The Memory of Justice
Why great communication won't save romance, or art
“Meno: And how are you going to search for [the nature of virtue] when you don't know at all what it is, Socrates? … And even if you actually come across it, how will you know that it is that thing which you don't know?”
- Plato, Meno
On and off for the past year, I’ve been working on an album of original music. The songs were written during one long, humid spell of about a week, driving from California to Detroit in an RV with my then partner, a dear friend, and my friend’s chihuahua-dachshund mix. As I lolled in the back on the floral-patterned couch, windows open and roaring to compensate for our broken A/C, I watched the landscape morph from foggy beach to dust-engulfed plain to glistening meadow to the standard crayon green I associated both with the Midwest and my home, Ontario. With each geographic layer we traversed, I felt I was also traversing a part of my own psychology, and as the days threaded through their urgencies — a slipped tow chain, a vapor-locked engine, a few days trapped in an RV park called Sleepy Hollow — small melodies paid their visits, appearing each after the other in my mind’s ear. Each melody, it seemed, was inflected with a sense of place — like souvenirs plucked from the cultural aura of whatever American zone we traversed. Country music, folk music, bluegrass, jazz. I welcomed the scraps of songs with a mixture of wonderment and absorption, hunched over my iPhone, singing into its array of tiny microphones, thumb-tapping lyrics into my Notes app, frantic and giddy and always one step behind God.
In the world of the arts there is a recurring tension between the two main archetypes of the creative process: the romantic flash of “inspiration” and the industrious “daily grind.” On one side, creation is not commensurate to the effort of the artist, but is rather the precipitate of some mystical set of conditions. On the other side, creative production is linearly scaled to the effort of the artist: it is “production” in an almost mechanistic sense, in that each action on the part of the artist can be traced to some outcome in the final product. What’s more, the former conception of the creative process usually involves a sense of other actors, divine or merely supernatural. The latter conception, with the artist hunched over her midnight desk, better accommodates a vision of pedestrian solitariness.
These days, it seems the “daily grind” is all the rage, and for good reason — one can rarely expect to produce great art without producing, on some level, a great amount of art. While this is not universally true, it certainly seems to be true enough to hold value as a rule of thumb. At the same time, though, I feel torn about our collective insistence that art is just about showing up at your desk, day after day. It seems to paint a picture of creativity as a predictable, knowable process: one in which the artist has utter control over what they produce, just as an artisan has control over a client’s shoe. In my personal experience though, the process of creating art is always a little bit spooky, because it requires a certain intimacy with the unknown.
I was thinking about all this the other day when I was sitting in my sound engineer’s studio, a heavily carpeted room in a warehouse building just north of my apartment in the Junction. (Coming up the stairs to an unlit hallway, crowded with keyboard stands and instrument cases, we joked: is it even indie music if the hallway has a working light?) Fueled by Cookies n’ Cream Pocky and a plastic clamshell of Ontario nectarines, we sat side by side over the soundboard and listened, for hours, to the minutia of each of the tunes I’d written a year before: each turn of phrase, each vowel and consonant in the singing, the way the instruments emerged and dissipated, their timbre, the shape of their sound, the way they crowded each other or gave each other space. “How is it sounding to you?” we would say. Leaning in, leaning back. Pacing. Playing it again.
My sound engineer experiences my album in a way that is fundamentally different from me. Where I hear a flowing whole — you could say, the impulse of inspiration that stirred each song — he hears layers and choices, the optionality of plugins, filters and re-recorded tracks. If these layers could not be disaggregated, he could not do his job. But if they could not be combined, I couldn’t do my job either. I had been looking forward to sitting with him as he mixed the songs, and I was hardly disappointed: watching him work was like seeing a familiar place utterly anew. Slowly, methodically, as we worked our way through the songs, I began to hear the distinctions that he heard, the structural elements that each contributed to an unmistakeable feeling of oneness. Out of the divisible, the feeling of the indivisible. At some point, a collection of sounds begins to become a song.
I know that the two archetypes above are not really in opposition to one another. After all, what process had we shared in the studio: was it “inspiration” or the “daily grind”? It was both, of course: inspiration began the impulse and the grind completed it. In our work, the two versions of the creative process were pleasantly sutured, each needing the other. And indeed, some of the most interesting theories of the creative process — like Elizabeth Gilbert’s, which holds that there is a realm of “ideas” that float around autonomously, choosing the right artists to bring them to life — successfully weld the two together, usually to the tune of “you have to show up every day in order for inspiration to find you.” Good old-fashioned hard work and the presence of the divine: the two fundamental elements of art.
But something is missing from this picture, and it pertains to the “spookiness” I spoke of earlier. The thing is this: if art is fundamentally about creating something that doesn’t exist yet, how on earth do different artists work together on the same piece of art? Is it enough to both have inspiration and a sense of the grind, or do you need something else, some third thing? How do you know you have the same vision, sense, intuition for what you are creating, in the absence of a perfect blueprint? Can any two artists work together on anything?
The answer, I think, is no: we understand intuitively that there is something like creative chemistry, something that renders a group of collaborating artists — like a band or a collective — more than the sum of their parts, more than the sum of their individual inspirations and work ethics. But what is that? What is that thing that enables some artists to work together, and leaves other artists fumbling for connection?
From a New Yorker profile on the songwriting virtuoso Adrianne Lenker:
When I asked [collaborator Buck] Meek to describe Lenker’s songwriting, he paused for forty-five seconds to gather his thoughts. “It’s as if she removes her conscious mind from the room,” he said finally. “She’ll hold her guitar, and she’ll start to speak in abstractions, or speak in complete nonsense—just sounds and shapes. Then she emerges from that space, and slowly the words start to form into syllables, and into the English language, and become a story, or a character, or a reflection of her own experience. But it has this really clear element of . . .” He thought about it. “Grace.”
Plato had an idea that I think about often — perhaps the only idea of his that I take very seriously these days. The idea was this: how is it that, when we witness injustice in the world, we have a sense that what we are seeing is wrong? Not one of us has ever lived in a perfect world. So, on what grounds are we able to feel that something is unjust — instead of merely accepting it as normal?
Plato suggests that it is as if we are each born with a “memory of justice,” something like a trace or a sense of a utopia from times past. It is this "memory" -- and I put it in scare-quotes for a reason -- that guides us as we move through the world, a kind of comparative compass for our moral intuition.1
I don’t know why I love this idea so much. The circles I more readily move in are understandably suspicious of the Ideal, and even moreso of notions of justice derived from folks like Plato who basically believed “justice” was about bolstering the great hierarchies in society, preserving or restoring some natural order in which some were meant to rule over others. This is certainly not what I mean by “justice.” And, to be complete in our critique, we might also take issue with the word “memory,” which implies — like Donald Trump with his MAGA hats! — that the past is a place where things were once right, and that regressive politics will make the world better. But! Despite all of these very valid critiques, I am still drawn to the idea of a “memory of justice,” because it is the best phrase I have found to describe what I experience as an artist: the third thing that allows me to work with others, the spooky thing that makes it possible for strangers to move towards a shared future that no one person can possess, articulate or determine.
For me, the “memory of justice” is about the sense of perfection that artists feel only through comparative absence: the thing that tells us that this song, or poem, or painting isn’t quite finished. We cannot see the final masterpiece in our minds, we just know that what we have created has fallen short of something — something that never existed, but that nonetheless we seem to remember as though it had— and that this or that action will bring it closer. I call it “memory” because like the past, it feels both dreamy and attainable. I call it “justice” because to achieve it is unmistakably satisfying, not just intellectually but in the body — at the level of an animal’s appraisal of the world that must serve as its home. The “memory of justice,” then, is what guides us in remaking the world to become more of a home for us: and we know it by the comfort we feel, the settledness that arises, in achieving it in the delimited realm of the artwork.
Some fun implications of this pet theory of mine, this shameless repurposing of our culture’s favourite ancient Athenian —
Unlike Plato, who seemed to believe that Justice was universal, it seems to me that there are many competing memories of justice. To find the right collaborators in art is to find those who have a shared “memory of justice,” whose sense of “rightness” is somehow compatible if not fully overlapping.
This idea extends not just to the realm of art, where it might be better called “taste”; it also extends to the realm of politics, where we must find those who share our “memory of justice” in order to work together to collectively influence the world in its image.
The process of finding those who share your “memory of justice” is intuitive and full of trail-and-error. There is a great temptation to use all sorts of heuristics — like identity markers, or Twitter bios (!) or even someone’s CV — to simplify the process. But ultimately, one must be guided by just doing things together, and seeing what happens, and whether it is satisfying. And, for better and worse, this takes time.
Our “memory of justice” can be changed. It was likely formed in us through our earliest interactions with our immediate family members, friends, institutions and society at large — as well as our innate senses of what is beautiful and pleasureful. It can later be influenced by what happens to us, by the people we most admire and want to listen to, by new ideas, new experiences of beauty or pleasure, or even negative experiences in relation to our original sense of justice.
Finally and unfortunately, I believe something like the “memory of justice” is also at play in close human relationships. I have a mentor who described it thus: “You want to be with someone who is ‘looking in the same direction as you.’” Without this, relationships are apt to become confusingly painful, full of little missteps that can be explained away in isolation, but at great energetic cost to all involved.
In recent years there has been an upswell of pop psychology-type relationship advice on my corner of the internet. I’m thinking here of the popularity of figures like Esther Perel, with her chart-topping podcast Where Shall We Begin; of the Holistic Psychologist Nicole LaPera whose Instagram account has over 5 million followers; of popular non-fiction books like How to Not Die Alone which counsel its readers to understand and better articulate their non-negotiables in love. Suddenly, attachment styles, love languages, and John Gottman’s “Four Horsemen of the Relationship Apocalypse” are becoming semi-common knowledge.
On one level, I’m grateful for the growing prevalence of these ideas — they have contributed much to shifting our culture towards explicit communication of needs, feelings and desires between people seeking closeness. On another level, though, I feel suspicious of the quasi-utopian energy behind this movement, and of the implication that great self-knowledge and communication is tantamount to being invulnerable in love.
This has not been my experience. As both an artist and lately a rather lonely person, I have had to learn over and over that clearly communicating things, disaggregating the spooky wholes we feel, does not guard us from miscommunication, betrayal or being hurt. The reason, I think, is not just that communication is imperfect; it is also that there is something in the aura of what we want that cannot, in the final analysis, be broken down into language. Like a memory, we are haunted by what we want most: if we could recreate it at will, we would be more than human. Like justice, it is often both unattainable and unable to be set aside. We are doomed, it seems, to want things that we cannot fully negotiate in advance. No matter how good we get at speaking, or feeling, or disaggregating. No matter how eloquent we become.
Rather, I think we are destined to have to encounter each other, over and over, until we get it right. Feeling in the dark, we have to use the best language we have, the best knowledge we have, just as N and I must communicate in the studio. “How is it sounding to you?” (The other day, I told him the chorus section of one of the songs sounded “as though its center of gravity was lagging behind itself.” He nodded and said, “I think we are hearing the same thing.” Then he cited a certain plugin and turned it down.) It is because of experiences like this that I’ve lately come to see the in-between as more real than I initially believed. The back-and-forth. It is in these moments that we are creating not just art, but the nostalgic force that animates the art: the shared “memory of justice” that will endure beyond any one particular work. Good ear, we say to each other. A statement not about the ear. A statement about us.
I wrote earlier, in my list of implications, that shared memory takes time. This idea can be so uncomfortable that we turn to the promise of contracts, of forming a list of requirements, values, specifications complete enough that their fulfillment will promise instant relational success. But contracts are built on market logic, on a world of transactions between strangers, where known quantities exchange hands in predictable ways.2 In love, there are no known quantities on offer, only hazy concepts like "casual," "communicative," "long-term partner," "commitment," each a sprawling world of meaning unto itself. As in music, we often turn to metaphor, gesture, strange approximations. And even so, between any two artists, only time will tell.
We are not in a market of connection. There is no common coin of relation, no way to fix our exchange in order to make it orderly. Rather, art involves an unlimited relationship with the future. So does love. So does politics. Language sometimes can give us the false sense that we have more control over the future than we really do. But even if we could succeed in fixing the future, would we really want to? After all, if it were possible to say in advance exactly what a piece of art was supposed to be like, would it not thereby render the art itself superfluous — a kind of carbon copy of a plan already made?
So instead of seeking better contracts with each other, detailed and inviolable, let us seek to be honest about where we are, and patient about what we cannot possibly know. We are animated by nostalgia beyond our control, for worlds we crave but have never seen. We must make and remake these worlds with each other — our shared “memories of justice” — and in turn, these worlds make us. Without guarantees, without perfect language, without perfect knowledge of the self — it’s a wonder we can be here together. Let us show each other the mercy we deserve.3
Discussion Questions
Feel free to reflect by yourself, with loved ones, or with other readers in the comments.
Do you feel you have a strong sense of justice? Where do you think it comes from?
If you are an artist, or have ever had to create something indefinite with someone else — say a home renovation project, a family, or a relationship — how did you navigate aligning your “memory of justice” with your collaborator? What helped? What got in the way?
Do you feel you are a good communicator? Why or why not? Where do you feel your communication skills been helpful in your life? Where have they been surprisingly unhelpful?
Reading Group Announcement
A friend of mine is seeking to start a reading group (!) around these essays. Are you interested in joining him? He says he plans to meet once a week, for about an hour over Zoom. He may start with the discussion questions or just host a general discussion around the ideas of each piece.
If you’re interested, please email him here: mda.hewlett@gmail.com. Thank you!
If you liked this post, you might like this essay on working with my emotions as an artist, this essay on the creative cultures of the early internet, or this essay on beauty (not the Platonic Form, just the terrifying suggestion of it. Haha). As always, here is the complete archive of past essays.
Acknowledgements
To J and A for the legendary roadtrip that started it all. If you hadn’t driven, if you hadn’t navigated, I wouldn’t have been able to laze in the back, playing at the idle artist. Thank you for your love and the thousands of ways you show up for me and each other.
To Johnny and Nathan: you both took this fledgling songwriter under your wings and nurtured my ideas with patience and indomitable optimism. I’ve learned so much from your deep commitment to your work, each of you in your own way. Art is work! Art is play!
And as always, to Daanish: Destiny placed me in the path of a best friend with a knack for research. Heehee. Thank you for shoring up these ideas with cold, hard quotations and papers. Amen.
My friend d. and I went searching for the exact quotation in Plato, but couldn’t find it. The best we could do was land on Plato’s overarching idea of “anamnesis,” which is the idea that we are each born with a trace, kind of like a memory, of perfection, which is why we can sense we have touched the Platonic Forms when we do. Literally, we re-cognize them: we think them anew, but also recall them, as this is not the first time the eternal part of our being has touched them. Until we encounter them again, we are simply in a temporary state of forgetting.
This is also the answer to the epigraph of this essay: essentially Meno asks Socrates, “If you don’t know what you are searching for, how will you know when you’ve found it?” One way to understand Socrates’s answer is that he believes he will recognize it, because the eternal part of his soul will have once known it.
David Graeber, may he rest in anarchist heaven, wrote extensively about the difference between market exchange and debt in his inimitable tome, Debt. This book is so important to me that it features in my dating app profile. I am still not finished reading it. I have been reading it for years — and that is a compliment!
Two notes on mercy. The first is these lines by Shakespeare, from The Merchant of Venice:
“The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”
The second is this poem, “S.O.S,” by Leonard Cohen, one of my favourites.
One day I’d like to write on mercy, but it feels so great a topic, so tender and consequential, that I’m not quite sure I have the skills to pull it off in my current form.
my god this essay is magnificent ;u;
"Rather, art involves an unlimited relationship with the future. So does love. So does politics. Language sometimes can give us the false sense that we have more control over the future than we really do. But even if we could succeed in fixing the future, would we really want to?"
I like how you're using memory & justice in surprising yet insightful ways.
This makes me think of "I want to do this [song, album, person, work] justice..." + "there's a statue buried in the marble", which get thrown around in discussion.
This idea of the vulnerability of stepping into the unknown, into a world beyond linear language, is such a core but under addressed part of creativity. Eleanor really emphasizes this to me as she guides me on my (oft angsty) creative journey: to create is to fundamentally step into what can't be known. In that place, the goal isn't to clutch for something concrete as fast as possible, but develop your own processes for flowing with the unknown as long as the work demands.
(Yes, all of my ideas come from Eleanor. I have about 2 novel ideas a year. And by novel I mean that midway through my having them I realize they actually came from a novel I read :P)
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I'm struck also by the tension between the Mechanized, contractual world view & the unknown inherent to creativity. (Hi, Vishesh!)
Reading that, I think it sheds some light on a deep frustration I've had for several years: the whole "starving artist" stereotype & its use to deter folks from creative careers.
I think what people (often parents) are thinking is: "oh, this naive child, of course they'd love to be musician: it sounds romantic from the outside! But in reality the industry is brutal, near impossible to succeed in, & they'll end up being unable to pay the bills." In other words: this couldn't possibly work practically.
I think there's some wisdom there. Like, eating is important.
But I think it misses the point: the daunting challenge of a creative is not if/how they'll make it a career. It's how to know what "just" art is for you, & how to come to remember it, alone & with others (as you say). When we mix the idea of a "stable career" with the idea of learning to really serve the work & navigate the unknown, I think we start to make creativity about things like "grinding" or "producing".
Similar to what you say about the mainstream-ification of relationship ideas, I think the rise of the notion of a "creative economy" is both a great sign & also a troubling framework. Art becomes "content", artist "content creators". Creativity is now seen as a career (woohoo!) The problem is: creativity is now seen as a career (fiddlesticks!)
Squeezed by algorithms, I think it's easy to uncover what sells, & just execute more of that.
It's such a balance of showing up to the work but also remembering what you show up to is something mysterious & beyond your control. Thank you for helping us see it!
PS I couldn't help thinking of CS Lewis (who *definitely* read Plato) & his idea that we are "made for heaven", & that's why we're always feeling this wistfulness, this incompleteness on earth. He says that's why beauty makes us sad: we're remembering -- and then missing -- home.