A Personal Project

I began a new project a few days ago. In many ways, it is the opposite of the Learn in Public orientation. In fact, it is intentionally Learn in Private.

I have been writing (and learning, and sharing) in public for 20 years, and it has been great. I’ve learned a lot, and I flatter myself in thinking that my writing made at least a little difference to those who were trying to re-imagine theater. But the overlap between the Venn Diagram of Learning in Public and Teaching in a Classroom is almost total, at least for me, and that has become somewhat of a crutch. To teach involves an outward orientation: what does the student/reader need to know in order to understand this step? What does the student need to hear at this moment? Even though I retired in 2020, I have found myself continuing in the habit of asking these questions as I’ve written books and blog posts.

In addition, when I started in blogging in 2005, the scene was a lot like social media today–very contentious. Either you were reacting to someone else, or you were the one being reacted to. And soon I found I was becoming like Benvolio as described by Mercution in Romeo and Juliet:

Thou—why, thou wilt quarrel with a man that hath a hair more or a hair less in his beard than thou hast. Thou wilt quarrel with a man for cracking nuts, having no other reason but because thou hast hazel eyes. What eye but such an eye would spy out such a quarrel? Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat, and yet thy head hath been beaten as addle as an egg for quarreling. Thou hast quarreled with a man for coughing in the street because he hath wakened thy dog that hath lain asleep in the sun. Didst thou not fall out with a tailor for wearing his new doublet before Easter? With another, for tying his new shoes with old ribbon?

In my defense, there were a lot of quarrels that needed to be had. But eventually all this becomes a habit rather than a choice, and (to quote Shakespeare again) you become “damned, like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side.”

So it’s time for me to learn how to have an inward orientation. To ask not what does the student need, what argument needs to be countered, what information is missing from the world, but rather what do I need. And that’s a question I have avoided.

At 66, I’ve done a lot of reading and thinking over the years, about a variety of topics. My specialty is theater, obviously, specifically theater history and criticism, but I have done an enormous amount of reading in literary criticism, rural issues, theology, philosophy, political philosophy, education, entrepreneurship, business models, myth and anthropology, psychology, social media, economics, anarchism, and many, many more. Lately, I’ve been having an interesting experience of encountering, in something I’m reading or a podcast I’m listening to, a person or movement or idea that provides the link between two people/movements/ideas that I’ve previously encountered and appreciated, but seemed to be floating out there in mental space without a context or tradition. So I want to spend some time taking a step or two back in order to try to recognize the pattern in my own carpet – i.e., to examine my intellectual journey and figure out what I believe. And in order to do that, I have to learn how to look inward.

I hasten to say that this is not some sort of an announcement that I am not going to continue to write publicly, about theater or anything else. I fully anticipate that I will continue doing so, perhaps even more frequently, with the only possible change being a broader pallette of thoughts. But I will also have this private project that I likely won’t share with anyone except maybe family at some point.

Maybe you’re curious what this might look like. I can tell you it won’t be linear–I’m not writing an autobiography. It will be more like the independent web of the early days: a bunch of pages on different topics hyperlinked together. I’ll be using Obsidian, which is what Obsidian is best at. I suspect the result might look like an Obsidan graph view:

But for readers, it will be like a choose-your-own-adventure book of pages with text and links. Nothing fancy.

My hope is that this process, which I expect will go on for quite a while (if not the rest of my life) will lead to greater self-understanding, as well as to future sources of inspiration–“breaking bread with the dead” (and the living!), as @ayjay would say. And I also hope the process will lead to intellectual or emotional explosions in my mind, like a star exploding in space, producing a massive burst of light, heat, and high-energy particles along with a shockwave of expanding intellectual material. Enlightenment! Or a major headache. One or the other.

On the other hand, it might just be a private version of digital gardening where I can putter to keep my mind active. Either way, it is a net plus.

If you have any examples or suggestions, feel free to share. I see something like Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, or Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language as inspiration. I know there are many more precursors, and that this is nothing new or original. But I think it will make me happy, which I’m trying to learn is sometimes enough.