Nothing and Everything

It is Saturday evening and to be quite frank with you, my dear reader, I have no idea what to write or publish this week.

This has happened before, if you’ll allow me to give a peek behind the curtain. There have been many a week wherein I have gotten up to the last few days feeling as if I had nothing to say only for that vague, collective unconscious that fuels dreams and inspiration to blink first and reveal something to me.

That hasn’t happened this week. Nothing that I’ve thought of, nothing in my drafts, has felt right for this particular moment in time.

That could be because I am flying solo with the two kids this weekend while my wife is out of town, and so any and every chance I would otherwise have gotten to sit in solitude and just think has been unavailable, and by the time they are asleep I am too tired to move or think.

It could be because we have just lived through one of the most politically turbulent weeks of my lifetime, certainly, if not ever. I must be honest that up until last weekend, the very thought of the looming election filled me with nothing but the deepest existential dread. It was getting so bad of late that I felt physically, emotionally, and mentally paralyzed. It felt like a hopeless endeavor, as if we were simply going to hand everything back to the most destructive force to ever hold office. And with that, it felt like we were handing over our future. Now, of course, things have flipped so decisively that it feels as if we’ve slipped into an alternate, better universe. It feels silly to me to try to write about anything else in the present moment, so obsessively have I been following every possible nuance and development for the last week.

There is a superstition here, too - the fear that to write about it is to jinx it. So I don’t want to talk about it for now. Better to act. I’ll be writing postcards to voters in competitive house districts and in swing states within the coming weeks. I’ll be joining what is sure to be another record-setting Zoom call the beginning of next. And I will be sacrificing my SMS inbox to the onslaught of solicitations that will result from my monetary donations between now and November.

But beyond that, I still don’t know what to write. Perhaps it’s because I am in a bit of a liminal space between the end of summer semester and the beginning of fall. All deadlines have been cleared until mid-August. I have just this morning submitted my summer grades, and last week submitted the sample chapter and general outline for the textbook I’m co-writing. This has been an incredibly productive summer, but also an incredibly demanding one.

And so instead of trying to figure out what to write, I’m just writing. That was one of the primary purposes of this newsletter - to keep myself on a schedule in addition to giving myself a regular outlet. Not in the name of productivity, whatever that even means, but because I have always found that I am at my happiest, and making the most sense of myself and the world, when I am regularly writing. No matter what it is I’m writing.

There is a Zen practice known as Hitsuzendō. It is a form of brush calligraphy that does not focus on the style or form of the result, but on the act itself. The most famous expression of this practice is an ensō, achieved by the practitioner drawing a circle without thinking about what they are doing - no planning, no sketching, just one or two spontaneous brushstrokes. The idea being that you are creating without inhibition. Rather than a translation of conscious thought or meaning into form, it is a means of discovering the deeper self through the act of drawing or writing.

Now there’s certainly nothing I’ve sent through this newsletter that hasn’t been equal parts beneficiary and victim of conscious thinking and re-thinking, but this is akin to the philosophy I took in the creation of this publication. It’s why I gave up trying to find a specific unifying theme and opted for a central conceit that was so open to whatever I wanted to write about at any given time.

It’s also a helpful reminder of the need to minimize the imposition of the self as much as possible in the creative act. It’s an interesting paradox because the best work is going to be the most personal, in whatever way that manifests, and yet self-consciousness can be the most inhibiting force against that expression. With self-consciousness comes the need to question whether or not what you’re doing is accurate to what you want it to be, an accurate reflection of yourself as an artist, something that’s going to resonate or mean anything to anybody else. In asking those questions, you get further and further away from the truth of it. By not thinking about it, you retain the truth of yourself because all that’s left is what’s coming directly from you.

So here I am, writing about why I can’t write this week and in the process writing about why the act of writing about that is in itself a worthwhile, even spiritual, act. Even though doing so is certainly self-reflexive to an extent that it goes against everything I just said.

Because of the way it is created, the ensō may at times be a closed circle, or may at other times remain open. It all depends on the brush stroke and the specificity of the movement used to make it in that particular moment in time. When it remains open, it is understood to be a symbolic leaving of space for further development. It is an expression of the larger Zen notion of wabi-sabi - an appreciation of the beauty in the transient nature of existence, and of imperfection itself as an expression of this impermanence.

I try to think about that a lot. Not just in relation to this newsletter, but in everything.

-cs