On Rigor

When I worked for two years as an orderly in a heart hospital in Arizona, I heard more corpses fart than anyone should. They do that when you move them. Part of my job was to transfer recently bagged bodies to a gurney, usually in the ICU, and then wheel them through the bowels of the hospital, carefully avoiding areas where live patients might see me, to a temporary morgue where the bodies were stacked like frozen pizzas in a giant metal freezer. In the course of moving so many bodies I became intimately familiar with what we call “rigor mortis.” The death stiffness.

In fact, for a long time I associated the word “rigor” mostly with death. But when I got to graduate school “rigor” began to take on a different conceptual hue, and I became obsessed with it as a quality of thinking and writing. A good quality.

I chose not to pursue a post-doc or teaching position after I’d defended my dissertation in part because I saw that the game of academic preferment often got in the way of the intellectual rigor that had drawn me to study philosophy at the tertiary level in the first place. PhD students cluster around teachers with institutional clout, who become their patrons, and the inner-directed objectivity of research and thinking that I—naively or not—continued to admire and cherish, seemed inevitably to be immolated in the fire of ambition. For a time this realization disillusioned me about universities. (Now I realize it’s not a peculiar malady of universities, but of all human institutions whatsoever.)

That’s pretty normal: discovering a lack of rigor where it’s expected is always disillusioning. That’s true for crossers of aisles, lapsers from faiths, revisionists, prophets, dropouts, whistleblowers, those suspicious of science, medicine, and law. They all hate hypocrisy, a failing which is basically just the accusation of un-rigor, moralized.

Almost all the most rigorous people I have met or heard of were unaffiliated weirdos whose principles put them outside normal institutions and ordinary careers. I think rigor is more attainable in a simple life—I mean a life with few parts. To be in a big institution necessarily complicates one’s life, multiplies its parts. Of course, some people have very complicated lives and belong to major and complicated institutions, and yet manage to carve out a space of simplicity to develop a rigorous practice. It’s not impossible! But I suspect it’s harder.

I think of Spinoza, perhaps the most rigorous (or at least the most rigor-loving) philosopher in history, who chose to turn down an appointment at Heidelberg University. He preferred to continue working as a lens grinder. Eventually the dust of that occupation killed him. A simple life is not necessarily the best resourced life, or the safest.

Any practice faithful—faithful in letter and spirit—to self-imposed constraints is, to that extent, rigorous. I guess if pressed to define rigor, that’s what I’d say: faithfulness to self-imposed constraints.

I wanted to see who else was interested in rigor, so I used Google Scholar to see what sorts of highly cited texts had the word in their titles. I found three major groups for whom rigor appears to have become a major concept. The first, unsurprisingly, was mathematicians, who have a very precise and objective definition for rigor; the second, medical researchers, particularly in journals about nursing; the third, educators, among whom there is a lively conversation about rigor in the classroom. For the nurses, rigor seems to have a lot to do with reproducibility of research. For the educators, rigor has to do with making pedagogy sufficiently challenging.

The other thing I found on Google Scholar was that comparing rigor to rigor mortis is irresistible. So many scholarly articles use that as their title: “rigor or rigor mortis?”

One way I try to be rigorous as a writer is by avoiding cliches of language and of thought. Clearly, as the opening lines of this essay prove, I fail often. The worst is when I think I’ve found a rather clever juxtaposition or metaphor, and it turns out to be as original as toast for breakfast.

My major intellectual practices are writing and reading. Within writing, I pursue rigor in three ways. First, I seek rigor in the practice itself, writing a certain small quota of words every day regardless of personal circumstances or mood. Second, I seek rigor in each of the genres I write by setting and attempting to follow genre-specific rules that will, I hope, give my work in each of these genres a specific reliable flavor and quality. So I have rules about scene and structure and the variation of narrative modes in my fiction, rules about quantity of textual evidence and singularity of thesis in my book reviews, rules about the movement of thought (sideways, not from center to spoke, and yet cyclical) in familiar essays, and etc. Third, I seek rigor in all the prose I write, regardless of genre, by following specific rules that add up, I like to think, to the style I want to exhibit, a style simple in outline and complex in detail, hyper-readable but interlarded with the weird diction I’ve acquired in my odd intellectual history. (That last sentence falls afoul of several of my prose-level rules. I seek rigor, but I don’t always, or even usually, attain it.)

As for reading, there my aspirations to rigor are simpler. I have two rules. I read at least four hours every evening, and I only read books I’m excited about. The hour number was settled upon partly by experience and partly because I love Machiavelli’s classic description of the reading life:

When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me. I deliver myself entirely to them.

The second rule makes for a notably eclectic reading diet. That’s because I have a bad habit of losing my enthusiasm for a series or a certain type of book if I read too many in a row. Half the time I choose a next book by how different it is from my last book. But it’s an important rule for me. The only way I manage to adhere to my hours rule is by adhering to my enthusiasm rule. It’s no trouble to spend hours reading books I’m excited about. It’s torture reading books I’m not excited about.

Rigor is often expressed by adherence to a set of personal rules like mine, though mine are a pretty boring and minor example. For some reason, these personal rules often arouse extraordinarily negative reactions in other people.

“How dare you suggest everyone is alike?”

“How dare you universalize from your own experience?”

“Just because this works for you, doesn’t mean it applies to anybody else.”

This is a baffling response, since it assumes that stating a personal rule amounts to asserting a categorical imperative for everybody else. Even my small rule about writing to a quota every day has been known to provoke this sort of outrage. I’ve been told my rule proves I don’t understand the necessity of self-care, or that by letting it be known I have this rule for myself I am creating an oppressive environment for those who cannot write every day, or that by holding to this rule I am implying that “real” writers write every day. But actually, it’s just a thing I do that makes me feel good about myself, like I’m trying my best. I’m perfectly aware that plenty of much better writers than me work in a more intermittent fashion. My rule is just one of the ways I’m personally pursuing rigor.

I don’t feel oppressed by the athletes who work out for hours a day and train their bodies to do things of which I am incapable. Nor do I feel judged by the musicians who practice all the time to produce one perfect performance. Nor do I feel offended by the aesthetes who train their palates, their eyes, ears, and noses to discern subtle differences I cannot detect.

What I do feel about all rigorous people (instead of outrage) is interest. I am fascinated by rigor. And when I manage to be rigorous myself, even in my small ways, I feel more interesting to myself.

Why is rigor interesting?

Perhaps because rigor implies a loyalty to something outside the self, a loyalty strong enough that the rigorous person is prepared to suffer to remain faithful. A rigorous writer or thinker seems wonderful to me because they subordinate their desire for what is popular or easy to their sincere belief that a certain method of proceeding will bring them closer to an ideal. I feel as if paying attention to a rigorous person might introduce me to this self-external thing they value so much.

For example, even though I find César Aira’s surreal fictions pretty unsatisfying to read, I’ve read half a dozen of his books. And I’ll probably read more, because I’m so fascinated by the rigor of his method, which he calls “fleeing forward.” It’s a particularly delicious rigor, because what it produces is so defiantly unstructured in intention, and yet it throws up remarkable structures. It reminds me of the rigor of the “familiar essayist,” who moves from point to point with no apparent logic except association, and yet ends up somewhere that feels inevitable. The loyalty expressed by both of these forms of rigor is to a structuring power outside of forethought. And this loyalty fascinates me exactly as I would be fascinated to meet a modern Baal-worshiper. Nothing is as interesting as the devotee of a strange god.

The Jesuit order—about whom I read a book a few decades ago, just because—cherishes a phrase from the work of their founder, Ignatius of Loyola. This phrase always truck me as odd and semi-frightening and definitely cool: perinde ac cadaver. “As if it were a corpse.” This is the manner in which one ought to pursue “spiritual obedience.” Obey as one dead, in other words. As I now understand it, the idea is that Jesuits ought to obey their superiors—first of all God, of course, but also, perhaps, the dictates of their superiors in the order—with the same unresisting movement of limbs and posture as a dead body.

I suppose Ignatius’s experience of dead bodies must have been mostly from his time as a soldier. He was a fighter from the age of 17 until his leg was shattered by a cannonball at the siege of Pamplona. He traded the military life for the monastic life as a result of the introspection enforced by his long bed rest after the injury. Most of the dead bodies he encountered must have been relatively fresh. I mention this because, when I first learned about perinde ac cadaver, I was still working in the heart hospital and therefore missed the point of the phrase.

I had recently had a lot of experience of dead bodies myself. I transported mostly living humans, and a corpse once or twice a month. The corpses were not fresh. And let me tell you: the living are much easier to get from their bed onto a gurney or wheel-chair than those who have been dead for a while. Rigor mortis makes a corpse terribly unwieldy. Somehow dead bodies seem heavier than living bodies. And the gurgles and farts of a corpse being moved are profoundly disturbing. So when I imagined someone “obeying as one dead,” I pictured a body getting heaved onto a gurney, heavy, awkward, stiff and resistant, emitting horrible noises.

On my shifts, I ended up with most of the “Dr. Morgan’s” (the euphemism dispatch used for transporting a corpse). This was because I was one of the only transporters who wasn’t disgusted to the point of incapacity. Which is not to say I enjoyed the experience. I just gritted my teeth and got it done, without calling for two or three extra transporters as backup and (let us be honest) as moral support during the long trip through the fluorescently-flickering, empty, Kubrickian corridors of the hospital basement. A dead body could bring our department to a standstill as all the transporters piled into the one job, causing major backups in all the other jobs we facilitated, from getting patients to pre-op, to discharging them at the curb. I could do the job alone, so I got most of the Dr. Morgan’s dumped on my head.

Anyway, obeying as one dead is the attitude that created the Jesuit’s famous rigor as an order. They were militantly effective as missionaries, as scholars, as lobbyists within the ecclesial hierarchy, and as teachers. Jesuit high schools and universities still often maintain a higher level of rigor in undergraduate teaching than you can find in other universities, or at least that’s been my experience. Arguably, the Jesuits accidentally gave birth to modern science when they educated Rene Descartes.

"Rigor" and "rigid" come from the same Latin root, which means, of course, stiff. But one word is a term of approbation; the other, disapprobation. Rigorous thinking is good; rigid thinking is bad. Whatever it is about rigor that I admire, it must live in that shade of difference. It’s a different kind of stiff.