I didn’t start writing until I was 58, Annie Proulx said as she accepted the National Book Award in 2017; so if you’ve been thinking about it and putting it off, well…
The crowd burst into applause and wistful people all over the world fell in love with her. Who wouldn’t cheer? The heart, at least, stands up, and standing is an important movement for hearts to make. Proulx never hems about when it comes to our suffering world, but she also offers hope. A hopeful lament, maybe.
Get going, she says. It isn’t too late.
Flour billows from the folded and pasted edges of the five pound paper bag as I shake it. Not a lot: a puff. A dusting that reveals something of light and something of angles.
It seems an odd thing to do, shaking the bag: it makes a mess and there is a part of me that is lazy and complacent and doesn’t like making work for myself.
But this is the proper way to begin: making a mess.
After you’ve shaken the bag, spoon flour from it into your measuring cup one teaspoon at at time. Let the flour in the measuring cup stay light and mounded: do not shift it about. Do this as many times as it takes, one spoon at a time, marveling at how you both want to rush it (scooping) and are tempted to undo your work (shifting about) simultaneously. Notice how these urges are pulses in your hands. Resist them. Keep spooning. Keep spooning until you create a tiny mountain of flour higher than the lip of the measuring cup. To level, draw the edge of a knife across the cup at the height of its lip. Now this is truly a cup of flour, something that weighs about 137 ounces. If you are lazy and stick the cup in the bag to scoop, you’ll end up with far more than 137 ounces. As much as 150% more.
150% more than what is called for is a sure route to failure.
Accept the fact that you will dirty a lot of bowls and utensils; this is a part of the baker’s life. I recommend an apron and a good broom. Be menial and repetitive.
Baking is a science. Excellent baking requires precise ratios, proven techniques, and well-tested recipes. You can’t just throw ingredients together by the pinch or the handful like a cook. Cooking is generously forgiving and subject to taste: even if you substitute half of the things for other things, the end result tends to be edible.
Not so with baking. It’s just not so.
A baker is disciplined.
I say this to myself for the fourth time of the day, rubbing at my cheek with the back of my hand because my fingers are floury. I’m referring to either the fires in Hawaii or the fires in Canada, or the hottest summer on record anywhere. Or hot violence.
Discipline is a troubling word. We don’t like it. We resist. Most of our lives feel controlled; what we want is freedom. We don’t like making work for ourselves. And we’re awfully tired.
The concept of discipline has moralistic overtones, which sounds heartless when folks are already tired.
Discipline sounds like punishment. Discipline is associated with rulers to knuckles, being grounded or having our favorite things taken away. We don’t want to have our things taken away. We’ve worked too hard for them. We are already grieving the losses of more than we can count. Because grief is so pervasive, we feel insecure. It gets tricky: many of us have been punished unfairly and excessively, or never had enough to begin with. Maybe the person wielding the ruler was a nun and we haven’t gotten over it yet. We bristle when the merits of discipline are laid out. We bristle even if none of that was personally true, but happened to folks like us. The costs of centuries of arbitrary punishment are everywhere around us; the threat is pervasive.
Discipline can also mean devotion, or being a follower of a particular sect or life path. In this context one becomes a disciple. Spiritual teachers like to lean into this understanding of discipline. It seems gentler. It is gentler and it happens to hold up: both ‘disciple’ and ‘discipline’ have etymological roots in “being a learner”.
A related usage makes discipline a field of knowledge; disciple here is a person or the people who continually, consistently, over a long period of time return to the chosen field. There are allusions of discovery and arrival, a beckoning, winds, whispers of angles and of light.
Sometimes this discernment (also etymologically related to discipline) has felt helpful, but the issue remains: discipline sucks. Being told to follow the herd is no less coercive than punishment is.
Yet I think we humans like measuring. There’s something satisfying to it. Look at kids with their beach toys: buckets and shovels. Children have appropriated an infinite variety of canisters, spoons, and boxes from whatever their original function was to shift, contain, move, pour, dig holes, make castles, or hold stuff. I’ve watched kids play with tape measures for hours, accessing everything from Dad’s foot to the dog’s tail. I’ve seen them do it with rulers or bits of string or their own palm, with whatever comes to hand, so I take it as a kind of universal.
Here is the funny thing: I like baking, and I like the results of baking, but the constituent parts of it are often annoying. I don’t want to spoon and level. I want the process to go faster. I don’t like sweeping or doing dishes. In order to bake, I have to resist my own inclinations every single step of the way. In the end, having done feels good and results in better cake. A collection of independently irksome stuff leads, in the collection, directly to pleasure. Sometimes I forget myself, and enjoy the work itself.
Pleasure is the only argument for discipline that makes any sense to me. Discipline is only worthwhile if it leads to greater things.
I believe in great things. Such great things they’ll burn your eyeballs and break you breath. Things that will remind us of our humanity and deepen it. I believe that through ordinary human striving good things are possible; that it isn’t too late. My only real adherence to discipline I find in this aspiration, and through discipline I recover wonder, and hope, and patience, and love. These - wonder, and hope, patience, and love, just saying them matters - are important because everything else is so hard. Things are hard and without discipline they are arbitrary, accidental, given to luck. I mean contemporary American life, and war in Europe, and wondering what climate change will mean in the next, oh, twenty or so years. Two hundred years feels negligible: iffy. They are counting the dead in Hawaii. A thing that cannot be spooned or leveled.
So here we are. Everybody’s waiting out extinction or the collapse of society.
I’m baking cookies.
I don’t know. Maybe these are the end days. Maybe there is hope, but I don’t see it in conversations about apocalypse or liminal space or flippant talk of late stage capitalism. I see it in children measuring sidewalks, themselves, and the sunflower’s span, roughly larger than a kid’s head, as recently proved at the Saturday farmer’s market. I see hope in the persistence of love and the enduring bravery of science and art and education. I see it in the resilience of historically decimated peoples and ravaged landscapes.
I see hope in discipline, I mean. And I see discipline in hope. I mean that hope is not arbitrary or accidental. It isn’t something that alights on you, or comes to you, fails you or has been taken from you. Hope is hard wrought.
The fact here, if we poke at it a bit, is that we cannot know the answers to the questions of our time. We are chastised for our proximity to the problems and have our new found historical consciousness always in the back of our throat. There is a pressure to be outraged. We live within a seething shame culture that criticizes us for anything other than despair. Despair and fear have become the new rulers. I mean ruler as both the sticks that children learn to measure with and ruler as in sovereign influence. We feel stickily guilty and incompetent, which is a horrible combination. We’ve somehow gotten the impression that we have a responsibility to be crushed, that it is our moral duty to be traumatized, and that the unfairness of life creates a conundrum.
I cry foul.
I think this is a staggering manipulation of of human intelligence and a clipping of the soul. An inability to know the future isn’t a moral failing but an existential truth. The shock function of social media and the alienation of private, intimate, ordinary human life create an acerbic distortion in which the ordinary, vital realities of life are scorched. Once scorched, they noxiously dissolve until only tragedy and our helplessness remain. Then we’ll wonder about the point of falling in love, beginning anything, our day job, our marriage, or our novel.
A pitiful cycle is set in motion: we experience a personal problem, and then we take in a bit of news or instagram; we are told of another shooting or a neglected elder or how leprosy is breaking out in Florida, which is downright medieval. Suddenly it seems, by the confluence of our personal problem and the flashes in the media, that everything is awful. It seems as though whatever pleasure or responsibility you previously felt was delusional, false, at best utterly selfish. Then it happens again: you read about world violence, and then your wardrobe malfunctions or a co-worker is snide and you spoof a thing that should have been easy. You take this as proof: everything is fucked.
Including you.
But this is, I insist, a distortion. That we do not know all the answers does not mean that we are absolute idiots. That we cannot save all the people doesn’t mean we can’t help. The changing environment does not dissipate the beauty of the cool moon, sailing through the late summer sky. It does not provide any argument whatsoever against the glory of a sunflower.
That we cannot know the future is not the same thing as ‘it’s too late’. Even, and I’ll be generous here, if it is too late for many things, if some losses have become irreversible, it does not follow that today is a futility. The danger is in projection and ambiguity, and the way they push us to equivocate.
Let us not equivocate, but get down to the serious business of doing what we can. “It’s not fair” has never, ever helped anyone. It isn’t even a conundrum. It’s a hint.
Discipline helps.
All sorts of folks rely on discipline: artists, writers, bakers, philosophers, farmers, and soccer players. Many of them talk about it earnestly. Others never mention it precisely because it is so foundational. Whether their reticence is modesty, superstition, or a lack of interest in stating the obvious, it’s always true: the folks who do good things practice discipline.
Discipline lays the conditions for something marvelous to happen. Specifically, it allows us a way of inhabiting reality in which suffering does not hold sway. This isn’t to say the suffering isn’t there or that we should ignore it. Having a discipline does not mean you are turning away from life.
Novelist Jennifer Egan (A Visit From the Goon Squad, et al) spoke of it this way:
When I’m not writing I feel an awareness that something’s missing. If I go a long time, it becomes worse. I become depressed. There’s something vital that’s not happening. A certain slow damage starts to occur. I can coast along awhile without it, but then my limbs go numb. Something bad is happening to me, and I know it. The longer I wait, the harder it is to start again.
When I’m writing, especially if it’s going well, I’m living in two different dimensions: this life I’m living now, which I enjoy very much, and this completely other world I’m inhabiting that no one else knows about.
This is it, the secret of discipline: access to various dimensions of life. It keeps us from getting stuck in one that may have some truth to it but is ultimately belittling. Our perception of being stuck, of futility, directly corresponds to our own vitality. Psychologist Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi laid it with his concept of ‘flow state’. I think all spiritual traditions, artist statements, and great leaders point to it. We humans have the potential to hit a place in our physiology and emotions that offers us essential evolutionary and existential gusto. It’s vital. It’s necessary.
It’s hope.
I found an E.B. White interview with the Paris Review from 1969:
“There are two faces to discipline. If a man (who writes) feels like going to a zoo, he should by all means go to a zoo. He might even be lucky, as I once was when I paid a call at the Bronx Zoo and found myself attending the birth of twin fawns. It was a fine sight, and I lost no time writing a piece about it. The other face of discipline is that, zoo or no zoo, diversion or no diversion, in the end a man must sit down and get the words on paper, and against great odds. This takes stamina and resolution. Having got them on paper, he must still have the discipline to discard them if they fail to measure up; he must view them with a jaundiced eye and do the whole thing over as many times as is necessary to achieve excellence, or as close to excellence as he can get.”
This is lovely. It’s lovely precisely because it allows what conversations about discipline so frequently exclude: going to the zoo. Being in the world, wandering about and looking around, are not separate from or in any opposition to discipline.
But then we also, if we are writers, need to sit down and write things. If we garden, we must weed. We have to show up.
But the truly, truly important part of White’s discipline is the ability to discard mediocrity.
In other words: good measure.
It seems to me that our fears and confusions about life - and discipline too - are misunderstandings. We might resist or rebel against discipline out of a prior or presumed unfairness, but again: unfairness is just as much a reason to engage as it is an excuse to quit. Of course, there are valid conversations about the need to rest, to deprogram ourselves from the idea that we are what we produce and perform. I agree with those conversations. But discipline is not the same thing as exploitation. Go to the zoo, goddamn it. And then do your work.
We must not mistake ourselves as being final. It seems to me this is related, adjunct in a way, symptom of the mistaking of discipline as an end in itself or forgetting the crucial stage of return, the glorying surprise of the mundane, and the ability to dismiss mediocrity. “The end of history” is a psychological illusion, common to all age groups, in which we believe where we are is an end. All human beings can see their previous immaturity and growth process. But then they do a funny thing and think that they’ve grown now: the end, finis, that’s all there is. We can’t see our current immaturity. If we cannot see or are defensive about that, we cannot believe in - can’t conceive of - future growth. We have an enormously hard time believing in possibility.
Discipline proves us wrong, thank goodness.
Ray Bradbury once gave a DIY MFA degree curricula. Every night, he said, for the next 1000 nights, he said, read one essay, one short story, and one poem. He also encouraged the watching of movies. Read the good stuff, he admonished: things that are classic, mythical, resounding. Mere slices of life aren’t good enough. Choose art.
You are also to be writing, every day. Write one short story a week. This is where it gets glorious: “I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.”
Take heart: obviously Bradbury was some kind of special genius and we don’t have to be him. But we can take some of his meaning. He loved writing. He took intense pleasure from it, and he strongly believed that if you didn’t take pleasure in it you should find something else to do with you time. This is important, since most writing and life advice talks about discipline involves hair pulling and vein opening and bleeding your heart out all over the things. No: just do what you love, because you love, even when you feel blue.
Bradbury also did several interviews with the Paris Review. In 2010, he told them:
“Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad—you did it. At the end of the week you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.”
But I am not a baker, you might be saying, or an artist. I’m too old, we say, and the world is just too much.
I cry foul. Go to the zoo. Look at paintings. Go for a good long walk, which is one of the most respected forms of reverent discipline known to history. Exercise. Send someone a postcard. Go to a movie. Clean your kitchen. Find yourself a sunflower and look at it good. Do that and then come back and tell me the world is ending. Then tell me you are hopeless. I defy you.
There is still room for magic. Baking, with it’s careful proportions and chemical reactions, is still prone to mystery. Expertise can only take you so far. Cakes rise and fall according to subtleties beyond your control: humidity, an oven’s quirks, the stages of the moon.
You begin by making a mess, and then you go after the mess with a spoon and a measuring cup.
Do something. It’s okay if it’s terrible. It probably will be terrible. But notice the light; study the angles. Then take yourself to bed.
We’ll try again tomorrow.