He Who Doesn't Know Says, 'Lentils' – Balckwell Round-Up 2024
December 17, 2024
I have, over the past several months, started and not finished several essays about my new profession as an apprentice carpenter. In the first attempt, I approached the topic from a personal, psychological angle, exploring the way that finally acquiring a full-time job and working with real people has allowed me to cast away my incessant feelings of guilt and shame and accept myself as a “real human being.” The essay began like this:
It appears that in a very short amount of time I have gone from being the biggest loser to ever waste space on this planet to a productive citizen employing his physical capacities in service of the Publick Good. Two questions remain: How did such a radical transformation occur? And in whose imagination?
I wrote this opening, titled the essay Anti-Oblomov (in reference to the novel Oblomov which I discussed extensively here and here) and then went on my merry way. When I returned, I started writing about this supposedly rapid transformation, only to realize that it was all an illusion. I further realized that my former view of myself as a hopeless loser is far better elucidated in my novels (Only In Dreams and the as-yet-unfinished-and-therefore-unreleased Pierre & The Ambiguities, or Knights Snails, & Plastic Boogie (working title)) — and that, in fact, that view itself always co-existed with the opposing view of myself as The Greatest Novelist of Our Times, which often made me feel a little better (and sometimes worse.)
As often happens, I had written something that I found funny but wasn’t exactly true, included a stupid joke for myself in the form of the “Publick Good”, and then assumed that I would be able to pick up the pieces later. Well, that didn’t happen!
In the second attempt, I took a more comedic, detached approach. I called it, What Goes on Inside of a Building? It began with these paragraphs:
I spend the vast majority of my time inside of buildings. I think this is likely true for many of my readers as well.
When we’re not inside of buildings, we’re passing by buildings. We’re driving past buildings and walking past buildings, and sometimes even flying past buildings. We may, on occasion, even bicycle or scooter past some buildings. A select few of us skateboard past buildings. I believe these are all the ways in which people pass by buildings.
From the outside, a building is a collection of walls. These walls contain windows and doors. The walls may be flat, but most of the time they have sticky-out bits somewhere on them. When it comes to roofs, some are gabled, and some are so flat you can land a helicopter on them. Buildings, it may be said, come in many shapes and sizes. Any worthwhile geometer will tell you that it would be foolish to say that buildings come in all shapes and sizes.
I would then go on to describe four of my “findings” since becoming a person who walks into a lot of buildings and deals with the parts of them that most people don’t see or think about. This was inspired by recent blogs by suboptimalism which deal with the nature of his “professions.”
When I say, “I would then go on to describe four of my findings,” I mean that I wrote four headings, only to get a few paragraphs into the first before boring myself. Well, what can you do? I don’t want to write about my job. I’m out there doing it for 40+ hours a week.
Here’s a funny thing about jobs: I think most people are curious about other people’s jobs, and can’t properly imagine what they look like day-to-day. Every job contains interesting aspects and surprising quirks. However, these aspects and quirks immediately become commonplace when you actually do the job, to the point where you don’t feel like mentioning them to anyone. If I were not a carpenter right now, I would probably be curious about the experience of becoming an apprentice carpenter at 29 years old. However, having just gone through it, I’m a little bored of the topic.
See, therein lies the rub. I am interested in other people’s lives. I am interested even in the parts of other people’s lives that they don’t think are particularly interesting. It’s nice to find out how people live. This leads me logically to the conclusion that other people might be interested to know how I live. I live in an oft-forgotten, underpopulated province known for extreme temperatures, doing a job that involves building and un-building objects that many people take for granted. The only problem is that I can’t write about any of it without boring myself.
The failure of these two essays to materialize reminded me of an idea I had last year which I named the Balckwell Round-Up. The idea was to compile unfinished fragments that I liked and post them all together during a week when I couldn’t come up with anything new. The edition I compiled last year sat around too long, until I finally grew sick of its contents. But the name — along with its corresponding idea — stuck in my head. And thus, I would like to introduce
The Balckwell Round-Up: 2024 Edition
in which I present to you unfinishable fragments from the year 2024, with accompanying commentary.1
A few months ago, I found myself repeatedly watching the music video for the song “This Kiss” by Faith Hill. This led me to compose this fragment:
My enduring memory of “This Kiss” is hearing it on the radio in the car while running errands with my mom during the time when I was the only child in our household not yet attending school. At the time, I couldn’t figure out what was being sung during the chorus, at the part when she says, “This kiss! This kiss!” These words remained a total mystery to me for over a decade.
Once I learned the name of the song, I could accurately sing it to myself. I would guess that I did this around once a year. It wasn’t really a song I thought about often. However, every time I thought about it, I remembered sitting in the car for what felt like a long time in some mysterious location while people bustled around us. Using my now-developed skills of deduction, I can say that it’s likely we were getting an oil change.
As I watched the music video for “This Kiss” for the first time a few weeks ago, consciously perceiving the lyrics to the song, I was suddenly struck by the nascent desire to act like a blogger from the early 00s. The song, a breakthrough hit from a country star with a corny 90s CG music video, felt like perfect fodder for the type of “satire” that I loved to read as a pre-teen, where young men would construct written “criticisms” of popular songs and/or music videos, pointing out the inaccuracies or inadequacies of their lyrics, along with baffling directorial decisions. (This eventually hit The Big Time (in Canada at least) with the MuchMusic TV program “Video on Trial.”) Sometimes, the blogger would even go so far as dissecting the song line-by-line, providing what was essentially a live commentary for the song.
I have decided to indulge myself: what follows is a single comment regarding the lyrics of “This Kiss” by Faith Hill.
“It’s centrifugal motion. It’s perpetual bliss.”
Centrifugal motion is when an object moves away from a centre. Probably a more accurate term for what she’s describing would be centripetal motion: that is, motion towards a centre. A kiss is, after all, the result of two entities moving toward, not away from, each other.
This change would also provide some fun consonance between the words “centripetal” and “perpetual.”
Ah… subliminal!
It’s hard to describe exactly the sensation that watching the music video to “This Kiss” over and over created within me. This fragment makes it seem like I only wanted to lampoon the song, but the truth is that I think it’s an amazing piece of work — miles better than any of her other hit singles.
As I referenced in the attempt at an introduction, the video, the song, and Faith Hill’s appearance itself is so reminiscent of my shadow-view of the 90s as someone whose first awareness of years having numbers was everyone getting excited about the new millennium. Unlike some others, I don’t allow this fuzzy feeling to trick myself into believing there was actually anything special about the 90s or the early 2000s. It just happened to be the time when I was a little child.
This song lies at the intersection of several topics, none of which I feel capable of elaborating into a full-sized essay, or even any proper piece of writing. The best I can do is what I’m doing now, which is gesture at a potential explanation that I can never give. Sometimes a song just captures you. As someone who writes, I always wish to transform this being captured into some sort of idea that I can communicate to others; I want to make the song mean something to you, as well. But, I can’t — or, at least, I haven’t yet figured out how.
My wife, who is two years younger than me, loves to comment about how things just “aren’t like they used to be.” Whenever I accidentally let her start talking about cars, she says something like, “They don’t make ’em like they used to.2” In this particular instance, she is correct. However, she often takes it a little too far.
In response, I wrote an introduction to an essay titled ENOUGH HEARKENING! which goes like this:
ENOUGH HEARKENING!
For as long as there has been a past, there have been people hearkening back to it, and for as long as there will continue to be a present, there will be people comparing it to the past, via hearkening.
Hearkening! It’s wherever you look, and wherever you go. You may think such a phenomenon would be restricted to the aged, but this is not the case. Youtube comments for music videos from the year 2013 and even later are full of teenagers and even pre-teens hearkening back to the music of their youth, “when music was real.” If unsatisfied with music even that modern, they can comment on videos from the early 2000s, and 1990s, or heck, even the 1960s, and decry that they were “born in the wrong generation.”
It seems to me that I am entering the exact phase in my life when hearkening back to the past no longer holds any appeal. I have outgrown my youthful romanticism that posited the existence of a past world much more pleasant and sensible than our own; and I am too young yet to begin hearkening toward the age of my childhood, which appears to me just as silly now as it did then.
And so where does that leave me? With no grand plans for the future and no great reverence for the past, I am left only right here in the present. Many decry our times as “unprecedented,” or else attempt to identify them precisely with historical precedents. Many note the incongruity between past barbarism and present civility, or past civility and present barbarism. History is a scrap heap from which we may salvage the material necessary to repair our lives and our age…
I’m not entirely sure where I was going with that last sentence, but it reminds me of an even shorter fragment that I believe I tore out of an essay I wrote years ago and copy-pasted into my word processor, only to realize that I have no use for it:
anyone with clear ideals lives to see those ideals create something completely outside of their intention, and people without ideals push forward terrible acts for the sake of their own self-interest. and those two things combined make History
In a similar vein, I wrote a whole essay about Karl Marx this year (or maybe last year) that I didn’t publish because I don’t it think offers any particular insights into the matter, but I do have a special fondness for this particular sentence:
Economics, in most cases, is about having fun with math. Economists are people who like math and want to get paid, as opposed to pure mathematicians, who are people who like math and don’t much care if they get paid or not.
and, now that we mention it :
You reach the point where we are now: where economists on TV talk about the Economy in the same way that Hegelians talk about Consciousness.
In order to prove to my loyal readers that they truly do not want to read this essay, here is a snapshot of a paragraph near the conclusion:
Hegel and Marx end up trapping us in is this problem of agency: am I supposed to be pushing forward the transformation of consciousness and/or the economy, or is it pushing itself? Is it pushing me? Am I being pushed as I push it — is my pushing only the result of my being pushed, such that the Concepts behind it all are simply using me as a medium by which to, finally, push themselves? Who is in control here?
This follows these paragraphs in which I ask far too many rhetorical questions:
But is the galaxy moving in a circle, or is it going somewhere? That is to say: is the technological and/or philosophical progression that Hegel observed simply part of an even grander cycle that he is unable to cognize? Has he noticed that the Earth revolves around the Sun, only to fail to notice that the Sun itself is caught in some form of orbit?
Is our grand attempt to mould history into a linear narrative utterly futile? Is Historicism itself a mere illusion? Can something be born which will not die? Are we able to admit to ourselves that there is no such thing as “true” change, that there is nothing that can be done which is permanent in any shape and form, and that just as we are born so too will we die?
Too much coffee, is all I can say about that.
Here is a fragment from the summer, when we were having car troubles (which later materialized on this website in the section about car troubles in the essay Problems and Proverbs in the Canadian Prairies):
“Inshallah”
When my wife was growing up in an Islamic elementary school, the students were all taught to affix the phrase “inshallah” to any positive comment about the future. “Inshallah” means “God-willing,” and the idea is that the future is knowable only to God, so to presume any knowledge about or control over the future is to put one’s self on God’s level. If we want something good to happen, we have to pray to God and let Him decide whether or not it will happen.3
This is similar to the Western idea of “jinxing” something by talking about it beforehand. “Jinxing” doesn’t actually make any sense; by which I mean, it doesn’t have any sort of metaphysical principle behind it. It doesn’t refer to a God that makes things we talk about not happen, but instead indirectly and absent-mindedly points toward a Greek sense of tragic fate, where people’s words and their future exist in an often-fraught relationship.
Last week, I was texting my wife about the results of our car’s most recent visit to the service shop. I began,
“he can do it next Thurs.
i will be so so so happy when this is over because each step just makes me more and more stressed”I began to type my next sentence, “Friday I will go to the insurance place,” briefly imagining that the inspection on Thursday would go perfectly well and our car would be ready to be insured. Suddenly I was overcome by a spell of superstition. Over the past month or so, many unexpected problems had befallen us in the midst of our Car Troubles, and each visit to the service shop had introduced new wrinkles to the problem. I wanted to communicate my intention to take the car to the insurance place on Friday, but I didn’t want to presume too much, lest it fall back on me. So the message I ended up sending was,
“Friday I will go to the insurance place inshallah.”
I tried to build an essay around this fragment, which I called A Mantra For All Seasons, and was about various mantras and phrases that I like or dislike. However, it turns out that I didn’t really have anything to say about that particular topic. And I still don’t!
The following exchange is from the novel Bodhisattva by Ishikawa Jun:
“Is there any human habit more nasty than eating?”
“You think there’s something despicable about food?”
“No, on the contrary, I feel insulted when I realize how much I enjoy it.”
This takes the place of an essay I wanted to write about food.
Send some more of those bad boys up!
This is something a child yelled during the Canada Day fireworks show on the South Saskatchewan River.
CONCLUSION:
I can now enter 2025 lightened of this load of fragments that have been weighing upon my shoulders. In a few weeks, I still start a new, blank document entitled “2025 Essays,” leaving all this lying in its past-heap.
1. The idea of providing commentary was inspired by saddleblasters‘ post, “A Saddle Forgotten,” subtitled “Saddles old and new meet in dialogue for the first time”
2. In a recent conversation with a coworker, I was able to feign car knowledge via an appropriate deployment of this phrase.
3. Since writing this fragment, my wife let me know of an alternative use of this phrase. Similar to “We’ll see,” it is used by parents to indirectly nix the requests of their children, e.g. “Can I have a sleepover with my cousins next weekend?” “Inshallah. [Translation: No.]"