Do you ever get the urge to look back at old photos and videos? For me it happens whenever there's some enormous deadline looming. I think it's one of my favourite things to do. You have to be in a certain mood though. It helps if it happens to be between 2 and 6 o'clock in the morning, when it's quiet and you can hear the tungsten hum and crackle of your light bulb's filament and your thoughts flitting circuitously from perch to perch, settling in dusty corners, idly folding and unfolding their wings.
The strange thing about looking back on good times is that it invariably makes you miserable. But it's a kind of misery that you're reluctant to let go of. A rich and wholesome famine. It's the kind of sadness that makes you suddenly want to call up friends you haven't seen or spoken to in ages and tell them how you've been, and ask them how they've been, and reminisce - to be in the past with someone else, to reanimate the golden bones of youth. But really, what you want is to find out that they just so happen to be looking at old photos and videos at 5am in the morning too, and to discover that you are both right now feeling the exact same thing at the exact same time, and to listen to the sound of each other's hearts breaking and not have to hide it, and to be able to tell someone something and be understood completely. In all its dreadful loneliness and confidential glory, this moment, with someone else -- you want to be able to share this pain.
---
Between 2am and 6am the distractions of daily adult life and bus schedules and deadlines and the soul-crushing drudgery of nine to five all sort of fall away and reveal to you a sacred inner stillness, an unshakeable core of solid being you almost forgot you had in you. It allows you to enter a state of unconscious, near-hypnotic concentration. You involuntarily become acutely aware of the world around you. Your focus shifts outward and you absently acknowledge the reality of entities other than yourself. That you are sitting on a chair in a room wearing clothes. You begin to notice the total and strangely dignified inertia of the objects on your desk. You note the dissonance of their erratic distribution and imagine how they maintain this posture of static disorder throughout the day, how they remain perfectly still as the sun rises and sets and evening shadows writhe and do complicated contortions along your water bottle's irregular surfaces and contours while you're away, and how no moment ever repeats itself the same way and that each moment is unlike any other moment you have ever experienced or will ever experience again and that it's all happening all at once in your neighbour's house and in your old house halfway across the world and even here right before your very eyes.
And then you shake off the burden of knowing you are travelling 43000 miles per hour through the universe on a planet pirouetting at 1000 miles per hour, and go back to checking your email, ironing your shirts, purchasing coffee.
Saturday, January 30, 2016
Friday, January 15, 2016
unknown blessing
And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the Lord, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel.
- Isaiah 45:3
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if the nature of fame is to make us lonely then maybe the past 16 years have made us more famous
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
death of the author
Yesterday I finally started reading Infinite Jest, about two months after ordering it off Amazon. Or rather I got through the foreword and two pages of the actual book before falling asleep. Part of me is thrilled at the thought of being seen with it in public - to have someone recognise the book and make assumptions about me as a reader and a person based on the fact I am someone who ostensibly reads David Foster Wallace 1 but I'm also aware that if I saw someone carrying around a copy of Infinite Jest on the train platform or on the bus, I would (1) initially be thrilled and very willing to converse and get to know that person, but also (2) immediately assume that person doesn't know DFW like I do - that they haven't established a relationship with the author as "profound" and "meaningful" as I have - that they've picked up Infinite Jest simply because it's popular or trendy - that they hadn't read his short stories, hadn't read his essays on cruise ships and tennis players, hadn't spent an unconscionable amount of time watching old tv interviews of him wincing and grimacing on youtube, hadn't read multiple interpretations of what his work meant to other people, hadn't trawled through the internet for eyewitness accounts of what kind of guy he was in person, and for biographical reports of his personal life and of the circumstances surrounding and leading up to his sudden apparent suicide, hadn't listened to an interview of his sister talking about growing up with Dave Wallace and what their parents were like.
I'm aware that it's cynical but it's also logical. I mean, what are the odds that someone would be just now reading a book that came out 20 years ago unless it had something to do with the silver screen portrayal of its author that just came out called the End of the Tour, starring Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as Jesse Eisenberg.
---
I watched the End of the Tour today, on a whim. The fact that my final exams are in a month's time might have something to do with this. And for the record I liked the film. I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did. To be honest, I had mixed feelings when I first found out it was being released. A friend of mine had sent me the link to the trailer, and my immediate reaction was this: 'Oh man, he would've hated this.'
The underlying assumption is that David Foster Wallace, if he were still alive today, would never have willingly agreed to a movie portrayal of himself. I mean, the type of person who has misgivings about being interviewed for a magazine and begrudgingly attends literary readings probably isn't the kind of person who is going to be ecstatic about having a major motion picture film made about them. That was my thought - and the David Foster Wallace estate who in fact openly opposed the production of the film probably thought the same. David Foster Wallace admits over the course of the film that there is a part of him that wants fame and recognition for his work - that he wants to be lauded and praised and rewarded - but it's that very same knowledge that makes him nervous and uneasy about courting fame. Because he knows how susceptible he is to it, he fears that he'll become addicted to it - that he'll grow accustomed to the blinding brightness and artificial warmth of the spotlight of recognition. And he hates the idea of being seen as someone like that. He states in various ways throughout the film that he has a fear of being a certain way, that he'd hate to one day look at himself in the mirror and think - what an absolute phony.
But I knew I was going to watch it. By the first 10 seconds of the trailer I had already made up my mind. I was interested in the man, in a very fervent and odd, bordering-on-obsessive way - the way you usually reserve for female celebrities blessed with exquisite bone structure who appear on late night talk shows with impossibly lustrous hair flaunting slender hairless appendages.2 I had been unwittingly nurturing over the last year a quietly overzealous fascination with and sense of respect for David Foster Wallace.
I had my own doubts about the film of course, like if you heard a movie was going to be made about your older brother, or an uncle of yours who you really liked but who was also notoriously reclusive and camera shy - you'd want to know who the actor playing them was and you'd be justifiably suspicious of the possibility that they might turn him into a caricature. You worry that they'll reduce him to a set of mannerisms and tics and idiosyncrasies. The bandanna, the small-town demeanour, the Midwestern inflection. It's that thing where the more intimately you know / knew a person the more apprehension and trepidation you feel when you hear they're going to be posthumously represented in some way, because the more truly special something is, the harder it is to capture, to pin down and package all pretty. You hope as well as pessimistically doubt that they'll stay faithful to the real person. After having watched the movie, I can safely say, from my point of view at least, that the David Foster Wallace portrayed on screen by Jason Segel is pretty darn faithful and believable.
In the film, he's essentially hounded / interrogated / tortured by this less-famous and accolade-hungry, tape recorder-toting younger version of himself over the course of four days, and it is out of this period of prolonged discomfort that the transcripts for Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself came into being.3 As a deeply personal and privileged peek into what it would be like to spend 4 days with the author of Infinite Jest in 1996, the book is an amazingly nuanced insight into what was going on inside his head at the time and an unprecedented vehicle for wish fulfilment for DFW-nerds and fanatics everywhere. Without that willingness to antagonize and mortify DFW the person, we would never have the book, and the book is not a bad thing at all. Pop quiz: Which is the lesser of two evils? To leave a brilliant author alone according to his wishes and deprive the world of a great film, or to make a great film about him even though you're pretty sure it will upset him. There's a line in the film where David Foster Wallace says, 'this is a brilliant tactic on your part. Get me a little pissed off, get me to lower my guard, and I'll reveal more.'
There's a scene in the film that may provide a clue into understanding Dave Wallace's phobia of / hypervigilance against indulging one's ego. He talks about how junk food and masturbation aren't inherently wrong, but it's only if you overindulge that it becomes an issue of health. He predicts a future where entertainment becomes so seductive and pleasurable and available that it becomes impossible to escape it - that every fibre of your being just wants to engage in it 24-7. Similarly, it's not wrong to want to be praised, but it's wrong if that becomes your sole reason for living. If your life revolves around it, or if you become obsessed with it, and every single thing you do or thought you have is driven by the desire to have your ego stroked - or as Dave elegantly puts it, to get your dick sucked.
Here's the thing, I don't think DFW's reaction would've been as unequivocal and straightforward as pure revulsion / aversion to the film. I'm sure it'd be in there, and would probably form a large part of his gut-level immediate visceral response. But I don't think that's the whole story. It doesn't take into account the part that he admits to harbouring and being profoundly suspicious and wary of, the part that would be thrilled by the attention and adoration that birthed the endeavour.4 It doesn't consider the part of ourselves that wants desperately to be loved, that wants to be seen for who we are and be accepted in spite of it, which is not abnormal or unhealthy at all. It's part and parcel of being a human being, and to deny that would be to deny part of your own humanity. When DFW talks about feeling lonely and wishing he were married sometimes, it hints at the idea that fame may elevate a person but in fact does nothing to mitigate or alleviate this feeling. That it in fact often does the opposite and exacerbates this profound unfulfilled desire to be loved - which results in feeling even more isolated and alienated and lonely than before. Feeling that there's something essential and vital and massive missing from our lives. Feeling this deep-down gut-spiritual feeling that we're so desperate not to feel, that we try to drown it out with junk food and sex and alcohol and mind-numbingly good commercial entertainment.
There are a bunch of clever and very intellectually sophisticated articles, some of them written by people who knew David Foster Wallace personally, warning against the tendency to canonise or romanticise the preternaturally talented and prematurely departed. They foresaw that people would want to paint Dave as some kind of literary martyr or turn him into a kind of cult figurehead. They claim that that's precisely the kind of idol worship Dave would've condemned. DFW says in an interview somewhere how when you become an icon or a symbol or an ideal you lose the ability to relate to people in a real and meaningful way. When I heard that there was a movie coming out, I automatically and in retrospect quite cynically assumed they weren't going to get it right - that the film would undoubtedly cast him as some kind of icon or symbol or ideal. That it'd be impossible for them to do more than replicate a figure on screen who looks and talks like him - that it'd be impossible for anyone other than the author himself to convey the indescribable complexity of a person as indescribably complex as himself - that it'd be impossible for mimesis and facsimile of a person to become a viable way to encounter the author, in a way that feels alive and genuine and authentic.
I think David Foster Wallace was worried about appearing in the public eye because everything produced and disseminated by the mass media up to that point had been immensely pleasurable but also cheap and hollow and superficial - and therefore to be disseminated in that way he would have to become something similar. I think he might have subconsciously assumed there could be no translation of the self into the world of TV and commercial entertainment without selling out or seriously mutilating your identity in the process. But as it turns out, not all broadcasting has to be hollow and gratuitous. Courting fame is dangerous, no doubt - it can be toxic and corrosive to the soul, but attaining it is a powerful platform. Wanting to have your voice heard doesn't have to be selfish if what you're really aiming to do is to reach out and connect with another human being. It's always a risk - to disclose yourself fully, to tell someone what you believe, to be seen as you are - but I think the tacit agreement that all writers share by laying themselves bare on the page and writing fan letters back and forth to each other and agreeing to interviews and book readings is that it's a risk worth taking a hundred times over.
1. An airline host / flight steward(?) on a flight from KL to Birmingham noticed me clutching a copy of The Catcher in the Rye as I was boarding a plane once. He said, 'that's a great book'. I was taken aback by the unsolicited assertion, but I instantly felt a bond, an instant deep connection with this person I knew nothing about. You know that feeling when someone else loves something that you love, that not many other people really get? That feeling of finally finding someone on the same wavelength as you, that feeling of: surely nobody who likes this book can be a truly bad person. There's a powerful sense of connection when two people discover a mutual fondness for a book or an author - a connection supposedly more profound and intimate than if it turned out that you two liked the same TV show or middle eastern restaurant. It's kind of like finding out your best friend in college was really close friends with this person at university - or that you both went to the same high school or share a parent in common or something. Really good literature has the power to bring people together. When two people connect over a book you both love, you get that sense of genuine community and instant camaraderie. This manifested in me as an irrational and ardent desire to strike up a conversation about the book and perhaps become best buddies for life, but instead all I did was look up with an expression that I'm pretty sure conveyed none of the excitement and affinity I felt toward this flight steward guy and say 'oh... yeah' ↩
2. I think it was David Lipsky who wrote, 'writers have crushes on other writers' - intellectual crushes. It's just part of the territory. It's a strange and fascinating thing, the whole dynamics of infatuation - how it works, how the distance, the inaccessibility is an integral / essential part of the equation. It all hinges on the object of longing being out of reach.↩
3. The suffering channel, the last short story in DFW's last published collection of short fiction Oblivion, the artist's suffering is being seen producing his art. His greatest fear is appearing on TV. Exposing his guts, childhood traumas, foibles and insecurity and flaws and shortcomings. To cut his brain open and spill blood on the page. To disclose himself immediately and intimately to an audience he does not know in a way he has no control over.↩
4. David Foster Wallace states in the book and the film that he doesn't mind being featured in Rolling Stone, but he'd hate to be seen as the guy who wants to appear in Rolling Stone. What this film manages to pull off is that it manages to put David Foster Wallace on the big screen, while making it explicitly clear to us and everyone else involved that he most definitely does not want to be there.↩
I'm aware that it's cynical but it's also logical. I mean, what are the odds that someone would be just now reading a book that came out 20 years ago unless it had something to do with the silver screen portrayal of its author that just came out called the End of the Tour, starring Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as Jesse Eisenberg.
---
I watched the End of the Tour today, on a whim. The fact that my final exams are in a month's time might have something to do with this. And for the record I liked the film. I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did. To be honest, I had mixed feelings when I first found out it was being released. A friend of mine had sent me the link to the trailer, and my immediate reaction was this: 'Oh man, he would've hated this.'
The underlying assumption is that David Foster Wallace, if he were still alive today, would never have willingly agreed to a movie portrayal of himself. I mean, the type of person who has misgivings about being interviewed for a magazine and begrudgingly attends literary readings probably isn't the kind of person who is going to be ecstatic about having a major motion picture film made about them. That was my thought - and the David Foster Wallace estate who in fact openly opposed the production of the film probably thought the same. David Foster Wallace admits over the course of the film that there is a part of him that wants fame and recognition for his work - that he wants to be lauded and praised and rewarded - but it's that very same knowledge that makes him nervous and uneasy about courting fame. Because he knows how susceptible he is to it, he fears that he'll become addicted to it - that he'll grow accustomed to the blinding brightness and artificial warmth of the spotlight of recognition. And he hates the idea of being seen as someone like that. He states in various ways throughout the film that he has a fear of being a certain way, that he'd hate to one day look at himself in the mirror and think - what an absolute phony.
But I knew I was going to watch it. By the first 10 seconds of the trailer I had already made up my mind. I was interested in the man, in a very fervent and odd, bordering-on-obsessive way - the way you usually reserve for female celebrities blessed with exquisite bone structure who appear on late night talk shows with impossibly lustrous hair flaunting slender hairless appendages.2 I had been unwittingly nurturing over the last year a quietly overzealous fascination with and sense of respect for David Foster Wallace.
I had my own doubts about the film of course, like if you heard a movie was going to be made about your older brother, or an uncle of yours who you really liked but who was also notoriously reclusive and camera shy - you'd want to know who the actor playing them was and you'd be justifiably suspicious of the possibility that they might turn him into a caricature. You worry that they'll reduce him to a set of mannerisms and tics and idiosyncrasies. The bandanna, the small-town demeanour, the Midwestern inflection. It's that thing where the more intimately you know / knew a person the more apprehension and trepidation you feel when you hear they're going to be posthumously represented in some way, because the more truly special something is, the harder it is to capture, to pin down and package all pretty. You hope as well as pessimistically doubt that they'll stay faithful to the real person. After having watched the movie, I can safely say, from my point of view at least, that the David Foster Wallace portrayed on screen by Jason Segel is pretty darn faithful and believable.
In the film, he's essentially hounded / interrogated / tortured by this less-famous and accolade-hungry, tape recorder-toting younger version of himself over the course of four days, and it is out of this period of prolonged discomfort that the transcripts for Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself came into being.3 As a deeply personal and privileged peek into what it would be like to spend 4 days with the author of Infinite Jest in 1996, the book is an amazingly nuanced insight into what was going on inside his head at the time and an unprecedented vehicle for wish fulfilment for DFW-nerds and fanatics everywhere. Without that willingness to antagonize and mortify DFW the person, we would never have the book, and the book is not a bad thing at all. Pop quiz: Which is the lesser of two evils? To leave a brilliant author alone according to his wishes and deprive the world of a great film, or to make a great film about him even though you're pretty sure it will upset him. There's a line in the film where David Foster Wallace says, 'this is a brilliant tactic on your part. Get me a little pissed off, get me to lower my guard, and I'll reveal more.'
There's a scene in the film that may provide a clue into understanding Dave Wallace's phobia of / hypervigilance against indulging one's ego. He talks about how junk food and masturbation aren't inherently wrong, but it's only if you overindulge that it becomes an issue of health. He predicts a future where entertainment becomes so seductive and pleasurable and available that it becomes impossible to escape it - that every fibre of your being just wants to engage in it 24-7. Similarly, it's not wrong to want to be praised, but it's wrong if that becomes your sole reason for living. If your life revolves around it, or if you become obsessed with it, and every single thing you do or thought you have is driven by the desire to have your ego stroked - or as Dave elegantly puts it, to get your dick sucked.
Here's the thing, I don't think DFW's reaction would've been as unequivocal and straightforward as pure revulsion / aversion to the film. I'm sure it'd be in there, and would probably form a large part of his gut-level immediate visceral response. But I don't think that's the whole story. It doesn't take into account the part that he admits to harbouring and being profoundly suspicious and wary of, the part that would be thrilled by the attention and adoration that birthed the endeavour.4 It doesn't consider the part of ourselves that wants desperately to be loved, that wants to be seen for who we are and be accepted in spite of it, which is not abnormal or unhealthy at all. It's part and parcel of being a human being, and to deny that would be to deny part of your own humanity. When DFW talks about feeling lonely and wishing he were married sometimes, it hints at the idea that fame may elevate a person but in fact does nothing to mitigate or alleviate this feeling. That it in fact often does the opposite and exacerbates this profound unfulfilled desire to be loved - which results in feeling even more isolated and alienated and lonely than before. Feeling that there's something essential and vital and massive missing from our lives. Feeling this deep-down gut-spiritual feeling that we're so desperate not to feel, that we try to drown it out with junk food and sex and alcohol and mind-numbingly good commercial entertainment.
There are a bunch of clever and very intellectually sophisticated articles, some of them written by people who knew David Foster Wallace personally, warning against the tendency to canonise or romanticise the preternaturally talented and prematurely departed. They foresaw that people would want to paint Dave as some kind of literary martyr or turn him into a kind of cult figurehead. They claim that that's precisely the kind of idol worship Dave would've condemned. DFW says in an interview somewhere how when you become an icon or a symbol or an ideal you lose the ability to relate to people in a real and meaningful way. When I heard that there was a movie coming out, I automatically and in retrospect quite cynically assumed they weren't going to get it right - that the film would undoubtedly cast him as some kind of icon or symbol or ideal. That it'd be impossible for them to do more than replicate a figure on screen who looks and talks like him - that it'd be impossible for anyone other than the author himself to convey the indescribable complexity of a person as indescribably complex as himself - that it'd be impossible for mimesis and facsimile of a person to become a viable way to encounter the author, in a way that feels alive and genuine and authentic.
I think David Foster Wallace was worried about appearing in the public eye because everything produced and disseminated by the mass media up to that point had been immensely pleasurable but also cheap and hollow and superficial - and therefore to be disseminated in that way he would have to become something similar. I think he might have subconsciously assumed there could be no translation of the self into the world of TV and commercial entertainment without selling out or seriously mutilating your identity in the process. But as it turns out, not all broadcasting has to be hollow and gratuitous. Courting fame is dangerous, no doubt - it can be toxic and corrosive to the soul, but attaining it is a powerful platform. Wanting to have your voice heard doesn't have to be selfish if what you're really aiming to do is to reach out and connect with another human being. It's always a risk - to disclose yourself fully, to tell someone what you believe, to be seen as you are - but I think the tacit agreement that all writers share by laying themselves bare on the page and writing fan letters back and forth to each other and agreeing to interviews and book readings is that it's a risk worth taking a hundred times over.
1. An airline host / flight steward(?) on a flight from KL to Birmingham noticed me clutching a copy of The Catcher in the Rye as I was boarding a plane once. He said, 'that's a great book'. I was taken aback by the unsolicited assertion, but I instantly felt a bond, an instant deep connection with this person I knew nothing about. You know that feeling when someone else loves something that you love, that not many other people really get? That feeling of finally finding someone on the same wavelength as you, that feeling of: surely nobody who likes this book can be a truly bad person. There's a powerful sense of connection when two people discover a mutual fondness for a book or an author - a connection supposedly more profound and intimate than if it turned out that you two liked the same TV show or middle eastern restaurant. It's kind of like finding out your best friend in college was really close friends with this person at university - or that you both went to the same high school or share a parent in common or something. Really good literature has the power to bring people together. When two people connect over a book you both love, you get that sense of genuine community and instant camaraderie. This manifested in me as an irrational and ardent desire to strike up a conversation about the book and perhaps become best buddies for life, but instead all I did was look up with an expression that I'm pretty sure conveyed none of the excitement and affinity I felt toward this flight steward guy and say 'oh... yeah' ↩
2. I think it was David Lipsky who wrote, 'writers have crushes on other writers' - intellectual crushes. It's just part of the territory. It's a strange and fascinating thing, the whole dynamics of infatuation - how it works, how the distance, the inaccessibility is an integral / essential part of the equation. It all hinges on the object of longing being out of reach.↩
3. The suffering channel, the last short story in DFW's last published collection of short fiction Oblivion, the artist's suffering is being seen producing his art. His greatest fear is appearing on TV. Exposing his guts, childhood traumas, foibles and insecurity and flaws and shortcomings. To cut his brain open and spill blood on the page. To disclose himself immediately and intimately to an audience he does not know in a way he has no control over.↩
4. David Foster Wallace states in the book and the film that he doesn't mind being featured in Rolling Stone, but he'd hate to be seen as the guy who wants to appear in Rolling Stone. What this film manages to pull off is that it manages to put David Foster Wallace on the big screen, while making it explicitly clear to us and everyone else involved that he most definitely does not want to be there.↩
Sunday, January 10, 2016
act natural
there was a time when I had no idea who I was, and was so desperate to be myself, that I piled on layer after layer of irony and iterations of ideas of self till it got to a point I nearly suffocated underneath
---
being yourself =/= trying to be what you think is yourself
---
how accurate do you think your perception of yourself is?
---
she hadn't changed much, hair glossier, skin better - but she was still the same person I knew back in high school.
'What's the worst part about being famous?'
She thought about it for a while.
'That people hardly try to get to know you anymore. They all have a pre-conceived idea of who you are before they even meet you, which they're convinced is the real you. It's hard to connect with people if all they see is some concocted persona cobbled together from a handful of television appearances and... you always get the feeling that they're sort of performing? at least for the first few minutes... that they're putting up a front to try and impress you - or trying to play it cool. It takes a lot just to get them to just relax and be themselves around you. Sometimes it feels like I'm some kind of alien. And also I guess the pressure to act or be a certain way in public. Like, you have this public image to maintain and that everything you do is being judged and held up to an ever-shifting standard. It gets hard to be yourself when other people always expect you to be something else... and when all they care about is how they appear to you, or trying to get an autograph or a selfie or a juicy headline out of you, or trying to get you to like them. It kind of wears you down after a while.'
---
being yourself =/= trying to be what you think is yourself
---
how accurate do you think your perception of yourself is?
---
she hadn't changed much, hair glossier, skin better - but she was still the same person I knew back in high school.
'What's the worst part about being famous?'
She thought about it for a while.
'That people hardly try to get to know you anymore. They all have a pre-conceived idea of who you are before they even meet you, which they're convinced is the real you. It's hard to connect with people if all they see is some concocted persona cobbled together from a handful of television appearances and... you always get the feeling that they're sort of performing? at least for the first few minutes... that they're putting up a front to try and impress you - or trying to play it cool. It takes a lot just to get them to just relax and be themselves around you. Sometimes it feels like I'm some kind of alien. And also I guess the pressure to act or be a certain way in public. Like, you have this public image to maintain and that everything you do is being judged and held up to an ever-shifting standard. It gets hard to be yourself when other people always expect you to be something else... and when all they care about is how they appear to you, or trying to get an autograph or a selfie or a juicy headline out of you, or trying to get you to like them. It kind of wears you down after a while.'
Friday, January 8, 2016
the point of searching
8/1/15:
The point of searching
The point of searching
There was a whole sheet, a blanket of snow on my backyard last night and now it's all gone, dissolved as if it were never there. Like last year
Lets talk about Artists. How do they know what colours to use, what notes to compose. What secret rule book or algorithm are they consulting. These were the thoughts in my head as I listened to Roma by Edo lee. And then it occurred to me- they just know. Like a baby knows how to suckle or a dog knows how to bark. And they don't second guess it. That's the secret, to trust your impulses and your gut. I've found that once you start talking about writing, it becomes rigid. It stiffens up. You can't use it any more its not pliable. Virginia woolf writes and essay, treatise on words, she says, the moment you pin down its meaning it dies. The colour is drained, the music of it fades. The ones who masterfully craft phrases the poets I suspect associate words with not a definition, by definition itself a string of dry, withered exact precise in unemotive words. It's not a prescriptive, recursive enterprise. Instead they are associated with a rich and immediate experience. Qualia or sendation phenomenon (check meaning of qualia) meanings are useful so we understand, to keep things standardised- but we can't get caught up with the meanings, don't let them rule us- the best artists broke the rules not because they deliberately set out to but because they were too preoccupied with getting the images and colours and music inside them out to care about conventions and Norms. Broke the mould. Care about what you are trying to say and do your best to say it. Then the words will come- arrange themselves, lay themselves out before you. The good ones, the ones that still are kicking with vitality, fluttering out of grasp of all but the very few who dare to reach for them.
Euphoria. Much more intense version of pleasure- exceedingly happy. Or do you think of hold, shining lights and choruses of Angels. Because that's the experience the original subject the word was designed invented to evoke invoke recall point to- its there as a signpost to represent something realer than itself. Eu- good - phoria, bearing, carry- original meaning health. The actual experience of euphoria came before the word, and its that experience that must blossom in both the reader and writer's imagination. Not an abstraction or a cold flat idea.
Wednesday, January 6, 2016
some lovers try positions that they can't handle / percussion head
"you seem like an intelligent enough fellow"
"well, i don't know about that"
---
... and living in a way no one else understands
---
last year was about making the moment last longer. this year is about how to cherish it more
---
last year was about making the moment last longer. this year is about how to cherish it more
Monday, January 4, 2016
Sunday, January 3, 2016
resistance in the materials
I realise it's become so cerebral. So sterile. My writing, I mean. All intellect and no soul. Nothing visceral. And it's probably a semi-conscious thing. I remember at the beginning of 2014 I told myself I wouldn't write sad things - or excessively depressing and mopey things anymore, because that's what my blog was becoming - just an accumulation - an assortment of woes and lamentations. All it did was bring a person down. So I decided at the start of 2014 to try and break the self-perpetuating cycle by trying to write optimistic things, or interesting things instead.
I developed an aversion to the old style, which was to write the thing that occurred to me - to go along with my first instinct. I got into the habit of telling myself 'it's ok, things aren't that bad.' and getting myself to believe it through sheer force of will. I was going for hopeful. And it worked - more or less. I began to see the world in a different way - began to enjoy things more and be open to seeing the silver lining, the brighter side of every situation. By changing the way I wrote, I changed the way I looked at the world. I succeeded in becoming a less sad person. But in doing so, my writing stiffened up a bit.
I now approached the exercise warily, with a kind of apprehension. But perhaps worst of all, I subjected it to an agenda. I subjugated it to my will - which means whenever I wrote - or most of the times that I sat down to write something - I was always half-conscious of - does this sound too depressing? Am I falling into old habits again? Is this really the person I want to be?
I became suspicious of my own writing - so I muzzled it. Neutered it. Chained it to the swing. And now I look back and am surprised to find that it has no soul. That it isn't visceral... or moving. To find it contrived and overwrought and self-conscious and almost wholly taking place in my mind. That it doesn't dance.
---
A lot of these things are very removed from reality. Went to Bristol. Didn't write about that. Went to Italy, Nope, no record of that experience at all. It all takes place in my brain. But that's damaging - because reality is what we have in common. If I write about real life - my mom, my grandparents, the patients I meet in clinic - if I write honestly and unfiltered - that's the stuff that resonates - that has the potential to make you feel something.
It's been longer than I can remember since I wrote something that I could look back on and be surprised and impressed with. The really good things you write are the things you don't believe you could have written. They're too good to have come from your head. They seem to have come from elsewhere, descended from the heavens and fell into your lap.
In 2010 and 2011 I wrote without premeditation, just as and when I pleased and whatever I felt like writing at the time. Starting from 2013 I decided that that wasn't good enough. That it produced some pretty lines sure, but nothing meaningful, or life changing. Just the occasional one-liner and pithy aphorism. I knew I had to push myself if I was ever going to get better. So I started writing with an end in mind. I started saying to myself, 'okay, unless it's this good, I'm not going to publish.' I started setting standards for publication and any post that I judged to fall short of that standard became a draft, until I could redeem it.
I started having expectations for each post. What I wanted it to be - what I wanted it to achieve. Whereas before it was a matter of - sit down in front of a screen and see what comes out. No aim or goal or standard to meet. It turned the writing into a performance. Put pressure on me to produce something worth publishing. And did it make me a better writer? Did it make me less honest with my writing?
I checked some statistics. My old blog boasts 581 published posts and 100 drafts. This current blog consists of 500 published posts and 580 drafts. My process has changed a lot, but I still value, or regard as most precious those pieces where I sit down, not knowing what will happen and somehow surprise myself. Where I do not fall short of expectations. Those are the few worth reading.
---
The dangerous thing about writing with a word processor is that you can see the whole of it as you write. That sort of perspective can paralyse a person. The big picture is important but you have to be up close to paint. When you write with pen and paper you focus on each word and letter and stroke as you create it. As it materialises. It pulls you in - draws you into the moment. The present act of turning your thoughts into something finite and tangible. You have no time to look back on what you've just written and think 'maybe this wasn't such a good idea.' You're too busy writing. Professional athletes perform well because they don't have time to think - or maybe have learned not to think - about their performance. One of the most hazardous habits while writing is to think about how it looks or sounds, while you're writing it.
By trying to build up my writing into something bigger, something great and complex and difficult, maybe I was forcing it into a posture or mould it never felt comfortable or natural in. It doesn't take a genius to see how if I viewed my writing as simple or sentimental or basic and unsophisticated, that it meant the person writing it couldn't be any better. And I didn't want to be simple or easily understood. Maybe part of the problem with my writing is with my image of myself. Trying to reconcile the simple, silly, unimpressive parts of me with the things I admire. The dark, tortured and complex things. How to allow them enough room to co-exist.
I developed an aversion to the old style, which was to write the thing that occurred to me - to go along with my first instinct. I got into the habit of telling myself 'it's ok, things aren't that bad.' and getting myself to believe it through sheer force of will. I was going for hopeful. And it worked - more or less. I began to see the world in a different way - began to enjoy things more and be open to seeing the silver lining, the brighter side of every situation. By changing the way I wrote, I changed the way I looked at the world. I succeeded in becoming a less sad person. But in doing so, my writing stiffened up a bit.
I now approached the exercise warily, with a kind of apprehension. But perhaps worst of all, I subjected it to an agenda. I subjugated it to my will - which means whenever I wrote - or most of the times that I sat down to write something - I was always half-conscious of - does this sound too depressing? Am I falling into old habits again? Is this really the person I want to be?
I became suspicious of my own writing - so I muzzled it. Neutered it. Chained it to the swing. And now I look back and am surprised to find that it has no soul. That it isn't visceral... or moving. To find it contrived and overwrought and self-conscious and almost wholly taking place in my mind. That it doesn't dance.
---
A lot of these things are very removed from reality. Went to Bristol. Didn't write about that. Went to Italy, Nope, no record of that experience at all. It all takes place in my brain. But that's damaging - because reality is what we have in common. If I write about real life - my mom, my grandparents, the patients I meet in clinic - if I write honestly and unfiltered - that's the stuff that resonates - that has the potential to make you feel something.
It's been longer than I can remember since I wrote something that I could look back on and be surprised and impressed with. The really good things you write are the things you don't believe you could have written. They're too good to have come from your head. They seem to have come from elsewhere, descended from the heavens and fell into your lap.
In 2010 and 2011 I wrote without premeditation, just as and when I pleased and whatever I felt like writing at the time. Starting from 2013 I decided that that wasn't good enough. That it produced some pretty lines sure, but nothing meaningful, or life changing. Just the occasional one-liner and pithy aphorism. I knew I had to push myself if I was ever going to get better. So I started writing with an end in mind. I started saying to myself, 'okay, unless it's this good, I'm not going to publish.' I started setting standards for publication and any post that I judged to fall short of that standard became a draft, until I could redeem it.
I started having expectations for each post. What I wanted it to be - what I wanted it to achieve. Whereas before it was a matter of - sit down in front of a screen and see what comes out. No aim or goal or standard to meet. It turned the writing into a performance. Put pressure on me to produce something worth publishing. And did it make me a better writer? Did it make me less honest with my writing?
I checked some statistics. My old blog boasts 581 published posts and 100 drafts. This current blog consists of 500 published posts and 580 drafts. My process has changed a lot, but I still value, or regard as most precious those pieces where I sit down, not knowing what will happen and somehow surprise myself. Where I do not fall short of expectations. Those are the few worth reading.
---
The dangerous thing about writing with a word processor is that you can see the whole of it as you write. That sort of perspective can paralyse a person. The big picture is important but you have to be up close to paint. When you write with pen and paper you focus on each word and letter and stroke as you create it. As it materialises. It pulls you in - draws you into the moment. The present act of turning your thoughts into something finite and tangible. You have no time to look back on what you've just written and think 'maybe this wasn't such a good idea.' You're too busy writing. Professional athletes perform well because they don't have time to think - or maybe have learned not to think - about their performance. One of the most hazardous habits while writing is to think about how it looks or sounds, while you're writing it.
By trying to build up my writing into something bigger, something great and complex and difficult, maybe I was forcing it into a posture or mould it never felt comfortable or natural in. It doesn't take a genius to see how if I viewed my writing as simple or sentimental or basic and unsophisticated, that it meant the person writing it couldn't be any better. And I didn't want to be simple or easily understood. Maybe part of the problem with my writing is with my image of myself. Trying to reconcile the simple, silly, unimpressive parts of me with the things I admire. The dark, tortured and complex things. How to allow them enough room to co-exist.
Friday, January 1, 2016
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