Improvising Care: Detail, Detail, Advance

He asked me how my week had been. I replied. When I stopped talking he said, like a demand: “Detail!”

“Have you also been shouting ‘detail’ at people all week?” I said through laughter.

As it turned out, we’d both spent the last few days demanding ‘detail’ in our conversations. A callback to a game from our Improv class: ‘Detail, Detail, Advance’.

Let me tell you about the game. Then I’ll tell you what it has to do with the politics of care.

The game goes like this:

You are asked to tell a story. Let’s say the starting prompt is: ‘There’s a horse in a field.” Each person in the group takes it one line at a time.

Our first round went something like this:

player 1: There was a horse, it was brown.

player 2: It stood in a green field.

player 3: Suddenly, the horse was startled by a man who had started walking in the field.

player 4: Then the horse bolted, running far across the field towards the fence.

player 5: The man chased after the horse because the horse was heading for the road.

player 6: The horse jumped the fence and made it out onto the road.

player 7: A car crashed into the horse!

This particular description is pretty superficial. New elements are introduced without much build up and then abandoned. We don’t know much about the horse before it is suddenly fleeing the field and getting run over. The action starts up quickly. It feels a bit disjointed.

The Improv teacher then encouraged us to try again. To slow down, to linger on the description. Each person was asked to incorporate an element from the previous player’s line and build on it:

person 1: There was a horse, it had a chestnut brown glossy coat.

person 2: Its coat glimmered in the sun.

person 2: The sun was hot and beat down on the field.

person 3: The field was parched under the baking sun.

person 4: The parched field had a shimmering haze over it.

person 5: The shimmering haze warped the plants in the field.

person 6: On the horizon, something was moving, its outline hazy.

player 7: It seemed to be a human, and it was moving closer.

In the game, each player can choose whether to detail or to advance. Maybe giving more detail about the figure on the horizon. Or advancing the plot along by telling us what the figure is doing.

These choices have an impact on how the story feels. Each choice does something different. For example, taking more time on the detail first may mean that listener feels invested in the progression of the story. Or, it could create impatience and they might disengage.

Another version of the game involves pairing up. Player one tells a story, and player two shapes the story by pausing it at any point and either demanding more detail, or for the story to advance.

After the game, in the rest of my life, I noticed the times where I wanted more detail from people’s stories, and when I felt an itch for them to progress to action.

It made me think about how care is made up of a combination of details and actions.

Sometimes, we can be rushed through the details, moving too fast to action. We’ve all been there: You’ve not finished explaining your situation or sharing your feelings and the person you’re talking to will rush in with advice. They will push for action.

I’ve been on both sides. I find the premature push for action can often come from impatience, a need for control or fear of discomfort. Listening is a skill we can get better at. But it doesn’t help that impatience, control and fear are all structurally encouraged by the grim climate of austerity politics we’ve got going on.

There are times where you can tell people all the details and yet nothing can be done. Times where we must just be with what is. Sometimes there isn’t an ‘advance’ option.

Chronic illness has taught me that the day to day work of care is often about tending to the details of what is, rather than making great leaps and bounds into the future. Sometimes, no action can fix things. Care, often isn’t a linear progress narrative, it’s more a dance between details and actions that make up our lives.

Sometimes though, accepting the details just as they are can spiritually bypass the need for real action that could make real tangible advances.

The game also made me think of all the times I’ve been asked to give a lot of detail to advocate for what I need. Told that the details I give will get me what I need, and yet no action has happened. Undertaking paperwork or assessments for disability related support, I am often expected to disclose huge amounts of personal detail, without much guarantee of any positive action. (In this particular case, if I were the horse in the story I told above, the listener would hear every in and out of my health. But I’d still be stuck in exactly the same spot in the field, staring at a shimmering mirage of institutional support on the horizon.)

There is no perfect formula for how much detail to pay attention to, or how much action to take. We don’t always get much choice about the level of detail we get to share publicly. Some of us are far more visible, forced into public scrutiny because of our differences.

The amount of detail you can hold, and action you can take, has something to do with your relationship to power and resources. It isn’t automatically the case that the more power or access to resources you have, the more space you have to hear the details or to take action. Often those further from power, fighting for the specifics of their lives to be better, are good at paying attention to the details and taking action. Equally, being systematically denied power can really screw with your agency and capacity to take action on the details in your life. I don’t know the magic formula.

Politically, there is real value in knowing the specific details that make up our lives, the precise ways the world plays out for particular people, and the precise ways we can strategically intervene to liberate ourselves in ways that suit our specific needs.

But, we also there’s a risk in getting too fixated on the details, and imagining ourselves as so fundamentally different that we forget our shared experiences and our capacity for solidarity. Too often I find political left also gets so caught up in some details. Endlessly policing one another’s vocabulary. Celebrating those who can perform certain politically pristine symbolic details, rather than celebrating those who take (inevitably) imperfect action. We the value the identity of being an activist, like it is a brand, over the actual actions or efforts. We risk dividing into smaller and smaller identitarian fragments that forget who and what we are up against, that we can fail see the common ground in our struggles. Or we fail to see the actual power we hold and how historically we’ve protected ourselves through solidarity.

I danced with this tension during my Gender Studies Masters, between the need to hold space for difference but also for solidarity. In my learning, the most effective movements hold difference as a condition for solidarity. They do not erase detail, but they also do not allow details to overwhelm and erase capacity for action. Studying the details teaches us about how to take action. There is rich knowledge in the details of people’s specific experiences. So this is not to say we should put aside our important differences, but rather to practice a caring discernment.

Our attention to detail can help us study the specific tactics used to oppress us, strategically build communal leadership from the margins. A tool of that improv game is taking what came before and building on it. It’s that kind of long sightedness that makes our narratives more compelling. There’s a reason callbacks (when you reference an earlier joke) are so satisfying in comedy. They make us feel like we’ve been taken on a journey and we’re part of something. Politically, we are dealing with serious stuff, and I’m increasing curious about how good humour is essential to telling new stories and building better worlds. I’m not saying laugh off the horrors, I am saying I’d like to take seriously our access to joy and connection, now as things are. As a part of a whole that holds all the pain and suffering and tries to do something about it.

I hope we can write for ourselves alternative stories and strategies, even if we can’t play them out with perfect integrity in every part of our lives. The choice of when to add detail and when to advance reminded me how a small change can reframe a whole story.

With care,

Rachel

Ps. The cover image for this post is an image from The Friendship Book of Anne Wagner. I love the string of little details.