Ambiguous Work

Untitled (landscape, woodcutter on path) (1879), Edward Mitchell Bannister

Hence why I tend to obfuscate, and write in a manner, pace and style that is my own. A way that goes against the grain of default advice—where everything must be as crisp and clear and sterile and homogeneously optimised as possible…

I’m also reminded of the sensibilities that Tyson Yunkaporta spoke of in a podcast episode once upon a time.

I don’t know, I try to avoid naming anything. And I try to avoid making too much sense, and I try to say things a bit differently every time and to mix it up. And I’ll make points that you can’t put together. I do that quite deliberately because I don’t want the things I’m thinking or working on to become an ideology or a brand, or something that people can use as a name. I have seen that happen before with a few things I’ve done: People have grabbed it, and then it’s become their thing. You’ve got to avoid that packaging and repackaging of ideas and let these things be free-range. (source)

…Besides: no time spent being lost is ever wasted.

(Isn’t that a wonderful phrase? I have a patch that says, “Not all who wander are lost but I am.” I haven’t put it on anything yet.)

There’s a line from the Nigerian-American writer and photographer Teju Cole that has offered some solace to me as I go about this book in the pace it demands.

How to sustain for as long as possible the ‘I don’t know what this is’ phase of the work. How to keep the search focused but open at the same time.

…In a culture where you have to describe your ‘project’ before you’ve even begun work on it. Where explanation is the coin of the realm and sensibility is outmoded. Look. For a long time.

Which, of course, links to the very same thing that David Whyte speaks of in his prose on ‘ambition’.

Ambition abstracts us from the underlying elemental nature of the creative conversation while providing us the cover of a target that has become false through over-description, overfamiliarity or too much understanding. The ease of having an ambition is that it can be explained to others; the very disease of ambition is that it can be so easily explained to others.

I have various ill-defined things I’m working on, things called The Hypothesis or The Project (two of those) in my notes, etc. Some things are reasonably defined and named! That always feels like progress, like the start of something. Hell, I might even spin up a shitty logo using some generator or AI. But they’re no further along than the ambiguous ones, and they don’t feel as important, and often less exciting.

The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.