Good Things I Read In 2022

games, beliefs, bullshit, meaning, writing, joy, adultery

I didn’t count, but it seems like I probably read fewer books this year than any in recent memory—maybe any year since high school. I feel surprisingly okay about this, which is a marker of how much my relationship with reading has changed. Especially lately, a lot of the sedentary time I might have once spent reading has been replaced by inquiries of the kind I’ve been describing here, sometimes written, sometimes just felt through. My younger self would have found this solipsistic and dangerously boring, in the sense of “unlikely to make me an interesting person that other people would want to spend time with.” I think I disagree.

It seems like another reason I didn’t read as much this year is that books are affecting me differently than they used to. They seem more intense. Getting some new insight on a topic I’ve been thinking about makes me too excited to want to sit still, and books are literally full of these things. When it comes to novels, I’ve become more conscious lately of the degree to which they afflict me with whatever worldview the story is operating from. That can be fun and important, but it’s powerful, and I’m having a seemingly new experience of feeling frustrated when writers don’t wield this power with real care (almost like they don’t believe they have it).

Maybe I’m a bit resentful of books, after having spent years maintaining a myth that they were the conduit of everything that mattered. But this is probably temporary. I anticipate a lot more reading happening in the new year, with perhaps marginally less flailing around on the couch.

Here’s a short list of some things I did interact with this year (not all books, not all text) that moved me or changed my brain in some way.

Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, James P. Carse

Very few books have affected me this strongly. First of all just a remarkable act of composition, starting from two definitions (“A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”) and organically building a compelling (probably not airtight but it doesn’t really matter) philosophical picture that ends up illuminating terms like society, nature, art, the state, and the violence of explanations. Most memorably to me, there’s some really elegant descriptions of the ways humans choose to impose limits on themselves (in development, in play, in relationships) and then choose to forget that they’ve chosen those limits. Sorta like game/play theory as existentialist operating system. This book initiated changes in my basic phenomenology that will likely not be undone.

“The Stability of Beliefs” (1952), Michael Polanyi (requires JSTOR access unfortunately)

Polanyi was a Hungarian-British polymath who argued that his own belief and participation in science was a personal commitment that could be elaborated and defended in various ways, but never fully justified through facts or rational argument. Or, as he puts it in this lecture: “I hold that the propositions embodied in natural science are not derived by any definite rule from the data of experience, and that they can neither be verified nor falsified by experience according to any definite rule.” He thought this was true of all belief systems (but wasn’t an inherent problem).

Polanyi gives maybe the clearest description I’ve found of how conceptual frameworks perpetuate and entrench themselves. The core point for me:

So long as we use a certain language, all questions that we can ask will have to be formulated in it and will thereby confirm the theory of the universe which is implied in the vocabulary and structure of the language. It follows that we cannot state without self-contradiction within a language any doubt in respect to the theory implied by the language. The only way to dissent from the theory of the universe implied in a language is to abandon some of its vocabulary and to learn to speak a new language instead.

This helped me understand why spiritual teachers so often deploy paradox: they’re trying to knock the student out of the language that structures their perceptions. And why it’s a really good idea to periodically oppose conceptual frameworks with doses of noise, rather than “arguments” in the same language: arguments in the same language just tend to strengthen the underlying assumptions.

So long as each objection is defeated in its turn, its effect is to strengthen the fundamental convictions against which it was raised. 'Let the reader consider (writes Evans-Pritchard) any argument that would utterly demolish all Zande claims for the power of the oracle. If it were translated in Zande modes of thought it would serve to support their entire structure of belief.' Thus the circularity of a conceptual system tends to reinforce itself by every contact with a fresh topic.

Points indirectly to the value of letting conceptual involvement relax, instead of trying to fight your way out of a system using its own tools.

“Calling Bullshit on Enlightenment: A Polemic,” Halliday Dresser

A bracing read for anyone stretching after any form of Enlightenment, practicing in a tradition where this idea has been used to point to the fruits, or prone to feeling envious or intimidated by people who claim to have found The Best, Most Truest Thing That Could Ever Happen To Anyone. My favorite passage:

When we cling to it, when we imagine it “has happened” or “will happen,” we are as far from it as can be.  The more we cling, the more we grasp, the more we try to convince others of our wisdom, the more we drive it away from us, and from our friends (and everybody).  It is when we let it arise; when we turn away from awakening and knowingly become our best deluded selves, do the best that we can within delusion, that awakening has a chance to flower in our lives.

Been learning this the hard way.

John Vervaeke on Awakening From the Meaning Crisis. 5-part interview series on The Jim Rutt Show.

John Vervaeke, a cognitive scientist and philosopher, has made a stir on the so-called liminal web with his YouTube series on the meaning crisis. I have questions about some of the sweeping claims he makes about historical transitions—largely rooted in not having read much else about them—but in general, my experience of listening to him talk is of a lot of things I think about very frequently (introspection, meaning, meditation, psychedelics, shamanism, ritual, what “awareness” is, what we lost when we lost religion and why we lost it) clicking into new tectonic alignments that make radically more sense. This series with Jim Rutt attempts to condense fifty lectures into five interviews, and it does a surprisingly good job at that.

Hate Writing Less. Online course by Sasha Chapin.

This course played an important role in my starting this newsletter (which I’m happy about). It helped me adjust some of the largely unconscious attitudes I was bringing to writing, and I do indeed hate writing substantially less now. Two big low-hanging-fruit-type revelations were the anti-grinding principle (I’d summarize as “don’t reject the words in your head, just write them down”) and what he calls the entertainer mindset. Basically: one way to play the writing game is simply to connect with the reader however you know how. There are a million ways to do this. You don’t necessarily need above-average intelligence, vast knowledge, an extensive vocabulary, searing takes, or whatever other secondary stuff you may have been taught constitute good writing. Maybe just being human is a pretty good basis for communicating with other humans.

These things might sound painfully obvious, but, I guess I am pretty dumb. If you dislike and avoid writing despite also conceiving it as an important or desirable part of your life, you might be dumb in similar ways. The course is limited release and each new posting seems to sell out in less than a day, so if you’re interested I think you have to sign up for his newsletter (linked above).

The Children’s Bach, Helen Garner

Gorgeous crystalline novel that does the opposite of afflicting the reader with its worldview. I just realized I returned the copy I was borrowing, so I can’t share a passage, which would be the only good way of getting across what’s so special about this book. If/when I write fiction again, I want to learn to inhabit characters the way Garner does.

Joy: The Surrender to the Body and to Life, Alexander Lowen

I read this when I was just starting to develop a firsthand understanding of how some core beliefs are structured in my own body, and it did a lot for me. Lowen was the main bearer of the lineage of Wilhelm Reich, a disciple of Freud who made a radical break and created the bodywork tradition. Bodywork, as I understand it, uses deep breathing and other physical techniques in tandem with talk therapy to unblock flows of emotional sensation in the body, similar to some Vajrayana methods. Most fascinating are Lowen’s descriptions of what each emotion is like when it’s flowing freely (for instance, anger runs up the back, which he connects with a dog’s hackles) and the vignettes where he’ll explain how he could look at the way a patient carries himself and the shape of their body and immediately get a sense of where they’d cut off feeling in their system.

The astonishing thing is that this becomes pretty easy to notice in people once you know that it’s a thing to look for—or rather it seemed like something I’d always noticed and had feelings about but had never realized I was allowed to notice. Seems like we all just go around politely unseeing the emotional amputations written in people’s bodies, as if this could keep them from seeing ours. The discovery of this way of seeing was quite disturbing to me, and then it was terrifically poignant, and now it’s more like a mix. I don’t advise adopting it very much of the time.

I had a harder time appreciating the Biblical-mythic frame Lowen brings to things—he talks a lot about childhood as the garden of Eden and the child’s conflict-driven move to cut off their own feelings as the Fall, and that’s resonant enough but at times he seems to see it as more than a metaphor, and I think it contributes to an overall vibe of failing to appreciate the diversity and resourcefulness of his patients’ defenses, of seeing trauma as inherently bad, a little as if an arborist were to adopt a tragic attitude toward the rings in trees. There is an extremely sad portion toward the end where he talks about how over the course of his life (he was born in 1910 and the book was published in 1995) he watched the average person on the street and in his practice become drastically more anxious, more folded in on themselves, less capable of laughing or shouting or moving freely: in a word, less joyful. This trend does not seem to have abated in 2022. Maybe next year.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence

Imagine if what I just summarized about the Lowen book was expressed in a novel that is also an adultery romance set in a mining town in early 20th century England. This book remains brutally true in what it has to say about the relationship between industrialization and sexual repression. It also remains super hot. I cried a lot reading it, especially toward the end. It’s made me curious to read more about Lawrence and to find out why the words “mystic” and “fascist” are both sometimes used in describing him.

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Stay warm and see you in the new year,

Andrew

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