The Essayist's Notebook

Originally arising from this note: On the mimicry of uncertianty This note explores the notion of the anchor point within an essay. You will need to have read the above note if you want to make sense of my rereapting references to the washing machine

George Orwell

A good example, and one I think resonates strongly with what I'm calling an anchor point, comes from Orwell's essay “A Hanging” (1931). The essay is moving through questions of empire, punishment, power and death, but the entire moral weight of the piece pivots on a tiny observation: the condemned man steps aside to avoid a puddle on the way to the gallows.

It is a trivial act. Yet Orwell suddenly apprehends that this is not an abstract category called “a prisoner” but a living human being with a life of purposes and habits. The puddle becomes an “anchor point” from which the essay's moral perception unfolds.

The essay does not begin with a thesis about capital punishment. It begins with experience. The recognition emerges from attention. Similarly, in “Shooting an Elephant”, the elephant itself becomes an anchor point. Orwell is ostensibly discussing imperialism, but the essay turns on the concrete predicament of standing before the animal with a rifle while a crowd watches. The imperial system becomes legible through a single lived situation.

What is interesting for our purposes is that these early Orwell essays are full of what Essayism would probably regard as legitimate anchor points:

a puddle, an elephant, a cup of tea, a coal miner descending a shaft, a toad appearing in spring.

They are encountered things. The thought grows out of them. When I write about the washing machine, Ludwig Gann, Fagor and Mondragon, I believe I am doing something structurally very similar. I am not presenting evidence to support an existing argument. I am recording the point at which the world itself begins to disclose a connected thread. Where my critique of the “later” Orwell may emerge is that these anchor points gradually seem less capable of sponsoring possibility and more capable of sponsoring diagnosis.

To put it differently: Early Orwell: “This thing I have observed unsettles my assumptions.” Later Orwell: “This thing I have observed confirms my opinions.” That may be putting it too sharply, but I think it is close to the distinction that is now pacing the trackways in my thoughts.

In my note, the washing machine functions very much like Orwell's puddle in A Hanging. It is utterly mundane. Yet from it unfold questions of technology, co-operation, labour, memory, place, intellectual formation, cynicism and essayism itself. The difference is that my washing machine anchor point leads to an expansion of possibility and connection, whereas the argument I am beginning to formulate about AI and perhaps the later (Animal Farm) Orwell is that both exhibit a tendency toward closure. They arrive at the answer too quickly.

That, I think, is why the line in my note: It seemed entirely ordinary then. is important. It is the moment before the anchor point reveals itself as an anchor point. I would like to believe that sentence carries the same quality as Orwell noticing a man step around a puddle. The meaning has not yet arrived, but it is about to.

William Hazlitt

For me, personally as an Essayist, Hazlitt reveals more because Hazlitt's anchor points are often absurdly ordinary and personal. He does not begin with public questions and descend to experience. He begins in experience and discovers that it contains the world.

The classic example is “On Going a Journey.” The anchor point is simply walking. Not a philosophy of walking. Not a theory of solitude. Just setting out on a road. Everything else unfolds from that act. Hazlitt notices a signpost, a distant hill, an inn, a stream, a stretch of road. The essay's reflections on freedom, society, memory and consciousness arise from those encounters. The walk is not an illustration of the argument. The walk generates the argument. That feels very close to my washing machine passage.

Now as I think about this, I must report an observation of a friend: I suspect your own work is actually closer to Young than you sometimes admit. When you talk about writing as “walking the landscape in words”, that's not quite Hazlitt. Hazlitt's landscape often becomes a theatre for consciousness. Your landscape often has an independent reality that pushes back.

Hazlitt often begins with self. Young often begins with observation. Your Essayism seems to begin with a relationship between the two. Neither the Romantic tendency: What does this reveal about me? Nor the purely descriptive tendency: What is out there? But rather: What happens when an attentive mind encounters this thing? That is why the washing-machine passage works. It isn't really a memoir passage. It isn't really a descriptive passage. It is a record of an encounter. The machine leads to Gann. Gann leads to Leicester. Leicester leads to Mondragon. Mondragon leads to Orwell. Orwell leads to uncertainty. – OK I paraphrased his comments.

But to return to Hazlitt and his anchor points – Another excellent example is On the Pleasure of Hating. The anchor point is astonishingly small. He sits at a coach window watching people gather around a travelling show. From this observation of a crowd his thoughts begin ranging across politics, prejudice, conflict, partisanship and human nature. Again, the anchor point is concrete and observed.

Even closer to what I am trying to describe might be My First Acquaintance with Poets. The ostensible subject is literary, but the essay repeatedly anchors itself in specific remembered encounters: seeing Coleridge walk into a room, hearing him speak, the atmosphere of the place, the impressions of the young Hazlitt. The essay is not organised around a thesis concerning Romanticism. It is organised around recollected moments. What I see here for my developing notions areound Essayism is that Hazlitt's anchor points often remain open.

Orwell's puddle in A Hanging ultimately points toward a conclusion about capital punishment. Hazlitt's best anchor points often continue radiating associations long after they have performed their immediate function. Take the opening impulse of On Going a Journey. The walk never quite becomes reducible to a lesson. It remains a walk. The physical experience never entirely disappears beneath interpretation.

I'd like to believe that's close to what my washing machine is doing. The machine is not merely “evidence” for a proposition about essayism. It remains stubbornly itself: a machine, Ludwig Gann, Leicester, Fagor, Mondragon, ICOM, laundry before a flight. The associations accumulate, but none annihilates the reality of the thing itself.

In reviewing the washing machine a number of thing occur to me. It is much more Hazlittian anchor than an Orwellian one. Orwell's anchor points often become moral revelations. Hazlitt's anchor points become occasions for associative exploration. And I wrote it naturally, it was not a contrived device, it was the simple emergence of my disposition on to the page.

And there is perhaps a useful formulation lurking there for Essayism: An anchor point is an ordinary encounter that proves incapable of remaining ordinary. The puddle in Orwell. The road in Hazlitt. The washing machine in Montory. None is introduced as a symbol. Each becomes one only because prolonged attention reveals a network of relations hidden within the mind of the person perceiving it.

That, I suspect, is precisely what my AI critique is saying. The machine can imitate the shape of the anchor point, but it tends to arrive carrying the conclusion already folded inside it. Hazlitt, at his best, genuinely does not know where the road will lead when he sets out along it. The uncertainty is not decorative. It is generative.