Beginning From No Fixed Point
Most websites start from a fixed point and move in a direction. The first page tells you what the site is about, what it offers, who it is for. It establishes the context before you’ve had a chance to develop your own.
Then it directs you: here is the next thing to read, here is the thing you should do, here is the shape of the experience we have designed for you.
The design is rational. It reflects how things on the web are usually built and what most people, arriving at an unfamiliar page, find reassuring. A clear beginning. A route. A destination implied from the start.
This site doesn’t work that way, and I want to say something about why, because the difference is not accidental and it is not, I think, simply an eccentricity of design.
You are currently on a page that appears to be the first one, and it probably is, in the technical sense that the site has to start somewhere and this is where it starts. But a first page that announces itself as the authoritative introduction to everything that follows—that positions itself as the frame through which all the other pages should be understood—carries an implication that I find difficult to reconcile with what the site actually is.
It implies a sequence. It implies that what comes later derives its meaning from what was established here. It implies that there is a correct order and that entering in the wrong order means missing something essential, or arriving without proper preparation.
I don’t believe that’s how things actually work, and the observations collected here come from enough time spent with other people’s experiences to make me confident in that disbelief. Humanness doesn’t have a structure that begins at one end and proceeds to the other in the way a website’s information architecture usually assumes. Birth and death provide the outer boundaries, certainly, but within those boundaries the movement is not sequential and the meaning is not cumulative in the simple sense. Things illuminate other things retroactively.
A conversation in your fifties casts light on something that happened in your twenties that you had been carrying as a sealed fact for decades. An encounter you were barely present for at the time turns out, years later, to have been the thing that mattered most. The structure of a life, when you look back at it, is not a funnel. It is something more like a landscape—with regions of different character, paths that connect them in non-obvious ways, and a quality of discovery that depends on where you entered and which direction you happened to be facing.
So this is the first page in the sense that it is where the site begins, and it is not the first page in the sense that what is written here frames or controls or prepares you for what you’ll find elsewhere. You might start here and go there and end up somewhere you didn’t expect. You might begin in the middle of the observations, read something that resonates or baffles, trace it to something adjacent, and find that what you thought you were looking for was not quite the thing you found, and that the thing you found was more interesting. That’s acceptable. That’s, in fact, more or less how the encounters I’ve been writing about tended to work—not as a progression through prepared stages but as a movement that found its own direction.
Nothing is demanded of a man who enters here. That is not a marketing position, though I notice how easily it reads as one in a context where everything is positioned as something. I mean it literally.
There is no expectation about how long you will stay, what you will read, what you will conclude, whether you will contact me, or what you will do if you do contact me. Expectations, when they precede an encounter, do something to the encounter—they install a metric against which the thing is measured as it’s happening, a standard of adequacy that was established before the thing began. I have been describing throughout these observations what it is to be in a space without that metric, what becomes available when neither person in the room is trying to meet a previously established criterion for how the time should go. The site tries to create something of that, or at least not to create the opposite. A man can stay five minutes or five hours. He can leave. He can come back months later. None of those outcomes constitutes a failure of the experience, including the five minutes and the not coming back.
There is no funnel. Nothing here is designed to move you towards a predetermined conclusion. You may read one page or one hundred. You may never contact me. None of those outcomes represents success or failure.
The offer here, such as it is, might be described as a practice rather than a product. I use the word practice in the sense of something you return to, that you develop a relationship with over time, that reveals different things on different occasions not because the thing itself changes but because you have changed in the interval. A practice doesn’t complete. It doesn’t resolve into a final state. It remains available, ongoing, something you maintain a living relationship with rather than something you acquire and put away.
What I have developed, across the decades this collection draws on, is a particular practice of being with another man: the quality of attention, the refraining, the willingness to sit with whatever arrives without immediately doing something with it, the particular combination of physical ease and unhurried conversation that the work made available. I continue to find this practice interesting.
I continue to find encounters that make use of it interesting. I am offering it to the men who find their way here, in whatever form and at whatever pace suits them, if they want it. That is the whole of the offer. There is nothing behind it, no subsequent reveal, no stage two that becomes visible once stage one has been completed.
I notice that this can sound either very simple or faintly suspicious, depending on the disposition of the person reading it. The suspicion is understandable and I have addressed it elsewhere. The simplicity is the more accurate reading.
A man enters. Nothing is explained before it needs to be. If he has questions, he can ask them. If he has no questions, he can read, or not read, or put this down and pick it up again later and find that it reads differently than it did the first time, which is one of the things that text does when you return to it having had more life in the meantime.
I want to end with something about what an encounter is and what it isn’t, because the word appears on this page and it’s the kind of word that accumulates implications if left unattended.
An encounter is not a transaction in the narrow sense, though there is often a financial element to it, as I have described elsewhere.
It is not a treatment, a session, a service delivery, an appointment. Those words imply a structure that determines the shape of what happens before it begins, which is precisely what I have been arguing against. An encounter is two people in the same space at the same time, each bringing what they bring, neither fully knowing in advance what that will produce. What it produces is not predictable. It is not guaranteed to be useful or interesting or pleasant. It might be none of those things, or it might be something that neither person would have thought to predict.
In my experience, and the experience is what this entire collection draws on, the unpredictability is the point—the thing that makes an encounter distinct from an appointment, and the thing that makes it worth having.
A man who finds his way through these pages and decides he wants to be in the same space as the man who wrote them is making a particular kind of decision. He is not purchasing a defined outcome. He is accepting an undefined one. That requires something from him—a tolerance for not knowing exactly what something will be, a willingness to be present in what is actually happening rather than in an anticipated version of it, the particular quality of arrival that I have found again and again to be the thing that makes the difference. Not readiness for a particular thing. Just readiness.
And if he arrives in that spirit, I will be there.
You are here: Bodies At Rest