It Just Takes Some Time

Skip the shortcuts, light a candle.

Next week I’ll be asking my students to read this very short piece as a preamble to the first time they’ll be required to revise something they’ve written for me.

Revisions are an integral part of my curriculum. I try to abolish the framework whereby students write an entire essay the night before it’s due, hand it in with a silent prayer, and then never think about it again save for the moment it comes back with a letter and number at the top. That’s obviously a lousy way to learn how to do anything, especially so fundamentally bizarre a thing as writing for a specific context, a specific audience.¹

And yet we insist on this kind of accelerated, pressure-driven framework for writing in the academic context anyway. We pretend to a notion of objectivity, an exact right and wrong, and demand that it be done as quickly as possible. No wonder students skip past it all and see AI tools as worthy shortcuts: when the institutional demand for outputs increases while the institution is stripped (or strips itself) of the tools for providing meaningful inputs,² we can’t expect students to do anything other than to replicate the incentive structures they see enacted all around them.

This is why I’m so excited to introduce my students to that piece I linked above, which begins with a description of a magic trick from Teller. Once explained, the trick is no less impressive, because of the sheer amount of time that would have to be put in to pull it off. And Teller makes no secret of this. He says:

Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.

This is the rub, and what drives me so batshit crazy about the rapid cultural shift toward AI-everything. Yes, the tools themselves are largely garbage; yes, they’re insanely resource-intensive at a time when we simply Should Not Be Doing That; yes, they depend entirely on the precarious labor of victimized people. But perhaps just as noteworthy is the fact that they fundamentally misunderstand, and so skew, what was so meaningful about all of this stuff to begin with: art, writing, task-completion, communication, you name it.³ We are a society, here in the midst of whatever stage of capitalism you want to call it, obsessed with outputs. And in this obsession⁴ we have forgotten that what makes any of this worth it is the input.

Here’s Allen Pike, from that piece on Teller’s trick:

It can be difficult, psychologically, to commit yourself to spend an extreme amount of time and attention towards a goal, no matter how worthwhile. Doing impossible things feels, well, impossible.

That’s why, generally, the approach is to start small, then increment. Do something, so you can change it. Get your reps in. Evolve your complex system from a simple one that works.

Eventually, years in, this will culminate in overnight success. You’ll have achieved something that seems magical – impossible, even.

It just takes some time.

I have no interest in AI art or AI writing because at best, all they can do is steal from the immense amounts of time that others have put into honing a particular craft. I have no patience for the treatification of American society, where everyone has come to believe that all food should be deliverable at all times, rapidly and without any meaningful increase in cost. I don’t just mean to moralize here; there is joy in getting better at things! There is joy in using a blizzard to make your own giant pot of stew, the fact that you don’t have to pay a 40% markup to get a wage slave to risk their own safety to bring you something lukewarm to eat aside!

Alright, deep breath.

I wrote recently about the need to embrace the darkness surrounding us in these winter months, a precious gift that is steadily being stripped from the sky by our artificial lighting.

More Darkness

Accordingly, my wife and I have been trying to keep our house lights in line with the rhythms of the day: as evening comes on, all of our lights, save a few strategic festive strings, go out. We light our gas fireplace and then, in every room we might enter, a candle or two. There are aesthetic joys to be found in this simple practice, as Kim Stanley Robinson describes:

Fooling around with stones, running, throwing things at things, those are all on the Paleolithic list, everything we did to evolve into what we are. You do them now and there are parts of the brain that just light up, like a light’s gone on in a room. Even looking at fire, which is a very basic thing. You look at a fire and a part of your brain is just going, “Right on,” and loving it.

But in light of all I’m trying to do as a writing teacher, the desperate pleas I’m making for my students to see their own attention as a resource that they must ferociously guard, it strikes me that candles serve an additional purpose, especially if you choose to do your work by them: they function not only as a unit of light but as a unit of time. Burning the midnight oil wasn’t always just a metaphor; when you live and work by candelight in the dark months, you can actually see the evidence of time passing as the candle diminishes. You can look up at the vanishing wax and quantify the time spent on the work you have done, and in doing so also qualify the work you have done. How much time, and so how much attention was given to the task?

This doesn’t have to be work work, either. Showering by candlelight on recent evenings has turned a task that usually happens on autopilot into a more attentive one. Eating dinner by firelight has brought a quietude and a sense of interest to a meal I usually spend with a fork in one hand and my phone in the other. In that flickering glow my phone screen seems genuinely offensive. I see this as a good thing. Like I’m getting the millennial version of that nasty-tasting spray they tell you to put on your furniture to make your dog stop chewing it.

All I want to do is to live within the rhythms of the real world, the one behind and between all this nasty stuff that has been superimposed on it. Despite really meaning that, it is still a daily struggle to live accordingly, but it is a struggle worth having.

Kim Stanley Robinson again:

I do a lot of weeding in the garden every morning. I have my hands in the dirt, and I’m vigorously and enthusiastically killing plants that I don’t like, or maybe I do like them, but I definitely don’t want them in my garden. So I’m just sitting in the sun on my butt, or I’m standing kneeling over, digging around in the dirt. Well, it’s very satisfying. I don’t think anything I can do on a computer is actually quite as satisfying as that.

There are degrees to all of this, and your mileage may vary. I might never end up back in the pre-industrial rhythm of “The Watch,” the two-sleep default that we likely carried for most of human history. But everything feels so insane lately that I don’t see any other way than to try to break these habits, these poisonous impositions on what could otherwise be a reasonably good life.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

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1. I like to ask them on the first day to guess what percentage of human history we’ve been writing for. No one ever guesses as low as the real answer, which is in the 2-3% range, depending on how you define “human” and “writing.” It’s a weird behavior that, unlike speech, we are not inherently hardwired for, and so must learn through what are ultimately some pretty complex processes.

2. Read: more teachers, and more pay for teachers.

3. There’s a recent commercial that’s driving me fucking nuts where an otherwise personable office employee uses a new AI tool to “clean up” an email to his boss into perfect corporate drone speak. Rather than celebrating this as some time-saving measure, how is this not triggering a fundamental reassessment of the way our society is structured due to how literally meaningless most of the work people do most days to earn the money to survive really is?

4. Which, yes, is a structural problem, something sold to and imposed upon us. Though this doesn’t mean it’s not our responsibility as individuals to fight against it on every terrain.