like the voice of steady rain;
Now hard, now soft, while clouds conceal the sky.
Rain is the prayer of farmers’ life and gain;
But rain brings mud where knights must walk and die
In the wooded valley twilight. The path is lost,
The pagan voices speak with tongues of rain
The pagan wailing echoes under frost
The wordless speech of frozen rain and pain.
The ancient sacred words of monks and priests,
The paters counted over knots and beads,
The wordless howling passed from beast to beast,
The wind a breath that whispers in the reeds:
 Her breath is like some strange and secret speech
 Which none shall learn when none remains to teach.

IV

She swore, before the priest would give his leave,
Never to touch and never a touch to allow.
Sometimes she pulls her arms in through her sleeves
And sleeping winds herself inside a shroud.
The narrow cell is narrower every night.
He sleeps in belt and boots and wrapped in wool.
He flees the bed once the sky is gray with light,
To charge the field like the heavy, heedless bull.
How could the knight who always won before
By force and strength, the first to leave the castle,
Have known that he already lost the war
Only when he gave a needless battle?
 They were no friends who led him to this oath:
 “A year to prove you bravest and purest both.”

V

Her skin is still as smooth as banner silk
Streaming over the tents of Tartar kings,
Still pale as ice when rivers turn to milk,
Still somehow like all rare and precious things.
The knight has learned with steel that skin’s a lie,
The lie of life that covers death within.
The strongest knights, like oaks as broad, so high
Still rot, still fall from the smallest scratch of skin.
He knows how soon her skin will fail the lady.
The priests have taught him all that age can do.
He knows the painting already is fading
And only memory is always new.
 His blood had yearned for the touch of painted saints:
 But he turns from the taint of blood beneath the paint.

Gender Neutrality

When I took up writing essays I learned that writing is best when it is gender-neutral. Tradition told me that he is an adequate contraction for he or she. Languages where gender is obligatory have no problem with it. But as soon as I tried it, I saw that tradition was wrong. In English at least, gender neutrality is simply better than gender conflation, for three reasons.

1​. You cannot be gender-specific when you want to be unless you are first gender-neutral. There is no way to gracefully modulate from equating male and human to discussing men and women separately. Try it: If he is male… If he is a she… The man who, as a male… The man who, as a woman…

Of course confusing men and human beings may be evil, when it hides women; but even when it is not evil, it is still silly, because it will not let you say anything about the difference.

2​. Gender-neutral writing is more forcible. True, formulas like he or she and men and women are tiresome. Interpolating a piece of gender-conflating writing into gender neutrality neuters it. But expressions originally conceived in gender neutrality are more direct and vivid than those that conflate genders.

Some people find men and women or human beings or people intolerably awkward expressions; they would rather say, with Germanic inclusiveness, men. Now I like human beings – it asserts biological solidarity without anthropocentrism. But if you want to address the human condition, why not say we?

For the most part, gender neutrality is only a problem because English overloads the third person. Balance the load and you avoid the problem. Are you talking about yourself? Stand up; say I. Are you addressing your readers directly? Look me in the eye; say you.

Not all gender-neutral expressions are more forcible; but those that are gain so much that they justify the rest.

3​. Gender-neutral writing is underdeveloped. Someone who becomes a writer in admiration of great but gender-conflating works of literature will understandably suspect gender neutrality as a subtle form of philistinism. So it can be, as gender-conflation can be a subtle form of misogyny. But the strongest argument for gender neutrality is literary.

It was a favorite technique of the twentieth century to escape the weight of literary history by subjecting writing to constraints. Someone wrote a book without the letter e; which is remarkable, but trivial. Gender neutrality is a nontrivial constraint. Literature is desperately overcrowded, hopelessly competitive. Everything has been done before and done better. But gender neutrality opens a new world, with space, horizons, elbow room.