Backward Phrenology

I relate to this:

From The Nightmare Thief by Nicole Lesperance

I suppose not everyone would be, but I was delighted to read What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund. Here's what I wrote for my review:

I've always felt a bit deficient as a reader because I tend to gloss over descriptive passages of any length. I've never felt the need to try to create detailed images in my head; I "see" impressions of appearances rather realistic pictures. What I've always focused on is the idea of the people, places, and things being described, their significance to the story, their meaning and emotional impact. So every time I run across a written description that does not spring vividly to life for me, I've felt I've done that author a disservice.

It turns out, according to Mendelsund in this book, I am entirely normal. No one "sees" things exactly the way authors describe them. That's not how our brains work, not how they respond to words. Mendelsund is an artist and book designer, so he approaches his topic from a visual perspective and fills his book with images and illustrations. Then, in conversation with literature, literary analysis, philosophers, and psychologists, he explores at length the ways visual descriptions work to conjure concepts and feelings, not visuals. It is a fascinating exploration.

Though weighty, the amount of text is limited, playful, and personal. I highly recommend this for all readers.

Central to Mendelsund's point is that readers participate in co-creating the meaning of everything they read. When we read the word "river," for instance, all meaning attached to the word comes from our own experiences. The sights, sounds, and smells we associate with the word will be the ones we have experienced before. The only rivers we can imagine are those we have already seen, so no matter how precisely the author describes a river, all imagery will come from us as readers. We co-create what we see.

Here are more words from Mendelsund (minus his delightful images).

Literary characters are physically vague--they have only a few features, and these features hardly seem to matter--or, rather, these features matter only in that they help to refine a character's meaning. Character description is a kind of circumscription. A character's features help to delineate their boundaries--but these features don't help us truly picture a person.

-----

Specificity and context add to the meaning and perhaps to the expressiveness of an image, but do not seem to add to the vividness of my experience of an image--that is, all this authorial care, the author's observation and transcription of the world, does not help me to see. They help me to understand--but not to see.

-----

We desire the fluidity and vagary that books grant us when we imagine their content. Some things we do not wish to be shown. . . .

Visualizing may demand effort on the part of readers, but readers may also choose to resist the pictorial in favor of the conceptual. . . .

My friend was going to describe the Woolfs' Hebridean house to me and I stopped him. My Ramsay house is a feeling, not a picture. And I wish to preserve this feeling. I do not want it supplanted by facts.

Well, maybe the house is not only a feeling . . . but the feeling has primacy over the image.

The idea of the house, and the emotions it evokes in me, are the nucleus of a complex atom, around which orbit various sounds, fleeting images, and an entire spectrum of personal associations.

These images we "see" when we read are personal: What we do not see is what the author pictured when writing a particular book. That is to say: Every narrative is meant to be transposed; imaginatively translated. Associatively translated. It is ours.

-----

We colonize books with our familiars; and we exile, repatriate the characters to lands we are more acquainted with.

-----

If we don't have pictures in our minds when we read, then it is the interaction of ideas--the intermingling of abstract relationships--that catalyzes feeling in us readers. This sounds like a fairly unenjoyable experience, but, in truth, this is also what happens when we listen to music. This relational, nonrepresentational calculus is where some of the deepest beauty in art is found. Not in mental pictures of things, but in the play of elements.

-----

Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader. Words "contain" meanings, but, more important, words potentiate meaning . . . 

-----

I continue to interrogate readers . . . I ask them to describe a central fictional character (making sure to only discuss books they've just recently finished reading, or have reread several times, so that whatever imagery they conjured when reading would still be fresh in their minds). My subjects respond by offering up one or two physical characteristics of a character (for instance, "He's short and bald--I know that much"), followed by a longer disquisition on the character's persona ("He's a coward, unfulfilled, regretful," et cetera). I generally have to stop them at some point in order to remind them that I was asking only for physical description.

That is to say, we confuse what a character looks like with who a character, putitatively, is.

In this way we are backward phrenologists, we readers. We extrapolate physiques from minds.

-----

Authors are curators of experience. They filter the world's noise, and out of that noise they make the purest signal they can--out of disorder they create narrative. They administer this narrative in the form of a book, and preside, in some ineffable way, over the reading experience. Yet no matter how pure the data set that authors provide to readers--no matter how diligently prefiltered and tightly reconstructed--readers' brains will continue in the prescribed assignment: to analyze, screen, and sort. Our brains will treat a book as if it were any other of the world's many unfiltered, encrypted signals. That is, the author's book, for readers, reverts to a species of noise. We take in as much of the author's world as we can, and mix this material with our own in the alembic of our reading minds, combining them to alchemize something unique. I would propose that this is why reading "works": reading mirrors the procedure by which we acquaint ourselves with the world. It is not that our narratives necessarily tell us something true about the world (though they might), but rather that the practice or reading feels like, and is like, consciousness itself: imperfect; partial; hazy; co-creative.

I'm reminded of this quote I like from another book:

I'm not telling you what I look like in any detail. I hate those endless descriptions of a heroine's physical attributes . . . First of all, it's boring. You should be able to imagine me without all the gory details of my hairstyle or the size of my thighs. And second, it really bothers me how in books it seems like the only two choices are perfection or self-hatred. As if readers will only like a character who's ideal - or completely shattered. Give me a break. People have *got* to be smarter than that.

― E. Lockhart, The Boyfriend List: 15 Guys, 11 Shrink Appointments, 4 Ceramic Frogs and Me, Ruby Oliver

Though this is meant as humor, I think it actually has some real wisdom to it as well.

Don't chase your dreams!

Humans are persistence predators

Follow your dreams at a sustainable pace, until they get tired and lie down

For more on humans as persistence predators, see: Running was the superpower that made us all human--which means it's a superpower all humans possess

Later, after !Nate had helped him back to camp, Louis marveled at the ruthless efficiency of the persistence hunt. "It's much more efficient than a bow and arrow," he observed. "It takes a lot of attempts to get a successful hunt by bow. You can hit the animal and still lose it, or scavengers can smell blood and get to it before you do, or it can take all night for the poison on the arrow tips to work. Only a small percentage of arrow shots are successful, so for the number of days hunting, the meat yield of a persistence hunt is much higher.

Louis found out only in his second, third, and fourth persistence hunts how lucky he'd gotten in the first; that debut kudu dropped after only two hours, but every one after that kept the Bushmen on the run for three to five hours (neatly corresponding, one might note, to how long it takes most people to run our latter-day version of prehistoric hunting, the marathon. Recreation has its reasons).

Last post, The Remedy Is Boundless Compassion, was about the book Laziness Does Not Exist by Devon Price. Reflecting on it I realized it has themes in common with other books I've read, specifically:

• In Praise of Wasting Time by Alan Lightman (see: Introspection and Contemplation)
• Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May (see: Of Winter: A Dialogue)
• What If This Were Enough? by Heather Havrilesky (see: Exactly How It Should Be)
• Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing by Jamie Holmes (see: Doesn't Look Like Anything to Me)
• The Book of Delights by Ross Gay (see: Things Fall on Me: Delights)
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living A Good Life by Mark Manson (I haven't read this one, but I follow him on Facebook; see: Discovering Mark Manson and a few others)

So I decided to turn those titles into a booklist on my library's catalog, then flesh them out with similar ones I could find:

Relax: It's good for you.

The full list (in Dewey order):

• The Importance of Living by Yutang Lin
• What If This Were Enough? by Heather Havrilesky
• Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock your Most Productive and Creative Self by Manoush Zomorodi
• In Praise of Wasting Time by Alan Lightman
• Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing by Jamie Holmes
• Tinker Dabble Doodle Try: Unlock the Power of the Unfocused Mind by Srinivasan Pillay
• Pottering: A Cure for Modern Life by Anna McGovern
• Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing by Olga Mecking
• The Art of Doing Nothing: Simple Ways to Make Time for Yourself by Véronique Vienne
• The Art of Rest: How to Find Respite in the Modern Age by Claudia Hammond
• Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Cleste Anne Headlee
• How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living A Good Life by Mark Manson
• Laziness Does Not Exist: A Defense of the Exhausted, Exploited, and Overworked by Devon Price
• The Lost Art of Doing Nothing: How the Dutch Unwind With Niksen by Maartje Willems
• Dimming the Day: Evening Meditations for Quiet Wonder by Jennifer Grant
• Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now by Walter Brueggemann
• How to Relax by Thích Nhất Hạnh
• How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
• The Secret Therapy of Trees: Harness the Healing Energy of Forest Bathing and Natural Landscapes by Marco Mencagli
• Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
• Snooze: The Lost Art of Sleep by Michael McGirr
• Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
• Wisdom From A Humble Jellyfish: And Other Self-care Rituals From Nature by Rani Shah
• Forest Bathing: How Trees Can Help You Find Health and Happiness by Qing Li
• Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less--Here's How by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
• The French Art of Not Trying Too Hard by Ollivier Pourriol
• Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
• The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
• Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May
• Pantsdrunk: The Finnish Path to Relaxation by Miska Rantanen
• The Art of the Wasted Day by Patricia Hampl

A couple of excerpts from Woke: A Young Poet's Call to Justice by Mahogany L. Browne with Elizabeth Acevedo and Olivia Gatwood:

Sometimes, you body can make you angry

or sad;

because it doesn't look how you want it to,

or it doesn't do what you'd like it to;

because it might have limits

that you want to move beyond,

but remember, even on the days

you aren't feeling yourself:

Your body is always a good body

because it carries the good in you.

 . . . we don't need

to look like each other or speak like each other

or live like each other to know what it feels

like to be sad, to be hurt, to be in need of a friend.

instead, we can simply say the words

i understand, we can make a secret club

out of our sadness, we can let everyone in

who wants to join, we can sit in a circle

and laugh and share, sing over and over

you are not alone.

After years of living close, I finally visited Kaw Point Park at the confluencee of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers, where Lewis & Clark camped for three days on the journey west. Here are pictures from the hour I spent exploring.

Words potentiate meaning.