before the work begins

Between mundane obligations-like cooking and cleaning, emailing client updates, booking flights, etc.-and what the mind, or my mind anyway, wants to be doing, which is exploring ideas, investigating itself, trying to understand things in a more abstract, logos kind of way, there exists a tension. Perhaps it is the battle between the mensch and the daydreaming poet in me.

Knausgård explored this tension in extremis in the first volume of My Struggle, torn between the duties of being a father to his children-all the changing of clothes, the bedtimes, the demands for attention, the adorable exhaustion of wants and needs expressed clearly, repeatedly-and his intense desire to write. Writing requires isolation. You must go away from your life, from your family and social relations, and enter inside yourself, to dredge up memories or imaginings or ideas and nourish them with your attention and capacity to give them a body of words.

This morning I too have felt this tension. My wife, daughter and I fly to Seattle tomorrow, and there's plenty of household chores that need to be done before the Uber arrives at 5am to drive us to the airport. And yet, this morning I chose the coffee shop. I couldn't stand to start the day with chore after chore, then work for hours on end at my job, then close the day with more chores, then sleep, then more chores in the early morning hours. It just felt too large a load to haul.

Instead, I went out. I talked it over with my wife, and she was ok enough with it. She may have preferred me to clean the bathroom now instead of later, but it wasn't a dealbreaker. And so, freed briefly of the mundanity, or at least given a reprieve, I came to the cafe. With my scone and my cappuccino, I started out with no impulse to work, but the journal function on this website wasn't working properly, so the first step was to have Claude fix it up. While that was happening, with my brief input here and there, I responded to emails, and wrote other emails to clients, letting them know that my price is going up at the beginning of the new year.

Finally the AI fixed things, my journal entry from yesterday was published, but then it was still broken, I couldn't write a new entry. I had Claude work on that, wrote a few more emails, my price is going up, here are the updates, etc. Finally, AI fixed the ability to write a new entry, so here I am.

What is it about writing that I so adore? There's a beauty to it, a rhythm, a delight. It gives me a space to reflect, a way to step back from the immersion in the daily world, where fences need to be fixed and then stained, where gutters need to be cleaned and then fixed, where washers have black mold in the rubber lining and the new mini-splits are way too hot. Uncomfortably hot, even when set at 60 degrees.

What Knausgård discovered, and exploited, was that the mundane actually fuels the artistic space. At first, he thought that art was there to expand upwards towards ecstacy. A religious view at heart, with art sort of stepping in for God, or heaven, or pleasure stepping in for salvation. But he did that, and I don't think it was all that compelling, at least for the public, or at least it didn't gain widespread appeal. And then he found that looking down, looking around at the humdrum requirements of living in a family, and the love and frustration to be found there, and the desire to contribute and also to escape fully, especially for a man, that urge to be free that is bound up by love, especially that love particular to fathers and daughters, produced his major contribution to literature.

And so he took that same perspective, and that mundane style, and looked at his past, investigated so many memories and places, the woods he walked through as a child and his father's drinking problem, and exploited it all. Maybe it was therapeutic for him, maybe he's autistic, with the precision of memory that infuses his work; you can see all the muddy pathways through the woods, smell the old furniture in the house. Whatever it is, he brought it to life, because it was his life and it is his life, and I don't really know if he has anything special to say about it other than, here it is, look, walk here where I walked.

At some point I had to put down his books. I have my own life to live, why walk on and on with this man, who is so talented and pretty miserable too, through his teenage years and his troublesome father. Why not look at my own relationships and the places I go, which is what the writer does anyway, or at least look at my thoughts or look at the life that is here around me.

Stepping away and coming back. I've had my coffee, eaten my breakfast, written my emails, fixed my journal. It's enough for now. Time to close it all down and head back home, say hi to my wife and coo at my daughter, pet the dog and have another cup of coffee before the work day begins.