The Muck of Intimate Knowing
On combinatory creativity, commonplace books, and making a mess
I run the can opener along the lip, unstick the lid and dump the contents into a glass bowl. Fleshy jewels, glowing red. The recipe does not mince words: pour the tomatoes with their juices into a bowl, crush them with your hands. Instinctively I scan the kitchen for a savior. Would a potato masher do? Maybe an fork with some extra oomph? Is a blender excessive?
The truth is I’d dirty a mountain of dishes to keep my skin warm and dry, sleeves unstained. Anything to maintain a comfortable distance between me and a mess.
• • •
Dating back to the Renaissance, many of history's great literary thinkers have kept commonplace books to hold their inspiration close.
The term has roots in Ancient Greece, where scholars and speakers designated a "common place" to store arguments they might need to reference later. Distinct from personal journals, commonplace books are traditionally used to collect information for future reference and reflection, making them more like idiosyncratic encyclopedias.
A typical one might house interesting facts, quotations, poems, proverbs, ideas, observations—a haphazard collection of snippets from a variety of sources, whose common thread is that they struck a chord with the book's keeper.
• • •
It's hard to divorce fun from mess. That's not to say everything messy is inherently fun, but good luck living a life imbued with play and pleasure without at least a baseline tolerance for unruliness.
Growing up I was the ruliest of kids, and one who never learned to play video games. I remember spending whole afternoons on the neighbors’ couch while other kids fought over the N64 controller, taking turns leaping Mario into giant paintings and steering him down the twisting slides that hid behind them. I tried once or twice, always quick to pass the controller back after I’d lose control of poor Mario and send him careening into the black.
Women and girls aren't encouraged to chase fun nearly as much as we're trained to please the eye. As Elissa Bassist writes, "women are trained to disappear while being looked at constantly." Girls learn early that to do womanhood right is to be more vessel than creature.
Refusing to let other people watch me flounder, watching other people play became my sport.
Just last month I stood in the doorway to our den and watched my husband play Zelda after work. I watched as his onscreen character heaved a medieval weapon across his body and lopped off a monster's head, its body crumpling briefly to the ground before springing back to life. My husband sputtered, slung the weapon again, followed swiftly by a second blow. I waited for it to spring back, only this time, it dissolved into a cloud of gray pixels.
“Why’d it die that time?”
“You have to get ‘em a second time, while they’re down.”
“Did somebody tell you that? Or did you just kinda figure it out?"
“Just figured it out.”
Since girlhood, all I ever wanted was a manual. Something to study up close, a safe distance away from the action, until I felt ready to enter. To this day, I notice the way my body tenses from scalp to sole anytime I'm thrust into the unfamiliar without the armor of experience, or at least a plan.
In an episode of Glennon Doyle's podcast, she describes the experience of watching the U.S. women's national soccer team like something liberating, almost subversive:
"It makes me so emotional, watching women use their bodies to compete instead of perform, the way they just try so hard and don’t give a shit what it looks like. They’re not trying to be pretty."
If the opposite of mess is control, it's no wonder so many girls learn to contain their limbs and stop short of reckless abandon—or that those same girls bloom into women who are fluent in over-functioning and creating a sense of order.
That same instinct to insulate myself from risk and uncertainty also makes it harder to be an artist. For the past eight months I've been losing my fight with paralysis on the page, and rather than try to write my way into greater clarity and flow, I've poured that energy into engineering a shortcut.
My 'Writing HQ' dashboard features an ornate digital system of toggles and filters designed to spit out prompts and inspiration on command, saving me from ever having to hear the howl of an empty page. Meanwhile, my writing practice and I have become polite strangers.
I've forgotten how to be lost—or maybe I never really knew.
• • •
In the 17th century, John Locke developed a new and improved method of keeping a commonplace book, which featured a robust system of indexes. These indexes were meant to add a layer of structure to an otherwise nonlinear trove of clippings. Other notable commonplacers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Virginia Woolf followed suit, creating bespoke systems for organizing their notes as they captured and made sense of new information.
Emerson later became known for his extensive indexes that spanned hundreds of pages across multiple notebooks. These indexes unfolded over time from his regular practice of revisiting, distilling, and re-indexing the same information again and again. Emerson once said he felt "more like a scribe than a poet"1 but in fact, his regular practice of re-reading, chopping up and rearranging information led him to sharper thinking and deeper meaning-making.
There's a limit to how intimately we can know and understand something from a distance vs. up close. It's the difference between passively collecting information about a thing, or studying a manual vs. rolling up our sleeves and plunging our hands straight into the bowl. Letting its juices run down our forearms until it starts feeling like something familiar.
In a world that fetishizes speed and efficiency, there's a lot of talk among productivity gurus about friction and how to reduce it. One common solution is to simply toss the things don't need (or want) to engage with in the moment—a task, an idea, a note—into an app. In doing so, we offload the burden of having to mentally store the thing, retain its meaning, and remember it later.
My fancy Writing HQ uses this same slick approach for collecting and storing information. Say, for example, an instructor in a writing workshop shares a great writing prompt that I think might be helpful later. No problem! Type it, tag it, send it into the abyss. Same goes for reference material, articles I may want to read, and ideas for future essays.
It's a sleek system with enormous potential, except that it's slippery by design. A whole system built to help me slither out of ever having to sit in stuckness, or flail on the page. Designed to fuel and lubricate a writing practice I don't actually have yet, because I keep dodging the unavoidable panic of sitting down to write without knowing exactly where I'm going.
It's all tidy toggles, no heat.
Friction is the force that slows movement between two objects in contact with each other. For artists and thinkers, it's what happens when we slow down and get close enough to the unfamiliar to get a little tangled. Without friction, those same two objects might slip right past each other like wet bars of soap.
What else slips away when we keep the unfamiliar at a safe and comfortable distance? When we optimize our way out of making a necessary mess?
I think of the woman who, in conversation with Esther Perel on her podcast, shared, "I'm always the one asking questions about [my boyfriend's] family, about his past, about his cousins, his friends. And he never really asks me questions." She feels loved and accepted, but not truly known. Give me the muck of intimate knowing.
• • •
Bees have become a symbol for commonplace books, a reference to the way they collect pollen from different flowers and turn it into honey. The Roman philosopher Seneca was an early champion of keeping a commonplace book, who believed it was not enough to simply collect information. He wrote:
"We ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading . . . then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us . . . we should so blend those several flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came."
Cognitive scientists believe some of our most creative thinking happens when unrelated ideas have the chance to cross paths, and we connect them in unexpected ways to form something new. Neuroscientists call it combinatory creativity. Whether you call it serendipity, or productive chaos, or mess, the sweetness of creativity and evolution demands it.
I don't bemoan my fancy Writing HQ, or that building it was mostly an elaborate distraction from the terrifying but necessary work of writing into uncertainty. Still, I've shelved it for now, trading it in for a chunky coil-bound notebook that sits open on my desk, collecting sporadic nuggets of interesting information.
There is no elaborate system of indexes, no table of contents or no pre-planned sections. It is simply a container to hold my chaotic nectar—an unorganized mix of excerpts, interesting facts, writing exercises, and observations that hum.
It doesn't ask me to perform competence, to know what I'm doing or to have a plan. All it asks is that I be willing to follow the heat. To roll up my sleeves and follow what glimmers, straight into the sticky heart of the unknown.
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Michelle! This was gorgeous! And so timely for me personally - I actually just started a similar notebook after seeing Jordan's posts about it, so you've really had a ripple effect haha. I think it will help me engage more deeply with what I read and will help retain the small "aha" moments that strike me for longer.
I really loved seeing this in both essay form and poem form - so cool to see how you explored the same idea in both. This was a really beautiful piece :)
My grandpa called his a common book, and I’ve been keeping one for years. Mine are mostly quotes, or words I love, and sometimes phone numbers or addresses. My biggest lesson from Yoda this year has been to just start writing, and I’m still terrified of getting started on it every time I sit down to do it. You keep taking up space, my friend. Your writing is too important!