Hi, hello,
It’s been a little over a year that I have started this Substack. As I work on Part II to my last essay on deep time and the apocalypse that isn’t coming for us (despite all the signs, I know), it occurred to me an update on the ‘stack is probably overdue.
If you’ve been following along, you might’ve noticed that I’m still working out some kinks and experimenting with direction. I’m happy to say it’s mostly gratifying and mostly fun; hopefully, so is the experience of reading it (feel free to tell me all about it in the comments, or, if you receive these in your inbox, just press “reply”). Either way, I appreciate all who read and comment and engage with my work, regardless of whether or not you’re feeling chatty.
Going forward, I aim to publish these letter-updates about bi-monthly, in part to encourage a bit more community and conversation around here, and in part simply as a way to let you know where I’m at, what I’m working on/ thinking about, and what I have planned for future Gather No Moss posts. Unlike more traditional updates, there will still be some kind of rumination at the core of it; letters, in my opinion, are not just lists of recent events, but a way to share one’s mind in a more immediate, impressionistic way than a formal essay might allow. Hopefully, it helps us get to know one another better.
In this letter, given it’s the first one, I write a bit about writing, authenticity, and what being an immigrant taught me about relatability and the idea of a shared cultural context. At the end, there is a brief bit of housekeeping.
From Where I Write
As a way of reflecting on what I’ve been doing here for a year and what I intend to do from now on, I have been thinking about why I write in the first place. It occurs to me that the reason I write is the same reason I read: to shift and expand my perspective, to let my mind slip out of its usual moorings and go on a roam, coming back with a slightly altered sense of reality and self. This includes learning things, but also goes beyond a list of “takeaways and outcomes.” I read (and I write) to order and pattern my experience of reality, to discover new pockets of meaning and beauty, to make new connections between the flickering images of the phenomenal world.
I don’t know if my writing is achieving anything so lofty, but that is the ideal I am aiming at. Admittedly, it is a process. I find myself slowly shedding habits acquired during long years in academia, re-discovering my own voice. Funny, but it turns out one doesn’t just wake up after a decade or so of grad school, writing primarily for the hyper-specialized ears of scholarly journals and one’s dissertation committee, and suddenly recall how to communicate with other humans. At least, I didn’t. But, I think I am beginning to remember.
Incidentally, this is an almost clichéd topic for a Substack post. Writing about writing proliferates on the platform (unsurprisingly)—part of a time-honoured tradition of authors reflecting on their craft. (Stephen King and Ursula Le Guin come readily to mind; Borges had made a literature of his philosophy of language, and Umberto Eco made a philosophy of his literature. I could go on).
Substack posts on writing tend to lean less academic (or esoteric) and more practical; from my survey of the genre, the most common advice tends to fall into two broad camps: be yourself and be relatable. All in all, it’s pretty good advice. The first emphasizes authenticity and writing from a real, internal place of genuine interest and passion for whatever it is you’re writing about. Its proponents quote authors such as Haruki Murakami, and assure us that “not everyone needs to like your work.” This is true. In his writing memoir, Novelist As A Vocation, Murakami reiterates this idea, writing “you can’t please everyone, so you may as well please yourself.” He doesn’t mean just write whatever; obviously, we all write to an audience, and we mostly hope it is one that is receptive and interested. Rather, the point is, don’t get too hung up on appealing to everybody; just be a wonderful weirdo and you shall find your tribe.
In the second camp of writerly advice, folks double down on relatability. This means, I think, that one should write from one’s unique yet very human and therefore in some ways universal vantage point. The idea here is that when people can see you as a fellow human being (the fellow part is key), they will be more open to absorbing everything else you have to say. I think that’s true, but there’s a caveat. This is a bit trickier of an ask than simply ”be yourself” because it implies not all parts of oneself are relatable. It implies there is, after all, an art of self-construction in the public space; an art of appealing to others, be it through empathy or recognition or mystique or whatever else.
Between authentically “being yourself” and (presumably also authentically) “being relatable,” which does one prioritize?
As someone who came of age across three continents, speaking multiple languages and moving across multiple cultural registers, the dance between authenticity and relatability is one I am intimately familiar with on a relational, interpersonal level. How weird (read: how transparent) can you get, before people decide that being your friend requires too much homework? Too much background reading? Too much immersion in niche expatriate or diasporic realities? Too much strange food, and impenetrable humour? On the other hand, assimilate too deeply and you risk losing that spicy kernel that makes you interesting in the fist place.
In my writing, this is something I continue to learn to juggle, as well. Over the years I have discovered that not everyone (read: almost no one) gets my literary allusions and pop-culture references. I might think I am being witty and accessible, yet, my lost-in-translation-ness, coupled with slightly esoteric academic interests, often yields a kind of code, nigh impenetrable without a prior education in the specific cross-section of languages, books, films, and ancient cultural memes that form my intellectual formation. Of course, I’d like to think I’m just being mysterious; after all, some delight in looking for clues in Taylor Swift lyrics. Most of the time, however, I suspect it simply registers somewhere between “kind of obscure” and “I don’t get it.”
And, I don’t mean this in a self-deprecating way. I suspect this is actually a very common (maybe even universal!) experience of wildly overestimating our ability to make our minds transparent to others. We tend to think the way we see things is self-evident, and moreover, that it is easily communicable. Even setting aside the existentialist question (i.e., can we ever truly be known by others), from a purely social perspective, this is not always a given. I suspect that when we live in a largely shared cultural landscape, this is more of a given—and may become something taken for granted. When everyone is reading the same books, watching the same shows, and listening to the same music (not literally, of course, but by and large), then they also tend to speak in a similar, or at least widely-intelligible, idiom. There’s a shared pool of “common ground,” as it were.
However, as soon as one has the experience of moving across multiple socio-cultural and linguistic contexts, one quickly realizes that this expectation of a “shared idiom” is a very local, very contextual thing. Being from more than one place, speaking more than one language, it’s dislocating. Not everything translates; not everyone is on the same page. To learn to be relatable under these conditions, in my experience, is to be in a perpetual state of translation.
As our cultural landscapes are become more fragmented, segmented, and specialized—and increasingly they are, breaking up along age groups, interests, and other identity markers—the looser and thinner our shared context becomes. We might still assume that we speak the same idiomatic language when we speak a common tongue, but, do we?
Some may find it concerning, but personally, I think we ought to embrace the plurality—to become conversant with multiple contexts, multiple idioms, to get adept at moving freely across these different registers. This is as good for one’s development as is learning multiple languages, and perhaps even more valuable in today’s world. Different languages not only encode the richness of cultural and literary traditions, but even on a syntactic level, they have an impact on how we perceive and orient ourselves in reality. What is more, it is not only natural languages that carry within them deep information; we can think of worldviews or cosmologies as “languages” in a sense, too. Learning that there is more than one way to make assumptions about reality—and that they need not be entirely incompatible with one another—is about the most powerful paradigm shift one can gift oneself with.
And so, as we find ourselves navigating pockets of intellectual camaraderie amid a sea of puzzling and incomprehensible meme traditions—which do we prioritize? Authenticity, or relatability?
Perhaps one can both be oneself and be relatable—et voila! achieve effortless and widespread popularity. I am not so sure, though, if that would be a good thing. It reminds me of a scene in Annie Hall (1977), where Micky, the neurotic Woody Allen character, stops an attractive couple in the street and asks, “You look like a very happy couple, um, are you?” “Yeah, yeah,” “So how do you account for it?” And the woman says, “I am very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say,” and the man adds, “And I’m exactly the same way.”
Maybe that is something neurotics console themselves with, but I think the exchange also gets at the fact that human beings are, in essence, messy and complex, and maybe the best we can hope for is that our complex messiness is compatible with someone else’s. Picture-perfect happiness, just as pitch-perfect relatability, are either a lie or a disappointment.
To circle back to the subject of writing, here’s a fun case in point: around the same time I published my last essay, I also replied to
’s note calling for cat pics. And, unsurprisingly, many more people liked a random note with my cats in it than my essay about time and dice in the Indian epic Mahabharata. Obviously, cats are much more relatable than philosophies of time; what could compete with their feline allure?? I myself am immensely more relatable as “a person who shares her home with cats” than as “a person who spends her days thinking about things like philosophy of time and theories of consciousness.” But, I wonder, is that really a good thing? And, are you really more likely to join me in thinking about language, myth, or ethics, if I first show you a cute picture of a cat? (Let’s experiment:)The jury is still out, maybe.
As for me, at the risk of sounding blasé, in my own writing I intend to continue prioritizing authenticity. This isn’t just about creative integrity, though that is part of it, too. If nothing else, it is more honest; but more importantly, I suspect it will be more valuable to me, as a writer and as a person. I have to believe that when Haruki Murakami advises me that I cannot please everyone, and therefore I ought to please myself, he knows what he is talking about. And, to please myself, I rather be relatable through being authentic, rather than vice versa.
A Bit More Housekeeping
I’d love to close this update with a promise to publish more consistently, etc., but, as I am about to give birth to a tiny human soon, I suspect my writing schedule will remain somewhat erratic.
That said, essay topics will continue to coalesce around new—or old, but new again—ways of thinking about the interesting times we are living in. It seems to me that in a world that is increasingly fragmented and increasingly distracted, philosophy is not a quaint art, or a pursuit for the few in an ivory tower—it is a dire necessity. Why we think the way we think is not an idle question; it defines how and why we make choices, relate to others, raise our children, believe what is real, do work, vote, love, hate. It seems irresponsible not to think about it, and, doubly so when one is caught up in storming the ideological (or real) barricades.
But that is getting ahead of myself, a bit. All this is to say that here I will continue thinking aloud about things like language, consciousness, the intersections of metaphysics and ethics, and why we should care about any of that. I may spice things up with the occasional travel essay, too, which is just another way of doing philosophy, really (after all, I still haven’t written about Japan, and that only goes to show what sort of year this was).
And of course, I am always happy to communicate! Comment, like, or drop me an email (if you receive these in your inbox, you can simply press “reply”). Tell me what you’re reading now, and what you’d love to read about. I won’t promise to take requests, but, I will definitely consider them. Writing, after all, is always a dialogue—even when we write for ourselves; even when we write for the “ideal reader” in the ether… maybe, especially then.
Until next time,
Nika
Exceptionally well-written, as always! As an immigrant I vividly relate to this question of, “is my authenticity too complicated to be appreciate”. And while my literary leanings tend towards the cozy, mysterious, and easily digestible, I do get a certain thrill when a plot turns out to be more complex and surprising than initially estimated. You can guess which books leave a lasting impression (has the metaphor made its point?)
I think in our Instagrammable world, “authentic” has taken on a curated definition. After all, even a complete meltdown on social media is in itself a choice to present oneself in that way. So while public-facing authenticity is a choice, it is also a spectrum.
Looking forward to reading further musings!