SPARE PAPER ❖ Two things

I read about joan didion and dinner

Ansel Adams, Sierra Meadow (1930)

I’m busy and I’ve decided to just write things and not edit them for a while.

Here’s two things I loved reading this past week:

Joan Didion’s ‘Why I write’

The writers writing about writing genre is a tedious but necessary hell to circle around, and some writers do a good job of making their particular stopover through hell both compelling and an actually fresh reminder of why one writes. I use the word reminder in a deeper way here, as in the specific way that very good writing tends to trigger something between or combining both recognition and insight through specificity. The specificity in question is how Joan describes how she does not identify an intellectual at all:

I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact.

I have found myself here in this position again and again, grasping an impressionistic understanding of phenomenology and ontology only to be bored endlessly by the technical sterility of its academic exploration. True capital-T Thinkers are quite content in the lab of abstractions. But the disharmony of exploring the bluest matters of the soul or human existence in surgical terms is jarring; far more important and more interesting is the mythology which thrusts these same ideas through the boundary of imagination and outward into the real world. Where true intellectuals value a certain even, level-headedness I think that writers value things which have momentum and energy to them; that is style, and how meaning and weight are conferred by it.

By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

There’s two things in here: the first is that being someone who doesn’t know what you really think until you write renders you as a totally non threatening object in the real world. You are not someone who shoots from the hip or even shoots very much at all, and that is someone who feels safe to be around. Joan had described herself as “awkward and terribly inarticulate” and this is in fact what gave her an edge in investigative journalism: her subjects would almost lose awareness entirely of her gaze, which was in fact constantly switched on and scrutinising.

This turns out to be true of many writers: although larger-than-life when encountered in their form, one gets the impression that they carry these notions fully-formed around their ideas and merely need time to sit down and pull it out like one of those magicians yanking twenty feet of handkerchiefs out of their throat, when in fact they are utterly inarticulate and disorganised in their stream of thinking (you can observe the same in David Foster Wallace).

The second thing is that it echoes this idea that to chase a problem or an idea into its most interesting depth you have to have the ability to hold a question open and in a state of confusion and ambiguity in your mind as long as possible. Said another way: you have the inability to close it prematurely. All of my worst writing, I have found, has started with an answer or a thing I think I want to impart upon the world as useful information. It turns out these answers are never worth much more belaboring; I end up writing like a schoolkid trying to fluff up their wordcount. Which it turns out is about the same way that ChatGPT talks. So I find information sharing to be a silly ambition to have for writing.

But when I have a real question, and a genuine confusion without many more clues than fuzzy impressions that keep swimming to the surface of my mind — that’s when it gets interesting. I have always thought it was true that confusion is a necessary step to clarity, and it should not be avoided or dismissed, but fully and foolishly engaged with to its damning end.

the dinner party - Helena Aeberli

Speaking of recognition: I loved how this post pulled on a thread I’ve been idly interested in for a long time. Why do dinner parties feel so important?

There’s a sense that being an adult woman hosting regular dinner parties with the commitment and seriousness of how men freely go about their assorted ventures is nothing more than an indulgent, girlish frivolity, like a little pigtailed girl overly attached to her old doll tea party days.

But I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that good hosting feels somehow political, important, collectively enriching as well as joyous. There was decisioning to be made about guests, there were prospects for follow-on opportunities, and you could see people change their minds about really small and really big things in real-time. And when I get that feeling — that cognitive dissonance between a sense that something seems a little stupid and trivial but that it is also very important — I have gotten in the habit of asking myself of whether it has to do with the fact that it is something that women tend to do (or that I am doing it as a woman).

To reexamine the dinner party from a feminist perspective is also to ask how we can reclaim spaces and forms of being which are both venerated when masculinised (the Last Supper, Plato’s Symposium) and demeaned when gendered as feminine. Why must Clarissa Dalloway feel ashamed of her instinct to bring people together, which the men of the novel mock? Indeed, what if she — or rather, her Conservative MP husband and his successors today — could apply that instinct to politics rather than just parties? To bring very different people together yet to cherish them equally, in ‘an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom?’.

And the truth is this that the importance of how ordinary space is organised and facilitated has been a recurrent theme in civil rights and equality, as with Virginia Woolfe’s “A Room of One’s Own“.

George Saunders wrote (to paraphrase) that the smallness of everyday interactions then ‘writ large’ is what you might call politics; think of it like a simulation of interactions between people run over and over again thousands of times. That is politics; that is the shape of a society.

The dinner party is a space of welcome. An opening of doors and arms which can enable conversation and debate, community and (re-)connection. There’s shared resources and shared labour — purchasing, cooking, and cleaning together — as well as the opening up of the private sphere to a gathered group in an age when leisure is increasingly privatised within the nuclear family and the home, or separated into online bubbles.

One of the most ironic things about politics is that it is the domain that most people are eager to separate from their own lives, rightly so: we feel often so alienated from our own governments, what they do and how they make decision, so how does it concern our happy and sad little lives? But it’s the same as the parable of the fish who asks, “What the hell is water?” We shape and are shaped concurrently by politics as the fish in water; its power and its totalising stupidity are unavoidable.