Tuesday, May 14, 2019

I keep coming back here

I keep coming back here, so I suppose this will be where I go to die.

I miss blogging suddenly. To be precise, I miss the blogging era, the way we were all diarists and voyeurs in the same body, snooping around one another's innermost thoughts, trying to decipher strangers and make them a part of us.

I thought about a wipe-out. I love clean slates. But at this juncture, I realise that my past makes me who I am right now. The good and bad and incredibly stupid altogether in one package. Which is fine. I wasn't the only stupid one. More importantly, it's okay to be stupid if you learn something from it. New, hippie me (as K calls it) says so.

So there you go. All that and maybe this will be my last post for another two years. (I resist the urge to use an emoji here. How times have changed since the last time I was on this platform.)

Truly though, I am back to thinking I need to jot down my thoughts throughout the day. But I was and am not a pen-and-paper person, no matter how many Moleskine journals I buy. Writing on the Notes app on my phone leaves me empty and ill-disciplined in my writing because I know no one is reading it. Voilà! Reasons for blog revival!

Thought of yesterday: The current trend of personal essays vs. blogs as journaling platform. Discuss?

Tuesday, January 02, 2018

2018, final-fucking-ly

The last day of 2017 took way too long to fuck off. By the time I woke up here in Alberta, Canada, the streets of Singapore had already been wiped clean of celebratory debris, and hangovers had already been greased over and dealt with. And by the time I had nestled into the black mood that had been cast over me and was looking for a way out, a second wave of ushering in the New Year in Europe was splattering over social media. Even after I finally downed a tequila shot out of desperation, I was still hours away from 2018. By then, time had become a monster deliberately holding me back, which only compounded the unrealistic expectation that a new year would bring new beginnings.
At 11.57pm, I was smoking in the bitterly cold garage, bundled up and wondering why Canadians do not just leave their country in protest of such absurd temperatures.

At 11.58pm, I wondered if I should snuff out my cigarette and head back into the living room, where he was silently scrolling through his phone after a long, black day between us.

At 11.59pm, I found myself unable to move, exhausted at the thought of another Serious Conversation, wondering what the point of being with someone was when, at the impending stroke of midnight, I was all alone anyway, and worse, thinking that was perhaps the better option.

At 12.01am, I tossed the disgusting cigarette butt into the disgusting almost-full can of stinky butts and re-entered the house, wondering what to do with the rest of my life.

Thursday, October 19, 2017

"... Their demands are very basic, there is nothing they like better than outings with the whole family, which are full of adventure: a trip to the Western Harbor on a sunny day, starting with a walk through the park, where a pile of logs is enough to keep them entertained for half an hour, then past the yachts in the marina, which really capture their attention, after that lunch on some steps by the sea, eating our panini from the Italian cafe, that a picnic didn't occur to us goes without saying, and afterward an hour or so to run around and play and laugh, Vanja with her characteristic lope, which she has had since she was eighteen months, Heidi with her enthusiastic toddle, always two meters behind her big sister, ready to receive the rare gift of companionship from her, then the same route back home. If Heidi sleeps in the car we go to a cafe with Vanja, who loves the moments she has alone with us and sits there with her lemonade asking us about everything under the sun: Is the sky fixed? Can anything stop autumn coming? Do monkeys have skeletons? Even if the feeling of happiness this gives me is not exactly a whirlwind but closer to satisfaction or serenity, it is happiness all the same. Perhaps even, at certain moments, joy. And isn't that enough? Isn't it enough? Yes, if joy had been the goal it would have been enough. But joy is not my goal, never has been, what good is joy to me? The family is not my goal either. If it had been, and I could have devoted all my energy to it, we would have had a fantastic time, of that I am sure. We could have lived somewhere in Norway, gone skiing and skating in winter, with packed lunches and a thermos flask in our backpacks, and boating in the summer, swimming, fishing, camping, holidays abroad with other families, we could have kept the house tidy, spent time making good food, being with our friends, we could have been blissfully happy. That may all sounds like a caricature, but every day I see families who successfully organize their lives in this way. The children are clean, their clothes nice, the parents are happy and although once in a while they might raise their voices they never stand there like idiots bawling at them. They go on weekend trips, rent cottages in Normandy in the summer, and their fridges are never empty. They work in banks and hospitals, in IT companies or on the local council, in the theater or at universities. Why should the fact that I am a writer exclude me from that world? Why should the fact that I am a writer mean our strollers all look like junk we found on a junk heap? Why should the fact that I am a writer mean I turn up at the nursery with crazed eyes and a face stiffened into a mask of frustration? Why should the fact that I am a writer mean that our children do their utmost to get their own way, whatever the consequences? Where does all the mess in our lives come from? I know I can change all this, I know we too can become that kind of family, but then I would have to want it and in which case life would have to revolve around nothing else. And that is not what I want. I do everything I have to do for the family; that is my duty. The only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing. Where this ideal has come from I have no idea, and as I now see it before me, in black and white, it almost seems perverse: why duty before happiness? The question of happiness is banal, but the question that follows is not, the question of meaning. When I look at a beautiful painting I have tears in my eyes, but not when I look at my children. That does not mean I do not love them, because I do, with all my heart, it simply means that the meaning they produce is not sufficient to fulfill a whole life. Not mine, at any rate." — My Struggle: Book 1, Karl Ove Knausgaard

"But joy is not my goal, never has been, what good is joy to me?"

Often I can't tell when a piece of writing resonates, if it's because it lays out in succinct clarity my cluttered thoughts (and this comes with envy and the agony of knowing I am such a meagre writer in comparison), or if it's injecting ideas into my head.

I started reading Knausgaard's epic volumes of his struggles after a brief mention of it from a man I dated almost as briefly (but he introduced me to Sebald and bought me a copy of Vertigo as a first-meeting-after-many-long-drawn-conversations gift, so points for that). I say epic not in a conventional sense. There are no heroics nor great achievements. If any at all, he plays them down. Instead, he has blown life's minutae into epic proportions.

It is incredibly addictive, the step-by-step breakdowns of how he butters toast or makes tea or goes to the bathroom to pee. They bore into the consciousness the mundane, tedious grind of everyday life, the stuff that takes up our days and we attribute no significance to.

It is hubris typical of a man, who needs to be exalted for simply existing.

I swing wildly between my two opinions. My eyes are glued to the page and occasionally I raise my head to roll them before diving right back in.

"But joy is not my goal, never has been, what good is joy to me?"

We fought bitterly about it, the Boy and I. He, a former depressive, is of the camp that believes in denying negativity in an eternal quest for feeling good. I, on the other hand, am perversely attracted to melancholy. In other words, he lashed out at me for bringing him down when I moped and I accused him of not allowing me to think about and process my agonies my own way.

That blew over. We reached an understanding for co-existence. Instead of getting mad at me, he hugs me when I go quiet and tells me he loves me. It helps, even during those times when he is the cause of my gloom. I try to communicate better and when I don't have the energy for that, simply tuck my thoughts deeper into the folds of my being. I smile but sometimes my faraway eyes give me away and I have to remind myself not to let the act slip.

"But joy is not my goal, never has been, what good is joy to me?"

I just want to be happy. I wept when I said that to the Artist towards our tumultuous end. That was a child's plea, a base desire laid out in desperation when there was nothing else to say or do. But I was and am no longer a child, and happiness is a game with many layers. Not merely levels to unlock towards an ultimate goal, but layers to probe at and decode.

I need time to dwell in my despair and to examine my anger, I told the Boy. I can't just shut off the valves and make up my mind to be happy. What depth does happiness have when you disregard its antithesis, the precise conditions that give it value? Besides, pain is fodder for a writer. Or is it?

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Art

Even if you have only one person who likes your work, is that not enough?

That was in reply to me saying I have no interest in starting a travel blog because I'm not sure longform is relevant anymore and I don't think there would be an audience for it.

If you write only for yourself, is that akin to masturbation?

If you write just for that one person who likes your work, and fail to engage more, is that a lack of aspiration/ambition? An admission of failure?

I valued the comment, even though it was nothing original nor something that I have not read before, because it came from the Artist. Perhaps I felt that he understood crippling self-doubt, the need to feel that your work is connecting with an audience and simultaneously, the self-loathing in wanting to be liked and validated as an artist.

I think about what he said about despising small-town provincial art sometimes, especially when I wander around the odd gallery here or glance over a street mural. All these tedious landscape paintings and sculptures of wildlife and pseudo conceptual installations depicting the damage humankind is doing to the environment, unironically hoping to provoke self-reflection and encourage recycling.

Tedious.

I miss big ideas and small but in-depth introspection. I miss unusual points-of-view and minds that greedily chomp up the world before regurgitating it in outlandish gestures. I miss boldness that requires great leaps of mind rather than a jump off a cliff. I miss courage that has to do with putting your raw self out there in an interpretation, and not therapy speak over insipid conversation and cheap liquor.

I need to get back to a big city, don't I? To being myself?

So. Hilar.

I've always thought that those characters you see on North American TV programmes are caricatures.

car·i·ca·ture
ˈkerikəCHər,ˈkerikəˌCHo͝or/
noun
noun: caricature; plural noun: caricatures
1.

a picture, description, or imitation of a person or thing in which certain striking characteristics are exaggerated in order to create a comic or grotesque effect.

Last night I realised, nope, they are a lot more true-to-life than I thought. There's no exaggeration involved, no highlighting and magnifying of traits for a laugh. Actual people are like that.

Gems of the night include:

"That's hilar!"
"Hilar?"
"Yeah, for hilarious."
"I like that."
"Yeah, right? It's a shorter word!"
"Yeah!"

"Thinking? What's that?"
"This DJ (drops name) is playing."
(Insert a few lines that make it seem like this guy makes awesome music and is really famous.)
"Yeah, I think I've heard of him ... he's really good, right?"
"Yeah, well, I don't really know his stuff."
(Conversation trails off and subject is changed.)

Really?

I can't tell you how hard I was trying to hide my face behind my hand of cards, so that my disbelief, disgust and pity did not spill out in that moment of revelation: people are insecure fools who just want to seem cool in order to be liked.

What am I doing? Am I taking this experiment too far? Can I really continue to be with a guy who was in seriousness one half of such conversational highlights? Someone who tells me after reading barely one page of Knausgaard that it's stupid, he prefers to read (I've seen him read all of once and it was a few pages of The Secret that he found truly illuminating) books that teach something?

Seriously.

He has a lot that is good and endearing about him. But if I have to tell myself to focus on the positive that many times a day, it really isn't going to work. I'm not going to become a better person, just a dumber one.

I could call myself an intellectual snob, and I've mostly been with other intellectual snobs. What I've figured is that everyone is an intellectual snob. There are plenty of smartasses out there who'd find my brain lacking, the way I sneer at those who use the word "hilar" unironically, and in turn even they are convinced that they are better and smarter than those they deem beneath them.

So the trick is to find someone who is intellectually snobbish on the same level?

I'm tired. And not at all high, so the rambling is not smoothly on auto pilot and should probably stop now.