Something to Do with Paying Attention

Something to Do with Paying Attention
David Foster Wallace

(17/03 – 02/04)

new york, februrary 2023

So — to the honorable men who stand to wrangle the coming tides of data. To ‘deal in facts‘. To slug through the necessary. I suppose that is me also. That is my life, is it not?

Lately, I’ve been somewhat fixated on the relics and artifacts of the data we engage with. Like where exactly do old emails go? What happens to those pdfs and word documents and spreadsheets and other errata we arrange? The ones that slip through the cracks? It’s funny. I was walking through South Bank actually the other day and I came across that bookseller who sets up right by the BFI and under the Waterloo Bridge — the one who lays all those ancient orange Penguin paperbacks out on the big tables. Out of instinct, I had a quick look and outside of a few of the big names — the Eliot anthologies, some Graham Greene, etc. — the vast majority were complete unknowns to me. That might make me poorly read; but I couldn’t escape the feeling that these books were unlikely to be read in full, again. And I am not sure exactly why, but a bit like unread emails, it felt like there was something beautiful about these books, something uncompromised, like that the price of pure potential is the total absence of movement. They were purposeless now, functionally defunct; I thought of our main character and his rotating-boot-sign watching days.

It takes a special skill to make this kind of stuff come to life. To write about tax and make people feel something. And I suppose I don’t share our hero of the ordinary’s disdain for the creative arts — but perhaps that is just what works for him: he’s a ‘cog’ not a ‘spark plug‘.

I myself, can admit to finding some personal freedom in the ordered systems. In the understanding of the pieces of the world, and the how and why they work together. What law and tax share — like all other vaguely relational systems of social taxonomy — is that they tell us usually more about ourselves than anything else. They contain (baked in) the petit choices and decisions that make the world the way it is. Even for me — something of a dreamer; someone who more than anything wants to create new ways of seeing the world — understanding these decisions is critical. Why they operate; why they sustain themselves. To understand the ‘ordinary‘ is the only way to protect yourself from taking it for granted.

Increasingly, I feel the coming of a new epoch: that the architecture is profoundly changing. That it is shaking. That it is being enumbered. When change comes, I hope to be able to help ‘slice the pie‘ too in my own way, perhaps for the better.