Noise & Technology

I have just turned music back on. A Manu Katche jazz album I've written about before.. The music is accompaniment to my writing and blots out some of the white noise produced by a network switch in my classroom. That thing's driving me crazy.

The switch have hung in a box on the wall of this classroom since before I took up residence in 2011, but early this year the tech folks replaced an old unit with a new one. The fan on this new one runs constantly and it is loud. I've just measured it at about fifty decibels. That's not technically loud, but is like a window air conditioner run all day long. The noise pulls me away from reading and writing.

I've asked the technology people for a fix, but they say it's not loud. Oh, well, in that case. I pressed them further, saying, it is loud in a classroom where we try to concentrate. They said, nothing we can do about it.

So it goes with technology. I'm to accept it without complaint. Or with complaint. Either way, I am to accept it, but I don't. This is not the way things ought to be.

I'm trying to read Wendell Berry's essay "Faustian Economics" which would be difficult for me in a silent room and is stretching my limits with that network switch running. One quote I've hung onto is this:

Our true religion is a sort of autistic industrialism. People of intelligence and ability seem now to be genuinely embarrassed by any solution to any problem that does not involve high technology, a great expenditure of energy, or a big machine. &endash; The World-Ending Fire, 209.

It is also embarrassing when someone questions the machines, technology, and constant burning of energy. The network switch is necessary for moving internet bits about the school. Live with it and stop complaining.

More and more I'm less interested in living with things that don't seem worth the sacrifices they demand. Music and writing, yes. A lot of technology and noise, no. There are other ways to live and most of the good ones are evident in our history and the traditions we all too often abandon.

I'll return to Wendell Berry now, as best I can with that switch's fan running. It would be bad for me to go up there and unplug it. Terrible in fact. It would be a violation of our true religion. Hmm, come to think of it, that sounds like fun.

Sick Leave

This is the first I've sat at the computer to write in days. I caught a cold last week that, while we were in Vermont, turned into something quite awful. I couldn't drive us home Sunday and spent Monday on the couch passing in and out of sleep, sneezing, barking a wet cough, and wheezing. This morning I am foggy, but able to sit and type while listening to music. Doesn't sound like much, but it's a world of improvement.

Throughout the sickness I maintained the habit of writing three Morning Pages each day. The pages are in my basement office and I'm too tired to go inspect them. Good. There's almost nothing in them. I wrote how sick I was and how far from finishing each day's pages. I trudged through those pages.

Is there a point to that kind of thing? Yes and no. Start with no.

Nothing of consequence came out of the words on those pages. Nothing in them will come out and become some new piece of writing. Nothing. Not a word. Four days of pages like that means over three-thousand words of nothing. I should have slept instead.

But I don't really believe any of that

As of this morning, I've done 1,747 days in a row of Morning Pages. Even sick and completely fogged over, I wrote three pages. The exact number of days is unimportant, but that many days adds up to a feeling. The habit of beginning each day with writing has become so important I do it even when sick and far from home. This isn't willpower. It's that it has become a reflex, a comforting habit.

Another habit I have been trying to establish is posting to the blog each day. Well, I blew that this weekend. I couldn't get a good piece together when I was that sick. Three things come to mind about that:

One: I can return to posting now that I'm healthy. There's no penalty for having missed a couple days. No one is grading this. I can forgive and understand the lapse. To suffer guilt or give up are the acts of a fool.

Two: Technology gets in the way. Morning Pages continued because pen and paper are simple. Blogging requires all sorts of mediation. I didn't bring a computer on vacation because I wanted to be with my family. The first morning at the hotel, I used a computer in the lobby. By the second morning I was too sick to go down there. Paper and pen are always available. Computers and wifi, not so much.

Three: I should bank a few blog entries to draw on in times of trouble.

I'm getting healthier and understanding things about myself and about writing as I go. Being sick yesterday I read, slept, and daydreamed. I found a possible approach to a book idea I've toyed with for years. The idea has to do with Morning Pages, health, and the ways in which the two feed off one another.

It feels good to be back to blogging. It feels good to have stayed with Morning Pages. It feels good to have shed the worst effects of this cold and to know that things will get better with each passing day. Mostly it feels great to know that I'm still a writer in sickness and health, until death do us part.

Good Tools In Times Of Trouble

Part of my thinking about good tools is that something ought to work well and endure in times when so much is breaking down. Increasingly I demand my tools be designed to avoid obsolescence, free me from electronic connections, and help me do good work.

Last night we took my daughter's failing iPad back to the Apple store. A woman there reset the device, but I suspect we will be back in a month to exchange it. Most electronics are poorly made and we are patsies to believe that they are good tools.

Yet as I waited at the store I felt the desire for a tablet, a new phone, a fresh laptop to make me feel better. I wondered how I had gone so long without new electronics. These half-baked thoughts rose in the overheated oven of my brain. Fortunately, the reset done, we left before I could make any mistakes.

Later, in bed, these ideas forming, I wrote the bones of this with a felt-tip pen on post-its. I thought about my phone plugged in downstairs. Had it have been next to me I could have dictated the note without even sitting up. The ease! The convenience! But my post-it was strictly between me and myself. It was done in solitude without mediation. I was unplugged from the networks — actually, I was listening to Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny on my Google Home, but the writing was at least unplugged — and connected with myself and my ideas.

Compare pen and paper to phone in terms of Wendell Berry's nine rules for new tools. Pen and paper are (1) cheaper than the phone, (2) smaller in scale, (3) do the work better, (4) use less energy (though I dislike the pen being disposable), (5) are powered by me, (6) do not require repair, (7) can be purchased near my home, and (9) do not disrupt my thinking or connections to the world. The pen and paper fail only in that (8) they are not made locally.

Implicit in Berry's rules is the simplicity of good tools. Consider the tools a carpenter wears on her belt: hammer, tape measure, pencil, razor knife, and square. She goes to the truck for more complex tools (sawzall, air nailer, theodolite, and screw gun), but the essentials she keeps at hand. Those tools are likely old because they and endure. In any craft the essential tools are simple and enduring: a chef's knife, an artist's palette, a writer's pen, a tailor's needle and thread, a doctor's stethoscope, and a coach's stop watch.

There are always specialized instruments but these give way to the basics of the trade or art. Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny is a master of the guitar synthesizer but he returns to six strings and exquisitely crafted wood, a purer form that mesmerizes.

I don't need an iPad, new laptop, or "upgraded" phone. I need the constant and regular return to pen and paper, the unmediated experience of creation done with good and necessary tools that open me to my best work and lead me to more interesting places than stores which can't sell anything to fix what really ails me.

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The Wendell Berry essay from which I borrowed the rules for good tools can be found here.