In which I write a think piece and engage in navel-gazing

^{Tetradrachm Portraying Alexander the Great. 297-281 BCE, issued by King Lysimachus of Thrace. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago. CC0 Public Domain Designation}

This essay is my submission for the monthly Symposium at the Soaring Twenties Social Club. This month's theme is 'Perspective.'

This is also my announcement for the new section of my Substack entitled “Navel-gazing” in which I will write essays and other nonfiction. No, I don’t know what “other nonfiction” actually means.

You will not automatically be subscribed to the new section. I thought it best not to subject you unwillingly to my nonfiction ramblings when you came here for fiction and poetry (which serves as a reminder that I need to write some poetry). I will not regularly post these essays to the main page, though it may happen again. If you’d like to receive more nonsense like this, you can subscribe here: https://adamkozak.substack.com/s/navel-gazing, at least I think that’s how these sections work. If no one subscribes, so much the better.

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As I sit at my kitchen bar-top counter, the morning sun streaming in from the north-facing windows, I find myself in the unenviable position of wanting to write nonfiction and write what I would derisively call a ‘think piece.’

I shudder at the mere thought of the term, to say nothing of its implications—self-centered navel-gazing, masochistic self-pity, a penchant for over-valuing one’s perspective and self-worth (there it is again, that word ‘self’), an apparently narcissistic desire to bring one’s own perspective to the fore, invited or not, and a tendency toward solipsism.

Once when in graduate school somewhere in the middle of my PhD program, I remarked to a junior professor, whom I greatly respect and admire and who was perhaps only five years my senior, that I was glad we could study and teach philology, literature, history, in fact the whole ancient world, from a purely historical perspective—that is, without reference to or concern for present political issues or other, as the saying goes, current events. She somberly shook her head and with a pitying look remarked that I was, in fact, wrong. I quickly remarked, “No?” to which she shook her head again and, although I don’t remember her exact words, went on to tell me that the past and present were linked and that when teaching the past we can’t escape the present. In that deferential way students treat their superiors, I merely nodded slowly and said something to the effect of, “Huh, I suppose so.”

Despite this lackluster response, she did give me cause to reflect after which I concluded that we were both wrong. My approach I took as being akin to sticking one’s head in the sand, presumably in an effort to get closer to buried artifacts, and ignoring how the present affected one’s perspective on the past (although I still argue it is essential to understand the past on its own terms), while her approach I took as bearing towards projecting onto the past one’s present ideas, prejudices, experiences, wants, and needs. Academia shouldn’t train activists.

This is, to be sure, unfair to the present and unfair to the past. Unfair to the past because it favors the present over all else and narcissistically casts present concerns, present politics, the so-called ‘modern’ world as paramount when it is the past that we are, or were, actually studying, and unfair to the present because it refuses to take present issues on their own terms and treat them as the effects of history rather than problems to be imposed on history and typically distant history at that.

Whence my disdain for the ‘think piece’? At the risk of engaging in a bit of navel-gazing, I suspect the origin lies somewhere between my devaluation of my own perspective and, thanks to the internet, the ubiquity of everyone else’s perspective, which causes a devaluation of its own.

And yet, I cannot help but wonder if this is the wrong way to go about it. After all, what is wrong with sharing one’s perspective? We are all human, presumably, and we all have needs and desires, one of which is to connect with others and share our thoughts and feelings, often about those needs and desires. Ever since the first homo sapiens stood up on a soapbox somewhere in the depths of Africa we have told anyone who would listen what we are thinking about anything and everything.

I also find that I have realized one of the limitations of my approach to fiction, and to a lesser extent poetry, the writing of which has been my chief concern for a few years now: I refuse to bring in any obvious, allegorical, hectoring, or lecturing manner the concerns of the present, whether politics, culture, religion, or any other specific issue, into my fiction. It makes for bad fiction and boring writing. I should add that I refuse to introduce such things to my fiction in an obvious way. If a character has a perspective that springs naturally from his or her experiences, well, that’s fair game.

This is not to say, however, that such things can’t be talked about or that any other topics, however mundane and anodyne they may be. But there’s a time and a place and I have come to realize that ever since I left the academy four years ago I have missed the opportunity to write what I think rather than craft stories or lyrical meter.

For what is writing but thinking? To write requires one to think, and to think clearly, or at any rate, to commit one’s thoughts to concrete form.

I have been reading, in audio form, Christopher Hitchens’ memoir Hitch-22 for some time now, a little bit at a time, though recently much more frequently. Whatever the downsides may be, I highly recommend listening to an author read his or her own work, especially if it is nonfiction where there is no temptation for the author to ham it up, unlike where fiction is concerned.

Hitch’s voice has been in my ear regularly for the past week. He has a tendency to mumble at times, to make names unintelligible, and to not only mumble but to cycle his speech between inaudible on one end of the spectrum and, on the other, deeply and loudly rumbling as if competing with the diesel engine of a big rig.

It is, in a word, sublime.

There is also something special about hearing the voice of someone who has died and hearing him tell you what he thinks, or thought, in his own voice from, as it were, beyond the grave.

Because I have been listening to him so much, I also find myself writing with his voice in my head, causing me to exaggerate my standard modus operandi of writing longer periodic sentences and using a metric ton of Latinate words where sturdy Anglo-Saxon would do. I cannot help but feel that, perhaps, my writing would sound better read aloud by someone with a deep tenor and an English accent, or as Hitch would say with an sly, ironic smile, “English accent? Don’t you mean not an American accent?”

Some hours later from when I started this piece I’m now in our office/library/study with the curtains drawn and desk lamps blazing, ensconced in books and getting myself around a whisky and soda.

If the writing takes a turn, well, this is where the bottle was uncorked.

I won’t keep you too much longer, really, I promise. I think this has been a brief yet still all too long way of saying that I’m back—I’m back to writing essays on occasion, to writing about what I’m thinking instead of just exclusively writing fiction. Fiction, I find, springs from what I feel whereas nonfiction necessarily springs from what I think.

I will, of course, continue to write fiction. Fiction is the marrow in the bone, the song from the bird, scent from the flower, the blood in the heart. It’s essential and yet ephemeral.

I’ve also come to the realization that this is actually fun and that I missed writing as a way of reifying thought, my thought, if even just for myself. I had an academic article published in a top journal in my day and, although I’m ashamed to admit it, I was and remain proud of that fact and, as much as we scoff and sneer at academia these days, myself included, I’m proud of the work I did and I'd like to do more of it. The knowledge I learned has limited applications but the skills I learned do not.

I think I intend to use them. In fact, I mean to.