Once again starting again, more or less from scratch. I do have to admit that I find this rather tiresome, this whole business of staring and stopping continually, blocked by self-censorship and anxiety, and only ever staying at it long enough to get a rough idea of where I was and add another 500-1000 words. The above are, I suppose, good reasons—well, they’re definitely reasons, I will leave any judgements as to their quality up to you.

But, What If?

What of I decided right now not to do this anymore; this being endlessly whining about how I can’t write, of can’t think if anything to write. What of I dropped for a minute and let the knot simply untie itself?

Oh, But Then I’d Have To

Then I’d have to spend time sitting quietly, undistracted from the sensations of my body and the contents of my mind. I wouldn’t be able to fill my ears with other people’s idle chatter, which, in truth is hardly idle, since the purpose of their chattering is to keep my attention and earn them ad money. They provide a “service” which keeps me “entertained,” but entertainment, while technically a service, is actually a disservice, since is ultimately serves to distract me from more useful and fulfilling things I might otherwise do with my time.

That said, today I got up at 9 and worked on recording stuff until 2, took a break for a few hours, then spent another hour doing the final performance. That’s 6 hours of engaged work, which is more than most people do at their paid jobs.

I Am Not A Monomaniac

To my eternal frustration, I am not singularly obsessed with any particular thing. My interest is only deep enough to give me a superficial understanding of a number of subjects.

The Missing Muse

There was a time when I wrote as if to someone, never a specific person, but a sort of disembodied entity, to which I would explain whatever it was that I happened to be thinking. It was part performance and part communion. Like, in a way, the SFBs. I never actually knew the TAs who read them, and yet the purpose of my writing the thing was solely that they would read it.

In my writing lately, and lately being the last few years, I have lost the belief that anyone will ever read anything I write. What then is the purpose of doing it? Where does the energy come from? To what end the effort put into creating an elegant and evocative form?

The psychology stuff still has a bit of that energy beacuse I will ostensibly publish those things at some point, but I’ve also been hiding away from it, avoiding it as much as possible.

I Am Not Depressed

I am repressed. That is to say: I block myself from doing things which I fear will elicit criticism or correction, and depression is the means by which said repression is administered. High energy and high motivation mean that I will make things and then publish them, whereas low mood and low energy mean that I cannot do anything so stupid or presumptuous.

Thinking About Laing

It’s interesting to think that Laing is presented by some as undermining propriety and family values, when in fact all he did, really, was have the temerity to point out that in many families, these so called values were mostly a sham. There is no one who is not a hypocrite, and generally, the more perfect a person’s self-presentation, the more hypocritical they are. They present this perfect facade because they need to feel that they are living up to whatever unreasonably high standards they happen to hold. Partly to protect themselves from cosmic punishment, but also so that they can stand in judgement over others and prove (to themselves, mostly) that they are of a superior sort and intrinsically more valuable as a human being. However, for the righteous-minded, belief itself is usually sufficient, meaning that they excuse or ignore their own misdeeds and perversions on the basis of this knowledge that they are in fact perfect. They are perfect, therefore whatever mistakes they make can’t be a meaningful reflection on their character, because they are perfect. This is a circular, nonsensical, and frankly crazy argument, and any child of sufficient mental independence will spot these hypocrisies immediately. The child who eventually develops a nominally innate case of schizophrenia (or whatever), was usually perfectly happy and functional until they began noticing and pointing out their parents’ hypocrisies. The righteous parent cannot tolerate this, and so the child is first branded willful, then rebellious, then problematic, then, if they are not finally crushed by the punishments that typically come with such branding, “mentally ill.”

Laing’s point is that it is possible to drive someone crazy by telling them that they are crazy and refusing to listen to them when they explain, usually very reasonably and rationally, why they are not. Their clear perceptions of this emotional mistreatment are labeled “delusions” while the accuser’s own clearly self-contradictory and genuinely delusional self-beliefs remain unchallenged. Which is the purpose of driving the child crazy in the first place: they had the gall to challenge beliefs which are expected to be held sacrosanct. Young women who want to have sex with cute boys are labeled hysterical nymphomaniacs and young men who want to be artists or writers are “lazy” “indulgent” and “indolent.”