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This linguistics manual I held in my hands an hour in total said that sentences are the smallest meaningful elements of a language, not words. Even one word,
if expressed linguistically (with
the intent of communicating) is at
the core a sentence.
“Go!” is “I want you to go”.
Some time after reading this —
and with no apparent connection
to it — I wondered: “What comes first, a photo or a video?”. It was clear
to me that, actually, there was
a connection. The word (just like
the photo) is a casual extraction
of the sentence (the video).
The latter belongs to reality, where nothing doesn’t move. We can shed some light on reality and capture its temporary and still form, but there will be as much said (the word)
as assumed (the rest of the implied sentence).
Think about these one - word utterances:
”Joke”
”Sure”
”Island”
”Shit”
It doesn’t matter how many words you’re adding in your head, it could even be none, but you’re adding
a story and a movement. There’s something bigger behind those words, they can’t stand on their own.
And if you see a picture? (And that’s precisely why I don’t like it when people are posing) You assume
the people portrayed, even objects, were existing in a moving form
and were captured “stopping”.
It’s kind of cool, isn’t it? If I say “here”, do you imagine it’s me inviting you
to join me where I am, or me telling you I’m firm on my (physical) position, or me pointing to where you hurt me? What story we add to simple statements is basically asking how
do still things move in our head.
Dopamine, one of my closest friends and archest enemies, is “the molecule of more” (this is how Lieberman
and Long titled their book). More is what we often associate to it.
But dopamine is also the molecule
of elsewhere. Analogies are made with its help, because they need us
to see what’s not there. Dopamine creates a movement. What’s present only matters insofar as it alludes
to something not present or not ours that we’ll find or get.
On top of these reflections,
that at this point are piling up one
on top of the other, I start thinking that we shouldn’t say that someone who took drugs is “high”, because it would be more accurate to say they are someplace else. Being intoxicated simply moves you from where you are to another place you didn’t know until that moment. And at this point it’s clear to me that despite how interesting these free associations are, and how something more linear might even come out of them, they are the product of a struggle.
My mind (with the help of some variables, like August) can’t find stillness. It frantically moves at all times making connections, starting new conversations (while getting intensely attached to finishing all
of them), initiating projects, making
a point and debating it, engaging
in full cycles of speculation, jumping with tired legs between here
and there.
This makes this sequence of words much less eager to come out,
and you’ll be asked to shift from reading something informational, albeit delusively so, to something personal, and making an assessment on whether you’re willing to get a bit closer.
It doesn’t matter how close you get, though, because this chemical productivity is only accessible to me, and I can explain it, but you won’t hear the noise if you listen carefully, and you won’t see the chaos if you put a straw in my ear.
What explains it is perhaps
the metaphors and changes,
the moving quality of my speech
and my writing, that feels neutral
at times but mostly feels very good
or very bad. When it’s very good, these series of inferences on movement and stillness can become something interesting to read, or one my philosophical side quests that will turn into something that looks nothing like its premises. In another life,
it would have been a perfect drive
for an academic career, or it would have made me stick to playing piano.
When it’s bad (we’re only referring to feelings here, not moral judgements), I’m confronted with the limits
of a body that is better suited
for words and for images, or could
at least benefit from a more varied diet. A body can’t possibly contain all this back and forth. Yet it does.
It can’t decide not to. It has to host these intruders because they are already in, they never knocked
to come inside. They are, in a way, older than the house itself.
Some things are given and other are chosen. I have the privilege of even questioning what to do with this silly brain, and the answer (a generous average of all months, not just
the summer ones) so far has been:
I keep it as it is. The good is alive, bright, curious, hungry, amazed.
Half my life would not exist if it wasn’t this way, and the other half (when I’m sleeping) would certainly have much quieter dreams.
But it’s not an easy choice. The fifth time I pick up my nightstand voice recorder (the fact that I need to give it a name based on location should already tell you there are more) because I have another thought
on movement, I can hear my brain laugh at me. And I have to remind myself how funny I find it at times, whereas at this moment it feels like bullying.
There is only movement
I have been absent from Substack
for a while, although I’m never too reliable on how often I write. When
I don’t write here, I’m either not writing at all, or I’m writing elsewhere. This other place is practically but also symbolically different: things I write there pretend to be poems. They are often disconnected thoughts with
a lot of line breaks. They are always
in Italian, there’s a decent amount of cursing, and lowercase is the default. The people writing here and there share the same body, mouth
and fingers with which they type (although one mostly uses a keyboard and the other writes by hand or on the phone), but I’m not sure they’d have a lot to talk about if they went on a date.
They’d be able to appreciate
the presence of some common grounds — how arbitrary things are, how little control we have, how extremely painful and generous life is — but they’d certainly call it a night pretty early, and maybe only kiss
to see how that feels. Incompatible mouths. They’d be happy to go home.
My poet self doesn’t even read poets, but she lives like one. She would make Rilke proud, not for the quality of her work, but because she lives by what he said: “This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night:
must I write? […]
A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. […] I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create“.He’d be probably more judgmental once he knows she posts them
on Instagram.
“Letters to a young poet” is a cuddle to mind, heart and body. Rilke‘s insights are a gift to anyone who lives as a human on this earth. For this human right here, the question of how
to balance and integrate duality is always present, but changes theme. At this moment, the duality is psychologist vs. poet. One writes on Substack, the other
on Instagram. One expresses herself better in English, the other in her mother tongue.They both believe in the unconscious, but one is a translator, the other is
a surrenderer.One wakes up at 7:00, the other is still awake. One speaks at a proper volume, the other whispers.One finds meaning inside the depths of herself and others, the artist decorates these depths as if she’ll never get to escape them.
In the book “Psychomagic”, Jodorowsky talks about living like
a poet when he was a young man who could have been raised in Russia
but instead grew up in Chile:
“For example, Lihn and I decided one day to walk in a straight line, without ever wavering. We walked down
the avenue, and we came to a tree. Instead of going around it, we climbed up and over it; if a car crossed in our path, we climbed
on top, walking on its roof. In front of a house, we rang the doorbell, entered through the door and exited
I have browsed amongst the books
on my bookshelf to select one I had not read yet, and ended up picking one that sat there for years: Lolita
by Nabokov. I had watched the movie when I was a kid, and after scrolling through other, more tempting titles,
I decided this was appropriate for
the moment. Before you report me
to the authorities, let me say it’s just because of the mood of the book.
I was surprised to notice how different I felt towards the movie, so after reading a bit I googled the 1997 film and noticed that the actress was seventeen at the time, not twelve like
in the written version.
It’s quite the statement to make
a movie about a man who abuses
a child by choosing a girl who’s about to enter adulthood, who wears lipstick and looks like a woman — admittedly, still a minor, but very different from a preadolescent child. In Kubrick’s version the girl sucks
a lollipop and wears heart sunglasses in the cover.
I find both very interesting choices.
It’s no mystery movies do this,
and you have not really lived if you haven’t heard someone tell you
at least once how “the book is actually better”. If you haven’t, you’re probably the one who tells others. Stop.
Movies and books are quite different means of artistic expression,
and whoever tries to simplify
the matter probably just likes to be part of a team — or is someone who has certainties, ew. I was asked years ago what form of art is my favorite one and I’m still trying to find
the right answer. How am I supposed to choose between literature, cinema
and music? I need them at very different times and in very different ways, but my life would be equally empty without either one. What I can choose is something for each moment: in Lolita, I can place myself inside that “I” and feel empathy, disgust, discomfort.
Reading a book lets my imagination project and receive, and I’m suddenly part of those pages.
It’s a meditation, to sit in silence
with a book in your hands, read one word after the other. You are so much in you that ‘you’ drifts away and leaves space for the everything.
Written psilocybine.
If we expect the same from movies, the most overstimulating form of art, we are clearly misguided.
A movie tells you what, who, how, when, why. Within those confines there’s still so much to interpret
and imagine, especially if you’re into
Emotions are:
- Eight, basic, for Plutchik
- Defined through valence
and arousal for Russell
- Six, shared universally, for Ekman
And these are just three theories
of the ones Claude gave me when
I prompt it to summarize them.
I asked the AI because these theories are not what’s important here.
Since we were already talking, I also asked it how they treat guilt — which is the reason I’m writing this post.
It told me that none of the theories concerned with basic/universal emotions insert it in the list, since
it’s a heavily culture-loaded one,
but it added that for Plutchik it’s
a combination of fear and joy. When I asked it to provide the source, it recognized it should have been careful with saying that because it’s not sure it really comes from Plutchik himself. Was Claude… feeling guilty?
I didn’t investigate, I went to download the article instead.
But at this point I was deep in a rabbit hole of vague yet intriguing statements. And I let go of any resemblance of accuracy, because
I mean: how cool is it to imagine guilt
as a mix of fear and joy?
As with anything unpleasant (all things we call “bad” when we’re not yet emotionally literate) there are hidden spots of pure perverse pleasure. I don’t have to trust Claude to know that. If we get so attached
to guilt that it becomes our default reaction, there must be a good reason. Right?
I hear you say: “Well, people make me feel guilty. It’s not me, it’s them who recriminate me.”, but deep down you know as much as I do that people don’t have that much power.
Guilt is a price we pay for having done something we wanted to do.
We punish ourselves, so we pay no other price.
There’s the joy! I get to do the thing, and I make sure everyone knows I feel bad about it. “I’m not usually like this”, “I don’t know why I acted this way”, “That was so stupid of me, I feel
so bad”.
where we could, sometimes through
a window. The important thing was
to maintain the straight line and not pay any attention to an obstacle, as if it did not exist.”.
Being an artist is this, whatever that means. To decide, one day, to walk
in a straight line. Not because straight is better than curved, not because it’ll be easier or funnier to explain, not
for any other reason, because there are no reasons to do it.
I just do. And after I decide, I start walking, and nothing can stop me. I struggle to find better metaphors than this one.
When something painful happens,
my other self soaks in it.
She is not even that scared of dying,
to be honest. She flirts with dissolution and destroys with total devotion.
She holds on to irrelevant things
and doesn’t need me to tell her they are. She knows. Yet, she hears my remarks and reacts disgusted: “Don’t you get it? That’s the point.
Full commitment”.
The psycho-enthusiast that is writing in English knows how many projections dress up the faces she encounters, and has the banal goal of suffering
a bit less. She won’t get there through easy steps or resolutions (she shares a certain subtlety with her counterpart), but she will try to water a plant with her tears, build a shelter for her fears.She’ll look for syllables that rhyme, words that resonate.
She wants to find a story where between here and there, before
and after, there’s a difference. Where April does not come back unaltered every year.
There’s no desire to heal in the part
of me who wrote:
“If an atomic bomb exploded, I’d think it was my fault”. I know exactly what she means, and I have to work every day not to kill that part. I know very well, however, that she is also refraining from killing me, because I’m the only thing keeping her from total annihilation, but she’d love to get rid
of me at times. We’d live much more straightforward lives if it was just one of us.
To be this or to be that. Once again,
to be both. Being powerless in the face of dilemmas. Letting them engulf you, and then, when it seems like the day will never end, snap out of it.
Find the therapeutic undertone.
My poet self writes because she must. And to be fair, this one too. She needs to write, yet she has no goal.
She needs to write, otherwise she’ll explode. I need to write, otherwise life won’t look like life anymore.
“Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression
and each embryo of a feeling come
to completion, entirely in itself,
in the dark, in the unsayable,
the unconscious, beyond the reach
of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait
for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means
to live as an artist: in understanding
as in creating.”
movies that are not plot driven,
but the experience is supported
by senses. And you don’t get much agency over those. I have covered my eyes during Sirat, but I was still hearing everything.
I went to Flora earlier this week.
Flora is my go-to movie theater. Spring takes a toll on me, because my energy is even higher than usual but my body stays the same. So I use my Cineville pass to go watch anything without much reflection beforehand, hoping the randomness will shake me
the right way. I picked Wasteman,
and Tom Blyth had some influence
on the choice. It’s a prison drama, very well acted and tension dense.
Many tattoos, drugs, inaudible English dialogue, and Jamie xx in the soundtrack. When I pick movies,
as well as books, I’ll look for some relatability.
I am not one who seeks knowledge about other worlds in forms of art. Thankfully though, if I pick a movie randomly, or just based on that nice-to-look-at actor, it can happen
that there is not much I can relate to
in what I’m watching.
I mean, anything can be brought
to an abstract level: feeling trapped, being a misfit, class struggle, race, being the cooler friend, having a lot
to lose, being exposed. But if we stick
to plot and themes, this was a movie that granted me some distance.
Yet, I gave it 4 stars on Letterboxd.
Yet, I felt my fidgeting and moving
on the chair (already limited compared to my everyday life) reduced to the minimum.
I had the pervasive experience
of entering another reality, however claustrophobic and depressing,
and someone else’s body, even if bent by addiction. My body left that room with a big sigh, like something had been released, like my mind had gained space.
Since everything nicely comes together in my research paper on life, it fits that yesterday a colleague resuscitated a song from her past,
and it was also my past. The song goes like this:
“Just a perfect dayproblems are left to know.Weekenders all night longit’s such fun.Just a perfect dayyou make me forget myselfI thought I was someone elsesomeone good“
Do yourself a favor: go listen to it,
and forget yourself a bit.
Crocodile’s tears, although no crocodile deserves this definition. Guilt is purely human, it stems from having both a body and a very self-aware brain inside and above
that body.
Guilt is how we make sure to pursue something we desire but without
the responsibility of it, without saying, proudly: “Yes, I did it. I wanted to”. Nobody can make us feel guilty unless we do.
The beauty of this sneaky emotion is that it’s so many things at once.
It is also company. Desires have a lot of power: they invigorate us but can make us terribly lonely. Expressing
and pursuing them leave us stranded. How embarrassing, how awkward, how intense. HOW DISGUSTINGLY HUMAN. With guilt we make a little space
of comfort where we gain back control: it was me, it was my fault,
I made a mistake. It’s not that life is incredibly chaotic, it’s not that things happen with reasons I can’t grasp.
No no. It’s me. This time I failed
but watch me next time.
A sort of emotional perfectionism,
guilt is also how we live in an eternal yesterday. A day where things hadn’t happened yet and we can still ruminate over and over and over
and over and over on how they could have been different.
Like in trauma, a way to never process, to never move, to avoid the future.
Guilt engulfs any emotion that would allow us to wake up one day older tomorrow. Grief, sadness, anger, fear.
It all gets eaten up, never digested.
And with it, nothing transforms. Tomorrow, and in ten years,
I will still hold no responsibility over
my decisions (I feel too bad to even consider something as complex
as accountability) but will feel the guilt for all that’s happened in the world beyond my reach. This way I make sure me and reality never meet, because that’s where the scary things happen.
Or is it?
to be or not to be
such a perfect day
guilt, keep me company
blog
This linguistics manual I held in my hands an hour
in total said that sentences are the smallest meaningful elements of a language, not words. Even one word,
if expressed linguistically (with the intent of communicating) is at the core a sentence. “Go!” is
“I want you to go”.
Some time after reading this — and with no apparent connection to it — I wondered: “What comes first,
a photo or a video?”. It was clear to me that, actually, there was a connection. The word (just like the photo)
is a casual extraction of the sentence (the video).
The latter belongs to reality, where nothing doesn’t move. We can shed some light on reality and capture its temporary and still form, but there will be as much said (the word) as assumed (the rest of the implied sentence).
Think about these one-word utterances:
”Joke”
”Sure”
”Island”
”Shit”
It doesn’t matter how many words you’re adding in your head, it could even be none, but you’re adding a story and a movement. There’s something bigger behind those words, they can’t stand on their own.
And if you see a picture? (And that’s precisely why
I don’t like it when people are posing) You assume
the people portrayed, even objects, were existing
in a moving form and were captured “stopping”.
It’s kind of cool, isn’t it? If I say “here”, do you imagine it’s me inviting you to join me where I am, or me telling you I’m firm on my (physical) position, or me pointing
to where you hurt me? What story we add to simple statements is basically asking how do still things move in our head.
Dopamine, one of my closest friends and archest enemies, is “the molecule of more” (this is how Lieberman and Long titled their book). More is what we often associate to it. But dopamine is also the molecule of elsewhere. Analogies are made with its help, because they need us to see what’s not there. Dopamine creates a movement. What’s present only matters insofar as it alludes to something not present or not ours that we’ll find or get.
On top of these reflections, that at this point are piling up one on top of the other, I start thinking that we shouldn’t say that someone who took drugs is “high”, because it would be more accurate to say they are someplace else. Being intoxicated simply moves you from where you are to another place you didn’t know until that moment. And at this point it’s clear to me that despite how interesting these free associations are,
I have been absent from Substack for a while, although I’m never too reliable on how often I write. When I don’t write here, I’m either not writing at all, or I’m writing elsewhere. This other place is practically but also symbolically different: things I write there pretend
to be poems. They are often disconnected thoughts with a lot of line breaks. They are always in Italian, there’s a decent amount of cursing, and lowercase is the default. The people writing here and there share the same body, mouth and fingers with which they type (although one mostly uses a keyboard
and the other writes by hand or on the phone),
but I’m not sure they’d have a lot to talk about if they went on a date.
They’d be able to appreciate the presence of some common grounds — how arbitrary things are, how little control we have, how extremely painful and generous life is — but they’d certainly call it a night pretty early, and maybe only kiss to see how that feels. Incompatible mouths. They’d be happy to go home.
My poet self doesn’t even read poets, but she lives like one. She would make Rilke proud, not for the quality
of her work, but because she lives by what he said: “This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? […] A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. […] I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps
in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create.“.He’d be probably more judgmental once he knows she posts them on Instagram.
“Letters to a young poet” is a cuddle to mind, heart
and body. Rilke‘s insights are a gift to anyone who lives as a human on this earth. For this human right here,
the question of how to balance and integrate duality
is always present, but changes theme. At this moment, the duality is psychologist vs. poet. One writes on Substack, the other on Instagram. One expresses herself better in English, the other in her mother tongue. They both believe in the unconscious, but one is a translator, the other is a surrenderer.One wakes up at 7:00, the other is still awake.One speaks at a proper volume, the other whispers.One finds meaning inside the depths of herself
and others, the artist decorates these depths as if she’ll never get to escape them.
In the book “Psychomagic”, Jodorowsky talks about living like a poet when he was a young man who could have been raised in Russia but instead grew up in Chile: “For example, Lihn and I decided one day to walk in a straight line, without ever wavering. We walked down the avenue, and we came to a tree. Instead of going around it, we climbed up and over it; if a car crossed
in our path, we climbed on top, walking on its roof.
In front of a house, we rang the doorbell, entered through the door and exited where we could, sometimes through a window. The important thing was to maintain the straight line and not pay any attention to an obstacle, as if it did not exist.”.
I have browsed amongst the books on my bookshelf
to select one I had not read yet, and ended up picking one that sat there for years: Lolita by Nabokov.
I had watched the movie when I was a kid, and after scrolling through other, more tempting titles, I decided this was appropriate for the moment. Before you report me to the authorities, let me say it’s just because
of the mood of the book.
I was surprised to notice how different I felt towards
the movie, so after reading a bit I googled the 1997 film and noticed that the actress was seventeen at the time, not twelve like in the written version.
It’s quite the statement to make a movie about a man who abuses a child by choosing a girl who’s about
to enter adulthood, who wears lipstick and looks like
a woman — admittedly, still a minor, but very different from a preadolescent child. In Kubrick’s version the girl sucks a lollipop and wears heart sunglasses in the cover. I find both very interesting choices.
It’s no mystery movies do this, and you have not really lived if you haven’t heard someone tell you at least once how “the book is actually better”. If you haven’t, you’re probably the one who tells others. Stop.
Movies and books are quite different means of artistic expression, and whoever tries to simplify the matter probably just likes to be part of a team — or is someone who has certainties, ew. I was asked years
ago what form of art is my favorite one and I’m still trying to find the right answer.
How am I supposed to choose between literature, cinema and music? I need them at very different times and in very different ways, but my life would be equally empty without either one. What I can choose is something for each moment: in Lolita, I can place myself inside that “I” and feel empathy, disgust, discomfort. Reading a book lets my imagination project and receive, and I’m suddenly part of those pages.
It’s a meditation, to sit in silence with a book in your hands, read one word after the other. You are so much in you that ‘you’ drifts away and leaves space for the everything. Written psilocybine.
If we expect the same from movies, the most overstimulating form of art, we are clearly misguided.
A movie tells you what, who, how, when, why.
Within those confines there’s still so much to interpret and imagine, especially if you’re into movies that are not plot driven, but the experience is supported
by senses. And you don’t get much agency over those.
I have covered my eyes during Sirat, but I was still hearing everything.
Emotions are:
- Eight, basic, for Plutchik
- Defined through valence and arousal for Russell
- Six, shared universally, for Ekman
And these are just three theories of the ones Claude gave me when I prompt it to summarize them.
I asked the AI because these theories are not what’s important here. Since we were already talking, I also asked it how they treat guilt — which is the reason I’m writing this post.
It told me that none of the theories concerned
with basic/universal emotions insert it in the list, since it’s a heavily culture-loaded one, but it added that
for Plutchik it’s a combination of fear and joy.
When I asked it to provide the source, it recognized it should have been careful with saying that because it’s not sure it really comes from Plutchik himself.
Was Claude… feeling guilty? I didn’t investigate, I went
to download the article instead.
But at this point I was deep in a rabbit hole of vague yet intriguing statements. And I let go of any resemblance
of accuracy, because I mean: how cool is it to imagine guilt as a mix of fear and joy?
As with anything unpleasant (all things we call “bad” when we’re not yet emotionally literate) there are hidden spots of pure perverse pleasure. I don’t have
to trust Claude to know that. If we get so attached
to guilt that it becomes our default reaction, there must be a good reason. Right?
I hear you say: “Well, people make me feel guilty.
It’s not me, it’s them who recriminate me.”, but deep down you know as much as I do that people don’t have that much power.
Guilt is a price we pay for having done something we wanted to do. We punish ourselves, so we pay no other price.
There’s the joy! I get to do the thing, and I make sure everyone knows I feel bad about it. “I’m not usually like this”, “I don’t know why I acted this way”, “That was
so stupid of me, I feel so bad”.
I went to Flora earlier this week. Flora is my go-to movie theater. Spring takes a toll on me, because my energy is even higher than usual but my body stays the same.
So I use my Cineville pass to go watch anything without much reflection beforehand, hoping the randomness will shake me the right way. I picked Wasteman,
and Tom Blyth had some influence on the choice.
It’s a prison drama, very well acted and tension dense. Many tattoos, drugs, inaudible English dialogue, and Jamie xx in the soundtrack. When I pick movies, as well as books, I’ll look for some relatability.
I am not one who seeks knowledge about other worlds in forms of art. Thankfully though, if I pick a movie randomly, or just based on that nice-to-look-at actor,
it can happen that there is not much I can relate
to in what I’m watching.
I mean, anything can be brought to an abstract level: feeling trapped, being a misfit, class struggle, race, being the cooler friend, having a lot to lose, being exposed. But if we stick to plot and themes, this was
a movie that granted me some distance. Yet, I gave it
4 stars on Letterboxd.
Yet, I felt my fidgeting and moving on the chair (already limited compared to my everyday life) reduced
to the minimum.
I had the pervasive experience of entering another reality, however claustrophobic and depressing,
and someone else’s body, even if bent by addiction.
My body left that room with a big sigh, like something had been released, like my mind had gained space.
Since everything nicely comes together in my research paper on life, it fits that yesterday a colleague resuscitated a song from her past, and it was also
my past. The song goes like this:
“Just a perfect dayproblems are left to know.Weekenders all night longit’s such fun.Just a perfect dayyou make me forget myselfI thought I was someone elsesomeone good“
Do yourself a favor: go listen to it, and forget yourself
a bit.
Crocodile’s tears, although no crocodile deserves
this definition.
Guilt is purely human, it stems from having both
a body and a very self-aware brain inside and above that body.
Guilt is how we make sure to pursue something we desire but without the responsibility of it, without saying, proudly: “Yes, I did it. I wanted to.”. Nobody can make us feel guilty unless we do.
The beauty of this sneaky emotion is that it’s so many things at once. It is also company. Desires have a lot of power: they invigorate us but can make us terribly lonely. Expressing and pursuing them leave us stranded. How embarrassing, how awkward, how intense. HOW DISGUSTINGLY HUMAN. With guilt we make a little space of comfort where we gain back control: it was me, it was my fault, I made a mistake.
It’s not that life is incredibly chaotic, it’s not that things happen with reasons I can’t grasp. No no. It’s me. This time I failed but watch me next time.
A sort of emotional perfectionism, guilt is also how we live in an eternal yesterday. A day where things hadn’t happened yet and we can still ruminate over and over and over and over and over on how they could have been different. Like in trauma, a way to never process, to never move, to avoid the future.
Guilt engulfs any emotion that would allow us to wake up one day older tomorrow. Grief, sadness, anger, fear. It all gets eaten up, never digested.
And with it, nothing transforms. Tomorrow, and in ten years, I will still hold no responsibility over my decisions (I feel too bad to even consider something as complex as accountability) but will feel the guilt for all that’s happened in the world beyond my reach. This way I make sure me and reality never meet, because that’s where the scary things happen.
Or is it?
Being an artist is this, whatever that means. To decide, one day, to walk in a straight line. Not because straight is better than curved, not because it’ll be easier or funnier to explain, not
for any other reason, because there are no reasons to do it.
I just do. And after I decide, I start walking, and nothing can stop me. I struggle to find better metaphors than this one.
When something painful happens, my other self soaks in it.
She is not even that scared of dying, to be honest. She flirts with dissolution and destroys with total devotion. She holds on to irrelevant things and doesn’t need me to tell her they are. She knows. Yet, she hears my remarks and reacts disgusted: “Don’t you get it? That’s the point. Full commitment”.
The psycho-enthusiast that is writing in English knows how many projections dress up the faces she encounters, and has the banal goal of suffering a bit less. She won’t get there through easy steps or resolutions (she shares a certain subtlety with her counterpart), but she will try to water a plant with her tears, build a shelter for her fears.She’ll look for syllables that rhyme, words that resonate.
She wants to find a story where between here and there, before and after, there’s a difference. Where April does not come back unaltered every year.
There’s no desire to heal in the part of me who wrote:
“If an atomic bomb exploded, I’d think it was my fault”. I know exactly what she means, and I have to work every day not to kill that part. I know very well, however, that she is also refraining from killing me, because I’m the only thing keeping her from total annihilation, but she’d love to get rid of me
at times. We’d live much more straightforward lives if it was just one of us.
To be this or to be that. Once again, to be both.
Being powerless in the face of dilemmas. Letting them engulf you, and then, when it seems like the day will never end, snap out of it. Find the therapeutic undertone.
My poet self writes because she must. And to be fair, this one too. She needs to write, yet she has no goal.
She needs to write, otherwise she’ll explode. I need to write, otherwise life won’t look like life anymore.
“Everything is gestation and then birthing.
To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as
an artist: in understanding as in creating.”
and how something more linear might even come out of them, they are the product of a struggle.
My mind (with the help of some variables, like August) can’t find stillness. It frantically moves at all times making connections, starting new conversations (while getting intensely attached to finishing all of them), initiating projects, making a point and debating it, engaging in full cycles of speculation, jumping with tired legs between here and there.
This makes this sequence of words much less eager to come out, and you’ll be asked to shift from reading something informational, albeit delusively so, to something personal, and making an assessment on whether you’re willing to get a bit closer.
It doesn’t matter how close you get, though, because this chemical productivity is only accessible to me, and I can explain it, but you won’t hear the noise if you listen carefully, and you won’t see the chaos if you put a straw in my ear.
What explains it is perhaps the metaphors and changes, the moving quality of my speech and my writing, that feels neutral at times but mostly feels very good or very bad. When it’s very good, these series of inferences on movement and stillness can become something interesting to read, or one my philosophical side quests that will turn into something that looks nothing like its premises. In another life, it would have been a perfect drive for an academic career, or it would have made me stick to playing piano.
When it’s bad (we’re only referring to feelings here, not moral judgements), I’m confronted with the limits of a body that is better suited for words and for images, or could at least benefit from a more varied diet. A body can’t possibly contain all this back and forth. Yet it does. It can’t decide not to. It has to host these intruders because they are already in, they never knocked to come inside. They are, in a way, older than the house itself.
Some things are given and other are chosen. I have the privilege of even questioning what to do with this silly brain, and the answer (a generous average of all months, not just the summer ones) so far has been: I keep it as it is. The good is alive, bright, curious, hungry, amazed. Half my life would not exist if it wasn’t this way, and the other half (when I’m sleeping) would certainly have much quieter dreams.
But it’s not an easy choice. The fifth time I pick up my nightstand voice recorder (the fact that I need to give it a name based on location should already tell you there are more) because I have another thought on movement, I can hear my brain laugh at me. And I have to remind myself how funny I find it at times, whereas at this moment it feels like bullying.
There is only movement
to be or not to be
such a perfect day
guilt, keep me company
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