Cadence

Have something to say? Really? An essay on frequency, quantity, exhaustion and the dangers of saying too much or too little.

The other morning, I told a friend that my latest book was about 350 pages. He’s in a different line of work, and told me he doubts he’s had 350 pages of thoughts in his life.

I said that after a few dozen books and a year of these essays, I worry the same is true of me. But it would be a bigger problem for me.

Purposes of speech

People write and speak, in a lot of different ways (see March’s “Tones of Voice, Types of Talk”). In my experience, though, there are two main motivations.

Grooming - mostly in the sense of primates, who pick at each other’s fur to show deference and to keep calm at close quarters, though it works in the other more nefarious context as well. This is speech that says ‘I am here. I am safe. I am on your side. I am just as excited or alarmed as you. Talk to me. We’re inside the same thing.’ This includes marketing.

Communicating - there is a clarity here. It says ‘This happened. This is what it means. This is what I’m going to do. This what it leaves you to decide.’

I put the second one second because it’s less common. Things that need to be communicated don’t come up as often as it seems. By contrast, the need for grooming is ceaseless. We’re jumpy creatures, thin skinned and suspicious. Staying on people’s good sides means you can spend every waking moment involved in one form of soothing or another.

Bad motivations

We all talk to people. At least I hope so. We all have people who, when they approach to talk to us, we flinch inwardly. When we flinch the hardest, it’s often because we don’t like their motivations. Often, they’re seeking a grooming we don’t want to give.

Or they’re trying to win - to confirm their side in another argument, or to affirm their dominance over a shared acquaintance, or over you. It’s murder. At the very least, it’s draining.

Talking wolf

Maybe you’ve got a lot to say. I certainly seem to think I do. But who do you know who really has a lot to say? Look to your friends. Look to your bookshelf. Take a breath. Some people are brilliant, certainly, fathomless even. But even Spinoza had his limits.

As a writer, these limits present problems. The first is that the really interesting thing you have to say may be smothered by the incredible volume of what you do say. The second that what you think is interesting may not actually be the interesting part of what you say.

As a civilization, we had a solution to these problems, called an editor. But those guys have taken a worse beating than writers in our peculiar century, though you hear less about it.

Meanwhile in the pleasure dome

Fir a writer, there’s a bigger problem. You may miss your own train as it leaves the station. There’s a famous story about it.

Coleridge had a head cold, or so he said. He took a remedy, according to the prescriptions of the day. I’m not googling this I swear. And he woke up with a poem in his head, crystalline and whole. The only distance was between the thing itself and getting it on the page.

With sleep still in his eyes, he started dashing the perfect thing down, doing all he could to not be distracted by its perfection. He was breathing heavy and drooling. That didn’t matter. He was taking an entire perfect thing from the impossible realm where perfect things live into this world of, well, you know.

And unlike everything else, it was going swimmingly. Then there was a knock on the door. Fuck it. Keep going. ‘Sammy are you ok,’ comes the voice and more knocking. Fuck, not that one - give her a scare and she’ll go weeping to have a butler kick in the door. So he got up to soothe the knocker on the door. And the poem was gone. Wholly gone just as it had been wholly there a minute before.

It’s a famous story. The lesson is to get it down while it’s fresh. This comes with rueful results, like the best minds of Ginsberg’s generation who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish.

Waste not

The stanzas of gibberish thing is real. It’s something to do with tapping into a timeless vein as part of the creative process. In my experience, I’ve gotten important news that turns out to be completely irrelevant for another decade, or another lifetime (see “Lessons out of Order,” in October, if No Homework gets there).

Eid ma clack shaw

Bill Callahan sings about the stanzas-of-gibberish phenomenon in one song. In it, he has this great dream, and races out of bed to write it down. It’s “Eid ma clack shaw.” Just nonsense. But he makes it into a song all the same. In some ways, it’s a terrible song, because it dumps this frustrating obsession into the listener’s lap. It’s catchy.

My guess is that Bill will figure out the meaning of that dream later. It’ll be a line that puts paid to an important concept, and fits right into one of his songs, something like “I’d mock like I’d show,” or something. But he’ll he have used it already.

This business puts you in some awkward spots.

Nothing ever happens

I was somewhere once, listening to a Louis Armstrong recording and he said “nothing ever happens.” Some unnamed interlocutor said something like “come on Satch, nothing?” To which one of the foundational individuals of the American Century and a then-living pivot upon the history of human music said “nothing good, anyway.”

It was a head scratcher at first. Then, a relief. It’s not just me.

Nothing’s happening - it feels that way all the time. So I look around. I pick up my phone to check my email to see if anything has happened to me, the news to see what’s happened to my city and country, then social media, where people are desperate to make something happen by showing their ass or insulting elected representatives. But that’s not it.

Then I try to make it happen, somewhere like here. This is how so much half-baked not-quite-communication comes into the world.

The pit

I had the experience of learning journalism shortly before the bottom fell out of the profession. The place I worked at had a story-a-day rule. The story had to be original, meaning no one else had covered it. And it had to be corroborated, with at least three sources.

And that was a challenge, but doable. At the end of each day, there was the sense of accomplishment of having done something difficult on a tight deadline, and having delivered something halfway honest into the world.

The job had grown from the days of daily, weekly and monthly publications. There were only so many column inches. You could have a good story that just wasn’t good enough to make the cut for that issue.

In a digital publication, there were infinite column inches. You could publish any time day or night. And people were always looking for something that was happening. Soon, a story a day wasn’t entirely enough. Then there were social cutdowns, and a constant drive for better numbers - readers, read-time, shares, comments and so forth.

No number would ever be so high that it wouldn’t need to be improved upon. The pace had gone from being satisfactory to insufficient. The job as it had been practiced wasn’t sufficient. With each day, it felt worse to be there.

The nothingness shows through

The hunger for something to happen is constant. But only so much news is possible. How do you follow up an assassination? Two assassinations? Too derivative.

Even if the thing after the second assassination is something completely different, a succession of wholly novel events makes it impossible for each thing to have full significance - it destroys the thread of a narrative. To hold our attention each event has to top the last. And each event has to somehow leapfrog the gathering noise of everything that came before, while validating the logic according to which they made so much of a ruckus.

This leads to runaway MacGuffin inflation. It’s like how superhero movies can only be about an object that will save or destroy the world, and time is running out. With the world saved, the next object must be the damnation/salvation of the universe, then multiple universes in an infinity-plus-one progression.

The plot no longer resembles any human life or institution. It’s a frantic wank against a bottomless hedonic sinkhole that opens up when you rely too heavily on something happening.

Exhaustion

The limits to what’s happening, or what anyone has to say show up in exhaustion. Today, exhaustion is the default. But it wasn’t only so.

Maybe by mistake, the slow and limited media outlets of the last century - record releases, movies in the theaters, even pre-cable television, cultivated anticipation and a sense of emerging novelty. The exhaustion only became popularly conscious in the ‘90s. I remember hearing Bruce Springsteen’s "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)" on MTV, and thinking it can’t be all that bad. It got worse.

Exhaustion is everywhere. Exhaustion of ideas and nerve is evident in the writers and the readers, the talkers and the listeners. It’s evident in the sequels metastasizing into cinematic universes, the reliance on comp-titles (it’s like The Great Gatsby meets Fifty Shades of Gray meets Jaws) in publishing, the fact that today’s pop music sounds like a less-interesting form of pop music from forty years ago.

All that time-saving innovation, all that seamlessness, has left us somehow drop-dead tired.

One-hit wonder

Something happening is necessarily a finite resource, sprint as we might. This is especially true of made-up things that happen, which lack the resources and flexibility of reality.

Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes is a novel about why it took him thirty years to write a novel. It’s a real ass-kicker of a book, though, and a success in his time. The others he wrote after are dull. But he had one. And it was great.

Quality is rare and difficult. Quality looms behind the frantic show of ever-higher numbers and ever-faster production. It accuses from the shadows, like Hamlet’s Dad’s ghost. It reminds us that something’s awry.

Real depth and intensity on the part of the writer and the reader, the speaker and the listener is powerful enough to make the numbers feel irrelevant. When it occurs on a personal or cultural level, quality can change everything.

The innovations of this century or the one before don’t, by themselves, impede this quality of attention. They do nothing to improve it, however. They steal time and energy from it. But quality paragraphs and conversations persist like ghosts beyond slander or criticism or even death.

No amount of the lesser stuff can diminish their power. They shape us. They find us when we're lost. They remain when inspiration - and even small talk - run out.

Selected bibliography

An essay on the uses and abuses of filler

A home-brewed taxonomy of the different types of written expression

An essay on content marketing

Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child by Louis Armstrong

A book by Ben Schaffer, who contributed to this article

Eid Ma Clack Shaw by Bill Callahan

Feather by Feather by Bill Callahan

Howl by Allen Ginsberg

A Fan’s Notes by Frederick Exley

Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge