On quality in thought and word

+why I left the university for the productive household

Whenever I find myself stale and stretching for words in my writing, it means one of two things:

1. Either that my understanding of the topic is underdeveloped;

2. Or that I am insufficiently embodied to energise its articulation.

Usually, the two are related. The disembodied spinning of concepts produces hollow, stunted writing — sometimes concealed, but only loosely, by clever diction and inter-textual reference.

Direct, embodied experience is the lifeblood of proper understanding. And great writing is an outgrowth of proper understanding. It cannot be otherwise.

We like to think of bodily and cerebral functions as belonging to separate spheres. But writing, when it reaches for the achievements of art, comes about through the sublime marriage of action and thought.

Nietzsche put it best:

“Sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement — in which the muscles do not also revel. All prejudices emanate from the bowels.”¹

This fits into Nietzsche’s broader philosophy of intellectual metabolism, which he details in Ecce Homo and which I vow to unpack in future essays. For now, it’s enough to say that writing is only ever worth doing, or worth reading, when it grows out of deep bodily understanding. When it gestates in, and is born of, the body. The rest is drivel. And you feel it, when you read something laborious and contrived, or otherwise flat and underwhelming. Words without music, sense without sound — content insufficiently rooted in form. Such writing is nothing more than recycled thoughts; dead concepts that spawn more dead concepts and are, in that way, perversely generative; tumorous. Unfortunately, this kind of writing constitutes the bulk of academic and journalistic effort.

Nietzsche later elaborates:

“Scholars who at bottom do little nowadays but thumb books — philologists, at a moderate estimate, about 200 a day — ultimately lose entirely their capacity to think for themselves. When they don’t thumb, they don’t think. They respond to a stimulus (a thought they have read) whenever they think — in the end, they do nothing but react. Scholars spend all of their energies on saying Yes and No, on criticism of what others have thought – they themselves no longer think….

I have seen this with my own eyes: gifted natures with a generous and free disposition, “read to ruin” in their thirties – merely matches that one has to strike to make them emit sparks – “thoughts”.

Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of one’s strength – to read a book at such a time in simply depraved!”²

In our time, reading a book in the early morning would be preferable to that which many of us now make a habit: a scroll through our notifications and news-feeds. I cannot think of a worse breakfast for the intellect: the blue light of a screen, a kind of imposter-sun, flashing with images and clickbait and other people’s reactions. I’d much rather my waking body be anointed by the sun, the real sun, and my head thereby set in its place: on my shoulders.³

We should resist at all costs that our written thoughts become “sparks”, burning bright but brief before dissipating into space. We should aim, instead, for our thoughts to be outgrowths of the earth — the branches and leaves and blooms that strive upwards, but are only as vital as their plants are rooted.

My best thoughts often catch me over the sink, scrubbing dishes, or nursing my baby to sleep, or watering my poppy seedlings in the garden. Sometimes, “nap-trapped” as a fellow-stacker put it, I scribble them down on my phone over my baby’s dreaming body.

When I think back to the many years I spent in tertiary education, one of my best academic essays, and the most effortless to write, grew out of intensely-grounded and immersive participation in the life of a Moroccan family, while traveling for my language studies. My body so brimmed with life in those months — was so charged with the energy of my daily experiences — that it simply had to articulate itself, to prevent implosion. (Expect, soon, an adaption of said essay, Lessons from Moroccan Matriarchs: on reticulated self-hood).

This florescence of experience into words reminds me of the beauty of dried flowers — a vestige of the bloom’s former brilliance, and yet, still able to rouse the spirit. Our words should be the dried flowers of our experience, pressed to paper for future musing and meditation.

Nietzsche famously claims: “That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts.”

This is true, except that, if these things do indeed come from the heart — that pulsing centre of being — then their death is a beautiful kind of death, a living death, with the capacity to regenerate life.

I’ve made this distinction before: there is death which flows from and feeds back into life, like fallen foliage; and then there is a kind of alien death that never lived in the first place, like a sheet of plastic or a polyester rag, incapable of reintegration into living systems. Our writing should aspire to the first, the ever-generative, marking the death of our bodily experience as it transmutes into words — but those words, having come from life, can then feed life again, both in the writer and in his or her readers.

This is why, in my musings on quality, I talk so much about spirals of effect. Quality can only exist in word and thought, or in food and fibre, or in the home-space, if these ‘things’ are part of a chain of effects that generates more life and more value; spiraling upwards. Usually, what enables them to do this is that they’ve also come from life — living materials, human hands, embodied knowledge. A pair of hand-knitted pure-wool socks, a mature pastured chicken, the layout of a local wholefoods collective — all of which I’ve discussed in recent essays — derive their quality from the pattern of positively-disposed, enlivening relations within which they nest. This means their value is judged not by some fixed, uni-variate measure, like weight or size, material or brand, or the simple classification of “organic”, but by the broader pattern of effects stretching before and out beyond them: including but not exclusive to the soil and system of farming from which they derive, the degree and nature of human involvement in their production, the manner of their processing, the manner of their sale or acquisition, the uses they are put to and their impact on our health, our character and skill-sets, the stories they tell, the feelings they generate within us, and so on.

Quality writing follows the same metric: its putting-into-words might be the ‘death’ of ineffable experience, but it comes from life, and so generates more life. But what does this mean? What does enlivening writing look like? I believe that a major part of its impetus comes from its capacity to reveal to us the metaphorical substrate of our reality. It employs metaphor, not simply as a literary tool with which to make clever comparisons, nor merely as a super-imposition on top of the literal, as a way to bring some novelty to our understanding of it — but as a means through which to actually access reality in its depth and wholeness, showing to us that what we take as ‘literal’ or ‘real’ is in fact only a conceptual cleavage of reality. Life in its living fullness, in this sense, is pure metaphor. It encompasses all that is possible and makes it just as real as that which is literally and materially indicated. In The Matter With Things, Ian McGilchrist makes a strong case for this: that ‘the literal’ is not more real than ‘the metaphorical’, but merely what he calls the ‘limit-case’ of the metaphorical, whereby ‘the wealth of meaning is collapsed into a 1:1 correspondence for a useful, temporary purpose.’⁴

In quality writing, there is a reciprocity involved, not easy to delineate: embodiment gives the writer access to metaphor-as-reality — reality beyond the conceptually-contrived ‘literal’ — because the body is apart of that reality (something the mind often obfuscates). The writing produced, therefore, also inspires the reader to experience reality as a living metaphor. This intensifies our feeling of life because we know, and feel, that life is more expansive than what words can refer to, and crucial to the metaphor is the way that it points beyond words, to the form beyond content; to the body beyond the conceptual deceit of an ‘independent’ mind.

Advocating writing from a place of embodiment is not to say that writing is always a momentous outpouring of energy. Obviously, it also requires a degree of discipline. But it seems true to me that what is deeply known, and deeply felt, has a way of surfacing and enunciating itself, without much conscious effort. This is my experience, anyway.

Unfortunately, so much of what we read today is the second kind of ‘death’ — the kind of dead thing that never lived, spun from the gray, detached concepts of a mind insufficiently connected to its body. An echo-chamber of conceptual ‘reaction’, as Nietzsche would put it. This is why I take issue with “empirical” data. If it resonates with what you already know from lived experience, then it has a role to play. But if it is your primary means of knowing — if you must force yourself to learn from it and by means of it — then the thought and writing that results is nothing more than abstraction. Data-crunching and fact-stacking does not constitute understanding, nor does the blind application of a borrowed conceptual framework.

Some would call this skepticism of empirical data unscientific. But I am not aiming for science, nor am I aiming for the chicaneries and solipsistic fictions of a mind that denies reality. Both are equally detached from proper understanding: the first, by rejecting subjectivity as a means to truth; the second, by making subjectivity the only measure of truth. This broadly characterises the pitfalls of Enlightenment rationalism, on the one hand, and postmodernist relativism, on the other. I aim, in my writing, for something in-between, something which positions the self within nature and allows its wisdom to grow into the self as though from seed. Something which seeks nuance but does not deny the existence of truth. Something which starts from the whole, not the parts.

You’ll notice in the few analytical pieces I’ve published so far, and in those to come, that I’m not very interested in referencing and reviewing the literature. I refer to a small number of thinkers, like Friedrich Nietzsche and Christopher Alexander, because their words resonate with what I already feel to be true, with what life and my body has already taught me. One of the reasons I unyoked myself from formal academia and delved into motherhood and homemaking is because there was inordinate pressure, in the university, to contextualise one’s ideas within the literary echo-chamber of thought, and attribute or relate them to the “thought-sparks” that had gone before. There was a compulsion to affirm and reproduce disembodied knowledge. I had one tutor admit that she was so enraptured by an essay of mine that she was “on the edge of her seat” and yet marked me down because I had been insufficiently explicit about my methodology and how it related to the few thinkers I had referenced. This was because, I might have told her, I did not use these thinkers to construct my thought piecemeal, in a kind of contrived, synthetic manner; I allowed my thought to grow from my own knowing, and when it resonated with established literature, then I would allude to those resonances.

The most profound insights often come from people who don’t make the production of insight their job: why else are so many great writers also avid walkers, gardeners, mothers and fathers? Because the best work preserves continuity between the real world and the written word. It is the veritable fruit of a labour of living. It’s not a reaction to the words of others — or worse, a reaction to the reactions of others, which characterizes both the media platforms and the academic journals of our day.

Motherhood is an embodying experience like no other, and I do feel, contrary to the platitude that mothering somehow dulls or muddles the mind, that wisdom became available to me like never before the very moment I stepped down from the ivory-tower of academia and into the hands-on, hard and holy work of family and home-weaving.⁵

I strongly believe that parents, farmers, dancers and other individuals for whom embodiment is a daily and comprehensive duty, are the best-equipped to share living wisdom. As another substacker put it, in reference to the productive household:

“analogue, hands-on activities are grounding exercises in focus and flow. I believe they are crucial for us to process ideas.”⁶

This speaks in part to what I am pursuing through Penelope’s Loom: the marriage of formal and domestic education. In our times, homemaking has become something to juxtapose with education. Real education, they tell us, is outside of the home — in schools, classrooms, universities, and the workplace. But few tell us that the most self-sufficient households, the most self-reliant families, rest upon a depth of education and knowledge unlike any other. A different kind of education, for sure. One that doesn’t negate a university degree, but directs itself more faithfully towards the art of living, towards a quality of life that can only be properly reaped through the intentional, accountable, day-in day-out weaving of a home and family — not outsourced to ready-made solutions.

I don’t neglect the fact that my capacity to reflect and articulate myself in this way owes a great deal to my formal education; to the kind of education that gets you the salary to afford to outsource working with primary resources and full-time care-taking in the first place, and avoid the daily embodiment this demands. I am not here to say that forgoing such education is always wise. I’m here to say that such education might be married, in an especially meaningful way, with the self-sufficiency and survival skills it has come to replace. I’m here to advocate that professional education be brought home.

Reflecting on his life in Ecco Homo, Nietzsche expressed something similar: that he would have been better off a physiologist than a philologist. Forever a lover of parable, he meant not that he should have been a practicing scientist, but that he accessed greater wisdom through the body-in-motion than he did from flipping books at the University of Basel, where he studied and taught the classics for many years.

What I’m interested in, now, as a mother, homemaker, and agent of a productive household, is not only how to make bread, knit and darn socks, grow veggies and keep a dairy-cow, but the timeless wisdom hidden inside fermentation, fibre and farming. I’m interested in how child-rearing, kneading, knitting, weaving, sowing and harvesting, among the many other skillsets of self-sufficient living, might be conduits for deeper and more essential undercurrents of knowledge about being in and of this world:

Working with dough might give us insight into the true nature of strength.

Fermentation (and other alchemical forms of food production and preservation) might become a window to spiritual knowing.

Interior design and decorating might demonstrate the impact of spatial structure on our humanity.

Knitting might show us the cumulative value of patient, repetitive actions.

Weaving cloth might reveal the properties of a robust social and familial fabric.

If theory were to meet practice in this way, on the scale of the household and family, what kind of magic might result?

These are the questions that preoccupy me as I move through my daily duties in the household; as I nurse and put my daughter to sleep; as I retrieve the bones from a chicken roast to make stock; as I observe the incremental growth of our seedlings in the soil. The making of a family and home is not antithetical to thinking; it can be one of thought’s deepest wellsprings.

But when I find myself labouring over a paragraph or an essay, I know it’s my cue to file the document away and get on with the laundry. And so, for the few genuine readers following my journey to date (for whom I am very grateful), if you don’t see any new pieces from me for a while, it’s probably because I’m out living in the world, allowing my actions and experiences to beget my words.

---

What’s upcoming on Penelope’s Loom:

Lessons from Moroccan Matriarchs: on reticulated self-hood

Reflections on the ‘demise of decorum’ in dress and public presentation

Unpacking ‘Quality’ with Christopher Alexander and Robert Pirsig

A comment on what’s really at stake in the “trad-wife” movement

An explanation of the symbolism of loom-weaving, and its eponymous relationship to Penelope’s Loom.

1. Friedrich Nietzsche. Why I Am So Clever, Section 1 in “Ecce Homo”. Walter Kaufmann translation.

2. Ibid., Section 8.

3. Nikko Kennedy of Brighter Days, Darker Nights writes in detail on the importance of exposure to raw sunlight in the early morning and other matters of circadian health.

4. Ian McGilchrist, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, vol.1, p.8.

5. Jan of The Mother Letters writes beautifully about home-weaving. On another note, if you happen to be the woman who reflected on the ‘hard and holy work’ of a decade of motherhood, please reach out. I so enjoyed your essay but unfortunately can no longer find it.

6. Karen Rosenkranz of City Quitters.