Remembering to Believe
Finding an edge in the power of fiction.
Today, talking shop on the putting green, I was accused of overthinking. This happens often, and it bugs the hell out of me because it’s usually true. Most people with a BA in philosophy are chronic overthinkers – the degree lies at the end of a long road of thinking, questioning, and dissatisfaction with available answers. I do still believe they’re synergistic modes of thinking, golf and philosophy: they both combine technical, analytical thought with the creativity to abstract problems and come up with creative solutions. But this synergy doesn’t negate the fact that sometimes – in both fields – there’s just too much thinking.
This most recent accusation irked me because I was trying, explicitly, to keep things simple. Another player had asked me what would happen to his low point if he moved his pelvis down in transition. I told him I didn’t know; I never learned much about The Golf Swing and its rabbit holes, just about mine, to keep things simple. But I guessed that it wouldn’t move the low point laterally, because he wasn’t moving laterally, just down. So the low point would just go underground, and he’d hit descending-blow chunks.
I was now asking a swing coach, a friend around my age, who said I was right, but that the club would also move out. The club is a fixed length, and if the handle goes down, the shaft has to flatten to keep the clubhead above ground. So he’d heel it. This seemed like an extra step: the question was just what would happen to the low point, and I said it’d go down – flattening the club isn’t a direct cause of the low point moving, just a secondary response to it moving. He’d made the question more complicated. The low point would go down; all the rest is downstream.
He thought for a moment, said I was probably right, then said, “but you’re just overthinking it.” I didn’t have much more to say, and the conversation ended. I tried to wrap my head around what I might have overthought for the next ten minutes before giving up.
I grew up a reader. I watched a normal amount of TV as a kid. I never got into video games, in part because my parents didn’t want me playing the fun ones (shooters) and in part because I was terrible at them, making them more frustrating than enjoyable. I was one of the last Americans to grow up before the smartphone, so my days had a few extra hours in them. And I’d fill those hours with kid stuff: shooting tin cans with a homemade slingshot, building suits of armor out of duct tape and discarded pizza boxes, digging for stuff in the corner of the yard. And I’d read. Of those, reading stuck past puberty, and I got through most of the quality young adult fiction of the day: The Hunger Games, Rick Riordan’s work, the whole child spy genre, some one-offs whose plots I forget but feelings of wonder I remember.
I first fell in love with English class as an excuse to read. But, in sixth grade, we started getting into the nuts and bolts of storytelling. The Outsiders wasn’t just a story about rival gangs; it was a conceptual examination of “coming of age.” In The Giver, rules around bicycle riding weren’t just world-building details but a commentary on social control. I’d never considered anything like this before. I’d just liked stories. I never considered fiction this way: as a tool for social analysis, a means of uncovering some greater hidden truth about everything.
I started treating fiction like engineering: the meaning was in there somewhere, the book’s function, a single established thing. I just had to figure out what the pieces stood for and put them together. With the right historical context, establishment of themes, the current “this stands for that,” I could put things together, connect the right dots, and the meaning would be revealed to me. Fiction was a mechanism, and by identifying parts and how they worked together, I’d reveal the story’s true function.
Over the years, I grew frustrated that The Meaning had to be hidden in this way, under so many layers of ambiguity. If we knew the answers, if the author knew their intentions, why not just say it outright? I started gravitating towards fiction that defined its scope: James Joyce’s Dubliners makes no secret of the object of its commentary. Greek tragedies and postmodern short stories named their characters for the archetypes they represent, giving me confidence I was properly oriented. I read Infinite Jest during COVID, still my favorite novel by a 2000-US-Open margin, amazed how it explored its concepts with the depth and precision of a physics simulation, defining its particles’ properties before describing their collision. A new world seemed possible, one of pure ideas, unburdened by the ambiguity of most fiction. A new world of pure thinking. Around this time, I transferred from my school’s English department into philosophy, switched most of my reading to nonfiction, and haven’t read much fiction since.
I’ve had this nagging sense, especially lately, that fiction and storytelling remain vitally important parts of the human experience, something I’ve lost touch with. I try to get back into it from time to time, and I’ve enjoyed a handful of novels quite a bit (Benjamin Labatut remains a favorite, which shouldn’t come as much surprise to those familiar). Last month, I picked up Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger. The premise intrigued me enough to fight through it for a while, the unattributed dialogue, my own difficulty remembering characters, that I couldn’t really see what it was all for. I felt bad. After all, it seems pathetic that a (somewhat) professional writer could feel a titan of American fiction was lost on him. A little over halfway through, I lost faith that I’d find out what happened on that plane. [Spoiler: I googled it just now, and we don’t.] I haven’t picked it up in a bit, and I’m not sure I will soon.
I’ve known my sports psychologist for eight years now; at this point, we have most of the nuts and bolts secured, and most of our conversations revolve around application. I told him that, after a lot of work, I didn’t feel like I was fighting my swing as much anymore, and how liberating that felt. He asked if that could mean I was now a top player, say top 50, with that off my back. I thought. I’ve been taught to believe on the basis of reasons. The results and my performance suggest there’s a long way to go. I said no: I’m not executing at a top 50 level yet. He didn’t like this reasoning much. He wondered if I could think of myself as already being a Top 50 Player and let the results flow from there. I didn’t need a rational basis for my belief; in his view, the belief comes first.
I try to use this newsletter for two things that are really just one thing: a space to work through my life’s open questions and to capture the a-ha moments when they come. Things seem a lot more real when I can move them, with some fidelity, out of my head and onto a page. It helps solidify an image of myself, clear a more navigable path towards who I’m meant to be.
Philosophically, “meant to” is a strange concept. From a deterministic perspective, I’ll become whatever the natural laws decide I’ll be, and it doesn’t make much sense to say I should be anything else. Ethically, I’m supposed to behave in certain ways for certain reasons, but that doesn’t say much about meaning. Metaphysically, arguments for any particular unimodal human existence are pretty weak, and arguments against any such existence are weaker. None of this leaves us much of anywhere. It’s almost as if philosophy doesn’t capture “meaning” all that well.
Around this time last year, I picked up The Entanglement, by card-carrying capital-P Philosopher Alva Noë. It’s a book about art, broadly, and his introduction notes that his colleagues have wondered why he made the switch from metaphysics to aesthetics. Noë doesn’t see the two as separate. He argues that “neither biology, cognitive science, nor AI can tell a complete story of us, and we can no more pin ourselves down than we can fix or settle on the meaning of an artwork.” As such, art is our means of reinterpreting the world, of recreating it for ourselves. In this sense, “human nature is an aesthetic phenomenon, and art–our most direct and authentic way of engaging the aesthetic–is the truest way of understanding ourselves.” [Quotes from the book jacket, which summarized far better than I could.]
To be totally honest, at the risk of placing some horrible jinx on myself: I find it hard to believe I’m presently a Top 50 player. Most of the time, it’s even tough to believe I’ll get there. I’ve also found it hard to get through fiction recently. It seems like there’s some similarities. Thinking is just figuring out the way that things are. If you’re not careful, it’ll convince you that’s the only way they can be. But that’s the same as saying a painting, a song, or a story has a singular, rational, inanimate meaning. Art evokes imagination, belief. Fiction doesn’t tell us the way the world is – it admits as much, that it’s fiction. But it helps us imagine a world, and, if we believe in it, it gives us an image in which to remake our own.