Polybook Day 1: Why Another Book on Polyamory
A few people at Inkhaven asked me why I didn’t use the time there to write a chapter on my book on polyamory every day, and thus complete the book. My answer was that I did not think it would suit the format of blogging every day. I have since changed my mind. After blogging for 30 days, it is a lot easier for me to write about anything, so long as it is something I have decided I want to think about. At Inkhaven, so many other interesting things were happening, that clearing my head and thinking about the polyamory book, and put it in my attention space actually felt pretty hard. Now that I am sadly away from everybody and am not thinking about 500-words-worth of other things, I could try the polyamory book experiment. I figured I could either write parts of the book, or write out my plans for the book. Either way, some work on the book is getting done every day.
Before we keep going, I want to mention that I saw this incredible artist, Mobina Nouri, today at an exhibition. I had hoped to write more about her, but I realized I do not know what to say, and that perhaps I would need more time in some kind of process of really engaging with her art before I feel like I can write anything interesting about it. I found it very beautiful. The Arabic calligraphy on nude bodies photographed in an ethereal way could be tacky, except she is a true artist and handles it incredibly well. Her black line and gold drawings could be a lot less crisp, and still be considered true art, and she takes it to another level. It was super cool in person, to have it be all around you.
The polyamory book is meant to be my “make a table of contents, fill it in with content,” practice for writing a book. There are two books that I had started writing that started with the concepts, and were meaningful to me on the level of the ideas. One third book I started to “practice writing a short book,” and then the polyamory book I started as an exercise in “making a table of contents, fill it in, edit, now you’re done.”
I did not realize that I would have questions about my own table of contents, and would be spending quite some time reworking it. This means that I cannot actually escape the work that goes into writing a book, which is figuring out what you want to say in the process of working on it.
In some ways my thoughts about the book feel like the lacy calligraphy of Mobina Nouri. There is a beautiful woven mathematical dimension for me when I look at Arabic calligraphy. I cannot read it, but it creates a kind of peaceful feeling in my brain. Something aspirational, and like I can become better or “more sane” when I go towards it.
This means that if trying to fill in the table of contents feels bad, in my brain there is something disorganized that happens when I try to put my thoughts into my own table of contents schema. But it also means that a process could be “write a bunch of the book, figure out the table of contents, rework it” which is also a fine process, even though it gets in the way of my plans involving the “Just fill in the form” process of writing a book.
Although — maybe not! The form can be “What are you thinking about polyamory today, fill out these 500 words.” In 3 months, that would be approximately the amount of words I would want to be working with to use the Blueprint Your Manuscript method of organizing a book. This should in theory be a similar enough process to my “Just fill in the table of contents” original inspiration.
I am finding myself repulsed in a certain way, in myself, from wanting to write this book. When I first had conceptualized it, I wanted to write a book that I would have liked to read, myself, and that might have helped me personally. Maybe it will help other people, too.
There aren’t that many books on polyamory, and the famous ones that people get around to reading don’t talk about the things that I would want to talk about.
When I read online forums about relationship troubles, I find that often enough I have to talk to my friends about them who have had experiences to know “what is likely actually going on” behind the text that people wrote. I have to do enough of different kinds of triangulation, that even though I sometimes benefit from the material I’m reading online, I would have to do a lot of extra things to it to make it useful to myself.
The “post-digested, post-chewing” thoughts are what I want to fill this book with. In some ways, this makes it difficult to think about. Usually what led to the consumption and digestion of the material, and making it my own, was my own pain. Some fight, some misunderstanding, some phenomenological overwhelm. The thoughts feel good in my brain, now, but in “trying to get them into a communicated shape” feels almost like getting back in touch with the original pain. I would like to create different intermediary steps for people to follow, such that it is not a “painful process they are following” to understand what I am saying, insofar as the process I followed for my own self was painful. I want to make something beautiful out of pain I had felt, but I don’t want the jagged painful thorns to be jutting out of my book, poking myself and my readers — and in part because that is not how it feels inside my brain, it is not how the experiences and the ideas settled, and a book that did that would be “dishonest” to my concept.
I am doing a creativity camp called Reconstellation with Supercycle. I’ve worked with them before, and I know that their methodology will really help me with this set of questions. I know I can just ask them how to get over this block, and I know that they would have a really fascinating answer. They have worked on problems far, far harder than this with people.
Before I ask them though, I should take some personal responsibility and do an experiment of trying to write the content, any content, having it be organically painful, and seeing what happens to me. I should put in the ante which is a willingness to collect the data about my pain. Which parts of myself get accessed, where do I feel fear, where do I actually get stuck in the process of the writing, rather than being stuck before the writing in anticipation of negative feelings during the writing.
ATTEMPT 1: 500 WORDS UNTIL THE PIZZA ARRIVES IN 1 MINUTE, GO
There are a million ways to feel cucked. Some people feel good about it. They enjoy the feeling. Some people feel really bad about it — they hate the feeling, they want to avoid it at all costs.
Women and men feel cucked in similar ways, some of the time, and different ways other times.
It would be convenient to have a switch, to feel the optimal feelings at optimal times. To be a sort of infinitely-beautiful ditto-nymph. Not only are you saying the right thing at the right time to have the most seductive effect on your partner, such that your partner is most attracted to you, is in the best mood possible to be their best possible self, but also you are genuinely being your best possible self, not repressing emotions, speaking authentically from your heart and your gut, and really manifesting in each moment in authentic expression.
That would be really great, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately this is god-tier stuff, and you can’t actually be the best part of every god and goddess all at one time.
This is part of what makes polyamory hard. Maybe this is a stretch, and I’ll probably have to set this up in some better way.
*post-pizza-arrival*
This might end up being a book about feelings. Constellations of feelings. I can imagine diagrams, of different shapes of poly people, how they got there, and how their shapes tend to grow and change over time. (For example, “a quad is a good way to end up with a triad” is a quote.) But it will be a book about not being able to actually be everything for everyone, and it will be a book about what “moves” you have with your authentic feelings, to be more like yourself. I am not particularly interested in investigating “types of people” as if they are in a zoo. I am also not really into gossip. Some people are really into gossip; they are doing a thing, and it’s not a thing I am doing or am particularly inclined to do. They are working on other projects that I am not working on. “Who is banging who” has never really been a major site of my attention.
However, “can I turn a feeling I don’t like into a feeling I like feeling more” has been a focal point of my attention for many years.