{"id":14125,"date":"2024-02-10T17:08:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-10T17:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=14125"},"modified":"2024-03-19T17:09:48","modified_gmt":"2024-03-19T17:09:48","slug":"contemplate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2024\/02\/10\/contemplate\/","title":{"rendered":"contemplate"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a>
a photo of actor-dirctor G\u00e9rard Blain, in Paris, by Jeanloup Sieff (1959)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve spent a lot of the past two years thinking about how to do these substack essays. Recently, I was getting so frustrated with the overwhelming, increasing volume of my drafts that I decided to start tweeting about<\/em> the drafts. I\u2019ve now done 6 threads like this<\/a>, each quoting the previous one. I knew right away from the first one I did that this is the way<\/em>. This is what was missing from my process. And this is what is going to lead me to \u201cthe promised land\u201d (which of course isn\u2019t a final end-state but a way of being. The Kingdom of God is within you, etc). And I was feeling the crackles<\/a> from the first, but the BOOM<\/em> just hit in the most recent one. It hit me that I have been subconsciously trying to write essays that provide people with answers<\/em>, when really I want to be providing people\u2013 and myself, most of all, with contemplation<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I circled around this in an earlier essay, The Tavern and the Temple<\/a>\u2013 <\/em>rereading it now, let\u2019s do a quick overview: I always gotta be writing somewhere, a part of me starts to dry up if I\u2019m not writing. I\u2019ve written a lot on Twitter (the tavern), which has been great, but I\u2019ve been feeling like there\u2019s an itch I haven\u2019t scratched, which is writing essays (the temple). I then spend most of the rest of the essay talking about the limitations of the tavern, my frustrations with the tavern, which might be summarized by the following line: \u201cthere are thoughts that I can\u2019t hear myself think on Twitter, and if I go too long without hearing those thoughts I start to feel alienated from myself\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s funny is noticing that I didn\u2019t actually spend a lot of time or effort articulating what the temple looks like. I do say \u201cI want a sacred temple-library to quietly reflect in\u201d, which is correct\u2026 and also not what I\u2019ve been doing! This is the beautiful, amazing, hilarious, incredible thing that happens for me with my writing, which I think is one of the reasons why I write so much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

;;;<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What did I really fucken wanna say here lmao. did I want to contemplate contemplation? that sounds wanky. no the point is to get myself out of the old frame of trying to write proper essays, and instead move into writing contemplative stuff. what\u2019s some stuff i\u2019d like to contemplate? I was talking with my wife about how I still don\u2019t feel like I\u2019ve properly transitioned from hobbyist to professional. Yeah that\u2019s the stuff I want to think about. I love that the word \u201camateur\u201d is rooted in amare, to love. And the word hobby is had to do with like, tiny toy horses, activities that didn\u2019t go anywhere. Doing something just because you like it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And here there\u2019s an interesting tension, isn\u2019t it? Because I\u2019m talking about being contemplative, which feels like a hobbyist thing to do. But I want to take my stuff seriously. I don\u2019t want to be utilitarian in a way that\u2019s dry, drab, boring, tedious, superficial. I want depth. I want substance. I want to improve language just by using it. I want to be a word-artist. I don\u2019t want to lose the love of the amateur. But I want to take my work more seriously, without taking myself too seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The followup questions reveal themselves: what does taking your work more seriously look like? One thing that came up for me is \u201cget physically fit, because a professional doesn\u2019t let their health be a bottleneck\u201d. So I\u2019ve been working out, and that\u2019s been going well so far. Another thing that came up is, \u201cyou should be making regular dents in the things you say you care about\u201d, and the twitter threads of essay drafts are scratching that itch for me. Maybe I should experiment with a publishing schedule for a while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can fantasize about bigger changes that are harder to make. My wife and I plan to move to a new home sometime soon-ish, that\u2019s going to be a big project, so it really doesn\u2019t make sense to make big costly changes to my own setup at home. But what I know I will be doing in my new home is designing a much more deliberate home office, with a whiteboard for thinking. And I\u2019ll be printing out my drafts and ideas more often so I can go over them with a red pen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What else does going pro entail? Well I could be thinking more about how to spend money that helps me do my work better. I\u2019ve bought more books than I otherwise would, because these aren\u2019t just for personal pleasure, but they are of professional interest. There are things that I want to research for my writing. Those are clearly work expenses! In my ideal state I think I might even like to have separate libraries entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another thing I\u2019ve been thinking about is being more deliberate about my media consumption. Again I\u2019ve always been a sort of amateur-hobbyist media theorist…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

abandoned<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve spent a lot of the past two years thinking about how to do these substack essays. Recently, I was getting so frustrated with the overwhelming, increasing volume of my drafts that I decided to start tweeting about the drafts. I\u2019ve now done 6 threads like this, each quoting the previous one. I… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[730],"class_list":["post-14125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-substack"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-3FP","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14125"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14127,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14125\/revisions\/14127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}