Solving for X

According to the poet Robert Earl Hayden, W.H. Auden once said: “Writing a poem is like solving for X in an equation.” More recently, a similar analogy was employed by the journalist and podcaster Alex Blumberg, who explains:

I’ve developed a mathematical test to tell whether you’re on the right track. It’s called the “and what’s interesting” test. You simply tell someone about the story you’re doing, adhering to a very strict formula: “I’m doing a story about X. And what’s interesting about it is Y.” So for example, again, taking the homeless story, “I’m doing a story about a homeless guy who lived on the streets for 10 years, and what’s interesting is, he didn’t get off the streets until he got into a treatment program.” Wrong track. Solve for a different Y.

And while this might seem to make the art of poetry or storytelling feel unbearably dry, it’s really quite the opposite. As Jakob Einstein famously told his nephew Albert: “[Algebra is] a merry science. When the animal that we are hunting cannot be caught, we call it X temporarily and continue to hunt until it is bagged.”

Thinking of writing, or any creative endeavor, as a subcategory of this “merry science” clarifies many of the issues that confront the aspiring solver. The typical problem in mathematics or geometry consists of an unknown, some data, and a condition, and the same can be said of many of the narrative issues that a writer is compelled to address. When you’re first plotting out a story, particularly a novel, the number of individual decisions you have to make can seem overwhelming, but you usually have more information than you realize. Once you’ve spent even a modicum of time mulling over an idea, you wind up with at least an initial premise, a location, some primary characters, and a few of the major story beats—although, as I’ve noted before, many of these seemingly fundamental units are also the result of working backward from an earlier problem. When you line them all up, you generally find that they also imply other scenes or ideas: to get your characters from point A to point C, it doesn’t take a genius to see that you should pass through point B first, at least in your initial outline. (Point B often ends up being omitted in the rewrite, but it helps to lay it out blandly at first, if only in hopes that it generates some useful material.) And by the time you’ve laid all the obvious scenes from end to end, along with the connective tissue that they suggest, you often discover that you’ve got most of what you need. The hard part is solving for the remaining unknowns.

And you can’t do this until you’ve suitably arranged the pieces that you have, which can be easier said than done. Just as the first step in solving a linear equation is to get the variable by itself on one side, the unknown in any story can only be found once you’ve isolated it as much as possible from the surrounding elements. Hence the charts, graphs, and lists that writers produce in such quantities: once you’ve got everything down on paper in some kind of rough order, you start to see where the gaps exist. George Pólya, in his classic book How to Solve It, advises:

If there is a figure connected with the problem [the student] should draw a figure and point out on it the unknown and the data. If it is necessary to give names to these objects he should introduce suitable notation; devoting some attention to the appropriate choice of signs, he is obliged to consider the objects for which the signs have to be chosen.

And this last point is crucial. The outline isn’t the story, any more than an equation is the physical object that it represents, but by giving names or signs to the component parts, you can see through to the reality beneath for the first time.

In On Directing Film, David Mamet says much the same about identifying the beats of a story: “Here is a tool—choose your shots, beats, scenes, objectives, and always refer to them by the names you chose.” Once you’ve named the unknown, you can start to hunt for it more systematically, using some of the methods that Polya describes:

Look at the unknown. This is old advice; the corresponding Latin saying is: “respice finem.” That is, look at the end. Remember your aim…Focusing our attention on our aim and concentrating our will on our purpose, we think of ways and means to attain it. What are the means to this end? How can you attain your aim? How can you obtain a result of this kind? What causes could produce such a result? Where have you seen such a result produced? What do people usually do to obtain such a result? And try to think of a familiar problem having the same or a similar unknown. And try to think of a familiar theorem having the same or a similar conclusion.

Pólya compares this “same or similar unknown” to a stepping stone, and he adds drily: “The new unknown should be both accessible and useful but, in practice, we must often content ourselves with less.” It’s a system of successive approximations, or good hunches, converging at last on an answer that fits. And if we’re lucky, we’ll find that X, for once, marks the spot.

The Bollingen Library and the future of media

About a year ago, I began to notice that many of the books in my home library came from the same place. It all started when I realized that Kenneth Clark’s The Nude and E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion—two of the most striking art books of the century—had originally been delivered as part of the A.W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Art and published by the Bollingen Library. Looking more closely, I found that the Bollingen Foundation, whatever that was, had been responsible for countless other titles that have played important roles in my life and those of other readers: Vladimir Nabokov’s massive translation and commentary of Eugene Onegin, the Richard Wilhelm edition of the I Ching, D.T. Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture, Jacques Maritain’s Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, Huntington Cairns’s extraordinary anthology The Limits of Art, and, perhaps most famously, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Intrigued, I sought out more books from the Bollingen imprint, looking for used copies online and purchasing them sight unseen. So far, I’ve acquired tomes like The Survival of the Pagan Gods, The Eternal Present, The Gothic Cathedral, and The Demands of Art. Along with a shared concern with the humanities and their role in modern life, they’re all physically beautiful volumes, a delight to hold and browse through, and I hope to acquire more for as long as I can.

Which, when you think about it, is highly unusual. Most of us don’t pay much attention to the publishers of the books we buy: we may subconsciously sense that, say, the Knopf imprint is a mark of quality, but we don’t pick up a novel solely because of the borzoi logo on the spine. (The one big exception may be Taschen, which has built up a reputation for large, indecently attractive coffee table books.) Publishers would love it if we did, of course, just as television networks and movie studios would be happy if we automatically took their brands as a seal of approval. That’s rare in any medium: HBO and Disney have managed it, but not many more. So it’s worth taking a closer look at Bollingen to see how, exactly, it caught my eye. And what we discover is that Bollingen was a philanthropic enterprise, essentially an academic press without the university. It was founded in 1945 by Paul Mellon, heir to the Andrew W. Mellon fortune, as a tribute to his late wife, a devotee of Carl Jung, and while it initially focused on Jungian studies—it was named after Jung’s famous tower and country home in Switzerland—it gradually expanded into a grander project centered on the interconnectedness and relevance of art, history, literature, and psychology. As names like Gombrich and Clark indicate, it arose out of much the same circle as the Warburg Institute in London, which was recently the subject of a loving profile by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, but with far greater resources, patronage, and financial support.

In the end, after publishing hundreds of books, sponsoring lectures, and awarding generous stipends to the likes of Marianne Moore and Alexis Leger, the foundation discontinued operations in 1968, noting that the generation it had served was yielding to another set of concerns. And while it may not seem to have much relevance to the problem of media brands today, it offers some surprising lessons. Bollingen started as an act of philanthropy, without any expectation of profit, and arose out of a highly focused, idiosyncratic vision: these were simply books that Mellon and his editors wanted to see, and they trusted that they would find an appreciative audience over time. Which, in many respects, is still how meaningful brands are created or sustained. Matthew Yglesias once referred to Amazon as “a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers,” and although he was being facetious, he had a point. It’s easy to make fun of startup companies that are obsessed with eyeballs, rather than sustainable profits, as venture capitalist Chris Sacca put it on Alex Blumberg’s Startup podcast:

That’s usually a bad move for an early-stage company—to get cash-flow positive. I have strong opinions about that. Everyone I know who pushes for cash-flow positivity that early stops growing at the rate they should be growing, and gets so anchored by this idea that “we need to keep making money.”

Sacca concludes that you don’t want a “lifestyle business”—that is, a business growing at a pace where you get to take vacations—and that growth for its own sake should be pursued at all costs. And it’s a philosophy that has resulted, infamously, in countless “hot” tech companies that are years, if not a lifetime, away from profitability.

But I think Sacca is half right, and despite the obvious disparity in ideals, he all but circles back around to the impulse behind Bollingen. Venture investors don’t have any desire to run a charitable enterprise, but they end up doing so anyway, at least for the years in which a company is growing, because that’s how brands are made. Someone’s money has to be sacrificed to lay the foundations for anything lasting, both because of the timelines involved and because it’s the only way to avoid the kind of premature compromise that can turn off potential users or readers. We’re living in an age when such investments are more likely to take the form of startup capital than charitable largess, but the principle is fundamentally the same. It’s the kind of approach that can’t survive a short-term obsession with advertisers or page views, and it requires patrons with deep pockets, a tolerance for idiosyncrasy, an eye for quality, and a modicum of patience. (In journalism, the result might look a lot like The Distance, a publication in whose success I have a considerable personal stake.) More realistically, it may take the form of a prestigious but money-losing division within a larger company, like Buzzfeed’s investigative pieces or most of the major movie studios. The reward, as Yglesias puts it, is a claim on “a mighty engine of consumer surplus”—and if we replace “consumer” with “cultural,” we get something very much like the Bollingen Foundation. Bollingen wasn’t interested in growth in itself, but in influencing the entire culture, and in at least one book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, it went viral to an extent that makes even the most widely shared article seem lame. Like Jung’s tower, it was made for its own sake. And its legacy still endures.

Every forty seconds

People have a lot of options and boredom is the enemy…You’re constantly trying to introduce something new, introduce a reason to keep listening…Everybody who is super successful in audio, from Rush Limbaugh to Howard Stern to Ira Glass, they are all doing this. Go and listen to Howard Stern and listen to what he does. Every forty seconds, every minute and a half, he’s got something new. He’s got some new question…he’s trying to get a surprising moment, trying to get an emotional moment…

Something new has to happen. Music has to come in, there has to be a new voice. There has to be a new idea. There has to be a punchline. Something new should be happening every forty, fifty, sixty seconds.

—Alex Blumberg, on Creative Live