I’ve been in a funk lately. Maybe it’s because nothing’s happening. Or I have nothing to do. Or I’m not doing anything risky. Or I’m not sticking to my routine. Or I’m eating meat. Or maybe it’s the carbs I’m eating. Or because I’m still living at home. Or I’m not washing my face before going to bed. Or it’s my allergies. Just, nothing’s seemed terribly interesting lately.
Maybe, really, it’s because nothing much dramatic has gone on in my life lately. Or not anything that’s like, been super good where I get that post-excitement depression or something that’s energized me at all. There’s this passage from High Fidelity that kind of describes it:
“It’s only just beginning to occur to me that it’s important to have something going on somewhere, at work or at home, otherwise you’re just clinging on. If I lived in Bosnia, then not having a girlfriend wouldn’t seem like the most important thing in the world, but here in Crouch End it does. You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it’s just one bloke on his own starting into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who’d believe in this character then? I’ve got to get more stuff, more clutter, more detail in here, because at the moment I’m in danger of falling off the edge.”
I threw these two sage and lavender bundles that I got from that fortune teller lady into the river. I was supposed to do that like two months ago, I think a week after I got them. And I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about them until I threw them away. I can’t remember what they were supposed to do exactly–something like heal me or renew me, I don’t even know. I was supposed to keep them in my pockets for two weeks and then toss them in a body of running water. After my tarot card reading I kind of felt pressured into buying them but they were like two-hundred dollars. They were supposed to give me diarrhea and make it hard to sleep and have some other side-effects but I really can’t remember much except that I felt pressured into buying them, and like a tiny bitsy part of me was like “what if this is the solution to my funk?” but I’ve still been in a funk so I doubt that was it.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the role of intimacy in art. Like, you’re supposed to expose yourself, your feelings and whatever, in your art, to the point that it’s slightly embarrassing. Like Neil Gaiman said, ““The moment that you feel, just possibly, you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind, and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself…That is the moment, you might be starting to get it right.” But then I think there might be a point where you get too personal. Like with her album Ctrl, which is pretty much a diary of SZA’s tumultuous love/sex life, even she cut some stuff out that she thought was too personal to go on the album. And Pinkerton, Rivers Cuomo’s album where he pretty much bares his soul, that felt too personal. Like maybe sometimes you should keep that shit to yourself.
In an interview, SZA said “You know what’s crazy? I probably could have made Ctrl five years ago but I couldn’t have made it two years ago. I was probably at my most free five or six years ago, and then I psyched myself out. It’s like in the Bible, ‘And then they knew they were naked.’ I knew I was naked and it just crippled me from there on. It just went downhill. Now, it’s like I know that I’m naked and I don’t give a fuck.
So I guess art-making is some kind of voyeurism. So people who write and stuff, really they’re just voyeurs and like exposing themselves, regardless of how introverted or whatever they may seem.
I read the first chapter of Carl Jung’s autobiography, where he describes his early childhood. If anyone was being extra honest, it was Carl. It doesn’t get any weirder than that man. In it, he describes having a dream as a child of seeing this giant penis sitting on a throne in this temple underground. And the dick was supposed to be Jesus. I feel like traumatic childhood dreams like this are not uncommon. So you should be fine sharing whatever your thoughts are.
This is from the Prologue in Carl Jung’s autobiography: “What we are to our inward vision, and what man appears to be sub specie aeternitatis, can only be expressed by way of myth. Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science. Science works with concepts of averages which are far too general to do justice to the subjective variety of an individual life.
Thus it is that I have now undertakedn, in my eighty-third year, to tell my personal myth. I can only make direct statements, only “tell stories.” Whether or not the stories are “true” is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth.”
Concerned with his internal life. But I didn’t make it very far, yet, because like I mentioned, just nothing’s been terribly interesting lately.
Carl Jung also said, “Like every other being, I am a splinter of the infinite deity.”
He also says:
“We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct. Consequently, we cannot have any final judgment about ourselves or our lives.”
Also: “The life of a man is a dubious experiment. It is a tremendous phenomenon only in numerical terms. Individually, it is so fleeting, so insufficient, that it is literally a miracle that anything can exist and develop at all. I was impressed by that fact long ago, as a young medical student, and it seemed to me miraculous that I should not have been prematurely annihilated.”
There’s more, and it’s all interesting, but you’ll have to read it yourself or something.
Here’s something else from High Fidelity, the book:
“It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the centre of your being, then you can’t afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You’ve got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you’ve got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you’re compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship. Maybe Al Green is directly responsible for more than I ever realized.”
Maybe I just have to do some picking, so things resonate with me again. I just need to feel more alive.
How do you put yourself out there while still feeling not good enough? Share your work when you feel like it sucks? Not be embarrassed by the things you enjoy, or find interesting?
So, I’ll follow in Carl Jung’s advice and describe my internal life instead, like he decided to do in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, and Reflections. Because my external life is just both not interesting at the moment and far too personal, too intimate for me to feel like sharing. And also just not interesting enough. And where the two cross over–internal and external–which is everywhere, it’s literally a grid. The external and the internal are just a grid of graph paper and on it is plotted something, and I feel like I’m stretching this metaphor and I’m not sure what its purpose is. Why do the diaries of like Susan Sontag and Kurt Cobain and Rivers Cuomo and Silvia Plath get published? Why can’t people just mind their own business? It’s not like someone’s journal can even come close to approximating their real life. That shit takes place in the folds. It’s just a copy of a copy of a copy, or whatever they said in Fight Club. I’m not sleep deprived. It’s already passed through so many filters and processors that what comes out is the sludge that makes the hot dog and not the piggy at all. What scares me most is people who voluntarily publish their diaries. What sort of fucked up voyeurism is that. Actually all artists are voyeurs I guess.
What I’m writing is nothing close to what I’m feeling–it feels put on; faked. I’m just approximating the stylistic language of whatever the last thing I read was, probably subconsciously. This is not me except for some surface details, probably. It doesn’t feel like me when I write it. Everything we do is a performance of what we think we ought to appear to the world. What even is the real me? Hopefully I’m getting some subconscious relief or something from writing this, because why else would I be doing it. When you search for your actual self, you find nothing. You find that the person is just a process. A conglomeration of the things you do every day and the things you eat. Where does free will come from. Who the fuck knows? Truly, I don’t care. Whatever is running this world like a well-oiled machine is also running me, and I’m ok with that. Sing in me muse, I guess. You don’t come into the world, you come out of it. Language was a gift given to me by a bunch of other people. The internal world is the external. Spent way too much thinking about my sociopath ex recently. And just fuming.
I’m a jealous person. Does jealousy come from insecurity? I have no idea. I need to draw. Or something. Maybe design something, I don’t know what. There’s this sentence in High Fidelity that I like, “Has it fuck.” That’s it, that’s the sentence. I don’t know what it means but I like it.
I do hope I get that apartment, though.
Reading does help if your external life is boring. I feel like the older I get, like middle age, the more I’ll start watching movies and reading books but by then it’ll be too late. The cultural miasma that lives in my head won’t be cool and precocious anymore. Damn, I love big words. Fuck the bitches who say you should keep words simple. Fuck the kids on the Internet (accomplised SEO writers and bloggers) who say to write at a third grade level. Decathetic is a fucking crunchy ass word and I’ll use it if I want to. Decathexis, that sounds like an album title or the name of a grunge band. Actually all the good grunge bands had pretty paradoxical band names, like Soundgarden or Nirvana. Something ironic, you know. Either way, it sounds like a band name, or an album Grimes would release or something she’d name her kid if you throw in a couple of numerals and alt characters. I hate the word sonder so much but i keep seeing it everywhere. If you’re gonna worship a word from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, please let it be something else. Sondermind, sonder. Please just stop.
The tone of this post is sponsored by Nick Hornby and High Fidelity. How do you learn? You steal from others.
The friction between my internal world and the universe has been at an all-time high recently.
Am I really me or am I pretending to be somebody. This is me, right now, in this moment. I can be somebody else tomorrow.
I learned how ot make an Adios, Motherfucker but I’m also pretty sure I fucked it up. I’m trying to move out and so far it’s not working. My mom told me her psychologist friend told her it’s a sign from the universe for me to stay home. I think my mom just wants me to live at home. But it’s just not for me. Little things matter. Like the sunlight bouncing off the top of the car and oh my god my fucking eyes it’s too bright. Taking pictures of kids at soccer games for money. Watching Shaun of the Dead, forgetting that it’s actually great, and watching The Princess Bride. Tutoring a kid. Volunteering in hospice care. Working on freelance copywriting. Having allergies. Getting STI testing. Going to urgent care for allergy testing. Not having HIV. Not being pregnant. Being parked by the same model car but black. My matcha tea matching the color of my laptop case. Spending too much money on gas. My brother buying a Prius.
Is it just me that when I scroll through my Instagram explore page I get all those tarot card readings? I had to throw two bundles into the river. Stop targeting me and my insecurities, Instagram.
Ethan Hawke is so cool.
Ride the wave, ride the delusion. That’s also something that SZA said. “To tell my personal myth.” That’s what I’m doing. Thanks, Carl Jung. I knew I could trust you.
Fucking hate that guy. My ex. Among the stupid shit that occupies my thoughts all day and give me no rest, it’s bouts of hatred for this guy.
The world is far too big. Focus on taking care of myself? We’re all the same under our shells. All the same mush. You know, organs and shit. All our hearts beat. All the things that make us different are just a funny ruse to help us forget the fact that we’re all really the same.
I love Wikipedia stalking people. Particularly the Early Life & Career tabs.
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