Coming home | A Working Library

What do they do,
the singers, tale-writers, dancers, painters, shapers, makers?
They go there with empty hands,
into the gap between.
They come back with things in their hands.

Le Guin, Always Coming Home, page 74

I’ve written before about the restlessness inherent to screens, the inability to ever linger or pause or catch your breath. It’s a strangely disembodied experience, a sense of ceaseless, rustling motion when nothing is moving at all: electrical pulses flash and gasp beneath the oceans, your mind strains to catch up, your body remains still save for a few twitching digits, the shell that’s left behind when your spirit evacuates for the mirage of higher ground. We become as smooth and reflective as the screen itself, all glassy surfaces and metallic edges obscuring the hollowness within. No need to fantasize about what it might be like to upload your consciousness to the machine—most of us are already there.

It’s curious, the way we refer to media that comes at us as a stream, whether of moving pictures or sentence fragments, as if it were the mere flow of cool, fresh water running smoothly and gently at our feet. But all it takes is one big storm, and your friendly little stream becomes a gushing torrent of mud and debris, strong enough to fling cars and houses out of its path, to smash your own fragile body—itself mostly water and so perhaps sympathetic to the display of power—against the rocks.

One meaning of the verb “distract” is to separate, to draw apart. To separate the body from the spirit. To draw apart, or perhaps to draw out, as of a small animal lured from its den by the smell of fresh grass, only to be met by dust and talons. Another meaning is madness.

To step into the stream of any social network, to become immersed in the news, reactions, rage and hopes, the marketing and psyops, the funny jokes and clever memes, the earnest requests for mutual aid, for sign ups, for jobs, the clap backs and the call outs, the warnings and invitations—it can feel like a kind of madness. It’s unsettling, in the way that sediment is unsettled by water, lifted up and tossed around, scattered about. A pebble goes wherever the river sends it, worn down and smoothed day after day until all that’s left is sand.

At some point I became acutely aware of a sense of scattering or separation whenever I glanced at the socials. As if some part of me, or some pattern or vision that I cupped tenderly in my hands, was washed away, wrenched from my grasp before I quite realized what it was. I think of the orb spiders I often glimpse in my tiny city backyard, delicate webs balanced on two leaves of the rhododendron and the stem of a laurel. In my own work, I’m weaving ideas, stories, prophesies, metaphors, dreams by the shore of this great, inconstant stream, and every so often a wave rises up and swallows the whole affair. I can’t predict when a wave will come; I can, at this point, count on it coming.

A wise spider would move a little ways away. But not too far, because this is where the life is. And so I find myself thinking about how I might get some distance, what it means to move uphill a ways, to weave my web safe from the spray. To get out of the flood zone. To come home.

Some weeks ago, I quietly shipped a new content type on A Working Library, such that I am now writing short, social-shaped posts on my site and then sending them off to the various platforms. This is not a novel mode of publishing, but rather one borrowed and adapted from the POSSE model (“publish on your site, syndicate elsewhere”) developed by the IndieWeb community. While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context. Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work. As I played with setting this up, I could immediately feel how that would change the kinds of things I would say, and it felt good. Really good. Like putting on a favorite t-shirt, or coming home to my solid, quiet house after a long time away.

A website is, among other things, a container. The shape of that container both constrains and makes possible what goes within it. This is, I think, one of the primary justifications for having your own website. Not just so you can own your stuff (for some meaning of “ownership,” in a culture in which any billionaire can scrape your work without permission and copyright only protects the rich). Not just so you have a home base among the shifting winds of the various platforms, which rise and fall like brush before the fire. Not just so you can avoid setting up camp in a Nazi bar. But also so that you can shape the work—so that you can give shape to it, and in that shaping make possible work that couldn’t arise elsewhere.

I made a decision many years ago to shape my work around the books I read. If I’m being completely honest, I don’t recall spending a lot of time thinking about that decision or contemplating the consequences of it. It seemed right and so I ran with it. But it has since given rise to a kind of scholarship and writing that I’m not sure I would have landed on were I writing on some all-purpose platform, or fitting my work into someone else’s box. It’s allowed me to cultivate the soil to suit my purposes—rather than having to adapt my garden to the soil I was given. Not every seed I’ve planted has thrived, of course. But after all these years, some are quite hardy, while others have made some very rich compost. And I find myself often amazed by what emerges: not only the seeds I planted but a great many I never anticipated, connections and stories I didn’t see until I was right on top of them, until they were tangled at my feet. Dark velvety leaves amid glossy blooms, thorns and small sour fruits, vines that weave and climb and show me the way.

This is, objectively, a difficult way to publish. There’s a great deal of friction between an idea or phrase coming to mind and the words making it out into the world. And I don’t mean the writing itself (which, as every writer will tell you, is dreadful), but the actual mechanics of sharing that writing. I mean, I am the fool who opens their damn terminal every time they want to publish; in recent weeks, I have spent a not insignificant number of hours writing some absolutely criminal CSS. I cannot, in good conscience, advise this path for anyone with sense. But the choice to do so suits my own proclivities: a desire to tinker not only with the words but with the strata underneath them, and a long-running interest in the material reality of publishing. And more often than not, I find that what I need is some friction, some labor, the effort to work things out. Efficiency is an anti-goal; it is at odds with the work, which requires resistance and tension in order to come into being.

This is one of the many reasons why I find the current conversation about so-called generative AI so immensely frustrating: there’s all this hype about making everything easier and faster, about how we can eliminate all the work involved in the making of words and images. But no one arguing for this seems to have asked what’s left when the work is gone. What is the experience of asking for something to appear and then instantly receiving it? What changes between the thought and the manifestation? I fear that nothing changes, that nothing is changed in such a making, least of all ourselves. But then, what does it mean to be unchanged, for your feet to pass so lightly over the ground they don’t so much as disturb the sand? Even the dead make change in the world, as their bodies decay and and are transformed into food for beasts and bugs and trees. But in eliminating the effort, in refusing the temporality of making, the outcome of an “AI”-driven creative process is a phantasm, an unsubstantiality, something that passes through the world without leaving any trace. A root that twists back upon itself and tries to suck the water from its own desiccated veins.

There was a time when I felt some resonance between spending time in the social stream and doing my own work. As if the movement of the water imparted some energy or power I could make use of, and then return. But it’s been a long time since I’ve felt that way. I grieve that loss: a great number of my closest friends are people I met in the halcyon days of Twitter, and I find I still often long for that kind of connection, the ambient awareness of people in whose company I felt at home. But I know that longing to be a kind of nostalgia, an unrealizable wish to return to a past that never was quite as I remember it. I do not want those memories to be a burden, like stones weighing down my pockets. I want, instead, to carry them lightly and tenderly, to have the fortitude to accept the grief that comes with leaving the past where it belongs.

A word about the Fediverse is warranted here. I believe that we desperately need to be experimenting and developing methods of communication that aren’t beholden to either the advertising industry or the brittle egos of billionaires. Hitching our means of finding each other and forging relationships to those insatiable appetites is to invite scarcity and fear into our most intimate alliances. We need room to talk and to take up space, to listen and to be heard, to organize ourselves, absent that exponential scale of manipulation. And I think that something like the Fediverse, which seeks to locate power in small communities, and functions at the level of a protocol rather than a company, moves us in the right direction.

And yet: as much as the Fediverse is different (the governing structures, the incentives, the moderation, the absence of ads and engagement tricks), so much of it is also unsettlingly familiar—the same small boxes, the same few buttons, the same mechanics of following and being followed. The same babbling, tumbling, rushing stream of thoughts. I can’t tell if we’re stuck with this design because it’s familiar, or if it’s familiar because we’re stuck. Very likely it’s me that’s stuck, fixed in place while everything rushes around me, hoping for a gap, a break, a warm rock to rest awhile on. Longing for a mode of communication that lifts me up instead of wiping me out.

And so I remain at an unresolvable juncture: the intersection of the very strong belief that we must experiment with new modes and systems of communication, and the certain knowledge that every time I so much as glance at anything shaped like a social feed, my brain smoothes out, the web of connections and ideas I’m weaving is washed away, and I tumble downstream, only to have to pick myself up and trudge heavily through the mud back to where I belong.

It’s exhausting. It is, at this point in my life, unsustainable. I cannot dip into the stream, even briefly, and also maintain the awareness and focus needed to do my own work, the work that is uniquely mine. I cannot wade through the water and still protect this fragile thing in my hands. And perhaps I owe to my continued senescence the knowledge that I do not have time for this anymore. Perhaps it’s age that grants the wisdom to know where my attention belongs and the discipline to be able to direct it. The great power of a middle-aged woman is that she knows where to give her fucks.

Will it be weird, to write this way? Probably. I’m tossing the same words into (currently) three totally different networks, each with their own affect and moods and characters of the day. I’m keeping my distance, such that I likely won’t hear the replies (at least, not with any timeliness) or see the ripples my words make, should they make any at all. But maybe we need more weird—not in the very recent sense of the word, but in the sense of prophesy or potential, a spell or charm, the magic, the wild, the wyrd—that which is becoming, rather than that which has already passed us by.

In Madeline Miller’s beautiful retelling, the Greek witch-goddess Circe comes to understand the difference between her own magic and the greater gods’ divinity:

Let me say what sorcery is not: it is not divining power, which comes with a thought and a blink. It must be made and worked, planned and searched out, dug up, dried, chipped and ground, cooked, spoken over, and sung.

Miller, Circe, page 83

Circe is surprised to learn that she loves the work of magic, loves it even when it’s infuriating and frustrating, when it’s filthy and exhausting. (The reader is not, I think, surprised.) But she doesn’t learn that love until she is exiled, left alone on an island, her only companions the birds and lions and wild boars. There she comes to see what her sorcery really is. There she goes into the gap, and discovers that magic is dirt and muscle, work and will, effort and choice.

Later, she returns to the world. Not to the world of the gods—which she comes to realize is a lifeless place—but to the mortal world, carrying her small herbs and potions, her wisdom. But as far as she travels, the island remains her home, the place she always comes back to.

My own magic is a small one: to write in order to uncover what I think; to prefigure a future of work that serves the living; to listen intently as people speak aloud a story of themselves that is, in the speaking, being rewritten. But it is mine. For too long I have tried to make space for it along the banks, to keep one foot in the water, to speak my incantations into the wind while the river slips the sediment out from under me and pulls me ever deeper.

No longer.