But Enough About Me; Or, the Ethics of Analogy
This is my 40th newsletter! Check out some of the old letters in the archives, I’ve linked to a few of my favorites below. Also, this summer I’ll be taking starting a fun new project with this newsletter. (Yes, it is Halloween-related.) So please share the newsletter and pass it on, I’d love to have as many people as possible join me this summer.
Many years ago I wrote a humor piece poking fun at the tendency for popular science journalism to use science as a metaphor for human culture, psychological states, and interpersonal relationships. The piece was presented like the syllabus for a class I called SCI201: Science as Metaphor. I thought it was a very clever little bit of comedy writing, but apparently no one else did; it was not one of my more popular pieces. But beyond my (EXTREMELY FUNNY) observations, I found something troubling about the tendency to engage with science and nature only insofar as they serve as a mirror for your own preoccupations. It’s not necessarily the most humble way to approach the universe.
My friend Aubrey reminded me of this old (REALLY VERY CLEVER AND FUNNY CLICK ON IT WHY DON’T YOU) piece recently and at a fortuitous time. I had been working on another piece, an essay exploring an interesting historical phenomenon, and my editor was urging me to make it more about me. The editor was thoughtful and judicious in her comments. She just thought this particular piece would work better as a personal narrative, and she may well have been correct. But something in me resisted taking the essay in that direction, perhaps only because I thought the topic was so interesting on its own that any attempt to analogize it to my own rather boring life would diminish it. Or just because I like facts. (In this classic tweet, I’m the reader asking to hear more about the hot dogs.)
I fell into personal essays somewhat by accident, having started my career (hah) with reviews and then comedy which eventually took on a more personal character. And I’ve enjoyed writing them, but I’ve struggled with them too.
I’m not going to get into The Discourse here. Suffice it to say, personal essays were very in fashion, and now some people in various corners of the internet have started grumbling about them. There are some good criticisms to be made of the Personal Essay Industry, not least of websites that pay (often very young) people $50 for their most grueling stories of trauma, offer them little in the way of editorial support, and then leave them hanging in the wind, exposing themselves to merciless public scrutiny, all to garner clicks. And yet–personal essays as a form are hardly new. What’s new, in many cases, is who’s writing them, and don’t think we haven’t noticed that a lot of cultural gatekeepers want to pull the ladder up just now when marginalized people are finally making inroads into the genre.
But I said I wasn’t getting into The Discourse.
I’ve struggled with writing personal essays for years, and not for any of the reasons above. As I blurted out when my editor me asked why I hadn’t developed the personal sections of my essay more, “Oh, I don’t care about me.”
To be clear, I don’t mean I don’t care for me. I’m a big fan. But I’m not interested in me, least of all when I’m writing.
At the same time, writing stories about me–or stories about something else that is then analogized to something about me–raises questions about analogies of all kinds. Even when I’m not writing about my own life, I tend to work by analogies, comparisons, and connections. Certainly you can learn new things about something in connection with other things–”in conversation with.” as grad students love to say. Let’s put hot dogs in conversation with steam shovels, see what they have to say! But is that the humblest way to encounter a hot dog?
“The world is bound with secret knots”- I even have the tattoo–but the world is also made of particular things. Often I feel the world’s magic in those invisible threads, but it’s also there in every single hot dog and steam shovel, every secret separate self.
The medieval theologian Duns Scotus developed the idea of haecceitas as a sort of complement to the classical notion of quidditas. Haecceitas is the irreducible particularity of a thing that makes it distinct from all other things, its innate "thisness;” where quidditas is the essence of a thing that makes it what it is, what puts it into a category it shares with other things. So the quidditas of a table is what makes it a table and not a stool or a dresser or a chair.* The haecceitas of a table is what makes it THIS table, distinct from all over tables even if it appears identical in every way. Two tables that are the exact same size, color, weight, etc. etc. still have their own haecceitas, which is “neither reducible to other facts nor is it grounded in other facts.” (This whole thing actually started as a debate over the individuation of angels—which, I just love that so much.) Haecceitas is a non-qualitative property which–and this is me talking now, not Duns Scotus–implies haecceity cannot be judged, critiqued, or compared, it can only be apprehended, which seems like a very humble way to encounter can angel, or a hot dog.
The thing is, though, quidditas and haecceitas aren’t opposites. To really know something, you have to know both this table and how it relates to all other tables, and to hot dogs and steam shovels and angels, the shimmering gossamer threads and all the hard little nodes they’re anchored to. Which makes me feel a little better about writing essays, anyway.
* There’s actually a whole other thing about the quiddity of an object (quid rei) vs the quiddity of the name (quid nominis) which I won’t even attempt to summarize but you can check it out here.
You Can Find Me
In celebration of my 40th newsletter, here are a few of my favorites you should check out:
Death in Yosemite and Everywhere Else
Gifts, Gratitude, The Empty Manger, and a Broken ATM
Joseph Cornell, A Gemini Mind, and the Beautifully Boring
Rotting Skunks, Burial At Sea, Romantic Decay, And The Conviviality Of The Dead
Animal Omens, Apocalyptic Metaphors, The Meaning of Notre Dame, And Looking For God’s House
Real Ghosts, Fake Vampires, and an Ocean Without Octopuses
What I Should Be Doing
Finals.
What I’m Actually Doing
Starting tomato seedlings,learning how to play gin rummy, competing in the Los Angeles County Fair tablescaping competition, so much–too much–PTA stuff, and most importantly GOING TO TRANSWORLD, the world’s only industry trade show and convention for the Halloween industry!
Also I'm Very Excited About
How To with John WIlson; the return of Joe Pera Talks With You; these amazing cookies; 818s and Heartbreak, the preeminent podcast about the San Fernando Valley
The Fine Print
I have a Ko-Fi page that allows readers to send me small payments to support this newsletter and my writing in general. Remember, every dollar you send is A Vote For Halloween.