The Bad Press of Dubito
On the collective resistance of uncertainty
This week I’ve been thinking about doubt.
About how I’ve always left little room for it. Too busy to daydream and unwilling to cope with the potential of many other parallel lives, modes, cities, people I can become. I preferred to live in clean, clear lines.
This thought, of course—as all great thoughts do—came from an instagram reel. The reel clipped a soundbite of Anne Carson in conversation with Linn Ullman.
“Descartes said this famous sentence cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore I am—which everybody knows and learns in school but if you look at the sentence really it says dubito ergo cogito ergo sum—I doubt, therefore, I think, therefore I am—...you know you see cogito ergo sum on t-shirts all over the world but dubito has a bad press.”
I started researching other texts on doubt and so many of them ask us to leave doubt behind.
I couldn’t help but spiral a bit. I’ve known and even preached that uncertainty is the thing we need to get comfortable with, lean into, maybe even leap into.
Flattening was my first step.
But why was it so damn hard?
Last week, the things that hid behind the stack, the things I previously had no time to question, began to reappear—they creeped. They began to sketch speculative versions of myself I had yet to become.
I dreamed of shapes appearing out of darkness. I felt my body tense, then release, and then a deep grief set into my chest.
What does it take to reframe uncertainty?
We always talk about it in the climate world and in the storytelling space but what can it look like in practice? How do we embody it, in our day to day? In the micro moments?
Rebecca Solnit says that “the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act,” but have we grown too cowardly? –distracted? –distraught? –self absorbed?
I knew I needed to make friends with the darkness AND now I’m stuck. Maybe that’s part of it? Maybe it's supposed to be the opposite of easy. Sitting in the darkness.
I sought guidance. I had to look to my, in the words of Ellie Robins, imaginal ancestors this week. Some of them live in my phone notes:
One of the hardest things to accept is learning to live within uncertainty and neither deny it nor hide behind it. Most of all, to listen to the messages of uncertainty without allowing them to immobilize me, nor keep me from the certainties of those truths in which I believe. I turn away from any need to justify the future- to live in what has not yet been. — audre lorde
I’m finding that taking advice, even when it’s as resonant as Lorde’s, is a process. Today I'm swimming in the “what has not yet been” - but I don’t doubt I’m getting more comfortable with uncertainty (or should I..?).
I have no answers for you.
Only questions.
Things I’m reveling in this week—
feeling:
watching: I watched a lot these two weeks in doing research for my film projects. I’ve loved revisiting Yuri Norstein’s “Hedgehog in the Fog”
listening: Zadie Smith on Ezra Klein
When you wake up in the morning and you turn to your social app, you are being instructed on what issue of the day is what to be interested in. The news has always played some element in doing that, but this is total. And it’s not even, to me, the content of those thoughts. There’s a lot of emphasis put on the kind of politics expressed on these platforms to the right or to the left. To me, it’s the structure — that it’s structured in a certain way. That an argument is this long, that there are two sides to every debate, that they must be in fierce contest with each other — that is actually structuring the way you think about thought….And that’s OK. All mediums modify you. Books modify you, TV modifies you, radio modifies you. The social life of a 16th-century village modifies you. But the question becomes: Who do you want to be modified by, and to what degree? That’s my only question.
walking: up and down mountains
picking: persimmons
missing: if you are in new york do yourself a favor and book an acupuncture/gua sha/cupping session with Kelpy—perfect for transitioning into this new season—I have been going consistently for over a year now! —they were the channel that brought the idea of this newsletter to me!