Daniel Janus – life

The immensely powerful tool

2008-09-23T00:00:00Z

A pen and a sheet of paper are simple utilities; but there lies vast and sheer power in them that I was not aware of. Up until now. So what can they be used for that one might possibly not realize?

Short answer: serializing the stream of consciousness.

Yes, it’s simple, and you may laugh at me now. I myself am a little amazed why I haven’t noticed this before. But this answer lends itself to another question: what good is this serialization, and what exactly do I mean by it, anyway? And the answer to that is a little longer. So here goes.

I’m one of the people who tend to have problems with concentrating when thinking, especially when thinking hard. This is not to say that I am not capable of thinking hard: I am, but doing so requires a level of concentration that is tricky for me to exert for a prolonged period. (Unless, of course, I am in the state of absolute fascination, where this is taken care of subconsciously. But that’s another story.) More often than not, a tough problem requiring a significant amount of work just has to be dealt with. And then things start to distract attention. There is an itch to scratch, thoughts are shreds, each one pertaining to a tiny bit of the problem, but intertwined with hundreds of other bits of other problems, forming a dense, tangled web, hard to navigate over, and jumping fast from one to another, it becomes more and more unclear what’s next.

So what can one do? One way is to grab a writing device and just start writing. Running text is linear in nature, so you end up traversing the thought graph depth-first and writing down each thought as you traverse its node. And what’s more, translating ideas to written language slows you down, which is a Good Thing because it makes you see your way through the graph more consciously. It might take you longer to walk from point A to point B than to drive there by car, but definitely you will see more of the landscape as you go. Arriving at the final destination, or simply putting down the pen because enough thoughts have been collected and serialized (there’s never really any end of the stream), makes you end up with a half-product: an unsmithed lump of ore out of which you can forge ingots.

But why a pen and paper, as opposed to, say, a text editor? I think any writing utensil would work to some extent, but for me this seems to be the best option, for several reasons. First of all, I can type on the keyboard much faster than I can write legibly by hand, so this further slows down the pace (which is a Good Thing as we have observed already).

Second, there is something magical in handwriting which a text editor will never be able to achieve: it’s hard to describe. But the net effect is a very evident focus on Here and Now, the pen moving across the paper, the sheet filling up with more and more lines of script. This environment is naturally single-tasked: no Alt-Tab to press to switch to another terminal, no blinking icon of an instant-messaging program (unless a phone happens to ring). This causes synergy with the concentration caused by serializing thoughts.

If you have never tried this approach, feel free to do so. Although I cannot guarantee it will work for you, it certainly does work for me.

Recently read #1: Akhmatova meets Bashō (Vasil Bykaŭ, “The Wall”)

2008-05-19T00:00:00Z

(Introductory note: This post marks the beginning of a new series on this blog, aptly titled “Recently read.” Every now and then I will try to verbalize afterthoughts inspired by the books I happen to read, and post them here. I hope these recommendations or anti-recommmendations might turn out to be useful for someone.)

Give me
a kiss to build a dream on,
and my imagination
will thrive upon that kiss;
sweetheart,
I ask no more than this —
a kiss to build a dream on.

Thusly starts the Fallout 2 intro — a mini-movie that can be considered a piece of art in its own right. Louis Armstrong sings these words in an abandoned underground cinema, wherein a movie is displayed, touching on nostalgia for pre-War times as well as severe dangers that lurk on the surface of the earth. And then come these words…

“War, war never changes.”

Just like throughout the entire Fallout saga, these words reverberated in my mind as I read “The Wall,” a collection of short stories by Vasil Bykaŭ, the late Belarussian writer.

For the war indeed does not change. And wherever it appears, it carries around such an amount of destruction and utter wrongness that it is next to unimaginable for a generation grown up in a relatively peaceful place and time such as ours. In fact, even the words “utter wrongness” do not do justice to what was once an unescapable reality. There is only one way to find appropriate words: to show it, show it without overlooking anything, show it dryly and aloofly in all its hideousness.

And Bykaŭ does. There is not a single word of moralizing in these stories. There are no high words, and barely even a human thought beyond fear for life. There is pure depiction; and yet every word in this depiction stands firm and cannot be removed without losing the level of detail called for. This induces associations with Anna Akhmatova and her famous “Requiem,” which begins as follows:

Это было, когда улыбался
только мертвый, спокойствию рад.

“Это было.” “It happened.” These simple words are immensely powerful. And the same two words, unspoken, echo throughout the entire book. It happened, and it was like this. Nothing more can, or should, be told.

I’ve mentioned the level of detail; this aspect of these stories deserves longer comment. It is imminent that they would not be quite as powerful were it not for the detail. One can almost sense the chill of a dawn rising up above some godforsaken trench somewhere on the battlefront. Or shudder at the cold dampness of the soil inside it. Or smell the stench of decay rising above a corpse shot several days ago. Or feel the almost palpable fear floating in the crossfire of danger, one on the enemy side, the other shaped as one’s own commandment. Or the gloom with which a small group of soldiers sets out to dig their final resting place before committing suicide, lest worse fate befall them.

These stories are almost “haikuistic,” so to speak, in that each one of them resembles a very thinly cut and faithfully portrayed slice of reality from which there is no escape. This shows most strongly in case of the shortest ones, like “The Hill,” which are just several pages long, but it arguably holds even for the longest text in the book, the opening novella, “Love Me, Soldier.” (In which, by the way, Falloutesque associations are particularly strong: imagine a Belarussian sergeant who finds a fellow countrygirl hiding in a village in Austria, at the very end of the war, and falls in love with her. Doesn’t that sound like “a kiss to build a dream on?” Well, in Bykaŭ’s world, good dreams never come true.)

I quoted Akhmatova’s “it happened.” Yet, perhaps, the most striking and saddening impression from “The Wall” as a whole, and one that sets it apart from other war literature, is that this should really read “it still happens.” For the war has ended, but it takes long for a nation to recover from the scars it left; especially the Belarussian nation, who have been held captive by various regimes for too long and have never actually experienced freedom that we take for granted. Once a wound has been healed, it is all too easy to reopen it. And fear for speaking one’s own language remains the same, war or no war.

No wonder Bykaŭ’s writings are still censored in his homeland. Thanks to the Internet, though, the full Polish text of all the stories is available online. Highly recommended.

Inward ripeness

2008-05-05T00:00:00Z

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stol’n on his wing my three and twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth
That I to manhood am arrived so near;
And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
That some more timely-happy spirits endu’th.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure ev’n
To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heav’n:
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great Task-Master’s eye.

John Milton is said to have composed this sonnet on his twenty-fourth birthday, and his thoughts (including, but not limited to, the criticism of the achievements so far) are very much in line with mine on my very own 24th birthday. One wonders what is the programming equivalent of “Paradise Lost.”

Forgetting

2008-04-24T00:00:00Z

It has just occurred to me that the best way to throwing things out of one’s mind is to let it be absorbed by something else. I guess this is oft-overlooked fact, even though it seems to be quite obvious. In particular, forcing oneself not to think about something is not a wise strategy, since it leads to mental strain and thinking more and more, eventually yielding dejectedness that can be hard to get over.

And what could be more absorbing than debugging a SIGSEGV buried deeply in the innards of some library early in the morning? ;–)