First off music is a huge part of my life. I spend as much time noodling as I do writing. With that said the only thing you really need to listen to is Song for Caden. It sums everything up so beautifully. What do I mean by everything? You decide.
“Which came first: the chicken or the egg?” It’s an innocuous question. Pick one: Someone created the chicken that laid the first egg or a chickenoid animal laid an egg that evolved into the first chicken. What is a chicken though? When does a chicken stop being so chickenlike that it ceases to be a chicken? If we glue feathers to a man can we say “behold a chicken”? I find that I’m in a similar situation myself. On October 10th 2019 I was diagnosed with bipolar (on world mental health day of all days. A sign? It’s -kind of funny in a cosmic sense.) so 2020 was bound to a(n) — adjective of your choice — year. Experiencing an unimaginable range of human emotion for much of my continuing adulthood has had an undeniable impact on the developing of my world view, however, where does my bipolarity end and where do I begin? If I were able to say “behold myself!” all would be saved or lost. For some reason I have an inexplicable fascination with duality and all that comes with it. Was this some innate attribute waiting to come out and my bipolarity accelerated the process or maybe this created something new. Physics says no but metaphysics says possibly.
Exploring such an intense range of human feelings creates such conflicting views of the world I live in. I’ve felt the full insignificance of myself and my actions, felt powerless, been swallowed by pessimism but I’ve also drowned in self-importance, “transcended” past the concrete and abstract constraints of being human, and viewed the world through a rose-tinted kalopsopic telescope. So, what’s an enby to do? It’s a confusing as all hell, especially when I get mixed states where both sides somehow decide to happen at the same time. Both sides have some valid points and some believable lies. Filtering that is too much work. Deep introspection like that is a one-way ticket into a philosophical stupor. Being self-aware is pretty much useless in terms of trying to be your honest self. It means you’ve gotten good at deceiving yourself. Another issue is that as time progresses things becoming needlessly meta and always ends up becoming “I am self-aware that I am self-aware that I am self-aware” which is nothing perpetuating nothing for the sake of itself. Having no reference point to what is “normal”, (Re: standardized) I’ve come to the realization that I need to act as if both sides are absolutely true or else. Now there is no need to honestly filter what I am. I.e. Politics Isn’t About Right Or Wrong; It’s About Winning (To be used only for good.)
“If you seek authenticity for authenticity’s sake you are no longer authentic.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre,
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
You might be thinking to yourself “Wait hold on. This sounds awfully close to some Orwellian 2+2=5 doublethink type stuff”, and you would be correct. There’s nothing wrong with that though. This is your head we’re talking about, not some oppressive totalitarian regime trying to gain power. There’s nothing wrong with that either. It’s your life so taking control of so it is probably high on your list of priorities to do that anyways. The world fucking sucks, so, some delusion does us good.
Self-deprecation is a scarily good example of this phenomena.
—”I am stupid”
—I know I am not stupid I just made a simple mistake
— If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. – Some dude, I think it was hitler someone that propganda-ed around
—”I am stupid”
Change that with nice and good and cool and nice things and your perception of yourself has changed.
Okay but what does this have to do with writing aesthetics and 2020? Something probably. Well, I already was spooked and incapable of going outside not much has changed in that regard. Without the… distractions for lack of a better word, there’s a lot of time to sit around and wade through the confusion. My neuroses (Although, I’m not particularly neurotic. I thought I would just throw that out there.) are fairly prominent in my regular life and I’ve learned to analyze them so it’s morbidly interesting to me how social isolation and information fatigue affect people and have brought out those neuroses that would have stayed hidden otherwise. Combine that with my experiences and there’s my explanation for why I love media that loves to unravel how people work. It should cut through me like a knife. There’s always a part of me that’s aching to be discovered. That’s why I think experiencing things so deeply helps me a lot in that regard. I end up having a lot more mental/emotional material to work with and writing it all out helps ease that pressure.
Notice how time feels like it’s not even real. Yeah, that’s me. Not in it’s my doing but rather that it’s something I experience on the daily. When I experience the “big sad” time moves like molasses. It’s a meditative molasses but a molasses nonetheless. I spend a lot of times watching walls and waiting for the day to pass by. In essence I am a human sundial, however, I do not get much sun because I stay inside and isolate so much. Everyday ends up, or seem to, be the same day repeated and repeated over and over. Then there’s the complete opposite where I move so fast it feels like the world can’t keep up. The wonderful dancing of free-flowing ideas (which uh oh I’m experiencing now), clang association, extreme sociality, and talkativeness is addictive. However, the world is slow, it cannot keep up with me, other people cannot keep up with me. It gets lonely to be like this. As the adage goes: “those who dance are thought to be mad by those who cannot hear the music.” If only there was someone who would dance with me
There’s some magic here. Something about my anxieties towards domestic life? The effects of LSC on society? Who knows. Not me. It speaks to me.
so, that’s something I like to play with a lot: the passage of time. The paradoxical nature of time has revealed itself even more than it usually would. Does it go faster? Does it go slower? Who’s to say? It’s like in Adam Sandler’s (NAME DROP BITCHESSS) Click where we see the time and have control over it, or rather what we do with it, to an extent while it relentlessly moves forward. A lot of what I write doesn’t make sense timeline wise. It’s all very manic. Time jumps around along with setting, things are impossibly over described in an impossibly short amount of time, does this section go in this part of the story, is it happening at the same time, etc. Does it matter in the first place? According to eternal recurrence no.
Sorry talking heads is one of my favourite bands
I’m an incredibly claustrophobic person. If claustrophobia were a person it would be me. I don’t mean like afraid of tight spaces, or maybe I do. I do, but that tight space is me. Myself. The self. Like I wrote in that Kafka (I refuse to say it) story it sometimes feels like I’m looking through a window that is my eyes rather than just looking out my eyes. This disconnect makes me feel the same way I do towards other people. I suppose that’s why I look at other people a lot. To transcend existence is not exist at all. As Charlie Kaufman said in his movie Adaptation “You are what you love, not what loves you.” and my way of finding purpose and meaning is falling in love with everyone I see, taking myself out of the equation. Otherwise, I see no other outcome than becoming a stranger to yourself.
Compared to other parts of the world “the west” has a very solitary culture and that leads to a lot, like a lot a lot, of alienation between people. With covid that alienation has gone up and it ends up feeling like we’re fading away as opposed to feeling ourselves disintegrate.
I would leave it here but Kafka says it better than I ever could in his story The Street window in regards to my last paragraph.
Best wishes to you all,
Cee
Ps. Do I sincerely believe everything I said? Maybe. Doesn’t matter, go be your own unreliable narrator.