Hi everyone! This is one draft I found in my folder: an example of the kind of thing I kept writing not sending this year when I was trying to work on the newsletter. I'm still ambivalent about it for reasons which I express explicitly maybe 2/3 of the way through, but I am putting it here instead of deleting it. Okay!
Apologies for the radio silence! In the past couple of weeks, I’ve had real trouble finishing any of the letters I’ve tried to write. I know that, as the writer Max Read points out, blogging and blog-style writing like this is fundamentally about just putting shit out, even if it’s not that good; while Read lays out the cynical economic reasoning behind this, I like the blogs I like not because they are perfectly controlled, formally exemplary works of prose, but because they evince the day-to-day activity of minds whose movement I admire and appreciate. This was always part of my idea for this thing: abandoning preciousness and perfectionism in favor of something more in-progress. After all, “control” in writing is an illusion—I really do believe that the writer is, in general, the person who least understands their own work—and it’s a good exercise, I think, to lean into that uncertainty. But even knowing this, I haven’t been able to bring myself to send out any of the stuff I’ve written in the past couple of weeks.
As I have said before, if any of my writing is interesting, it’s because it emerges from a place of confusion. I write about aesthetic objects because I’m fascinated by the hold they exert over us, a hold we can only understand in retrospect, and partially. When my writing flirts with the philosophical or academic, it’s because, while I am far from an expert, these are ways of talking and thinking that have allowed me to account for things others often seem capable of intuitively understanding, of taking for granted.
In the spirit of whatever the hell this all is, then, I present to you a single perplexity I have had in recent days about shit like blogging. I’ve been going back through Adam Kotsko’s excellent blog in the last few days, after reading a very interesting and probably correct post on the critical reaction to Oppenheimer. One of his earlier posts is a brief, thoughtful, admirably ambivalent meditation on the ongoing psychological effects of the pandemic.
The thing that’s interesting to me here is his conclusion, regarding (presumably online) chastisements that “the pandemic isn’t over”:
None of this is to say that the disease isn’t serious for others, nor that we shouldn’t have taken more or different precautions as a society. I’m just suggesting that for me, and probably for many, the most enduring post-covid effects are due to the isolation itself rather than the disease.
And I wish that our public sphere were not structured so that bringing up those concerns automatically triggers the reaction of “OH! so you wish the elderly and immune-compromised would just die for your convenience, huh?!” No, I don’t. I sacrificed a not-inconsiderable percentage of my life to try to avoid harming others — primarily My Esteemed Partner, but also many people I barely know or have never met. That imposed a cost on me that is very real and that I am still dealing with. And it still seems like every day on social media I see a stray remark implying that “lockdowns never happened” or social isolation is easy and fun. Even the repeated refrain that “the pandemic isn’t over, by the way!” grates, because it seems to carry with it the assumption that we should return to that level of anxiety and restriction.
What is the point of this post? I’m not sure. Ultimately, this is my blog and I sometimes blog about personal things. If there’s a political point here, it might be the suggestion that maybe liberals don’t need to add a constant reminder of that terrible pandemic that ruined all our lives to their litany of smug truisms and that maybe it doesn’t need to be an article of faith that the side-effects of all pandemic restrictions are either non-existent or by definition swamped by their life-saving intentions. In any case, not seeing constant reminders of the pandemic or implicit accusations that I’m a bad person for feeling bad in its wake would help my mental health.
I’ve felt this way, too, so I’m not objecting to anything here, exactly. It’s an expression of feelings, so I’m not interested in examining its veracity. What I’m interested in is the way it goes about diagnosing a social problem—namely, by isolating a common rhetorical refrain and interpreting it in light of the writer’s experience of reading that refrain.
All language is ambiguous, but written language is especially, famously ambiguous. While I have felt the thought-terminating force Kotsko describes behind “the pandemic is still going on”-style rhetoric, I have also felt other forces behind this rhetoric, spanning the moral gamut: mistargeted venting and condescending moralism, yes, but also genuine concern, even terror—perhaps more often than not, all of these at the same time. The human mind is, of course, a muddled bundle of crossed impulses and misdirected desires—we often don’t even know what we ourselves mean; this doesn’t exactly make reading something like Twitter clearer. Kotsko's post, then, is about a familiar experience of reading online writing: here is an expression I can't but interpret in a way that makes me feel very bad.
The classic definition of trauma is as a kind of experience so overwhelming that you can’t experience all of it in the moment. This is why a bad thing, even if temporally discrete, endures after it is “over.” No matter how long it lasted, we can’t seem to finish living through it. It shades the way we see things: it affects our interpretive orientation. It can, and often does, become the thing everything else is about.
This is why I really do think social media is, among other things, a trauma propagation machine. Person X is traumatized by the pandemic because they have long COVID; Person Y is traumatized by the enduring emotional toll of isolation. Person X expresses this frustration by saying “the pandemic isn’t over”; in the vast void of context that is Online, Person Y interprets this as a kind of moralizing at their own (Person Y’s) expense. Or perhaps Person Y articulates their frustration at what social isolation has done to them, and Person X interprets this as expressing an attitude that has personally hurt them. A shared trauma—the trauma of living through a terrible pandemic in a semi-failed state—becomes instead a point of seeming antagonism; the weird, pointless whirlpool of bad feelings continues apace. Everyone just winds up deeper in their own personal holes.
(I would never want to deny that there are genuine antagonisms in society; my hypothetical interaction between two fake people might, in fact, be an example of this. We probably can’t know!)
I think this process is often described as “misinterpretation,” but I don’t think it’s really a mistake. This is how all interpretation works. Interpretation is possible because we share a world. We are capable of looking at something—an utterance; a work of art—and extrapolating from it, finding meaning in it, to the extent that there are other things in experience we can connect it to, and the meaning we find can’t come from nowhere. (In this sense, interpretation is a way of returning the object of interpretation to the world from which it emerged.)
Interpretations like Kotsko’s (or, perhaps more to the point, my interpretation of Kotsko’s interpretation) aren’t bad faith, exactly—or they’re bad faith insofar as all of our faith is bad. (I also don’t think he’d disagree with what I’m saying; his post was explicitly framed as personal.) Ideally, when encountering an utterance you’re perplexed by, you would be able to contextualize it—ask for clarification; think it through in light of the person speaking it; read body language and so on—but the context we’re missing is often impossible to supply.
Because to be clear, I’m doing the exact same thing I'm complaining about right now. Something I saw online spoke to a preoccupation I have—a preoccupation extrinsic to the person who wrote the thing, a person writing from a place of genuine personal pain—and I took it as a launching pad for an examination of some stuff I, personally, have been thinking about. It’s a selfish thing to do. But I’m not entirely sure that there’s an outside. Some interpretations are more or less plausible, but the evaluation of plausibility is predicated on context. When there’s no context, there’s not a lot to check your interpretation against. The person online is yelling at me, personally, because there’s nobody else in the room that I can see. Maybe they mean something other than I think they mean. But who knows? We’re all throwing paper airplanes into the void; sometimes they bump into each other; sometimes we get hit in the eye.
For better and for worse, many of us conduct much of our emotional “processing” (such an ugly term) textually—both by writing and by reading. Reading and writing to figure out how you feel is inevitable, and has been happening probably for as long as the written word has been widely accessible, or at least since, like, Montaigne, or whatever. I am a fan of the provisional—the diary; the written fragment; the sketch; the blog. I think there can be something special about what doesn’t make its way into the finalized systems of art and thought.
But it’s good to be clear-eyed about this all. One of the great things about fragments is they’re often small enough to pick up and rotate, to try to see all sides of. You can sit with an aphorism or a fragment of a Sappho poem, return to it, try to see it anew, come back to it with more or different experience. But this is a slow, slow process, one which requires a persistence and imaginative generosity that I, at least, often find difficult to summon.
This is all the flip-side of making provisional thinking publicly available, one of the things which gives me pause. It’s why I try, and also why I fail, to steer clear of posts about all this shit—the self-referential discursive economy social media has trapped us in is hard to slip, even though I really do try to spend my time thinking about other stuff. (It might be part of why Substack is constantly yelling at me that my emails are too long.) Most of what I write about in this newsletter is pretty silly and unimportant, but I do want to perceive things clearly, and to communicate these perceptions as clearly as possible. It’s probably a doomed enterprise to try to do this sort of thing on the internet, but I’ve been Posting since I was like, eight years old, so I think I’m here until the grid goes down. But I do I try to be careful. It’s hard to understand what’s going on, hard to know what things mean; and as I have said, I feel very, very confused. I don’t have any answers, but I am trying to be careful.