I Think I Need To Keep Dishwashing

I’ve been thinking a lot while dishwashing.

There isn’t much to do except repeat the same motions.

[scrubbing plate] [spraying cup] [drinking coffee] [loading machine]

Thoughts stretch out in the pit. They don’t arrive all at once. They change while I’m having them. Sometimes I don’t know what they are until I’m already halfway through them. It doesn’t feel like I’m deciding them. More like I’m noticing them.

I started paying attention to how quickly a thought turns into something else.

I’ve been trying to write everything down lately. Partly because I forget things. Partly because if I don’t, they come back different. Smaller.

Some people think I forget things because in middle school I used to huff something from a bottle I found on the street so I could throw up and go home early. I don’t know what it was. But it made sense while I was doing it.

I’ve become a bit obsessed with the tools used to document thoughts. I started wondering if the tools you use don’t just record thoughts, but shape the pattern of thought. Maybe even influence what kinds of thoughts are possible. I felt I needed to try something else.

So I started building something.

I holed up in my room for 8 hours.

“What’s he building in there,” my roommates would say. They would come knock on my door and peek in and I would say, “go away, I’m building something.”

A blurred figure at a desk at night, moving fast enough that the head and one arm smear across the frame. On the desk a mechanical keyboard, a wide monitor filled with code, a typewriter pushed to the back, a jar of pens, a small red box of electronics, headphones and a mouse. The wall behind is papered edge to edge with drawings, prints and photographs.

“What are you building?”

“I’m not sure yet but I think it will make sense.”

Code started forming into something I called Field. It became an infinite canvas where I could place notes anywhere. Blocks of text, fragments, labels. You can move things around, group them. An infinite, spatially organized word processor. Not in lines, but in clusters. Things near each other because they felt related.

A screenshot of Field, an infinite canvas. A sidebar on the left lists three fields: Notes on Field, Scale Test, Hmmmmm. Seven text cards sit scattered across the canvas at different sizes, all of them placeholder — Hmmmmm, mhmmm, heerrrmmm, maybe, a card of nothing but question marks, one headed not quite over rows of the word no, and one headed ALMOST. Along the bottom edge: Double-click to create, T label, G gather, Z fit view.

A screenshot of a single Field note headed Hmmmmm, filled with placeholder lines — hmmmm?, a bold hmmm, two bullets, a grey code block reading herm? hmmmm, and a quoted hmmmm. A block menu has been opened at the bottom, offering Text, Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 and Bullet list.

I would sit there moving things around. Placing fragments next to each other. Zooming in and out. It felt like I was getting closer to something. My roommates asked if they could have it for themselves. “No, it’s not ready yet.”

After a while I realized I was just building a more complicated word processor. I hadn’t really changed anything. I just gave myself more space to do the same thing.

I needed something else. The tool wasn’t enough. Maybe it was me.

Maybe I needed to think less like the person on the computer and more like the computer.

In an effort to think like a computer, I started describing a pattern of thought syntactically. More conditionally.

A typed page on cream paper setting out a thought as pseudocode. It declares originalThought, currentThought, previousThought, stable, iteration, maxIterations and log, then loops while stable is false: add to the log, stop if the thought equals the previous one, give up and return the original if the iterations run out, write the thought down, replace it with a slightly different version, continue if that feels more correct, revert if it feels less correct, wait if it cannot be described, and take the new thought if waiting changed it. The last line reads: return originalThought.

It felt small and linear. It didn’t capture the depth.

I needed more mess. Maybe what I needed was something that didn’t have to turn into words.

Around this time I read The Kekulé Problem by Cormac McCarthy. One of the ideas in it is that language isn’t where thought happens. It’s more like how we report it. The unconscious does most of the work, and by the time something reaches language, it’s already been simplified.

That could be right. It didn’t seem like something that started as words.

So I stopped writing altogether and I started placing objects on the floor.

Objects laid out in loose rows on a wood floor between a dishwasher and the kitchen cabinets, shot from above. Among them a cordless drill, a claw hammer, binoculars, scissors, a can of WD-40, a deck of Bicycle cards, a tambourine jingle, a speed square, reading glasses, sunglasses, a blue toy VW bus, a beaded figure, a paper crown, a coiled white cable, a tin of cherry gummies, loose sweets, a zebra figurine, a dustpan, brown Vans and a blue football.

I would move them around until it felt like something had settled. Yes, there is a thought in here. A whole story. I left everything where it was and headed out the door, thinking I might understand it better when I got back.

When I came home it just looked like I had made a mess. My roommates were not pleased.

I stood there for a while trying to remember what any of it meant. But I couldn’t. It felt like I had been working with something that only made sense while it was happening. And the moment I stepped away from it, it turned into something else. Or maybe it was always something else.

I thought about what David Lynch said in Catching The Big Fish.

He talks about ideas like fish. The deeper ones are larger. More abstract.

He says if you expand the container, you can catch bigger fish.

I realized I had been standing in my lake the whole time.

I already had the stillness. The repetition. The space.

The dish pit was expanding.

It wasn’t the tools.

I think I need to keep dishwashing.