Clifford Geertz and why my diary suddenly feels like homework
Classes start at UChicago in like, a 3 weeks, and these past few days, I’ve been trying to kind of prep by looking a bit ahead at the syllabus for my summer session and, there’s an essay that they had us read and it's Clifford Geertz's piece on thick description-and it messed me up about everything I’ve been doing on this blog for the past seven months.
The whole point of this essay-from what I can tell after reading it once-is that talking about what happened, isn't the same as describing the meaning behind it, and that the meaning is layered, it is contextual, and unless you are able to pay enough attention to exactly which people were involved, exactly when, it will all remain illegible-that is the way he described it. He uses the example of a wink-it is not just the eye twitching-it is a wink. You’ve got to know a ton of contextual shit to understand what it means for something to be a wink, obviously, it's kind of blindingly obvious after someone tells you that but it's the type of obvious that will kind of reorganize your whole world in the process.
Anyway, once I finished that essay, it just occurred to me, that I have been writing a bunch of posts here that are, you know, just describing what happened. Thin descriptions. I don’t think I’ve been doing the second, meaning-making layer of it at all, nearly as much as I thought. Writing 'we ate fuchka at a party' does not mean exactly this-it means something far more rich and complex and layered abouttranslation and belonging that took me about a paragraph to even approximate even then, and I’m not sure I even managed.
Anyway, every time I open this blog to write on it now, I have this tiny, Geertz-ian voice that’s like, are you doing a thick description or a thin description? And it has basically made me turn this diary into something that basically has a rubric applied to it that I didn’t really want coming from a diary nobody is reading and that seemed like it was supposed to have lower stakes than that or at least I wanted it to have lower stakes than that. I wanted it to be “today wasweird” and I could leave it at that.
Obviously I’m going to keep writing on this blog, clearly-I am writing this right now. But I’m finding myself already editing myself, cutting out the thin parts, making sure I earn the thick parts, and I don’t really know if it’s going to make the blog better or worse or just more work to deal with. Ask me again in like a month, probably after I’m actually at UChicago and probably have even less time to obsess over my own paragraphs.
