How to Think About Stuff
This article first appeared in the Minden Times in March 2024.
Sheila Heti is hogging book reviews again with her book called Alphabetical Diaries, which is described as sentences – sentences, not paragraphs or entries!! – from her diary presented alphabetically. The reviews – I’ve not read the book and am not likely to – muse that she is exploring the making of meaning separated from context.
This is an approach not out of keeping with Motherhood, published in 2018, in which Heti queries her way through the complex question of whether or not to have a child by posing questions that can be answered yes or no and flipping a coin to guide and extend the enquiry. This strategy prolongs the decision until menopause settles the issue. (Morning-after pills rescue her from accidental pregnancy in the interim -- a necessary element, since her ambivalence about motherhood seems somehow to require that she use withdrawal as birth control. Sort of like flipping a coin.) Motherhood won several prizes and was short-listed for the Giller, so clearly it appealed to some people.
Possibly these forays into making sense from fragments are a necessary lesson in a factoid world. Information beats at us like water from a firehose. Figuring out what to take in and what to swallow is exhausting. Feeling confident about what you ‘know’ is becoming impossible. So, consequently, is checking out through discussion and debate whether what you think you know is actually ‘true’. And without certainty, taking action is scary. Choosing between a desperate leap or paralysis? It’s a mess.
Heti justified her coin-flipping approach to debating the merits of motherhood by comparing it to the I Ching, a venerable Chinese oracle dating back to Confucius. The I Ching requires one flip three coins six times to create one of 64 hexagrams, each of which is an image (as Chinese letters are) attached to a philosophical line-by-line parsing of potential meaning. My I Ching has an introduction by Carl Jung in which he applies his analytic framework to the I Ching’s response to his query about writing the foreword for this translation. He’s ambivalent because he knows he’s applying one world view – his turn-of-the-20st-century European/Swiss view – on a very different ancient Chinese perspective mediated by an interpreter.
Jung concludes that the Western mind, hewing to science, believes in causality, whereas the Eastern mind (and he says also nature) believes in synchronicity, the coincidence of events in space and time. While the Western mind seeks certainty, the Eastern mind expects contemplation. The I Ching gives the questioner a way to think about their question: it does not give direction. It requires agency and self-knowledge, personally owning an understanding that leads to an action.
Why am I nattering on about this arcane stuff? Because I think we need to push back against the idea that certainty is attainable and desirable. I think we need to (re)learn to love the work of making sense of stuff, of thinking our way through the challenge of the moment, choosing the best option of those we see as available to us, and living with the consequences. We know we’ll have another chance to get it ‘right’, whatever that means, because circumstances change. In fact, we expect change as a consequence of choices; that’s why we take action, to bring change. And when circumstances change, so do options. Which means we never get to stop making choices. And we never get to know for sure if they’re ‘right’.
The moral of the story? Learn to love ambiguity. Old-fashioned and humble as that is, I think it is a cure – or at least an antidote – for the scourge of modern anxiety.
Living with ambiguity is called curiosity when children and scholars do it, and it’s seen as good. Making a choice among the options seen as available was called character. Expanding and improving the options was called progress. What was the spoiler? The expectation of certainty. The belief that certainty was a good life companion, a till death do us part arrangement. A connection that means I must defend my certainty against yours, rather than let them dance together as the I Ching does.
(By the way, I Ching translates as The Book of Changes.)
Here is a poem from my childhood about the limits of certainty. Heti may see some parallels between this and how she made a decision about motherhood.
A centipede was happy quite
Until a passing toad, in spite, said
“Pray tell, which leg goes after which?”
And worked her mind to such a pitch
She lay distracted in the ditch
Considering which leg came after which.
