Tom Lutz - Aimlessness

T he stray dog, the feral cat.

At least since Montaigne, the essay has been a literary form that embraces aimlessness, the form that best captures and regularly celebrates aimlessness as essence, as the opposite of deficiency, that finds in aimlessness not lack but plentitude, bounty, abundance. The essay lets aimlessness rule, lets aimlessness direct the proceedings. Essays can, occasionally, follow the kind of linear synaptic progress common to narrative and argument, but the best essays digress and digress and swerve and circle before returning to digress againsuch essays follow Vicos historiographical approach rather than von Rankes or Hegels. As Sara Levine writes, The essay is like a coat of fur, or Proteus in chains, or a syllable-filled spirit, and has more in common with the German cockroach than the Tennessee snail darter. Like that description, it is a form that embraces weirdness and randomness and multiplicity, a form that enacts aimlessness, and in fact elevates it to a method. Aimlessness is the essayists method.

The essay, as Levine puts it, is like a journey they say, or a walkabout, or a loose sally of the mind. As a form, it makes its living by pretending to be a mind thinking, by pretending to represent a mind sallying, which is to say, a mind at work, and this is, of course, like any representation, a bit schematic, incomplete, even, we might say, a bit sketchy in both senses of the word: a flawed simulacrum, a con job, and more often than not a poor, poor copy of its original. The sense that readers get when reading a great essaythat we are watching its author thinkis quite easily produced with even the most rudimentary tools in any working essayists tool kit. All we need do, we essayists, is express a bit of doubt about what weve just said, wonder out loud, as it were (since it isnt out loud at all, but on the page), whether what we just said is true, suggest that we dont know what we are doing, and do it with sentences built using long strings of phrases and clauses and parentheticals, all commenting on, revising, and even reversing what we just said, and all of which suggest a stream of consciousness, a thought process, rather than a polished presentation.

But wait, why am I telling you this?

You see how easy it is? I pretend to have a new thought, I pretend to do it in real time, as if in conversation with you, my reader, slipping in the second person quietlyno matter that, for instance, I wrote the paragraphs that follow first, and that I knew I was going to ask that question when I started down this road, knew that I was going to use that strategy to dupe you, whoever you are, long before it appeared on the page. And as I discuss these ruses of the essayists trade, explain how the trick is produced, show you the false back of the box that allows the magicians assistant to disappear, Im remindedIm reminded, doing the same work againof a story about Thomas Edison, a shaggy dog story about how Edison finally, after endless trial and error, found the right material for his filament. Edisons dog, in the story, watching his master fail time after time to make his light bulb last more than a couple of minutes, takes pity on him and says: tungsten. The dog explains, to Edisons gaping mouth, that, yes, dogs can talk, but there is a pact among them to never let humans know; they have agreed to pretend humans are smarter so we continue to buy the food and build the houses and pay the vet bills. If they knew I was talking to you, the dog says, they would kill me. Another dog overhears, and, yes, they kill him. I will now be looking over my shoulder at writers conferences.

You notice, too, the spiral of time, from the time of my writing, to the time of your reading, to the time of my reading about the shaggy dog, to the time in the story, to the present again, to the future.

And what of the stray dog and the feral cat? Why do they go where they go? What propels them? Hunger? Fear? Do they go to the same places, over and over, or do they wander? Are they aimless creatures, or, in their own minds, do they know exactly what they are doing and why, and feel, to themselves, like perfect utilitarians on their appointed rounds? We have seen them twice nowwill we see them again?