bruh I hate this blog. okay, that’s not entirely true, but I have a lot of writing that is better put to other ends, so right now I don’t really care enough to ensure this is a thriving source of varied content. but what then do I want from this? I’ve made lots of plans and thought up plenty of ideas for what might be good topics to regularly blog about, but the fact is right now any writing that isn’t going into the novel I’m working on is generally being avoided. a story and some newsletter essays, but that’s it.
I’m in the process of dedicating myself further to my artistic endeavors, trying to make better use of my time, so there’s probably some to be devoted to maintaining a more regular supply of posts here, but fact is, blogging is very low on my priority list. but the idea of having a blog is to have something to offer as evidence of the work i do without the hassle of convincing some website or legacy publication to publish me. and if that’s the idea then I should be writing all kinds of things here, because I write all kinds of things, but with the intention of submitting them for sanctification via publication.
this week is the week I’m thinking of as “starting in earnest” ie making myself work on or plan what’s next in this novel. I’m not hitting the word quotas I made but I’m letting myself get up to speed. because I’m limiting how much more research I do at this stage until I have actual drafts to work with, I don’t have time for anything like that here. but I should do something else here. maybe text generating exercises; cut-ups, algorithmic games, parody, so on. anything to keep me occupied throughout the day so I don’t spiral into despair or distraction, as is my wont. make myself laugh, write jokes, whatever. something every day. let’s do it.
music’s going well too, though of course I have renewed energy and focus for the studio when I should be putting my time in in front of the typewriter.
aries is the sign of the self so this is about me.
recently some of my friends got into a discussion around a general sense of “I don’t know what to do.” with COVID fading into the background, destined to be another source of misery and death for the rest of our lives, and not a single lesson having been learned by the World, any hope that perhaps habits of labor and care might change has proven naive.
at the time of the discussion, I didn’t feel these concerns as acutely as my comrades did/do, since as of late I have been absorbed by writing projects that keep me preoccupied, if not exactly content. plus I’ve been more social in the last few weeks than I have in a long time, finally pinning down some friends of my who have been, let’s say, difficult to reach. but I am always at odds with myself about what I want to do. I have commented on this often, so often that I’m sick of hearing myself talk about it if I’m not going to do anything about it.
there’s something I don’t seem to get, something everyone agreed on at some meeting, or maybe there’s some memo I never received, about the inevitability of conformity, about the necessity of murdering your inner child, along with its ideals for what it means to live well, for the sake of submitting to the world of Work. I understand intellectually, but can’t abide it, not without the vertiginous sense that Death approaches. in my grandiose mode, I mystically imagine ways we as a people might change, what sort of resistance or revolt is necessary to alter course, something I don’t think is impossible like some more melancholic leftists might believe. but absent large-scale political action and organization, the social changes necessary to improve everyone’s lot remain pipe dreams.
I spoke with a friend of mine about all this this morning, about wishing I could quit my job, about the sense that I will need to make certain compromises soon, about feeling like I make too many decisions out of fear. despite being much better off than many people nowadays, I still feel the precarity that by design creates anxiety around employment, health care, etc., and so cannot imagine how exactly to operate without the guardrails of employment.
the conversation made me feel a little better, in that I shouldn’t bother trying to form some escape plan from the straight world and should instead continue to focus on writing, while in the mean time determining what my actual options are, rather than merely the easy/obvious maintenance-of-course ones. like, for example, I could sell my car and with that money I could afford to live without a steady income for quite a while, maybe a year or two. just, as an example.
here are some specific, concrete actions I can take while I continue to assess my options for avoiding regret:
first and most importantly, continue writing.
sell/get rid of what I don’t need.
take stock of what is “necessary” to submit to vis a vis technological control, vs. what is “convenient”/”easy”/”seductive.”
make an effort to be more of a diva and a clown, and less of a goody-goody all the time.
many books written nowadays are like, “it’s okay to be sad! I know adulting is hard :). don’t you worry your innocent little head about it, lil buddy. I have an MFA! have you heard of Karl Marx?”
but all the books I love are like, “DARE TO BE GREAT. FAILURE IS INEVITABLE, BUT ACCEPTANCE OF THE GIVEN IS THE MOST PERNICIOUS EVIL. WE ARE CAPABLE OF OUR WILDEST DREAMS, SO LONG AS YOU DO NOT COWER IN FEAR.”
romanticism is an eternally returning defense mechanism against nature’s indifference/hostility that obfuscates a projected aggression on humanity’s part. nature is essentially good, purer than us, a source of salvation; beauty is not only worth suffering, but requires it, often self-induced and cascading outwards; instability walks arm-in-arm with passion and creation.
photo credit: dreamstime
but this realization does nothing to counter the experienced knowledge that Reality is often wantonly hostile, hence the natural occurrence of defensive/reactionary formations. nor does it negate romanticism’s usefulness in times of crisis.
the title of this post is a paraphrase of some of the things my mom tried expressing to me in the delirium of an extended personality-disorder-related anxiety attack that lasted all weekend. it’s none of your business what happened; she’s calmed down now, some. “pay attention, Cody, because the universe is trying to tell you things, always. words, phrases, sentences, numbers…if you notice patterns, that’s because you’re supposed to notice them.” almost parodically, I happen to be in the midst of reading Eros & Civilization, and if my mom weren’t so scattered I might have tried to rigorize her complaint about the world seeming designed to cast out as unacceptable such an outflowing of emotion. but theory and analysis don’t dissolve acute distress. far more likely that they exacerbate it.
a problem of our current situation is the primacy of information, which has led to the oversaturation of information. we are not equipped to handle the volume of data an average person consumes via the miraculous network that now dictates the terms of our lives. information chaoticizes; there’s much I find underwhelming about Byung-Chul Han’s thought, but he is right to point out that information does not help us feel grounded in the world, that information’s superabundance is responsible for the sense that concrete lived experience is disappearing.
Han, as I understand, argues that we must reacquaint ourselves with non-activity, what with neoliberalism’s demand for constant productivity leading to insidiously internalized forms of violence. this is a position I sympathize with, being myself a hyperactive workaholic who feels adrift when not absorbed in research or productive creativity (or sex). but non-activity is also a useful collaborator in the ascendency of fascism and other forms of societal brutality; Pynchon points out sloth’s reign in the years prior to the Nazi regime, and in the years prior to the Reagan administration, in his essay examining the deadly sin.
as an artist, I struggle with how to address these contemporary issues. Pynchon is my only real role model, because he implicitly acknowledges information’s chaotic nature without turning away from its proliferation. in recent years, literature has partaken in this turning away by reverting to “realism,” which, in my mind, is best exemplified by the neo-Kmart realism of the post-alt lit set. but believing it possible to return to “bare facts,” or “concrete/literal” description, belies, or maybe consciously covers up, the polyvalent nature of information; it is not possible to access the facts of existence as such, because such access always comes from a certain position, with its own blindspots and exaggerations. but I can’t just rewrite Gravity’s Rainbow.
additionally, I fear that, increasingly, information will appear free while actually being tightly controlled by the corporations whose power has been built on the accumulation of data. why should I trust Google to provide me answers to queries free of ulterior motive? why should I confide in Google which porn stars I find attractive? it’s not a problem that can be totally obviated by like, switching to Duck Duck Go or whatever either.
but, so, like, does the method of mimicking information overload through dense, research-heavy literary prose only participate in the chaoticizing of the world? no, because what makes such an endeavor art is the effort by the artist to shape the information into an aesthetic form. all art making, even in its most radical forms, is a reduction of chaos, an assertion of order in place of noise. which complicates the project of using art to assail sclerotic cultural norms complicit in the destruction of the world.
but to perform information overload requires overloading on information. and after fielding phone calls from my disturbed mother all weekend, I’m not sure how useful it is to flirt with paranoid psychosis, despite my Romantic tendencies. yet I will continue imagining, “as a joke”/”for the novel”/”metaphorically,” that I’m practicing espionage in a world where literally everyone is a double agent, where happenstance shines forth with meaning, where everything is about numbers and money and things written on paper.
The crudest, but also the most effective among these methods of influence is the chemical one—intoxication. I do not think that anyone completely understands its mechanism, but it is a fact that there are foreign substances which, when present in the blood or tissues, directly cause us pleasurable sensations; and they also so alter the conditions governing our sensibility that we become incapable of receiving unpleasurable impulses….The service rendered by intoxicating media in the struggle for happiness and in keeping misery at a distance is so highly prized as a benefit that individuals and peoples alike have given them an established place in the economics of their libido. We owe to such media not merely the immediate yield of pleasure, but also a greatly desired degree of independence from the external world. For one knows that, with the help of this ‘drowner of cares’ one can at any time withdraw from the pressure of reality and find refuge in a world of one’s own with better conditions of sensibility. As is well known, it is precisely this property of intoxicants which also determines their danger and their injuriousness. They are responsible, in certain circumstances, for the useless waste of a large quota of energy which might have been employed for the improvement of the human lot.
Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud
I’m tempted to “get back into” drugs. not in like, a problematic way—the drug I have a “problem” with I puff all the time, and I don’t like drugs with a high risk of habituation like opioids or benzos. I want to incorporate psychedelics into the program of self-derangement my █████ is a pretense for, and okay maybe “not into drugs with a high risk of habituation” isn’t totally honest, since I always wish I could handle a small amphetamine habit. of course, if I really wanted speed I could just convince a doctor I have ADD, because I probably do but I’m wary of psychiatric (over)prescription so I’ve never consulted a psychiatrist.
unfortunately I am too responsible. or maybe just too worried about appearing less than put together. this is a central struggle for me, because I am drawn to chaos and excitement but know myself well enough to realize I really crave stability and security. but problems arise when stability and security start to feel like a cage I’ve built for myself, and I begin seeking, sometimes subconsciously, ways to rattle the bars in the hope that they become unhinged.
naturally the cage is not entirely of my own making. I certainly tend to “play it safe” and would benefit from being riskier in general, but Reality stands as the border outlining experience even beyond those boundaries of habit, custom, tradition, civility, etc.
in my Romantic mode I think it the poet’s duty to determine the contours of reality by raging against its limits (I’ve been reading Rimbaud). which is to say I don’t want to “improve my mood” by “microdosing” to make me a better (ie more docile) functionary in the machine draining Eros from the surface of the earth. but I also have no illusions about drugs leading to anything like enlightenment; Deadheads who claim to have achieved satori while on acid earn nothing but eye rolls from me.
the ability to “be right” (i.e. do immediate fact checking facilitated by the tentacular and increasingly sclerotic network owned and operated by, among others, a corporation that probably should have been distrusted the first time anyone previously uninitiated saw the words “DON’T BE EVIL” tacked onto its IPO, waiting to be read in disbelief by future historians accustomed to much richer forms of irony) interferes with the writer’s wont to spread harmful, half cited, misconstrued, but otherwise aesthetically (and therefore rhetorically) persuasive disinformation
