Action Potential
by Rachel Genn
"Working from home is un-erotic."
Agnes Callard
You recently posted in the GroupChat that skiving is simply waiting to be flirted with. Has he been checking your phone? The final straw is his glee in telling you that "This is what you wanted! No escape!" You can’t call it home anymore.
A bricklayer, he knows by now what writing's about, but right now he's redundant and he's watching you. You get the Riley quote in early – you cannot show the slightest interest in the activity of writing unless you possess some feeling of futurity. In your case, the future happens to be the medium in which the intimate relationship between you and your work originates, fluid, you know, possibilities bobbing – none yet sunk (you'll confess later that it's mercy rather than brute strength puts them under). Yet somehow he senses that this lockdown has guillotined your opportunity to put off tasks that you said you needed more energy or resources for. Writing demands looking forward so that you don't look down at what you really are. The reverie you artists seek will not be beckoned if you are rating yourself. You are slowing to a stop, realising there'll be no hiding place, you'll be crippled, a cancelled fraction of hope and despair; crushed between no possibility and every possibility; fucked both ways, creatively speaking.
We naturally imagine alternatives to reality about the future. Some writers make a living from it, he's heard. Pandemic notwithstanding, you regularly struggle to write because you so keenly anticipate the regret you will feel at not having chosen better words (you had your chance you blew it, ad nauseam). Writers spontaneously create these counterfactual alternatives to reality when they think "if only" or "what if" and imagine how the past could have been different. In fact, it is the counterfactual thinking between the obtained and the unobtained outcomes (think, what you could have won) that determines the quality and intensity of the sting of regret. There's an allure to imagining how things could have turned out differently, but there's also a pull toward testing just how bad that feels. Like Anne Carson's notion of eros, regret is all about what we are lacking. You've wondered whether Karen Solie's line – My many regrets have become the passion of my life – is a celebration or lament, and through both science and art you have asked am I addicted to regret? You scuttle to the GroupChat to share a link to “Wooden Bag” by Richard Dawson because that song is a masterclass in how beautiful it is to have certain future pain in our hands right now.
It is a period early in Home School, when your children begin to parrot your telephone conversations. My house has no private parts! they squawk and dodge your hands as you empty grab after them. Actions creep in, it's now a skit – they rub their fingers and thumb under your nose to cackle, There's no salt in anything! You bat their hands away but feebly, aware that in the tighter telephone dyads, there's been crude unashamed rhyming of stasis and molasses. They better not have heard that.
Unable to read, write, or suspend belief, something comes back to you about the alertness and vigilance of having a newborn: the deathly loss of luxurious mind-wandering when you are forced to care about the survival of another, a thing from which even you could not skive. Such persistence of the present closes off the future. Pandemic prioritising is dizzying. With the current crisis, the future has fanned out majestically, and in 3D. Online home school passwords blossom, fall and are blown away so that the idea of following through on anything becomes fascinating. A friend sends you some trans-dermal testosterone for experiments in focus. You give up coffee. The kids behave better.
You may be catatonic but the GroupChat is on fire. Twitter's alight. Severed from your muses, your inability to perform is all you talk about. The value of our work to us has not changed intrinsically, but hurled into hectic relief by mounting incremental deaths; its incentive salience, what it means to us, cannot remain the same. If real life or death is up in our grill, how are we supposed to surrender to the pretend malevolent force that we secretly pit ourselves against daily? We rely on pursuing the work for its own sake, it's autotelic; the 'enjoyment' comes from seeking out novelty and problems to be solved. In fact, if you reward an animal for something that it previously did for fun, it will become disinclined to do it. I save this nugget for fights about writers' earnings; a comeback for when he asks, "Why don't you write something people want to read?”
You go outside alone and the phone goes dink as you record a message to yourself. What if it is the very computation of anticipation that is jamming the signals the future is trying to send back to you? Dink. Perverse in the extreme to be cock-blocked by The Future for Looking Forward. You don't want an answer to the next question so there's no dink. Is it only sustained togetherness with the work that keeps you going?
Sustained togetherness is a term you heard Jenny Eden use. Influenced by Agnes Martin, Jenny says, "imbued with the power of the maker, paintings attract attention and perform a 'subject-like' role, like a quasi-person." Eden powerfully advocates a shared agency with her work, and listening to her you recognise the sense of swelling anticipation that diminishes only when your writing no longer threatens to overpower you. Contemplating the work like a love affair appeals to the future: as Ingeborg Bachmann says, to continue with work we only need a sense that something will come of it. Futurity as Riley perhaps means it may be following the lure of what is possible without having to think incessantly about what is probable (the best as opposed to your best) or (normal death vs pandemic death) encouraging you to anticipate but without awareness of value or expectation about the outcome.
A reverie state amid this is no more than a rumour and it teases you like the smell of petrol in the disused pump that the man and his son come across in The Road. Interruptions to deep thought, like mummy shouted at volume, fire up a petulance in you at a level you haven't felt since nursery school; like someone has spitefully ruined your game. Lockdown means you are drawn closer to those who are also childish, unscrupulous, lazy, brilliant. You sense in the GroupChat a groping for what Bollas calls the "unthought known." You camouflage caprice as courage. You bomb the poets' GroupChat, then leave.
Someone mentions that Margaret Drabble imagines a companionship with her novel in progress, which is great for Margaret; perhaps she's not the bullying type. A short story writer you admire states in an interview that novels always seem to need you to like them. You envy those who seem to be "getting on" and you refuse to admit that it's because of their ability to resist releasing jets of themselves from just below the surface, under the slightest pressure. Hell is other people's certainty. The GroupChat is getting wild, algebraic, paradoxical, nonsense. Opening a document, you consider that style is your attack on reality. You've tried bullying the work into submission but then the vengeful spite that brought you here stays unprocessed, you end up with a Rorschach blot of a work. Getting prepared to be wounded is no mean feat, we have to be vulnerable but on our own terms. Only then can the work speak through us. Otherwise, it is our voice only and who wants to hear that. Not us. You press down the inclination toward cruelty and try to forget there's a pandemic. Love of our neighbour, being made of creative attention may be tantamount to genius, but did Weil ever think to ask what if that neighbour has the persistent dry cough?
You remember that you were outside De Crespigny Park, sharing a fag with the surfer your youngest is named for. It was actually one of your last meetings at The Institute of Psychiatry in Camberwell and she was telling you about patients with particular brain damage, to the OrbitoFrontal Cortex (OFC) that could no longer regret. Counterfactual thought, on which regret relies, requires not only a simulation of a possible alternative as if it were true, but also an evaluative comparison of the alternative to the current reality, to work out the difference between the two. Regret cannot happen without this mechanism. What if in our current reality, these counterfactual evaluations are not possible because of more pressing evaluations (say, you know, the intricate sequalae of a pandemic). Or perhaps, structures like the OFC, whose job it is to compare values used to make decisions, has been overloaded by these larger looming threats. For Jenny Eden, starting to paint means "to begin articulating intention." Could it be that, forced into considering greater conflicts — worries that cannot be made smaller than word choice or paint colour — our intention cannot make the leap into action?
You met Jenny along with experts in shamanism, other artists, psychoanalysts, anthropologists and scientists at a symposium on reverie. Reverie, Amanda Ravetz suggests, is “a certain kind of absent-mindedness which is not easy to achieve unless one is given a certain type of protection and permission from the environment.” It is related to but not the same as the psychological concept of flow. On that day it emerged that reverie may not be an act of will but is perhaps a product of intention, but where no urgency is involved. Artists described reverie states converging with a loss of self-recrimination, diminished awareness of time and space, in a balance of safety and vulnerability. It could be both exploratory and defensive; perhaps even mingled, like the Siberian Turuk trance state, with a force outside oneself. Your paper proposed that regret may be a roadblock to reverie because the experience of it demands counterfactual thought (which, because of its evaluatory nature, may repel reverie). Vapenstad, a child psychoanalyst, pointed to how strenuous it was to actively suppress the need to solve the problem, that the analysts’ reverie was "work not holiday," and the day ended with Tim Ingold weighing up which were the most accurate metaphors for reverie. You caught Jenny's arm, desperate to talk about differences in agency and autonomy, or whether in reverie the space that is held open has anything to do with free will.
Now, closeted indefinitely, pretending that unable to write is just unwilling becomes your new vocation, and you are determined to console yourself by convincing others of this. You go into the laundry room; a grey galley kitchen with an unsealed sink that you've named the Brexit Corridor, and whisper into WhatsApp (it's like there's a lid on experience – it's like I have armbands on my feet. Why is anticipation so buoyant?) The messages intensify and similes degrade. To build up the pressure under your own pretence is difficult at the best of times but shuttling between unwilling and unable, every relay between the two, diffuses the energy needed to commit to work. You need an accumulation of energy to breach the silence, to reach threshold for transmission, like a neuron's action potential, but there's a leak somewhere. Or a burning off – in one chat you liken the energy you expend discussing "not writing" to the scandalous setting of oil fires in 90s Kuwait, but the friend, listening politely, wasn't born then.
Under surveillance of a bricklayer or not, one has to muster up a fake desire for the work, spin the web and catch oneself; artists gain the wherewithal to do what they must without knowing what it is they're trying to do. A friend likens it to long-distance swimming (for her, not seeing the destination is key), but writing in lockdown, the distance we need to breach, our usual abyss, has been filled by a deep not knowing. We are aware that artists must be able to dwell in uncertainty, but to be at ease with uncertainty, perhaps we must dampen anticipation, ignoring the future while feeling its pull. Computationally speaking, such endurance may depend upon suppression of anticipated regret. Like any relationship, we must trust that something will come of it. You point out to others in difficulties, that to discover what they could have won, people put themselves at risk of regret in order to resolve uncertainty, and it's this lure of counterfactual curiosity that gets us scouring for clues of infidelity. A potential clue, even at great cost to our mood, is very alluring. It's at the heart of the (FOMO) phenomenon. It's what keeps us on Twitter. You almost tweet "ofc the OFC is involved in compulsive seeking of rewards.” You resist. Thank God.
Perhaps only with a sense of futurity can time disappear: it lets us trust to the surprises in store if we allow ourselves to truly be with the work and let it talk back. Reading Eden, you feel better about being nunned-up, she convinces you to relax the attack:
"This . . . led me to consider whether the painting also has its own unthought known since it seemed to know what it wanted all along."
You must start up some small talk with the work, flatter it with attention. You begin to wonder if you won't engage because you are reluctant to see how easy it could all have been. You cannot make someone love you but pretending to love them is a start. But the more you understand that only you can do this work in the way you want to, the more ecstatically paralysed you become. You want that ultimate relief: shutting up the voice that asks what are you trying to prove. You try to resist abusing its good nature but the future is always sympathetic to you. It lets you sink forward into the task while still searching. The future is flexible but you know that if there's no closing down of possibilities, there's no story. It's a Pixar storytelling tenet: story is testing not refinement. The future beckons, it's what it does. In my mind, it's in a negligee but I was born in the 70s. I google seduction and find that rape is offered as a synonym. Back to the future.
Despite best efforts, you find you cannot instigate the toppling you normally rely on, nothing cajoles you into that desired unsteadiness – is it futurity that materialises with the right amount of precarity, where the relief momentarily outweighs the anticipated regret and allows progress? Being pulled forward out of a static position suddenly annuls the scolding you give yourself for your own inertia. It means you are moving.
This man you live with better not be right, but who are you kidding? You are already wretched with the knowledge that the writers you admire, think clearly and deeply about what they mean because they give themselves no choice. Youcan taste the deleted accounts, the imposed loneliness, feel that they were sacrificed at their own hand, holed up in the West of Ireland cottages, the BC shacks. Unlike lockdown, their protracted entanglement with their writings was an entire investment made possible by a choice to limit life. No need to flirt with other projects. Dink. When you give yourself the necessary environment to ensure loneliness, missing out cancels fear of missing out. It's all or nothing for these bastards and you can smell it off the pages of their work. No choice. A poet friend says she stays like a crocodile with eyes just above water, so that when the future gives you something graspable you are ready to snap. Like the time to go in for a kiss, the time not to go in for a kiss also has to be endured. The bricklayer is staring at you. Anticipation is best when it ends.
Self Portrait 2021
Rachel Genn works across Manchester Writing School and the School of Digital Arts. Formerly a Neuroscientist, she has written two novels: THE CURE, (2011) and WHAT YOU COULD HAVE WON published by & Other Stories (2020) and has contributed to Granta, 3AM, Aeon/Psyche and has forthcoming work The New Statesman and LA Review of Books. She is currently working on three short volumes on the subject of longing. Find her on Twitter @RachelGenn.
