Today’s doodle is a cheat: I drew something for our grammar goddess at work, Myrna, who asked me for suggestions about her next instructional message to the general e-mail conference. This one is about proper use of exclamation points, so I suggested calling it “WHAT ARE YOU, CRAZY?!!!!!” because whenever people use a lot of them in a row, I picture them looking something like this:
Okay, and what am I grateful for today? (When will this end?! Oh, in two days.)
- Parsley. I love it so. Am about to have some in my evening goop.
- Ideas. I’ve got lots of books on the go, and there’s something irresistable for me about the idea of collecting new ideas, getting better and better at thinking about life. More on this in a second.
- Unplanned time. I’ve nothing planned tonight. Okay, it’s 7PM and I’m just finished working, and I haven’t made dinner yet, but still — it’s open before me like a promise. I am my word, and will always follow through on what I say I’ll do (like this stupid list!), so when I find ‘unspoken’ bits, I enjoy them.
Further to the ideas thing: One of the books in my pile that I was really looking forward to reading was one called The Enchantment of Modernity, by Jane Bennett. I’d read the introduction, which put forward an idea I would paraphrase like this:
People often speak about the world as if there was once a time in which it was enchanted, and now, in the modern era, enchantment has gone out of the world. Some look back on the old world as a place of tribes and superstition and consider this a good thing. Others lament the loss of meaning in a mechanised age of isolation. There’s a third path available, though, an “alter-tale”, which considers the modern world as still having the power to enchant — to arrest us in a moment of wonder — without needing that enchantment to be tied into any “divine” purpose.
Why is this enchantment necessary? As Bennett says so beautifully, “I tell my alter-tale because it seems to me that presumptive generosity, as well as the will to social justice, are sustained by periodic bouts of being enamored with existence, and that it is too hard to love a disenchanted world.”
As I’m working on a book about climate crisis, you can see how this would relate. Also, I’m one of those human beings who prefers to see the world as more than mere mechanism. But that goes beyond what Bennett is asking, or would likely approve of.
My problem is the rest of the book after the introduction. The whole thing becomes this laborious exercise in adademia-speak, where plain English is completely lost, and every other clause contains a reference to some dead white guy and a neologism I have to read three times. For instance:
Kant began with the idea that the ground of thought is the categories of the mind and then, when he inquired into the ground of that ground, he referred to the infinite, the inscrutable, the noumena, the supersensible realm. Deleuze begins with the idea that the force behind thinking is sense and then, when he inquires into the force behind that force, he refers to an indeterminate immanent field of differences-in-intensity. (p54)
Blargh! It reminds me of my attempts to read Heidegger — but at least, in his defense, he was being translated from German!
As I flip through the book, her ideas pop out one by one like little goldfish. I get them. It’s just the whole that’s mystifying, convoluted, like that same fish worked into an Escher drawing. As someone who works hard each day to write business copy that’s free of business bullsh*t, I’m not happy wading through academic bullsh*t. If your idea is a good one, you can say it plainly. Instead, the worthy ideas in this book are spun off into abstractions.
I’ll probably go back and dip into it from time to time, but reading it all at once is like trying to make a meal of hors d’oeuvres.
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p>But why did I need to read this book in the first place? I had the idea as soon as I read the introduction. Or even before — that’s what led me to seek out this book. Did I really need the book to validate my thinking? I need to have faith in my own mind — particularly for the task ahead.
