how to live in the moment #2
If writing is selection, is
literature like curationhow to use restraint
Sometimes, audio is the superior medium. It’s easy to forget this because audio is often just a supplement or alternative to video. The audio show Random Tape is a good reminder. It’s a collection of audio recordings that don’t have much to do with each other than having all fallen into the hands of man named David Weinberg. I cherish it as a testament to the power of pure audio as a medium.
Recently during my routine cleaning of Google storage forced by their 15GB max and my determination to stay in the free tier, I came across a video that was all black. It was 1 minute and 34 seconds long and had retained its place in my Google Photos purely due to its audio. I had recorded it purposefully with my phone in my pocket during a recent Christmas trip I took with my mom and younger sister to Puerto Vallarta. In it you can hear only our voices and the sound of the beach. So I lifted the audio and scrapped the video, reducing the file’s size 100 times. Here it is:
Inspired, I tried the same for a video I took that same trip of a live band at River Cafe, where we had dinner. It was blurry, a bit shaky, and not much to look at. I figured keeping just the audio would be a good compromise. Footage of the band lost, but their music conserved and in a much smaller file. But then I listened to it and realized that I liked it better as pure sound. It wasn’t a compromise, it was an improvement.
Admittedly, part of my satisfaction was in finding an efficient way to conserve the memory without paying for cloud storage. But I think the audio version is better because it omits sensory details – visual, in this case – that would’ve otherwise made the moment seem more ordinary. By making it difficult to know exactly what is going on in the scene, by slightly disorienting the listener, and by forcing them to sharpen their focus on the limited source of sensory information, the audio version heightens the feeling of being transported to a particular place and time. Feeling around to get a grip on what’s going on, you find yourself pulled in.
A writer creates meaning in collaboration with the reader by manipulating their attention. They curate bits of experience and bring them into sensory focus for the reader to notice and experience. The literary writer’s job isn’t to explain experience, but to
simulate itand thereby provoke the reader to reckon from it their own understanding.
Making art is in part an act of calibration. Creating
secondhand experiencesdepends on the omission of details just like it does on their inclusion. A good writer, a good storyteller, a good filmmaker, good artists of all kinds withhold things from us so that we lean in closer, listen more carefully, read between the lines. An artist’s greatest resource is not words, images, sound, or any of the elements of their craft. Their greatest resource is the human body, the magnificent biochemical machine wherein all experience real or artifical takes place. Artists use their own to intuit what stimulus and how much of it will evoke something in their audience’s brains and bodies. Insufficent information renders a blurry image, but so does excess. Clarity lies in between.
? This is easy to notice about storytelling. From an infinite stream of events and evergrowing crowds of people, the writer plucks out a chosen few to construct their narrative. But this is also true at the elemental level of words and sentences. Of all the action and detail available for depiction in a scene, the writer says very little. Good literature distills from life the beautiful and the resonant normally diluted in a sea of mundanity.
Reading good books is practice in looking through this lens at your own life. Practice in noticing the beauty that hides in plain sight. Even more so if you try writing about it as well. You need nothing but experience of living and the words in your head. Cast your attention out into the world like a fishing line and wait until you notice something. A tug from the subconscious. Something stirring your curiosity. What is it? Is it the sunlight? The colors, the sound of the breeze? The oddly pleasing way the shapes arrange themselves?
Art is a means for capturing these moments. Take a picture, draw the scene, put it in words. What you produce is an observation not of objective reality but of subjective experience. Like the jarring of a firefly, you’ve taken from the vastness a little treasure so that the magic of that moment might endure a little longer. Something for the future, for yourself and to share with others. But you’re also doing something now. You’re enjoying the act of living.