Against Thinking: In Which Peter Stallybrass Confirms What I’d Begun To Suspect

ecantwell:

Thinking is what people like Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas’s character in Wonder Boys) do.

Working is what people like Benjamin Franklin do. 

I spent this morning reading Peter Stallybrass’s article “Against Thinking” (from a 2007 issue of PMLA); he sets out a pretty neat defense of working over thinking—an attack on those academics and writers who hold thinking up as some ideal and elite pursuit. 

Here is my vulgar recipe for working as opposed to thinking.

THINKING is
Hard, painful 
Boring, repetitious
Indolent
NB. Hard and indolent. 

WORKING is
Easy
Exciting, a process of discovery
Challenging

There is nothing mystical about working.

I like this “recipe” not just because it leads into a more detailed examination of what it means to work instead of think, but also because it makes me feel less alone. I think a lot of academics/writers (and those of us cursed to be both academics and creative writers) feel like they have to sit around looking like this all the time (or like this, or like this). That they have to be engaged in active pondering, that they ought to say things like “This morning I was listening to Beethoven and staring at the brick wall opposite my desk, when suddenly I came to the realization that Marlowe is really the inspiration for Eliot’s The Waste Land” or something atrocious like that. 

Sometimes I imagine my colleagues drinking pots of coffee and staring at blank Word documents on their computers and being flooded with brilliant theses about the nature of language and image. And I think about my own process and feel like a fraud. I talk to my therapist all the time about the persistent, nagging conviction that I’m a complete fake. That I’ve fooled everyone around me into thinking I’m something I’m not. That, deep down, I have absolutely nothing to give anyone. No original thoughts. No unique ways of seeing the world. 

Peter Stallybrass’s essay reassures me that even if I’m right about myself, that’s no reason to despair. That being original is overrated. That the people who are the closest to being frauds are those who perpetuate this idea that ambient thinking is the most exalted and perfect activity the mind can attain.

When you’re WORKING, you’ll be in the good company of the writers we’ll be working on. None of them had a writer’s block. When Shakespeare sat down to write a history play (say, Richard II), he made sure that his table had the right things on it: Holinshed’s Chronicles, from which he took the plot, and a commonplace book that I imagine as having entries under death, Ireland, Cain and Abel, etc. Shakespeare and Anne Bradstreet wrote. They assembled the necessary materials (this was called “invention” in the Renaissance) and then got on with the job according to two fundamental principles: 

(A) IMITATION: This means that you read (or listen) so as to write. If you look at the scenes of medieval writing, you cannot tell if you’re looking at a scribe, a translator, or an “author”—all have books around them from which, in their different ways, they are transcribing (or “translating”). Shakespeare (who invented in the modern sense at most one or two of his plots) “translates” Holinshed and other chroniclers. In Hamlet, Shakespeare rewrote a ten-year-old play called Hamlet (which doesn’t survive). In King Lear, he rewrote an earlier play called King Lear (which does survive).

(B) INSPIRATION: This is a complex way of rethinking imitation. It means allowing yourself to be “breathed into”—as your own voice has been breathed into you at school and by parents, lovers, those whom you aspire to be like, etc. When you’re working, as opposed to thinking, ideas will indeed “come over you” (as in, “I don’t know what came over me”). Thinking does, in that sense, take place, but dialectically. You are not, nor should you be, the origin of your own thoughts (any more than you are the origin of your own voice). Having your own thoughts in the literal sense is as impossible as having your own language. It’s not only impossible; it’s silly and unnecessary to attempt it. You should have better things to do with your life. When I’m tempted to think, I commonplace Pepys or Montaigne instead.

I think back to this summer, when I went to a writer’s retreat in the woods of Virginia for 10 days and wrote more than I had in months and months. My routine every morning? I woke up, made myself coffee, sat out on a porch with W. S. Merwin’s Migration: New and Selected Poems, and copied down a few poems that struck me that morning as being relevant, somehow, to my life. And as I was doing that, I’d get ideas for my own poems. The act of copying Merwin’s words gave me my own. 

When you’re THINKING, you’re usually staring at a blank sheet of paper or a blank screen, hoping that something will emerge from your head and magically fill that space. Even if something “comes to you,” there is no reason to believe that it is of interest, however painful the process has been. ORIGINALITY (an unhelpful concept connected with thinking and deep thought) is another name for repeating other people’s ideas without knowing that you’re doing so. What would it mean to speak with an original voice, if our voices are the (unique) combinations of hauntings through which we speak and through which we are spoken? In this sense, originality is not only a bad concept, it’s a cruel one that would excise what makes us who we are—the voices that have taken up a local habitation and a name in our bodies.

There is no relation between the quantity of pain and the quality of the work produced.

Oh, that line is so good, I have to type it again:

There is no relation between the quantity of pain and the quality of the work produced.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, all of this copying down of Stallybrass’s words has given me some other, fleeting ideas I have to write somewhere.

The cure for the disease called thinking is work.