I’ve been catching my breath.
Back in early May, I sent in the final manuscript of one novel—it’s all over but for the copy edits and page proofs and the occasional waves of panic. Then I spent a week typing up the manuscript of the next book, which is—well, the word count says I’m halfway done, but to judge from the shape of the story I might be closer to a third. Fortunately, there’s plenty of time. And then I did something strange and unnatural (for me, at least).
I stopped.
It’s not that I don’t know what happens next, though some questions remain about the overall shape of the project. I’m not lost or blocked or whatever. But I’m about to undertake a long and deep period of dwelling in the Craft Sequence, a grand sweep through the many nooks and crannies it’s accumulated after six books and two games, and I am enjoying the edge—the prospect—the view from up here.
I hadn’t understood why I was doing this until I sat down to write, just now, after a day of tasks—accounting, tightening bolts on the old Hugo Award, glaring at the new printer, sharpening knives, etc. (Don’t worry, the new printer is fine.) I know what avoidance feels like, and this isn’t it. I’ve been doing this for almost ten years, and part of writing for that long, consistently, for me, has been learning the shape of the various obstacles I put in my way.
There’s a Zhuangzi story about a butcher named Ding, who’s so careful that he never has to sharpen his knives. “There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife really has no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into thick spaces, there’s more than enough room to play about!” But it’s not always easy. The butcher says: “when I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until—Zip! Zoop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground.”
On Django Wexler’s recommendation, I’m reading The Secret of Our Success, a book about why humans have been so successful, in ecological terms. That is to say, even in prehistory, the biologically modern human was wildly great at altering our environment, at reproducing, at dispersing through a wide range of terrains and ecosystems, at constituting biomass and fixing nitrogen and all the other things organisms do—more than any other vertebrate. Sure, we got there in large part by displacing, eating, or domesticating everything else in the food chain—but how and why? Our raw physical platforms, our sinews and skin and bones, aren’t all that impressive, by animal kingdom standards. One of the species we displaced, for example, was a bipedal primate that was something like ten feet tall at the shoulder and could probably bench press a small car. Compared to other vertebrates, stat block for stat block, we’re good at slow distance running and throwing and not much else. And speaking for myself, I’m no great shakes at either distance running or throwing.
We’re not, apparently, very good at raw cognitive tasks either! The book’s second chapter features a series of charming experiments pitting chimps and human toddlers against one another on a number of problem solving tasks—using toddlers in an attempt to control for educational advantages like “having taken a test before.” For most raw processing tasks, the humans only edge the chimps out by five to ten percentage points on average. Not a commanding lead, considering how much more raw brainspace humans have than chimps. We only pull way out front when it comes to social learning--if a person demonstrates the solution to a complicated problem to a human toddler and a chimp, the toddler is very likely to be able to follow along.
It’s enough to make me wonder how any of us would stack up against a chimp when it came to writing a fantasy novel… Another angle on the old monkey/typewriter saw, I guess.
The book’s general thesis is that culture sets us apart—our ability to learn from other humans and pass this knowledge down through ritualized practices. (I’m using ‘ritual’ here in an extremely soft, Confucian sense, li, any cultural practice or performance.) I’m only a few chapters in, and while too many bad internet takes have left me nervous whenever I see “evolution” and “culture” in close proximity to one another, the writer’s being careful (so far) and I’m interested to see where all this goes. As I ponder and work toward the end of a long series of books with my name on the cover, it’s a comfort to think that, alone in our own minds, even the cleverest among us is not particularly clever—that when we do great things, we do them by channeling forces and concepts and techniques that we have received from those who came before. Of course we don’t just accept everything that’s given, but consider and evaluate and critique and refine and carry forward. But nothing is wholly our own, which means that nothing has to be wholly our own.
One of my pet extremely bad and no-doubt-discreditable-by-experts theories about Chinese philosophy is that when Xunzi, the arch-Legalist, writes that humans are born “evil” (恶) and made better by instruction, the word he uses for “evil” carries a connotation of “incomplete” or “improperly formed,” rather than ontologically Dark-Lord-of-the-Sith style Evil. Parenting has made me even more dubious than I used to be about that word evil, but it has confirmed my belief that, at birth, we’re not done yet. There’s an exuberant and sublime readiness, a raw palpable gameness in an infant or a toddler—a self taking shape, roaring out into the world. But an infant does not know how to sleep, and a toddler does not know how to feel, or to move from one feeling to another. Many people in their mid thirties still don’t!
But it’s exciting in a way to think that, even as we’re not born complete, we might not be done at thirty-seven. At every age we turn back, and back, reviewing what we have been told, retelling the stories of our lives, taking stock, growing. One of my favorite quotes from Confucius’s Analects sketches out a path of constant growth:
吾十有五而志於學,三十而立,四十而不惑,五十而知天命,六十而耳順,七十而从心所欲,不逾矩
Here’s a stab at an English rendering, monkeying (chimping?) with a common translation of the quote:
At fifteen I set my heart upon learning.
At thirty, I took take my stand.
At forty, I no longer suffered from perplexities.
At fifty, I knew the will of Heaven.
At sixty, I heard it and was at ease.
At seventy, I could follow my own will; for what I desired no longer overstepped the bounds of right.
I’m interested to see whether, at forty, I will no longer suffer from perplexities. I don’t think many forty year olds of my acquaintance would say that’s true of them, though I might be surprised. I’ve heard a lot of forty plus friends talking about having “run out of fucks to give,” which may not be exactly the same thing but maybe it’s the most we can ask for in these fallen times.
I don’t think I would have described myself, at thirty, as having “taken my stand,” but in retrospect something of that sort did happen around thirty. Maybe the levels of attainment only appear in retrospect. When you’re climbing the mountain you only see the trail beneath you, or the scree slope ahead. You write a book and another book, and then a third book after that. Themes assemble, concepts aggregate, refrains repeat. The horizon changes, and you see more when you look over your shoulder—but even when you reach the summit, the mountain does not appear. The world appears, and the surrounding mountains. It’s only later, when you’re hiking away, that what you’ve done in climbing becomes comprehensible to the eye, or to the mind.
We size up the difficulties, watch out, take care. We listen to the problem with the blades of our knives. A book series can be ten years of a person’s life, or more, a constant deepening, growing more sensitive to subtler articulations of the central concern, the driving problem. We listen, as well and deeply as we can. And then—Zip! Zoop! The way is clear, and we proceed.
We are bubbles of earth, as Thompson says (and Crowley quotes). Bubbles of earth!
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If you’re in Canada: This is How You Lose the Time War is on sale through Kobo for $4.99 (CAN) through July 4th. Happy Pride!
I work in international trade (among other things), and Admiral Hewett's desire for "velvet" (that you mention in another comment) is gaining traction in the supply chain world right now as an alternative to both ever-more-efficient (and brittle) supply chains and autarky. It's "supply chain redundancy," actually, but "supply chain velvet" would make a better band name, no?
Anyway, while I hope more people begin to value slack in case things go wrong for reasons beyond the material needs of business, it can't hurt to have businesses start to recognize it. They are wired into the culture, after all.
Thanks, as always, for a thought-provoking read. I love the Craft Sequence. The stories are a reminder to us real-life craftspeople and risk managers and consultants that our jobs can be really cool--and that they carry both the awesome potential and responsibility to help build a more just world.
I’m fifty and have plenty of perplexities, but I spend less time marveling at them and just roll my eyes and put the effort toward figuring out what action improves the situation.