Whereas I devoted much of the 2022 Christmas break to (re?)learning Bayesian modelling, and over 2023 took four months off to learn software development, over the 2023 Christmas break I vowed to do nothing useful, nothing that involves thinking or effort or learning, in order to make the break as restful and uneventful as I could.
However, as anyone who’s tried sitting with their own thoughts for more than a couple of minutes realises, it’s not really possible to avoid thinking about things, and attending to one’s own thoughts is often far from restful. Attempting to sit mindfully for more than a minute puts the lie to the very idea that I have thoughts. Instead the reverse is true: thoughts have us.
Attempting to sit passively with one’s own thoughts is to attempt to recognise the eternal turbulence of what Rational Mystic Sam Harris keeps referring to as the ‘field of consciousness’. It’s like standing on a worn wet stone, surrounded by eddies and currents, and being invited to dip a toe into the waters without falling in. Failing at this task is the default state of cognition, it seems, especially (possibly uniquely?) for humans. Even if we stay mindful enough to notice that thoughts just appear to us, unbidden, without some kind of humuncular avatar of the self causing or driving them, the temptation of following a thought, of engaging with it, is something that is near impossible to resist. Drop into a thought, and it takes us to another thought, then another, then another, and before long we find ourselves thinking about cheese when we meant to think about spreadsheets, or Nazis when we meant to think about buying Christmas cards, or stuck in a ruminatory cycle where a complex of three or more thoughts cycle back onto each other in some kind of unstoppable mental vortex.
Invariably, the thoughts we have, or rather the thoughts that have us, lead us into some dark, surreal or smelly places. We seldom report to others the mental journeys we went on to retrieve information that’s actionable or useful to others. We self-curate, and self-censor, displaying the pearl of wisdom we’ve found, without recounting the sadistic joy we felt ripping the oyster that contained it apart and ending its innocent life. We wipe off the stink and the gore accrued in the journeys we’ve been on inside our own heads, and instead try to present to others a pristine edit of these journeys, and we pretend these curated edits are our ‘true self’. And almost everyone else feels compelled to do the same, because we do, and we do, because everyone else does.
All this is a rambling, (mindful?) way of saying, I read David Sedaris’ latest book Happy-Go-Lucky over the Christmas break, and like his other books and stories found it humourous (as intended), engaging and refreshing as an example of how to tell stories that don’t aim to build and sell a pristine curated self to others. Though the term ‘humourist’ (or rather ‘humorist’) has been used to describe Sedaris’ outputs and the genre he dominates so effectively, a more accurate term may be “unrepentant observational confessional”.
Sedaris’ stories are finely crafted, polished, and I’m sure edited and reedited many times, often using, like most stand-up comedians, the involuntary and unvarnished feedback from audiences (such as whether people laugh) as a guide on how to improve his texts further. But they are not stories in service to the promotion of a pristine and virtuous self, a paragon to live by. No, they’re stylised records of ‘things that happen’, inside and out, and the relationship between occurrances, thoughts, feelings, and actions. And importantly, though stylised, they have a sense of verisimilitude to the inner world in which thoughts and associations are often far from linear or pristine, whether it be noting that crowds shouting “Black Lives Matter” do so with a quality and cadence of a fishmonger selling “Fresh-Caught Haddock”, the private vilification of those who move too slowly in queues, or Sedaris’ recognition that the deaths of his mentally ill sister, or homophobic father, did not evoke in him the quality of grief that a ‘good person’ ought to experience.
Humour often comes from distance: the distance in time needed to sublimate tragedy into comedy (‘too soon?’), but also the distance between expectation and reality. The Pristine Self creates this expectation, whereas careful observation and honest accounting reveals a reality that near invariably falls short of this expectation. Sedaris’ stories work as humour because he knows how much most people edit the stories they tell themselves and others about themselves in order to maintain the Pristine Self, but he doesn’t. Instead he edits to make the blacks darker, the smells skinkier, and the circles his mind wanders in more eccentric.