Stories & Soliloquies

Stories & Soliloquies
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  • Tag: metaphor

    • When You Climb a Mountain, the Descent is the Hardest Part

      Posted at 12:00 pm by Michelle Joelle, on August 27, 2014

      Those of you who follow my posts know that I’ve been struggling with my writing lately. A week or so ago, I drew an analogy between writing a paper and chopping down a tree (when really you should be climbing it). It was appropriately rough, performing its own confusion and frustration. Well, I’ve finished the paper that inspired that post, and now that it’s off my mind, I thought I’d try another metaphor. Writing, especially academic writing, isn’t so much like trying to see the forest for the trees (I’m starting to think that’s research and note taking) as it is like trying to climb a mountain.

      Gros Morne

      You know there’s something awesome at the top, but you have to climb your way up there. It’s hard, but you like climbing. You like to hear your heart beating in your ears as you get progressively colder, you like to stop and look around at the progress you’ve made, and always, you’re pushing yourself to get to the top. It’s hard, but you know you just have to battle your way through.

      71

      Writing a first draft is a lot like this. Sometimes you have to just press on, even though the road is steep and the path is coming loose beneath your feet. You know where you want to get, and so you just keep putting one foot in front of the other, spurred on by the promise of the progress you’ve already made.

      75

      And you’ve put so much work in, and you’ve come this far, so it’s not like you’re really going to turn back.

      Croagh Patrick

      And so you keep pushing, even if you’re tired, even if you’re not really sure you like climbing anymore, even though you’re now so high up that you’re wearing winter gear in the middle of August, eyeing up the Arctic plant life.

      Back on Gros Morne

      And then finally, it happens. You reach the summit, and oh, you are proud of yourself. You’ve reached the point where everything is on the table, and you’ve made it to your conclusion, and you know just what you’ve been trying to say all along. The view is spectacular, and there’s nothing between you and the lay of the land.

      77

      But sometimes, once you’re done celebrating and actually stop to take in the view, what you see when you get there isn’t all that exciting. Sometimes all you see is the same stuff you saw on the way up. Sometimes you don’t see anything at all.

      Croagh Patrick

      Oh. Say, where’s that view I was promised?

      Croagh Patrick

      Sometimes you get to the end of a paper, and you realize that all you’ve done is confuse yourself further. You squint and you wait for the fog to clear, but sometimes it doesn’t. There’s always something gained in writing your way through confusion though, even if you don’t come away with any clarity.

      That’s what editing is for, and that’s why editing is where the real work happens; it’s the descent. When you climb a mountain – even a small one like the ones I’ve climbed – you have a certain momentum on the way up, an exhilaration that keeps you pushing forward. The descent seems like it should be easier – after all, you’re no longer climbing, but heading downhill, no longer generating new ideas, but making changes to existing material.

      But when you’ve just climbed a mountain, and your muscles are aching, and your knee hurts, the descent can be utter torture. Going down a mountain is often far more difficult that climbing it. It can be boring and repetitive, as you only see where you’ve already been, and you get to cringe in anticipatory agony when you know what’s coming next is steep and loosely structured. Sometimes you have to take an entirely new path, and it feels like you’re right back where you started.

      But what you gain on the way down, on every painful step, lowering yourself down slowly and gingerly, is clarity. You start to understand the mountain. You’re no longer looking up at the summit, but retracing your steps with greater care and attention than you gave them on your way up.

      And that’s when you can see the beauty.

      Delphi Weekend 112

      That’s when you glimpse truths and ideas you didn’t even know you had in you.

      80

      You get to luxuriate in passages you raced through without thinking, appreciating them more now that you’ve been to the top and know how essential they are to the project.

      81

      Or you turn a different corner, forging a new path, and look out at truths that you couldn’t see on your way up, but that you would never have gotten to if you hadn’t made it to the top.

      84

      It’s a bit like getting to your conclusion and realizing that your argument was something else entirely. You didn’t see it as your were writing, but you would never have made that realization if you hadn’t written your way through.

      82

      85

      When you feel that ache and that exhaustion, when you’re leaving your wondrous conclusion behind, that’s when you’re really able to see what you had in you all along.

      87

      And sometimes, it feels like magic.

      Posted in Essays | 3 Comments | Tagged climbing, editing, metaphor, mountains, photography, writing
    • Philosophy: A Fruitless Endeavor?

      Posted at 11:45 am by Michelle Joelle, on June 2, 2014

      I’ve been reading a lot of comments on articles about philosophy and science that seem to be seeking the worth of philosophy in whether or not it currently contributes anything substantive to the natural sciences. While I expect this from those who are aiming to show that philosophy is obsolete, I’m puzzled by the many defenders of philosophy who also follow this path, thereby reifying the idea that science is the be-all and end-all of intellectual inquiry – essentially saying that if a discipline is a science, it’s good, and if it’s not, it’s bad.

      But philosophy’s contribution to science isn’t that it helps us find answers to specific physical questions. Its contribution isn’t that it performs scientific inquiry, its contribution is that scientific inquiry exists at all. Philosophy isn’t worthwhile because it can do what science does, it’s worthwhile because it gave us science.

      That doesn’t mean, as many claim, that it’s job is over. It continues to look for new ways of thinking about causality, about subjectivity, and about bridging interdisciplinary gaps. Philosophy also gave us theology, psychology, aesthetics, logic, music theory, and more, and all of these disciplines are hugely important because they can discover things that philosophy cannot. But these discoveries don’t supplant philosophy, they actually make philosophy better.

      Instead of thinking of the value of academic disciplines as a continuum that starts out at “fruitless” and culminates in “science”, I prefer to think in terms of an orchard. An orchard starts with good, fertile soil, full of possibilities. Some of these possibilities will be realized, and some will fail to find a legitimate seed, or even if they don’t, they won’t receive enough sunlight, good air, and water. But many will grow into trees which will someday bear nutritious and delicious fruit. And the fruit will be what matters, because it is what is useful, and we will value the trees because they bear the fruit, and the sun and the air and the water because those are elements we can see and feel and understand easily.

      Random Stuff 010

      But that doesn’t mean we can forget the soil, because it’s also important. We cannot just grow trees and say that the soil has done its job and so we no longer need it. We cannot do away with the soil and expect the trees to still bear fruit.

      Luckily, the soil can be nourished, either by external care or by its own offspring, reincorporating fallen fruit that failed to be productive, or by trying something new (crop rotation is the metaphor here). Philosophy can gather false-starts in science and psychology and other disciplines, and evaluate where they went wrong, taking their assumptions and reorganizing them in case there’s something to salvage, some remaining possibility, or if there’s potentially some trouble ahead for other fruit which seems – so far – to be safe and sound.

      The point is that no one begrudges the soil for not producing fruit without the tree. The tree, the fruit, the sun, the water, the soil, the air, the seeds – they all work in a relationship. We don’t need to pick one at the expense of the other. Why then do we feel the need to pit science and philosophy against each other? Yes, philosophy by itself teams with sometimes fruitless unrealized possibility (and I so love this possibility), but science that neglects philosophy will eventually reach its limits. It’s only when we confuse the goals of the two that one or both will undoubtedly fail, but it’s not a necessary confusion.

      Random Stuff 023

      I don’t need philosophy to beat science at its own game, and no, I don’t know what philosophy will contribute next. I’m ok with that. I think it’s enough to try and keep the soil nourished and full of possibility, supporting other disciplines in their theoretical approaches and assumptions, and hopefully – if we can find just the right seeds – giving rise to new ones too.

      Posted in Essays | 28 Comments | Tagged interdisciplinary, metaphor, philosophy, possibility, science
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