Five days ago I submitted my master’s thesis at 11:57 pm at night. For the two days up to and including the due date, I had been unable to send it for review because of an IT issue. Earlier in the evening I had gone to my supervisor L’s house for a BBQ in celebration of the thesis I had still not electronically submitted. In the kitchen I chatted with him, incised a vanilla bean pod and scraped the entrails into a bowl of whipping cream. One of my friends chopped strawberries; L took out little blue glass cups. The hand mixer, my prerogative, almost instantly sent droplets of white fat everywhere in his kitchen. L took over but the outcome was the same. “You’re going to be finding bits of cream everywhere for the next few days,” I told him. He said he was planning to deep-clean anyway.
So, anyway. I submitted. Debilitating to be so free when I can’t really live up to it yet. Faltering. I can’t write about anything; I don’t even know how to read. I’ve been devouring articles from Brandon Taylor’s blog, desperate for advice on how to write good stories, real stories, actually fictional stories which are not thinly veiled anecdotes from my real life. As a child I wanted so strongly to teach myself everything. I believed in autodidacticism, the promise of the internet, the sharp knife of my own mind. It probably damaged me, although it did not feel it at the time, that I was often better than my art teachers at painting, or better than my English teachers at writing. In Grade 12 I took a course on writing fiction, and my teacher returned my first story to me with a note in red ink: Talk to me at the end of class. I don’t have anything to teach you! This is obviously exactly what I wanted to hear. When I visited her just after my first semester of university, months before COVID-19 would rip apart most of the social bonds I still had in Hamilton, she told me she still prints out my story and teaches it in that class.
How did I learn to write as a child? It’s almost a miracle to me. I wrote a lot of bad stories in Microsoft Word, alone; I cared religiously about word counts. Sheer practice, I certainly was indebted to and earnestly believed in. But I did not seriously believe that one could improve at writing through formal study, definitely not at universities, socially, in little circles where people offered collective art critique. Almost no one I knew was a real artist, an artist whose work I actually enjoyed and was interested in. This changed when I met Lili in high school and I realized you could actually talk about process with other people, and what books you had read recently, and reference Alice Neel or Calder and not be called pretentious. What someone didn’t already know, you could link to or send; and then they, in turn could actually open it. Lili read indie magazines the same way I obsessively read the New Yorker. Watching her cut thin slabs of linoleum was hypnotizing; so was seeing her in the dark room, dipping paper in trays of chemicals. When she told me she didn’t like poetry, I showed her Frank O’Hara’s Having a Coke with You on my phone; she then read far more poetry than I ever have, or will. I still think about an essay that she wrote for class in 2020 and sent to me. But the thing is, Lili and I don’t live in the same city anymore. We haven’t for years.
The New Yorker. My obsession must have started somewhere around 11th or 12th grade and it continues to this day; I think I check the website multiple times a day. Whole swathes of my personality are due to reading the New Yorker. Maybe now I can be glib about prestige magazines, middlebrow tastemakers, but at the time I was a teenager in Hamilton. I was desperately trying to educate myself. Most of the adults around me spent a lot of time on their phones; as a matter of fact, so did I. Most of the adults around me didn’t really have hobbies. In Hamilton my dad and I drove to the grocery store nearly every day, just to have a task to do. I wanted to be an artist, I told this over and over to myself, I wanted to be an artist. But then I did not actually know how to do that thing, to go out into the world and be an artist. And certainly I decided I wouldn’t go to school for it. I was above that, and above learning, and above paying a lot of money for something I could theoretically learn myself.1
This was a somewhat blinkered view. Perhaps I would’ve met real artists, adult artists who buy groceries and pay rent, and still manage to make art. And I might have learned something about craft, and how to make wooden frames for paintings, and actually applied maxims like thick over thin, fat over lean. Perhaps, in the right program, I might have learned even how to write: the thing I still feel most called to do. Since, anyway, how do I put these papier-mâché characters onto the page, and make them walk around, and talk to each other, and actually write down ugly connecting sentences like She walked over to the door? How do I write prose, and not poetry?
The other day I was reading this article by Sam Kriss about today’s alt-lit scene. He reads Tao Lin, Honor Levy, a genuinely crude and brutal book called Fuccboi. Obviously it’s very enjoyable reading Kriss rip this stuff apart. But when I read this paragraph, my heart dropped:
To be honest, I don’t know either how to get out of this bind and start moving again. I’m not sure what it would take to make literature feel genuinely vital and necessary again. My current best plan is to set off a series of small but loud bombs across New York such that if you mapped out the explosions they would spell the words PLEASE CONSIDER WRITING ABOUT SOMETHING OTHER THAN YOURSELF.
It seems to me that I don’t actually have the technical skills necessary to implement what I want to do. To put characters back in bodies, lol. And to identify any experience outside of myself. But then I also feel I have something to share! This is always what gets me, and why I can’t stop writing loosely disguised autofiction. Everyone I know speaks a highly arcane technical language, which no one actually gets right, ever. Not in Quanta, not in Good Will Hunting—and certainly not in fiction. Look at the way mathematics is written about in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian classic We, as described the main character D-503, a mathematician building a massive spaceship called the INTEGRAL:
It was long ago, during my school days, when I first encountered the square root of minus one. I remember it all very clearly: a bright globelike class hall, about a hundred round heads of children, and Plappa—our mathematician. We nicknamed him Plappa; it was a very much used-up mathematician, loosely screwed together; as the member of the class who was on duty that day would put the plug into the socket behind, we would hear at first from the loud-speaker, "Plap-plap-plap-plap—tshshsh. . . ." Only then the lesson would follow. One day Plappa told us about irrational numbers, and I remember I wept and banged the table with my fist and cried, "I do not want that square root of minus one; take that square root of minus one away!" This irrational root grew into me as something strange, foreign, terrible; it tortured me; it could not be thought out. It could not be defeated because it was beyond reason.
What the fuck is going on here? First, a technical issue: i is not an irrational number! Irrational numbers are real numbers which can’t be written as p/q, where p, q are both integers and q is of course nonzero. But i isn’t a real number at all. Imagine: A Russian, someone from one of the most mathematically literate cultures around, conflating irrational numbers with complex numbers. Even if the details had been written correctly, it’s absolutely unimaginable for a mathematician, let alone a utopian nation’s foremost scientist, to be afraid of i, especially as an adult (yes, D-503 continues to be haunted by this square root, even in adulthood). i is the most natural possible thing to define: it’s a solution to the polynomial x^2 + 1. You can make that rigorous, extremely rigorous, if that sounds sketchy: it’s not. And why would anyone fear i? It’s useful! i makes every polynomial with real (or complex) coefficients split into a product of linear factors. In the world of field extensions, C/R is like the easiest possible case: you adjoin a single element and get an algebraic, degree-2 extension. (In general, things can get unimaginably worse.2) In the world of physics, it’s the basis for the Fourier transform, the reason why we can calculate integrals of real-valued functions like e^(-x^2). To me, this metaphor, which could be a genuinely clever and interesting device, a setting-specific analogy about D-503’s repressed desire for an extremely sexy woman, fails in essentially every way. And you know, there are still things in math that are not like i, which are genuinely confusing and nonsensical!
I keep on reading books, trying to see what I could do. Recently I reread Either/Or by Elif Batuman. A novel of ideas, not as good as her first without the tension of Ivan’s character, but nevertheless extremely funny. Maybe I could do that, but also I’m not Turkish and can’t read Russian. At the moment I’m reading Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. There’s a novel: almost no description, no lushness, just pages and pages of dialogue about whether to marry this brother or the other, scheming to deceive rich suitors, falling into sin and prostitution3. It’s enthralling. On page 70, Defoe’s advice to women sounds like the deranged 1995 classic The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right:
No Man of common Sense will value a Woman the less for not giving herself up at the first Attack, or for not accepting his Proposal without enquiring into his Person or Character; on the contrary, he must think her the weakest of all Creatures in the World, as the Rate of Men now goes; In short, he must have a very contemptible Opinion of her Capacities, nay, even of her Understanding, that having but one Cast for her Life, shall cast that Life away at once, and make Matrimony like Death, be a Leap in the Dark.
That last line underscores that even in a freewheeling picaresque, the stakes are high. Marriage was life or death for women. Bad marriages spell disaster in basically all the books I read. And that’s what writing needs: disasters. Situations. Plot. Writing is about a set of relations, but instead of relations, what I seem to be able to put down is my own thoughts. A disembodied, depressed narrator. I could probably write some thin polemic on modern dating, the internet: I hate that shit! I want real characters, real bodies. Perhaps the problem is that I myself am not a very embodied creature. I’ve always related to Mishima on that one4:
When I examine closely my early childhood, I realise that my memory of words reaches back farther than my memory of the flesh. In the average person, I imagine, the body precedes language. In my case, words came first of all; then—belatedly, with every appearance of extreme reluctance, and already clothed in concepts—came the flesh. […] It was true, indeed, that the flesh came late to me in the beginning, but I was waiting for it with words.
The thing is, I don’t know how to write the kind of novels I like to read. I love 18th century novels about the propertied classes, but it’s a world I have no relation to, one that no longer exists outside of select echelons which don’t need the press. Servants, hunting dogs. I was fascinated by Kostya’s relation to agriculture in Anna Karenina, mowing with peasants in the field.5 But I don’t have the bravery to write historical novels in the way Jeanette Winterson does, realer than real, dreamlike, barely researched. I don’t like middle-class novels about professors sleeping around and fighting their wives. I don’t relate to shitty men, alcoholics, tennis players. But I’m aware in writing this that I’m enumerating a list of people I’ve decided to not extend empathy to, or whose experience lays so far from my own that I’ve declared them non-characters. I don’t even know how to write about the class of people I live in: underemployed students, dilettantes, NEETs, tattoo artists, mathematicians, professors. Privileged people who live mildly unconventional lives, energized by Marxist reading groups and Quebecois separatism. That’s a reductive view. But the reductive view is my only view.
The corrective to a surfeit of interiority, maybe, is journalism. For a brief season of my life I regularly reported on real events, mostly for student journals. I still look back and think that made me a much better writer. It made me go into the world and enter situations, interrogate them, and then describe them honestly. It forced me to encounter people whose lives I found genuinely repugnant or pathetic, and consider their lives more fully. Being a critic comes naturally to me: I’ve always been critical. What’s hard for me is to be generous to others, not in a saccharine way, but in the real way, which actually requires me to employ all my intelligence. In June I read Silas Marner and Middlemarch, and I still feel affected by those books in ways I can’t articulate. George Eliot’s lucid gaze, her careful insights, stayed with me for a long time. Filled me with longing that maybe, one day, I can learn how to write about other people.
Then you know the story: I studied math, and began a so-far somewhat promising career.
Only God understands the absolute Galois group of the rational numbers.
At some point Moll marries her own brother by accident (and is greatly distressed by this).
From The Sun and Steel, which is his book about bodybuilding but much more than that.
Of course, Levin is very much a self-insert character on the part of Tolstoy! So, you know, one must simply emulate Tolstoy—the greatest of all novelists, or whatever.