My next post is due in 12 hours, help!

How interesting - I’ve been working on my third entry in what’s becoming a little series on time, how to get more of it, when to move and when to rest. The next one is about how to know in which direction you should move. It’s coming along, okay-ish, I would say. But it just feels a little forced, the classic guy on the internet giving unwarranted advice into the void style piece, and I spent the rest of the morning feeling empty about it. And so now, it’s a little after 8pm the night before my next post is due (by my own standards, of course), and I can’t bear the thought of adding another piece of banal garbage onto the already monstrous digital pile out there. So I’m going to go a little more off the cuff.

Taking off the derailleur

I finished the third version of the piece at around 8:30am, after which I “worked” from home, which in this case means catching up on sleep (my flashy new app told me I needed to sleep for 13 hours last night to pay back my “sleep debt”), then taking my bike to the shop to see if they could help me replacing the front derailleur, the arc-shaped piece that physically pushes the chain from one gear to the next when you shift. The bike is this beautiful old Peugeot road bike I bought from a colleague when I first moved here for something like fifty euros. I spent a year not using it, then started biking to work at the end of last summer, in the fourth or so heat wave we had in Lyon, when the five minutes on the metro would cause my forehead and sternum to start sweating as I stepped into the air conditioning-less steel prison that had lain dormant underneath the superheated concrete jungle overnight. A few weeks later, the little screw in the middle of the derailleur broke, and since it’s a vintage model, they just don’t make ‘em in that size anymore.

That was a year ago, and my precious little vélo has stayed in the garage ever since. But as a trickle of sweat dripped down my forehead one morning on the metro, I knew I had to get ahead of things. I wanted to see if they had anything to help me fix the well-oversized Shimano derailleur I’d just bought off amazon for eleven euros (for some reason I was surprised when it didn’t fit, despite simply ordering the first thing that came up, without checking the diameter). The man working there breathed in through his teeth as he loaded a sentence into the chamber, as people often do when they have no idea what to tell you and also think it’s going to be an awful amount of work.

As I was about to leave, I asked my doorknob question: Is there anything I can do just to hold it in place? I don’t actually need to change the front gear. He looked at me, quizzically, before saying “Bah si t’en as pas besoin, tu l’enleves, quoi” (calling me the familiar tu, a practice most common in climbing gyms and apparently, yet unsurprisingly, bike shops as well). 

If you don’t need it, just take it off. 

Why was it so surprising to me? Several hours of sleep debt and a severe lack of bicycle comprehension were no excuse: this thing had been attached, broken, for nearly a year, and I had seriously believed that my only solutions were to fix it or replace it. A subconscious invisible wall blocked the thought from ever entering my mind. I could just take it off.

The workbooks of Ingmar Bergman

I’m definitely the type of guy to become even more insufferable if I start watching Ingmar Bergman movies. I drop things very quickly if they don’t catch my attention, but when I get sucked in I really go for it, and before long all my friends can’t stand to talk to me. The most recent example being Dune: Part Two, of course, with my group of Australian friends, French friends, and my girlfriend all separately ripping into me because I just wouldn’t shut up about it (last year it was David Lynch, and that lasted way longer). 

All I’ve seen of Bergman is the first half of Seventh Seal, but I must have been tired that night, or my eyes were too glued to the little black mirror, and so I stopped for some reason. But I got to reading Knausgaard’s essay on Bergman, in which he talks about the director’s workbooks. Specifically, I was caught by the way in which Bergman deliberately keeps free of function and format, allowing them to be a place free of criticism, especially from himself, saying:

”I can’t even be bothered to write them [the functions] down in this workbook, which needs to be so presumptuous and undemanding and is intended to sustain like the mellowest woman any number of my peculiarities.”

Knausgaard writes that:

“The workbook is this place—in it, Bergman could put anything he wanted, the entries he made there could be completely inane, cringingly talentless, heartrendingly commonplace, intensely transgressive, jaw-droppingly dull…”

This idea of intentionally removing function from the equation floored me a little. Constraints are good, of course, but they have to be of the right kind.  Arbitrary guidelines around the practice itself are good (keeping a workbook, publishing weekly at 7:30am on Substack), yet putting guidelines around the content can hinder creative activity that crawls its way out from somewhere within the subconscious. Bergmans first ever idea for his most famous film, Persona, as written in his workbook, were: 

“Dejection and sorrow and tears passing into profound outbursts of joy. A sensitivity of hands. The broad forehead, severity, eyes that explore, the soft and childlike mouth. What is it that I want from this…” 

And from that he made a masterpiece.

Yeah, I should probably have another crack at Seventh Seal.

Double-bagged camomile

There’s a tendency when you start writing to stick to some kind of plan, like I have been doing with my five-or-six-part essay series. I suppose it’s again about constraints, of giving some structure to the practice. When you write an academic paper, there’s structure: first you start broad, you tell the world how your problem is the most important problem of our times, and then you narrow in and narrow in until you give the context for the work you’re presenting, until you’ve narrowed into your by-nature extremely niche thesis statement of the present work (the story of my PhD often ends up being how we will cure lipid dystrophy and obesity by developing coarse-grained molecular dynamics parameters of neutral lipids, for example). 

And this is not the second little project that I abandoned; the first being a recounting of my early days moving to France (although I’d much sooner like to return to that one). The point is that I realised that within the good constraints I’d placed on myself (publishing a piece of writing weekly), I had inadvertently placed less good constraints (sticking to a formulaic series of boring advice style pieces) on myself as well. Yet like those workbooks, the best thing to do in a situation like mine is to probably keep function and form out for as long as I can, until I know I’ve found something I care about. And so, as is becoming my ideal writing habit, I made a big cup of camomile tea with two teabags (the bargain ones are just a little too weak), and sat down and banged this out. The stakes are low, here, and if I’m writing to an audience of 6 I’d rather write something peculiar and different. 

You don’t need the derailleur on the bike, necessarily. I’ll see to that again when I need to start going up hills.