Several years ago, there was a Twitter account called @NYTMinusContext. Even though it’s been inactive for years, it remains one of my favorites. The central concept was simple. The creator of account would pull random semi-absurd phrases from different New York Times stories and then post them without the benefit of context, hence the name. Some were funny, some were flirty, and some were a little sad, but they all had this little pop of life.
As someone who deeply enjoys these little bursts of absurdist humor, I was immediately obsessed with their tweets. Some days, when I was bored or needed a little of creative exercise, I’d pull together a few of my favorites and repurpose them into some sort of quasi-found poetry. It was always fun to mold these isolated phrases into something new, something playful or sad or sometimes both.
But there was one that I always came back to. One phrase, stripped of all context, that spoke to me at some deeper level. One phrase that I saw a piece of myself in:
In a lot of ways, it’s how I’ve always seen myself. Physically, I’m a big, lumbering guy. I’m almost always wearing a hoodie, a t-shirt, and ill-fitting jeans. I break a lot of stuff on accident. I’m clumsy and sloppy, sure, but in a refined and respectable way. I’m a resting state of inelegance.
But it’s not just a physical description, it’s an intellectual one too. I like big, messy ideas. I like wrestling with why they’re really good and why they’re simultaneously really bad. I like crafting big bold theories about how the world works and then forgetting them entirely when they’d actually be useful or even making completely contradictory ones a week or two later. I like embracing the messiness of the world we live in because I don’t just think that I’m a resting state of inelegance, I think the world is. I think we’re all a giant, big, sloppy, clumsy mess, but in the best, most beautiful, most fascinating ways.
The original context of the phrase comes from a January 2016 ballet review published in the New York Times. In a surprisingly harsh overview of Daniil Simkin’s show “Intensio,” Times dance critic Brian Seibert refers to the work as “bursts of brilliant elevation and effort arcing above a resting state of inelegance.”
Extrapolating from the rest of his review, I imagine Seibert meant this as a criticism, but I think it’s optimistic in its own way. I think it digs deep into what it means to be human. We are capable of so much. We are beautiful and wonderful creatures full of potential and brilliance that we never fully capture, but continuously display.
We are also messy as hell.
And that’s what I intend to write about here and what I want to explore more. I want to write about what it means to be human in both the best and the worst ways. I’m fascinated by the way we shape society in our image, by what motivates us, what inspires us, and what makes us be awful to each other. I want to write about the world the way I see it, full of billions and billions of little bursts of brilliant elevation and effort arcing above a resting state of inelegance.
Hopefully, I’ll be entertaining and enlightening in this process. If that sounds like fun, then I’d love for you to subscribe and join in.