Month: October 2024

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One of the hardest things about being an unmasking (or not) neurodivergent academic is the frequent estrangement from your previous selves. Until recently, I was constantly tripping over and ruminating on actions I’d made or thoughts I’d expressed in previous eras of life with some sense of shame or embarrasment, even following a reflex to conceal or suppress those thoughts.There are forms of protestant Christianity and models of self-improvement which I’d been exposed to which enshrine these forms of self-harm as good practice. I was thinking about the ways that this impairs scholarship this morning, reading an old post by Cory Doctorow. Cory is a bit older than me, but we emerged in similar radical techno-cultures, so I’m always learning and feeling edified by his writing. In my reading today, Cory talks about the value of bottom-up thinking. Reflecting in the post on blogging, he says:

Clay Shirky has described the process of reading blogs as the inverse of reading traditional sources of news and opinion. In the traditional world, an editor selects (from among pitches from writers for things that might interest a readership), and then publishes (the selected pieces).

But for blog readers, the process is inverted: bloggers publish (everything that seems significant to them) and then readers select (which of those publications are worthy of their interests). There are advantages and disadvantages to both select-then-publish and publish-then-select, and while the latter may require more of the unrewarding work of deciding to ignore uninteresting writing, it also has more of the rewarding delight of discovering something that’s both totally unexpected and utterly wonderful.

That’s not the only inversion that blogging entails. When it comes to a (my) blogging method for writing longer, more synthetic work, the traditional relationship between research and writing is reversed. Traditionally, a writer identifies a subject of interest and researches it, then writes about it. In the (my) blogging method, the writer blogs about everything that seems interesting, until a subject gels out of all of those disparate, short pieces.

Blogging isn’t just a way to organize your research — it’s a way to do research for a book or essay or story or speech you don’t even know you want to write yet. It’s a way to discover what your future books and essays and stories and speeches will be about.

As you’ll have seen from the ways that this blog serves as a repository of all my public writing over the course of more than a decade, this is the same approach I tend to take. Write and communicate the fragmentary thoughts, and work to identify the coherence of them, in a bottom-up way, until you identify the incohate intuition which drove them in the first place in a way that you can communicate to others.

What struck me about Cory’s piece, however, was his emphasis on the importance of memory. Referencing Vannevar Bush’s concept of the “memex”, he goes on to suggest:

it’s hard to write long and prolifically without cringing at the memory of some of your own work. After all, if the point of writing is to clarify your thinking and improve your understanding, then, by definition, your older work will be more muddled.

Cringing at your own memories does no one any good. On the other hand, systematically reviewing your older work to find the patterns in where you got it wrong (and right!) is hugely beneficial — it’s a useful process of introspection that makes it easier to spot and avoid your own pitfalls.

For more than a decade, I’ve revisited “this day in history” from my own blogging archive, looking back one year, five years, ten years (and then, eventually, 15 years and 20 years). Every day, I roll back my blog archives to this day in years gone past, pull out the most interesting headlines and publish a quick blog post linking back to them.

This structured, daily work of looking back on where I’ve been is more valuable to helping me think about where I’m going than I can say.

It struck me this morning, that this is a crucial part of the kind of messy process I undertake, but my implementation of it has often been impacted by forms of shame, driven by a span of life lived un-conventionally. As a neurodivergent youngster, I was trained by the adults around me to conceal my unconventionality, unless it could be packaged and shared with those around me in ways that would seem unthreatening and graspeable. And the “stranger” patterns or results of thinking were best concealed, masked for the sake of personal safety. Masking generates a pattern of self-suppression and a linked experience of shame and rumination on the dangers of past actions. Review becomes a space for reinscribing our masks, testing the fit, and ensuring its efficient operation.

What Cory points out here (at least for me!) is the importance of self-acceptance and love in the context of a bottom-up scholarly life which requires regular review and reflection. As I’ve pursued a process of unmasking, and what Devon Price reflects on as “radical visibility” over the past half decade, I can recall a specific moment of where I passed a threshold of self-understanding and acceptance and was able to begin looking back on my former self with acceptance and love rather than shame. What’s become increasingly clear to me is that until you’re able to pass that threshold (and let’s accept that it is surely a recursive process I will need to repeat with increasing levels of honest self-awareness), you are estranged from these processes of memory which are a crucial endpoint of scholarly reflection in the mode that I’ve come to practice. If you celebrate the bottom-up process like I do, your practice will nonetheless be truncated until you are able to methodically look back on past reflections with the ability to recognise their imcompleteness whilst also celebrating the shards of insight that they may tacitly contain.

Do also check out Cory’s post which inspired mine this morning, “The Memex Method” here at pluralistic.net.

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photo of the River Severn flooded in 1940, a car is being dragged by several men with a rope out of the river

Yesterday there was torrential rain, lashing Wales for a few hours and creating widespread flooding which shut down roads and trains. This morning, I walked past the River Severn on my way in to run a seminar at the University of Sustainable Development. The Severn is one of the largest and most lively rivers in the UK, but the river this morning was far beyond its usual path, a gushing, brown expanse carrying rain and runoff. It was a striking juxtaposition, creaking civil infrastructure neglected in part through decades of climate change denial, and a loud and lively admission of climate change intensified storms, likely a weather pattern which landed in the United States last week as a series of devastating hurricanes.

I’ve been studying the ways that we can communicate across species barriers, and the challenges to our conceptions of “normal” communication which result from these encounters. Over the summer I taught a course at a theological college, and we engaged in a contemplative ecology walk one rainy afternoon. That walk took us past the River Mersey in Manchester. As I pressed students to engage with other creatures around us in an act of contemplative communication, we paused to wonder about what sort of spiritual beings the different creatures around us might be and how they might be speaking to us. Rivers commmunicate through motion: pace, push, and flow. Like trees (and the subject of a workshop some weeks before), they communicate slowly, expressing conviction and presence by moving land and shifting their path in subtle ways, gently carrying other little beings of soil and rock with them to new homes. Communication through motion is not inaccessible or unknown to humans, though our everyday lives do sometimes deny us joyful motion, scholars have plumbed the communicative potential of dance, and I think we would do well to observe symmetries in the art of intention motion by human communicators and nonverbal nonhumans.

As we paused on our walk at the Mersey, I observed to the group that the sides of the river had been filled with cement in a form of cheap and efficient flood protection. This river could not move. It had been rendered mute and inert, in what could be seen as an act of cruelty and disdain for the intended ecological presence of a river. As the students and I reflected on the Mersey and the forms of presence it might be offering to us, and we moved beyond our initial appreciations for its benefits for anthropos, in the therapeautic conveyance of pace, strength, patience, forebearance. It was impossible to ignore the ways that the river brought life to the whole biotic community of the city. Yet at the same time, when I asked the group to push past our own lifeworlds and to try and imaginatively inhabit that of the river and consider what sort of presence it had to itself, it was hard to ignore the suffering it must endure as a creature, full of potential expressiveness, yet lashed to an artificial course, still generously holding down (for the sake of the health of other creatures) toxic runoff from centuries of mining and industry sedimented under its body. I spend some of my contemplation in quiet solidarity with those other traumatised creatures, including humans, who have had their communication taken from them.

This morning many news outlets decried the destructive potential of our waterways in Wales. I do not deny the tragic consequences of short-sighted development schemes and climate denialism placing houses close to waterways with little to protect them. And I note the ways that the victims of suffering in recent weeks are overwhelmingly minoritised and poor. However, I do not lament the speech of the river Severn this morning. At the same time that it is giving us life and protecting us from self-inflicted harms, it is speaking to us – screaming it the loudest possible voice (I wonder, is it rage? grief? fear?) – can we find our way back to the old ways of listening to the land and paying heed to its wisdom?