Stuckness
I’m trying to develop a taxonomy of stuckness, of the ways that I can’t work. It’s really helpful for me because if I can’t work — specifically, if I can’t write something halfway decent — I start to lose my mind; working is how I manage my depression and self-hatred, because yes I’m seeing a therapist already and no I don’t want to take medication at this point, and these things can only be fixed to a limited degree and that takes time, and in the meanwhile I want to minimize the number of late afternoons where I sit at the desk, sure I’ll never do anything again, figuring out how many pushpins I can bear to stick in my hand at once.
(I should write about the psychic economy of self-hatred sometime. It’s an intricate set of double binds, and laying this stuff out in public is a kind of exorcism, removing feelings from the protective, baroque involution of the mind. Binds: The loop where successfully doing something to your standards is a sign that you’re capable, and therefore all the other times that you’ve failed are a further indictment of your character. It’s interesting that self-hatred seems surprisingly underrepresented in literature but is the motor of so much great standup, that it can be so funny even as it crushes you within the vise whose screw you tighten and tighten. Anyway.)
The issue with stuckness isn’t that it happens but that it can be hard to identify and distinguish as such, and thus address. I call this the Whitehouse problem, after one of my favorite scientists manqué to get something disastrously wrong. The magnificently named Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse was a surgeon who became the chief electrician of the Atlantic Telegraph Company, with the job of figuring out how to get a signal through a poorly insulated cable running at the bottom of the sea. (He wrote some singularly entertaining papers on the subject.) To be clear, poor Whitehouse did quite a lot of interesting work, including developing and patenting his own rollerskates and the Electric Harmoniograph, a system for generating graphic notation from piano keyboards — but for the great bet of his life and his era he bet big, and wrong. The sea is a noisy environment for an electrically transmitted message; Whitehouse’s colleague William Thompson/Lord Kelvin wanted to address this by making the receiver more sensitive, better able to distinguish modulations in the signal. Whitehouse’s solution was the essence of brute force, building bigger and better induction coils to put more power through the line, eventually killing it and effectively melting it into scrap. Then, sadly, he did same thing socially: refusing any failure, he feuded publicly and at length with various parties, using sheer rhetorical bluster in the absence of much evidence to get his message across.
Being stuck, dearreader, is a delicate state. It has distinct forms. And the temptation is to Whitehouse things: pour on the willpower, the coffee, the focus, to make this work, right now, God damn it. Not to lose another hour, another morning, another day. As I get older I realize that my good sense and my willpower are mostly inversely proportional to each other — the more I lose track of my goals, the more I’m adrift, the harder I try, the more force I put into the system. An escalating feedback loop that ends with me as a flake of molten copper on the ocean floor (which is to say lying on the carpet in my office in the middle of the night, crushingly certain that everything I’ve done up to this point that’s been any good was a fluke, a run of luck that’s ended). What if we let things stay delicate, stayed attentive, and parsed out signals with the grace of Kelvin’s mirror galvanometer, a dot of light that can pull a message out of the sea? When I try to notice the stuckness, I see four distinct modes:
- Physical factors. They can’t be ignored. Heat, cold, lack of sleep, lack of exercise, the café staff playing the same Cure record over and over. An uncomfortable chair. These things seem facile; I always think, as I fret about the jabbing ribs of some Thonet chair, about my beloved Osip Mandelstam, who could write on shirt cardboards with a stolen pencil while facing the Gulag — what am I complaining about? (Oh, dearreader, if you haven’t read Mandelstam: “The Noise of Time,” “Fourth Prose,” the “Journey to Armenia,” the rest of the prose, his poems, to say nothing of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s document of inhumanity Hope Against Hope — there is perhaps no better writer of dreams in the Western tradition, but the dreams he documents are Russia, language, Judaism, history, the coming of the Terror. This reminds me that I need to start my Mandelstam podcast.) But they are real and nontrivial factors, and too many days I’ve ground to dust trying to work in an unworkable place.
- Out of your control. Like you’re waiting on feedback about an article, the one article you really want to be working on. You can’t do the most important thing, or you’re not sure what that is.
- Emotional factors. Like I’m scared of a project, or I feel confused, creatively worthless, preoccupied with something else. (This one is hard because I often use work to manage these negative emotions, so having them keep me from working is hard for me to finesse.)
- The necessary pause. Sometimes the creative process needs a break, a little search time, some listening and staring into space. You need to give the next step, the next idea, a chance to bubble up. Thinking, for me, is a mostly involuntary process; a real idea often happens as an interruption, a chance encounter that comes independent of any diligence on my part. A mentor of mine used to say that truth wasn’t a country you conquer but a cat you coax out from underneath the couch. Give it room, and quiet, to emerge.
I can work with my stuckness, I find, if I just acknowledge that it’s happening. Suddenly I no longer need to fight myself.
And having taken a break to calm down from deadline panic and write this instead, I need to get back to work.