My new book on Analog Slowing Down

I confess, while I work to understand my life, I don't understand it yet. As a hurricane bears down upon Florida again (and half of our operation) I'm reminding of slowing down.
 

A few weeks ago, I went to tell my Ex that our old dog had died. When I scoured the web for her contact info, I found a disturbing post: one that made me question my own history.
 

It was called something like:
 

'How I survived an abusive relationship with a narcissist.'
 

For a second I thought, hey, is this about me? As I perused, I realized it wasn't: it was about a much more difficult relationship she'd fallen into some time after ours.
 

I told a friend: 'I thought it was about me for a second. I mean, was I 'a dick' back then?'
 

And he replied with a timeless testimonial:
 

'You're the least dick person I know.'
 

So there you have it. That grammatically challenged sentence became my own salvation in that moment.

It's akin to my father's age-old admonition:

'Stop being an idiot.'
 

And as I read the post, I realized: this is something like witnessing two sides of a coin.
 

She has the narcissist tendencies, so she sees that word, that concept, in every lined face; every prospect of love. No matter how chiseled the jaw, how low the hairline, how broad the shoulders: that damn title keeps showing up, seared across her reality like a cattle brand.
 

I mean, she doesn't intentionally abuse anyone; she merely falls into manipulative power structures that have served her for a lifetime (and perhaps no longer do). And in this deluge of suffering, in the eye of the hurricane, she rises up and says: he was a narcissist, I have trauma around that. He was abusive.

Now, that may or may not be the case: but the healing journey is to say... this hurricane keeps showing up as these men with this condition which I've labeled narcissist. Perhaps I'm at the center of this crushing reality?
 

In the end, she stood naked and skeletal, crying in her shower, when her parents pulled her out and got her back on track. So the story goes.

I'd add the unspoken addendum: forgive the narcissists, and start living life from another vantage.
 

Deep work.
 

Anyway, this post startled me because I saw how profound the concepts were, and how one-dimensional the analysis was.

Something like that, a lifelong trauma, requires and deserves a deep dig: an excavation of the core patterns that hold a soul in thrall, wedded to this life by manipulation, deceit, subterfuge that the perpetrator often remains unaware of. I'd say 'blissfully' unaware, but it is miserable. The misery only gets hung upon the face 'of the other.'
 

Slow down, sister.
 

Robert Caro epitomizes the slow writing process. The Pulitzer prize winning non-fiction writer still keeps a huge board in his Manhattan office, full of notecards, which he deliberately arranges and re-arranges in order to understand a vast picture by connecting loose threads. He also does it to articulate and clarify what seems unclear at a glance.
 

This is one way that he works to 'understand' political power. Power is an interesting thing to study, because it immediately becomes self referential. Everyone has a relationship with it, archetypally: you cannot get out of this inquiry without examining yourself (though perhaps Robert Green managed to do it?).

In any case, Caro talks frequently about the importance of 'working slowly' instead of quickly; and he's evidence of the fact that it has numerous benefits. I mean, if a Pulitzer prize (and a host of other rewards) is evidence.

Now, I know you'll hear the opposite. Crank out content, see what sticks. That's what a cat does when you change its food. (Sorry, I'm surrounded by cats right now).
 

In my opinion, and experience, when you take that route, the quantity over quality route, the SEO algorithm gets fed; the soul languishes. Because all you have to look back on are your vanity metrics; your 'efficiency', perhaps a little more money in the bank. (Perhaps not because most of the world stews in this sea of mediocrity).
 

What you don't have is work you can be proud of; work that you know expresses the deepest facets of your being; the work of your soul; a cry in the wilderness of humanity.
 

I think of this Leonard Cohen song from Anthem, where God is talking about Leonard:
 

"He wants to write a love song;

an anthem of forgiving.

A manual for living with defeat.

A cry above the suffering;

a sacrifice recovering.

But that is not what I need him to complete."
 

In other words, our desires and your duties are not necessarily the same thing.

It takes deep work to get down to the level of what we're destined to do in this world.
 

Most people are surface level thinkers, and therefore surface level makers. Not by their design, but by their choice; or by their being co-opted by inappropriate tools.
 

Listen, death comes to us all: what will you long to have done? Note that I'm not omitting myself from this audit. If I did I'd fall into the swarthy realm of self-help folks that struggle to sell their product without doing the requisite work. For instance, the scores of relationship coaches (and I've known a dozen) that are in abusive relationships (I've also been one, though I didn't realize it until I read that blog post above).
 

This telling sentence is about Robert Caro: "Determined to write in a more thoughtful way when he began working on books, Caro came up with a scheme to slow himself down: "I resolved to write my first drafts in longhand, slowest of the various means of committing thoughts to paper, before I started doing later drafts on the typewriter."

Notice the longhand draft followed by the typewriter! A legendary and famously slow workflow.
 

Read better.

I'd be remiss in my duties if this wasn't mentioned. Most people don't write deeply or well because they've lost (or never had) a system for sifting through profound content in a meaningful way. When I read How to Read a Book by Mark Van Doren and Mortimer Alder, it changed my life. I realized that before that, I'd never read a book at all. Years later, I noticed that I was reading too much and not deeply enough, so I slowed down the reading in order to capture and digest more of what I read.
 

Now the concept of 'better' requires a comparison. Better than what? Measured by what metric?
 

So in this sense, read so that it contributes to the quality of your creations and your life.
 

As an example, I've read a lot of books in Kindle; a kindle paper white. I got it because when I lived in a Cabin in Cazadero there was a clawfoot bathtub outside on the deck, and I wanted to read out there under the stars.

Because digital reading is not quite as effective for retaining information, I'd highlight a lot of things.
 

Last year, I learned to sync kindle and a notion dashboard, so all of my highlights can be viewed by title in sort of a library of highlight reels. And then Readwise will give you 15 highlights per day of anything you've ever read, which is interesting to get a refresher, and to use time on the screen in a productive way. (Still probably note as productive as being off a screen!).
 

Now, I am using a Zettelkasten to write physical note cards, insular cards containing a thought in one form of its evolution, filed away by topic. Though it's not useful now, as I started last month, legend has it that it soon will be! (Thanks Scott Scheper!).
 

So I have this Tiago Forte 'Second Brain' in the digital world, and this Zettelkasten in the analog world.

I ask you: Which is more real?
 

In any case, either system will force you to read better. I find that digital has a tendency to proliferate content.

I think, dang, this novel should be 300 pages, but it is 700. Or: I made 512 highlights in this book, and only 15 are ever things that I'll need to access again.
 

Think of Robert Caro hand writing his first drafts of his momentous tomes. There is magic in scrawl and effort.
 

Thinking with the fingers.
 

Caro was admonished by his professor early on for 'thinking with his fingers.' He taught him to think, and then write.

By contrast, literary figures are trained to and celebrate 'thinking with their fingers.' They're also not forced, per se, to put their ideas in order. They can flow and catch a mosaic quality of reality. I'm thinking here of Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. They'd have the wisp of an idea, and then sit at the typewriter in process of discovery, delighted to find out what their characters were writing about.

It's not that one is bad and one is good: it's that you want to know which one you're doing, and have the capacity to do either one, ideally, depending upon the project.Most modern art in any medium involves 'thinking with the fingers.' The 'fingers' are an expression of the mind: the heart threads through to the fingers by way of the arms. As Gibran put it 'Work is love made visible.'.

This brings up another point: what is 'visible.' Is a digital artifact 'visible?' What if the drive gets erased. Just a thought experiment, there.Understanding your life and the world.

Rudolf Steiner thought that this age would suffer if humans took the path of 'materialism', where everything could be reduced to what is seen and can be quantitatively measured. Even love would become a resonance on an electrical scale of some sort: walk into a room, get matched with a frequency partner, walk out: copulate x times per week, have x number of children: they learn 52 lessons per year, get 74 vaccines by age three, they make x dollars, pay x taxes, live x years. Their children undergo the same process.

Of course, Steiner would argue that the spiritual outlook was the savior of mankind (at great peril, because it's been used to destroy lives in the past). However, an inward-looking, finding of divinity within ourselves, and then living from that place was his idea, which he summarized as:

'Bring heart to every thought.'

Regardless, it's not for me to say take this or that fork in the road: but I will say that in my experience, looking inward is both cathartic at the micro and at the macro levels, and personally healing as well as socially.

The problems we have are due to what Cal Newport called 'Solitude Deprivation.'

Be alone with your thoughts, and make your thoughts 'visible.'

I'm writing a book on this that will be released early next year:Analog Nation. Transcending Digital Politics with Soulful Creativity. You an preorder that here. [I like to sell books before I finish them because it forces me to finish them].

Paperback only. Otherwise nothing makes any sense.Your proceeds go into completing the tome, which will aim to be ample, inspiring, practical, and paradigm-shifting.

If you pre-order, you CAN use code analog for 50% off.This book will be created with analog tools, and will be an attempt to bring the deep work to a particularly poignant problem.

Hopefully coupled with drawings, a gift of mine which I've set down at the expense of my highest self (in order to make more money and doom scroll, oops).

Write on,

Steven Budden Jr.
The Classic Typewriter Company

budden.us