butterfly thinking

— transcript

This year I have been trying to write about design and it is surprisingly difficult to do this sometimes. One question that I keep revisiting is how working with the structure of books affect the process of writing for a book designer? The book is undergoing a transition from being a printed object and merging with other media forms which destabilizes the concept. It’s easy to get into the weeds and for the time being I am going to focus on the written or printed book. I was looking at a little book called How to Think More Effectively, published by The School of Life in 2020. Originally, I considered this book as a potential resource for design students, but in the end I found that it made for a better jumping off point for a discussion about working with books than a reading in and of itself.  I’ll be contrasting the School of Life’s advice with some passages from Vladimir Nabokov’s memoirs. The School of Life’s perspective on the creative process of writing is clean and smooth, while Nabokov’s is messier and less didactic. What they share is an appreciation of using reading and writing to clarify and communicate ideas. Each uses well known writers to illustrate their points. The chapters I will highlight in How to Think More Effectively are “Cumulative Thinking,” “Butterfly Thinking,” and “Reading Thinking.” And I am borrowing from Nabokov’s Strong Opinions and his childhood memoir Sense, Memory.

The UK-based School of Life publishes pretty, modernist hardcover books that you will find at the type of design shops that carry Hasami porcelain and Ellipi Klizia staplers — those are the beautiful enamel powder coated ones that look kind of like whales and come in shades of mint and egg yolk, and so on. A few years ago I was in such a shop, preparing to spend my life savings on some Italian thumb tacks when I impulse-bought the book Calm, published by The School of Life. Calm is a perfect example of a book that functions as an object. Just seeing the word Calm set in a simple geometric sans serif font is calming, especially when it’s pressed in a matte white finish into a blue linen cover. Books have a certain presence, perhaps because we know that they contain vetted and organized information, and so seeing this “calm” on the cover had a particular weight to it. On a book cover, the word “calm” reads as both a directive and a promise, which reflects The School of Life’s stated goal which is to “help us find calm, self-understanding, resilience and connection – especially during troubled times.”

How to Think More Effectively includes sections which reference Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov. As thinkers, both of these guys were oddballs, but they were very creative thinkers and they were very successful writers and they achieved fame that has lasted past their lifespans. I assume this is large part of why they are included in The School of Life’s definition of effective thinkers. Their thinking yielded tangible success.

And perhaps they wrote in order to achieve that success, in which case they were effective. But how would a person know if a poet is thinking effectively? Effective is an interesting metric in that it sounds very precise, but it’s a strange qualifier. I eat effectively. I sleep effectively. I am an effective friend. These sound odd for good reasoning. 

Creative thinking, I think, is attached to the desire to pursue unknown avenues – a kind of speculative exploration. A large part of this is accepting at the outset that these avenues will be unknown. But I think that some of the best creative work we do can feel like more of a tuning-in to something which is felt before it is understood. That process is even harder to teach than it is to try to do.I feel less ambivalent about saying that designers require the ability to think effectively and I think that is because I see design as an activity which requires engagement with systems. To use systems ineffectively, unless it’s for the purposes of understanding these systems better, is wasteful. There are plenty of designers who don’t see our work this way, but as a working designer, I do.  This does not mean I see this work as less creative, I am thinking more about how I would describe the process of working effectively with systems. For example, in 1949 Bruno Munari’s made a book called Libro Illeggibile —or Unreadable Book — which has no text.  I’ll link to this book in the show notes. The Unreadable Book is made up of colourful pages cut in different shapes. This is not the type of book a person would use for the purpose of learning facts or transmitting information didactically. But I could still trace both its purpose and its engagement with production and argue that it is an effectively structured book. It is a kind of anti-book, which it couldn't be without a deep understanding of the form of the book on Munari’s part. I think I could even say that it provokes a person to wonder things which might provoke them to observe more effectively — that is to say more clearly — without didactic instruction. But I’m not sure I even want to bring the word effective anywhere near a project like that. It feels as if I’m casting a shadow onto it as I look at it when I approach it with that word. On the other hand, it is part of my job to teach and explain the process of design and illustration. And so at some point, perhaps I will have to consider what it means to think effectively and how that intersects with the creative process. 

So, the book How to Think More Effectively has an explanatory subtitle which is: “A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity.” This understanding of thinking fits into the contemporary content economy. In the logic of the content economy, writers produce content and readers consume content. People commonly speak about writing like this now. 

The School of Life's description of How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity explains its mission like this: 

We know that our minds are capable of great things because, every now and then, they come out with a brilliant idea or two. However, our minds are also unpredictable, spending large stretches of time idling or distracting themselves. This is a book about how to optimize these beautiful yet fitful instruments so that they can more regularly and generously produce the sort of insights and ideas we need to fulfill our potential and achieve the contentment we deserve.

Like many of the books by this publisher, How to Think More Effectively is an ordered mix of quotations and brief historical notes, followed by some practical advice. In this book, each chapter concludes with some prescribed action or activities to do, which are called “mental manoeuvres.”

I’ll begin with Chapter 2 of How to Think More Effectively, which is titled “Cumulative Thinking,” This chapter deals with the challenge of assembling fragments of ideas into a whole. It begins,

The point is as basic as it is key: our minds do not disclose their more elaborate and best thoughts in one go. The mind is an intermittent instrument whose ideas come out in dribs and drabs. It is capable of a few inspired moves, then falls silent and needs to rest and to lie fallow for bewilderingly long periods. We cannot think for two hours at a stretch, let alone an entire day. The mind can’t neatly follow office hours. One paragraph might be the work of a morning; an entire book of three slow years.

We tend to miss this when we encounter the thoughts of others. Because they frequently sound so composed and can be digested in an effortless stretch, we too readily imagine that these thoughts emerged in a coherent burst. We forget that a lakeful of ideas had to be pooled together with painful effort from spoonfuls of thinking arduously collected over long days and nights.

As a result, we are often dismayed at our own desultory first efforts. Our misfortune is to look always at the final results of the thinking efforts of others, while knowing our own efforts primarily from the inside.

This is pretty relatable. When students or other young creatives compare their first drafts to other people’s final drafts, it can also lead to feelings that some people call “Impostor Syndrome.” To resist this discouraging feeling, The School of Life suggests that,

To calm us down and reassure us of the inevitability of humiliation, we should pay special attention not to the books but to the manuscripts of great thinkers. The French novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922) reads as one of the most polished and fluent writers of any age; his thoughts appear to flow ceaselessly from one point to the next. But his manuscripts suggest a different genesis. These densely packed notebooks are filled with multiple layers of changes, side notes, reminders, suggestions; sections moved about, crossed out, revised, abandoned, taken up again and ultimately rejected. The Proust we read is an artificial voice assembled over years, not spontaneously generated in the hours that are required to read him.

Here, How to Think More Effectively shows two pages from one of Proust’s notebooks. They are quite messy. 

It’s interesting to contrast this summary of Proust’s notebook with Mary Hawthorne’s version in  the New Yorker. She described Proust’s notebooks like this, 

Pages from the working notebooks, the ‘Cahiers,’ are written in fluid, all but illegible script, suggesting that Proust wrote quickly and easily. He wrote in lined notebooks, with double-lined red margins, where you sometimes find the absent-minded doodling of the author; at other times, he seems to be elaborating on the things he has set down. On one notebook page, he’s drawn a kind of surrealist collage of portraits … that blend into one another, and which may offer clues to the way he conceived of his novel: an amalgam of people he knew in life, dismantled and reassembled to form the characters of his fiction. Next to the collage, he has drawn a female face, which, the gallery note tells us, represents the genesis of Albertine”. (Albertine is one of the characters in In Search of Lost Time.)

Hawthorne looks past the aesthetics of Proust’s writing as “messy” and focuses insead on how he used his notebooks as a place to Proust’s notebooks is that they seem to be a place where he could mix his textual and visual impulses, putting them in contact with each other.  

The School of Life’s interest in Proust’s notebooks is how they provide visual evidence of the possible delays, obstacles, and confusion that might occur when a person develops an ordered one which can be delivered to a reader “effectively”. They are drawing attention to the way in which the completed works we are surrounded by makes the process by which those works were made invisible to us. Published works often successfully hide the process that produced them from us. When we attend a performance we generally want to experience one which appears effortless and it’s just the same with a book.

However, Proust’s fluid early drafts could be misleading in their own way, too. I spent some time this year looking through several poets’ archives, and I have a suspicion that writers tend to cover over the traces of their more embarrassing efforts. But even if this were not the case, I’m not sure if Proust’s notebooks make for a rounded argument because they seem very hard to live up to. As Mary Hawthorne points out, although they have the messiness of a scribal document, Proust’s notebooks are unusually lucid and fluid. Vladimir Nabokov provides a counterpoint to Proust’s elegant, preserved rough drafts. In 1962 Nabokov was asked by a journalist, “would you agree to show us a copy of your rough drafts,” to which he replied, 

I’m afraid I must refuse. Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It is like passing around samples of one’s sputum.

Nabokov’s response is extreme. And, by the way, he wasn’t referring to Proust’s Cahiers. He was speaking off the cuff and his comment has the carelessness of the oral dialectic when it’s transcribed. I don’t know what he thought about the Cahiers but he was quite enthusiastic about In Search of Lost Time. But if Nabokov was extreme in his assessment of rough drafts, I think Proust’s cahiers are also an extreme example of the notebook process. It seems like he really had an affinity for working with a notebook. Whereas Nabokov tried and failed to work with a notebook, as I’ll describe a bit later. So although they are both writers who have an interest in capturing memory, they don’t share the experience of successfully using a notebook to piece together their fragments of ideas and memories into a whole.

The “mental manouvre” at the end of the chapter on Cumulative Thinking is a suggestion to use a notebook. Personally, I’ve never been able to manage a notebook for a long period. They tend to make me self conscious and gloomy and generally don’t bring me into that desirable flow state of production. However, I do think everyone should at least try out a notebook or a sketchbook practice. And I agree with the chapter that we all need to develop a process of some kind for capturing fragments of ideas so that they are available to us later. I have some working documents where I collect snippets of ideas that relate to a larger theme, for example. Some of my working documents are just email chains that I write to myself – stray thoughts and notes. I had a friend who used to call herself and leave voice messages. Some people’s notebooks are really wonderful, though, with lots of drawings and snippets of nice ideas. 

The next chapter in How to Think More Effectively is called “Butterfly Thinking.” This is where Nabokov pops up on the School of Life’s radar. For my own part, as I was going through these books I was working on an illustration of a butterfly for a book I am developing about patterns. I was trying out both imaginary patterns and ones taken from nature. The butterfly I ended up drawing is called a “starry night cracker.” It’s black with pale blue spots arranged in semi-circular rings, so that if you had two starry night crackers facing one another head-to-head, their wings, when connected, would form full rings of spots. I had to look at a photo of one for awhile before I could understand how its patterns were actually formed. And so I had these butterflies in mind when I read this chapter. 

The chapter “Butterfly Thinking” borrows from Nabokov's obsession with butterflies for its structure. Not only did he have a practice of catching and studying butterflies, but he also wrote articles about them for scientific journals. Inspired by his twin fields of work, this chapter compares catching hold of ideas to catching butterflies in a net. As The School of Life describes, Virginia Woolf also compared ideas to butterflies. She envied Proust for his ability to catch hold of them. 

The School of Life writes, 

One of the frustrating features of our minds is that the more interesting or pertinent our thoughts are, the more they have a tendency to escape our grasp. There seems to be a devilish correlation between how important and necessary a thought is to us and how likely it is to elude our command. The truly precious thoughts have something almost airborne about them, so inclined are they to flit away at the slightest approach of our conscious selves.

Many of the world’s finest thinkers have equated ideas with winged creatures. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato (b. 429 BCE) compared the mind to a large cage in which a number of birds – or ideas – are circulating. He added that we can only catch these birds when they are sitting on a perch, but they spend much of their time agitatedly racing from one end of the cage to the other, leaving only a blur of feathers. Great ideas may pass through our minds, yet, as Plato knew, it is another matter to persuade them to land.

I’d like to compare this to Nabokov’s own description of his relationship with butterflies in his memoir Sense, Memory.

From the age of five, everything I felt in connection with a rectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion. If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender. The original event had been banal enough. On some honeysuckle near the veranda, I had happened to see a Swallowtail—a splendid, pale-yellow creature with black blotches and blue crenulations, and a cinnabar eyespot above each chrome-rimmed black tail. As it probed the inclined flower from which it hung, it kept restlessly jerking its great wings, and my desire for it was overwhelming.

Virginia Woolf’s description of her earliest childhood memory of southern England is actually quite similar. She wrote,

Lying half asleep, half awake in bed in the nursery in St. Ives. It is the hearing of waves breaking, one two one two and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking one two one two behind a yellow blind. It is of hearing the blind draw its little acorn across the floor as the wind blew the blind out. It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.

Butterflies and waves, respectively, played important roles in Nabakov’s and Woolf’s writing, and their formative memories of these things are both attached to sunlight coming through a window. When I noticed this connection I remembered that my son’s two earliest memories originally involved light coming through windows, as well, but these have faded from his memory. Now, I remember him describing these memories better than he remembers them himself. I wonder if we all have early window light memories? And I wonder if Nabokov’s and Woolf’s writings are partly an attempt to recapture on a book page these early, fleeting imprints on their senses which felt so magical when they first occured. The relationship between a rectangular window and a rectangular notebook both act as frames which contain the writer’s perceptions of a larger chaotic world. Rectangles are not really naturally occurring forms and are often associated with items constructed by people. The items which currently frame our encounters with the world are often rectangular: not just windows, but also doors, books, iPhones, and so on. We repeat this rectangular encounter over and over again, viewing or arranging the complex patterns that make up the world within these tidy frames. A notebook is one place to mark each encounter, which helps us track patterns and chains of associations. That is one way to organize our thoughts. The School of Life is suggesting something like this: ideas are butterflies, and a notebook is a net.

The chapter also claims that anxiety is what makes our thinking so often flighty. As the chapter explains, 

To encourage ourselves to know our minds, a blunt demand that we should ‘think harder’ may not be the best approach. In order to give new, threatening but important thoughts the best possible chance of developing, we may have to use certain mental tricks. The mind sometimes doesn’t think too well if thinking is all it is allowed to do; it should be given a routine task to distract it and help it lower its guard.

One “mental manoeuvre” offered at the end of this chapter is the observation that we often have excellent ideas when we’re engaged in another task, like washing our hair. The School of Life’s advice is to take advantage of these Eureka moments by jotting them down for later examination. 

How to think more Effectively’s model is modelled on the Benedictine monastic tradition as an institution which supported both thinking and creating. The Benedictines engaged in practices that were designed to calm the mind in order to facilitate clear thinking and this included spiritual practices of writing and copying. These practices echo Bhuddist traditions as well which are not included in the book’s model of publishing. As well as the Benedictine tradition, the inclusion of Plato calls to mind the Stoic tradition, which he partly influenced. The notebook, for example, which was discussed in the chapter on “Cumulative Thinking,” is a traditional Stoic tool of self knowledge and self discovery (although in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, he writes about the danger of writing usurping memory through the voice of Socrates). 

For his part, Nabokov, who wasn’t too crazy about Plato, actually rejected the notebook later in his career. In 1967, he responded to a question about his work habits at length like this:

In my twenties and early thirties, I used to write, dipping pen in ink and using a new nib every other day, in exercise books, crossing out, inserting, striking out again, crumpling the page, rewriting every page three or four times, then copying out the novel in a different ink and a neater hand, then revising the whole thing once more, re-copying it with new corrections, and finally dictating it to my wife who has typed out all my stuff. Generally speaking, I am a slow writer, a snail carrying its house at the rate of two hundred pages of final copy per year… In those days and nights I generally followed the order of chapters when writing a novel but even so, from the very first, I relied heavily on mental composition, constructing whole paragraphs in my mind as I walked in the streets or sat in my bath, or lay in bed, although often deleting or rewriting them afterward. In the late thirties, beginning with The Gift, and perhaps under the influence of the many notes needed, I switched to another, physically more practical, method—that of writing with an eraser-capped pencil on index cards. Since I always have at the very start a curiously clear preview of the entire novel before me or above me, I find cards especially convenient when not following the logical sequence of chapters but preparing instead this or that passage at any point of the novel and filling in the gaps in no special order. I am afraid to get mixed up with Plato, whom I do not care for, but I do think that in my case it is true that the entire book, before it is written, seems to be ready ideally in some other, now transparent, now dimming, dimension, and my job is to take down as much of it as I can make out and as precisely as I am humanly able to. The greatest happiness I experience in composing is when I feel I cannot understand, or rather catch myself not understanding (without the presupposition of an already existing creation) how or why that image or structural move or exact formulation of phrase has just come to me. It is sometimes rather amusing to find my readers trying to elucidate in a matter-of-fact way these wild workings of my not very efficient mind.

I enjoy the way that Nabokov evaluates his process in such detail. It stands out to me that the process he describes is less neat than the one that How to Think More Effectively describes. Nabokov’s feeling that his booksactually exist as a whole prior to being written might be seen as part of his monist perspective. A monist, as opposed to dualist, conceives of the world as originating from a unified whole. I don’t know a lot about this, but for context, Spinoza seems to have been a monist, while Descartes was a dualist.

The last chapter in How to Think More Effectively is called “Reading Thinking,”. It begins:

Reading has always had a central and prestigious place in our understanding of how we can develop our minds. The more we read, we’re told, the cleverer we stand to be. We need to read because we can’t do it all by ourselves; the fundamental point of reading is to acquire the good ideas of other people.

However true this might be, we can nevertheless point to another, perhaps less familiar, purpose to reading that is as important in terms of developing our minds: reading provides us with the chance to unearth and put into focus what we happen to think. It’s through contact with the books of others that we might come to a clearer sense of our perspectives and ideas.

The claim that reading has always had a central place in “our” mental development is a fragile one. But this chapter touches on something that I love about books. Because the technology of books has remained pretty consistent for hundreds of years, they do offer this possibility of connecting with the minds of people from different eras. There are many ways in which we could problematize this, such as in terms of who is given access to this technology and how, but I will save that for another day. Challenges aside, it is quite cool that books offer a possibility for intergenerational conversation. As the chapter goes on to note, 

…when we find a book on the subject we care about but are lonely with, we have evidence of an extraordinary commitment made by a serious stranger, which bolsters our sense of the legitimacy of the thinking challenge we face. Someone else has devoted years of their life to our theme, and gathered 100,000 words in its honour – a devotion made all the more tangible by the gold lettering on the spine, the logo of a venerable publisher, the rich cream paper and an elegant blue bookmark.

Whatever might actually be inside, this is proof already that the thinking task is in principle a serious one; with this book in our lap, it no longer seems so peculiar to want to think in a sustained way about urban design or the future of marriage, child psychology or income differentials in developed countries. We are encouraged to start our own brains by evidence of the developed thoughts of another person.

Once we start to read the book, the benefit to our own train of thought continues.

I really like the idea that books make us less lonely by allowing us to connect with conversation partners across time and space. 

This chapter also underscores the ways of looking at thinking and engaging with books and book technologies that we saw in previous chapters. The chapter “Notebook Thinking,” for example, suggests pinning down fragments of thinking — perhaps understood as brief illuminations — by working with a book as a tool to collate these ideas for later organization and reflection. 

In “Reading Thinking,” we’re given the impression of a universe in which the thoughts that Nabokov or Proust developed in their scribal notebooks were developed into more refined typographic models that can then circulate publicly through printed copies. One thing that I’ve noticed about books, print, and typography is that there are many paradoxes that surface when you examine the three closely. I see a possible paradox in the model How to Think More Effectively offers: it aims to demystify the process of creation by acknowledging its messiness. And yet, the publishing model through which How to Think More Effectively is produced seeks to obscure the messiness of its own process. It tends to smooth out all the wrinkles and contradictions that occur in our thought patterns, presenting a refined final product with the messiness filtered out. In its western European iteration, typography reflects this pattern, as well, becoming more and more abstracted from the messy idiosyncrasies of handwriting, fostering a very modular, repeatable, text-centred model of thinking and communicating.

It’s interesting to consider the traditions of scribal texts, such as in the perso-Islamic tradition or xylographic — meaning woodblock printed — texts, for example, such as the Edo era of Japanese publishing, in this context. Rejecting typography and frequently employing imagery as part of their process, these other traditions offer another way to use written content to organize and communicate ideas. These are not necessarily oppositional models. Written communication housed in a rectangular format is part each of these processes. But using imagery and retaining the evidence of the rhythm of a human hand on a page provide other forms of non textual information found in non-typographically reproduced books. For designers and illustrators, this is an important component to consider, as well, which we could link back to Proust’s notebooks, for example: Drawing was part of his writing process.

In his book Designing Design, designer Kenya Hara wrote,

When our ancestors first began to walk erect, for the first time both their hands were free. … I wonder if our ancestors drank water from the vessel of their tightly folded palms. I bet they did. Just as we ladle water with our hands from a mountain stream, so did they. When the palms are tightly folded together, the space within is so small that a butterfly can barely flap its wings.

Within the space of the hands, Hara recognized the concept of the vessel, one of our earliest tools, which developed into other “various kinds of containers,” including language itself. As Hara argues, language acts “as a tool for emotions and speculation,” and that “letters and characters … preserve languages,” which in turn are housed in books. How to Think More Effectively similarly sees the book as a vessel containing a trapped butterfly. 

The reappearing motif of the butterfly in these texts reminds me of the butterflies that my 4th grade science teacher, Dr. Sweet, caught as part of his studies. There were trays and trays of butterflies, pinned down and labeled for taxonomic purposes mounted on the walls of his chemistry lab. He would walk around our tables in his lab coat, which had a hole blown out near the lapel matching the big cowlick in his hair. He was often lost in his notebooks and butterfly studies during our class; his head was always somewhere else, never entirely in our classroom. I had – and still have – no idea what he was trying to work out, but it involved hundreds of butterflies. Perhaps without the taxonomical approach there are some things we can’t understand as clearly. I assume he was looking at the patterns of each butterfly, as well as the patterns that they shared. But I wonder how you can understand what a butterfly is independently of its spontaneity. The way a butterfly flits around in a seemingly disjointed way is part of what a butterfly is. Its surprise appearance and disappearance is central to its appeal. How can something like that be pinned down without losing something fundamental about its full nature? If we focus on its ephemerality or the element of surprise it brings, a chance encounter with a butterfly might give us a very different impression about what a butterfly is. An ordered, taxonomic approach is only one way to understand the world, a way the book is often employed to sustain and promote. 

As well as Plato, Proust, Woolf, and Nabokov, other thinkers mentioned in How to Think More Effectively include Immanuel Kant, St. Benedict and Michel de Montaigne. If this book was charting a star system, it would certainly be the one seen under the western sky. It’s sort of a greatest hits of western thinking, I suppose. The book does present other models of thinking within this European framework, including ‘Mad’ Thinking, Envious Thinking, Analogical Thinking, Empathetic Thinking, and Love Thinking, which might, to different degrees and in different ways, challenge the rectilinear confidence of the book. 

As an alternative or an addition to How to Think More Effectively, I would recommend Strong Opinions by Vladimir Nabokov. It also includes a parade of greatest hits of western thought, but from a later period: Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Jane Austen, hippies, Charlie Chaplin, and The New Yorker. In his memoir, Speak, Memory, Nabokov goes into more detail about his Russian childhood. He frequently refers to the Eastern European tradition, in his case almost always Russian. I like the way he considers the difference between writing and thinking in one language versus another, and he is self conscious about his relationship to the Anglosphere and the French publishing tradition, too – in its own way, a uniquely Russian perspective, I think. I found his collection of interviews in particular to be messy, surprising, and funny. My copy was used and I actually had to wash coffee off the front cover when I bought it. That’s the other thing that a book can be: literally, materially messy, used, and rumpled. Nabokov’s interviews and his memoir are full of butterflies, as well. In the end, I have to admit that it was the reference to Nabokov in How to Think More Effectively that inspired me to learn more about him. Books, after all, are always full of other books.

How to Think More Effectively was designed and typeset by Marcia Mihotich.