Void
I wish I could write more regularly, or at least post on here more regularly, at the moment but when I’m not trying to write my PhD thesis I’m tending to oscillate between existential dread, fatigue and pre-emptive disappointment. This last one has been on my mind a lot in recent months and not just the pre-emptive kind. How to respond when something you really want to happen fails to materialise? How to find a way forward knowing that, okay maybe from only certain perspectives, you failed? What does it mean, even, to fail? And how to find a way back when you do, one that isn’t cursing ideas the minute you have them and seeing them as bound to go nowhere?
I sort of hate questions like these. On the one hand, they’re exhausting in their scope, in how demanding they are to answer. To my mind, they also echo with a kind of management speak that’s easy to associate with a bland motivational speaker or life coach, the type who pops up all too casually and leaves a stench of malaise in their wake. In a way, they’re questions so general that they don’t so much as get to the heart of things as breed a kind of resilience that’s as useful as a hair shirt. On the other, though, they persist and, when taken with the right level of seriousness, might dislodge something and make it possible for you to recalibrate and reset your coordinates on a specific goal or ambition.
In my experience, though, these kinds of questions chip away at me to the point that I often just go immobile and withdrawn. It’s embarrassing to admit this, that often I sometimes just sit there and do nothing but feel the weight of things on top of me. I think I used to do this as a child. When I was young I was very good at hovering and it would annoy my mother especially. I was always asking for something to do. What can I do? I would ask, as if I were constantly at a loose end. Looking back, I’m not sure I knew exactly how to be a child. I suppose that for me, like many others, childhood was most vivid when I was dissociating through fantasy; maybe it’s no wonder I want to fictionalise for a living. Often, when I asked her, my mother would simply sigh, having been interrupted from whatever she was doing, then set me off on some craft, writing or reading activity. Often she would despair. If I hear that again, she’d say. Usually, she would tell me to run around the garden for a while so I’d get tired and stop asking.
These days, I find I simply have to pull myself up by the scruff of my neck and force myself to leave the void; it’s the only way I have of pushing through or finding my way out of the horrible internal monologue of defeatism: that even if I get started on what it is I want to do it’s bound to end in disappointment. Forcing my way out of the void and getting going, though, can sometimes feel motivated by a need to be relentlessly productive, a need for my desires to be realised so that they don’t fail. If it isn’t clear yet, this is neither a plea for help nor an advice column, though if you find yourself in a salacious predicament I’d love to hear about it and maybe be your agony uncle.
Even writing this is the product of a day of drifting in and out and growing completely annoyed at myself for doing so. It seems I have to wait until about nine o’clock in the evening for those voices to go away so that I can relax into the prospect of setting some words down, even if it means the lines of text on my screen are already fuzzing from my eyes being tired. I’m very quick to berate myself and not allow myself to accept that the withdrawal, if that’s what it is, may just be a necessary facet of my personality and life, that sometimes it might be my mind’s way of telling me to stop. Just stop! Take a break, be content with not needing to do anything. And yet…
It’s hard, too, when the world feels as if it is caving inwards. It was already precarious, a spider’s web rattling in heavy wind. But every day I can’t avoid the sensations of what I can only call history. Of time pressing itself up against us all and that is enough to make anyone seek the safety of stillness. Endless scrolling, watching or reading a series of the most silly, ridiculous, inane, then insane, then horrific videos, images, and sets of sentences is enough to induce affective vertigo, a spiral of not quite joy, anger, resentment, envy, sadness and despair which frankly I think can only lead to a kind of indifference, an inability to sit with any feeling at all for an extended period of time. Generally speaking, my emotions tend to be pessimistic in their hue but the rationalist in me tells me to keep up the hope, that a tangled knot can be untied, that something good can and will be done. The technology, though, is undoubtedly making us keep apart from one another and splinter any kind of solidarity or common experience. I know the common is never really common anyway, always subtly excluding while providing the veneer of life as shared, understood in all its tripwire surprises, but we’re so encouraged to spend time being static and alone that our looking outwardly often resembles the view of a kaleidoscope: a constantly shifting image fractured by its own reflections. I don’t really have anything clever to say on this, about how my disappointments and resentments are mediated and punctuated by a technology whose goal is its users inaction. I wish I did. A lot of other people think they do. All I can say is that these messy thoughts are just works in progress as any idea, project, piece of writing, recipe, film, public policy will always remain.
In other news, some cultural things I enjoyed the past couple of weeks:
Film/TV: I watched the X trilogy with Felix last week, sort of silly but the kind I’m happy to buy into (Mia Goth is brilliant and almost a little too convincing as Pearl/Maxxxine, both in terms of murderous rage and as a user of a certain white powder); re-watching Gimme, Gimme, Gimme featuring the brilliant Kathy Burke.
Photography: Graciela Iturbide at The Photographer’s Gallery, a terrific selection of her work: ghostly yet alive, dramatic yet understated, cuts the throat and brings on a smile.
Reading: The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai (trans. by Georg Szirtes); I’ve seen Bela Tarr’s film adaptation but reading the novel for the first time. I read LK’s War and War on holiday a few weeks ago and thought it, too, would make an excellent movie (I naturally want to adapt it; another idea on the list, another work in progress).
The photograph above was taken at Lighthouse Point Park, New Haven, CT in October 2023.