Dear Jay,
Writing to you because it has been a very long time since I've had the kind of fun, open, intellectually-curious conversation that defined our relationship in the later years in Providence. It isn't entirely true—I had a small dinner party a few weeks ago and we got some decent group discussion going—but it feels true. Maybe slowing the intellectual churn post-college is just how it goes, or maybe it was the quagmire of COVID. The disease and the death and the news and the money and the separation and the eye-clenching frantic everything of the past year turned me into an ooze. There's nothing wrong with being shapeless, necessarily, but this pile of muck wants to put on a burgundy shirt and have some sense of direction and movement in life. I wrote in my last newsletter about developing one's narrative of self, and Kyle Chayka further articulated how performative this can be given the current state of affairs. One coping mechanism to this miasma for me has often been through conversation with those who have interesting perspectives, and this is why I write to you today. It's really nice having Nate in the bay now, too.
My friend Jimmy lent me David Bohm's book On Dialogue and it felt perfect for me in this moment. Isn't it a joy when words find you at the right place at the right time? There are too many words in the world to put up with anything less, I think. I read it very slowly, partially because I didn't know how to choose what to read next (some Donald Judd essays, ultimately) and partially because I liked it so much. Bohm writes with an arrogant confidence that seemed to pervade white male academics of the 60s, which I am guiltily attracted to, due to its contrast to my more tepid and nervous tone when outputting words and ideas. The book inspires introspection, not in a selfish way but in a kind of networked, contextual way: celebrating the process by which an identity is constructed by all of its touchpoints within the world. I am the way I am because of how my blood pumps nutrients to my cells and because of the values I learned growing up and because of how my parents speak to me, that these aren't just facts that point to "me" as an entity but rather they are part of the constellation that IS "me". The same can go for thinking: Bohm says that being aware of ones own thinking thinking is less about charting some particular trail of thoughts inside our heads, but more about noticing all of the influences on us that lead us to view things a particular way. He calls this mode of thinking and seeing "proprioception of thought." Given my love of proprioception (which has always drawn me to the embodied elements of dance, architecture, sculpture), of course I love the term. Honing one's proprioception of thought, I believe, is a large part of the intellectual project, and I'd like more of it in my life.
I felt like myself when I read On Dialogue because I want so badly to participate in intellectual culture, and the act of reading it and the act of getting into the kind of dialogue it espouses seem like ways to touch this goal. One could frame my move to California as an attempt to push my intellectualism away, but eventually it caught back up to me. In the mean time I've learned how to enjoy some of the physical pleasures of sunshine, cool ocean water, and tall mountains. I just watched a short film on James Baldwin and it flared up, within me, a romanticism for European cafe culture. Here in California, the best conversations seem to happen on a run or bike ride or surf or drive. The urgency of cigarette-fueled conversations on the nuances of interiority seems to evaporate under dry sunshine, and the more open-mouthed Californian intellectualism takes on a different flavor. I speculate that the scales of nature here preclude high-level navel-gazing. Human endeavor feels a lot smaller, less important. I was working in the southeast part of the Bay a few days ago, which, in perspective, put the Salesforce Tower directly in front of Mt Tam. The tower is puny. I remember chuckling, thinking about a half-baked essay I read, years ago, about why surfer slang was so sloppy and nonsensical: the author said it was because dealing with the ocean up-close like that is actually so insane and so subtle that it is difficult to articulate the sensations involved. So surfers resort to platitudes. I think the same could be said for other features of physical geography: reducing us to awed mumblings. Tya has recommended this book Mountains of the Mind to me on two occasions, perhaps it will hold some insight in more delicate articulations of environmental joys. Or maybe I need to befriend more of the Philosophy department.
Bohm talks about all kinds of things, including the incoherence of society (the best cure for which seems to be group identity) and how most explicit thought is incredibly fast (minutes), and then we spend hours re-hashing it all over and over for no particular purpose. I have felt frustrated with research recently due to it seemingly embracing both atomization and constant rehashing, and I have felt too busy with small tasks to zoom out and enjoy the higher-level elements of my work. Or, hell, going to conferences. I wish, romantically, that my life could mostly be in response to more necessary things, working more closely with people on shared tasks. This is some of why I enjoyed teaching work. (And I suspect this sentiment fuels most of the back-to-the-land stuff for our generation.) I wonder about living on a sailboat, and if it would let me save more money than paying rent in the Bay Area. At least then I would have urgent and laborious chores to attend to all the time, as right now I give myself too much time to think. Let me know if you have any ideas for second jobs I should take up with that time, for I am broke once again. Have you read this poem by Tracy Smith? I shouldn't really complain—I'm not as scrupulous with my money as I could be—but I do look forward to a moment in life when I can buy wine without any guilt about it, or, really, I wish that I could buy a plane ticket and unplug for a little while, or see all of my friends and family. Instead I spent it on a dentist bill.
I've been seriously behind on both some professional and personal work, but nothing gets done without the brain ignited. Here's to catching up and catching fire, please let me know how you are doing.
In dialogue,
Lukas
Writing to you because it has been a very long time since I've had the kind of fun, open, intellectually-curious conversation that defined our relationship in the later years in Providence. It isn't entirely true—I had a small dinner party a few weeks ago and we got some decent group discussion going—but it feels true. Maybe slowing the intellectual churn post-college is just how it goes, or maybe it was the quagmire of COVID. The disease and the death and the news and the money and the separation and the eye-clenching frantic everything of the past year turned me into an ooze. There's nothing wrong with being shapeless, necessarily, but this pile of muck wants to put on a burgundy shirt and have some sense of direction and movement in life. I wrote in my last newsletter about developing one's narrative of self, and Kyle Chayka further articulated how performative this can be given the current state of affairs. One coping mechanism to this miasma for me has often been through conversation with those who have interesting perspectives, and this is why I write to you today. It's really nice having Nate in the bay now, too.
My friend Jimmy lent me David Bohm's book On Dialogue and it felt perfect for me in this moment. Isn't it a joy when words find you at the right place at the right time? There are too many words in the world to put up with anything less, I think. I read it very slowly, partially because I didn't know how to choose what to read next (some Donald Judd essays, ultimately) and partially because I liked it so much. Bohm writes with an arrogant confidence that seemed to pervade white male academics of the 60s, which I am guiltily attracted to, due to its contrast to my more tepid and nervous tone when outputting words and ideas. The book inspires introspection, not in a selfish way but in a kind of networked, contextual way: celebrating the process by which an identity is constructed by all of its touchpoints within the world. I am the way I am because of how my blood pumps nutrients to my cells and because of the values I learned growing up and because of how my parents speak to me, that these aren't just facts that point to "me" as an entity but rather they are part of the constellation that IS "me". The same can go for thinking: Bohm says that being aware of ones own thinking thinking is less about charting some particular trail of thoughts inside our heads, but more about noticing all of the influences on us that lead us to view things a particular way. He calls this mode of thinking and seeing "proprioception of thought." Given my love of proprioception (which has always drawn me to the embodied elements of dance, architecture, sculpture), of course I love the term. Honing one's proprioception of thought, I believe, is a large part of the intellectual project, and I'd like more of it in my life.
I felt like myself when I read On Dialogue because I want so badly to participate in intellectual culture, and the act of reading it and the act of getting into the kind of dialogue it espouses seem like ways to touch this goal. One could frame my move to California as an attempt to push my intellectualism away, but eventually it caught back up to me. In the mean time I've learned how to enjoy some of the physical pleasures of sunshine, cool ocean water, and tall mountains. I just watched a short film on James Baldwin and it flared up, within me, a romanticism for European cafe culture. Here in California, the best conversations seem to happen on a run or bike ride or surf or drive. The urgency of cigarette-fueled conversations on the nuances of interiority seems to evaporate under dry sunshine, and the more open-mouthed Californian intellectualism takes on a different flavor. I speculate that the scales of nature here preclude high-level navel-gazing. Human endeavor feels a lot smaller, less important. I was working in the southeast part of the Bay a few days ago, which, in perspective, put the Salesforce Tower directly in front of Mt Tam. The tower is puny. I remember chuckling, thinking about a half-baked essay I read, years ago, about why surfer slang was so sloppy and nonsensical: the author said it was because dealing with the ocean up-close like that is actually so insane and so subtle that it is difficult to articulate the sensations involved. So surfers resort to platitudes. I think the same could be said for other features of physical geography: reducing us to awed mumblings. Tya has recommended this book Mountains of the Mind to me on two occasions, perhaps it will hold some insight in more delicate articulations of environmental joys. Or maybe I need to befriend more of the Philosophy department.
Bohm talks about all kinds of things, including the incoherence of society (the best cure for which seems to be group identity) and how most explicit thought is incredibly fast (minutes), and then we spend hours re-hashing it all over and over for no particular purpose. I have felt frustrated with research recently due to it seemingly embracing both atomization and constant rehashing, and I have felt too busy with small tasks to zoom out and enjoy the higher-level elements of my work. Or, hell, going to conferences. I wish, romantically, that my life could mostly be in response to more necessary things, working more closely with people on shared tasks. This is some of why I enjoyed teaching work. (And I suspect this sentiment fuels most of the back-to-the-land stuff for our generation.) I wonder about living on a sailboat, and if it would let me save more money than paying rent in the Bay Area. At least then I would have urgent and laborious chores to attend to all the time, as right now I give myself too much time to think. Let me know if you have any ideas for second jobs I should take up with that time, for I am broke once again. Have you read this poem by Tracy Smith? I shouldn't really complain—I'm not as scrupulous with my money as I could be—but I do look forward to a moment in life when I can buy wine without any guilt about it, or, really, I wish that I could buy a plane ticket and unplug for a little while, or see all of my friends and family. Instead I spent it on a dentist bill.
I've been seriously behind on both some professional and personal work, but nothing gets done without the brain ignited. Here's to catching up and catching fire, please let me know how you are doing.
In dialogue,
Lukas