Writing against the Clots

A clot is a liquid on the way to becoming a solid. Lovely if the clots are cream. Not good when they form in arteries and veins. Clotting helps the body to staunch bleeding wounds, that’s true. Clots can kill. Also true.

Why am I thinking about this on a Sunday evening writing to you?

I have been thinking about writing. My mission, always, from the very beginning, not to get lost in the literal. To see over the wall. Not to damn the flow. Not to congeal. For me, writing gets things moving. Things moving around in the mind and in the heart. Both at once. That’s what exciting. I am not a Cartesian dualist. It was always a silly idea. But it offered/offers an illusion of control.

When you work creatively you know that heart and head act together. That’s the challenge. The pain. The moments of joy. The flow.

It’s true that this Substack is called Mind over Matter, and that sounds like the usual split. I chose to name it so, because I wanted these exchanges to be about ideas, about creativity, about imagination. All of that spills into the dimensional world we can touch and feel. It’s not an either/or. But for me, the life of the mind stands against crass consumerism, the monetisation of everything, worldly success as the standard measurement of who we are. And against death. We must go when the time comes. What we create can outlive us.

I don’t write for the future in the sense of caring about posterity. I do write for the future in the same way that I have learned so much from writers and thinkers now dead. It’s a beautiful thing, that continuity. Conversations across time.

Writing is a rope slung across space.

The space between us. Space-time. We are connected when we read the past. It’s not remote or antique. The sense of others struggling to understand their world, to change it, to describe it so that it can be seen, even when what was seen is long gone.

That flow is connection. That connection is flow.

What seems to me to be happening, thanks to sites like Blinkist, thanks to the tech-bro babbling enthusiasm that all you need to do, if you are smart, is to ask Claude or Gemini, to sum up for you whatever book it is you don’t want to read, is the opposite of mental flow. It’s mental clotting.

The flow of understanding to be gained by actually reading the bloody thing is more than jotting down a tally of its contents. Confronting a text is a dialogue and a challenge. Why do I love this? Why do I hate this? What drives me mad? What makes me feel differently? Are these arguments/characters repulsive to me? Why? Am I bored ? Why?

Reading is no different from any other relationship. You have to get involved.

Of course AI can be useful for synthesising quantities of reports that are all saying… not much. AI can guide us in a meta-analysis of hundreds of studies - though we know that AI gets both its information and its conclusions scarily wrong. AI can helpus towards the authors we want to read in a thicket of confusing arguments.

All good. Not good for philosophy or religion. Not good for thinkers who like long-form essays, and that’s what most thinkers do like. Hopeless for literature. Ridiculous for poetry. The sum-ups are like throwing jam at a white wall.

Clots of information thrown at the walls of our minds are useless to us. Humans excel at connecting disparate ideas, the magpie bits and pieces gathered along the way, then forming these pieces, surprisingly, unexpectedly, into new wholes. This happens in science and in the humanities. Humans do this not just by amassing a bundle of ‘facts' or theories. Humans do this by suddenly seeing something else in the pattern. By seeing a new pattern. A dot-joining that opens a new vein of thought. Starts a new movement (note the noun). When EM Forster said ‘Only Connect.’ ( Howards End 1910) he didn’t say Only Collect.

Knowing is not a commodity. Knowing is not product. Knowing is process.

That process is uniquely yours and belongs to you. To commodify it is to clot it. To stop the flow, To wrangle knowing - which is a continuous and active and ever-changing process - into knowledge as a product that can be packaged and sold. A Buy-Product. Life as a quiz show with a prize for the winners.

So when I talk about writing against the clot, it’s a warning against sluggishness. To be mentally active is the opposite of being mentally lazy.

We cannot know what we think, we cannot form any opinions that are our really our own opinions, unless we are prepared to grapple with the ideas of others in their unmediated form. Summaries and bullet-points are useless.

All people who work creatively talk about flow. We know what we mean when we say the conversation flows. Humans love flow. We hear endlessly about the the madness of a sedentary lifestyle - move that body! Yet our education system, our entertainment industry, the ubiquity of smartphone life, all encourage in us a sedentary mind.

A sedentary mind is a passive mind. A passive mind has neither response nor resistance. Such minds are easy pickings for Populism and consumerism.

Reading creates an active mind. Writing - at any level - asks us to challenge ourselves.

We are failing children by not allowing them near the wonders of their own minds. Reading and writing are not quaint legacy activities. Reading and writing are at the core of human connectivity. With others. With the past. With ourselves. With flow.

I am meeting too many clotted minds. Young people who would like to think but don’t know how. Young people who would like to express themselves, but don’t know how. They believe in grades and metrics. That’s what they have been taught to believe in. They struggle with reading a whole book. The neat mid-level prose AI offers them to explain the text they cant’t read, or the piece of work they can’t write, is a drug as powerful as any opiate. These young people are not dull but their minds are being dulled.

Opiates increase the risk of blood clots.

Reading and writing is the healthy option!

So if you were sitting there tonight wondering what it’s all for, your writing, your reading, your pursuit of independent thought in an homogenised society, you are saving yourself from a deep-vein mental thrombosis.

OK?

Now I am going to bed with a good book