Checkpoints

some thoughts about caring for basic function

Take a deep breath. Hold it for a count of five. Exhale.

Step zero is probably, put down your phone, close the laptop, get water and food in your body and sun on your face. But you’re here and I’m here, so let’s give ourselves a break and come back to step zero when we’re ready.

Notice five sensations in the external world. The pressure of the keys, the texture of the chair beneath your legs, the redness of the maple swaying next door, the aftertaste of coffee, the tension in your right shoulder.

This sucks. It sucks! It does. You don’t need me to tell you that but in case affirmation/confirmation/sympathy helps: it’s Not Good.

I’m not going to tell you “what next,” but I will share some thoughts I’m finding useful.

I first came across the archery concept of “checkpoints” in a Hawkeye comic, probably Matt Fraction’s run; I’m told this is something serious archers really do, and even if they didn’t I’ve found the idea useful. Anyway, here it is, checkpoints: when you’re doing a difficult thing with your body that is extremely sensitive to initial conditions, it helps to find external markers that correspond with the initial conditions you want. These markers cue your body to make all the subtle internal adjustments the situation requires. Each time you draw your bow, the joint of your thumb goes to your cheekbone, beneath the corner of your eye. Each proper draw creates a particular tension in your upper chest.

Life is a difficult thing you do with your body, extremely sensitive to initial conditions. Especially in moments of stress. I know what some of my checkpoints are; yours will be different. Consider things you usually do with your body: I usually go on a run on Wednesday mornings. I went on a run today. I didn’t hit a personal best or anything. Obviously! But my body knows it’s there, and it reminds the rest of me.

Movement helps: walking, dancing, lift a dumbbell, anything that lets the ape drive for even a few minutes. I remember thinking, sometimes, as a kid, how cool it would be to live as a sort of postsingularity disembodied Star Trek light-alien noncorporeal entity, uploaded to The Internet or whatever. This idea feels so alien to me now, not just because the hardware on which the whole disembodied non-corporeal entity thing runs would end up deprecated in three years anyway and supported only by a handful of overworked hobbyists. The language/reasoning layer that we tend to think of as “us” is a powerful exception handler but it rests on top of this much older, much weirder, vastly more resourced biological stack—and the older I become, the greater the demands placed upon me, the more essential I find that biological stack, the functional ape.

I think it was in Tu Wei-ming’s writing about neoconfucian thought that I first encountered the vision of the world as concentric circles. First you draw a tiny circle. That’s you. Draw a circle around that. That’s your family—blood, found, doesn’t matter, it’s everyone who is thick with you, everyone you reach for, everyone who reaches for you in the first instance. Draw a circle around that one. Let’s call it ‘close friends.’ Draw more circles. Each one expands the sphere of care. Eventually you’ll reach lighter, looser connections: your place of employment, town, city. County, commonwealth, state. Region. Watershed. Nation. World.

Responsibilities and work travel in both directions, toward the center and away. But we humans always have to start in the middle, and it helps to work our way out carefully. Find what your body needs first. Serve those needs. Look to your family, and care for them. Look to your friends. People need help right now, and will need help in the future, and those are the pathways along which help most easily travels. Acts of aid. Offers of company.

If you’re an artist, and trying to work: first, you don’t have to. Center of the circle. Take care of your needs. Find your checkpoints. For me this is tricky because, writing is one of those—that’s one reason I’m here right now, writing this. If you’re blocked—and hell, why wouldn’t you be!—it helps me to think about those circles, and ask what’s the work for. Am I offering something to friends, to family? To allies? Is this practice needed to protect or establish the foundation from which I work? Do I just feel better if I spent fifteen minutes every day writing about necromancers? (You don’t have to envision any lofty social purpose for the art: “I want to make someone laugh” is good enough, God is it good enough—art can wake the ape up, let it drive for a minute, and the ape, remember, is helpful.)

I saw Sunny Moraine writing a few days ago about how folk who entered school around the time we did, in the 90s moment, were extraordinarily poorly served by the “end of history” vibes when it came to actually living in the world, because there is no end, no single point of victory or failure. (“Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.”) When I started learning jiu-jitsu one of the hardest concepts to grok after many years of striking arts was how each technique is a continual process with occasional explosive “events”: you’re creeping out of a hold or past a guard, proceeding through obstacles. You’re trying to climb a wall while the wall’s trying to climb you. That’s long painstaking work. It can be done, even from the least advantageous position.

Science fiction and fantasy novelists are maybe weird people to listen to in the current moment. (He says, looking at the camera.) I mean, we can be helpful in some senses and less so in others, all else being equal. There’s the good: the novel is a game of eighth-inches, incremental work with vision of a state change that often seems impossible at each step along the road (there is no book—now there is a book!). That seems like a helpful mindset to me. On the flip side, the idea the right thing action is to Write a Novel, under whatever conditions, is an odd one. It’s “heroic” in the Seeing Like a State sense: grandiose, overwhelming action, kinda silly, unlikely to correspond 1:1 with the world, might lead to extremely weird assumptions. When looking for models, look for folks around you already doing the needful work. There are of course plenty of novelists out there who do the needful work.

Also the story of Zhuangzi’s tortoise is on my mind. You’ve probably heard this one before, but I’ll tell it anyway.

It goes like this: one day the king sends messengers to offer Master Zhuang a job in the court. They find Master Zhuang down in the holler, sitting in his back yard at the edge of a mudhole. The messengers extend the king’s offer. Master Zhuang says, “You know, I hear that in the king’s hall there’s an ancient tortoise shell used for divination. The king kneels to it every day; it’s praised and tended offerings and lauded in song. Now, do you think that tortoise would rather be dead and in the king’s hall, or alive, here, like that one, dragging its tail through the mud?”

The messengers say, of course the tortoise would rather be alive, dragging its tail through the mud.

Master Zhuang says, “So would I,” and sends them away.

Apes need mud too. It keeps the sun off.

Take care of yourselves, friends. And others. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings.

(and consider Step Zero.)