A LUCILIUS PARABLE: A GAME OF SKIN

March 15th, 2020

Lucilius was not paying much attention as he watched with lackluster interest, his student pulling back the drawstring.  All he saw were errors, the form, the tension of the student’s muscles, the angled arms, the curve of spine.  Lucilius knew where the arrow would go.  But he did not instruct, not seeing the bubbled hope on the student’s face.  Lucilius was caught in images from long ago, from a time when he himself was learning.

Invisible across the water, the wind had been crisp, flexing the taut sail cloth, bending the stiff mast.  The boat heeled as it sped up, water taunting the edge, tinting it green.  Ease the main, the old sailor had whispered gently, and Lucilius at the helm let out some of the strickened line.  The buried edge slipped out of the water and the boat levelled.

The student released the drawstring and the arrow careened off at an awkward angle.  The student sighed hard and fast and then unsheathed another arrow and drew it back against the drawstring again.  Lucilius casually stepped forward and tapped the boy’s shoulder down, and pushed a finger on the bow against it’s natural lay, and poked the boy’s side, making him jolt up straighter, tapped his pinched elbow up higher and then grasped a lock of the boy’s hair at the top of his head and pulled skyward.  The boy grimaced as he stood straighter, trying to hold together all of the adjustments, trembling like a paper building before the softest movements of air.  Lucilius took a step back to look at the boy, not noticing his own bored sigh as he did.  The boy’s back had slumped again in response to all the other tensions he was holding and Lucilius quickly stepped forward again to poke the boy back to posture.  The tiny details of the boy’s hard-set face quivered but Lucilius did not notice.  Lucilius’ mind was elsewhere, remembering. . .

Close your eyes Lucilius.  Now gently push her into the turn, and as she rounds, feel how the water eases and then tugs on her.  That’s how you’ll know when she’s ‘round.  I’ll handle the lines.  Ready when you are. 

Lucilius could remember even now all these years later as he brought the helm over with his eyes closed. How the weight had shifted against his feet, his body swaying with the move, the loose feel of the helm in the spin, and then quickly how it grew a force against his hold.  He’d opened his eyes to a wide and nodding smile. 

Beautiful.

Now Lucilius watched the rickety posture of his own student, the small waver of the arrow tip.  Lucilius knew how wide-cast that waver was, and when the arrow flew, Lucilius did not even follow it’s flight.  He took the bow from the boy and with a slick speed of years and hours in the thousands threaded the arrow to a full draw. 

See? Lucilius asked.  All of the body’s movements are at once. 

He eased the drawstring and then quickly repeated the swift move before the straining, wanting eyes of the boy. 

Again, Lucilius said. 

The boy took up the bow, drawing in all his breath.  With teeth clenched and unseen the boy fitted the arrow, and then tried to expand himself as Lucilius had done, drawing the arrow back.  But the boy was weak in ways that could not be filled in the moment, but only with great time, and because of this, he wavered in his core.  The arrow went it’s own way, and the student looked again to Lucilius.  The boy’s teacher had a face that showed plainly his truest thoughts, his better mind elsewhere soaked in years past with a time when he –Lucilius- had been a student.  And because of this he failed to keep up the face his student needed, failed to see where his student was truly wanting. 

You aren’t paying attention to the right places.

What should I pay attention to?

Only fundamentals.  Your body.  The breath.  How both move, expand, how they rise to show you the right moment..

So I shouldn’t look at the target?  The boy said looking off at the far circle, confused.

Lucilius waved a dismissive hand at the target without looking.  That, is just a detail.  It doesn’t matter.

The boy looked at him, more confused, and then the boy’s eyes wandered around as though they hoped to catch something that was missing.

How do I pay more attention to the body and the breath?  The boy finally asked.

Lucilius pointed at a pair of empty wooden buckets and a thin yoke that connected the two handles.  Carry water up the stairs  for the rest of your day’s practice.

And with that Lucilius left, failing to feel the boy’s confusion who saw the buckets as punishment, not as an exercise for strength, as Lucilius intended.

The next day Lucilius watched again as the boy wobbled in his stance, his tired frame struggling against the draw of the bow, his sore fingers aching in their task, begging to shy away from the boy’s drive.  But he was unyielding.  The arrow flew and the target was left unblemished.  The boy sighed and looked patiently towards Lucilius, but the boy’s teacher only shook his head with closed eyes. 

The body.  The breath, Lucilius said. 

The boy nodded as he nocked another arrow, but he held the bow just like that, staring at the target.  Just when he would usually draw the string all the way back, he only stood still, watching that elusive circle, so clear before his eyes, and yet shrouded.  It lay behind an impossible veil.

Then the boy took the arrow off the bowstring and placed it back in the quiver.  He did not look at Lucilius but walked to the wall display and hung the bow up in it’s place.  Then the boy turned briefly to Lucilius, bowed deeply, and then walked away. 

The next day when Lucilius expected to receive his student, he was left waiting.  Lucilius stood watch for an hour, then two hours.  Then after three hours, he wandered off into his garden, an arrow in one hand.  He sat down beneath a giant oak that he’d planted long ago and watched the arrow as he balanced it on an outstretched finger.  The boy did not show and would never return. 

Lucilius spent the day sitting in the garden, thinking, reminiscing once more.

He could smell the salt and stink of fresh sea air.  The speckling light on the water like millions of stone faces soundlessly chipped anew, reflecting again the crisp light.

Are you ready to be tested? Lucilius was asked. 

Lucilius grew worried.  I don’t know, he said. 

A big barrel laugh sounded.  That’s right.  Not for you to know.  This is where I must learn and test myself.

Wait, Lucilius said, puzzled, as he handled the boat’s helm.  Who is getting tested here?

A broad smile answered him.  Both of us.

Lucilius was handed the two lines for the other sails in addition to the helm he held.  The old sailor smiled at him. 

Well here goes.  Save me Lucilius.

And with that the old sailor swiftly mounted the gunwale and tossed himself into the water.  Lucilius was drawn into shock as he tried to realize the lines in his hands, the pull of the helm and the man now far behind in the water.  Lucilius looked back, spotting the man’s smiling face as it bobbed between the waves.  Lucilius checked the sails and corrected his course.

Ok, ok, he repeated to himself, as a plan of necessity emerged in his mind.  The old man had lead them downwind.  Lucilius would have to beat back up in order to get him back aboard, and the longer he waited the harder it would be.  Lucilius drew in the lines and spun the boat high against the wind, and then tacked onto a second course, now calm under the rattle of sail and line, knowing their meaning now, drawing them in again as the wind caught once more.  And then slowly Lucilius worked the boat back upwind towards the old sailor in the sea.

Lucilius sat beneath the great oak, remembering that time on the ocean and finally noticed that he was bleeding.   His fiddling hands had drilled the arrow tip into one of his fingers. 

There was something satisfying about the ach of pain that had dulled before the pinch, now realizing what he’d done as he’d been lost in the old reverie.

He watched the bright maroon lick a path down his hand as he held it raised to see.

Months later the wind whipped through the garden, pulling acorns from the vast tree.  A girl stood against the wind, her eyes set, the draw string creasing into her cheek.  The arrow flew, bending through the tossed air.  And then she looked to Lucilius for his reaction.  He was nodding.

It’s time, you are ready, he said.

The young woman’s face grew with question as Lucilius stepped close to her.  He swiftly grasped the string that held her long hair in a tight bun and snapped it, loosing her hair to grow suddenly wild in the wind.  The girl wiped a hand up along her face to reveal her startled look.

Do not touch your hair, Lucilius said.

But I can’t see, she said, confused.

Your hair is a part of you, Lucilius said.  You will have to see with it.  And now you will aim for the apple.

What apple?  the woman asked, rattled now, only seeing Lucilius in fluttering glimpses that peered through the blinking gaps of her hair as it sailed in the wind.

Lucilius did not answer.  He turned and began to walk out towards the target. The young woman held her hair aside against Lucilius’ words to watch as the man arrived at the target.  She watched as he gently removed the arrows and piled them near the target, and then he turned to her, standing in front of the wide target, and from a fold in his robes, Lucilius removed an apple, and leaning back against the target, he placed the apple on top of his own head.

Lucilius could see a familiar shock filling the girl’s face, but he knew now what was required to quell the calculating mind, to draw it into the heart of a student. 

The girl stood a few moments longer in shock, holding her hair aside.  Then she released it, letting her long locks run freely with the wind.  She took up her bow.  She fitted the arrow and drew it back, breathing deeply, expanding herself against the power of the bow. 

And just before she let the weapon fly, Lucilius smiled, and closed his eyes.

FIRST DRAFT

March 14th, 2020

We don’t often hear about great editors writing great novels.  There are certainly great editors that have been fundamental to the creation of great works of literature, and certainly writers have been quick and eager to gain feedback from their fellow creators.  But the span of skills here does not seem to be bi-directional.  Being a great editor seems less likely to make you a great writer than being a great writer equips you to be a good editor.

The explanation may be quite simple here: you get good at what you do repeatedly.  Writers become good writers and editors become good editors.  But what goes overlooked in this statement is that writers are constantly editing as they produce.

When we speak or put word to page, we do not do so haphazardly, we do so with intention, and this intention is a filter of what is actually occurring in our conscious experience.  This filter is a form of editing, and it’s even more pronounced as writers edit as they write.  When a sentence is put down, and then a slightly better version is immediately hit upon and then put down to replace the first.  This happens with sentences, with clauses and of course right down to individual words.  How many sentences get hung up on single words as we search for the right one?  This search is a process of editing.  Usually we have an inferior word that first comes to mind that ‘sort of’ captures the sentiment that we are trying to trace.  Perhaps we resort to a thesaurus, or perhaps it comes to us and we move on.

In this way, writers are exercising their abilities to edit on the fly.  From here, it’s far less of a leap to edit something into a second draft than it is for an editor to employ a reversal of their skill set and generate a great piece of writing.   This isn’t to say that editors can’t produce great pieces of writing.  Indeed, it almost goes without saying that it’s a love of writing that usually gets an editor into the business in the first place.  The distinction here is merely to point out which skills become stronger  and why.  The skill of writing and editing are complementary and so entwined that one cannot exist without the other.  The point here is merely to highlight that the pursuit of one skill over the other is asymmetrical in its results.

From the beginning Tinkered Thinking has been an experiment in the art of the First Draft.  Namely: is it possible to get better at writing something cohesive, and thoughtful in a limited amount of time?  The reader will be the judge, and the writer will hedge bets by spending more time producing than fine-tuning.

The logic here extends from a straight-forward fact: you can’t edit a blank page.  Something must first be produced, and it’s better to have a cannon to sift through when selecting something to polish than to be stuck with just one thing.  700 mico-essays later, this cannon is gaining some plump, and that gives Tinkered Thinking many more options to explore behind the scenes than would a smaller body of work.

Editing is essential, but in the age when written content is more and more free of charge, where should we spend out time?  Shall we spend it editing something that may be read by just a few people?  Or is time better spent practicing the art of the first draft?

Given time, a writer’s audience grows, even past the writer’s death, and as that audience grows, the likelihood that a fan emerges goes up and up.  A writer might not produce the most polished work, but given time, it’s quite likely that someone will come along that enjoys the work so much that they take it upon themselves to edit it.  We need only look to ancient works like Letters to Lucilius written by Seneca.  That writing was undertaken with just an audience of one in mind, but through the centuries that audience has grown tremendously, and of course as editions of this writing have emerged, they have emerged edited.  The word probably takes on a bit of a different meaning here, that being most writings of this category appear as selections, but the point remains:  the writer is more likely to get better by writing.

All of this points to an easy and simple mandate for new writers: just write, and keep writing and don’t worry if it’s good or not.  That’s a concern for later.

Postscript:  It’s perhaps important to frame this topic with the fact that the writer here used to spend hundreds of hours editing single paragraphs and even single sentences.  Think about that for a moment.  Imagine spending an entire week, eight to twelve hours a day writing iterations of a single sentence in the hunt for a very specific effect. 

There is a time and a place for everything, and where the writer is concerned, more of that time and space should be handed over to the act of writing.  FYI: this episode was written start to finish in about 25 minutes.  If that seems at all impressive, realize that after attempting to do this everyday for 700 days in a row, it’s merely commonplace, like eating a certain number of calories everyday, but in this case, I have more to show for it than a lovehandle.

This topic heavily relates to Episode 411: Quality of Quantity

FALSE PATH

March 13th, 2020

Some depressing subjects are healthy to explore.  This is counter-intuitive with respect to the current cultural prescription to always strive for happiness.  Aside from the fact this mandate is unrealistic, to catch happiness, clap it in mutual irons, and shackle it to yourself for all eternity, it also misses the point.   Happiness is a crippled word.  It serves merely to misguide us.  What we really seek, is to feel alive.

Not only does this light up our memory with those instances when we’ve managed to touch this elusiveness, it’s clear it has less to do with a single high-riding state -like happiness- and more to do with a depth across a spectrum of feeling.

Feeling alive has a lot to do with the way we deal with fear.  Do we ever feel alive when we give in to our fears?  What about when we rise up against our fears?  We wouldn’t necessarily call this happiness, but sure makes damn good living, even if you get knocked down, fail and wonder if it was worth it in the first place.  We feel alive when we summon the courage to get back up and try again.  This has nothing to do with happiness and everything to do with making life worth living.

Side-stepping happiness as a deceptive red herring, we now face fear unexpectedly.  How do we deal with this paralyzing puzzle.

This is why it can be so healthy to explore some depressing subjects.  For instance, what’s worse than failing to face your fear of incompetence, deficiency and defeat? 

Well for one we eventually run out of chances to stand back up and try again.

We must contemplate death in order to override our fear of failure with a greater one:

the fear of leaving life having never lived.

NEGATIVE EXTRAPOLATION

March 12th, 2020

Narrow misses are lucky for two reasons.  For one you didn’t get hit, but the second reason is you are given the opportunity to extrapolate negatively and imagine what the situation would have been like had it been much worse.  This might sound more depressing than lucky, but the second step to imagining a worse incarnation is the ability to figure out how to prepare for it.  Questions arise:

Will it happen again?

Is it possible to guarantee it never happens again?

If it does happen, what systems would I want in place?

This ranges across all sorts of things, from a scrapped knee after a bicycle accident while not wearing a helmet, to a destabilizing virus that doesn’t have a really high mortality rate?

Cyclists never fall just once during their careers on two wheels and we all get sick every year.

The first situation is pretty easy, and it’s often advice that we get from parents: wear a helmet, don’t ride when the roads are slick, pay attention to those gravel patches.

But the second, that of viruses that can run through populations opens up a potentially strange and productive land of thinking:

Does my business have the ability to hibernate for months on end without dying?

Why are my family and friends so far away from one another?

Perhaps I have another reason to keep healthy?

Do alternative energy sources seem even more advantageous now?

Such questions range the gamut of our whole life, and the imaginative space here is so ripe that our answers can start to take the shape of exciting movies.  We all admire the plotting and prepared super hero or supervillain, but such practicality often receives a smirk in real life.  This is perhaps because most people don’t want to feel obligated by the crowd to think about one more thing, and pencil in more stuff on the to-do list.

While these social forces are powerful in the moment, they mean nothing when events turn troubling.

We also have another force to battle, that is: irrational optimism.

As Robert Sapolsky writes in his book BEHAVE, “while people might accurately assess the risk of a behavior, they tend toward distortive optimism when assessing risk to themselves--- ‘Nah, that couldn’t happen to me.”

In some circumstances, this human tendency is great.  It helps create grit and fuels us to press onward past failure.

But it works against us when we face true disaster.  It’s for this reason that it can be so important to extrapolate negatively.  It’s not in order to be simply morose, it’s to level reality against our tendency to see it incorrectly.  Truly terrifying things can happen.  Are you good? Or would you rather have a plan when that monster comes knocking?

ALARM

March 11th, 2020

What is the function of an alarm?

The most common type of alarm is probably a smoke detector.  Sprinkler systems might come in second.  The detectors sound their alarm when a certain level of particulate in the air is detected.  Sprinkler systems activate when a certain level of heat is reached.

These make sense on their own, but think of it in terms of money.

When we use our debit cards or credit cards, do we get an alarm when we hit a certain level? 

Most people know that anxious circumstance when they run a card hoping that it’ll go through.  The only alarm we get with these cards is when they are dead.  Either there is no more money in the checking account, or the credit card is maxed out, and both decline.  To be sure, these systems don’t really have alarms so that we are left to be more likely to spend money. 

Imagine if they did have an alarm.  Say your debit card gave you a notice when you were down to $1,000 in the bank, and then another when you hit $500, and another at $100.

This sort of staggered alarm system would also give you an idea about the rate of spending.  Rate is something that smoke detectors and sprinklers can’t do.

These detectors can’t tell you how fast your house is filling up with smoke or why it’s filling with smoke, they only sing at a certain point.  And because of this simplicity, such detectors can’t differentiate between some food you burnt while cooking, and a pile of dirty laundry that an angry lover has soaked with gasoline and lit on fire.

No one questions the use of alarms, and we readily invest in them despite this alarmist quality they have.

This is what alarmist means: exaggerating a danger and so causing needless worry or panic.  That word has been bouncing around a lot lately and as a result the ricocheting has put some dents in the meaning.  Are the alarmists of today just the silly hypochondriacs of society?  Or does smoke always mean fire?  Even when it’s just someone cooking a delicious meal?  Even a delicious meal, or the desire for one can cause a house to burn down.  But there’s a difference between the alarmists we roll our eyes at and the smoke alarm that complains about our cooking.  The thing is, we have to do something about the smoke alarm, and if we don’t know exactly why it’s going off, then we turn on to high alert for what danger might actually exist.  Do we pay the alarmists of society the same attention?  Do we check up on the details of the possible danger they detect?  Or do we just roll our eyes?

Look at the asymmetry here.  We don’t begrudge our smoke detectors of false alarms, because they also work when there really is cause to worry.  The detector might be crying wolf, but we diligently listen every time because we know the wolf exists and the detector is always looking for it. 

Even more importantly false alarms give us a chance to see how we’d react during a real crisis.  Schools, ships, and organizations of all sorts have drills designed to deal with these emergencies, and these drills are intentionally carried out with a simulacrum of alarm. 

Would you call a school’s fire drill alarmist?  No, not really.  They are preparing for the real thing.

The way the word alarmist is being used, is akin to calling fire drills a waste of time.  At the very least, acquiescing to an alarmists call to attention is an opportunity to explore our response in order to see what will happen when a real crisis hits.  Notice how the word ‘alarmist’ here completely undermines the meaning of the word ‘alarm’.  If we don’t perk up when the boy cries wolf, what happens when the wolf actually comes?  What if the wolf is on the hunt for something more than just the boy’s flock of sheep?  What if the wolf is looking for the entire town?

Panic distracts you from seeing the best course of action.  This is its real danger.  It obfuscates and clutters the mind with too much emotion.

On the other hand, remaining calm does not mean you take no action.  Being inactive in the face of danger makes you likewise vulnerable.

If anything, panic is a sign of someone who isn’t prepared.  And remaining dedicated to business as usual is perhaps a sign of someone who doesn’t even realize how unprepared they are.

As Upton Sinclair once observed: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Very few businesses are designed with real catastrophe in mind, which means they are often vastly unprepared, assuming that things will continue business-as-usual.

In a world where we only have one life to live, is there such a thing as needless panic and worry?  Or are such things indications of real problems that we haven’t yet solved?