However naive it was, or may even continue to be, I told myself that my latent period from May until just recently, wherein I refused to write, was due in large part to me “finding myself.” While the months leading up to May were of a particular fear, the months that followed were of a particular uncertainty. Unsure of proceeding, or even, when, how, or if we should proceed, the precarity of previously quotidian actions and decisions had been thrusted into a morality crisis. Between the New York Times determinism to count nearly every person who had died since mid-March and the unspoken confirmation that Instagram was the new foundation of a liberal resurgence, it seemed that our collective vocabulary had been condensed. Nuance was lost in the implication that it was eternally present. To not speak was to speak just the same, and to speak was to lie. Some were losing lives and the rest of us were losing our livelihood. ¹
While the claim that I had refused to write because I was “finding myself” is not entirely untrue, it would fail to acknowledge one important factor: I was terrified to write. There was a certain amount of fear I held towards language and the communications that we have with one another. Both had been in decline for quite some time, but were clearly exacerbated by the year’s early occurrences. I lacked any personal conviction that the language which had caused such a mess would be the same language to clean it up. Innovation and flexibility defined our collapsed lexicon and were seemingly efficacious, yet entirely indoctrinating. It seemed, that despite our best and often depthless attempts, the most we could summon was a disingenuous articulation of hope.
Artists, as it were, had been given the expectation to perform some cultural surgery that would more or less indulge in the meaning of suffering without attempting to eradicate the phenomenon of suffering altogether. A nearly inexhaustible amount of virtual galas and online theater seemed to yield a great deal of delight and surprise at a minimal amount of technical prowess. What we witnessed however was not the necessity of the arts offering meaning during a crisis that was so utterly devoid of it, but rather a narcissism of the arts who vainly assumed that we would have spiraled into pessimism without them.
Subsequently, the power of love, or lack thereof, witnessed a resurgence in our common vernacular. Some chose to fight while the rest of us watched the events around us quietly unfold into a fascistic fetishism. When the bells tolled and everyone left, what remained was the astonishing realization that we hated one another much more than we had ever loved one another. I remember this day. Saturday, November 7th, I was at work.
In an effort to at least assuage, but also quite possibly combat the symptoms of refusing an inherited language, I remained quiet. I could not bring myself to make sense of something that had become so polarized. I tried my hand at a variety of other things, namely:
Oil painting
Music making
Coding
Figure drawing
Charcoal still lives
Sculpture
Screen printing
Collage
Social media influencer
Comedian
Critic
Ethical hacker
Dancer
I’m sure I could extend the list indefinitely. While I desired far beyond myself to find a new way of communicating, I instead left myself out to dry. Consciously, or at least what I consciously told myself, was that I was curious, but unconsciously I was terrified of being forgotten. At the time of many artists finding success on social media platforms, it seemed as though that while we agreed through a collective whisper that it was entirely senseless, half of us conformed while the other half sat in the quietude of our deluded failure.
I made some rather intolerable claims to myself during this time. One such being that I could not call myself an artist because most people would then expect me to be a good one. I declared I would no longer be making art, but instead, doing something completely different altogether. I don’t remember exactly what I told myself, or if these claims were particularly good or bad, I only know that they were lies. Games I played to avoid the truth. A certain unknown truth that shrugs language but nonetheless confronts the definitive weight of meaninglessness. This is exactly the thing with artists: we are scared to be good at what we do out of fear that we will arrive too close to the truth. The aesthetic is a lie, hardly an unconscious structuring, but instead, studied considerably, always playable, and usually fallacious. The aesthetic of our moment is barely an aesthetic and more a constant assertion that one simply knows and studies art. Highly politicized, because it is much easier to be political about everything than it is to be good at something. It is the lie that artists tell themselves so they can avoid the truth at all costs. I cannot narrow down the days that we stopped making art; I just know that I haven’t made any in awhile.
My fear of language is not some bourgeois artistic value that I have arrogantly seized only to make myself appear more enlightened. By enlightened I suppose I really mean trustworthy. Truthfully, I am terrified of saying the wrong thing. As a result, I have, in recent weeks, opted to write in my phone instead of my journal. I cannot help but feel some unuttered expectation for artists to not only keep journals, but also maintain some space that is already an artifact of the themselves. The suggestion that while there is no proper way to make art, there are still certain ways that offer better outcomes than others. Usually I find myself staring at empty pages which have become characterized by their infrequent use. Unceasingly dated every three days because I struggle to find not only the discipline, but the purpose of writing. One such entry reads:
the lowfat myth
a matcha latte this morning
morning pages because I heard someone talk about them.
I should do that
so I can be a good writer.
—
—
think that I will tell my therapist that I felt lonely this week
my plants are dying and I can’t find the motivation to water them
rain today
stressed about money
want more, wish I had more
trying to be happy
I want to be happy
One day home will fall into
the water be subsumed,
probably
what is everyone doing today?
I wonder
Danced slightly—feels good.
want to make art.
Don’t know how.
Want to make art about
not knowing how to make art.
“You have a great deal of love
inside of you.”
maybe. I feel awful.
would love to juul.
or drink. but also
skinny.
maybe there’s not enough
love inside of me.
sometimes I wonder if I’m ruining my life.
Instagram ruined my life.
I thought I was healthy.
one night, lying in bed, I
miss that night.
the ambivalence.
“who has not asked himself at
sometime or other: am I a monster or
is this what it means to be a
person?”
Am I surprised that I’m sad again?
The thing is, I don’t feel sad,
I feel as though I ought to
feel sad and this undiluted
miasma of neuroses has me
bogged.
Everyone is making art.
Good art.
I simply am not.
what makes it good?
why was van gogh the artist he
was?
could it very well not have been
me?
an allusion to dust filled skies
brimming with rosaries
collapsing into my mothers breasts
“you touch my leg
and insist but I wake up before
we do it”
something around me my head
feels like it’s buzzing I'm so hyperactive
I can’t tell if I write
to learn or write to assume some
writerly image.
I hate my professors.
I’m going to bed.
I hate endings.
It seems rather hypocritical to share something from my journal. It is hypocritical actually. I suppose I wanted to prove to you my frustrations, my grief, my inadequacies. It’s also quite possible I felt some desire to prove my ethos as a writer. I won’t settle on either as I’m sure they’re both true. I will confess that I have recently felt the desire to be smart more than the desire to be truthful—something I’m working on, but also something I’m scared of. I’m sure it’s caused by some unaddressed neuroses or even simply the fear of failure, proving my own fallibility. My recognition of it could be playing into the desire itself, proving that I’m self aware enough to avoid it, but I don’t think that would be the whole truth.
Regardless of the light in which I decide to hold an ounce of the truth, the whole truth is bound to reveal itself. The sheer fact of any matter is not as thin as I imagine it to be. The truth is that being a writer is a divinely terrifying ordeal and both a trivial undertaking at best. If I lack any conviction it is probable that I don’t believe that I have any at all. Just as true is the fear of having any conviction to the point that others actually believe you. I am painfully aware of my own ambivalences and fear that if I am to write I am to materialize some belief of myself in others that I can’t substantiate. I like to think that despite my fears I do not think of writing as a failed or failing act; the submission to a labor that is certain to never have an absolute. While the certainty of uncertainty at this moment evokes more fear than it does excitement, I believe that I’m bound to some certain dealings wherein I must continue to write. If not to assert an identity which you will or will not believe in, then at least to begin collapsing the fear around an act that is both arbitrary and a privilege.
It is by no means easy to begin the task of writing. It feels superficial, unimportant, and yet insurmountably holy. Because of this, I have a singular conviction that truth must reach revelation not in some finality, but in the phenomenon of its own process. I have a general distrust of the times in which ease reveals itself to be of the particular moment. Just as much, I fear those who are quickest in their convictions are often those who believe them the least. Not because ease is some undeserving circumstance that we are all wholly unworthy of, but because it is always a severance of the truth. Without an elusive truth, or even an illusion of truth, meaning cannot arrive.
It has been nearly eight months since I have written something that resembles the form which has been taken up here. Call it fear, frustration, or a jealous avoidance of other’s success—I’m sure they would all hold an ounce of the same truth. An ounce which, notwithstanding the other’s that I have neglected to mention, is enough to make anyone refuse the act of writing altogether, or simply dismiss it as being far too decadent or self-interested. These concerns, at some point or another, will prove themselves to be true. For now, however, or at least until my next period of stasis, I’ll sit in a potent quietude at the entrance of the crossroads. The crossroads of writing to avoid the truth and writing to discover the truth. It is evident, for now at least, that most will have already chosen the latter before even seeing the possibility of the other.
:)