Category Archives: Writing

You Understand Nothing, Robert Benson

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You probably think I’m dead. I posted a lot from 2012 to 2018. Less since 2019 and almost nothing since 2022. Yeah, there’s been a lot going on: a pandemic, an attempted coup, vandals in government, spreading fascism, unaccountable billionaires wrecking the place, changing climate, corporate rebranding of intelligence as a thing that can simulated, souped up and sold to make us all more .. productive?

I used to write with the belief that I needed share only what I felt I understood. When I stopped understanding, I stopped writing. That’s exactly backwards.

I’m sick inside my soul. Not because I stopped understanding. Because I stopped writing or I slowed down in attempt to be careful to say only things I knew for certain to be true. Problem: I know nothing for certain to be true.

We don’t write from places of perfect understanding. We write our way toward understanding.

We don’t write because our thoughts are all well-made and perfectly formed. We form our thoughts from our words. We put words on a screen or a page and say: is that what I think?

Sometimes we surprise ourselves in finding succinctly stated containers of direct thought. More often we iterate, we draft, we make paragraphs and let them cool so we can taste them in different lights at different times of day. Sometimes our thoughts are jumbled and chaotic. They don’t make sense to us. So many broken, misfit pieces. But that’s a puzzle and the only way to work a puzzle is to see the pieces, take inventory, place them into some kind of order so you can start the work of locking them together in a coherent picture.

The picture isn’t always coherent, of course. We don’t always understand what our thoughts mean. So we need to send them into the world. Let other people find them and try to connect those thoughts to their own thoughts. Sometimes they connect and someone helps us understand what we meant by what we said or what we meant to say.

All of this is to tell you, I am tired of waiting. I am tired of broken nonsense.

I understand nothing, and I am ready to tell you about it.

Can’t Run But

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I haven’t run since since September 24. That was two weeks before shoulder surgery put me on the couch for six weeks with nothing to do but let muscle attach to tendon and tendon to bone. I’ve been off the couch since late November and taking walks, but I am definitely missing the mental/creative benefits that find me with a regular running practice. Which is to say, I miss the clarity of thought and writing that seems to attend with physical exertion.

I am bugging my physical therapist for a Get Back to Running date. She says sometime between mid-February (Valentine’s Day!) and end of March. That is wide zone of six weeks, but at least I now have targets on the calendar.

Being honest, I can see that I have taken my inability to run as a bit of an excuse. Instead of embracing the opportunity to walk more, I have let myself wait to be able to run.

This is a habit that shows up often in my writing. When I don’t have time to sit and fully do the thing I really want to do, I often don’t take the times that offer themselves in between things to write what/where I am able. When I tell myself “there is no time”, I am ignoring the time between things. This, I think, is the nature of practice. Working with time in a realistic rather than idealistic way.

As Paul Simon puts it in another context: “I can’t run but I can walk much faster than this.”

Where Am I Going, Where Have I Been? (with apologies to Joyce Carol Oates)

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When I last posted in September 2022, I had no plans to quit this space. I don’t have a good story to tell about why I stopped. I wasn’t kidnapped. I didn’t suffer traumatic brain injury and forget my URL. And if I had forgotten, I still had the annual renewal bills to remind me.

I never meant to go silent. I just lost track of what I meant to do with this space. I knew I wanted my posts to feel like more than just feeding words into the hungry maw of large language training models. I didn’t want to feel myself become a ChatGPT vassal.

I stopped writing in the usual way and took some time, intentional or no, to relearn my own mind. I’ve been working a lot with the idea of community. As in: Who even am I? Who are my people? What do I need to say?

Having the need to say things is not the same as having things that need to be said.

Somehow in the last ten years of social media, the mere act of saying things became confused with the work of doing things, knowing things and feeling things. Simply saying things is a low bar. I am trying to become a person who says and knows less; who feels and does more.

I have been writing. A cycle of poetry workshops at the public library in late 2022/early 2023 put me back in touch with poems, and I started cultivating a practice. I have been fitting poems into the spaces of life where Facebook and Twitter used to go. I have been compiling a collection of other people’s excellent poems so I can make a study of how they work, how they move. The library workshops put me into community with a few new friends and we meet together monthly to explore our craft. This gives a sense of accountability missing since undergraduate writing classes. Better actually, since the four of us are all writing from similar places in life with wildly different voices. They care about what I have to say. I care about what they have to say. We share critique to help each other say it better.

I had shoulder surgery in October. There was nothing to do while waiting for muscle and tendon to reattach to bone, but sit, read, watch and listen. I read 17 books in 59 days. I finished two shows I had previously started but never finished (The Leftovers and The Mandalorian) and then watched the entire first season of The Last of Us in pretty much one go. I got to work curating my Spotify playlists, journaled a bit, tagged pictures in my photo roll and wrote poems.

Pondering, all the while, my wild privilege to have good healthcare, paid time off to safely recover and the luxury of time to rest.

My shoulder has healed well enough to begin a slow return to work and the other activities of life. I’m off the couch, out of the sling and doing most of the things I need to do. I’m also feeling fullness, the benefit of the time spent reading, watching and listening. There is a happy heaviness to it, a sense of richness. Which has me thinking of my writing here as a work of digestion, a way of making use of things I take in. This, I think, has been the purpose of the blog all along. A place to metabolize and try to make sense in community with others.

Everyone and Everything

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Sitting to write, I let myself fall in love with everyone and everything, preparing to accept they cannot, will not, love me back.

And Then: An Account of the Last Three Years

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I forgot how to write in 2019. I was still doing it to some extent, nouns and verbs here and there, publishing the odd post and scribbling notes to myself in the various places I stash ideas, but I had become confused. The internet soured. Each time I logged on, I felt myself permeated by incoherence, as if each day’s assault of random interestingness was a kind of cosmic radiation, weakening my bones, shredding DNA, mutating my sense of self, place and purpose.

At the same time, my twenty year career as a college librarian was unraveling. I lost connection to the work I was doing, had done and had felt to be important. The place I was working became poisonous, a place that celebrated mediocrity and prized uncritical conformity. The feel-good phraseology of employment as “work family” took hold, and directionless “innovation” masked an institutional rot that still breaks my heart.

The larger world seemed no better. Everywhere I looked, I saw once-trusted systems breaking. “We can’t keep living like this”: the mantra circling like smoke in my mind.

I started talk therapy (again) with an affable, but himself exhausted, therapist who helped me understand the turn a mind often takes in midlife. We talked a lot about the physical experience I had of staring into woods at night and feeling myself being swallowed by darkness, which seemed the inescapable fact of death — mine, yours, everyone and everything. It was, in psychological terms, a depression. It was, in spiritual terms, liberation. He helped me see that I didn’t have to do the things I had been doing. I didn’t have to continue thinking myself a plaything of what others deemed important or useful or vital. I could define these things for myself. He prescribed James Hollis and Robert Bly and poetry and writing and running and meditation. He prescribed family and friends and community.

And then: the pandemic.

My sense of darkness and the inescapability of death came to seem prescient. I felt also a kind of global kinship as we all moved our lives onto the internet to keep ourselves physically apart to help “bend the curve” of hospitalizations and death around the world. There was a brief moment of togetherness, beauty and wonder as my feed filled with video of people all around the world leaning from balconies to clamor and praise the work of nurses, doctors and emergency responders daily placing themselves in harm’s way. I saw cellists and opera singers perform in empty town squares for people who needed the courage that music and art bring. We stopped driving cars so much and air quality got better. And the thought “we can’t keep living like this” became “Oh. This is how it can feel to be a human.”

And also, then, the “work from home” experience which, for me, dovetailed with remote onboarding into a new job inside a completely different profession. I made my escape from the broken place that had been my professional home, a place that had been making me physically sick. Painful as it was to leave behind my own team and friends via web conferences, I found a new opportunity to do meaningful work in a place I respected and that respected me.

I turned my mind again to the possibilities of writing but my mind was worn with constant thought of pandemic, the gathering strength of anti-democractic politics, economic stress and the inescapable fact of climate crisis. I didn’t know what to write, where to start. And then, the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. My feeds were full of protests, the swell of pent up people coming together to demand accountability for the unaccountable. And then, tear gas and billy clubs as the state’s answer to the gathered people. And then, the gassing of Lafayette Square to make the way safe for the vainglorious president and his ego handlers to strike sanctimonious poses in the borrowed shine of St. John’s Episcopal Church.

And then, a white teenage gun nut became a Fox News hero for carrying his AR-15 into the midst of chaos so he could feel like a bad ass. And later, America went full Watchmen when Texas deputized all citizens to enforce its heinous forced birth law. Everywhere I looked, the people saying “America First” most loudly were actively putting American values last. Metastatic dumbness grew rampant, aggressive and violent. 

In the midst of all this, I lost my words entirely. As a white, professional, affluent male, I had no idea what to say. Everything that seemed possible to say also felt like a gross exertion of privilege. Who should care what I had to say? What could it possibly matter?

I am not proud of this reflex. In the moment, I could have used my voice to elevate the voices of Black lives, female lives and queer lives — people who already understand the violence and chaos I was feeling as a more or less normal part of their whole lives. I didn’t. I let myself vacillate too long trying to decide if using my voice was an act of aggression or an act of hubris. I couldn’t discern which. My silence became an exertion of my privilege. I spoke quietly to those people who already agreed with me, who saw what I saw and felt what I felt and tried to ignore the stupids and crazies.

Except, the stupids and crazies were everywhere. People I knew. People I had worked with. People I once had liked. People I had invited into my home. They were all on social media saying outrageously dumb things with a galling lack of shame.

I left Facebook because it was making me hate people I was meant to love. And then, I left Twitter because the richest man in the world decided he could fix America’s so-called “free speech problems” by buying the speech platform. Nothing to see here. Just one more self-righteous billionaire writing a check to feel like they are actively solving problems they daily help make worse.

And also the failed January 6 coup which was broadcast live for all the world to see, but for which the right people will never pay.

And then, the week the Supreme Court declared war on all of us. States cannot enforce hundred year old gun restriction laws but can force women to give birth against their will.

It is all too much. It has been too much. It will be too much.

And now, I am here, with you, to tell you that I never meant to leave this place and I never wanted to stop writing. For a while, I thought it hurt too much to try and now I find it is hurting too much to not be trying. Silence is making me sick. All of this not writing has become a thing I feel in the viscera of my body, in the hot reach of my soul.

And so, I am trying to return. I am trying to return with a new sense of what’s actually possible. Reading back on so much of my writing, I find a person struggling to declare what he believes he knows and understands. I stopped writing when I realized I know nothing. I understand nothing.

It takes a while to find humility, to accept your limits and realize that what you have to offer isn’t your certainty about things. It is your curiosity, your courage in uncertainty, your willingness to show your doubts to others in hopes they might recognize some of it as familiar, that some piece of your confusion about the world and these lives we are making can resonate and be helpful.

So I am trying to find a new way into my writing. Not as a declaration of what I know but, rather, as a joyful celebration of everything I don’t know, what I cannot perhaps ever understand. I still like the title Ubiquitous Quotidian but the meaning has changed. It is a journey of thought, feeling and community through what I am encountering everywhere (ubiquitous) everyday (quotidian).

I can only promise to show up in my writing. What we might do together with any of this remains to be seen.

Back in the Basement

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In Spring 2020, like many other middle-class American knowledge worker types, I created a make-shift, “temporary” Work From Home station in my living room. I moved my writing desk, my computer and, it turns out, the creative part of my psyche upstairs so I could spend the 8+ hour work days in better light and the company of my family. It served well for 20 months and got me safely through the worst of the dislocation.

In that time, I worked well and read a lot but did not write much. I told myself it was the stress of everything that kept me from writing – the pandemic, abrupt changes to social and family structures, the eruption of long overdue social reckonings, an actual attempted coup on daytime television, my daughter being a teenager. Too many things to process. Systemic overwhelm. Except writing is usually how I deal with overwhelm, how I process the world and my place in it.

Stress is not a reason to stop writing. Stress is a reason to write.

I was finding it hard to write in the space where I also worked. It was also hard to write in the part of the house where so much of life happens — you know, the “living” room. Interestingly, it was also more difficult to write in the light.

Now, I have returned to the basement. I have carried my desk, computer and all my scattered accoutrements back downstairs. I am inviting the creative part of my psyche, the part that likes to make things, to follow me down here.

For creative work I prefer darkness, much like plants prefer to press roots into fertile, black loam. For creative work I prefer distance, a small sense of apartness from whatever else is happening in the house. For creative work, I need to step down the stairs, which feels like an act of intention, physically stepping down into the unknown spaces of my psyche, my wilder unruly mind.

And so, I am returning myself to see what happens. To refind my seat. To reclaim writing as a thing I do in times of stress and uncertainty. Because the times are always uncertain. The conditions always impossible. The effort always slightly absurd.

I am back in the basement.

Photo by Ravi Kant on Pexels.com

Most Days It’s Dirt

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Here’s a thing that helped me today:

“Songwriting’s a lot like being a miner. It’s solitary work. You’re alone in a dark cave, and you just chip away everyday and most days it’s dirt and sometimes it’s gold. But with songwriting you don’t always know.”

Jewel. “Jewel — You Were Meant for Me.” Song Exploder. 2020.12.02. https://podcast.app/jewel-you-were-meant-for-me-e123314125/?utm_source=ios&utm_medium=share

A Secret Room

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I have spent an inordinate amount of my lifetime trying to write my way into stories the same way that I read them: in a straight line. Only just now does it occur to me to try getting into a story the way one gets into a secret room newly discovered hidden in one’s house: punch holes in the weakest parts of the wall until you find the beams.

Commonplace

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I set aside my writing because I could no longer understand the world and, thus, could no longer properly hope to describe it.

I left social media because it was making that swelling sense of tumult and incoherence even worse.

I even left reading for a time because it felt hollow and unconnected to things that were happening in my life. I realized, after a while, that I was no longer reading well. Words and ideas were blowing through me, and I was making no effort to catch or keep them. I was losing them and allowing them to be lost.

And so, I turned my attention to learning to read differently. To capture what I read. To annotate, denote. I am creating a practice of commonplacing, a habit I am still trying to cultivate and deepen. Commonplacing helps me hold those fleeting moments of insight called inspiration. Commonplacing helps me connect ideas together and find ways to allow my own thoughts to intersect and interact. Commonplacing is reintroducing myself to my own mind, which has grown weirder and more mysterious with time, to be sure.

I am getting weirder, but I no longer feel as frightened by my inability to catch ideas, to find relationships among thoughts, which is to say I no longer feel as overwhelmed, no longer as convinced I have nothing of particular use to say.

The words no longer simply blow straight through me.

I feel myself become weird and getting weirder.

For a time, I thought this must be middle life.

I am going to allow it keep happening. This is maturity.

I am telling you this because I want you to know.

I am writing.

The Value of Reading a Book I Hate by an Author I Love

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I am 89 pages into a book I am not enjoying by an author I adore. My middle life reading rule has been to abandon books to which I have not connected by page 60. Life is too short to waste reading bad books. I’m reading this one to the end.

My wife calls me a nerd for my compulsive commitment to finishing this book. She’s not wrong. I am reading this book because I am not enjoying it. Reading a book I don’t enjoy by an author I enjoy very much is a wonderful use of time.

Reading an unsuccessful story by a successful storyteller offers direct evidence of why some stories don’t work. What’s different about the way this story unfolds? What is the point of view? How are the scenes framed? How are the characters revealed? How is the conflict different from all the other stories I have enjoyed so much? What, if anything, am I enjoying about this mostly joyless work?

Reading an unsuccessful work by an author I admire very much helps isolate and clarify the variables of writing successful stories.

If I can read one book to teach me what doesn’t work in stories, I may avoid writing many such stories myself. Getting through the next 212 pages will save me a ton of wasted time in my own future work.

This has me curious. What have you learned by reading the worst book of an author you usually enjoy very much?