Simplicity seldom comes easy

I’m sorry this is such a long letter. I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.

Attributed to, amongst others, Mark Twain and Blaise Pascal

Years ago a friend told me, I think he meant it as a compliment, that my writing reminded him of Proust’s. I couldn’t for the life of me see how – other than being able to create long sentences which parse, and whose endings usually manage not to flatly contradict, draw non-sequiturial conclusions or otherwise fail to deliver on promises implied in their openings – but replied in a different vein. My gold standard for writing, I told him, is not Marcel Proust. It’s Mark Twain.

So how come I get complaints that my posts are difficult? I’m not best placed to say but having devoted much thought over the years to the question, in writing as in life, of simplicity, I’ll have a go anyway. Leaving aside the truth that aspiring to the lyric fluency of Huckleberry Finn is like aspiring to climb K2 solo, in my seventies and without oxygen, I plead the following mitigating circumstances.

First, it’s vital we distinguish simple from simplistic. The aim is not to ‘dumb down’ with prose whose Janet and John readability comes at cost of ditching vital detail and nuance. My subject matter is complex; perhaps inherently so though I believe its challenges more often arise from the truth that when we go up against the premises and talking points of mainstream narratives – which, as Marx pointed out, are in any age those that best serve its ruling class – we go up against ‘common sense’ itself. Or as I often frame it, against prevailing ideology. That makes our ideas counter-intuitive in ways barely distinguishable from inherent complexity. One reason I value Caitlin Johnstone’s pithy blogs is her ability to express in simple, short, colourful ways truths that cut right through the empire serving crap daily sprayed across our media. Those who deem her writing Janet and John – and in alt-media circles this is a large constituency – should try doing what she does. It ain’t as easy as it looks.

Second, simplicity is, as implied in the Twain/Pascal quote I opened with, expensive. The best popularisers of their own material – I’d cite Albert Einstein on relativity, Richard Dawkins on evolutionary theory, Noam Chomsky on systemic media corruption and Michael Hudson on the political economy of empire in decline – have spent decades in their fields. They’ve not only consciously wrestled with ideas from conception through iterative clarification to publication. No less important, they’ve assimilated the same – slept on them if you like – through those unconscious processes of cognitive fermentation whereby the wheat, if I may yet again change metaphors midstream, gets separated from the chaff; non critical detail from core truth.

Those who write as often as I do likely know the joy of waking up to pen with pristine clarity words that pour effortlessly onto the screen. They also know, alas, that while such writings get slightly more frequent over time, courtesy those assimilation processes just described, they are vastly outnumbered by posts that only see light of day after hours and days of struggle. ¹

Which leads me to …

… third, I write at the edge of my experience, of processes whose significance may take years to fully reveal itself. A case in point is Syria. Having slept through Afghanistan and Iraq, and been half awake at best for Libya, it took the dirty war against Syria to truly arouse me. As I put in in a 2024 post:

Syria was for me transformative, almost single-handedly inspiring this site. By now even I, slow of uptake, had cottoned on to an empire looking to set the Middle East ablaze in the name of ‘bringing democracy’, and in the ashes build a new regional order answerable to Washington.

But my progression from sensing something awry in the demonising of Bashar al-Assad, to the simplicity of that 2024 formulation, took years. During which I muddled through, fixating on fragments – Assad’s choice of pipeline … US-Israeli oil drilling in occupied Golan … Israeli medics treating wounded Sunni jihadists before sending them back to terrorise Syria – not insignificant but distracting me from the bigger picture.

I write as much to find out what I think as to communicate what I know. One clue is my overuse of dashes, parentheses and comma separated asides as I cram related but tangential ideas into sentences already creaking under the load. Occasionally I revisit such pieces to simplify them: for instance by converting long passive sentences, with sub clause stacked on sub clause, into several shorter active ones. Mostly though I haven’t the time. I’m neither a novelist producing one book a year, nor an academic publishing half a dozen papers. I’m turning out several posts a week, finished if far from flawless. Them’s the realities of what I do.

I could add a fourth driver of complexity, that sometimes I’m just showing off – see how much I know! – but that’d be bad salesmanship, wouldn’t it?

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1. One of the most valuable breakthroughs in a lifetime of writing came in the early days of this blog. This was a newfound ability to tell from my internal experience the difference between striving for effect, as indicated by frustration and an attendant throbbing at the temples, and striving for truth as indicated by the sleuthlike thrill of the chase and throb-free cranium.