Photo credit: Camille Kimberly on Unsplash
Introvert
Noun 1. Psychology someone characterised by introversion; someone concerned chiefly with their own thoughts.
2. Zoology, etc. a part that is or can be introverted.
adjective 3. marked by introversion.
verb 4. to turn inwards.
5. to direct (the mind, etc.) inwards or upon the self.
6. Zoology, etc. to sheathe a part of, within another part; invaginate.
The forecast on the weekend leading up to the Sydney Writer’s Festival this May was grim and rainy, but I had a good feeling. Instead, we got sun and lots of it. During that lead-up week however, the weather had taken a sharp turn towards winter cold which, given that we’re in New South Wales, never seems like it will be that serious until you’re out on the harbor, feeling the ocean winds full force. I was looking forward to the experience, having never attended the festival before due to being generally time/resource/energy poor as is typical of a long-term student’s life, such as mine is. But there was also some level of apprehension. Working in customer service for over 10 years has allowed me to become comfortable when dealing with people in public, but I’m at my best when I already know what I’m doing—when I have an innate understanding of the kinds of things expected of me; what can possibly go wrong; how to resolve any issues with relative ease. This wasn’t exactly a high-stress situation, but the unknown factor still made itself felt, as I suppose it does for any of us facing slightly new situations. I was also aware that I’d be expected to present myself sociably, both to festival-goers and to my co-volunteers. This too would not generally be an issue, but again I was overwhelmed with the potentially infinite nuances of an unknown situation. But I had a good feeling.
Thursday, May 25—Ashley Hay: 100 Small Lessons
My first event was in Camden, the suburb I grew up in during high school, and for some years beyond that. I’d put my hand up for this posting given that I could stay at our family home on the night leading up to the event, and catch up with my mother, father and sister who live there. Upon turning up to Camden Civic Centre I was swiftly introduced to Aaron, a well spoken gentleman who I learned worked locally as a teacher, and had volunteered for SWF (and as it turns out the Newcastle and Wollongong Writer’s Festivals, as well as Vivid) for many years now, and who was an experienced volunteer supervisor. Aaron made me feel immediately welcome and we opened some doors for some lovely people and kept the peace out in the biting Camden cold for maybe half an hour before we were able to move into the warmth of the Centre (charting a tactical route, of course, past its impressive assortment of food and drinks) to sit and listen to Ashley Hay speak about her recent novel, 100 Small Lessons.
What stood out to me about Ashley’s talk was her emphasis on a connection to place. She described her process as growing a description of setting (first, her home town of Thirroul in The Railwayman’s Wife and then her more recent home, Brisbane in 100 Small Lessons) from the outlines of her lived experience there, and going deeper into the possibilities of place through her characters and their situations within these locales and their surrounding histories. She also spoke about how her characters often grew from amalgamated reflections of herself and those around her, noting in particular an elderly couple she’d encountered when first arriving in Brisbane, and who she’d gotten to know more intimately since. One of these became the central inspiration for Elsie in her novel, an elderly woman who is moved into a nursing home following a near-fatal collapse, yet spends her time there reminiscing her experiences in her former home with her late husband. The story itself develops around the largely ephemeral relationship that grows between Elise and a much younger couple, Lucy and Ben, who move into the newly vacated home. Ashley expounded here on her use of the term Vardøger in the novel, a Scandinavian variant of the ‘double’ or ‘doppleganger’, a kind of shadowy pre-reflection who travels ahead of oneself, preceding one’s path, thoughts and actions. She contrasts this concept with Michael Ondaatje’s description of a newborn child’s entry into life in his poem The Story, who he writes “is given dreams of previous lives./Journeys, winding paths,/a hundred small lessons”. Building on this play of shared, overlapping fates, Hay painted a picture of her novel as a psychological/spiritual account of humanity and its ability to build communities around shared locations and experiences.
There’s something archetypal in her description here that overlaps with my own efforts of communicating life through the written word. I think the human experience is given to projecting a kind of ‘doubleness’ onto those around us, imagining and reimagining ourselves through the context of other bodies, other personalities, both in terms of emotion and sometimes in simply inhabiting the same spaces, the way one might observe someone else on a bus or in a restaurant and imagine what their lives might be like, how they might differ slightly from ours. And perhaps this is more so the case for writers than others. This may in fact be a writer’s chief concern, at least insofar as they’re driven (and, to an extent, expected) to describe this ‘otherness’.
That night, although quite tired, I lay awake in bed. As is so often the case, my mind filled with all of the words I wished I could have said in the small, lost moments of the day. Fragments of explanation for any number of intricate minutiae which all seem to fall into place once the pressure of the moment is suspended.
Friday, May 26—Drive with Richard Glover
On day two I was off to Walsh Bay at the (thankfully sunny) heart of the festival. I hurried along the harbour thinking I was running quite late, at one stage making a wrong turn due to my mistaken belief that the harbour walk had been blocked off for the ensuing preparations for Vivid (Sydney’s light festival which was due to launch that night). I ended up arriving at the Volunteer’s Green room with a good 20 minutes to spare, signed on and got acquainted with my team members, and from there set off to the Club Stage on Pier 2/3 which was to host a free event for the airing of Richard Glover’s TGIF edition of Drive, broadcast on ABC Radio.
Somewhat paradoxically, free events seem to bring out a slightly more strained reaction from festival-goers, possibly (or in fact, very probably) due to the necessity of their having to wait in a cue, and the resultant concern that one may not, in the end, be seated. The maximum capacity for this venue was 300, and while the cue steadily grew as the prior event finished and its crowd dispersed I counted up to about 170 heads waiting in line—nowhere near the danger zone. Once the doors for our event opened however, we were soon at capacity with a large line of people still outside, waiting (relatively) patiently for others to leave. The venue manager was a polite young man who kept alert to the situation, and remained extremely personable despite, at times, a certain level of stress evident in his eyes. As the event passed its midway point, when there were only a few people left waiting outside, the young man kept them company and conversed with them, and eventually all of them managed to get in, though some towards the event’s conclusion only rather briefly.
By the time I got situated, Richard had begun an interview with Brit Bennett, an essayist noted for her talent, and author of The Mothers, a recent NYT bestseller. Bennett’s most notorious essay to date is a piece written in 2014 titled I Don’t Know What to Do With Good White People, a highly politicised, though incredibly intimate perspective on race relations, particularly within the US but with parallels to almost any part of the world affected by the legacies of European colonisation (so everywhere really). In the piece, her voice is decidedly ambivalent, navigating between an ingrained cultural resilience and the understanding that many who ultimately ‘mean well’ often overlook, or simply don’t recognise the reality that they operate and exist within various systems which oppress those they ‘mean well’ towards, and the frustrations, ongoing tensions, and frequent eruptions of violence that arise from such deadlocks and their resultant miscommunications. This ambivalence shines most strongly when she writes “[s]ometimes I think good white people expect to be rewarded for their decency. We are not like those other white people. See how enlightened and we are? See how we are good?” The essay doesn’t attempt to answer the resounding question presented in its title. Instead it acts as an extenuated recapitulation of a deep tension spanning generations of unseen discrimination.
Her new novel The Mothers, she told Richard, unfolds around Nadia, a young girl who falls pregnant soon after losing her mother, and her decision to terminate the pregnancy. In bringing this character to life, Bennett said her interest was in exploring a character “who had just lost her mother, suddenly finding herself in the position where she might be someone’s mother, and deciding that she can not go through with that,” along with “the ripples that [this] choice would cause throughout her life.” Richard praised the novel, describing it as being “essentially about the dignity of the individual,” and one concerned with the portrayal of “real human beings”. Bennett emphasised her decision to focus on very intimate and personable aspects of life; simple intrigues and ongoing dramas such as “loss and friendship and betrayal” which are common to all of our lives, and in this way shifting her focus, for a time at least, away from the more politicised notions practiced through her essay-writing.
Glover’s next guest was Jamie Morton, the creator of the Podcast My Dad Wrote a Porno about which I’d recently heard rave reviews from some close friends. Morton was really down to earth and a natural presenter, talking about his show and his odd, yet good-natured relationship with his father. He fleshed out the concept of the podcast’s comedic nature, making particular mention of his dad’s many interesting turns of phrase; some strange characters including a Duchess, a phallically challenged—“Trump-like”—American business mogul named Jim Sterling, and Belinda, a sassy businesswoman in the burgeoning, trans-continental pots’n’pans industry; as well as some particularly bold choices in the anatomical complexities involved with his character’s bodies.
“The thing about my dad,” Jamie told Richard, referring to his father’s pen name, ‘Rocky Flintstone’, “he has a real ‘Flintstonean’ way about him that he has no idea why people find it funny.” It’s through comments like this, or when he impersonates his father’s North Irish accent, saying “Jamie, you think it’s funny, but you just don’t get it yet,” that you get a real feeling for the deep and friendly respect between the two, their mutual esteem playing out in that very English manner of showing affinity and affection through blithe parody.
For the TGIF segment, Glover began with a story about an instance in which he’d been returned a copy of his book by a woman at his mother’s funeral. When he looked inside, he found a stamp from a second-hand bookshop, where the woman had clearly purchased it to give back to him. This wouldn’t have been that noteworthy, except that this particular copy was the one he’d given to his mother as a gift, still bearing his personal inscription. The way Richard told the story was very light-hearted, though with mock-emotional distress, and reminded me of how prickly the idea of creation can be when sharing it with those closest to you. In a way, it’s essential to any work of creation that its creator cut themselves off, to a degree, from those who have undoubtedly influenced them and shaped their personalities into beings capable of creation. At the same time, they need to respect that those people may live as echoes within the pages, or scenes, or brush strokes of their creations whether explicitly or otherwise, and to misrepresent others, or the world as a whole, or even oneself, can be an element of anxiety which stifles expression, often in the same way that our thoughts, words, opinions and general social countenance can be stifled by uncertainty or social dissonance within a given context.
Richard was joined by guests Anthony Ackroyd, Rebecca de Unamuno and Tommy Dean who provided some much needed laughter, as did some spoken word stories in the following event which I sat in for briefly after my shift had finished. Although the day went smoothly, I was tired from being in a crowd and on my feet and decided to head home. Ashleigh, a friend from uni and assistant organiser of the festival, found me on my walk back to the volunteer’s green room and gave me a cab-pass to cut out my walk back to Circular Quay and its likely heavy vivid-opening-night crowds.
Ashleigh’s intern Ennis and I, deciding to share a cab, stumbled for some time on Hickson road trying to find one, and before long we were seated in warmth and headed to Town Hall station. At one point Ennis pointed, exclaiming “Oh my god, it’s Elaine Welteroth!” After confessing that I didn’t know who that was, she explained to me that she was the editor in chief of Teen Vogue, and was one of the more high-profile speakers at the festival. “She’s my absolute fave,” she told me, still quite gushing.
When I’m in the moment, I don’t feel introverted in any sense. I am easy going. Light hearted even. But I am quiet; there is often no noise which I feel I need to make, and this builds into the shadow of indefinite silence, a placebo towards vexation. I am hysterical; I am self-sufficient and yet I wish to be overwhelmed. But not beyond my control: I feel the need to remain within the boundaries of the known knowns of my existence.
For many of us the concept of introversion is more than a flighty theory cooked up by academics whose words have been long forgotten by the world. For many of us, the strained social relationships we experience throughout our lives are everyday facts. It can make the idea of going into public overwhelming; cause us to become over reliant on social lubrication such as drugs or alcohol; make the idea of a job interview going well an absurdity.
Sometimes I struggle with this, but often it seems only when I’m given reason to take note. I wonder how many others out there feel this same sense of intermittent comfort/isolation.
Saturday, May 27—Slate’s Culture Gabfest & Advice from Nasty Women
Making my way to Town Hall on the Saturday evening became its own adventure. I had a feeling that tonight’s events may have been a bit more formal, my role a bit more engaged due to the location in the heart of Sydney’s Central Business District which is often full of strange, yet exciting energies. As I rushed past the Town Hall itself, heading to the Queen Victoria Building to find a toilet, a couple of men singing loudly about Jesus attracted the looks of foot traffic, many stopping to pose with their phones taking insta-snaps. As I passed through the entrance, I took a photo of the talking dog statue situated out the front of the building and sent it to my friend, poet and fellow volunteer Shivani.
Once we’d all met inside we formed a group and did a quick tour of Town Hall, and were assigned roles. I was placed on one of the doors to the (stage) right of the building. My job was actually super easy, and consisted of directing people back and forth, from the entrance to general seating, and from there to the restrooms (and notice, they were restrooms now, not toilets) and after the show, pointing them towards the exits in much the same manner. Before the first event began, I found myself looking out amongst the crowd of people gathered. Who were these people, I wondered, who, of a Saturday night, found themselves pulled out into the cold of the city streets to wander over by way of bus, taxi or train, or some of them perhaps on foot, to gather in this building whose foundations of sandstone lay on top of old burial grounds? I stood for some time gazing at the intricate ornamental trappings on the roofs and walls and sideboards, decorative recreations of local flora, its row by rows of red seating inside. For a moment my gaze fell upon a woman sitting alone, above in the gallery, tapping on her phone, waiting for the event to begin.
The Sydney edition of Slate’s Culture Gabfest was refreshing. I hadn’t heard of it before (being a relative newcomer to the world of podcasts) but have since tuned in almost religiously each week and have found it to be filled with interesting perspectives on various cultural minutiae which otherwise I would never have encountered. On this evening, panelists Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens and Julia Turner took a brief look at the vacuity of the recently released revamp of Baywatch before engaging in a discussion of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel titled The Handmaid’s Tale, which had recently been adapted for television by Bruce Miller into a Hulu series starring Elisabeth Moss, known for her amazing portrayal of Peggy Olson in AMC’s Mad Men. The panelists noted the particular significance the story held in terms of our current place and time, mentioning that the show’s production took place during a period in which its creators would likely have been almost certain of a win for Hillary Clinton in the Whitehouse, and yet that the show’s underlying warnings against increased cultural and social oppression had become more relevant than ever in the wake of Trump’s victory. “I fell absolutely in love with it,” Slate’s Editor, Julia Turner commented regarding her recent reading of Atwood’s novel:
even then before we knew the outcome of the election it felt pertinent to the conversation and the rise of Trump and the kinds of rhetoric that were being thrown around. It’s interesting because … the politics and power of the book, I think are actually quite distinct from the politics of the show: the show somehow manages to articulate its own vision [and] be very respectful of … the original, but have a much, more ‘resistancy’ politics. I think in some ways, Margaret Atwood’s heroin in the book is not so much of a fighter, she’s a bit of an observer, and a hanger back and ‘how did this society get to this dystopian place and what happened after?’ seems more the point of the book.
They also had a discussion with Australian critic Sebastian Smee about the nature of criticism, citing a recent comment made by Neil Gaiman in which he said “I love critics. I’m not sure they do anything.” Sebastian is an art critic for the Boston Globe, Winner for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for criticism and the recent author of The Art of Rivalry and has practiced criticism throughout Australia, the UK and the US. Steven began the interview by asking Sebastian “does a critic need a cruel streak? … Or is kindness and sympathy … somehow more important temperamentally to the task at hand?” Sebastian spoke about the subtle differences he’d come to recognise between the cultures of criticism in Australia, the UK and the US. “It’s sometimes subtle, but … both in Britain and Australia … there’s a real taste for really trenchant criticism, and sometimes kinda nasty criticism,” he explained, noting that this kind of criticism as ‘bloodsport’ was something that attracted him when he was starting out, “I thought wow, there’s nothing better than seeing a critic really launch into a big target … and knock it down in really funny, articulate ways.” This he contrasted with the practice of criticism in America, saying “I just feel there’s maybe a greater level of politesse in the States … they might enjoy reading a really tough review, but they kind of worry about the kind of person who would do that … who would beat someone up on their typewriter.”
Criticism is certainly one of those ill-defined practices of a society seemingly bent on reserving its celebration for the pragmatic and the cost-efficient, and moreso one fixed on a stigma towards anything that seems academic, elitist and esoteric in its praxis. I wonder, however, if Mr. Gaiman was making this comment a little tongue-in-cheek, presenting his own friendly rivalry, as if he may have been alluding that he didn’t really think that critics ‘did nothing,’ but wanted a way to send a casual nod towards them without seeming too conciliatory to their appraisal of his cultural worth. Which, as an author, it’s important that he’s not.
For me, criticism is about shifting the focus of a piece of work, placing it within new contexts built around various discourses of materiality, psychological subjectivity and linguistic/semiotic possibilities, ultimately allowing for, or at the very least encouraging possible new interpretations. In a way, these interpretations have the potential to become new stories in and of themselves, something which I’d been thinking about a lot since reading Linda Jaivin’s Lost in Translation: In Praise of a Plural World last year. We learn to delineate our reality, we become more descriptive beings through the repeated folding of signs into consciousness, through this play of semiotics. To deny that a critic’s perspective does anything is a bit like dismissing the author of fictions because their stories aren’t ‘real’. For me, good criticism is about closing the gaps and reinforcing the boundaries and borderlines of communal identity through shared myths or ideologies. Good criticism teaches others to be good critics and to know more about their worlds, just like good stories teach people to know their worlds by becoming good storytellers. I’m reminded too, at this point in the evening, of recent news stories about computers creating art and writing stories that could conceivably fool audiences into believing they had been created by humans—an art nouveau ‘turing test’ of a kind. I don’t think I could ever conceive of a more compelling argument for the relevance of criticism: if I’m to interact with a piece of work, I’d prefer to know about some of the context surrounding the work and where it sits within the spectrum of human experience. This includes, of course, details about whether it was created by an organism or by a machine (along with the agent which programmed said machine, in the latter case).
After our break, and an interesting conversation with my co-volunteers (in which I restrained from my compulsion to argue about the obsoletion of a degree in the humanities as one of them, a fellow BA graduate, was asserting), I got to enjoy the event I’d most been looking forward to: the Nasty Women forum. The panel for this event consisted of a number of outstanding authors, some of whom I had heard about prior to the event, others whose names were new to me. All of them, as the title of the forum suggested, were women of resilience and strong resolve.
One of those I had heard about previously was Brit Bennett whose talk with Richard Glover I described earlier. Something Brit said rung out to me, about not necessarily celebrating, or placing herself within, the classification of ‘nasty women’. This made immediate sense in the context of her ongoing social commentary regarding the deeply entrenched prejudices against persons of colour (and in particular, women of colour) within the United States, to which she cited the tendency within US culture to label African American women as ‘Jezebels’ or ‘Sapphires’ and as being ‘nasty’, bringing the discourse of the term beyond Trump’s loathsome offhand comment in the leadup to the US election last year. Brit stipulated that despite her reservations in radically embracing the term in a form of defiance, she was proud to celebrate strong women who asserted themselves regardless of the approval (or lack thereof) of those around them.
It was special to be hearing Brit’s voice alongside (or at least in the same forum as) Australian Indigenous author and activist Dr. Anita Heiss who gave a stirring acknowledgement of country preceding the rest of the speeches. Dr. Heiss referred to the achievements of a number of ‘difficult’ or ‘nasty’ (by which she meant incorrigibly peaceful) women of Australian (and surrounding) history including Barangaroo, Oodgeroo Noonuccal (aka Kath Walker), and the recently deceased Rosie Scott (from New Zealand). Her descriptions of these women was celebratory in their capacity as figures who have challenged perceptions surrounding the roles of women in a society that seems intent on ignoring the ongoing displacement and cultural dispossession of its first peoples. The juxtaposition of these two activists/authors from different parts of the world set a truly global context for the forum.
Added to these was Viola Di Grado’s beautiful (yet harrowing) speech about surviving extreme loneliness and isolation, describing her childhood as being one of indefinite seclusion facing the harsh complexities of schoolyard bullying and finding strength in her developing talent for expression through the written word. Viola’s speech had me remembering my years as a teenager in high school. Although my experience was not nearly as painful as the story she told, I remembered with great clarity that awareness of being largely isolated and feeling unable to adequately express myself. It had me thinking about the friends I made during high school, without whom I believe I would have been lost entirely.
The discussion also brought to mind The Long Weekend in Alice Springs by Craig San Roque which I’d recently read, both in its essay and graphic novel form (illustrated by Josh Santosprito) after coming across a section of the latter in Fluid prejudice: Australian History Comic Anthology, edited by Sam Wallman. In the section, Craig’s friend, a Jewish/Polish man named Amos, gives the author his perspective on ‘cultural complexes’ particularly regarding the author’s working thesis that patterns of behaviours (complexes) are played out through a repetition of stories within specific places. Amos says of his Jewish/Polish ancestry “we invented ways to make us taste nasty and preserve our structure so as to make us indigestible to the cannibals.” I guess I’d say this sentiment stuck out to me as being a common aspect of life for many of us, in various shapes and forms, but particularly for those whose culture exists on the fringes of ‘acceptable’ ‘understood’ known society in the way that Dr. Heiss, Di Grado and Bennett described.
As I took off from the Town Hall that night I spent some time thinking about these talks on my train journey home. Introversion it seems is often seen as being necessarily a detriment to a healthy personality. Something that, while it may be tolerated to a certain degree, is viewed as a state to be overcome and eventually left behind.
Those of us who have learned to sit with our stillness alongside our storms, however, know what it’s like to resist interpolation into the larger whole. We know what it’s like to make ourselves indigestible. And although, of course, I can’t identify as a woman, let alone a ‘nasty woman’, I think my enthusiasm for this event stemmed from this experience of dissonance within my surrounding community. More than anything, such a forum gave me encouragement, and afforded me the strength to carry on in a world which seems to place me as being difficult, inconvenient, and often as not, seemingly problematic in some innate sense.
Sunday, May 28—First We Make the Beast Feel Beautiful & Deliberate and Afraid of Nothing
Before travelling into the bay for my remaining shift on the final day of the festival I was determined to visit the World Zine Fair held at Marrickville Town Hall. The fair was packed with people wandering between tables and checking out the merchandise. Worried about time, I skimmed fairly quickly over the stalls, but I was amazed by the variety and vivacity of the zines on offer there, packed with colour and expression. I picked up a few mags from a Melbourne publisher, one filled with scribbles and descriptions made during a concert by The Cure which I thought my sister Jodie might enjoy. I picked up another two by a Sydney-based anarchist collective, one for my brother Michael, a brief excerpt from a Noam Chomsky text, and another for myself titled Nihilistic Communism by Monsieur Dupont.
My train ride was a quick one and in no time I was heading to my final shift. Once I got situated the supervisor told us that we’d be required to pass microphones around for the Q&A section for the events we were facilitating which sounded like an interesting development from my prior experiences. For a moment I thought about the innumerable things that could possibly go wrong. And then I just decided to stop worrying and got on with it. This is something I’m becoming better at doing, for better or worse.
The first event consisted of a talk by Sarah Wilson, author of First we Make the Beast Feel Beautiful. Sarah discussed her experiences dealing with an ongoing anxiety condition and the many pitfalls of living a high-stress, busy life along with the various miscommunications surrounding her illness. Anxiety, according to Sarah’s description, might be understood as an evolutionary psychological trait that has carried on past its immediate relevance in many of our lives. In the development of human societies, she posited, it was those who rose to the ‘places’ or states of mind beyond fear and courage; who became the pioneers of new experiences and human endeavours; who would traverse their comfort zones to search deep into the forest for sustenance or to cross seas on precarious boats for the unsubstantiated promise of new land. I felt that this was an interesting stance to take towards anxiety which, for my own part, I generally dealt with by hiding it deep inside so as to be invisible to the outside eye, and something which I could work on within the comfort of my own mind. I wondered, was there some level of pride, or at least security I took towards my propensity for vexation? Could there be? The way, for instance, one might become defensive of one’s sense of depression, as if medicating it might somehow make one a less authentic version of oneself. As if that sadness was somehow a natural part of you. These are not easy questions, and I admire Sarah’s courage in offering an answer, despite my uncertainty as to her conclusions.
As I walked around handing out the microphone to patrons during the Q&A, one question stood out to me. A woman near the front row asked Sarah whether she believed there was a ‘cure’ for anxiety, whether she felt that there was a conceivable end to her trouble. Her answer was both a ‘no’ but with an attached ‘it’s complicated’. Sarah’s outlook suggested an aversion to viewing the condition as a disease, and thought instead to embrace its jarring particularities as a way to reapply stray energies into channels which might have some deeper propensity for growth. In this sense she didn’t see her anxious condition as being something which had a convenient ‘end’ or ‘cure’, and yet its negative effects could conceivably be counteracted through an ongoing effort to reassess one’s values and goals in life.
This struck me as a compelling parallel to describing creative energy. In some senses, it seems that something like ‘culture’ might adequately be viewed as this same type of ‘vexation’, both inspiring and, at times constricting. Perhaps, in the end all art, or ‘that which moves us’ is a call to action.
The following event was a panel discussion between Elaine Welteroth, Durga Chew-Bose, Yassmin Abdel Magied and Brit Bennett titled Deliberate and Afraid of Nothing. Each of the panelists expounded on their experiences relating to the challenges of writing and creating as a representative of an ethnic minority.
Now being able to put a face to the name since Ennis had pointed her out on the street the other night, I was eager to hear Elaine Walteroth speak, particularly given Teen Vogue’s show of strength in remaining critical in the outset of Trump’s presidency when so many other news sources returned to business as usual, and most of them at the earliest possible convenience.
Towards the beginning of the discussion Elaine mentioned a conversation in which someone had asked her how she goes about writing specifically to an audience. The panel all came to a fairly quick agreement that learning to speak in such a way—to a target, often niche audience—was one of the fundamental things one learns as a writer. “You can’t just write for everyone,” she exclaimed, and her panelists joined her in laughter at such a proposition. To think you can communicate to everyone equally is absurd, she concluded, “it’s lazy writing.” I could see her point. Any utterance (or act of expression/creation) has some form of audience in mind, be it one who shares in a spoken language, has access to convergent cultural and dialectical mores, or merely has eyes and ears to hear or read what’s spoken. On another level however I feel like there is room within expression to aim for (even if never reaching) a kind of universal intent and/or understanding in its reception; to reach for what Alexander Nehemas, in his essay The Postulated Author describes as “the notion of one interpretation answering more questions about a text”—and by implication, therefore of its author and her surrounding context—“than another and thus being closer to that hypothetical ideal which would answer all questions.” Sensing a potentially recursive ‘rabbit-hole’ in this stipulation, I made an effort to halt my mind before it began to wander the immense anachronistic halls of literary criticism,.
Whatever the case, I felt uncertain that it was so ridiculous to have a universal audience as the aim of an expression, however prone it might be to failure in our current niche-economy based manner of understanding mediation. But again, I could accede to the point that Elaine was making, and felt that it applied within the context of what the industry expects of a writer. To succeed in communication, one needs to connect. To connect one need use whatever tools lay at their disposal—seduction, emotion, logos pathos, the whole pantheon. This is a lesson I am still trying to learn.
In the Q&A someone asked an interesting question about whether any of them felt that it was the role of the oppressed to educate oppressors. The panel’s response—to which I agreed unequivocally—was a resounding ‘no’. I think this also played nicely into the aforementioned point about communicating with an audience: the way that cultural lines are drawn and reimagined through communication of a specific type. If those in a position of cultural ‘privilege’ wish to understand something which is ‘other’ to their lived experience, it certainly behooves them to ingratiate themselves to that new way of thinking, or else, by expecting it to be handed to them on a plate, run the risk of simply reinforcing their epistemological laziness. As a writer (and more generally as a person living in the world) I consider this to be one of my ongoing challenges.
After the writers festival finished, Shivani and I met up and took a quick sojourn through the festivities at Vivid, making some brief stop-ins at a few of the more interesting light instalments. While we explored Shivani told me that her friends and family had been asking her ‘why would you bother volunteering for a festival?’, and ‘what do you get out of it?’ and the like.
“I couldn’t really get them to understand,” she said. Beyond wanting to support the cultural expression of writing as a practice, and the chance to sit in on events which otherwise one might not be able to attend, it seems many have trouble understanding why someone would choose to dedicate their time and energy to the smooth operation of a literary festival. I was reminded of our induction meeting a few weeks prior to the main event. Misty, the festival’s organiser, made sure to reiterate a number of times to us volunteers—“without all of you,” she said “the festival simply would not be possible”. At a moment in history in which the celebration of human subjectivity seems to be an endangered, and largely dissipating form of cultural energy, this might just be enough of an answer, for me at least. Of course, in the moment, this is far too much for me to grasp, too many fragments of thoughts resisting interpretation. For now I only answer her with silence. Or, maybe not silence, but at least not much more than a passive sign of agreement. Some small utterance to indicate that I could understand the problem here. Expression is trouble. There is danger in writing. Writers are problematic creatures.
Of course, there is a point at which an expression or utterance or creation becomes almost meaningless. It may be too late, too unconventional, too stretched in its significance to really mean anything to anyone. It may simply act as a marker for oneself, to say that you were here or there, at some particular place at a specific time; that you had this experience and thought about it in this certain way. It may just be a reminder to yourself that you went out into the world, and you did something and you enjoyed yourself. The ultimate dialectical counterpoint of introversion is the letting go of things that have been on your mind. Maybe that’s the whole point of this holding back, this keeping to oneself: deep processing and release. Slow climax. Growth. Learning. Etcetera.
Post Script: A view of introversion, from Sigmund Freud through Carl Gustav Jung.
Although appearing in academic (and particularly medical) vernacular prior to Freud and Jung, the psychotherapeutic application of this term became central to the genesis of the psychoanalytic movement. Those suffering from neurotic afflictions seemed disproportionately ‘introverted’, concerned with their own thoughts, and were seemingly unable (or simply unwilling) to break out of the molds which developed alongside the recurrent ebb of their (largely) self-construed thoughts. In The Dynamics of Transference, Freud elaborates on Jung’s prior use of the term ‘introversion’, identifying it as a precondition of psychoneuroses, describing it as a reduction of “the portion of libido which is capable of becoming conscious” and an increase in a type of mental activity focused primarily on itself, which, he says, “though it may still feed the subject’s fantasies, nevertheless belongs to the unconscious”.
Freud’s position, based around his description of the unconscious as a reservoir of infantile desires, asserted that introversion was entirely pathological—the failure of an agency to connect with its surrounding reality. Jung—who thought of, and described himself as introverted—took seriously the dangers associated with the condition according to Freud’s heuristic and its proximity to the proliferation of neuroses, writing in his essay Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido that in its exacerbation, introversion “seizes upon regressive infantile reminiscences taken from the individual past” which in some cases “might go as far as the re-echo of a once manifest, archaic mental product.”
At the same time however, Jung began to assert the unconscious as being more than a mere reservoir of idle, obsoleted thoughts, but also as a repository for creativity and ultimately personal growth. In developing his own particular heuristic of the unconscious, Jung began to see introversion as an intermittent, yet often necessary ‘stockpile’ of mental energy for the purposes of revitalising one’s energy (libido). In formulating his view of the unconscious as a primordial well of image-based substructures, reverberating around and clustering in associated meanings, Jung resisted Freud’s conception of the unconscious as an unnecessary (and thus inherently problematic) damning of meaningless ephemera. He wrote in part two of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido of the healing symbolic resonance of imagery rendered through one’s immersion into the unconscious, in which we might discover “that driving strength of our own soul, which we call libido, and whose nature it is to allow the useful and injurious, the good and the bad to proceed.”
In today’s pop-psychological understanding of the term, introversion (and its inverse, extraversion) are often thought to operate on a single continuum rather than on a spectrum as was imagined by Jung and other pioneers of personality-based models of psychology. People often talk of themselves or others as being an ‘introvert’ or an ‘extravert’ as if that was the end of a conversation rather than the beginning of one. For much of my life I’ve considered myself an introvert, but have over the years begun to recognise the ways in which I am both and neither, depending on my situation.
Of course, much of the theoretical work surrounding introversion, extraversion and other personality-types have largely been abandoned for more fluid and less categorical methods of understanding personality. It still seems to remain, for some of us, at the very least, a potent conceptual model with which to understand ourselves and our ways of existing within society.
