Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World

A little experiment.

“Today, the unseen was everything. The unknown, the only real fact of life.” —Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

I very often—nearly daily—write short-ish little reflections about whatever I’m thinking about or reading or generally pondering at any given time. They are something between a journal and a letter to an imaginary friend who is coincidentally and keenly fascinated by exactly all the same things that I am. Those little drafts, however, go nowhere. There is nowhere for them to go, they don’t fit into any scheme. But in theory, I have realized, they could form a rough draft for a type of book, which I’m envisioning as something like a loose collection of thoughts about everything-I-think-I-know-so-far-about-how-things-are. Even though if there’s one thing I know for sure about how things are, it’s that the more confident I am about how things are, the more likely it is that I will be proven wrong, given enough time and willingness to be wrong. The only way I can remain certain about anything is to stop seeking, and I’m (certainly) not about to do that.

My laptop is a graveyard of outlines for other kinds of books—adapting my dissertation, more structured treatments of specific topics. The problem is—that’s not how I think. Writing is how I think, and in order to even have a chance at thinking well I have to write messily, and often. So I do, I just don’t put that writing anywhere. But maybe that is the book, and has been all along. Or at least a very rough draft of it.

Many of you support me across all the various platforms and I appreciate that so, so much. And I know I am maddeningly inconsistent and radio silent for long periods. It is almost always a result of trying to fit my thinking in a box of some type. I get into trouble when I start writing or producing any content with an audience in mind. Ego traps and imposter syndromes set in, and I get impression management paralysis: some people might like it, but other people will definitely hate it. Better not to do anything at all.

But again—I can’t function that way, intellectually. I don’t go anywhere worthwhile if I am trying to stay in the box and it also makes me completely miserable and stagnant. I have a tendency to assign a category to how-I-think-things-are at any given time and the category rapidly becomes a thought prison. Because truth is found in movement and process and pursuit. It is not a final destination. (See below.)

It has taken me this long to realize the only category I can operate freely in is: how-it-seems-things-are-at-this-moment-in-time. And within that, I can roam. A girl has got to roam. So that’s what I’ll be doing here, I can’t promise every day, but certainly a lot more frequently. And I want to use this space as a rough draft of what I hope will eventually become a book, or some kind of…compendium of assorted ponderings.

I am going to put these shorter reflections behind the paywall here on MM, not as a cash grab but as an offering to those of you who do support me who currently aren’t getting much bang for your buck. But I don’t want that to exclude anyone, and if you want to be kept in the loop but the membership is a burden please just let me know. And of course whatever it is that whatever I am doing here eventually becomes, it will be available in a more typical format.

Anyway, the below dispatch is representative of what these things will probably look like (perhaps a bit on the long side of the usual). Not very polished, not self-contained, sort of picking-up somewhere and leaving-off wherever. Just…musings, questions, a bunch of what-if and what-now? If this sort of thing is of interest to you, that is wonderful and I am very glad that it is so, but at the same time the entire point is I have to be in a state of reflection and creation even if it is not of interest to anyone else or I will….fossilize into something that I cannot abide, something really terrible and shrunken and against-truth, a little like Sam Harris. (I kid, I kid. Sort of. Not really.)

Thank you all for coming along on Mr. Toad’s wild ride with me. May we all, in our own ways, escape our thought prisons.

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Something Iain McGilchrist has sensitized me to in his work is the nature of truth-as-process, as opposed to our usual sense of truth-as-ultimate-objective. This is not an immediately intuitive concept, but as I’ve turned it over a bit I am beginning to understand, at least a bit. This is all the realm of phenomenological philosophy, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty and contemporaries. Phenomenological thinking has always seemed to me to be terribly European and impossible to comprehend, worse than postmodernism in its precious intellectualism. But I am coming to appreciate it as an attempt to deal as well as possible with something fundamental but also impossibly slippery, which is simply (simply!) the nature of consciousness and experience and what existence “is like.”

It is notoriously difficult to talk about such things without sounding completely circular and incoherent precisely because of the nature of the arguments themselves. The key point here is that to name something, to describe it simply and clearly, is to reduce it and categorize it, and by definition that excludes more and more “real” truth. If you are seeking truth, the more you seek the less you find. Or, perhaps more precisely, you can find it but cannot know it. This is not a postmodern inversion of truth-as-concept; truth exists. But whatever it is, it is not something we can express in the realm of language at all, or at minimum we can never do so completely, and the more precise we attempt to get the more we alienate ourselves from whatever is vital about it. Our sense of truth at any given moment is akin to a map. It is a sketch of ultimate reality, a description, a representation (re-presentation, in McGilchrist’s usage.) A map is certainly useful, but it highlights certain features of the terrain and therefore must conceal others. If you forget that you are within the map entirely, you lose all touch with the features of the landscape that are not represented by it; you forget they are there, you eventually cannot see them at all and when someone points them out or discusses them, you deny their existence. This is not theoretical, it’s how we map the world. We have to do it that way, or we wouldn’t be able to function. But it seems to me we have very little business staking any claim to The Truth as such hopelessly misinformed pilgrims wandering around our particular corner of reality.

I think this is why “The Master and His Emissary” is some of the most powerful work I have read in years, perhaps ever. The only work that comes close to revolutionizing my worldview so completely is Jim Scott’s “Seeing Like a State,” which makes a very similar argument but more specifically in the context of its political applications. If you seek to improve the world, but you only perceive a stylized rendition of it and mistake that stylized rendition for reality, you are absolutely certain to make mistakes. Even if your intentions are very good, your actions can be catastrophic. You cannot anticipate the unintended consequences of even your best intentions, and your attempts to evade them may very well make things far worse. Scott points to historic disasters at scale, such as China’s Great Leap Forward and the Soviet collectivization of agriculture. We can, of course, apply these insights to many (and increasing) contemporary examples: the organic farming revolution in Sri Lanka, exploding birds over solar arrays, Bill Gates’s genetically modified mosquito swarms, basically everything about the Covid pandemic.

This leaves us in what seems to be a philosophically untenable position: truth is the thing, it is the only thing, it is the absolute core of whatever matters most about the human experience and possibly consciousness more generally than that. But truth, itself, is a relationship. It exists within the observer, and it has something very important to do with the observer’s “disposition toward the world.” It is not neutral, objective, out-there, but it is real, it is emergent, and when we cease to seek it we run aground. But also—the more we define it, the more we push it away. The nature of it is the stuff of riddles. The best language can do to approximate what’s going on here is koans: “if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” “The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.” “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” “Si enim comprehendis, non est Deus.”

I’m increasingly reading McGilchrist as essentially—we really are trapped in the matrix. We’re in a children’s story where we became completely absorbed into a treasure map and we’re living out an adventure story with pirates and talking parrots, and now we’re trapped and need to hero’s journey our way out of the map. Which will require…a kind of absolute humility we don’t even know how to practice, because we’re so defensive about what it is that we (think we) know and what it is that we (think we) want.