the tavern and the temple

revelry and contemplation

Concept art from Uncharted: The Lost Legacy (2017)

If I don’t write for too long, and if I don’t publish for too long, it starts to take a toll on me.

I start to feel sluggish, knotted, frustrated. Sometimes I wonder if this entire thing might be something that I can bypass entirely… could I just slice the knot with some clever thinking? But in all my years of trying – often half-heartedly, sometimes seriously – it’s never quite worked out. So for the most part I have come to accept it as a part of who I am, roughly as unavoidable as needing to eat and sleep.

I remember reading Ray Bradbury talking about his own relationship with his writing in Zen in the Art of Writing (1990):

“But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. For writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in your bed.

I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow. An hour's writing is tonic. I'm on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats.”

Yeah. Same. There are certainly worse ‘problems’ to have, if this is to be considered a problem at all. Writing is a tonic for me too when I do it right– when I stop worrying about what other people think, and simply write what comes naturally for me. I’m now reminded as well about what Dave Chappelle said to Jerry Seinfeld about how “the guy onstage is the real me.” I feel that way too! It’s everyday life that’s comparatively insincere, with all of its polite fictions and tedious posturing and worrying about other people’s feelings. The guy I am in my writing, is the more honest, more earnest, truer form of me. Which isn’t to say that I am ignorant about how my writing will likely be perceived – but it doesn’t trouble me as much. Because this is my domain. This is “my house”! Here I get to set the terms of engagement, and if you don’t like it you are very cordially encouraged to fuck off and do whatever you like instead! Maybe one day I’ll have this sort of effortless clarity in my everyday life too…

there’s a metaphor to be drawn between (some) writing and on-stage performance.

Consider the page, the form, the expectations, the norms. I’ve been thinking about this a lot particularly when switching across mediums as a writer, and thinking about how ‘the same writing’ is received differently on different stages, by different audiences. And how it’s been a challenge to try and figure out precisely how to adapt to that.

I’ve spent a lot of time – years and years – writing on Twitter, writing “for” Twitter. I’m pretty good at it. And I’m also tired of it. I’ve been tired of it for quite some time now, if I’m honest. And I haven’t really expressed this on Twitter, in part precisely because I’m not a fan of the tiresome, simplistic way I imagine it will be received. I don’t want to hear “yeah bro, twitter fucking sucks, we all hate it here”. I also don’t want to hear “that’s so sad, if you feel this way what hope does anybody else have?” And pretty much any one-liner response you can think of is something I don’t really want to hear. I want contemplation, and Twitter, by its very nature, crowds out certain “waveforms” of contemplation entirely, roughly the way 24/7 news channels cannot give you the experience of sitting quietly by the ocean for several hours. And that oceanic feeling is what I have been so sorely, desperately craving as of late.

Merry and Pippin dancing in the inn of Edoras. Return of the King (2003)

The best thing about Twitter is also the worst thing about Twitter: that there’s a tremendous amount going on all the time, and that anybody is free to respond to anything they see. The result is a particular sort of chaotic mess. And I’ll be quick to say that it’s my favorite mess in the world, which is why I spend so much time on it. All communication is lossy to begin with, even between people who know each other very well, have a lot of shared understanding, and so on. And on Twitter we have high-velocity, high-volume plaintext comms, which is exceptionally lossy. I feel like I’ve tweeted enough over the years now (235,000 tweets!) to grasp both the perils and promises of the form. Because tweets are so low-context, the best of twitter and the worst of twitter often both involve a kind of hallucination-play. At its worst, it’s people assuming the worst things about each other, and treating each other in hostile ways that they almost certainly wouldn’t in person. But at it’s best, you have people who are good with language, being playful and creative in ways that are maximally effective when done with disembodied words, allowing people to jam and improvise in ways that can be as transcendent as the best of poetry and jazz. One of my favorite examples of this was Weird Sun Twitter, which I have a thread about that I love to share with people.

I think it’s true that I’ve been trying to push the medium in a way that it doesn’t really want to be pushed, with my elaborate multi-year threading and quote-tweeting. I’ve been trying to do something that I consider artful in a particular way, in a domain where many people aren’t quite receptive to it, aren’t quite willing or able to respect an artist’s work. And I don’t mean to say something clunky like “respect contemplative twitter preachers!!” – I know that that would basically be inviting mockery from certain types. It’s kiiiinda like going to a chaotic tavern full of drunkards – some merry, others vicious – and demanding that everyone have a little more decorum, treat the place with a little more respect, hello, there’s somebody working over here, building an intricate and fragile house of cards and talking about their feelings while some people are having a bar fight in the next booth. Well, why are you even trying to work in this environment?! The tavern is not exactly a place of honor, we know this! We can try to behave in ‘honorable’ ways if we so wish, and we can even try to challenge and inspire others to behave in ‘honorable’ ways as well, but it’s kind of silly to demand it of anyone.

(source)

Actually the wild thing about Twitter is that you can’t really describe it as a place. Because the magical thing about it is that it is many places all at once. Scrolling the timeline, you can get whiplash from different people experiencing very different emotions, reacting to very different events. Or you might get very different reactions to the same event. It’s chaos. I love it. I do love it. And I’ll likely write a separate essay titled “how to chaos-surf while remaining psychologically healthy” or something like that.

From time to time I do get tired of the belligerents who aggressively crash into my joint to loudly miss my point. They fail to see what I am really doing, they don’t take the time to really read, listen, understand. And I know it’s not their fault, or that there isn’t any point in getting mad at them. They are doing what is natural to them in an environment that they have come to perceive in a particular way. Which is arguably the “correct” way. Twitter was always ephemeral by nature – the timeline is a river of Now; turbulent rapids of mass hallucinations. Trying to do meaningful, lasting work in such an environment is a kind of fool’s errand. But I must confess, if it weren’t obvious already: I’m a kind of fool. I’m reminded of a quote from Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom (2012):

“The greater fool is actually an economic term. It’s a patsy. For the rest of us to profit, we need a greater fool — someone who will buy long and sell short. Most people spend their life trying not to be the greater fool; we toss him the hot potato, we dive for his seat when the music stops. The greater fool is someone with the perfect blend of self-delusion and ego to think that he can succeed where others have failed. This whole country was made by greater fools.”

I have no regrets about all of the time and energy I have devoted to doing what I do on Twitter. I’m glad that I did it, and I would do it all over again. Even if say, Twitter vanished tomorrow, or my account gets suspended – still worth it. It hasn’t even been a ‘sacrifice’ for me, it has been an investment that paid off handsomely. It has allowed me to live my childhood dream much sooner than I initially anticipated: I am now basically a full-time author who gets to write about whatever he likes, whenever he likes. And I’m blessed to have loads of people who appreciate the particular game I’m playing. So… what am I doing here, in this post? Am I just complaining that Twitter isn’t better than it is? That Twitter users aren’t collectively more enlightened, cooperative, charming, skillful? Well… kinda! And I can give you my usual shpiel that I’d recite to anybody with similar complaints: you gotta work with what you got, baby. You gotta live as though the day were here. A couple of my favorite books – Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces (1949), and Rollo May’s Man’s Search For Himself (1953), both end their final chapters on similarly uplifting notes that I try to carry with me every day. I feel compelled to quote them directly:

May: “The qualities of freedom, responsibility, courage, love and inner integrity are ideal qualities, never perfectly realized by anyone, but they are the psychological goals which give meaning to our movement toward integration. When Socrates was describing the ideal way of life and the ideal society, Glaucon countered: “Socrates, I do not believe that there is such a City of God anywhere on earth.” Socrates answered, “Whether such a city exists in heaven or will ever exist on earth, the wise man will live after the manner of that city, having nothing to do with any other, and in so looking upon it, will set his own house in order.”

Campbell: “The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. “Live,” Nietzsche says, “as though the day were here.” It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but preisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal—carries the cross of the redeemer—not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.”

Both excellent quotes, and worth taking a moment to really sit with. If you just skimmed them really quickly, I recommend taking the time to read them again.

Untangling knotted perceptions

Let’s switch things up a bit. I want to “take some of my tavern observations to the temple.” I want to talk about some feelings I’ve had witnessing a couple of different people say things that I felt were misguided. We’re not close friends, so I didn’t feel particularly compelled to have the difficult conversation with them of telling them what I think, and working through the abrasive misunderstandings that would likely follow. But it stuck with me, and so I feel like writing about it in the abstract, perhaps to reference in the future.

One person was fixated on their narrow concept of the term “freedom”. Another person was stuck on their narrow concept of the term “hate”. In both cases, in my view, their refusal to consider that someone else might use a word differently than they interpreted it, is something that likely keeps them trapped in a psychic prison. I know that sounds like a somewhat extreme thing to say– on twitter it would probably come across as condescending – but I really mean it in a compassionate sense of… we are all bound and constrained by our erroneous assumptions. I myself too am surely fettered by my own thinking in ways that I am currently unable to perceive. And a big part of why I write and think and talk so much is that I am hoping to encounter other people who can notice the subtle patterns I’m unconsciously repeating, and point them out to me. And of course, it’s quite likely that my initial reaction to having those patterns pointed out would be denial! That’s just part of the process. Jazz pianist Kenny Werner said, “it doesn’t take talent to upgrade your playing, it takes patience.” That’s something I want to do with these essays. I want to work through ideas and thinking, patiently. And I want my readers to do that with me. And Twitter, which I love so goddamn much – is simply not a medium that supports patience. And that’s fine! Let Twitter be the rowdy, riotous tavern it wants to be, ought to be. I will make a temple of my essays.

Oh- I also saw someone else say something like, “learning from failure is overrated because failure is psychologically damaging”… and it struck me as another similar kind of odd fixation. Why is it assumed to be a given that “failure is psychologically damaging”? I think that’s an overly broad claim about human experience. It’s not hard to notice that different people experience different levels of psychological damage from failure. Some people arguably even thrive on it, perhaps in an antifragile way – ie, as long as the failures aren’t catastrophic, they can actually be interesting, even fun. Edison allegedly said, “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” Victor Wooten said, “if you make music with the wrong notes, they’re not wrong notes anymore”. I’m not even saying that the statement “failure is psychologically damaging” is wrong – but there’s all this interesting wiggle room to play around that isn’t being considered. And if you have no wiggle room, then yeah, absolutely, failure will be psychologically devastating. But it doesn’t have to be. There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. I do believe this.

wiggle room, patience, cracks

I find myself thinking that there’s something in here (wiggle room, patience, cracks) that’s the real heart of what I want to do with my work, particularly with this Substack. It’s hard to do on Twitter, and not “just” because of the character limits. You can technically write long threads on Twitter, and if you have Twitter Blue you can also basically write full-length essays on it. The issue is that Twitter is a context in which most people are skimming and scrolling and don’t want to think too hard, don’t want to read too close. And yeah, yeah, I have my rant about how one shouldn’t worry about Most People, but even so… some environments – stages, pages – are more conducive to certain forms of thinking, certain forms of performance – than others. Some kinds of songs are best sung over a rowdy tavern, some kinds of songs are best sung in a cathedral, and a media-savvy, context-savvy player knows to be attuned to what is right for the right context. And I love rowdy taverns! But there are thoughts that I can’t hear myself think on Twitter, and if I go too long without hearing those thoughts I start to feel alienated from myself. Once I’ve thought it through in an essay, it can sometimes then be trivial to translate those thoughts into tweets. And I might do that. But I don’t even want to think that far ahead. I really just want to figure out this thing that I’ve been tinkering at for years now. It’s about the wiggle room. It’s about perception. It’s about helping people see the way that they are seeing. It’s about patience.

This is where I paused to think about what the title of this post should be. I already compared Twitter to a tavern above, and I figure I might as well contrast it to a temple. One of the title ideas I had for this substack – which I ended up using for a tumblr and twitter alt instead, was “HREFgopuram”:

Here’s what I wrote in my first post on the tumblr, which is currently a ramshackle junkyard collection of notes and links:

“In HTML (hypertext markup language), HREF is short for “hypertext reference”. It’s an attribute used in anchor tags, so a link to visakanv.com would look like <a href=“http://visakanv.com”>link text here</a>. HREFs function as magic portals across texts, teleporting us from one place to another.

A gopuram is an ornate tower at the entrance of south indian hindu temples. Gopurams function as gateways, demarcating the threshold of sacred space, and also as monuments: guiding attention, inspiring awe, embodying memory.”

It’s striking to me that, of course, I wanted to be talking about thresholds, gateways, consecration, sacred spaces. I’ve wanted it all along. I find myself sighing a deep happy sigh, to return fresh- to revisit a realization that has been stirring in me for such a long time.

Finally, I’m reminded of two seemingly contradictory things I’ve written about taverns. One is that I think of my life’s work as assembling a tavern of ‘my people’. Friendly Ambitious Nerds. Voyagers. Serious players. The tavern can be sacred in that it is a place for friends to convene, to gather.

(source)

The other, however, is the idea that a tavern can also be a site of escapism, where someone goes to avoid the work that they know they ought to be doing. Both things can be true, and it takes discernment to notice when you’ve been having too much to drink, and that your revelry has ceased to be a meaningful celebration and has instead turned into avoidance.

(source)

I want it all. I want to gather with my friends in the tavern, to sing and dance and be merry. I want to go on grand, challenging adventures of exploration, to learn interesting and useful things that I can bring back and share with my people. And I want a sacred temple-library to quietly reflect in. And more than access to these spaces, I want to cultivate the wisdom and sensitivity required to know what’s the right thing for me to do at each moment. And I want to earn the companionship of those who want the same thing I do.