Liminal Space 1.3

Sisyphus and the redwoods

Brian Leli

Jun 4, 2023

Welcome to Liminal Spaces, a place for me to put my brief and scattered thoughts (and extend an invitation to you to share yours) between essays.

Sisyphus

In my experience, writing is both an additive and a subtractive art. First, you add raw material. And then you start chipping away at it.

Writing is also a Sisyphean task. It is if you’re in it for the long haul, anyway. It is a challenge that can never be completed. Only continued. No matter how good you get (or don’t get) at pushing the boulder up the hill, no matter how much purpose and joy you derive from the process, it will always end with both of you back on the ground, and only one of you looking up with unabated thoughts.

Unlike Sisyphus, of course, you could always just stop. But then what?

The writing I do here is not a punishment. It can be punishing, though. Even when it’s all going well and I feel thrilled and fulfilled, those feelings come at a cost. I lose sleep, I get headaches, my jaw and eyes (and often the entire left side of my body) ache from over-focus; my thoughts get much louder than the other things and people in my life, and when they do, it takes a great deal of energy and care to stop those thoughts from damaging those relationships.

The thrill of writing itself—which I think is the result of losing oneself to intense focus while also (via addition, subtraction, and repetition) expressing oneself and creating something new—demands care, too. Like the boulder that is forced up the hill, the rising thrill eventually encounters a kind of inner gravity and plummets back down to lower (inner) earth. The whole thing is a very bipolar affair. But what thing worth doing isn’t?

“Basic dynamic in life: there is nothing meaningful enough to make you happy that could not make you sad if you lost it. This is the paradox of feeling, and it’s inherent and existential. If things inspire real positive emotion in you then they are necessarily things in which you are sufficiently invested that you would feel negative emotions when they’re gone. One of the fundamental choices that you face on Earth is the degree to which you’ll pursue deeper but riskier fulfillment or practice avoidance that exempts you from bad feelings but leaves you bereft of good ones.”

Freddie deBoer

, “You Are You. We Live Here. This is Now.”

In an earlier essay, I wrote that “every step in the writing process makes me feel [joy]—the thinking, the starting, the doing, the learning, the getting stuck, the trusting in myself to figure it out, the problem solving, the figuring it out, the finishing, the clicking send—all of it.” And that’s all true. But underneath everything, there is a more primal desire at work.

While lying in bed early this morning, unable to sleep or stop thinking about what I’m now writing about, I was reminded of a few things that Dustin Hoffman once said to James Lipton on an episode of Inside the Actors Studio.

After talking about the thrill of acting and how, absent commercial success, he's convinced he’d still be doing it—in community theaters or wherever else would have him—Hoffman paraphrases Picasso, saying:

If they took my paints away, I'd use pastels. If they took my pastels away, I'd use crayons. If they took my crayons away, I'd use a pencil. If they stripped me naked and stuck me in a cell, I'd spit on my finger and draw on the wall.

It’s a poetic and impassioned thought that brings to my mind a somewhat brutal image. It also makes me think about the Marquis de Sade, and the stories about how he wrote “157,000 words” in 37 days “on a 40-foot scroll while imprisoned in the Bastille.” Such things should inspire gratitude in those of us who can relate to them. (Gratitude just for having something that we care that much about. Because not everyone does.)

But why? Why do we feel so compelled to create, or to perform, or to do whatever it is that we do? Hoffman takes a stab at answering that, too, via a story about working with Laurence Olivier.

“He was in awful shape,” Hoffman begins:

Everyone knew he was in pain. Everyone knew he was on painkillers. This is a guy who had—at one time—King Lear, Richard III, and Hamlet in his head. And he's alternating them, okay? Here's a guy who had all those parts in his head, and he couldn't remember three lines in a row sometimes because of the painkillers.

He goes on:

When that movie was over, we went out to dinner. I’ll never forget it—never, ever, ever, ever forget it. I’m sitting there with Olivier, I don’t know if I’m ever going to see him again, because, you know, he’s sick. His wife is there, this wonderful woman, Joan Plowright, and we’re sitting, and a couple of his kids are there. And then we’re waiting and this other kid comes who’s going to UCLA. I remember he had red hair. And I remember he went up in back of Olivier [Hoffman starts crying], and he patted his head, and he kissed him on the head—and you just knew, you know.
And he sits down and we’re talking, and I was just so curious, I said, “We all wonder, what makes us do what we do? Do you have an answer?” I said, “Tell me, what’s the reason we do what we do?”
And he goes right up, and he leans over to me, and he says, “You want to know why, dear boy?”
I said, “What?”
“Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me.”

It sounds an awful lot like the words I shared last week from Dave Chappelle, who, speaking about his peers in stand-up, said:

They wanna be heard, they got something to say, there's something they noticed. They just wanna be understood.

It sounds a lot, too, like Bruce Springsteen in the Wings for Wheels documentary about the making of Born to Run:

We were seeking that spotlight out. We were trying to do something that would be noticed. That people would talk about and think about. That's what I felt inside of me, and it was what I wanted to communicate.

Or like the author and radio host Bill Flanagan speaking about Tom Petty in the Runnin' Down a Dream documentary:

You don't get to where he got to from where he started out unless you have something to prove to somebody who's not listening to you.

I could go on and on, of course. These are just the examples that I returned to recently, and that happened to come to me in place of sleep last night.

Each of the them contains a different story. But in the end, they are all basically the same one. In her novel O Pioneers!, the writer Willa Cather wrote:

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

It’s debatable what those stories are and exactly how many of them there really are. But I agree that there can’t be many. And I think one of them has to be some version of Olivier’s “Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me.”

We want to be seen. We want to be heard. This sounds like a pretty simple ask. And maybe it was once. But it’s not anymore. There are too many of us and we make too much noise. That roar you hear on the internet and elsewhere is us wanting the virtually impossible: to fit in and stand out. To push our boulders up our hills, just like everybody else is doing, but different.

The Redwoods

I’m not where I’m going with all of this yet, friends. I’m getting there, but where I actually am is all the way down here already, buried beneath the thousand or so words above. So I’m going to guide us toward the exit now with some closing thoughts.

In a section of The Elephant in the Brain titled “Parable of the Redwoods,” authors Kevin Simler and

Robin Hanson

write the following about “the world’s tallest tree species: Sequoia sempervirens, or the coastal redwood”:

The tallest living specimen towers a lofty 379 feet (115 meters) above the forest floor. Historically some may have been even taller, with evidence of redwoods reaching 400 feet (122 meters) and beyond. This is approximately the height at which capillary action ceases to work; any taller and a tree can’t get water from its roots to its topmost leaves. So redwoods are, in a sense, as tall as arboreally possible.
Height, however, doesn’t come cheap, whether for a redwood or any other tree. It takes a lot of energy and material to grow upward and remain standing in the face of wind and gravity—energy and material that could otherwise be put into developing stronger roots, growing horizontally to collect more sunlight, or making and dispersing more seeds in the hope of having more offspring.
So why bother? Why do trees put so much effort into vertical growth?
It depends on the species. Some grow tall to disperse their seeds more effectively. Other species do it to protect their leaves from terrestrial tree-eaters, like the acacia tree trying to stay out of reach from the giraffe. But for most trees, height is all about getting more sun. A forest is an intensely competitive place, and sunlight is a scarce but critical resource. And even when you’re a redwood, the tallest of all tree species, you still have to worry about getting enough sun because you’re in a forest of other redwoods.
Often a species’ most important competitor is itself.
Thus the redwood is locked in an evolutionary arms race—or in this case, a “height race”—with itself. It grows tall because other redwoods are tall, and if it doesn’t throw most of its effort into growing upward as fast as possible, it will literally wither and die in the shadows of its rivals.

As you’ve likely guessed, the parable of the redwoods is followed by sections on human competition. The areas covered include sex, social status, and politics; the similarities and overlaps that exist among them; and the signals and counter-signals that we humans are wont to send and receive as part of our competitive nature.

I’ll be exploring some of those areas—along with mimetic desire and what author Luke Burgis calls “social gravity” in his book Wanting—as I move forward with these posts. For the time being, though, I will leave you with this closing bridge from Simler and Hanson, which links their chapter on competition to the one that follows it on norms—or what the authors call “one of our species’ superpowers”:

As we think about our own ancestry and how we were shaped by it, it pays to keep the redwoods in mind. Faced with intense intra-species competition, they literally rose to the occasion, out of the darkness and into the light. So too with many of our most exaggerated features.
The problem with competitive struggles, however, is that they’re enormously wasteful. The redwoods are so much taller than they need to be. If only they could coordinate not to all grow so tall—if they could institute a “height cap” at 100 feet (30 meters), say—the whole species would be better off. All the energy that they currently waste racing upward, they could instead invest in other pursuits, like making more pinecones in order to spread further, perhaps into new territory. Competition, in this case, holds the entire species back.
Unfortunately, the redwoods aren’t capable of coordinating to enforce a height cap, and natural selection can’t help them either. There’s no equilibrium where all trees curtail their growth “for the good of the species.” If a population of redwoods were somehow restraining themselves, it would take only a few mutations for one of the trees to break ranks and grab all the sunlight for itself. This rogue tree would then soak in more energy from the sun, and thereby outcompete its rivals and leave more descendants, ensuring that the next generation of redwoods would be even more rivalrous and competitive—until eventually they were all back to being as tall as they are today.
But our species is different. Unlike other natural processes, we can look ahead. And we’ve developed ways to avoid wasteful competition, by coordinating our actions using norms and norm enforcement.

I would be remiss not to briefly mention a related and inseparable human superpower here: the sacred art of verbal norm violations and its singular norm violators. E.g., Norm.

Other Odds and Ends

One of the fears I had when I started doing these Liminal Spaces posts was that writing about the essays I’m writing would get in the way of writing the essays I’m writing. And so far, that fear has come true.

I’ve barely touched the piece that I want to write. It’s traveled a thousand miles in my mind. But thoughts are not essays. Not until they are. Until then, they’re just thoughts. I’ve so far just been reading and learning and thinking, gathering highlights and notes and ideas here and in a series of TextEdit files—the raw materials, if you will, from which I aim to eventually carve a completed essay.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’m enjoying doing all of those things, which is all that ultimately matters. But still, I do genuinely worry that, by writing these posts, I’ll inadvertently scratch the itch that I need to keep itching for long enough to get me to write the essay.

On the other hand, maybe these posts are adding to the itch. Maybe they are exactly what I need to be doing to write better essays. I’m not sure yet. But I wanted to at least mention that tension. Not because I’m delusional enough to think that anyone cares about my writing as much as I do. But just because I’m trying to be honest, both with you and with myself. And there’s no better place to do that than here. That’s another door that writing opens up for us. It’s like an endless invitation to be vulnerable and exposed in a merciless world.

Maybe the solution is just to allow myself to skip a week of these works-in-progress posts here and there, whenever I think that doing so would be in the essay’s best interest. Or, maybe there’s no problem to solve at all, and I should just keep doing what I’m doing. Time will tell, I suppose. It always does. In the meantime, if a week goes by when you don’t hear from me, there is a non-zero chance that my lack of new writing just means I’m busy writing something new, and I’ll see you on the other side of it eventually.