From the Depths
I'm revising, in grams per centimeter cubed
There’s a scene in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark that captures the revision process more than any other piece of art that comes to mind: Indiana Jones has reached temple’s inner sanctum, and stands before the golden idol he’s come to retrieve/steal. It rests on a trapped plinth. If the idol is removed, the trap will spring. But of course Dr. Jones can’t know precisely how much the idol weighs until he picks it up, so he has to guess. He measures sand into a bag roughly the idol’s size. Takes out some. Adds a bit. Licks his lips. Wiggles his fingers to limber them up. He’s ready to make the swap.
I used to share a .gif of this scene on social media, back when I was on social media, as a signal I’d gone into deep revision. What felt true about it then, was the feeling of precise manipulation of apparently-insignificant detail with vast & consequential effect. I recently noticed a new aspect—I’ve heard this joked about before, of course, but it clicked in a new way with the revision metaphor. Revision is a process of adding and subtracting sand (density 1.52 g/cm^3) from a bag, until it weighs the same as a roughly equivalent volume of gold (density 19.32 g/cm^3). As Geoffrey Rush says in Shakespeare in Love: “It is a mystery!”
A couple weeks back I read Moonbound by Robin Sloan—blitzed the last half in a sitting, sprawled on the couch long past bedtime. Books like this are one of the great reasons to have a couch you can sprawl on. Reading it felt like listening to a spring: bubbling with delight and discovery and strangeness.
Even I tend to talk about books in the context of their “genres”, which really just means their “kinds.” Of course: how else to organize the chaos field of story? When talking about a book, what are we to say except what sort of book this is? But the wonder of a good book lies beyond kind, I think—it’s a unique unfolding, inviting the reader into a new world of language and concept. Maybe ‘new’ isn’t the right word—even the oldest stories can have the smell of a just-broken cedar branch.
Books are in tension like almost everything else that moves—between the “kind”, the history, the conversation, and the inexpressible drive that must articulate itself through form. Watch a salsa dancer: she may use traditional steps, but she must do more than suggest the movement of other dancers. She makes them new in her body. We can sense when a strike is not driven by connection to the earth; we know when it’s pulled. Are we throwing a punch, or waving our hands in the manner of punches we’ve seen thrown?
Sloan has a breathtaking deftness. This book’s swift, flexible voice could so easily turn glib but never does. Here it allows for the expression of care, sorrow, generosity, loss—in grace notes, in phrases that point out to silence. That deftness permits wonders. Moonbound keeps turning itself inside out, transforming in a very Moonboundy way from fantasy and its reading protocols to science fiction and back again. And there are jokes! There are many jokes. It’s not a message book but there are messages in it, and what I took from the last few chapters, I desperately needed to hear. Maybe you, too.
The great thinker and writer James C Scott passed away recently. I read his Seeing Like a State not long after writing Two Serpents Rise. It’s hard to describe suddenly encountering, in a clear and reasoned scholarly argument with many footnotes and citations, a position which you have sensed issuing in a cthonic and oracular fashion from fissures at the back of the cave of your own artistic practice. If you haven’t read SLaS, I recommend it without reservation. My friend Matt once said that after you read Seeing Like a State, you can sense it hovering over a vast range of other conversations like an Imperial Star Destroyer. Henry Farrell has a wonderful retrospective and overview over on his newsletter (along with a shout-out for the Craft books).
There have been moments of grace in the last week—a sensation of ice breaking somewhere, permitting movement. Standing on my back porch with a cup of coffee watching the bees in the trees, drawing a free breath. Noticing the light on the rhododendron out the window. There lives the dearest freshness deep down things—but ah! When it breaches!
Love this :)
I totally get what you mean about revision. I feel like I even have had the same intense expression on my face as Indy does when I am revising. I finished a short story, and mostly just wrote, but at one point found myself going back over a scene. It felt like time froze for a second as my fingers hovered over the keyboard, looking for that perfect tension --- juuust right, there it is -- before putting down the new words.
I will put Moonbound on my to-read list! And, on the seeing like a state angle, my mom recently sent me a nice longread of three big articles (in Russian) about the start of WWI, and how it was *really* about Russia wanting to stop Turkey from buying these dreadnoughts. Only a theory to be sure, but a fascinating one, showing the deeply bizarre notions that likely drove the actions of Statesmen in those critical months of the summer of 1914. The state does not see like a human, indeed.