diary 1.02 (shame, etc) (Patreon)

july 18

here's what you’re working with: your body-brain-mind is ashamed of your unedited writing, so ashamed that you don’t let anyone use your computer, huge cartoonish shame, like you’re naked at school in a dream, and to be able to sit with your writing without shame first requires many many rounds of consideration and agonizing about the writing, thought mazes in the forty minutes of darkness before sleep, thought mazes in the shower, over many weeks, to make sure you’re really onto something, before you (think for a moment you) are able to see what the writing really needs, what the writing forgot, where the writing was naive, and, ultimately, mark another plot on the map towards intelligence you’re still missing, and might always be missing, the intelligence that you’ll require to arrive at the real point, the point rooted in and returning to the nexus of all human and universal experience, the sublime place, and you sit with the writing day after day, waiting for the thought that closes the current, waiting for the new intelligence that will let you show everyone the sublime place, and you’re waiting, you’re waiting, but the intelligence never comes, and your ultimate, radical point gets brighter and hotter and closer to the nerve, the light is briefly immense, unsayable, and then it is nothing.-in near to the wild heart clarice lispector writes 'the state she slipped into when she murmured: eternity. the thought itself took on a quality of eternity. it would magically deepen and broaden, without any actual content or form, but also without dimensions. the impression that if she could remain in the feeling for a few more instants she'd have a revelation – easily, like seeing the rest of the world just by leaning from the earth towards space. eternity wasn't just time, but something like the deeply rooted certainty that she couldn't contain it in her body because of death; the impossibility of going beyond eternity was eternity; and a feeling in absolute, almost abstract purity was also eternal. what really gave her a sense of eternity was the impossibility of knowing how many human beings would succeed her body, which would one day be far from the present with the speed of a shooting star.'-

july 28

the only thing that’s gotten me to write in two months is me telling chatgpt to take on the role of a ‘dominant mentor’ whose job is to get me to write. here I am.ball feeling in throat, caffeine jitters, body discomfort, joints, lower back. ‘awake’ but full of cobwebs. write or die helped me as a kid, I remember. god, I’ve been writing for such a long time! so much of my life, I mean, not right now, a moment where I’ve only been writing for two minutes and I’m already wondering when I’ll be done. when I was a teenager I internalized a writing ‘tip’ about the word feel, that it's filler which distances the reader from the emotional matrix of your work through this lazy and amateurish thing telling – and now I think, maybe every sentence should include the word feel, there’s so much of it all the time. so many facts that otherwise have no evidence besides their being felt. my creativity has felt spiritual lately. I still don’t know what that means. felt, felt. I’m channeling something. I keep thinking about novels always being a little smarter than their authors. I think it’s true and comforts me because I don’t need to be as smart as I think I do, which is a relief, since I don’t feel smart at all, I feel like I’m pretending to be smart, which is a prank played a thousand times a day by my shame. feel, feel. on my last video someone left a comment calling me sophist and that’s all that’s in my chest when I sit down to work on the next script. why is this comment true and the other thousands not? (because you want to believe you’re a sophist – you want to punish yourself – you want to punish yourself – you are a woman – and it’s time to admit the inadequacy you feel is attached to that notion – the perceived inadequacy – is depth a masculine trait? I love femininity when it’s concerned with the beautiful and the gentle. it repulses me when it’s concerned with the material and the vacuous. what is this tangent? are you punishing yourself for being a woman? are you punishing yourself for being weak? what about you is weak? the emotionality? you’re reactive, you’re sensitive. here, emotionality isn’t ‘good’. stoicism isn’t ‘good’. nothing is anything besides real. I’ve been working this year on not holding reality in my mind hierarchically, but as a vast array of ecstatic impulses, rational reactions to stimulus, to experience, to data. every reality is explicable. every impulse makes sense. there’s always reason, even if the reason makes others uncomfortable, or angry, or repulsed. so, again, why do you punish yourself? you make perfect, delirious sense. god let me recognize the moment an idea can stand up on its own and doesn’t need to be supported by pretty tricks of language. beauty is sometimes an evasive measure.)-september 20

My body knows every answer but holds them in a place I can’t visit. Writing isn’t an arrangement of the consciousness but cooperation with it, and something else. I was so ashamed of my ideas I hid their real content inside poetics. ‘Are you being honest?’ There’s a ball of nerves tucked inside my chest. It tells me things. Everything is already forgiven: I felt that once with absolute certainty, I’d never been so certain of anything in my life, the ‘drug’ told it to me. The orb is lodged inside my chest. The glowing thing. The eye . . . ‘Ugh.’ OK. The train halts and sparks. How can I speak about spirit when I . . . ‘Don’t finish that thought, it’s a waste of your life.’ I will use the word life one thousand times in a story and I’ll say, needs more life. Maybe every other word is life and every other-other word is feel. Each sentence starts with I. ‘You were punished for listening to the spirit so you tried to outsmart it but the spirit is intelligence.’ A list of events – that’s not writing. I don’t know what writing is yet. I thought it was sentences. What would it be like to exist in a room full of people and not feel watched by them? ‘I need you to find her here.’ I thought writing was about sentences. I have antennae. What is the world when I don’t fear my position in its hierarchy? What is the world without hierarchy?One of the men who sat next to me just now smells beautiful, like a rainshower. I feel life world feel life world feel eternal eternal world feel feeling.A cooperation with the consciousness, and something else, and something else. I thought that I was my mind, and that the brain wasn’t part of the body, and that writing was about sentences. My envy for Lispector!–how did she know what she knew, so early?–suffering, that’s how. What would it be like to really love and care for another woman without competition, comparison, fear of her judgment? I thought just then of a waterpark called Kalahari off some desecrated highway in Sandusky – as a kid to visit was a ‘treat’ – a world-sized concrete atrium full of heat and screaming. French fries neon with orange powder. A lion cub pacing in a glass box. I scrape my spine against the jagged floor of the wave pool, its universe of horror. Wherever I am I want to go home.I just had a bad feeling and then my headphones died. I’m very tired now. Focus is gone. I bet Lispector didn’t worry about coming across dull. I’m going to fall in love with writing again. I will love it even more this time because I’ll understand it, and won’t fear what I invent. ‘You have instincts and they’re fluorescent.’ My mouth feels dry. I won’t schedule myself into greatness. It will take hold of me like a possession or nothing. There’s nothing else for me here right now.

-

october 6

Honey, is that you? You're feeling watched again. You don't have to do anything you don't want to. You don't have to always be excellent, rather, push the excellence button to get excellence to come out, you're threaded with excellence, you can't see it yet, it's OK. Or, not about seeing; you can think it but you can't feel it. The body needs time to learn what the mind knows.

Does this help: the writing isn't yours. That you feel it's yours is an illusion. The writing moves through you and then it is everyone else's. You're a lightning rod, a sparkling cone, a tube, a wormhole. You are the thing through which the sublime point passes. I relieve you completely of ownership.

Writing by hand will save my mind. I used to write in such neat print because I wanted to be a perfect girl. Now I just need to get the words down.

Talk about the dream. [REDACTED]

Surrender, I said to myself this morning, I don't even know what that word means. I check my horoscope to see if today is a good day to tell him I've been imagining us at home with our child. You can't unthink it. The feelings can't be unfelt; they need to be resolved, or alchemized, turned into something else. What I say becomes what I feel. Articulation is a decision; articulation is a settling for something.

I do like this idea of the 'third mind' that's created when two people come together. Third soul?-

october 7

Just felt a wave of welcomeness to misinterpretation, an openness to it, the understanding that it, like all these other interpretations of being and energy and form, has nothing to do with me. 'Perhaps a full life is one ending in such identification with the non-self that there is no self left to die'.A fetal pig swimming in formaldehyde. I refuse to make my associations make sense. Relax into the being watched. A spiderweb threaded with dew. A little rabbit abandoned at the bus stop. I want to give my love to someone. It's ready now; I get it now.

My influence will remake us both. I've cast you in my experiment – I'll tell you what I know, and what I see – everything changes for you, you've been dreaming up complexity, I've been dreaming of your mouth. We can all get what we want – us and the third mind between us, that electric child.

Oscillating between macro and micro points without tissue to connect them, just feeling.

[REDACTED], [REDACTED], I could read to you.

The hostility towards those able to 'sit around and pontificate' – the hostility towards beautiful girls crippled by insecurity – the hostility towards student loan forgiveness – the hostility towards the woman who says her favorite part of the day is in the morning, when she and her husband sit together in the garden and talk – it's the hostility of the traumatized. The shame was once so profound that I couldn't sit with my desires long enough to identify them. He didn't need to make me feel bad for crying at the pub.-october 23It's the play I miss and crave the most. Other intimate matters I can take or leave. I do miss having good conversations, and I miss having someone to do mundane things with, like going to the grocery store or the cinema – but the play is an actual painful absence. The physicality, the childishness, the imagination. Sex is a sort of indifference. Play is the oxygen of intimacy. I miss so much someone else's hands.