Sturgeon’s Law and living in the rain.
Sturgeon's Law states that 90% of everything is crap. By this, what I would say has become a generous measure; I have written well over half a million words of crap in the last four years. However, it also means that I have written over fifty thousand words of “not crap”. Sturgeon calls the ten per cent good; however, following the genealogy of the sentiment and adding in the recent deluge of self-styled “slop”, calling it “not crap” feels more appropriate.
The point of sharing this, and surely any chance of not adding to the growing ninety per cent, requires that I, at the very least, attempt to have a point; which is that I am completely okay with this. Ninety per cent of everything I produce is garbage; yup, that is fine. I am not sure at what point it became okay, but here I am sitting with the thought; and the more I think about it, the happier I am that not one hundred per cent of what I write is crap. I have written absolute moronic trash, which has been ticked off and dispatched to the world, with my name attached to it (now that is genuinely cringe), while some really good stuff has fared worse than a straight to video release Blockbuster exclusive last Christmas. At some point it clicked that once something leaves my hands it is no longer my precious baby, and I am fine with that too.
Understanding and embracing that most of what I do, and of what most people do is crap is both optimistic and liberating. Like many, I have a discernible perfectionist tendency that needs keeping in its box. I learned that “good enough” was an actual school of thought long after I had embraced its core principle that I could not make things perfect. Progress, not perfection, had to wait a while longer. At university, the work I submitted was good enough that I was happy to have my name attached to it. After academia, “good enough” was pretty much integral to the brief, and so I learned the skill of not being emotionally attached to what I produced. I shifted from happy to have my name on it, to “not ashamed to have my name on it”. They are two very different things.
Last week I noted that not being in actual survival mode every day had allowed me to look up from my immediate struggle to make it from day to day to become aware of the world in which I am struggling. If we can be made to struggle and look inwards, we don't see what is going on; distraction is the plan and the goal. Greed and prejudice don't need conspiracies, just complicity; and right now, they are getting that. Create chaos and confusion by appealing to the most basic reflexes of the survival brain, “not me equals threat to me”. You don't need the Frankfurt School to see that one playing out.
In this narrative, I am the other; I am part of a community of “them not us”. It is in this societal context that my one hundred per cent good enough or not exists. This might be a bit meta for poetry, but I think not. Poetry still has the capability to be counterpoint and commentary; it can unite the seemingly disparate together through its expression of shared reality. Poetry does have a unique capacity for conveying emotion, and through the expression of common experience, possesses unifying potential. If ten per cent of poetry could be that impactful, it would be a golden age of the poet. More realistically, I am conscious of my subject matter and the world into which it lives. I want to make an additive contribution to the struggle of disabled and neurodivergent people, as well as evidence of our lived experience. I want to make work that is in the ten per cent, to be what Kipling called “worth the trouble for its own sake.” Back to my lofty goals, I suppose.
Thoughts which bring me back to questioning what I am doing and why I am doing it. When taking a journey by car, I tend to be one who meticulously plans their route and uses Street View to get some orientation of unfamiliar places if a recce run isn't possible. This instinct has not spilt over into my life, which is less a grand project, and more a series of dubious side quests strung together. It has been fun, interesting and has kept me very busy, but I feel like I may have missed out on progression in the main game to my own detriment.
I am not alone in questioning these sorts of things; however, I want to make the best of the opportunities that life has left for me. If disability teaches you one thing, it is to plan ahead (the second is to take a drink and snacks on any journey). Starting this blog, I had no idea what I was doing, and mostly since then it hasn’t changed much. Introspection is one thing; daily journaling keeps that muscle well exercised. What I am looking to do now is keep looking up. Much as I do want to be completely isolated from the world, I am not, and what I am running from is the powerlessness and helplessness I feel when confronted with so much that I cannot change. I was never one to think I could change the world, but I did think I could change my world. Being the change we want to see in the world has become an ever more utopian and unrealistic position; that part of me feels like it has died.
With that, I have come to feel that my writing, this included, has the potential to be more than a proof of humanity against the slopocalypse of AI; it is my record of a human, an autistic, adhd, dyslexic, chronically ill and disabled human; my successes, my failures, my struggles and a proof of the reality happening right now. A record that adds to all the other voices. We will be deleted; however, the size and number of voices will leave a trace, an indelible record that stands in opposition to any “official version”. The more we tell our stories, the more of our existence has the chance to survive. It is something we can all be a part of without having to sign up, get a subscription, follow, like or share; we can exist and document that presence however we see fit. The more we tell our stories, and tell the stories of the marginalised, the powerless, the othered and the dehumanised scapegoats of society, the more apparent that we are not a problem to be solved gets indelibly etched into history.
I can't remember where I read this, but I don't want to steal credit for a thought that is not mine; we are the people standing in the rain without umbrellas, and so are the best ones to talk about what it means to be soaking wet.
With that, into the week and whatever horrors or triumphs it has in store.
