Month: November 2015

Theory in practice

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.

If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.

– Albert Einstein

This morning, listening to blues. I know what you’re thinking about the blues. But I mean the kind that makes you want to dance with slouchy legs and melting hearts across dim rooms. So I’m dancing across the wooden floors at the office. And I can see him start to grin, wanting to dance with me. And I nod slowly, grinning back, playing air guitar to the music.

In the kitchen, she watched me grab the almond milk from the fridge. “Wow, I was looking for that. I feel like I am always looking for (and never see) the thing that is right in front of me.”

I laughed, “I think that is a general human thing.”

Today’s random tea mug has the silhouette of a wild deer, stately despite its inherent vulnerability, with antlers cradling the sky. These mugs are in rotation, and I choose one daily according to how I feel. That’s a theory, anyway. Maybe the selection is really just subconscious and doesn’t mean anything at all. More on this later.

***

There were the colors of Rothko and what I saw as the sea and the reflection of color of the sky when it is dark. Not black, necessarily, but something that doesn’t impose a color at all so that we may fill it with our own hues. My friend has a tattoo on her wrist. It’s a Chinese character that means “emptiness” but it’s idiomatic because it connotes “a space waiting to be filled,” which is arguably different.

There was you — afraid (or preferring not) to be alone, or maybe just overly accustomed to access and affection, or maybe just as a matter of coincidence, or maybe existing in another life or universe, or maybe just doing without thinking, or maybe really wanting something different — holding another woman. There are always theories about these things.

I hardly ever understand theories in practice. How things should (in theory) be possible but aren’t, or even more so, how things have never seemed possible but suddenly become so (in practice). Like how if someone uses the same ingredients as my mother does in her cooking, the end result should taste the same. But it doesn’t. Like how, even before now I should have always been able to wake up overwhelmingly sad next to someone on a Sunday morning and yet talk rationally, with love and respect, about matters of the heart. And then by the same afternoon, risk delight. Risk falling deeper into the space waiting to be filled.

There were empty highways. Rain, the kind that makes the temperature drop 30 degrees in a few hours. The kinds of blankets and the kinds of looking-into-eyes that make irrelevant the potential (and temporary) discomfort of things, like inclement weather. Like vulnerability. Almost makes them beautiful. In an absolute (because you claim not to be a relativist) way.

And at the end, there was you, grinning, because we got to dance together to the blues. Proclaiming with the kind of excellent danger in your voice that has tried to warn me since I met you: “Well, at the very least it’ll give you something great to write about.” And there is me, writing in run-on hopefully-lyrical phrases. Paying attention to the facts. Being joyful in spite of them.

But if I paid attention, really paid attention maybe I could ignore the mountain of sadness and she might entertain and distract me and I would think this is life. The romance and the sadness. I am in it now.

Poetry is just the performance of it. These little things, whether I write them or not. That’s the score. The thing of great value is you. Where you are, glowing and fading, while you live.

– Eileen Myles

Just in time, Stevie Ray Vaughan croons in Texas Flood:
Well it’s floodin’ down in Texas
And I’ve been tryin’ to call my baby
Lord and I can’t get a single sound
Well dark clouds are rollin’ in
Man I’m standin’ out in the rain

Openness, the new WordPress, and the dance most of all.

When I started self-publishing on the internet, there weren’t a whole lot of options in terms of platforms for publishing. But to be fair, in a sense this also meant a lot more freedom. I would just open up a Notepad file and my favorite FTP client to customize and publish the content I wanted to post.

We watch this trade-off happen in an increasingly technological world. Our options and abilities to do anything have increased exponentially, but what kinds of presence, openness, and freedom are we sacrificing along the way? What about taking time to consider the openness that the web was built on?

In a Brain Pickings article, Maria Popova references Rebecca Solnit and ponders how we can “break the tyranny of technology and relearn the art of presence” —

Solnit wonders when the uprising will come — against the part of ourselves too easily lured by the promise of efficiency at the expense of aliveness, and against the corporations exploitively perfecting the allure of such seductive illusions.

So how do we as individuals and as companies keep our aliveness intact in the face of technological advancement?

I’ve watched the evolution of ways we share and consume news over the internet. I’ve stubbornly defended the role of blogging in a changing world and argued that, contrary to many people’s beliefs, it’s not losing relevance. Many think that blogging is antiquated because of the constraints of their definitions around it. On the contrary, blogging is more relevant than ever because of its flexibility and openness. Let’s not forget the lyrical possibilities and profound connections that technology can offer us on top of fast news consumption and narcissistic announcements, if only we allow ourselves the more soulful perspective that the point of it all is sharing.

Om Malik eloquently discusses this point:

Blogging has always been mistaken for its containers, tools, the length of the posts or just a replacement for the rapid-fire publishing of old-fashioned news. In reality, blogging is essentially a philosophy built on the ethos of sharing.

Today sharing on the internet is a major social behavior: We share photos, links, videos, thoughts, opinions, news. Except instead of sharing on a blog, we do the sharing in increasingly proprietary and corporate silos: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Periscope and LinkedIn. You see, the blogging ethos is alive and well. However, the old blogging tools have to embrace change.

Most of those platforms are built to be silos, Facebook and Instagram being the worst offenders. Their approach is a threat to the open web as much as the rise of the app-centric internet.

I have used a lot of blogging platforms over the past decade. I admit that I moved back to WordPress.com with reluctance. While the desire to control a user’s experience is understandable (see: Apple), I craved the kind of flexibility that is rapidly shrinking on the web and I felt I was still searching for it.

Yesterday, there was a big news announcement about the new WordPress.com. This relaunch is spectacular for many reasons that are listed in neat bullet points in the articles covering it, so I won’t address all the technical aspects (it’s faster, it’s built on JavaScript, etc.). Rather, the open-sourcing of the whole thing and the big changes as a fervent adherence to a vision of freedom are impressive because I know:

  1. how hard it is for a company already in motion to reinvent itself while dealing with the million other things happening and
  2. how hard it is to stand by your vision while dealing with the million other things telling you to go the other direction.

Mark Bittman recently wrote an article for Fast Company about how difficult it is for any company (no matter how big or small or established) to uphold their vision and standards. There are so many voices to listen to, so many pockets to fill, so many people to please. I write for a very small audience relative to many people on the internet, and I sit in admiration of how WordPress has made ease-of-publishing available not only to huge companies but also to people like me.

I am inspired because, in the face of so many trying to stay afloat and sometimes even willing to sacrifice what they stand for in order to optimize profits, WordPress.com takes the risk of changing everything for the sake of freedom.

From one of my favorite Jack Gilbert poems:

Talking about how Charlemagne
couldn’t read but still made a world. About Hagia
Sophia and putting a round dome on a square
base after nine hundred years of failure.

“Not the great fires
built on the edge of the world.” His voice grew
fainter as they carried him away. “Both the melody
and the symphony. The imperfect dancing
in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all.”

I don’t always know what it means. But I think we all risk failure — as companies, as people — but the important thing is to still make our world. We may have gone down a certain road for nine hundred years, but why not take the risk of disruption? We may dance imperfectly, but isn’t the beauty in the dancing itself?

Cheers to openness, and the dance most of all.

Some references: