I. April (Sun) Showers
This week, in New England at least, spring has begun to bloom in its full glory, and there is a different energy in the air. It’s April, after all, a month of motion and memory and new desire. It is a time when life emerges from winter doldrums, when fields of daffodils blanket the landscape in their yellow robes, when cicadas rise from chthonic chambers with their incessant buzz. Poems, too, ascend to lighter skies (not surprisingly, April is National Poetry Month). It is a time, to put it concisely, when things happen.
If April is a time of awakening, of resurrection, then it is also one of upheaval. That energy needs somewhere to go. To wit, Monday marks Patriots' Day in Boston, commemorating the battles of Lexington and Concord fought on an April morning 251 years ago (and now the traditional date of the Boston Marathon, the topic of last April’s post). The élan of April, and its potential for both beauty and tumult, has long been a literary wellspring. Take, for example, the prologue of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which identifies April with the arrival of spring, and then T.S. Eliot’s subversion of the sentiment in his own opening line of The Wasteland, pinning April as the cruelest month, when, alongside the lilacs, there resurfaces the buried memory of a world in mourning.
Amid the burgeoning stimuli and competing impulses, the mind, too, moves with more urgency, awakening from its own winter malaise. In the academic calendar, April means that spring term is nearing its end, and the overflow of energy potentially looms as an impediment. Perhaps we feel frantic, driven by adrenaline, as deadlines approach and responsibilities mount, yet at the same time are swept up in the spirit of the moment. Further compounding things, we live in a world more distracted than ever, beset by endless messaging, meaningless noise. How can we bring coherence and clarity to our thoughts when they start to accelerate, swerve, diverge?
One way to channel the energy and then refocus it on positive ends is to consciously set aside time to reflect, to stop and smell the flowers, literally, but maybe also the April showers, to embrace the life of it all. A common suggestion is to go for walks with a notebook in tow, capturing inspiration, should it strike, in some essential words; writing by hand forces us to engage closely with the translation of the idea into a more stable form on which to ruminate. But is the notebook actually a benefit, or does it merely disrupt the experience of the moment, and perhaps dilute the mental processing that would follow? It seems trivial, yet it evokes a host of other questions about how we think, and about the role that writing, in its different forms, plays not just in manifesting our thoughts or in rekindling memory, but in becoming an avenue toward knowledge—of ourselves and of the world.
II. May (Paper) Flowers
These questions were on my mind recently when I reread Umberto Eco’s delightful How to Write a Thesis, first published in 1977. In it, Eco advocates for such research techniques as using index cards to catalogue and arrange the key information from sources, manual practices that still could be useful in, or transferable to, the digital age. Indeed, perhaps they could be more useful now than ever. (I recommend perusing Eco’s text for its many aphoristic pieces of advice, like this one: “First, writing a thesis should be fun. Second, writing a thesis is like cooking a pig: nothing goes to waste.”)
I am not suggesting that we discard our digital advantages, but only that there is value to stepping back and slowing ourselves down, to struggling through our mental processing. As technology, and especially AI, continues to advance, so too do debates about the merits of said technology, specifically as it pertains to the life of the mind. In reality, however, these debates are not new; we may no longer recognize it as such, but writing itself is a technology, and there has always been apprehension about both technology and creative figures. In classical myths, those who gift writing along with other arts and skills to society, sometimes to its benefit and sometimes to its detriment, frequently face embarrassment or karmic punishment. The tragic stories of Prometheus and Daedalus, to name just two, furnish ample material in this regard. Not just writers but the very act of writing comes under attack by Plato in several of his, yes, writings.
Perhaps Plato imagined an ideal April day like the ones we’ve had this week when he composed his Phaedrus, a dialogue in which the titular character coaxes the elder Socrates into their own walk through the countryside. At one point, Socrates relays the story of the ancient Egyptian god Theuth, who brought many inventions to the people (274b–275e). Upon Theuth’s presenting of the inventions to the Egyptian god-king Thamus (also identified as Ammon), the latter rejects writing. This tool, Thamus insists, will enable but a “show of wisdom without the reality.” Rather than aid memory, it will increase forgetfulness, for its disciples will come to trust the “external thing” and not remember themselves. Ultimately, writing will furnish a society of rhetoricians who “appear to be omniscient” but who “generally know nothing.” The memory that is resuscitated by Eliot’s April is just the kind that, in Socrates’ view, writing would make us forget, and in forgetting, we would lose something essential.
Socrates goes on to declare that writing has the attitude of life, yet is silent if you ask it a question, for it has but one unvarying thing to say. The world of Socrates was very different from our own, however, and amidst the daily barrage of information, writing has real value on many fronts. For one, it is an aid to recollection in a way that may not have been necessary for Socrates. It is also a path to self-discovery, and when it is meant to be shared, it becomes something greater still. For written words, in their longue durée, can indeed issue a response that carries a different meaning in different times and places, enabling us to learn from them, to dialogue with them, in our own journeys. In keeping these writings alive, we are contributing to a dialogue that transcends the boundaries of time and space, that, in theory, arcs toward truth. Not all writings are in good faith, but the dialogue should bend us in the direction of the good. The writings are not just reminiscences but records, connectors, of the human condition.
In his dismissal of writing, Socrates invokes the same concerns that we now have about AI. We put faith in sources scraped from the internet, often not even full copies but pieces of copies, without thinking deeply about them, without interrogating them. As AI evolves and gains the increasing capacity to dialogue (if in an unthinking way) and to write with (for?) us, can we still be active, purposeful, discerning thinkers? What kind of knowledge, beyond the show that Socrates derides, will we truly wield?
We don’t yet know the answers to these questions. But we do know that, in writing manually, we are activating a perpetual human struggle, searching within the depths of our minds for the right words to express something, failing and flailing until we finally reach a level of clarity, finally say something that is our own. In and through writing, we learn. Even in the most sterile academic writing, we leave a part of ourselves, drawn, to use Socrates’ words, from that truest knowledge inscribed in our souls. This is not to say that the tidbits we write in our notebooks will ever be read by others, or even again by ourselves, but it is a small part of a process that is human at its core, that moves us toward an exploration and an understanding of our humanity.
I would like to close by sharing the beautiful words of Ada Limón, former poet laureate of the United States, from a short essay called “Why I Write: Toward Belonging” (Alta Journal, no. 33): “I am always figuring out how to exist, and writing, poetry in particular, is one of the few things that offer proof that I am here. I write toward reciprocity, toward connection, toward offering something back to this wondrous suffering planet. Writing is a way of saying, Yes, I am here, but also we are here together, all of us, how rare, how miraculous, how awful, how utterly strange.” Perhaps we should ask ourselves the same question as Limón, and see what responses may emerge.
*Banner Image: Peter Paul Rubens, Neptune Calming the Tempest, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, 1942.174.
