(Don't) get to the point

A tasty little roundup of fascinating things

The Clown-faced Nebula as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope

Welcome to another edition of Discovery, the Celebration roundup of interesting things worth your while. I haven’t sent out a Discovery post in a while but one of my many goals for this last gasp of summer as we head into fall is to start sending out these kinds of dispatches again.

So here’s three things I’ve found fascinating recently (and perhaps you will too).

1.(Don’t) Get to the Point

I’m addicted to books on craft, creativity, and art so I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to read Rick Rubin’s acclaimed book, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. I ordered it much earlier this year and it languished on my bedside table until last week when I felt urgently compelled to finally crack it open. And in turn, it cracked me open. Symbiosis.

The book is a treasure. My copy is already earmarked, highlighted, and underlined into oblivion.

I’ll likely share more passages from Rubin in the future but here’s one in particular that reverberated. This lush excerpt was a warm embrace in the midst of my ever-growing frustration with a media environment that bludgeons us with heavy-handed expressions of virtue and ‘right-think' rather than thoughtful art that bravely wades through the muck of the nuanced and the unknowable:

“A point of view is different from having a point.

A point is an idea intentionally expressed. A point of view is the perspective—conscious and unconscious—through which the work emerges.

What causes us to notice a piece of art is rarely the point being made. We are drawn to to the way an artist’s filter refracts ideas, not to the ideas themselves.”

I touch on this idea in a previous post about “staying present in the messy middle,” which references what

Summer Brennan

calls the “wisdom trap.” The wisdom trap occurs when artists are so focused on arriving at a profound conclusion that they forget to pay attention during their creative process, thereby turning a blind eye to all the delicious epiphanies and course-corrections that arise along the way.

For the artist, eschewing process for outcome is a road to nowhere. And chasing the most popular, in-group ideas in lieu of being true to yourself is the path to sterility.

Rubin deepens this idea later in his book when he writes:

“The artist’s only responsibility is to the work itself. There are no other requirements. You’re free to create what you will.

You don’t have to stand for your work, nor does your work have to stand for anything but itself . . .

If there were anything you might stand for, it would be to defend this creative autonomy. Not just from outside censors, but from the voices in your head that have internalized what’s considered acceptable. The world is only as free as it allows its artists to be.”

A sermon. Amen.

2. The Ever-Expanding Pull of the Unknowable

I had limiting beliefs about my strengths and weaknesses in high school, and I tended to think I was only smart in literature, writing, the humanities etc. and that I lacked a fundamental ability to comprehend math and science to the same degree. As a result, I never took Physics, opting instead for a ridiculously easy senior year of science electives including Meteorology and something to do with the ocean (?). Mostly, we whispered to each other and giggled, and waited for class to be over.

Now, I regret opting out of the more difficult sciences because the attempt to comprehend the unknowable, which is in many ways at the heart of physics, is endlessly fascinating to my adult brain. Any time I come across an article that tries to explain the universe to a layperson, I click, and muddle my way through, feeling awe-struck by the ever-expanding realm of things we humans still don’t understand.

This Scientific American piece, “Why We Might Live in a Multiverse,” had so many fascinating tidbits to wrestle with but here are a few of my favorites.

The theory of the “cosmological multiverse”:

“The idea that a process called inflation, the rapid expansion be­­lieved to be an early stage of the universe, is relatively easy to achieve in the early universe and elsewhere and happens all the time. It results in other bubble universes that ex­­pand, and our universe has also expanded, so they’re currently be­­yond our scope.”

On grappling with things “beyond our perception”:

“The universe is expanding and accelerating, and light has a finite speed, so we’re never going to be able to see parts of the universe that are beyond a certain radius. Beyond roughly 46 billion light-­years we can only use our imagination. But it could be that nature has surprises beyond the range of observability, and we would never know.” (emphasis mine)

“The fact is that physics has evolved to a point where there are a lot of things that are not directly measurable. If we can come up with a theory that explains everything within the observable universe, and it requires reference to a multiverse, there is a segment of scientists who would say, ‘Well, we need to accept that there will be things that we will never know.’” (emphasis mine)

Is time an illusion?🤯🤯:

“Even if you’re a trained physicist and are basing everything on laws of physics and things like general relativity and quantum physics, there’s always some room for philosophical preferences. There are some physicists who really like to think that time is an illusion, and others like to think that time is real. That verges on philosophy because it’s hard for us, or even impossible, to step outside of time and say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, it was an illusion all along. Really, the world is timeless.’ We can’t really do that. So we can only kind of speculate about whether time is really passing physically or whether, in reality, time and space are on the same footing and we’re just inside some kind of illusory realm in which time passes in our own minds.” (again, emphasis mine)

And if that was too much to digest, here’s the pithy TL;DR takeaway: “It’s a mystery why things are the way they are, given all the options.” Simple enough.

3. When Our Heroes Do Bad Things, Are We Asking the Right Questions?

Like many writers and fans of literature who treasure the stories of the late Alice Munro, I was gutted to learn last month how she was complicit in the sexual abuse of her daughter, Andrea Skinner.

Usually, the discourse around artists who have made good work but are discovered to have done bad things defaults to the timeless question “can we separate the art from the artist?” I admit, my mind, in its limp shock, rested there first, in the easy place—a place with the veneer of complexity but without real depth.

So I was heartened to find this piece from Brandon Taylor’s

sweater weather

which more thoughtfully aligned and expanded my thinking.

Brandon’s response to Andrea’s harrowing account of her own abuse (and her continued victimization at the hands of a mother who sided with the abuser), was not to think of the great work or the great author, but of Andrea’s pain:

“I was a little shocked when I scrolled my feed and saw that other people had…different reactions to the news. They seemed to think immediately of the work like someone in the path of a hurricane or a wildfire thinks of their delicate artifacts and good plates . . .

Perhaps it is a human impulse . . . we would like as much as possible to distance ourselves from the party doing the wronging. And so, I see in their responses a means of slipping out of the discomfort of complicity and into the more comfortable role of victim. In grappling with the complexities of the situation, we allow ourselves to also be wronged and betrayed but Munro’s actions toward her daughter. It is a means of resolving the horrible, unbearable tension and displeasure of the idea that we have accidentally loved someone who is, in the modern parlance, bad.”

Brandon continues:

“What confuses me is when people claim victimhood or betrayal in a wrong that had nothing to do with them. As though your liking Alice Munro’s stories entitles you to emotional damages from the revelation that she abetted her daughter’s molestation and later refused to leave the man who did it. It’s almost as if people are embarrassed or saddened or disgusted or enraged by the idea that someone so loved and so cherished and brilliant could also be common and small.”

But why are we surprised? Brandon points out that human beings are often monstrous regardless of their gifts or their celebrity. It is not rare; it is usual to the point of banality. So is our reflexive pantomime of utter shock partly an act of self-indulgence—a way of setting ourselves apart as virtuous, superior? Perhaps.

And, finally, the kicker:

“There isn’t ‘the art and the artist’ and one does not ‘separate art from artist.’ To my mind, that is a broken moral calculus that confuses rectitude for an honest accounting of how we live in the world. The very question is stupid right down to its core. The better question is why do you need to feel comfortable in the rightness of the art you engage. Why do you need to create a safe art that has no harmful valences in it? I know why. You know why. Because otherwise, one has to own up to the knife you hold behind you, ready to plunge it into your brother’s back. Otherwise, you have to own up to the commonness and smallness and the very humanness of monstrosity itself.”

Whether you agree with

sweater weather

’s premise or not, and I’m still chewing on it, there’s lots to stimulate your thinking in the full piece here.

Little Misc. Snacks

An album I’ve been listening to: Tamba 4 - Samba Blim (1968)

A game: Sure, you’ve heard of Wordle and all the other brain-teasers in the NYT gaming-industrial complex. But have you tried Pyramid Scheme, Buzzfeed’s foray into the game-o-sphere? It’s fun. Play it here.

The parlance of our time: Why is everyone saying “demure,” and “mindful” etc.? Sigh. Of course, it’s from a TikTok. Us elder millennials should’ve guessed.