for future reference

what is it about work that endures?

The Temple of Juno in Agrigento, oil on canvas, Caspar David Friedrich (1828-1830)

“We build our computer systems like we build our cities - over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.” – Ellen Ullman

I’ve been writing online for a long time now. For over a quarter of a century! I’ve written in different publications, on different platforms and forums, and multiple blogs, many which have been lost to the sands of time.

Looking back, I regret not archiving my old material better. I was particularly devastated to lose the blog that I wrote in from ages 10-15 or so. It was hosted on Diary-X, which was a service run by one guy out of his home server, which crashed. Another time, I felt overwhelmed by the material on my blog, and I deleted a lot of posts. I might still have them archived on a hard disk somewhere, but I’m not sure which, and I’m almost afraid to go looking. I also once lost a notebook that I’d put a lot of heart into filling out, which I’m still sad about over 15 years later.

It took me some time to even begin to appreciate that I am still grieving these losses. They hurt me very deeply. My words are my friends. Losing my words felt like losing parts of my heart. And I realize that… to some degree, I overcorrected, and I live with a lot of sprawling text clutter. It’s a strange to look at my 1000+ posts on my archives blog, my 260,000+ tweets, and realize that they are… significantly, artifacts of grief. All of my work is a memorial to all that I have lost, and to my predecessors who were forgotten and underappreciated.

I could go on about that but I wanted to try and get to some practical stuff. I’ve noticed that, looking back over the past 25+ years of writing, the stuff that I cherish the most is not necessarily the stuff that went most viral – what I value most is the stuff that I can revisit and reuse repeatedly. Work that endures, at least in the context of my own body of work.

I have always been fascinated and kinda obsessed with the idea of work that endures. And yeah, I’m familiar with Ozymandias, and the heat death of the universe, and the inevitable decay of all things. I remember spending very somber moments processing those realities. The inexorable march of entropy. But even so, I’d like to make the most of what I’ve got. There’s an eternal tension between living in the present moment, and attending to that which frees us to enjoy the present moment. It’s hard to really relax and enjoy the present moment if we’re worried about getting our basic needs met. But there’s no sense in spending one’s entire life preparing and strategizing at the expense of actually living any of it. So obviously the solution is to cycle between the two phases, inhale and exhale, yin and yang. And there’s infinite nuance to get into about the specifics, and that too can be something that either enriches or spoils any given moment, or any given pursuit. Enough of that for now. What do I know about doing work that endures?

The first thing I’d want to say is that I often don’t actually know in advance what will endure.

An example I’d use here is… I used to record videos of myself playing guitar at my parents’ place, and upload them to youtube. I did that mainly to have a record of my guitar-playing practice at the time. But as the years went by, my family moved out of that home, and those guitar videos inadvertently have become a kind of memorial to my childhood home. I didn’t even realize at the time that I would particularly want videos of what my home was like, but now that it’s gone, I’m so glad to have a record of it, and I expect to show them to my son someday, and say “look, that’s where dad grew up when he was your age.”

So the lesson there is… look for any sort of excuse, however silly or arbitrary, to make anything at all. Because everything we do tends to leave some traces of everything that we are. The only way to fail on this front is to do nothing. So try to do something, however silly or small. I’ve found that when I’m at my lowest, sometimes this looks like… playing video games or watching youtube. Looking up my youtube watch history can be an interesting experience that triggers all sorts of thoughts and memories. (I suppose here I should caveat for the reader that I’m really describing all of this in the context of a life’s work for a creative. I don’t necessarily think that everybody ‘should’ do any of this.)

The second thing I’d say is that it’s really valuable to revisit and review old material.

There’s still some part of me that always flinches a little bit at the idea of going through my old stuff. It’s not because I think it’s bad stuff; I don’t seem to have much of that particular issue. I actually often like my old material, it might be less skillfully wrought but it’s often earnest and full of heart. And it’s sometimes surprising to me how insightful my younger self could be, which I think is explained largely by the fact that most of my writing is written at peak states of clarity, while most of my life is lived in the moderately muddled middle. I’m a generally wiser 34-year-old than my 25-year-old self was, but when my 25yo self was having a peak experience, he was typically wiser in that moment than I am on average day today. And the great thing about writing, journalling and so on is that we get to integrate our peak state wisdom into our ordinary lives. If our usual work would merit a B grade, we’d still occasionally make A-tier work sometimes entirely by accident. And since we did it, we do get to take credit for it. We already know we get to take the blame for our failures and missteps!

I digressed- the reason I tend to flinch at the idea of going through my old stuff is that some part of me finds it ‘narcissistic’, or ‘self-indulgent’. I know it’ll look silly once I write it out, but the unverbalized thought is something like, “Oh, there’s all this great art in the world that you’ll never get to, and you want to spend your precious time rereading your own shit? Get a load of you!” And yeah- once I write it out I can recognize this as a voice I inherited in my youth. And it’s quite a shame really. I can see that this voice is trying to protect me socially– something like, “people are going to think you’re full of yourself if you spend your time up your own ass”.

And here I want to investigate the phrase “full of yourself”. The implicit idea in “he’s full of himself” is, “he doesn’t have any room to care about anybody or anything other than himself”. And that would be a bad thing. I would think it’s a very bad thing if I didn’t make time to care for others. But I do! I probably already have a twitter thread somewhere about how some people are ‘larger-than-life’. Some of us just have larger containers, we can be full of both ourselves and our friends and loved ones and make quite a bit of space for the wider world, too. And this is especially the case for those of us who are literal professionals. This was always a very all-consuming hobby for me, and now it is essentially my job. So, while professionals in other fields might spend 8 hours a day working on software or legal documents or plumbing or medicine, I get to spend say half those hours going through my journals, and half those hours fussing about other people. I can do both things. I’ve made many deliberate decisions over the years to organize my life in a way that allows me to do this. So a lot of mainstream intuitions and norms don’t quite apply here.

I wanna end by reflecting on how graciously Montaigne handled his version of this challenge: In the preface to his Essays, he wrote: “Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.”

The third thing I’d want to say is that a disproportionate amount of my work that endures, emerges out of conversations with friends.

Conversations with anybody, really. There’s something about the frame of a conversation that challenges me to be interesting, relevant, useful, compelling. And I get to see in real time how they receive whatever I’m saying. If there’s stuff that’s insightful or funny, I’ll find out about it over the course of the conversation. I don’t like to waste people’s time face-to-face, so the information that comes up tends to be more economical. One of the best examples of this I have in recent times was a blogpost I wrote titled “Why were you late?”, which grew out of an anecdote from work I found myself telling multiple people in multiple conversations. I wrote it up after I found myself repeating it for maybe the dozenth time, and I shared it on Twitter as well, and like 10,000+ people ended up reading it, and many reached out to tell me they found it really helpful.

So… if something comes up multiple times in conversations, there’s a pretty good chance that it’ll probably continue to pop up, and so it’ll almost definitely be worth writing up so that you can share it with others. Similar posts on my blog include Most People, the world is big, and it’s just math. None of these posts are even ‘finished’, they’re all just assemblages of stray notes and tweets and so on. Each time I find myself saying something similar again, I try to update the post with more of it. I also have a post about relationship advice that I always share with friends who get engaged or are newly married, and now that I think about it I could probably write something like “Visa’s thoughts on the first 2 years of parenthood” and that would probably both be useful of enduring. Oh, I also have visakanv.com/howto, where I aggregated a bunch of posts and videos etc that I’ve often shared with people.

Ha, and this gets meta– I even have a post titled ‘talking for writers’, which I wrote after having a conversation with another writer who was struggling to properly scope his writing. And I have shared it quite a few times since!

It dawns on me that my archivist motivations and my desire for enduring work are rooted in grief, anger and frustration.

It feels a little strange to say that out loud, I think because those are somewhat discordant or sour emotions. The crazy thing is that not only do I seem to shield this from others, I seem to even shield it from myself. This coming from a guy who’s generally known to be quite emotionally open and honest, and who wrote an entire book about introspection. Despite these things, I am still startled to rediscover the deep emotional cores that govern what I do.

Actually, whenever I try to do some ‘really serious writing’, I always find that there’s emotion at the heart of it. I remember Ray Bradbury talking about this at length in Zen In The Art of Writing (1990). In it he wrote, “How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt? What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?”

Simply revisiting these words makes me take a deep breath and release a great sigh. I really needed that. I needed to remember that writing for me is not just a technical exercise, it’s confession, it’s catharsis, it’s absolution. And glancing at all of the works that I reference and revisit, it suddenly becomes so obvious: it is feeling that endures. It is feeling that gives a work its animating spirit, its zest, its liveliness. From time to time I forget this as I get overwhelmed with the busywork of drafting and scaffolding and positioning and calculating. And when I really face the truth of it, it’s clear that even all of that busywork is something I do… because I am afraid. It’s a safety ritual. Surely if I do more reading and research, surely if I do more drafting and redrafting, then my work will be spared the indignity of being mocked, derided, dismissed?

But I know that’s not true. There is no perfect defence against hostile or indifferent readers. The winning move is to not worry about them at all, and focus on writing for the readers who appreciate us. And that’s something I hope to rekindle and return to, over and over again, for as long as I’m alive.