Archive: Resolution, Confirmation, Intuition

As I'm working to write some new work to share, I'm digging into the archives of this project's inspiration, its first iteration from 2020-2021.

From Living Deliberately, Living Well 1.0, sometime in mid-June 2020.

At the beginning of 2020 I made just one New Year’s Resolution: follow the confirmations. To follow the confirmations is to try and see the world according to what’s working well and/or where I have a strong sense of seek out or avoid, and using these to see where to go next - what to write, what to read, how to prepare, what to do with my limited economies of energy and time. 

Following the confirmations in thinking and writing means that the piece itself is an expression of a bunch of different, interlinked and (probably) not linear elements that are collecting or coalescing around an idea.

In Catching the Big Fish, David Lynch suggests “asking the idea” what to do next:

The idea is the whole thing. If you stay true to the idea, it tells you everything you need to know, really. You just keep working to make it look like that idea looked, feel like it felt, sound like it sounded, and be the way it was. And it’s weird, because when you veer off, you sort of know it. You know when you’re doing something that is not correct because it feels incorrect. It says, “No, no; this isn’t like the idea said it was.” And when you’re getting into it the correct way, it feels correct. It’s an intuition: You feel-think your way through. You start in one place, and as you go, it gets more and more finely tuned. But all along it’s the idea talking. At some point, it feels correct to you. And you hope that it feels somewhat correct to others. (83)

Emphasizing intuition makes sense to me as a creative person, since I “feel-think” my way through lots of things, and especially my recent writing projects - even where these writing projects traffic in stricter formal requirements of argument, demonstration, and effective use of available evidence. Feeling-thinking is the thing confirming and the thing disconfirming: like, yeah this stuff about formal structures of deduction and proofs by absurdity in Badiou’s account of fidelity are really interesting, but the idea is bringing me back to rivers in the hymnal poetry of Hölderlin, so maybe I should go back to the poetry for a minute. It is like the idea is gently turning my whole head and thorax back in its direction; it’s not a shove, more of a suggestion that emerges from feeling like I can’t fit the current work into the shape I’ve been building.

Also, it’s kind of a relief because - and I state this publicly and for the record - negative proofs and proofs by absurdity are about my least favorite things in logic to think about.

I appreciate Lynch’s assertion that the idea has a life of its own, that it is something I’m partnering with and collaborating with and in conversation with. This also means that it isn’t my idea, that it isn’t springing fully-formed from my own head. This is a useful reminder, I think, and a way of keeping the ego in check on both ends - I don’t sit here and conjure brilliance in solitary, nor is my work merely rehashing what others have said. Rather, I engage with other thinkers by way of the sheaf of articles on my desk, and I find that I have something to say in conversation with them. This shows up in the form of marginal notes, usually, connecting the current reading with live wires to other readings or things I’ve worked through recently, threads to pick up after I’ve finished working on the thing in front of me (following a helpful mantra, finish one thing before starting another).

Lynch sometimes relies on an incredible checking stick to help him figure out “the next move.” He says intuition is a reasonable replacement to an incredible checking stick, but there’s an incredible checking stick for crying out loud!

To follow the confirmations or to be in a position to hear the idea requires a real reduction in existential static. If I’m trying to negotiate various pressures I might not be able to see the path forward or tune into the feeling-thinking at all, and the incredible checking stick - incredible as it may be - doesn’t have anything to focus on, doesn’t have anything to check. This is the corollary to escape velocity. Where escape velocity will allow me to find the trajectory that supports joyful creation, I first have to see that a trajectory is buried under all the static, getting drowned out by the noise.

Thanks very much for reading this, the sixth issue of Living Deliberately, Living Well.