Fighting Windmills

Considering connectedness and withdrawal, normalcy and weirdness, practicality and whimsy.

Once, someone I deeply respect commented on a mutual friend’s Instagram account: it was too head-in-the-clouds; it drove her crazy with the poetry and the ruminating and the photos of flowers. This woman I respect rolled her eyes while I offered a self-conscious laugh. I remember thinking, “Oh, this is how other people see her.” I remember thinking, with more than a hint of shame, “Be careful, lest you become her.”

I absorb these kinds of criticisms, make them a part of me for years and years. I liked this head-in-the-clouds person, and so did my friend. I liked that into a frantic stream of mostly nonsense, she offered a grainy photo of a bird on a windowsill. But after that conversation, I studied our friend’s Instagram account to make sure I was never that, whatever that was: romantic, impractical, woo-woo, out of touch. I made a mental note—I wouldn’t say “the big words” in public: nature, love, attention, meaning.

That was probably seven years ago. Still, I remind myself: for every time you say love, say policy; for every time you say God, say 401k. Paint a picture, but then go to the gym.

In this way, I committed to shielding myself from accusations of idealism, whimsy, sentimentalism. I would not be the Don Quixote of my friend group, spouting the rhetoric of chivalry and bravery, failing to sleep because I could not put down my books, attacking windmills I believed to be giants. I would remember to be Don Quixote’s trusty companion, down-to-earth Sancho Panza. (In my imagination, Don Quixote is hammering away on a vintage typewriter in his study while Sancho Panza drinks a frosty IPA and plays cornhole in the backyard. Guess who has more friends?)

It me.

I do recognize the feeling those kinds of Instagram accounts can evoke. I am drawn to poets who move at a slower pace than my feed, yet sometimes I want to whisper, “Oh, get a job. Oh, pick up a mop. Oh, deposit a paycheck that you earned—because you aren’t making money staring at dandelions.” Do something useful, I want to say. Be useful because I am useful.

This reaction is not just pride; it is also, I think, a meaningful corrective to 21^st-century navel gazing. Often the hidden message of modern “actualization” and “being” (as opposed to doing) is good old-fashioned self-absorption. To luxuriate in the big, meaningful words can be a means to evade collective responsibility. (Now that you are actualized, what of others?)

Surely we have choices other than (1) nurtured narcissism or (2) full compliance with an often-rotten set of conventions?

These days, I am wondering if there is a way to be out of touch (a user of big words, a poster of hummingbird photos and poems) without living inside an empire of self.

When I read the writers I love most, they are almost comically “out of touch”—Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, Marilynne Robinson, Katherine May, Annie Dillard, Richard Rohr. They are mystics and monks, recluses and ascetics. So many of them chose to live elsewhere by design, in a parallel world where the big words aren’t embarrassing. They have left the mainstream, yes, but they have replaced it not merely with ideas but with the humblest things: plants and birds and things they make with their hands.

When I read them, I am unfailingly left with the impression that these people know something I don’t.

What does it mean, anyway, to be “in touch”? It has to do with using employing the habits of the day: the clothing, the accessories, and most importantly the language. But the objects of the day are largely manufactured at the expense of someone unseen, and the language of the day is corrupted by its usefulness; it is the language of capitalism and profit and war. It is a language of industriousness, and the metaphors we inherited define us, both individually and collectively. We use language that signals our inclusion (without realizing we are doing so, without knowing the ways we are misunderstood). Modern language shapes us into machines, and in turn, we shape the world into machines.

These writers I love revive the big words that have nothing to do with profit or machinery (think: fulfillment, connectedness, wholeness) without a hint of solipsism.

It’s true that language that is big (and meaningful) is also slippery, and it’s true the rest of us are too lazy for the precision such weighty language demands. Why say “love” when we don’t know what it means? When we are awash in corrupt definitions? We cannot, like Annie Dillard, ground our big words in the muskrat-stalking weasel (because we are not paying attention to life, so we are least of all paying attention to the weasel).

Can a person abstain from the language, the culture of rush, the shared memes and reels for reasons other than self-preservation? Or, if that’s all it is—might intermittent self-preservation be an essential component of a society’s collective health?

I don’t know the answer.

Nature writer (and theologian) Fred Bahnson argues that, for some people, “the act of burrowing down into the concavity of the self becomes not so much a withdrawal as a fierce struggle for freedom. It becomes a battle against turning into the very forces that threaten us, an engagement of the highest level.”

I take some solace in the famed weirdness of most creative people. How strange was Mary Oliver, how strange still is Wendell Berry on his Kentucky farm. Maybe those writers I love aren’t actually “out of touch”; maybe they’re in touch with something (someplace? someone?) different.

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In Enchantment,

Katherine May

writes,

I have lost some fundamental part of my knowing, some elemental human feeling. Without it, the world feels like tap water left overnight, flat and chemical, devoid of life… I lack the words to even describe it, this vast unsettled sense that I am slipping over the glossy surface of things, afraid of what lies beneath.¹

Last week, thanks to a (scheduled) surgery, I spent a lot of time in bed. I was drowsy from pain pills, slipping in and out of alertness. And I was thinking constantly about this loss May describes. I had already made up my mind to relinquish my smartphone for the summer, some desperate attempt to find my way back to myself. It will be, I understand, the nail in the coffin of my social weirdness (in which metaphor, this newsletter is the coffin itself).

This is an experiment, and it may fail. Maybe there is nothing lofty on the other side of the internet.

But maybe there is something to be gained from going dark. Annie Dillard’s words return to me: “You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary.”

Is it too corny to miss the stars?

Do I have to care?

I want to stop feeling embarrassed about the bird in the Instagram feed, the soundless and still image in a deluge of dancing sound bites. I want to un-self-consciously offer a poem to the scroll of platitudes and diatribes.

But I can’t. I feel, like May, that I am missing the very thing I might have to offer.

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When I was in college, I refused to study creative writing. I was mortified on behalf of the poets and their flowing dresses and scarves and fedoras. I wanted to take them out for a night, show them a raunchy comedy in the theater, snap off their classical fugues and give them some greasy popcorn. I wanted them to relax.

I sat in the back of my poetry classes wearing a subtle sneer.² I felt sorry for the pitifully uncool aesthetes, rearranging verse on the page with such solemnity. I wondered if they had ever been on a date. I thought about how, in a couple of hours, I’d be in a bikini, tanning on the nearby beach.

I think I was wrong.

I think I might actually be a bird watcher, a tree hugger, a word rearranger. I think I wish I hadn’t gotten all those tans.

To be honest, I’m not actually sure who the adult version of me is, under all the noise. Whoever it is, I’m trying to be less embarrassed about her.

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I want to give up my smartphone, but I don’t want to do it out of fear. Not because I’m afraid of Big Bad Culture. I don’t admire the impulse to shield oneself from public discourse or even influence. I don’t think assimilation, to use the words and the images and the melodies of the culture we inhabit, is the problem. (For one thing, I watch the best and edgiest television next to a bawdy stream of Twitter commentary, and I freaking love it.)

I am actually just moving faster than I want to move, and I can’t do the creative work I want to do.

I am trying to work this out—can stepping outside culture be courage, not fear? Love, not false piety? An offering, not an acquisition? Instead of relying on the words and concepts our moment hands us, is there real, measurable value in slowing down and unburying the same words that have made sense as long as human beings have been alive, words like love and meaning? Is there value in doing the same things people have always done: planting plants, roasting carrots, watching stars?

Maybe it’s time we recontextualize these abstractions, make them useful again to a simultaneously bored and distracted society. Or maybe I just need that, for me.

In a tiny book called A Little Manual for Knowing, Esther Lightcap Meek writes,

It takes love to notice and wonder. A reality where love is the core of all things is one attuned to be seen only through eyes of love. Only when we first love do we begin to attempt to listen, to understand, to know. Why would we think that reality would disclose itself to uncaring, indifferent, suspicious knowers?

I want to stop feeling embarrassed for the bird in the Instagram feed, the image with no movement or sound in a deluge of sound bites—because deep down, I actually think those things matter. I think the poets are on to something.

What’s so wrong with being the person who offers a sacred pause while everyone else offers a frenzied jolt? Or, even, with offering a holy jolt when Instagram itself offers a dangerous lull?

I have successfully sprouted dahlia plants from tubers. But I did not post this on my Instagram feed because I do understand that watching plants (not) grow is tedious.

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The phrase that runs through my mind more often than any other these days: We are missing it. Politicians are missing it, churches are missing it, schools are missing it. I am missing it, and I don’t have time not to miss it. I wear my busyness like a badge because it is, after all, the currency and credibility of this age. Like everyone else, I scroll and pontificate and buy and simmer and worry.

I’m honestly not sure what I’m missing. My kids’ wonky smiles, half-full of baby and half-full of adult teeth? Spontaneous chats with neighbors in the street? Freaking sunsets?

I am a housewife in a suburb with a scattering of bikes in my driveway and a pile of Amazon boxes by the door. I am exceptionally unexceptional.

But I am getting weirder every day. I have an increasingly hard time making small talk.³ Deep down, I want to ditch the Amazon boxes to make space for the big words I have avoided, wherein the Amazon boxes are a metaphor for something. I want to watch the dadgum sun setting in our backyard and not feel weird about it.

I know well the criticisms: Who has time for meaning-making? Aren’t the poets the dewy-eyed, pale-skinned fools scrawling verse in response to a wilting flower petal? Who needs those people when a world must be run?

Our derision of poets is based on a utilitarian view of humans, but this view of people as primarily workers (in late-stage capitalism: money-makers) is defective. “Something is wrong,” wrote the poet Mary Oliver, “if I don’t keep my attention on eternity.” By eternity, she means the things that go on after us and went on before us—"the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness.” We like to scoff at the lingerers, to pretend the ways we spend our days are superior.

Look at all we have done!

To stop doing will cost us. It will cost me. To plug in to the eternal (those things that will outlast me) is to unplug from the temporal. I can pay attention to only so many things. I am so, very finite.

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At the end of Don Quixote, our head-in-the-clouds knight is ultimately arrested for freeing galley slaves, and a priest argues for his pardon on the basis of his insanity. He is locked in a cage. Make no mistake: Don Quixote is the punchline, not the hero, of Don Quixote.

I am trying to believe that, even so, the world needs a few Don Quixotes, ineffective (and, possibly, insane) as they may be. I am trying to decide how willing I am to be a punchline, that woman whose life is the equivalent of a series of bird photos.

Probably I am trying to decide this because I’m a Don Quixote whether I like it or not. I am a romantic; I have a little bit of fairy-tale in me. I can’t stop thinking this isn’t the way it was supposed to be. (Believe me, I’ve tried.)

Recently someone on Instagram told me, if I really cared about kids’ safety, I’d get my nose out of books and pick up a gun. Policy problems aside, this was the message: be a doer, not a daydreamer.

To be “nothing but” a daydreamer is my biggest fear, to be foolish Don Quixote in a world that needs Sancho Panzas. But in her book Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre writes,

Trained imaginations are what we need most at a time like this. That is what will enable us to reach across cultures and understand each other, to think of new models and modes of organization that might work better, and to wage peace, because the love of beauty is deeply related to the love of peace.

Is that possibly true, that a love of beauty can translate to models and modes? That daydreaming is maybe even a form of resistance?

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I want to do more than post poems on Instagram; I want to give up the whole vast universe for the teensy one in my house and neighborhood.

To live without a smartphone for a summer is nothing if not quixotic. It is a thing that makes sense only inside the off-kilter brain of an idealist. It is, probably, fighting a windmill instead of a real giant. People who abstain from connectedness usually tell you with the pride of vegans or marathoners. (I once told a snobby vegan friend who was trying to convert me, “It’s not that we don’t all believe you are doing the better thing. It’s that we like the taste of cheeseburgers.”)

By abstaining from technology, I run the risk of pointless contrarianism, disconnectedness just another useless badge to wear. Perhaps it is, at worst, self-rescue at the expense of a diseased culture and planet. And, at best, moving a grain of sand in the desert.

But there’s also the possibility that to disconnect (to, in effect, watch the flowers grow for a summer) will do what I think it might: rescue my brain from an almost desperate agitation and frenzy.

It might, for a season, “train my imagination.”

It might, if nothing else, ground me in the dandelions (more specifically in our yard, the ubiquitous lizards) long enough to return to the life of abstract, glossy digitization with renewed purpose.

If there’s even a chance that the pseudo-connectedness will be replaced with meaning, I have to take it. I sense there is something I have forgotten in the chaos. I sense I am missing something right in front of my face. Annie Dillard wrote, “I would like to learn, or remember, how to live.”

Equally likely: This is just a mid-life crisis.

Equally likely: I am, like a real Don Quixote de La Mancha, losing my mind, and someone should lock me in a cage.

Too late now. Cue the windmills! Cue the dandelions! Cue the sunsets and the lizards!

1. No I will never stop quoting this book.

2. But I kept taking those poetry classes! So many of them!

3. Friends can verify.