The return of the Why mode of thinking

My desire and even ability to write disappeared for months. Is it back?

Photo by Jackson Hirsch on Unsplash

Is it back?

It’s the morning after a sleepless night in Miami in a hotel room with a broken air conditioner. I’m there to celebrate a friend’s milestone birthday, and now everyone is traveling back. Over a luxuriously solitary breakfast, I notice that I want to write.

It’s not a desire to write per se. It’s that small, persistent ideas keep pushing into my awareness, elbowing for attention. Questions and possible answers. I open a Google Doc on my phone to channel some of the flurry. What I want is to record what I’m puzzling in my mind.

Like, this question: Why do I like novels that cultivate ambiguity? I finished the first half of How to Be Both by Ali Smith, a diptych novel that surfaces countless questions about the characters, hints at different answers, then leaves them unresolved. Forever. Since unlike in the natural world, where things don’t end but only change, a definitive curtain closes at the end of a novel, leaving an infinitude of uncertainty.

A theory: Perhaps because I’m uncomfortable with uncertainty in real life, the forced ambiguity of a novel is thrilling. It’s a relinquishment of control, a safe kind of danger. Like skydiving — except the diver remains suspended over the patchwork earth, anticipating the queasy thrill of freefall that never comes. In a novel like How to Be Both, mysteries surface, possible explanations shimmer, and I brace for the warming flush of resolution that spreads like the first sips of liquor — but it never comes. I’m left in a half-space, suspended, expectant. I can return to that state for days, even months after reading the final page — take the feeling out of the drawer and wear it again, just by remembering the characters and their questions. The sensuality of an ambiguous novel lingers. A novel that ties up its loose ends rarely has such an afterlife.

I tapped these ideas into my phone over breakfast.

Late that night, after hours of flight delays, I arrived home. I brought my bags up, changed into PJs, and got into bed. Our house, as I always notice after being away, smells bad. Like a linen closet sealed for years. That simile is the best I can do, and it’s imperfect. I can also simply say it smells musty, but that’s too blunt. It wants specificity.¹

So, a question: Why is it so hard to describe a smell? Beyond broad metaphors that tip easily into cliche — a smell is metallic, or floral, or oniony, or sulphurous — why aren’t there better tools?

A theory: In the end all description is metaphor, and describing smells is harder than describing, say, visuals because we have fewer comparators. We can say that a person is shaped like a pear and a pear is shaped like a bell and a bell is shaped like a snowdrop. Or all of that in reverse or in combination, as when Steinbeck writes:

These too are of a burning color — not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies.

The tools for visual description feel more refined because there are simply more of them, even though there is still no word denoting the fundamental pear-ness of a shape, or the essential golden creaminess of a color.

But wait: a counter-theory. I can say that a pear is like a bell, but I can also say that a pear has a smaller section comprising a semicircle that grades into a larger semicircle. And, there are certain colors that exist as atomic units of description. Blue and orange aren’t just metaphors (though they can be used that way); they are metaphysical concepts in themselves. Yet we don’t have words for the indivisible building blocks of olfactory experience that I can use to describe my house smell. Do we? So the inadequacy of smell descriptions compared to visual descriptions isn’t just one of degree, but of kind, too.

Last year when I was writing, this is how my mind used to work all the time. An observation cracks open a question, which invites a theory, which provokes a counterpoint. This kind of recursive noticing and theorizing is the stuff of my writing.

And then when September came around: silence. At most, there were only fleeting theories that I had no compulsion to record. The looping questions and answers that played through my mind yesterday marked the return of a prior way of being. Something fundamental has changed.

I consider how I’ve been occupying myself in recent months when I am free to choose: I’ve been working with physical materials, figuring out technique, using my hands and body, turning one thing into another thing.

The change I noticed yesterday — one that came on all of a sudden — seems to be a mode shift. When I stopped writing, it’s not that I stopped creative problem-solving. It’s that the problems changed. They became ones that couldn’t be worked out through language but only through physical action, by bringing about state changes in the material world around me. The problems were how to create something useful or visually pleasing or having certain qualities from material that — as yet — didn’t have those qualities.

Which prompts another question: Why did the problems change back again?

Maybe I’ve gotten my fill of material problems. Their solutions are definitive. Either the fabric creates a three-dimensional shape when sewn a certain way, or it doesn’t. Either the object balances upright, or it doesn’t. Either certain colors and patterns ineffably “work” when thrown together — a question of personal taste, to be sure, but one that is knowable — or they don’t.

By contrast, problems that are worked out through language alone are more like the ambiguity of a novel. They linger and we can take them back out and work them again. We’ll never know for sure and maybe that’s the thing that draws us in sometimes and sometimes repels us.

Another way to explain the change: I’ve gone from How? back to Why?

How is the space of method, technique, material, action. How is solved by doing.

Why is the space of theory, metaphor, pattern. Why is solved by conceiving.

So, a final theory: Maybe the Why and the How can be a framework for understanding how our minds are oriented. Whether as a matter of tendency (philosophical v. mechanistic minds) or of a transient mood or phase.

Perhaps we misdiagnose periods of silence as creative depletion, when really they’re mode saturation.

Maybe we need to be both, at different times. The person who makes the thing, and the person who asks why we’ve made it.

Stay curious,

Laura

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1. We do clean our house! Frequently and routinely. It seems to be a smell that’s deep in the house’s bones and thus unperturbed by conventional cleaning. I can live with it simply because I stop noticing it after a while. My husband says he doesn’t notice it at all. But I’m self-conscious about visitors.