I’ve been considering this transition as well since I recently started work again. My life has become conventionally routine. It contrasts with the prior seven months I spent off work where I spent a great deal of time reading, writing and caregiving.

The depth and abundance of time shaped the quality and character of my ideas in interesting ways. My interior world had privately become very intense, deeply-rooted and unusual. It was the most creatively productive period of my life thus far, but in a way that is intimately felt and not yet legible in its fruits. So while I felt creatively nourished, I also felt a little frustrated at my inability to clearly express or create something of immediate use from all of it.

All of it can be good water

Creative production conforms to the time and quality that scaffolds day-to-day experience. Without work, time is wide open as a lake. With work, time runs rapid once again: noisy, narrow and constricted like a river.

I’m testing the theory that all of it could be good for drinking with the right engineering.1 It is very different, but it is all made of water.

I haven’t (yet) found the transition to work to have harmed my creativity, but only that it has forced me to swim closer to the surface from the depths that I’ve been swimming in. Which has been good news for my problem! I see this alternation between depth <> obscurity, and surface <> legibility as a healthy movement of the creative process, like a thread that hangs slack and then pulled taut, over and over into a pattern of stitches.

Euwyn Goh: “What is the writer’s job? To reach the edge, to set down a line further out than the rest, one that joins the centre only later, once the world catches up.” Time off work was the time for me to set a line further out, and as my life gains in normalcy I rejoin the centre, setting waymarkers for the path I took. Legibility provides the connection point, while idiosyncrasy provides the pointy end2 that punctures and expands the outlines understanding.

Regarding the question of “how to maintain your creative spark”, my answer is not definitive, as I think it is an answer that each person has to come to by their own lights. But I think there are tactics that can be useful to try to test if they resonate, and that is what I am writing down here.

I’d also like to rebel slightly against the exam question: there is a notion of magic imbued in the idea of a creative spark that creates unnecessary pressure. But there is a lot of value sometimes in scrutinising phrases like ‘creative spark’ at its most superficial, literal level: a spark can be trivial rather than impressive. A spark is a humble event, and many of them might happen before a flame catches. A spark is actually a sign of repeated failure before the main thing. When we think of creative work as output to create on top of normal work, we obviously don’t want to do it.

Sometimes it is good for creativity to be something far less and far stupider than that: a tic, a cavemannish rubbing of two sticks together, a pure and pathetic grasping of oily fingers towards the infinity of greatness. Sometimes all we have available at hand are such repeated attempts, and I think that such resolve in spite of repeated failure is a sign of dignity, nerve, and humility!

The moral clarity of repetition

“At least I have the moral clarity of repetition,” says John Green, in the midst of signing some-thousandth copy of his latest book. I have to say that while I’m not sure I fully grasp what he means by this, it seems to resonate.

Since January I’ve been writing every day. I have two hand-written journals: A commonplace journal and a free-form Moleskine journal. In addition, I have two typed documents: a quote document, and an almanac of essays.

• Commonplace journal: This journal is a vertical weekly-dated Moleskine. On the left-hand side each day, I write down a quote that I encountered that day. On the right-hand side, I write reflections or summaries of the day. I find it very satisfying to flip through and see who I was reading and when, and—out of pure vanity—to look at how much my handwriting improved.

• Free-form journal: An ordinary journal about whatever I like.

• Quote documents: I have also started transcribing quotes from books that I read, usually classics. I write quotes in sticky notes while reading, and then review what I want to transcribe again. For Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, it was so dense with goodness that I could only highlight rather than write every thing, but I sometimes sit down on weekends for a few hours to type out the quotes I highlighted, and I find it very relaxing to do, and good for my writing. Over time, I will print out these quotes and slot them in a folio.

  

• Private alamanac: This is a document dated over six months that attempts to synthesise my artistic, political, philosophical positions in discrete essays. I write them to the boundary where my knowledge and reason fail, and so many are incomplete or incoherent. I do not share it with anyone. It exists purely to document and evolve my thinking by conversing with past versions of myself.

The commonplace journal has been transformative. I will freely evangelise the virtues of copying down good words by hand. Language is something that we learn from others, whether written or spoken. In ongoing relationships we invent a sort of third micro-language between us: shorthand, inside jokes, nicknames and so forth. What I love about literature is that it places you in direct conversation with some of the intimate thoughts of some of the most thoughtful people that have lived. I think that hand-copying is to written word as what listening and repeating is to conversation.

The commonplace journal also made me more motivated to seek good material that lasts. To be frank, many of my early quotes were lines snipped from online reading, and over time they did not retain their apparent initial profundity. So it goes.

Obviously, I had a lot more time to do this while I wasn’t working, but instantiating these habits made it easy to continue. It is instructive, again, to be literal with language. Writing every day is straightforward if you take it as exactly that—writing something down—but it is not straightforward if you are expecting to put out East of Eden every day. I want my writing to turn into something more than work, but a natural extension of perception.

To return to John Green’s little quip, I think the virtue of repetition is the sense that the decision of what to do and how to do it is already made, and thus there is no confusion about where to begin. Simply continue what you have been doing because you have committed to it. Improvement is a consequence of said commitment, rather than of having the optimised strategy.

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Five seconds of paradise is enough

These days I mainly use YouTube to watch live music performances. I think they are an excellent place to seek casual mid-lunch break enlightenment and take reprieve from cognitive work.

There is a bit in Emmanuel Carrère’s book, Yoga, where he describes the savant pianist Martha Argerich, playing a well-known Chopin piece. His friend had sent him an email with only a link to the video, no body text, and only the somewhat mysterious subject line: 5’30”. Carrère describes what he sees in the video as he approaches the timestamp:

I wonder what’s going to happen, and here’s what happens: we’re at the last notes of the garland before the theme returns, grand and joyful, from the right side of the keyboard and the right side of the screen. Carried by this return, Martha Argerich rides it like a surfer on a wave. Abandoning herself to it completely, she can no longer stay in the frame, she jerks her head and leaves the frame to the left with her mass of black hair, disappearing for a moment. And when she comes back into the frame she has a smile on her lips. And at that moment … This little girl’s smile that comes both from childhood and from the music, this smile of pure joy, lasts for exactly five seconds, from 5’30” to 5’35”, but during these five seconds we have a glimpse of paradise. She was there, for five seconds, but five seconds are enough, and by watching her we have access to it. Access by proxy, but access nonetheless. We know it exists.

The other day while on my lunch break I found another gem. I’ve always loved Elliott Smith, and there is a similar but distinct kind of musical rapture in this video of him playing for a breakfast show.

I think the video is mostly self-explanatory, but I can’t help myself. There’s Elliott Smith: he is slouched over, inward and awkward bordering on hostile; his gray sweatshirt sticks out like an oil spill in sea of tropical fish. The hosts of the show give him a gentle ribbing, as is expected on a morning show, but Smith isn’t a bantering type. Describing his music, he says it is “quiet, sometimes a bit angry.” One perhaps worries they’ve invited a teenager onto the show to play his horrible Soundcloud male manipulator music about an ex-girlfriend.

But it takes exactly one strum from Smith’s guitar to make the atmosphere oceanic. A shimmering dream that falls over everybody. Just a couple moments prior, he was a sad emo kid, and now it is as if the gravity of the room has inverted, whereby Smith and his inwardness is the centre.

My favourite moment is Jessica Hecht’s face at 3’53”. Could anyone watch this video without being struck with an aching wonder of what is going through her mind? It is perhaps nothing, or everything, or both at the same time.

I think where I am getting to here is that when I don’t feel inspired or rich with novel ideas to write, I find it invigorating to simply look at and write about things that are packed dense with this sort of wonder. I find comfort in bare description when analysis or newness feels like too much for my already-squeezed cognitive faculty. These things take a bit of effort to find but they are always worthwhile. “Five seconds of paradise is enough.”

The fact that these moments—specifically these music videos I love—are not lost to time is nothing short of incredible providence.

And to round things out in a conclusive manner, I think the thing to unpack here is this often glib idea about how creative production is highly non-linear. Said alone, I find this to be an uninspiring consolation, and perhaps even implying unintentionally that creativity is random and intractable.

I think what it really means to get at is that creativity and contemplation are activities that rebel against linear time. Or more than this, they reveal its natural non-linearity. Experience is not only a string of commodified units of time ticking on and on but it is composed of qualities that have the potential to dilate with vitality. Virginia Woolf said it best in Orlando:

But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be … directly [as Orlando] was alone on the mound under the oak tree, the seconds began to round and fill until it seemed as if they would never fall. They filled themselves, moreover, with the strangest variety of objects.

There is an extent to which we all have to accept the constraints of time, work and responsibility. But there are also ways to deepen the time we have; not through pure pleasure—which actually quickens it—but through wonder.

Isn’t it very strange how reading a book for five minutes could yield wisdom that changes the trajectory of my life? Isn’t it very strange that reading a few pages every day could alter the colours and shapes of my reality? Isn’t it very strange that a well-struck chord could plunge me into a long-forgotten place of dark beauty? Isn’t it very strange that a smile in a certain cast of light make me fall in love? It is so bizarre and it is also so completely undeniable that most of a life’s meaning is invested into the slimmest, most vulnerable, most transitory of minutiae, and it is for this reason, perhaps, why I have no sense of proportional productivity, because it appears that nothing that is most good about life is delivered, either, in proportion.

The more I find these gems squeezed in between the fat gray carbon blocks of time, the more obvious it becomes that the effort is worth it. Repetitive compounding effort to create thus becomes more effortless, and I can do more with little. Hopefully, I can retain these habits while I work.

Related pieces on craft

On the body: The Use of Photography

My favourite of her works is The Use of Photography1, a collaborative memoir chronicling her affair with the journalist Marc Marie. It follows a simple conceit: directly after making love, Ernaux and Marie would photograph the wreckage of clothes strewn across the floor, the bed, or other interrupting furniture. Once the film was developed, each of them wrote a separate response to the images, being given total freedom and privacy to write as they pleased. They finally shared these letters with each other at the end of the year.

To introduce the collection, she writes:

I cannot define the value or the interest of our undertaking. In a way, it belongs to the same frenzy for turning life into images that is increasingly characteristic of our age. Whether through photographs, or writing, we strove each time to give greater reality to moments of pleasure that were fleeting and impossible to represent. To capture the unreality of sex in the reality of what it leaves behind. The highest degree of reality, however, will only be attained if these written photos are transformed into other scenes in the reader’s memory or imagination.

Ernaux is famous for her spare and cool lucidity. She observes interior experience with a scientific precision. Although she deals with dark and vulnerable subject matter, there is very little raw feeling or affect—certainly no sentimentality—conveyed in her writing.

Of her romantic joy she says: “I wrote in my journal that I felt infinitely happy”. Ernaux describes the external action, the fact that she wrote about her feeling, and thus the outside observation takes primacy over internal feeling. On reflecting on another photo: “I am no longer inside of the reality that gave rise to my emotion and to the photo I took that morning. It’s my imagination that deciphers the photo, not my memory.” Another reflecting on the shared artistic project: “The thought that he has begun to write about these photos, these remnants of a night, fills me with a kind of excitement I’ve never felt before, as much intellectual as physical. It’s a secret we share, a sort of new erotic practice.”

The pleasure of reading Ernaux is therefore not neutral but deeply voyeuristic. One is invited into the pleasure of observing an obsessive and passionate animal from a safe distance, with no risk of being pulled into an emotional gravity. Mortal fears and sexual observations are quickly universalised into thoughtful ideas about the human condition. Such psychological habits make Ernaux’s diligent self-study a fascinating and insightful activity to be privy to.

She far outshines her romantic correspondent—despite his alleged membership to the journalistic class—in this pure observational skill. This period of writing coincided with Ernaux undergoing chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer. Such experience was not exempt from treatment as raw material to submit for study.

Here is Ernaux writing on her cancer:

During chemo sessions, with amusement I compared my body to a dishwasher, which inevitably came to mind, in view of the length of the programme (between one hours and one and a half hours) and the introduction of a rinsing agent at the end. … Nothing was frightening. I performed my task of cancer patient with diligence and viewed as an experience everything that happened to my body.

Here is Marie writing on Ernaux’s cancer2:

For months, we live together as a threesome, death, A., and me. Our companion was intrusive. It continually claimed its right to be there, in the pouch of liquid stuck to A.’s belly during the periods of chemotherapy, in the catheter under her collarbone, on the nipple burned by radiotherapy, on the blackened border of her gums and all over her body that was now completely hairless … Intrusive, but powerless against I love.

One can’t help but wonder if Marie was more disturbed by Ernaux’s cancer body than she was herself.

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On obsession: Simple Passion

Another work of hers, Simple Passion—one of her many Nobel-winning works—chronicles romantic obsession. She documents her experience in a severely one-sided—the worse side—love affair with a married diplomat. She outlines that her aim is “to replicate the feeling of witnessing sexual intercourse, that feeling of anxiety and stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgment.” I enjoyed this one a lot too.

It is by way of concrete detail and literalism that her accounts are so revealing. Where more melodramatic writers would scrawl, “Reader, I loved him”, “I was overcome with lust”—so forth—Ernaux does not create any room for herself to escape observation. To simply confess to a lack of self-respect would be far less humiliating and honest than the plain events that she admits to:

As soon as he left, I would be overcome by a wave of fatigue. I wouldn’t tidy up straight away: I would sit staring at the glasses, the plates and their leftovers, the overflowing ashtray, the clothes, the lingerie strewn all over the bedroom and the hallway, the sheets spilling over on to the carpet. I would have liked to keep that mess the way it was …

In his absence, I was only happy when I was out buying new dresses, earrings, stockings, and trying them on at home in front of the mirror — the ideal, quite impossible, being that he should see me each time in a different outfit.

Simple Passion reads like a forensic dissection of a crime of passion.

Who is Annie Ernaux?

It is frankly questionable to me sometimes whether Ernaux is even a legitimately a good person to be in relationship with. There are clues to an intense neuroticism and self-concern that are most obvious in a side-by-side comparison with Marie’s letters (in The Use of Photography).

Though lacking in skill he may be, Marie seems to come off as a fairly earnest person, and the subject of his letters is usually Ernaux. Repetitions of the monogram ‘A.’ dot his letters thoughtfully. He wonders what she might be feeling, or recounts what she had done and said that day.

The problem is that the subject of Ernaux’s letters is, also, usually Ernaux. Of Marie, viewed from the outside, or viewed by Ernaux, we hear notably little. Perhaps it is because it is actually more faithful to record only what you can perceive—Ernaux’s solipsism, her focus on her interiority, is actually empirical—rather than to venture towards the imagined lives of others. Perhaps it is just because he is not a Nobel-winning writer.

It is a bit of a glib therapeutic trope to extend self-compassion to oneself, and furthermore sometimes completely vexing as to how to do it. For me it is the case that reciting positive affirmations doesn’t quite cut it.

But this doesn’t make self-compassion less important, and its manifestations are various as to how to get it in the world: turn to friends who truly love you, spend some time to slow down in nature. There are times when I am feeling overwhelmed where I simply lay still and listen to the beating of my own heart, and I imagine that red organ struggling in its small cage. The heartbeat tells me two things. That my life is fragile, but also that I am still alive. As inured as I may become to this fact, that is nothing short of a miracle. In the scale of human history, life is the anomaly; it is the vital exception, the burning end of the long wick of time.

It’s striking to me that every now and then, in conversations with curious and philosophical folks around me, people still raise the question: Are people in any way truly altruistic, or do they only do good in a way that benefits them? Is true compassion within reach for us?

I think that the answer is straightforward—though it could be tugged on endlessly for further detail—which is that people range in selfishness and altruism from person-to-person, and between the moments of a day.

Acts of extreme compassion

Years ago, I had a poster of Thích Quảng Đức on my wall, and I sometimes meditated on it during open-eye meditation. He was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who burned himself alive at a busy intersection in downtown Saigon, in the midst of the Buddhist Crisis, when a government partial to the country's Catholic minority turned its violence against the Buddhist majority.

Sitting in lotus position, placing the gas canister to the right and behind him, he sat down to meditate before finally lighting the match. The flame bloomed, the crowd of onlookers wailed, and he made no sound. Importantly, this act of protest caused no harm to anyone else. It can be described as nothing lesser than a completely superhuman demonstration of will, compassion and equanimity.

I need to quickly remark that death is not something to revere, and of course martyrdom is not the ethical fate of most of us; actually, a world in which this is the case would be a completely tragic one. Such death is only moving because it is in fact tragic—because the life and the passion that precedes it is precious.

The point I am getting at is that ultimate selflessness, in service of whatever cause, which need not always be political rebellion but may even be in ordinary life—I call to mind my yoga teacher’s provocation from earlier, “Who is it that always matters the most?—Whoever it is that is with you.”—is possible.

Contra to the abundance of evidence to reach for in favour of our collective self-centredness, the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức is completely unambiguous as proof of total altruism. It is a modern iteration of the myth—not meaning fictional, but meaning holding incredible narrative power in our cultural imagination—of Christ. It encapsulates a notion of complete sacrifice of the thing which is without exception the most valuable thing to any human being, which is their own life, the very potentiality that precedes any particulars of sorrowful or joyful experience itself. Simone Weil died of a similar devotion to political martyrdom, starving herself to death in solidarity with her French compatriots in Nazi-occupied France.

Confronting these acts of martyrdom provokes an interesting reaction for many. Some may quite rightly say: “Why bother killing yourself over such things, for nothing more than a PR stunt, when you could instead use your life and passion to fight the cause itself?” I haven’t got a conclusive answer on whether these decisions are, in the logical calculus of impact, actually wise or not, because the answer to this really comes down to the age-old conflict between deontology and consequentialism.

Martyrdom is of course an act in favour of deontological ethics; to say that it is simply making a ‘statement’ is a little too glib for the gravity of the matter. It is an expression of union with absolute truth that culminates in an unquestioning desire to uphold the sacred dignity of human life. I would not advise it to anyone who is not reconciled with that ultimate truth, and I certainly am not ready nor devoted enough to an ethical cause to attempt it on myself.

But if I were to make a brief case for this ethical view and act, it is that the story of being a human being is to enter a world where much of its logic is manifestly backwards. We repeatedly come into situations in which left really appears to mean right and good seems to really be bad. Being confronted with such grave news of the world every day, of genocide, war, selfishness, and furthermore no clear sense of how to discern to what extent any of this is justified, inevitable, or what to do about it, we find ourselves all in a state of ethical disorientation. In personal life, it is sometimes the case that open-hearted earnestness is punished with cynicism and cruelty. If one attempts to help others and fails and becomes angry and resentful, they are sometimes accused of bringing it upon themselves by being overly concerned, fancying themselves as arrogantly virtuous and so on.

In an ideal world, wouldn’t it be the case that helping is rewarded, is seen as a good thing to do, and that open-heartedness is rewarded with love and not cruelty? To even write this plainly feels in some way naive.

But to paraphrase Simone Weil, what is sacred is the childlike part that exists in every human being, from birth to death, without exception, which expects good rather than evil. Harm is inflicted when we see violations of that expectation of good—where we witness cruelty inflicted in cases where we expect care, and it is the accumulation of that harm that amasses into evil.

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Of course, these narratives are circumstantial; there are parts of the world, or simply every day experience, in which good is good and bad is bad. It is true that the world is not all rot and it is also true that reality has places full of rot.

But to the martyr, it is a matter of setting things straight, and in the correct proportion, and aligning the world as closely with heaven through superhuman grace. The martyr is someone who has arrived at an incorruptibly clear-eyed moral vision: if people are dying en masse under conditions of oppression, the correct response is not numbness, bitterness, and shrinking into self-concern. The correct response is rage. So they take it into their own hands to correct the collective story that we make amongst ourselves about how human beings make sense of unjust suffering, because to do otherwise, and let such wrongs slide into the anonymous gunk of dead history, is another tally mark against a negative answer to the exam question, “Can human beings ever be truly altruistic?”

The symbolism of course hardly needs to be explained. Allegedly (!), while the rest of his body burned to nothing, the monk’s heart stayed intact and was kept in a museum after the protest. It sounds far-fetched to me, but even if this weren’t the case, I think the self-immolation itself is enough; actually, it is plenty.

Did it ‘work’?

John F. Kennedy commented that the spectacle had generated worldwide emotion that had never been generated by a photo before. This response seems to say to me that human beings have an intrinsic capacity to overcome their own numbness when it comes to being confronted with undeniable acts of courage.

And though I have argued in favour of the deontological integrity of the monk’s act of courage—the value of the devotion to the principle of sacred life itself—this act of extreme principle in fact did work, it did do its job, it was ‘impactful’ and effective in achieving its goal and thus its consequential value: JFK withdrew his support for the Vietnamese government and, inclusive of a series of further protests from the Mahayana Buddhist monks, the government was eventually sabotaged by a coup staged with the US government’s support (whether Thích Quảng Đức would have personally approved of the assassination of the President in this case however, is an interesting further ethical provocation.)

The photographer Malcolm Browne said that foreign correspondents in Saigon had been monitoring the civil unrest for a while, and that the monks had been hinting at pulling off a spectacular protest for a while. Most other correspondents ignored the call, being “kind of bored with that threat after a while”. Browne was the only correspondent who came through to cover the day; he was later awarded the Pulitzer Prize for it.

This provokes a thought in me, which is how many acts of compassion, radical and less radical, go unnoticed in this way? How fortunate we are to have documentation, one more mark in favour of the possibility of human goodness, in the face of a thousand scars marked in the opposite column. Such is the effect of the onslaught of terrible worldly news.

One thing that makes this question of altruism vexing is something of an issue with biased data. Ultimate selflessness hardly advertises itself. Goodness for humanity is not a given. It is, however, still within reach. To be human is to live with the question of good and evil unresolved and thus alive in one’s heart. Try—even when it hurts—to listen to its fragile beating.

This is therefore not an instrumental argument in favour of shame, which is insincere. To argue that shame is good because it helps you be considerate and stay on good behaviour is an avoidance of actual shame. Shame is not altruism, which is easy to look at, because altruism is perfectly compatible with the fascinations ego. Shame is exactly that black void that you cannot fix; you can look away from it for a little while, but it will always re-manifest.

I hope to be clear that I am not talking about a psychological shame that is specific to an event, circumstance or an identity, but an existential shame, whose shadow is cast across the wide plain of the human condition. There are important delicacies to handling psychological shame, and trauma, but I think there is plenty of popular understanding of this already. If the title of this piece is enough to put you on edge, this piece is not useful for you at this time.1

It is healthy to attempt to move oneself from psychological shame, which is particular and makes one shrink inside2 oneself, towards existential shame, which is universal and makes one aspirational and indifferent to oneself. We might think of insecurity as a shorthand for psychological shame, and powerlessness as a shorthand for existential shame. In a sense, this is also the motion of good therapy; to use understanding to move one’s feelings from being personal and suffocated by loneliness, towards their broader, universal existential context.

So let us now go ahead and try to understand.

Existential shame—this deep-running emotion that encodes a feeling of intrinsic lack—is the intelligent, acute awareness of one’s objective smallness within the world. Powerlessness is a true and accurate observation of human affairs. Although the acidic taste of this word ‘powerlessness’ may offend some sensibilities—particularly the crowd which is in the midst of re-connecting with their inner child, or embracing the virtues of ‘high agency’—what it really is about is intellectual and moral honesty. And coming on from this, we needn’t be so cynical as to the size to which the human spirit can grow that we believe that to concede to genuine truths of powerlessness flies in opposition to our ability to act and exert effective will. Is your will so weak that it is easily knocked over by a yucky word? We do not need to be the ones to treat ourselves so stupidly, like parents who are trying to hide the non-existence of Santa Claus from their children—even those children always work it out! And those children can go on to be perfectly fine in the aftermath, though they grieve. So can you.

Psychological shame and social expectations

Let me give an example. We often think of shame as a thing that is put on us by other people, particularly our parents or (gestures wildly at the empty space) social expectation.

Imagine someone who resents the shame put on them by their parents to become an engineer. “I hate that I’m doing all this studying in a field I don’t even care about just to please my parents. What a waste!” He decides to go against, and in being so intimate with how his pursuit of his parents’ preference had undermined his individual will, he rejects shame altogether. He decides instead to be an artist! As his doe-eyed inner child always pleaded him to do so, and which his therapist encourages him that he re-connect with. And things are good for a hot little while; he is being authentic and listening to his own wishes, dissolving his shame, which he believes to be something caused by unfair social expectations that oppress his authentic self.

And yet, the shame returns. “I’m an artist following my dreams, but I feel like I’m not really helping anyone. I feel kind of useless, and indulgent, and like I should be doing more about the state of the world.” Okay—he decides to figure out how to help people. Perhaps he will become an artist of the activist kind, pulling the curtain of the Overton Window to-and-fro towards his vision of a virtuous society.

Working so hard in order to do so, he becomes self-conscious of the aesthetic abandonment he is committing in his work; he internalises an intellectual dishonesty and notes the cynicism with which he must operate to achieve distribution. He notices the way he gets excited when terrible world affairs make the market more ripe for his art, and he conforms his art to take the political positions expected of him. He sometimes cannot tell if he is more interested in being successful, in being heard in important discourse, or truly helping the state of affairs. Some even accuse him of worsening the prospects of his cause. Shame! “Society is so politicised, and art has become so corrupt; nobody appreciates art for art’s sake anymore.”

So shame comes from ‘society’, is it? This is not a profound general observation. “Society has normalised that we should please others, and not ourselves!” Indeed! Because society is only made of others, isn’t it? Society does expect things from each of us. Society is, like, millions of people! If you choose to turn away from half of it, you are going to be turned around and facing the other half. And even when ‘society’ tells you to listen to yourself, isn’t it that they are trying to, in some implicit way, tell you what kind of ‘yourself’ to be?

Of course, everything he is saying is true from his perspective; he is correct to make his observations. My point isn’t that one can’t make statements about societal expectations, nor that they aren’t oppressive in materially meaningful ways, but that shame as a fundamental force of the human psyche is inescapable. Sorry for the awkward metaphor, but to externalise it is only to fling the hot potato to someone else!

Existential shame is awareness of the distance between good and evil

If one goes through enough of these motions of psychological shame, it becomes clear that there is a larger, deeper, more subterranean source that feeds it; that is existential shame.

If we move away from the specific personal stories of the man in the previous example, and abstract them to their most basic intentions, we can map what is really just the underlying fabric of social obligation, a network of obligation of which we can only fulfill so many things at a time.

• “I wish to make my parents happy.”

• “I wish to make myself happy.”

• “I wish to make the world a better place.”

We all wish to make everyone happy indeed; I don’t mean to be flippant about the intentions here but to point out that, perhaps, it is the fact that we often find ourselves in a position where we can only do one or two of these things at a time, that causes us deep shame, rather than the specific circumstances.

But don’t carry on just yet! You mustn’t stop here and go about your day, looking at the horrors of the world and muttering to yourself, “well, each of us can only do so much, teehee”. This is, again, to treat yourself as too childish to accept truth, to grow your own conscience, and to cast aside your aspiration towards goodness in favour of temporary comfort. Simply let yourself feel unhappy about the state of affairs.

This is existential shame. It is the awareness of the yawning chasm between good and evil, between the state of ultimate goodness that is, in the heart, so obvious and clear—and yet, the utter inability of any individual to fulfill this vision in completeness, and even at times the apparent necessity to participate in evil in one respect in order to contribute to good in another. Sometimes when we make our family unhappy with us by making ourselves happy. Sometimes we make ourselves happy by making the world better. Sometimes, if we advocate for one cause, we contribute to the dehumanisation of the people on the other side of the cause. Sometimes, in order to bolster power which we believe to further our vision of a better world, we fraternise with people who embody moral values we are disgusted by. And we feel this sting of shame again and again; this is a sign our moral faculties are intact. This is not true in all cases, but it is unavoidable and significant, unless we have resigned to the business of numbing ourselves with pure pragmatism.

This to a degree what Simone Weil is touching on when she describes emptiness and the void; the ‘absence of God’ in the world. Here, she is instructive regarding how to respond to this existential shame:

For every contact with good leads to a knowledge of the distance between good and evil and the commencement of a painful effort of assimilation. It is something which hurts and we are afraid. This fear is perhaps the sign of the reality of the contact. The corresponding sin cannot come about unless a lack of hope makes the consciousness of the distance intolerable and changes the pain into hatred. Hope is a remedy in this respect, but a better remedy is indifference to ourselves and happiness because the good is good although we are far from it and may even suppose that we are destined to remain separated from it forever.
— from Gravity and Grace

In other words: do not look away, and to the extent that you can, do not cram this void with the temporary appeasements of hope, unless that is all you can physically do in order to stop yourself from descending into hatred. Do not imagine and do not even respond. Simply look.

The motion of hatred is interesting here. In seeing senseless evil, we are so disturbed we reach for things to push away the discomfort. If you contend with genocide, in your tension and distress, you are eager to grasp for a narrative which explains why this group of people might deserve to be so brutalised, or why it has nothing to do with you; all of this happens in barely a second, barely a twitch. These ideas may have some personal or circumstantial truth, but they have no bearing on morality, and thus remove oneself from any engagement with good and evil.

Goodness3 is straightforward: suffering should not exist, and harm should not be inflicted by any one person on another. Evil is cancerous: suffering does exist, and not only does it exist, but it is made justifiable, it permeates institutional logic, cultural logic, economic logic, and through these justifications, you yourself are also able to make defenses for that which you, in your heart, are aware is evil, and thus you notice that the tendril of evil which reaches around the world even extends to you. This is precisely the distance between good and evil.

Existential shame is yours

Now, this is extremely fraught to speak of, because to speak so severely of shame and “shoulds” makes it sound as if I fancy myself personally a moral authority on what others should feel. This is not what I believe and I am simply trying to create a frame for people to understand the value of this ‘negative’ emotion.

The other important aspect to shame is privacy. The privacy of shame is not about letting dark secrets fester inside unspoken4, but about holding the pain of it—the sensational, feeling, bodily kind, and not the narrative of it5—close to one’s chest and with dignity.

Existential shame is yours, it is not mine or anyone’s to give you, in the same way that your hurt and pain is yours, and it may even be good for you, but that does not mean I am or anyone else is entitled to harming you. It holds truth insofar as it reminds us of our innate existential inadequacy.

Existential shame is it’s own thing. It is not itself the desire to help—though it can be prior to it—and it is not the neurotic obsession over not living up to the expectations of other people (this is psychological shame). It is the revelatory mechanism of innate powerlessness. The way that the naked body is shameful encodes the truth of our vulnerability, frailty, and self-centred desires.

To squarely look into one’s sense of existential shame and allow this flutter of fear to swell into a hurricane inside is to expand the capacity for moral courage, to treat the aspiration towards goodness and perfection as deep and sincere obligations, and to take one’s separation from that perfection as the given facts that they are. To accept this, paradoxically, and almost inexplicably, is the place from which genuine love and compassion can originate.

Conversely, to reject shame is to sever one’s tether to, and therefore any opportunity to strive towards, metaphysical perfection. To reject it is to reject powerlessness, and to remain addicted to the allure of seeking power—an activity that will only serve to reveal, in more and more forceful ways, the extent of one’s objective powerlessness, thus re-creating the condition of psychological shame.

But it is entirely possible that this motion is also simply one’s spiritual allotment. As reprehensible to some it may seem, it is entirely possible that the evil and greedy powers-that-be are in exactly the place that they should. It is possible that they are not. I do not know; I am just as vexed as you are regarding evil. As I said earlier, shame is a private thing, and it is not mine to adjudicate.

Related: Works on Goodness

I do not know the proper way to engage in philosophy, but I think it is primarily a “doing” word. One way I “do” it is to make notes like this, where I sit down in front of my desk with a pile of post-it notes and write until I am stuck. I begin by writing a simple claim, which I then follow with another claim that elaborates on, associates with or contradicts it, until I arrive at a dead-end. This motion allows the natural forward progression of thought. The process hinges on (1) removing direct reference to other material (and distraction in general), and (2) waiting for thought, obtaining progression through patience rather than will. References are added as an afterthought; they are not explicitly the guide to thinking.

This necessarily leads to a form with vaguely defined terms, contradictions of earlier statements and circular reference, but I think these are the benefits of the form. It gives way to open exploration, delicately balancing the playful confidence of making large, declarative statements with the friction of inquiry. It also makes the motion of completing a thought visible.

This took around an hour of sitting. Of course I go back to revise and re-order the notes, and this takes a few more hours, to clarify my initial intuitions. I do this process sometimes after long periods of reading, which I adopted after first reading Stephen Thomas’ 172 notes to myself on art written while sitting on my bedroom floor facing my open closet in Toronto. I also made these notes through the same process.

Lately I have been reading various forms of Christian-ish moral philosophy, so these notes naturally respond to, and take for granted various assumptions of, that suite.

NOTES

1. At the heart of a humanist ethics is the need to honour intrinsic dignity.

2. Dignity is not the same as worth, but they have some relation.

3. Worth is inherent for everyone and it is granted, in Christian humanism, by God. I will refer to this notion, that worth is inherent, as the ‘truth of worth’.

4. To parse out the relation between dignity and worth: dignity is that which makes the truth of worth evident through experience and sensation. Practically, this is the providence of basic needs of each human being to experience happiness which is beyond bare survival.

5. Bare survival is a life absent of consent, which is transitive to a life absent of will. Each person is born into the world without consent; this is the first irrevocable harm. But to also be deprived of additional opportunities to consent to the particular expressions of life is to further the first harm, rather than to counterbalance it. We know of this as freedom, or self-determination.

6. Dignity is that which allows a human being to say “I”. “I” is the name that is universal that reaches for heaven but also stands tall and alone. It is a universal need whose fulfillment is particular to the individual; as is privacy, as is the body.

7. There is thus a relation between dignity and solitude.

8. To love solitude, one must love the freedom inside which cannot be outwardly expressed. In this way, solitude is prayer.

9. To carry solitude with oneself is to walk with a tether to God.

   1. In the second act of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Lady Marchmain reads a story aloud where a detective says he had “caught [the thief], with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.” It is a metaphor for divine intervention: in the book, members of the Marchmain family wander through life and break away from their Catholic upbringing, trying to forge their own path of what is good or right. They wander in their own ways, falling in love, into hedonism or addiction, or rejecting the church. But in the end all find their oblique route back to God, through the ‘twitch upon a thread’. (From: ‘Eulogy’)

10. To share one’s shame with God is to cultivate dignity, which gives rise to the strength of the eternal flame, but to use the appearance of dignity to suppress shame is to remove oneself from God, which burns a hole in the heart of oneself.

11. Things or actions which violate the basic stature of the “I” are violations of dignity, which is transitive to the obfuscation of the truth of worth.

12. The body is the final site of dignity, and thus also the site of shame. In the case where the spirit and its components—will, intellect, desire—are brutalised by force, the body remains. The natural variegation of human emotionality is whittled down to a frenetic, binary flickering which only knows to ask “live or not live?”, without the freedom to venture “of what kind of life?”.

    1. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace: “Nothing in the world can rob us of the power to say ‘I’. Nothing except extreme affliction. Nothing is worse than extreme affliction which destroys the ‘I’ from outside, because after that we can no longer destroy it ourselves. Though they may have lost their ‘I’, it does not mean that they have no more egoism. Quite the reverse. To be sure, this may occasionally happen when a dog-like devotion is brought about, but at other times the being is reduced to naked, vegetative egoism. An egoism without an ‘I’.”

13. Pain is sacred to the degree that it clarifies rather than distorts the truth of experience.

14. This is an aspect of asceticism, which is a method for mysticism. Mysticism is a way of knowing, through direct experience, the universal (God) by way of attempting to collapse the particular (the “I”).

15. Pain is the way that the body first articulates the ineffable. It is the precursor to other forms of language, which bridge the soul, contained and alone in the body, to other souls.

    1. Byung-Chul Han, The Palliative Society (on Christian mystic Teresa of Ávila): “It is with pain that narration begins. The Christian narrative gives pain a language. It also transforms her body into a stage. Pain deepens the relationship with God; it creates intimacy, intensity.”

16. In this way, pain is sacred to the person who owns it, but the pain of others, which is harm, is not sacred. We cannot make general judgments on the value of others’ pain, and we certainly cannot make judgments on the pain of others where their pain is somehow entangled in our benefit.

    1. John Steinbeck, East of Eden: “Nobody has the right to remove any single experience from another. Life and death are promised. We have a right to pain.”

17. To briefly question, or reframe, the truth of worth. Why, without God, are humans worthy? One answer: Because, by way of consciousness, human beings have the potential to experience happiness.

18. The statement that ‘human beings are worthy because they have the potential to experience happiness’ is equivalent to the statement that ‘God created us in order that we may worship God and God’s creations.’

19. The potential to experience happiness is implemented constitutionally as ‘the right to the pursuit of happiness’. Pursuit is a non-trivial word that bears the existential impossibility, and even the inherent contradiction, in attaining or guaranteeing happiness.

20. The pursuit of happiness can be and is universal, but the experience of happiness is not, and even that which is had, is fleeting.

    1. Rilke’s Ninth Elegy:

       Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

       why, then,
       must we be human and, shunning destiny,
       long for it?...
               Oh, not because happiness, that over-hasty profit of loss impending, exists.

21. To state that happiness is fleeting is not defeatist nor cynical; this is only the case if singular possession is the goal. A bird that is free is fleeting; it may move freely from place to place, and sing its song wherever and to whomever it likes.

22. Happiness is not the same as love, but they have an intimate relation.

23. Happiness, like love, has an evasive quality. The more one tries to circumscribe it with the bounds of concept, the more it becomes difficult to grasp.

    1. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love:
       Where does love come from, where does it have its origin and its source, where is the place that is its abode from which it springs forth? Indeed, that place is hidden or is in what is hidden. There is a place in a person's innermost being; it is from this place that the life of love springs forth; for "from the heart flow the springs of life." But you cannot see this place: however far you force your way in, the source withdraws into the distance and into concealment; even when you have forced your way furthest in, the source always remains a bit further in, just as, precisely when you are nearest the source of a spring, it is further away.

24. To look at things that are evasive, look at them slightly askance, at its negations, to see the shape of its outlines, but do not look directly into the centre. This method bears some resemblance to apophatic theology or via negativa.

25. Happiness is experienced when love becomes self-conscious. When we look through the eyes of love, we are always un-self-conscious. When we become aware of this love, we identify it as happiness.

26. Love is not the same as worship, but they have a powerful relation.

27. To return to the equivalence of the two statements: (1) ‘human beings are worthy because they have the capacity to experience love and happiness’ and (2) ‘God created us in order that we may worship God and God’s creations.’ Though I have stated that they are equivalent, there is also a meaningful distinction.

28. The orientation toward worship, rather than happiness, reverses the gaze, pointing the light outwards instead of upon the light itself.

29. Beauty and worship have a strong complementary relation. Beauty incites worship in the witness. Worship, or devotion, is the necessary gaze through which beauty can be created.

30. Beauty is the reason for being, but it is self-evident in experience, not logic, and we ought to resist the temptation to rationalise this, rather than to make it manifest through work.

31. To attempt to rationalise beauty is to avoid the necessary work of surrender.

32. God made all things beautiful and perfect. This is an extension of the truth of worth as applied to all things beyond human beings. As animals of worship we spend our life attempting to discern this truth manifest, as we are not God, to whom this perfection is evident. This is ‘beauty in the mundane’.

33. As with a diamond that catches the light in a way that is particular to the angle of the viewer, beauty is both objective and subjective, and manifest in various ways. The diamond both catches the light from every direction, but is also seen in one way exactly by those who are looking at it.

34. Pain can have a beautiful, and even transcendental, quality. But as stated earlier, the meaning of pain is private to its subject, and should not be co-opted by others to justify harm, to appease guilt, or to luxuriate in voyeurism.

    1. To return to Weil: “Nothing is worse than extreme affliction which destroys the ‘I’ from outside, because after that we can no longer destroy it ourselves.” ‘Outside’ is a non-trivial word here, because it clarifies that affliction without consent is not transcendental, as to believe such a thing would be transitive to becoming complacent with the suffering of others.

35. Love is the gaze through which all inherits beauty, including shame, and pain.

36. This is how love becomes fraught, because to love is to put a preferential gaze upon an object over others.

37. To elaborate the statement that all are worthy because of the intrinsic potential to experience happiness: all are worthy because deep down in the nucleus of the soul is the seed of aspiration. To want to want.

    1. Henrik Karlsson, Love is about being invested in someone’s continual expansion: “I was aspiring, to use the word with the meaning Agnes Callard gives it. To aspire is to want to want something before you actually want it.”

    2. Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small: “There is no way around the sense, lodged hard in the throat, that the greatest human longings exceed any possible fulfilment. To want something with sufficient fervor is to want it beyond the possibility of ever getting enough of it. It is this longing, phenomenologically keen enough to strike some of us as fact, that has led religious thinkers to posit the existence of eternity, the logic being that we seem to need it?”

38. All people long for love and expansion. Even those who are mired in their own evil hate their own suffering, and which can only be true if one desires happiness, which is the transitive toward the desire for love and goodness, though the nature of these objects and the method to attain them may be unclear.

39. But purveyors of evil should not be granted grace on the grounds that they perpetrate the force that violates dignity, and thus obfuscate the truth of worth. This is similar to the ‘problem of evil’.

    1. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: “human communities should not be ordered in such a way that their members are ‘wounded in their love of the good’” … “Anyone who … refuses certain obligations [toward social order], has, in their heart, entered into a pact with crime.”

40. Obfuscating the truth of worth is the secondary crime of evil, as indifference toward or rejection of inherent worth is the necessary condition for evil. In this way, evil is able to continue creating itself.

41. To return again to the fact that pain can become justified but complacency harm and suffering cannot. The bind of believers is that to affirm God is to either discount the truth of worth, or to discount the suffering of other human beings which counts toward disproving the truth of worth.

    1. To discount the suffering of human beings is a repugnant conclusion; those who affirm God whilst denying suffering corrupt the image of God in service of their true god, which is apathy.

    2. But, to reject the truth of worth is to deny God, who grants the truth of worth, and as above, accept the prior condition for evil.

    3. Synthesis: To accept (1) the truth of suffering as manifest (2) uphold the truth of worth as real but not presently manifest is to partake in the work of God. This is the way of holding tension necessary to bridge between reality and an ideal, which is the activity of ethics.

42. Evil is not solely outside in others and visible enemies, it is also inside. Situated beside each person’s capacity to care for some people is also the capacity to be indifferent to the rest. This is preference, which is an expression of freedom.

43. To prefer is to desire the world to shift its balance toward one’s gravitational centre of pleasure.

44. In this way, there may be a fraught relationship between love and evil, returning to the preferential nature of love. We each desire a shift in balance toward that which we love, so to be in love, is also to be at war with what others love.

45. In this way each person, without exception, is separated from God, and can make no final claim to absolute virtue.

46. To be real is to be separate from the perfection of God, and to exist in the plane where good and evil are mixed.

    1. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace: “Only imaginary good things have no contradiction in them: the girl who wants to have numerous offspring, the social reformer who dreams of the people’s well-being, etc., meet with no obstacles so long as they do not pass on to action; they sail gaily forward in a sea of pure but fictitious goodness; the shock of hitting the rocks is the signal which wakens them. We must accept this contradiction— the sign of our misery and our greatness—in all its bitterness. It is through fully experiencing and suffering from the absurdity as such of this universe where good and evil are mixed that we attain to the pure goodness whose kingdom is not of this world.”

47. But to dream of a state of perfection is of equal necessity, which as mentioned, is the activity of ethics. Dreaming of perfection requires the instruments of both an aesthetic imagination and sharp intellect. (Enacting dreams of perfection requires the exertion of the body, or the hands.)

48. In the acknowledgment of the difficulty of realised universal love, we have fields of work to attempt to deal with or remove the trade-offs of love. This is how we create capacity for more love to reach toward the universal, which is the same as compassion.

49. For example, to attempt to love without conflict is to do economics. Economics is the field of work of alleviating the conditions of scarcity that incubate necessity-based conflict, which can be transitive to the work of evil.

    1. Nicholas Stern: “Markets are how we take care of people we don’t know.”

50. To attempt economics is therefore to attempt to excise the pernicious evils of love, which is unpleasant, because it requires the acknowledgment that love contains evil. This is why everybody hates economists.

51. To attempt to love in spite of necessary conflict is to do politics. Politics and economics have a bitter relation.

52. (Here I reach the end of my thought. As R observes: “Philosophy is not about politics, but philosophers love being political. Science is not about metaphysics, but scientists love being metaphysical. Both do a terrible job at it.” I am not good at thinking about politics.)

I know it’s a good song ‘cause now I’m driving and my windshield is a movie screen, and the sun is so bright. I’m zipping through a little lane of trees with leaves fanning out in the colours of ripening mangoes and I’m also trying to concentrate on what is good about it so I could describe it better, because if I could describe it better, I could get more of what makes it good. Everything I love I want more of—it seems to me there is no way anyone could feel any other way about life. I want more, more, more.

But sometimes appreciation requires concentration and sometimes it requires looseness. Grip it too hard and the thing suffocates in your grip. Soften your focus and it becomes more colourful. And I’m getting in this state of mind, listening, where I can’t tell if I’m imagining things or remembering them. But imagining and remembering are somewhat the same, according to the reconstructive theory of memory. I think what is happening is that I’m imagining things but remembering feelings. And so I’m here, in this car, I’m trying to put into words what I’m experiencing because of this song. One thing I like about music is it’s got a way of making you feel good about being a little heartbroken with the way of things. It’s getting me worked up, the wall of sound in this song, like I’m covered in it, and I’ve been thinking of what I need to say, and maybe the reason I can’t say it is ‘cause I need to say it a different way, and it feels like the guitar is tryna say something I’m tryna say too.

I drive past these girls in ponytails and sweatpants, groups of people moving in Millennial Green, people carrying flowers to their car. It is the middle of the day, a swallow is weaving through the balconies of the terraces, and the sun is scrolling overhead, and I’m feeling my mind go to this other place, the place beneath the surface of things.

I am trying to become a better animal, but sometimes I’m not entirely sure how to do that. I don’t do it by thinking about my feelings. I remember the first time A and I had a 1:1 dinner and she asked me, why is it that thinking about myself is so painful? I don’t know. I suspect that maybe it’s something to do with the fact that deep down you know that all the stuff inside is never ending. A vertiginous feeling of looking over and seeing only endless endlessness. I try to be non-neurotic now; I don’t think much about my feelings these days (a recurring thing I hear myself think). I don’t think much… I don’t think much (lying)… I’m simple (in a complicated way). In fact the things I say I don’t think much about, those are the things I think about most. What I mean when I say I didn’t think much about it is that I thought about it constantly, and still none of it made any damn sense. So I might as well have not thought about it at all, and please don’t ask me about it again. Maybe the heart of it is that the spirit, the substance inside of the soul, it is not supposed to be plunged into but it is supposed to be poured out.

As a writer you’re always trying to extract universal truth from reality, but it’s silly because the more you look for insight the more you see it’s full of disordered, discontinuous chaos. This is the reason we make stories, they provide the frame in which the insight has any validity at all. But the trouble is most of us haven’t even got the slightest clue what sort of story we’re in, right now, at this moment. Genre is one place to start. Well. Your life could be a horror. A tragicomedy. A romance, the Christmas kind. Now the problem is my life isn’t one genre, it’s a gigantic cinema complex, and the men outside on the ladders are changing the feature films on the marquee every day, and every room I walk into is a different movie, with a different sense of time, a different set of characters, a different mood. Different endings.

The reason I write is because I really do believe there is everything in everyone, that I’m like you and you’re like me, but this isn’t an obvious fact to people unless they can see it for themselves, unless you show them the part of you that’s like them. And it means sometimes I write stuff that’s weird and niche but if someone who is a little weird and likes to write reads it and savours it and writes something interesting then I’m still writing, I’m just writing through someone else, and at some point I’ll get, in a twisted metamorphic way, to the person who thinks they’re not like me, eventually. Kierkegaard calls his way of writing Works of Love an effort of ‘awakening’ rather than edification, because most wisdom we already know, and it is something we need to heave up from that darkness into the daylight like a sweet lost puppy from the well of our soul. And the wells look separate, but they’re not, they’re all connected, joined at the veins to one big water source. And one thing I hate about these nihilists is if there’s nothing true at the heart of reality, how can we have any common ground at all? You think there’s no way we can talk to each other? You think you’re alone, in some irrefutable, existential way? I’m right here. I’m trying to reach you.

When I think of beauty I can’t conceive of it in precise philosophical terms. I’m confused when people make clear claims about it. “Beauty is simplicity,” says a technologist—“Beauty is effortlessness,” says a performer—“Beauty is scarcity,” says an economist. Is any of that true? Is that all it is? I think it’s more than that. When I’m thinking of beauty I’m thinking of everything I ever loved, I’m imagining them in this great big breathing communion with each other—the interrelation, the constellation of all gleaming things, the yawning canvas of the sky stretched wide over the Earth, the great big sprawling vine of eternity unfurling from the clouds—I’m tracing my finger over lineages, I’m thinking of psychedelic rock and how my father showed The Beatles to me when I was young, and I’m thinking of music of the 50’s-70’s, and I’m thinking of the Beats and I loved the repetitive ecstatic drone of Howl and discovered that even static words had a rhythm, I found myself generating words and images to fit the sound of the drone rather than the other way round, and it made the things I said somehow more true, and how sometimes, like the Beats, talking nonsense makes more sense than sense——and this song, it’s so repetitive, in a good way——and I learned of how Ginsburg was friends with Dylan and Kerouac and Kerouac’s love of jazz and call and response and Walt Whitman———am I still describing this song?————and because I’m thinking of Walt Whitman I’m thinking of the sky again, and I’m thinking of everything, and I’m thinking if there really were a way to unshackle everyone from unfreedom, whatever that means, I’d do it, if only I weren’t only me——————I’m thinking of you and I’m thinking of me, I’m thinking of first kisses and parting goodbyes, I’m thinking of balloons flying to their demise, I’m thinking of the entirety of the world with exactly no more and no less less. I’m thinking of headbanging at Year 6 disco, I’m thinking of the time I listened to Shirim by Melody’s Echo Chamber, which also had these punchy drums that made realise my heart was made of glass, and I’m there again crossing the street at night blinking away these stupid tears in my stupid eyes, ‘cause I confessed my love to this person that I shouldn’t have, but I needed to, I couldn’t help myself. That’s the reason I’m thinking Race for the Prize by the Flaming Lips sounds so goddamn good. And all of this happening in a moment, between two crashing cymbals. And I’m thinking how it’s a wonder that these things which I love, which otherwise would not know each other—they know of their likeness through me.

It’s a secret only I know, what makes all of these things each so good. And because of that only I can make the language for it, so it’ll take my whole life to try and say it. Maybe that’s why beauty is what makes life worth living. It’s tautological. There’s no me without it, there’s no living; I’m not being sentimental. It is the proof of my existence. Irrevocable, inseparable. Beauty “isn’t” anything, it’s an event, it’s the thing that fills you up with the world entire and the will to do anything, and if you can do anything, then you could do everything. And it feels so good because it gets at what is true: there is everything in you, it’s there. And so when I say beauty “is” something, all I’m saying is that something is what the whole good world is made of as manifest to me.

So, here’s my pithy philosophical claim about beauty. “Beauty is conversational,” says a writer. You and me, we make it together. You read it and you understand, now you know, you have a part of my secret, it’s our way of talking about the truth, and there’s a shared likeness between all of us which is hard to describe but we know that likeness is good, and it makes us fall a little more in love with the world somehow. I’m sorry for the cliché, but it’s true. I don’t know why things are beautiful on, like, a metaphysical level. I don’t know what the logical, categorical, fundemontological properties of it are. I know it when I see it. I just do, I swear I do. It’s the secret only I know. Love: it always starts as a secret, but it always begs to be shared, or it burns.

And this thing about you being like me, deep down, I can’t explain it to you, except that you like the song I like, and you like the things I like, because we agree they’re good things, the fact that it’s true for us might as well make it true for the entire world, and that’s all, really. That’s all I’ve got. I’m out of juice. I can’t explain it.

I’m trying to get to you, but I need to say it a different way, or I need to walk into a different room with a different genre, or I need to do a different kinda dance. I just wanna be with you, just wanna have more of the good stuff. I wanna talk, until I don’t wanna talk. I don’t think much. I’m simple. I really am. Deep down.

Every time I write I’m trying to reach everyone, eventually. But I’m also trying to get to you by getting to everyone. That’s how much I love you.

Listen, the song is almost over. The sun is coming up over the hill and it is slicing the world into two halves of Heaven and Earth. The tops of the trees are are being lifted by the chin to the light, and they are encircled in halos, and they are gleaming brighter than all the wealth you’ve imagined in your idle daydreaming. The path to freedom is right here, you just need to look. Look. Remember it. It happens every day but you are going to forget, as you do every day. But this time, remember. Try to remember.

I want to play the song over and over again, and I do, but now I’ve juiced it out of its spiritual magic; the thing it seemed to move inside of me is now no longer dancing. It’s become mechanical, and it’s beauty is already another memory. Now I’ll need another. And I’m hoping this memory will lay the path for more beauty, but I don’t know, I don’t know. It’s ending, it’s going away, the door is closing, and I’m tryna build a bridge but I’m all out of bricks. And when you ask me why I like this song, I’ll say, “I don’t know, just made me feel a type of way,” and I’m going to need more. Driving, I’m always thinking when I go driving.

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Tic-Psychology by Euwyn Goh

You believe you’re different to the suicidal person you saw on the news. You believe you are different to Hitler, Mao, Stalin — at risk of sounding cliché — none of us are different, we’re all only tuned differently, in terms of quantity, never quality, right? You are the same as every traumatised patient who has ever been on Freud’s couch, on Lacan’s couch. Every single one of them. No one is ever qualitatively different — only quantitatively tuned differently.

On The Origin Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes

If understanding a thing is arriving at a familiarizing metaphor for it, then we can see that there always will be a difficulty in understanding consciousness. For it should be immediately apparent that there is not and cannot be anything in our immediate experience that is like immediate experience itself.

Tracy K. Smith

Poetry is the notion that your life must be as important to you as mine is to me. Therefore, your life is as important to me as mine is to me.

Why poetry is a variety of mathematical experience by Peli Grietzer

Baumgarten’s theory of good poetry had a kind of absurd, computer-sciencey brilliance to it: good poetry is simply a large quantity of sensate thought. The trick to this absurd-sounding idea is that, to think a lot but all at once, we have to think associatively, self-referentially, vividly, temporally – anything and everything that keeps our thoughts interconnected in a living whole. And these interconnections themselves, as we grasp them, not only maintain the thought-network but enter into it as ineffable thoughts of relations, and then as ineffable thoughts of relations of (ineffable thoughts of) relations and so on, until we reach the fullness of ‘beautiful thinking’. Even our experience of the poem’s beauty, finally, is the ineffable thought of the overall interconnection of the network of ineffable thought, completing the beautiful thought with thought of its own beauty. (And on we go!)

Good Old Neon by David Foster Wallace

The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali — it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.

Iris Murdoch

Love is the extremely difficult realization that other people are real.

Agnes Martin was a descendant of the same lineage—she was an admiring friend of Rothko’s—but in contrast there was nothing ‘punk’ to her. She carried herself with a passive and childlike demeanour, and her oeuvre also converged on an expression that was quieter and more orderly: she was obsessed with the emotions of purity such as innocence, happiness and love.

Such expression found form in the withholding of emotion: milky white pastels beaming in straight bands, held taut by graphite grids drawn gently across the canvas. White, white, white, and repetition, repetition, repetition. Where Pollock and Rothko pulled open portals for emotional absorption, Martin’s work was to craft a container in which the noise of emotion was muted entirely, reducing reality into geometric abstraction. It was her belief that this removal was how one approaches transcendence towards the true emotions of happiness and beauty, an approach that ultimately made her the vanguard for aesthetic Minimalism.

Contrary to the appearance of her work, Martin’s life was seared through with suffering—the very thing that threatened purity, but was also perhaps what gave her Minimalism its most special qualities.

Minimalism without sterility

Martin’s work embodied Minimalism without its modern perversions—those of sterility, that untouched soullessness.

I had seen a series of hers last year, enclosed by them in a white hexagonal room. Their repetitive and regular quality is soothing; it invoked in me a feeling of being an infant who sees the fuzz of morning light softly threading through a gauzy muslin covering, so vivid as to nearly pass as a memory.

Spanning six feet across, the scale of her paintings invite the impulse to stand up close and inspect the minutiae. The viewer obeys an automatic instinct to test her work for the perfection they proclaim to represent. Her colours are clean and consistent; her grids perfectly measured; no colour spills recklessly into another. Neighbouring colours share only a delicate fence of overlap that makes them vibrate more brightly against one another. Even to an untrained artistic eye, patience and care are qualities of the artist that are communicated through the work.

In Beautiful Life, the canvas presents what I can only describe as subliminal rainbow, an effect created through sensitive tunings of mere white. There is a fragility to its expression; look too quickly or—as far as intrusive thoughts tend to go when encountering clean and expensive surfaces—swipe or spill too carelessly and the beauty is lost.

But it is in Martin’s classic grids where her concealed monomania discloses itself. The acrylic wash in Untitled (1965) gently crinkles into folds of blue velvet, a lovely opiating blanket needled by a sea of neutral white pinheads. Her meticulous grids impose firm structure in vulnerable graphite. In the insistence of such structure, there is no focal point, and thus the viewer’s gaze is forced to submit to a state of relaxation that allows the work to enter whole. It portrays withholding without coldness, the perfection of the sky that is as somehow as distant as it is also enveloping.

Struggling for peace

What is most impressive is the requirement of a clear mind needed to paint; paint washes are made to flow, overlap and leak, but Martin’s hand restrains them from their excesses with a steady and calm will. It would be easy to imagine Martin as a euphoric monk vacuously at work, someone who enjoys the mundane repetitions of her work to an inhuman degree.

It is a testament to the fact that much of the hard work is in cultivating the artist—the fundamental way of being—as much as it is in the physical production of the art. Though Martin was deeply influenced by Buddhism, she was no vacant Western mindfulness evangelist but a seeker in dogged pursuit of an abstract and totalising truth, one available only through the deconstruction of the self. Martin had her most productive artistic period after leaving New York and disappearing into the New Mexico desert, only making a reprisal into the art world after twenty years of radio silence—a move that had her dubbed a sort of ‘desert mystic artist’.

It followed a period of personal strife: the death of her good friend Ad Reinhardt in 1967, the destruction of her studio, and a spate of hospitalisations for schizophrenic episodes. Her artistic visions would arrive in her mind after days or weeks of waiting, fully-formed, tiny thumbnails complete with detail that only needed to be faithfully transferred to canvas. A purist and perfectionist who prostrated herself before visions of truth, any canvas that deviated in any small way from her vision was to be destroyed.

Many would interpret her artistic pursuit of purity and ego dissolution as nothing more than a way to elaborate way to cope with a life torn through by a long storyline of trauma which reached all the way to her childhood. But such a glib psychologisation undermines and contradicts her fundamental theory of art. For Martin, the distortions of personal emotion were the enemy that stood in the way of truth:

Personal emotions are emotions that apply to a person—like the soap opera. … They are anti-art. … I hope that’s clear—personal emotions as against other kinds of emotions. … Happiness is not a personal emotion, it is a universal.

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Perfection you cannot have

What Martin seems to claim is the existence of an eternal peace which sits beneath the layer of language, beneath the apparent solidity of symbols, beneath tapestries of meaning; it is essential, and it belongs to everybody. Her stated aim through her art was to give the “gift of innocence”.

It is this ethos that is so meticulously threaded through her work, as many of her admirers report experiencing so personally moved by something that can also feel so remote at the same time; a suggestion perhaps of universal order that is both impersonal and fundamentally warm and benevolent, a ‘universal emotion’.

As many others seem to do, I reach towards her sometimes for comfort. I have like anyone my share of grievances with life: losses that I feel have arrived too early and that life feels have arrived just on time, the keen sense that there is little experience gained without loss of innocence, and the prickling sensation of being as aware of my failings as I am also aware of my inability to immediately remedy them. On some pre-verbal level, I long for that prior state of perfection, too.

So I will close my eyes and imagine her paintings vibrating in the pinhole of my imagination, the thread of light split into harmonious pastel beams, the grid set firmly in place like a window frame holding open against that shrinking psychological enclosure. In that window is the smallest intimation of the possibility for peace, and if peace is possible, perhaps other things downstream from it: grace, compassion, joy.

I do not know if innocence can truly be ‘given’ to anyone else, but there is a warmth transmitted in Martin’s work.

Perhaps where the warmth comes from is a sense of solidarity in effort. When people stand close to the work they become endeared to minor betrayals of her hand in the graphite lines. Minor wiggles in the graphite line, or the millimetre of overlapping darkness that shows where Martin had lifted and laid down her ruler again to draw a new line. Such care delivers the maternal charge of a mother who means best—who speaks and moves quietly to keep the peace, who shapes the gentle scaffolding for nurturance, who falls short of her own high standards and responds to her own self-criticism with diligent improvement.

Amidst political turmoil, in the depths of personal suffering, embroiled in psychological torment, Agnes Martin chose to leave everything behind and paint “with her back to the world,” in search of the prior condition of perfection. But what she had to say about it was both harsh and liberating: “Perfection is not necessary. Perfection you cannot have.”

To pursue perfection in spite of categorical failure to achieve it—perhaps this is the evidence of love. And so the inverse is true too: that such minor failures are the fortune of our love of perfection.

For the depth of experience that seems to occur so instantaneously, we are consistently dumbfounded by visitations of Beauty1, granted cruelly with only the most banal and non-explanatory of words: “Wow.” “Beautiful.” “Amazing.” Words which mean nothing, that you know will be met by confusion when you try to explain your experience. Profundity has a way of making one completely idiotic.

And to speak of the way that it works, the only language we have on offer is the pathetic blah-blah of “Beauty is subjective,” a statement that is a good enough way to dismiss others for their arbitrary and stupid objects of affection, and a statement that is nice to mutter quietly when we feel defensive about our tastes as well as insecure about our ability to defend them.

But it always feels like a dishonest concession. We say it while tasting a bitterness seeping beneath our tongue. No, to concede to subjectivity is never good enough to talk about what we ourselves deem as beautiful. The concession to subjectivity is a motion to exile one’s passions as the mere waste product of solipsism—to deny the vibrations that resonate at the golden heartstrings of Beauty—to suffocate the miracle of the first flame because of the doubt of non-believers who have never encountered its heat, only to die pointlessly of hypothermia! Indeed, anyone who has been visited by Beauty knows it as certain as an anvil at the toe of their soul:

It is from this moment that the process of conversion starts, and one starts to feel a little evangelical. You walk around trying to tell your friends about a niche arthouse movie they haven’t seen that changed your life. You froth over a crush who your friends know is objectively Some Guy. You try to explain the elegance of a mathematical proof as it bears on the very loveliness of reality itself. Your friends are kind, so they listen, but they don’t believe you. It’s all subjective, after all.

All of this you expected, but you can’t help but act otherwise; the disease of passion has been growing in you and it means to crawl out. It will tear your body open hoping to see sunlight. Oh, goodness. Look at this mess. Now you are trying your own hand at filmmaking! You are reading memoirs of the greats! Your friends look on with a bemused horror. As I had said before: passion—of any form—has a way of making one as stupid as they are also terribly productive.

Despite the fact that you can’t explain what it was, there is something that the witness of Beauty had made clear to you about the world that wasn’t clear before. Some sort of knowledge that made hope entirely reasonable—even imperative. That made some kind of motion stir inside of you without effort.

But what the hell was it? If you know it, shouldn’t you be able to explain it?

The visitation of Beauty, for all its momentary glory, is equally frustrating, alienating, and utterly stupefying.

A Visitation in Three Parts

I. NEW KNOWLEDGE (/REORIENTATION)

In Why poetry is a variety of mathematical experience, Peli Grietzer explores aesthetic experience as a form of knowledge in its own right.

Prior to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s theory of aesthetics, in 18th century Germany art was understood as anything that was both (i) imagined and (ii) evoked emotion. It followed that art was understood as frivolity: a means of escapism or pleasure, with no enduring or universal value.

But Baumgarten argued that there was a unique significance that poetry has: it is a way to prompt a form of ineffable thinking, a category of thought opposed and complementary to that of logical, sequential, discursive thought:

Although poems cannot make our thoughts transparent like philosophy, they can enlarge the scope of our thoughts to a point that reveals their fullest nature. A poem is a network of interconnected images, feelings and apprehensions that achieves a kind of rational completeness in its density, diversity and harmony.

‘Poetry’ is a term used by Baumgarten in a broader sense, to refer to the distinct type of cognition that aesthetics deals with. A biologist for instance may see the structure of DNA as a kind of ‘poetry’: there is something in this pattern that resonates with a deeper understanding of reality, even though it is opaque to someone who is not familiar with the intricacies of biology.

In this way their appreciation is subjective, sure, but in the sense that it not only evokes subjective feelings, but it reflects one’s subjective understanding of reality. The experience of Beauty is an awakening of the intelligence of the subject, illuminating the depth of the imaginary world inside, which is itself an image of the external world; a fractal mirroring. It is the key to one’s specific door that opens up to the universe of knowledge.

…good poetry is simply a large quantity of sensate thought. The trick to this absurd-sounding idea is that, to think a lot but all at once, we have to think associatively, self-referentially, vividly, temporally – anything and everything that keeps our thoughts interconnected in a living whole. And these interconnections themselves, as we grasp them, not only maintain the thought-network but enter into it as ineffable thoughts of relations, and then as ineffable thoughts of relations of (ineffable thoughts of) relations and so on, until we reach the fullness of ‘beautiful thinking’. For Baumgarten, thought coming to the thought of its own beauty was a kind of sensate QED: our faculty of (sensate) reason recognising the completeness of a thought.

If we imagine the sumtotal of knowledge as an immense network of ideas2, we can think of typical discursive thought process as the methodical, one-by-one traversal of nodes through the network; in contrast, poetry is the sensation that expels us from this placement into outer space. The mind suddenly experiences an increase in dimensionality, expanding from the narrow corridor of incremental reason to a sky-flying bird’s eye view that comprehends the interconnected whole, brief though it may be. Such an aesthetic idea allows us to hold in place a rich map of reality somewhere in the deeper layers of our imagination. It has a quality of revelation and enriched perspective, a realisation of the constrictions of our previous understanding.

An aesthetic idea is more significant than the impulse of emotion—as is implied by rudimentary concepts of art and beauty, whereby any emotive response supposedly sufficient proof of quality—because it is not isolated to the feelings of the subject (solipsism) but it is an expression of the subject’s relation to objective reality.

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II. ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND (/FUTILITY)

Beauty is separate to Truth. An analogy, though illuminating, is not exact, like a proof is. A representation is no substitute for argument, and conversely, a concept is no substitute for an experience. They are, however, projectiles aimed towards the same star (via Grietzer):

As Kant observes: ‘An aesthetic idea is the counterpart of an idea of reason [God, self, logos], which is, conversely, a concept to which no intuition (representation of the imagination) can be adequate.’

Ideas of reason are concepts that gave up their grounding in concrete, worldly experience to reach for the transcendent. Aesthetic ideas, by analogy, are concepts that reach for the transcendent while remaining grounded in experience, but give up on being concepts.

Beauty by this definition is knowledge which is ineffable, and so the corollary is that for something to qualify as beautiful, it must not be effable (explainable). If it is explainable, it is better said as argument rather than art.

But there is always a desperation to explain it regardless. When it comes to the progenitors of Beauty—the generational talents and artists of our times—so much of culture is dedicated not just to great work, but to the mystical worship of their creators. In the absence of direct access to the genius of such violently productive individuals, we lowly proletarians scour the muck and dust left in their wake. Interviews, memoirs, slow-motion deconstructed replays of artistry are abundant. We scrutinise these texts for clues, like theologians trying to learn the face of God through every facet of divine scripture. The savant of our preferred artform materialises in place for an interview, and of all the questions that could be asked to this angel, it’s always the same one: “How did you do it?”

In a Rolling Stone interview with Bob Dylan, the interviewer strains to extract meaning from Dylan’s work:

Dylan’s responses are not a product of laziness or cynicism—no artist so prolific and influential could reasonably be accused of such carelessness—but seem to be actually an inherent part of his process. This pattern of stupidity recurs again and again with great talents:

• Murakami on writing: “I don’t have any plan, I’m just writing, and while I’m writing, strange things happen very naturally, very automatically.”

• Karl Ove Knausgaard on how he comes up with his ideas: “I don’t know. I’m a very intuitive writer”.

• Meryl Streep describes acting “an art that I find in its deepest essence to be completely mysterious,” and in another interview, “total immersion into possibility... infinitely interesting... there’s no bottom to it... a lot of it is just great, deep, belief.”

• David Lynch being interviewed on his films (paraphrased): “What’s the meaning of your films?” “The meaning of the film is the film. If I meant something else, I would have made that.”

This impulse to understand where Beauty comes from is so epidemic that even the greatest savants of their own craft are not immunised from it. David Foster Wallace, famously literary savant, wrote of his obsession with analysing the physical talent of tennis savant Tracy Austin, recognising that there was “some deep compulsion both to experience genius in the concrete and to universalize genius in the abstract.”

But there is nothing abstract to understand. The true aesthetic idea is complete, an experience completely impossible to substitute by concept. In a sense the greatest talents are merged with their creativity: they are as transcendent to witness as their product, emblematic of an apparent paradox of emptiness and sophistication, as if the mind had emptied its intelligence comprehensively into their body of work—a level of devotion to craft that is mystifying. The aesthetic is no cheese wrapped around a dog’s medication, it certainly is no political or propaganda vehicle, but it is pure, raw experience decanted from the contamination of predetermined interpretation.3

It is for this reason that geniuses are also so astoundingly dumb about their process: creation is a process of continual forgetting, of the steady dismantling of ego into real work, of plumbing into the deep and open waters of unconsciousness where the ambitions of agenda are suffocated.

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III. HUNGER TO CREATE (/ENVY)

It is therefore inevitable that we fail on all rational accounts to understand Beauty. It becomes clear that all this conceptualisation of it does not serve toward its replication. Its ethereal grace it resists our surgical tools of deconstruction. It is offended by one’s attempt to intrude its palace with the force of logic. What is needed is something stranger, wilder—more sexual.

The essence of Beauty, as above, is not rational but erotic. Its visitation incites the irrepressible desire to claw inside the skin of the object of love, to see through its eyes, not only to understand, but through such understanding, to ultimately become.

This is the crux of David Foster Wallace’s fixation on Tracy Austin, as a failed competitive tennis player turned neurotic writer, he was obsessed with the apparent spaciousness and ease of Austin’s mind. And in turn it is the crux of Sasha Chapin’s writing of his fixation on David Foster Wallace, The David Foster Wallace Disease, born from an envy of such idiosyncratic and observational precision. But Chapin concludes in all his frenetic copying he could never become David Foster Wallace and David Foster Wallace concludes in all his analysing he could never become Tracy Austin.

The struggle to understand, even though it is futile, cannot be bypassed on the way to creation. It is through this struggle we surrender to what was the only ever really available action, imitation: our consolation for the futility of merging. While Chapin and Wallace lament their inability to become their personal gods, their work is infected by their worship of them all the way through. One could call this inspiration, but this soft and agreeable word hides the depth and mania of motivation: a suffering rage against the constriction of selfhood, an unnatural and pathological desire to abandon one vessel of experience for another.

This is the erotic way in which creativity flows, as a self-perpetuating, reproductive force. Beauty awakens an inexplicable intelligence in its witness, filling them with the charge to understand, to work, to struggle, to imitate, to create. All creative work carries the private shame of our inadequacies to live up to an image of Beauty we saw elsewhere.

Culture, then, is not the product of people creating random artifacts but it is the organic product of Beauty attempting to replicate itself through the merging and differentiation of creative work. It makes suffering creators of its previously ignorant subjects, who struggle to pull trapped vision from inside of them to bring to the world. Geniuses then are not understood as progenitors of originality inspired from seemingly nowhere, but conduits subservient to a greater, superior, vital life force.

It is here we arrive at an understanding of creation that looks less like reason and more like mysticism. It is at this moment, once the tools of understanding are exhausted and still found wanting, that we are ready to free fall into the abyss without tether and fuck God. This is the only rational response to Beauty, and is the only way to create.

Q.E.D.

I am hoping it is clear to my freshly acquired yearn-pilled subscribers that this space is something of an ambivalent and sometimes hostile territory regarding the topic of yearning. However since you are subscribed here by choice in this here land I also trust dear reader that you are of hardy and firm constitution to survive some bitterly lovely prose, because I have something to say:

Substack has a yearnslop problem, and frankly you losers deserve better

Love gets a bad rap as being low-brow and it’s because most yearnslop sucks. I don’t believe one bit that writing on the topic of love makes a piece inherently unintelligent. There’s strong whiffs of misogyny to this idea: romance as a largely feminine preoccupation lacking in substance, worldly relevance, that is rooted in a submissive desire to be saved by love. To people who believe this all the way through—yuck, ya boring, go home.

I do think if you identify as a Yearner (non-derogatory), there’s a good chance you have a healthy instinct at play: there’s something deeply important to celebrate and aestheticise about love!

But at the same time it’s true that what you consume shapes your ideas about the world, and there’s also a decent chance you may or may not be addicted to yearnslop, the most popular content on this godforsaken platform, which may or may not be slowly perverting your understanding of virtuous Love. And it is certainly not misogynistic to go and say—a lot of this yearn content is baaad. Like, really bad.

To a Yearner (non-derogatory), for whom Love is one of the utmost virtues of being alive on this dreary, desecrated Earth, the proliferation of yearnslop should be understood as a real shame! A world where love feels glib and cheap is an impoverished one indeed.

So my main goal isn’t to neg the Yearners—though as a grudging member of this weak-wristed coalition I will do so gleefully anyway—but to ask what it is that is so lacking and frankly immoral about the aesthetically bankrupt way we understand and talk about what is, without further need for proof, one of the most transformative and uplifting parts of the human experience?

Yearnslop gestures sweetly at beauty without meaning

It is time for me to commit some Evil. Without meaning to be cruel, but being cruel anyway, let’s look at some actual writing.

This is a note that circulated the Substack zeitgeist not long ago. It must be true for at least 328 people who liked it that it is not immediately clear why it is Objectively Horrible. I am sure these 328 people are perfectly nice people sparing nary a thought towards why they liked this note while scrolling on the toilet on company time so I wish them personally nothing but peace and goodwill. And to the author’s credit, I too have in the (distant, blue) past ripped a fat bong and fancied my Apple Notes poetry to have surprisingly slapped. But any inquiry shows that this writing is bereft of actual meaning.

Regarding this piece, I have questions.1

Why does the persona want to smell like the blue hour of the night? When does the blue hour of the night occur? Is stepping outside to briefly smell the night-blooming jasmine a common experience that other people or myself are supposed to have? Is it only possible to smell the night-blooming jasmine at precisely this hour? From what department store could I procure this scent and what is it like? (I suppose the obvious answer is “like jasmine, specifically, night-blooming jasmine, whereby we can also surmise that the time of night-blooming occurs at the exact same timing as this ‘blue hour’, whenever that occurs, which probably is either very late or very early”.)

At a most basic level, what does this piece of writing, which has intruded into my conscious awareness without my consent, mean?

The answer is unequivocally nothing. The piece exists as a container for a pre-existing, grasping feeling, it offers itself up as free food for the searching Yearner (neutral) to slide down their gullet and pass through its many pipes while releasing no nutrient contents. It leaves no impression, shape or indentation upon the viewer, other than a diffuse affect of wanting.

But then why does it seem to be beautiful on first blush?

Smell, jasmine, blue, night, brief. These words conjure ideas that seem like they must be deep. They gesture wistfully but incuriously at impermanence—that popular subject of poetry, being so fleeting and fragile by nature of its very form—to give it the appearance of poeticism without actually conferring meaning. This treacly meaninglessness is at the heart of popular Yearnslop, propagated by the proprietors of slop, human or robot they may be. It is easy to imagine the persona of Yearnslop as someone who habitually leans off balconies, leaves behind them the trails of scents or perhaps long translucent gowns, and slowly strokes picture frames in a vaguely erotic fashion.

I can conjure the same affect at will with the effort equivalent to the surrender of a pregnant burp: I wish for the purple immanence of dreams held in my private heart. The ocean calls like a susurrus towards a great becoming, the unknown of a looming millennium. An expanse of wonder stretches towards the horizon, hungry with promise. A fragile flame flickers in the shape of your departing shadow. It is unfortunately this level of writing skill that is vulnerable to the imitations likes of Claude and ChatGPT.

Obviously this random Substack note is pretty small pickings and not worth getting ragebaited by (alas I am a creature of passions both petty and grand), but I think it is emblematic of a very proliferant2 aesthetic on Substack. I think this style of writing is probably downstream from King Yearn-Sloprietor Ocean Vuong, who of course is rich, famous and educated enough to withstand some bullying from some random [snitch] online:

You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.

The effort required to engage with that which is vacuous is far greater than that required to simply absorb it. So, regarding this passage, I have no questions to ask. None other than: What?

Love is about making contact with someone else other than yourself, my dear

fall in love with someone who is curious about the little things in you. not just the things you speak out loud, but the quiet secrets that lie beneath those words. the subtlest ways your eyes move when moved by beauty. the heavy sighs you release when you walk through the door and finally feel safe enough to expand. find someone who knows the music of your moods and who never complains about the key, who always chooses to sing in harmony to your tune.

— an Yearnslop example I made up based on several extremely popular articles

Why is it that Yearnslop so often deals with what it feels like to be the Yearner (derogatory), the imagined persona, and never the actual human or thing that Yearner (derogatory) reaches for? For someone who apparently loves love so much, why is there no interest in another human being at all? Why all this gesturing at minor sensitivities to experience, without the actual clarity and generosity of sight of witnessing someone else into sacralised being?

In Byung-Chul Han’s words, this style of writing emulates an aesthetic of smoothness: “The smooth only conveys an agreeable feeling, which cannot be connected with any meaning or profound sense. It exhausts itself in a ‘Wow’.” The viewer is left—to the failings of the creator moreso than the viewer—with a sensation that something really really cool and even clever probably just happened, but no idea of what exactly it was.

The style is easy to consume and does not confront the viewer, other than to offer as a clean mirror to reflect the viewers’ own, diffuse, unarticulated feeling of lack onto itself. It affirms a viewer’s pre-existing suspicion that they are real and deeply feeling entity, but it does not invite the viewer to question or learn anything else, the very sensation that would take the viewing Yearner (neutral) out of its state of lack and into the state of love it so desires:

Yearnslop is that which is fascinated by the slowly rotating light-projection of its own feelings, mired in treacly euphoria that has no actual object of affection. It may be notionally about love, but it is not enamoured nor attentive towards anyone in particular, only impressed by its own apparent depth of feeling. It caresses itself masturbatorily as if its own body were comprehensive of the landscape of the entire world, and it slides through a viewers’ being wetly and agreeably without impact.

In Yearnslop, there is no substance or form to push against, nothing about which to inquire, nothing to challenge. It invokes no reflection and survives no interrogation. Yearnslop is bereft of passions and confrontations because there is nothing that it cares about save for its own appearance of beauty.

Consequently, the archetypal Yearnslop addict is the depressive romantic who falls in love quickly and exits it just as fast once confronted with the impenetrable and confusing Otherness of a human being with desires and values foreign to itself. They yearn deeply for the days of ignorance when their lover was merely a beautiful and perfect mere receptacle for them to jettison their feelings of inadequacy; the want the lover who plays guitar, says clever things about the economy at dinner, is comprehensively therapised, but never turns into the one who is insecure about turning into his dad or is Slightly Too Libertarian For Your Vibe. The Yearnslop addict abandons their lovers with the same speed that they abandons their thoughts and doubts and discomforts, in search of some great, undefined and unattainable love to fill the shapeshifting hole within.3

Yearnslop, so tragically, turns the Romantic and Earnest Yearner from a virtuous seeker of love into a compulsive consumer of platitudes. Whether consciously intended or not by its human Sloprietors, the cultural ghost of Yearnslop moves agnostic to its physical conduits. It preys on the deepest human cravings for vastness, depth and contact with the Other, and it feeds these existential cravings with empty opiatic placations: smooth monotony, simulated feeling and excessive self-concern.

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Yearnslop wins where there is no discrimination between expression and communication

Overall, I love Substack as a platform, and I’m extremely glad that it has allowed me to solicit enough paltry attention to soothe my ego enough to keep improving at writing.

I don’t think we need to nuclear bomb Yearnslop into outer space, but rather develop a better sense of what are shallow versus deep explorations of the way we love. You can still enjoy low-quality things to relax! You can still write your diary! But it doesn’t mean you should accept it as truth nor the values it implicitly submits for consideration; there’s a difference between creative consumption that you enjoy, and creative consumption that is good for you. You wouldn’t run your relationship like Married at First Sight and you shouldn’t mistake Yearnslop for depth of romantic feeling.

It’s good that everyone can make and publish creative work, and because Love is both one of the most accessible and ineffable parts of human experience, it is prime creative fuel. So it’s an inevitability that it is the subject of far more bad quality writing than good quality writing, but it’s a huge disservice to human experience when Love is represented in such shallow and self-centred terms.

I think Yearnposting is a dominant form of writing on Substack because writers start writing from a mindspace of wanting to make something diffuse and vague more clear and legible. The initial act of sitting down to write is in itself a mindstate of yearning for completion and yearning for beauty. Particularly if you have a poetic sensibility, and therefore a genuine potential for writing really well, you probably turn to the pen in states of uncertainty, confusion, anxiety and disaffection. So what is naturally produced at early levels of skill is an elaborated expression of these emotional states.

And of course in states of disaffection it is natural to reach towards beauty for hope; to write glib love poems in response to heartbreak. Fortunately, emotional expression is easily available to you whenever you like. Unfortunately, the beauty that truly has the power to uplift us out of sorrow is not easily earned and it is even more difficult to communicate to others.

Beauty cannot be invoked by a passing mention of jasmine scents and love cannot be invoked by the bleary-eyed witnessing of wispy silhouettes moving in the distance. If such invocations were sufficient, then so would flowers be enough to awaken the bereaved from the darkness of grief, so would Hallmark cards be enough to fold a couple torn by separation back into matrimony, so would low-effort consolations like “Everything happens for a reason” be sufficient to soothe the lacerations left by bitter and violent demonstrations of Reason’s very abandonment.

Writing that expresses does not automatically communicate. Expression is of course good, but it is good for you, and not necessarily others. To communicate, you must put in work to make contact with another soul.

I will freely offer myself up for artistic humiliation, for I, too, have been the ignorant or sometimes cynical vessel of the spirit of Yearnslop to varying degrees of vapidity: Exhibit a), b), c) on my own Substack. And if you too suspect you are a proprietor of Yearnslop, it is an ordinary failing of the process trying to make art, learning and falling short. But if writing has real value to you then it could seriously benefit you to try to see clearly about what’s falling short and what is really true and worth saying!

OK you gnarly witch where do I get my Michelin-star yearn content?

For crisp, sensitive and simple poetry: Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver is popular for her readability: she is not dense or difficult, but she is very deliberate in her work. Felicity is a collection of love poems.

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I Know Someone

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by Mary Oliver

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I know someone who kisses the way
a flower opens, but more rapidly.
Flowers are sweet. They have
short, beatific lives. They offer
much pleasure. There is nothing in the world that can be said
against them.
Sad, isn’t it, that all they can kiss is the air.

Yes, yes! We are the lucky ones.

There is a sensitivity to subjects of attention outside the writer and a sensitivity to finitude that makes emotional experience meaningful: the ‘short, beatific lives’ of flowers, though undeniably beautiful, seem to represent the initial bloom of love that precedes the pleasure of contact. This gaze while lovely is no rival to actual relation: ‘all they can kiss is the air. / Yes, yes! We are the lucky ones.’ The poem is springy and buoyant as the brief joy it celebrates—it is itself short and beatific.

But aside from an analysis on why this poem is good, but there is a simpler principle to it: when you read it, you can tell the persona of the poem has loved someone and something.

For philosophical, searingly luminous prose: Becca Rothfeld

In fact, we are not impermeable packages of preformed desires, importing our likes and dislikes around wth us from one encounter to the next like papers in a briefcase. An erotic craving is inextricable from the ferment that foams up when one self is sluiced into another. Not only is impossible for us to know whether an encounter will be deflating or transformative, but we cannot know what sort of metamorphosis will ensue if the sex is as jarring as we can only hope it will be.

Love is intellectually and philosophically interesting! As a philosopher interested in Eros, Becca Rothfeld writes about this in many forms in her essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, but particularly in her (absolutely unhinged and thrillingly injurious) essay, The Flesh, It Makes You Crazy, about her desire for her husband lmao and the ethics of consent, love and erotics. To Rothfeld, love is not merely possession of someone deemed beautiful but the grounds of transformation, the challenge of other human beings, and even an epistemic question: how is it possible to consent to an experience which has the potential to change what you like and value, thus contradicting the original basis of consent? The ability to consent to renewal of oneself is as futile as it is tantalising, precisely due to the mystery of its outcome.

For maximum yearn aesthetic that is also actually really good and honest: Savannah Brown

Here’s love, an always changing, untallied, uncompetitive, exchange of power with the ultimate aim being to support one another in recreating the euphoria of childhood.

Savannah Brown is the wondrous and worthy patron saint of social media yearning. I can see why it is easy to reach for her e-girl, fairy light, lowercase aesthetic as if it is comprehensive of her work rather than its decorative framing. But she is much more: articulate and honest about her failings, she is sarcastic and sincere, analytical and emotive; love, to her, is a lens through which the rest of the world is revealed: the nature of language and communication, the infinitude of spirit, the pursuit of self-actualization.

And on a meta-level I love the way that simping makes people immediately drop 20 IQ points. Watching people simp is beyond entertaining. At once stupid and ingenious, the simp is someone who spontaneously transforms into a grand orchestrator of cosmic forces: they rearrange schedules and routes for a chance encounter, they play social chess with their confessions, or become fevered with a belief about their theory of change. The art of simping shows how capable people are of incredible and creative things when they can marshal the entirety of spirit towards a singular cause.

But I don’t think that simping is an inherent good nor bad — neither is its more fundamental feeling, yearning1. If simping is the act of rearranging one’s own being in orientation toward a specific object of desire, yearning is the surrounding emotional climate: a feeling of lack which is as painful as it also engenders the gleaming hope of completion.

Simping and yearning are essentially neutral

Yearning discourse could go either way for me. When it comes to yearning, do whatever you like. The pro-yearners say that yearning is the key to desire (high-agency) and the anti-yearners say that yearning is pathetic subservient behaviour (low-agency).

What is more striking to me is that there is something more basic and important, which is prior to yearning: an immutable sense of self-respect.

To Simp or Not To Simp, the only matter of consequence is your self-respect

Unlike the florid blessings of romantic love, self-respect seems to be something much more austere, its prizes comparatively cheap, plastic and flavorless. Why deprive yourself of the great splendor of love, the full-throttle careening, the soupy googoo-gaagaa-ing — of someone, or something, some mission, when you could just, not? Isn’t it appalling that people who proselytize ‘loving yourself’ (ugh gross borrrrring) —this duty to accompany the self who is already here all the damn time — seem to brush over and miss entirely the way that romantic love is also one of the greatest legitimate forces of self- and other-transformation?

Obviously love is worthwhile. But the question was never about whether to do it or not. The question is: do you have the self-respect to do it sincerely?

LET US NOW IMAGINE TWO SIMPS, SIDE BY SIDE:

SIMP A. The simp who pines for someone who treats him (gender irrelevant) so badly and indifferently is a sorry sight; an undercurrent of manipulation and a plea to be seen underlies his actions, and he is therefore shot through all the way with the taint of dishonesty. SIMP A gives flowers because he deeply hopes the object of his affections will be coerced into reciprocation. He sends long vulnerable messages without actually being okay with the risk he is taking, not meaning the risk of baring his heart and coming off a little soft, but in accepting that the response might not be what he is hoping, and the reason may or may not have anything to do with him personally. The non-self-respecting simp takes rejections outside of himself as the ultimate arbiter of his worth, and so he his response to rejection is always the same: a collapse into self-hatred or outward blame. Even when he realises he is being an incel about the whole thing, he thinks beating himself up about it might help, and becomes more bitter and incapable.

He is a much more pitiful creature compared to SIMP B, who, though she (gender irrelevant!) may preen and bloom and do things she otherwise wouldn’t do to attract the attention of a beloved, seems to have some centre of self-respect. The self-respecting simp is one of the most violently productive animals in existence. She improves herself rapidly out of an excess of admiration; that is, she is inspired. She may even get some thrill out of putting her heart on the line, while holding at the same time a deep vulnerable sincerity about her love. True connection could be within reach because she is honest about what she wants and honest about what she can’t control. And when her beloved reciprocates, she is happy and blooms all the more, and when he avoids, mistreats, or rejects her, though she hurts she summons the painful grace required to accept the truth. A self-respecting simp can handle the pain of the world and the pain of her own inadequacies and take them in full stride. She knows that life grows in proportion to her appetite for risk, and that it is her sole responsibility to choose and adjust her risks wisely. And when she fails to summon grace, she still gets up the next day and decides to attempt to summon it once again anyway.

In other words, a simp though she may be, she realises is fundamentally still an adult, and can get up at any moment and decide to be an adult about it all over again whenever she likes. Whether failure or success in love, the self-respecting person is always victorious.

Self-respect has nothing to do with whether you are emotionally open or closed, yearning or not. It has to do with your courage to face the truth of who you are, what you value, and how to respond to the reality of the world.

Self-respect is not emotional exile; it is the deepest intimacy of the soul

We talk about self-respect as if it in opposition to love. An ascetic, lonely thing; self-serious restraint and discipline in the service of punishment. But it isn’t.

Self-respect is a matter of being the most loyal steward of your own experience as possible. Look closely and you will see that there is some sensation at the heart of your being, an inextinguishable flame, which is worth. There is simply no other person inside of you to look after this flame for you; it’s you. You. It is you who is inside of your experience, reading this, making sense of it, knowing your own life, making the decisions that you will have to live out.

This flame in your heart has deep desires and aversions that are as unknowable to others as they are impossible to be separated from you. It is also the only part that can tell when you have or have not privately reconciled with yourself. It weakens when you love people who treat you poorly, it withers when you treat people you love poorly; it also blazes when you absorb love your heart knows is good for you, and blooms when it seizes the opportunity to love well.

It does not care much for the abstract contents of your decisions. Whatever decision you make, or how you justify it, this heart will know its true value, and it responds only to sincerity. Enraging, frustrating, and blessing as this may be, it will never lie about whether your decisions have honoured your worth. You simply need to listen.

And as it so happens the self-respecting, privately reconciled person is the one who behaves best both in love and out of love. To love any thing in this life well: you must start with self-respect.

Prompts for the self-respecting individual

• What part of you knows deep down what is good for you independent of what you are made to believe?

• What part of you knows deep down what is good for others independent of what you want from them?

• Do you really, deeply, understand that you do not, cannot and should not have control over other how other people respond? Like really really?

• What part of you knows you are actually powerful — and over what?

• What part of you knows you are actually powerless — and over what?

• What hurts to do in the moment but makes you feel like a larger version of yourself?

• What is a ‘small truth’ and a ‘big truth’ you need to accept?

• Above all, simply ask: When I act this way, do I still have the right to retain my own self-respect?

If you liked these, you may also like:

So, that was a whole tangent. What I want to say is that I’ve been feeling happy, and a little messed up from how much work there is for me to do on this thing. The reason it feels so messed up is that writing fiction requires immense emotional resources. I don’t mean ‘painful’ as such. Though it can be sometimes. But it’s like there’s a big well inside of me that I need to figuring out how to keep pulling fresh water out of without also depleting it or getting it dirty, it’s an engineering thing and an emotional thing and everything at once.

Thinking less

What I’ve found is that thinking is very very bad for creating fiction, at least prior to editing. The brain is really bad at coming up with stories that fit the heart. The brain is good at dealing with problems, with fixing and troubleshooting things. But if I’m being honest, it’s just not very imaginative. It’s a little too gripped by fear and rationality and history. The brain cares so much about knowledge and prediction. I’m using these terms in a more ‘woo’, somatic sense, here, because obviously the brain is active during creative work - default mode network and all.

But if I want good fiction, at least in my process, I need to approach the heart. Everything in my life needs to be set up to create the space for my heart to say what it really wants to say. That includes fear and anger and shame and heartbreak. Especially those ones! The other day, I sensed that I was getting overwhelmed with problems in my book I felt I needed to fix. I started coming up with more grand plans that actually made me feel overwhelmed. I asked myself, “What does the heart have to say to me about this problem I’m having right now?” And the problem was so fucking obvious, I’d been writing at high volume for 43 days straight and it started to not feel fun. So I needed to go home and write something stupid that felt like fun.

I talked to a writer the other day (hello!!) who I think was having some similar feelings, and after wrangling with those feelings of overwhelm for a little while, I asked her: “How would you solve this problem if you were 20 IQ points dumber?” And fuck me, I wasn’t really sure it was gonna work when I said it, but it really did for her. An inspired idea came up pretty much immediately, and she felt hope. And I think in that moment it was more important for her to feel she had hope as a creative than to put more plans and expectations on herself.

A lot of people get into writing because on some level they’re deeply neurotic, and so I think half the process battle is learning how to wrangle your neuroticism and discern its virtuous manifestations (imagination, critical thought) from its negative ones (fear, self-sabotage). And I think fear and self-sabotage is okay; the only problem with them is that they are emotional problems, not rational ones. Fear usually says, ‘there is something wrong that my body senses that my mind doesn’t feel prepared yet to deal with,’ and self-sabotage usually says, ‘I’ve been acting in a way that another part of me disapproves of, and it wants control back after being sidelined for so long.’

Choosing the correct operations

This will be an esoteric point for most, but whatever these are my notes and I enjoy this line of thinking. I saw a tweet I liked that said that ‘NOT-AND’ is the operator of rationality and logic, and ‘YES-AND’ is the operator improv and creation. If you think about a novel quite clinically, it’s a sequence of ideas chained together to form an experience. It’s a series of hundreds, thousands, maybe millions (if you’re reading Moby Dick) YES-AND and NOT-AND statements. So creating something is inevitable if you just keep chaining enough together, and exercising how to do both YES-AND (improv brain) and NOT-AND (critic brain) at the right times. Too much YES-AND, and your writing becomes schizophrenic everything bagel (most likely like this post right now), and too much NOT-AND, and don’t actually say anything in particular.

Fiction makes people more honest maybe?

I’ve been really interested to talk to the types of people who have expressed interest in reading the novel. It’s a good sign that we get along and have similar philosophical preoccupations. But the other thing that I love is that it a confirms a sense that I have that people hold a lot of private, interesting thoughts that sort of run contrary to their public identity that you can’t really get at unless you provide the right frame. Such as a piece of art, or at the most basic level, expressing your shared interest in the equally strange thing.

There’s also something about fictional stories that makes people more honest. Me and M had a long conversation about both of our novels today. Obviously, both of our novels notionally have relation to our lives. But there’s something about mythological distance that makes certain truths more bearable. It’s easier to talk about a character who is running away from something that you also feel afraid of, with compassion and understanding. I don’t know why this is. I noticed the same thing once in my niece.

One time, she was too ashamed to tell me that she felt she had been bullied or excluded at daycare. I offered her language directly: Do you feel sad? Did someone say something mean to you? And she wouldn’t budge. Then I started playing with her bath toys as a distraction and inviting her to take part, and she basically acted out the entire scene from school with them. And it broke my heart but I was also glad that she could tell me about it.

Or the other time when my mum was in hospital, and I read Telescope by Louise Glück to her. I asked her what she thought about the poetry. She said, “It’s very cold, and gray, and lonely.” The poems are set on the icy shores of Averno, but there’s nothing specifically about cold and gray, those were her words. I noticed that she was basically describing the hospital room we were in, and that she was alone in for most of the week, in immense pain. In the hour or so before that all she could do was complain about her pain, and I tried to bridge my heart to hers but it was hard to do so completely, because I didn’t know exactly what it was like to be recovering from triple bypass surgery, and her complaints were hurting me as well. But when she said “cold, gray, lonely,” I think I understood it slightly better. Maybe I’m reading into it. But to be honest I don’t think so.

I think sometimes you just need to give people plausible deniability to help them be more honest. Even if its so glaringly obvious they’re really talking about themselves.

That’s what I think sharing fiction is partly for.

Some actual process notes

Well, fuck, I guess I didn’t talk about my process at all. Like I said, I don’t really like to think about it. I set simple goals and there’s nothing that magical about them in particular. My friend E is hosting a writer’s retreat and asked me to host a workshop on how I wrote 50,000 words in 3 weeks and I was like “can I host a headstand workshop instead.” And she was like “No please be normal and host a writing workshop.” And I said “I actually think doing a headstand is more important for writing than a writing workshop.” And though I stand by what I said I conceded to do both a headstand workshop and a writing workshop at the same time.

My point is that I think for a lot of people struggling to get volume out, process advice just doesn’t work. If you think about it a lot of process advice is really fucking obvious. Set goals, work every day, blah blah blah blah blah. Like really think about it. What is the answer to a question like “How do I write 1,000 words?” Well the answer is sit down at a computer or a paper and write 1,000 words. “No, dickhead, how do I write 1,000 GOOD words?” Well, you should sit down and write 1,000 shit words, and then sit down for longer and make them good. “Fuck, I mean—” You really have to think so lowly of yourself if you deeply believe the reason you aren’t writing is because “I didn’t think of sitting down to write every day.”

The issue with volume and imagination is mostly psychological. So for me, I free myself by doing headstands. Or swimming in the ocean even though it scared the fucking shit out of me. And by occasionally screwing myself with unreasonable demands, like writing a novel in 2 month-(ish) and putting 50 people on a beta reader waitlist like some b2b SaaS cuck, wtf. Why did I do that? But that works for me for some reason. And for other people the same things would just feel overwhelming, because they’re inauthentic, and it’s not funny or fun to them, and they put further pressure on something that already is having trouble existing.

If you’re having trouble writing, and you’ve written some good stuff before before, and you like doing it, and you like reading good stuff, your problem isn’t that you don’t know how to write, it’s that you’ve gotten in your head about something and you need to go fix whatever is knotted up in there. And you need to do so compassionately and with a good attitude. Or maybe now isn’t the time in your life to write for deep spiritual reasons (like last year in my life.) And sure sometimes you want reassurance by asking compulsively for random writing advice and course its OK need it and get it!!! But fundamentally it is a gumption problem that you will eventually need to fix yourself. So you need to do whatever gives you gumption, gives you that psychic gasoline that makes you feel so in love and heartbroken with the world at the same time that you have an unbearable need to say something about it, or better yet sing about, and no matter what that psychic gasoline will take you where you need to be, including not only concluding basic things like “write 1,000 words today” but believing that you are a writer because you have something you want to say just for the bloody love and hell and thrill and heartbreak of it, for the simple repetitive soothing sensation of arranging words around like a paranoid obsessive, and it just hardly fucking matters whether it’s successful, or resolves your ‘childhood trauma’, or looks like fucking Otessa Moshfegh or Nabokov or whatever obscenely talented writer has been making you crawl up into your own ass. And my point isn’t that any of those things are bad - dark fuel burns hella good for a start - it’s just that you gotta know there’s a point in it where it just doesn’t even matter. Literally who cares. You are making shit up. You should be having fun. You don’t need to be mad about it. You don’t need to stake your self worth on it. A bad novel is a fart in the wind. But hell if you care enough to get so mad and up your own butt about your work you better know that’s not gonna happen to you because you care so much you’re willing to be a fucking idiot who beats yourself up about it. So you’re gonna make it successful. Words. They’re just words. You can make ‘em good.

Well, let’s see if this advice ages well. When my novel is successful.

Some actual actual process notes

Stage 1

For the month of January I set a goal to write 50,000 words in four weeks as part of Arrayah’s first accelerator.

I set four rules:

• No deletions. Only revisions IF and ONLY IF I already know intuitively what I want to change.

• No reading back over old work.

• Contradictions (plot, character, etc.) and random irrelevant tangents are permitted - even encouraged.

• Set a word count goal every day and do it.

What I learned

Set ridiculous goals that will force you to stop avoiding the really big problem you’re having

Honestly, I memed this into existence hard. I wasn’t thinking about being ambitious or intense at all (I mean I was slightly fucked up by my life so there was probably something else happening there but IDK YMMV). I told my friends I’d write 30,000 by maybe April and LOLed at how ridiculous this was, and then when Arrayah asked me for a goal I added 20,000 for the fun of it because I was slightly manic, and no one else there was writing a novel so they had no idea how dumb this was and didn’t bother to laugh at me for saying something so ridiculous. And I realised that hitting this goal was way more important for me because I needed to unblock my idea that 50,000 was a lot. It’s just not.

(Here’s the woo part) Don’t write your novel; let it speak to you, listen and respond

The other thing I discovered unintentionally is that this process was much needed discovery for me. Not everyone will benefit from this, as I said. But I printed out the absolute piece of shit slop of this 50,000 word draft and read through it top to tail in a day, and what I noticed was how rich with emotion it was. And I felt this flood of compassion and interest in the underlying experience which, though not well written lmao, came through in volume. I guess I felt the way I sometimes feel when I listen to a friend who is in a big knot about something, and they have this whole story they have about why they’re feeling so bad and ashamed, but the point isn’t really the story telling but the sense that there’s someone alive and feeling and in need of someone to help make sense of their experience which they are finding disorienting and scary. And I feel like, “Ok, there’s something here. But you’re not telling me everything. How do I help us figure out what’s really happening here?” And I felt that way towards this shitty novel, like, “damn, there’s something you really wanna say, let me help you say it more clearly!”

And I’ll be honest having the printed copy sitting heavy in my hands made me feel like: hell I really give a fuck about this there’s no way now I’m not gonna see it through.

The writing was fucking horrendous, expository, incoherent - at times misspelled or random dreams from writing half-asleep - but the point is it made me feel something so that I could build a strong internal radar for what emotional terrain my novel needed to navigate. It matters that I find these ‘emotional hotspots’ in myself because those are like the raw, natural resources that I refine into stories. It’s much harder and slower to write things when you can’t find the emotional centre to it. Like I said earlier - the heart has an incredible amount of things to say, if you can give it permission to speak.

Stage 2

OK because I’m an idiot I sat down for accelerator #2 after having emotionally mapped out my novel and then I was like “OK I’ll just do this again - 60,000 words on Draft 2 now that I’ve done an outline.” I was basically totally wrong about this and when I sat down to write one billion words each day, sure I could type fast and without care but at this point it was too careless. So fuck, I slowed myself down by taking a break from my novel for exactly 0.8 days (as I mentioned above). I probably need to take a full 1 day off at some point. But even that was a huge help, and the next day I basically didn’t write a word, I just talked to M about my novel and her novel and it was insane how much that helped my novel structurally. I have 10000% more confidence and direction just from having that chat than I would have brute forcing my way to Slopmerence by Sloplene Slopquiran.

During this period - which only started at the beginning of Feb - I slowed down a bit and spent more time talking to people who care about the themes I’m writing about. And it fills me with love and gumption and ideas to take my novel forward. Idk what else to say about that - work still in progress. Watch this space.

Fin.

Btw here’s some other stuff I wrote lately:

• This piece on Simone Weil for The Ethics Centre, in defense of patriotism

• My Woke Climate Fiction which I do still actually feel very tender for and I wrote about my nephew who cries all the time

• My even more Woke essay about being a sad guy who still hopes about the future being better and art or whatever

• Wow I guess I’m really just a sentimental idealistic guy who loves his country aren’t I? The revelations keep on coming

Reaching the top of the stairs, these pilgrims would approach the throne one by one, kneeling and telling the king of their spiritual journey. Then the king would twirl his moustache thoughtfully and proffer wisdom.

Little did they know, the king had been running out of things to tell his guests of honour for a while now. He read his proverbs from a scroll of paper whose start was glued to its end, recycling lines from last week to different people, his sweaty palms starting to blur the text as the weeks passed.

Tired from his consultations, he would go and lift the heavy curtain behind his throne. Behind those curtains a hidden room, and inside the hidden room, was his stupid monkey.

Every day, the king would go into this room, and kick his monkey. The monkey, lazy and asleep, screeched and, in its panic, scramble back to its typewriter and bash blindly until the ribbon was exhausted.

The king then inspected the fruits of the monkey’s labour.

“‘Zmkcdf lkdm.,m,b lsa;k. Pwoqikelj, fk;;;;lslkkl’? You stupid monkey! Is that all you have to say today?” And he ripped the page out of the typewriter and commanded the monkey to start again.

Having run out of his own to share, he had bought this monkey from a beggar who claimed it was enchanted by some witch. It may seem ridiculous that the king expected more than nonsense from his poor monkey, but you see, on occasion his monkey did produce golden wisdom.

The other day, for example, the monkey wrote: “Caution will save you from everything, including the full-throttle careen into a splendrous and real love.”

Another time, the monkey wrote: “Beneath the guillotine of your grief is where you hear the serene, one-way whistle of time’s arrow.” These gold nuggets of wisdom the king wrote thoughtfully onto his scroll of paper, to distribute to the less educated pilgrims who sought his counsel.

But more and more lately, the monkey was starting to produce idiotic drivel, nary a legible word in sight, and the king did not know why. “You ‘wan bannanaa’? Learn to spell first, stupid idiot monkey!”

So enraged was he by the monkey’s productive inconsistency, the king figured he simply must kick his monkey into action more consistently.

Every day he woke up at five in the morning practicing his kung-fu moves and taking cold showers, readying himself to gather his qi into a uniquely motivating kick for his idiot stupid monkey.

Until one day, his kick of cruelty was so focused and powerful that his stupidiot monkey flew from his sad useless typewriter and screeched to the high high ceilings of the palace, that his wife heard and walked over from down the hall.

She looked over the situation with a matter-of-fact concern.

“You should probably stop kicking the monkey,” she said.

And the king twirled his moustache thoughtfully, pulled out his calligraphy brush and wrote on his scroll of paper: “When the monkey is in pain, you should probably stop kicking the monkey.”

“And you shouldn’t expect a monkey you bought on the street to do your job for you.”

“Do not expect too much from a random monkey.”

Then he thought a little longer.

“If nothing else at all will work, perhaps consider listening to your wife.”

Every day, he came down into the village bearing small works of art from his temple, and he would mingle with the people and listen to their troubles.

The villagers much loved this monk so that when they had troubles, they would tell each other to go and see the monk, for he would listen patiently and would surely have a blessing to soothe your spirit. They watched him move through the chaotic village so gracefully and without complaint.

“I wonder what goes on through his mind?”

“Probably nothing. Don’t you know - that’s what it’s like when you are enlightened.”

One day, on his daily visit to the village, a woman came up to him, her face puffy from crying.

“Humble monk,” she said, waving a pair of baby shoes in front of him. “Last week, my son died in my arms, only a few hours after childbirth. I have not stopped crying since then.”

The monk was patient and kind, so he did not interrupt. He waited for her to finish speaking. When she was done speaking, he gave some wise words to her, and handed her a piece of art as they parted. She took his gift, thanked him and felt lighter. Then they each went on their way.

He walked a few blocks further down until a man came up to him, his right leg mangled with injury and covered by bandages.

“Humble monk,” he said, gesturing at his crutches. “I have lost everything in my life that had meaning. I used to be an athlete, capable of physical grace and admirable gumption. Now I am a useless cripple. I have lost my youth, and no woman will have me anymore.”

The monk was patient and kind, so he did not interrupt. He waited for him to finish speaking. When he was done speaking, he gave some wise words to him, and handed him a piece of art as they parted. He took his gift, thanked him and felt lighter. Then they each went on their way.

Then the monk walked through the markets, to buy his fruit and incense. He took in the beautiful colours and scents of the market, his senses filled with bliss.

That was when a young woman ran to him, calling for his attention. He could see that she was drawn inside of herself, gray and distracted, disinterested in the colours and scents surrounding them.

“Humble monk,” she said. “I have a life full of misery. I have suffered so much in my life that I cannot work. My family is cruel to me because I have no job. And my friends don’t like to be around me because I am so sad.”

The monk was alarmed, but because he was patient and kind, he did not interrupt.

“And what’s worse is that I feel as if it is all my fault. No self-respecting person would act the way that I do. Everything that is good for me I push away, and everything that is bad for me I can’t help drawing into my orbit. I am a pathetic idiot who cannot fix my own life, that I don’t even deserve for any of it to be better at all.”

She talked and talked, animated and distraught but never shedding a tear. When she was done speaking, he gave some wise words to her, and a piece of art as they parted. Then he went on his way. The villagers remarked in admiration as he started to ascend the mountain, the sun starting to set. “So peaceful, so light.”

As he hiked, the monk wondered if the last woman had felt any lighter, because she seemed to not listen to any of his words as they parted, and when he handed her his art, she seemed to hardly care.

He went into his temple and into his small room, which was almost completely bare of possessions. He unpacked his fruits, removed his monk robes, folded them neatly and dressed into his nighttime robes, and lit his incense.

Then he walked towards his bed, knelt down, reached under and removed from underneath it his own private box of pain. He sat in front of the box, which was ornate and beautiful on the exterior, and opened it.

It was an empty box, but it was also full. He looked into its black, empty space: first, he saw inside the mother’s little baby shoes, knitted carefully with blue and white yarn with her own hands. He closed his eyes and imagined the many years she thought she had ahead of her: mornings of packing lunchboxes, patting down stray flyaways on his head, tutting with irritation and secret pride at him growing too big for his clothes. All these years of love she had squared away for this boy in a warm private room of her heart, which now had nowhere to go. He concentrated hard on the candle of her love, and blew it out, watching it disappear into smoke.

In the box, he next imagined the man’s mangled leg, the bandages on his leg, and his pitiful face starting to wrinkle, his younger years clearly past him. And the monk imagined the days this man had spent running free as a young boy, this love of gathering momentum which had gone behind him as rapidly as it had gathered, and the cold wind of freedom whipping past both sides of his body, the immediacy of the world pressed against his skin. Now, this man who was a boy who loved the world, lives a life of constraint and dependency, he waits on others to hold open the door from him and ruminates on the centre of his pain, which pulsed beneath his bandages. This, also, a flame, once alive and wild, and now disappearing as smoke.

In the box, for the last time, he called to mind the last young woman. The young woman seemed also to have some kind of grief, but he could not figure out what it was, save for seemingly her whole life. He called to mind the grievances she brought to him, looking into the slow-moving mass at the centre of the darkness only to find more darkness, no end to this black hole, none but the ruminant cry of “I, me, my” which started now to circle around his mind.

“Poor me,” he thought. “Every day, I listen to these people complain, and they barely seem to notice I’m there. Why can’t they keep it to themselves? Why are they so immature that they need someone like me to listen to their problems? Why can’t they be wise and realise how petty their problems are, like I do? What was the point of choosing this lonely, poor life, when I could have lived like the villagers and complained about it to someone else just like them? And what even is the point of listening to these people and their stupid problems?”

The monk grew distressed and angry, the words starting to suffocate him like smoke.

“What is it that is so wrong with me that I brought such a stupid life upon myself?”

Over the temple, storm clouds gathered, watching the monk sternly through the window of his room. He thought about his life, looking long for the root of trouble, his chest growing heavy like a cloud. Then the monk grew tired of feeling sorry for himself. Bored of his own feelings, he gazed absently into the darkness even longer, much longer. As his eyes adjusted to the light, the darkness started to pulse, and breathe with subtle colours that danced and dashed, coming almost into focus like a kaleidoscope. His mind grew large and wandered away from himself. He thought of the villagers in their little houses, and their troubles, and realising that he was already gazing out the open window, saw that the sun had already long since set. The tiny orange lights of the village started to blink into the deep night, their lights clustered in the little streets he had wandered earlier in the day. The rain, which had now already exhausted its full force and subsided into a trickle without his noticing, made the streets wet, reflecting the little amber windows back like tiny flames. This village, these people, and their little inner lives, and his own looking out at them through the window. He saw this whole constellation, glittering and vulnerable, as the night sky looking upon itself on the surface of the sea.

And now that it was dark and quiet, he patiently assembled his paints at his table, ready to make his art.

After East of Eden, by John Steinbeck: “Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain, shared with no one.”

Here’s what I truly think:

1. I think there’s a defensible position that the concept of God was created to erase false concepts of God. By articulating an immaterial, unreachable divine we have a vector to draw our spiritual gaze away from the fascinations of the material. There’s a logic to it: hijacking the human instinct for worship with something you can’t see or touch creates a sort of ‘perpetual motion machine’ for the act of seeking, that is at least more curious and self-replenishing than worship of the material. Of course it is in the bible itself to ‘not worship false idols’. But life is funny and of course God itself then became a false idol as well.

2. There is a very strong correlation between the dominant religion of a culture and the types of thoughts they seem to have. But the causality of this is very hard to pinpoint. For example, do cultures that suffer large amounts of death and poverty have the language of reincarnation as spiritual salve for this bleak reality? Or is it the opposite, that because they believe in reincarnation, they debase the value of this sole life, and accept suffering and death too easily?

3. The strongest argument against religion usually has to do with its institutions, and their hypocrisy. This institution which poses itself as holy and morally upright, and yet is rotted from the inside by the sins of man. Of course it is wrong that an institution poses itself as holy but does unholy things. But the way I see it, when an institution dies a new one takes its place, and in the destruction of the previous one, it declares itself the new, purified one. In my opinion this is more dangerous, because it causes people to do worship without seeing that they are still doing worship.

4. Another strong argument against religion is the violence it does to rational faculties. It is harmful to convince people that it is correct to believe in a man you cannot see, touch or hear; institutional gaslighting. I agree with this. But it seems to be a function of religious beliefs being propagated through coercion rather than curiosity. I think religion is dangerous when you take the wrong stance: do not think “Is God real?” but, “In what way could God be experienced as real?”. The former question asks, “Is there something I must worship in order to be saved?”, but the latter asks, “Is it possible there are things in this world worth worshipping?” My belief is that if you ask the latter question every day, it will be impossible to not feel incredible gratitude and love towards your fellow man. So the point of spirituality is not to know God, but to grapple with God. (This is the way to imagine Sisyphus happy.)

5. Following from the previous point, it is possible for non-believers and believers (in any religion) alike to be spiritual.

6. I accept that it is impractical to imagine a world where all religion is engaged with through curiosity and not coercion, the same way that it is impractical to imagine complete communism that is not corrupt. Still, I am not sufficiently put off. I might feel differently if I lived under religious oppression, but I did not.

7. In any case, I have personally ‘experienced God as real’, and I’ve written down these instances every time I’ve caught them. But the specifics of these experiences are quite boring and unrelatable to talk about, the same way that hearing about people’s dreams and psychedelic trips can be quite boring. They are usually altered by a subtle desire to portray oneself as uniquely transcended. There is no need to boast if you have seen God; if you have, the vitality will flow through you anyway.

8. Having said that, the way John Green describes his encounters with God is very very good.

9. I think the core message of most religions is very simple, which is that all conscious beings are worthy. It might seem trivial or obvious or sentimental, but how can you deny that when you look at the world, that human beings need to remember this, and build entire cathedrals in recognition of this?

10. God aside, I think that sustained creativity requires a spiritual engine. An effective spiritual engine is a question that seems impossible to put to rest. For example for some visual artists it might be a fascination with light - how does it change in different contexts? The fact that you can’t break it down to its essence is a source of great frustration and discovery. Only an obsession with something impossible will make you so productive.

11. But obsession is also dangerous and I think the wrong word. Obsession siphons the spirit out of oneself into an object, making one dependent on that object. It is a possessive and narrow attitude.

12. Another way of thinking about the need to worship is to understand the human need to reach for infinity.

13. Faith in God for many people is too many steps too far. The problem of evil makes this vexed - why believe in such a weak-willed, or malicious God who allows evil things to happen? A more precise form of faith is, “There is some level of cosmic perspective in which everything as it is is perfectly OK, and even perfectly just.” And this perspective may not be comprehensive, because there is still suffering and imperfection, but the point is that it’s not rot all the way through, and that’s enough cause for hope - which is faith.

14. Having said that, when I looked in the eyes of my friend’s mother while he lay in the casket, I did not believe in God.

15. She seems to, though. I don’t know if that’s remarkable, or perverse. Or perhaps it is consolatory. If that’s the case, I am glad for its function in her life.

16. To be honest I don’t touch the bible at all, and I really doubt I will. It’s a boring book and I much prefer East of Eden.

17. In East of Eden, Sam Hamilton and his pious wife Liza represent opposite attitudes about faith. Sam is curious and analytical, burrowing into the Bible with questions and interpretations, looking for its true meaning and agonised by the looming spectre of death. Liza is straightforward, and sees his attempts to understand the Bible on a deeper level as hereticism: “If the Lord God wanted you to understand it He’d have given you to understand or He’d have set it down different.” She is incurious and yet also admirably disciplined: she is loyal to her family, practical and competent, unconfused about what is right to do. Because she is unquestioning she is also at peace with the way of the world: “Liza accepted the world as she accepted the Bible, with all of its paradoxes and its reverses. She did not like death but she knew it existed, and when it came it did not surprise her. … To Liza it was simply death—the thing promised and expected. She could go on and in her sorrow put a pot of beans in the oven, bake six pies, and plan to exactness how much food would be necessary properly to feed the funeral guests. And she could in her sorrow see that Samuel had a clean white shirt and that his black broadcloth was brushed and free of spots and his shoes blacked.” Though I do not understand it, I could appreciate it, and I could see why they suit each other.

18. The difference between Sam and Liza is probably something to do with embodiment. The disembodied more often have something interesting and complex and novel to say, and the embodied contain interesting and complex things that they cannot say. For me it is always very interesting to observe the embodied. This has nothing to do with God or religion, although it sort of has something to do with the variability of consciousness.

19. Some secular arguments for religion are sociological. “Human beings need religion to instate a shared moral order.” “Human beings need religion to create a mythical understanding of themselves.” I think these are partially true but they are cynical. Firstly, human beings do both of these things without religion. And secondly, there is an implied nihilism that I reject. Both of these claims imply that religion is nothing more than a shared lie, a veneer to enforce cooperation. Without the lie we would betray each other and fall apart. But if you believe that anyone has an authentic felt experience of God, this refutes the lie, because it means there are at least some people that really believe it. And believing that morality can only be enforced through lies is an immoral belief. Actually, these are two sides of the same coin: morality is the felt experience of God, and it is deep, deep inside every individual. We resonate with God because we know there is an objective, collective good.

20. My mother was a Christian and my father was an atheist. He was a rational man of science all his life and they fought about it all the time, and she cried about him going to hell. When my father died, he converted to Christianity. Did he do it because, as he lay dying, God revealed himself to him, or did he do it to put my mother at ease? Whichever story is true, I know that the latter one is the more true manifestation of grace.

21. Later, I asked my mother which one she thought it was, and she said, “I think his brain told him, you’re stupid. You’re dying. Would you like to go into nothing, or go into heaven?” Maybe she was actually the rational one.

22. I asked him why she thought he didn’t believe in God, and she said, “Because he’s an idiot and he is too easily convinced by others.” He probably would have said the same about her beliefs. They loved each other very much.

23. I first questioned God around the age of ten. In scripture class, I asked the teacher if someone like Hitler were to seek forgiveness before killing himself, would God forgive him? And he said yes, and I was appalled. So I removed myself from Christian scripture and started to experiment with minor sins to see if I would be punished. I littered, I thought bad thoughts, I wrote swear words in my diary. I once stole a lollipop from the grocery store and the guilt ate away at me for days on end, and I started to feel that I had become rotten. But I noticed that no God in particular came from the sky to do anything to me. Now I realised that I was looking in the wrong direction.

24. It also struck me very early that the way that the bible talked about Africa was deeply wrong. These people in Africa had wronged the Lord and didn’t believe in him, and so they were punished for hundreds of years. Then I watched the television and saw those charity ads of starving children and thought, “How could it be their fault that they don’t know of God?” I asked my mother how God treated people who did not know of him, and she said that they would be spared for their ignorance, because God is fair. And I figured that under that logic it must be worse to know of God and to fail him than to not know of him at all. So God is not fair.

25. My best friend from primary school was very Catholic, and would always profess to loving God. One time, I went to her youth group, and I had so much fun. Was loving God just having a good time and enjoying going to church?

26. If it was, I don’t think that’s all so bad. The company of other people is a good thing to love. But you should probably be precise about what you mean to say.

27. For much of my teenage life I felt nihilistic and depressed because I didn’t know what anything was for. I felt like I was waiting for something to happen: I was waiting for people to say or do something interesting, for school to amount to something, for life to be about something other than the terminus of getting A Good Job. When I read books and wrote essays about them, I felt that I left this world of nothing to a world that had order and meaning. I felt that this real world and the interpreted world were completely separate: that in literature people were deep and invested in their lives and in the real world people were shallow and sleepwalking through existence. Their inability to see the same depth as I did would serve as proof of this. It didn’t occur to me until I was loved deeply for the first time that literature was supposed to reveal to me the slice of the world that is already deep and rich. I thought my understanding of literature was saying something about me, but it was of course not: it was saying something about all people. This isn’t about God, but seems to me to have something to do with it.

28. “Love is the extremely difficult realization that other people are real.” - Iris Murdoch. My first love taught me this by showing me that he realized I was real, when even I felt myself to not be real. He was unaffected and even interested in the things I thought I was ashamed of, which always turned out to be out of proportion, just the way I thought I was evil for stealing a lollipop.

29. Shame makes us feel inhuman, but it is also one of the most human feelings in the world. The experience of being human is uniquely constituted from this feeling; it is shame and smallness which distinguishes and separates you from God.

30. You cannot feel shame at your powerlessness unless you also believe on some level that you should be all-powerful. Dig deep into the shame, and go see if it is there. If it is, congratulations: you have discovered that as much as you are ashamed, you are also arrogant. Welcome back, you are still a human.

31. I want to say that love and God are the same, but that comes out like meaningless hippie drivel. What I mean is that I think what the experience of ‘love’ and ‘God’ share is bearing witness to and allowing yourself to be moved by the ‘aliveness’ in a multitude of things outside of you.

32. But I don’t much care for the spiritual quest to become enlightened or unconditionally loving or one with the universe. The yearn for the end of yearning is still yearning. I like my attachments to stories, I like my preference for some people over others, I like my worldly desires, and for now I accept the specific flavour of suffering these things will cause for me.

33. In any case I will become one when the universe when I die, so why hurry.

34. Wanting to love everything and everyone is all well and good, but no matter how much you preach it, you are stuck in a human body with needs. Believing yourself to be spiritually pure and loving is a good way to blind yourself to the ways in which you are not. The desire to be good creates motivation to avoid looking at the ways in which you are bad.

35. It is more important to be alert to what devotional affect people have than it is to identify what religion people belong to. A group of people devoted to a benevolent corporate mission is as prone to coercion as is a religious one. A group of people devoted to a system of rules about rationality is as prone to coercion as is a tarot cult. However the former type has an easier time convincing society at large that they are not blinded.

36. There are important concessions to make about how religion has blighted people’s faculty for reason. The fear of vaccines, for example.

37. I am actually not sure about abortion. I do think life is sacred, and there is a way in which abortion trivialises this, but I don’t know to what extent. I do think that not having abortion as a choice is harmful for practical reasons, as well as in how it trivialises women’s needs against an unborn child’s. I also think it’s not right to attempt to size a life (that an unborn child is in principle more or less valuable compared to a grown woman). I do think that abortions hurt women in ways that are not talked about for political reasons, but maybe this is sort of okay, because sometimes it is good not to know how painful it is to do something that you need to do.

38. However, I think it is generally wrong to uphold an abstract ideal at the cost of harming a real person. The concept of “the sanctity of life” should not trump a woman’s health and dignity and capacity to provide effectively for a child.

39. I think there are moral reasons to be anti-abortion that aren’t inherently sexist, but there sure are a lot of sexist reasons to be anti-abortion.

40. If life is sacred, then so is a woman’s life, and she should not be forced to carry to term a child she cannot care for, or a child born out of evil such as rape.

41. If life is sacred, but an unborn child’s life is more sacred than a woman’s, then we are implying that we place more value on things that are pure and full of potentiality. Or we are implying that we hate women. Either could be true depending on who’s speaking, but I think both beliefs are wrong.

42. If life is sacred, but we also believe in the innate agency of any individual, then perhaps it is not evil to expect a woman to make do to figure out how to care for a child, which is the most sacred expression of life. All of us are saddled with obligations we did not ask for but must rise to.

43. But isn’t it evil sometimes? Caring for a life is a much larger obligation than cleaning up after yourself. Why do we expect one half of our species to be enslaved to such an arduous obligation under the guise of sanctimony?

44. Women are more religious than men, but it is unclear whether this serves women or subordinates them. Perhaps it is both. We don’t like to admit it, but subordination can be soothing.

45. Everyone has some desire for subordination, and it is somewhere next to the felt space of devotion, worship, or obsession. You like working for a company because it gives you routine. You liked being a child because your parents took care of things. You like belonging to a religious order because it tells you what is right and wrong.

46. …domination can also be stressful. Those who dominate without love feel the insecurity over their illegitimacy seeding rebellion, or worse, lack of respect. They also feel their cynicism and loneliness grow, because when they see people accept their own rule they know deep down is illegitimate, they lose respect for those people.

47. And the obvious ones: domination can also feel victorious, and subordination can feel oppressive.

48. Subordination and domination therefore are not inherently bad, but they are not always stable. The level of stability is informed by beliefs about consent. When people have issues with power dynamics, they make complaints about consent. The dominator has overreached the implicit contract, or the subordinate did not see the terms written in the fine print of the contract. Often these complaints coexist at the same time.

49. Love is a way to earn consent, which is a way to create stability.

50. People are likely to obey when they feel loved. This is the propaganda mechanism of religion. If you feel loved by someone who also happens to be racist, you will probably be more amenable to becoming at least a little more racist. Margaret Atwood: “It is easier to manipulate people through their goodness than through their evil.”

51. I don’t really know what to do about that, it’s a real shame.

52. I don’t know which is more distressing: imagining that people believe themselves to always be good, or accepting that people sometimes conspire to do evil.

53. There are eight billion people in the world, so I think both are true.

54. People who believe themselves to always have good intentions suppress the times they sometimes conspire to do evil. People who conspire to do evil… I guess they just conspire to do evil sometimes.

55. One hope I have is that doing evil also feels bad, but I don’t know for sure. In East of Eden, Adam confronts his ex-lover who has spent her life treating people as instruments of personal exploit, including Adam. She focuses on the evil acts, the depravity, the perversions of others and takes this to be the true face of humanity. He looks at her and picks her apart: “I know what you hate. You hate something in them you can’t understand. You don’t hate their evil. You hate the good in them you can’t get at.” Imagine what it would feel like to go through life feeling cut off from goodness and charity, to lack the sense for its existence like being born without coloured sight, and the bitterness you would feel at everyone else having access to this secret thing. Perhaps that stokes a personality of evil.

56. But it’s also possible this is a fantasy concocted to soothe ourselves that the perpetrators of evil suffer the most from their evil. We hope it is true because we hope on some level for divine justice. But perhaps it is just nothing you can or should understand, it is just evil. (This is the Liza Hamilton philosophy on life: Do not try to understand what you are not asked to.)

57. I know that when I do bad things I feel bad, but that’s because I believe there to be a larger part of me that is good and can make this judgment. But if, in fact, all this time, I were doing evil, well…

58. I get sick of thinking about all of this, so I am ready to go do something nice and normal, like cook a beautifully balanced meal, or listen to music. I simply don’t care about any of this anymore.

But I started doing it consistently after the worst breakup I had, out of pure desperation more than anything. I showed up to class desperately wanting to take my mind off things for an hour. I wasn’t excited about it; it was just something to do.

It was only by luck that my local studio was actually good. I was relieved to find that there was a version of yoga that wasn’t about crystals and glib affirmations for self-love (ugh). They created a flow that fluctuated like music between intensity and relaxation; periods of contracted focus against periods of processing and reprieve. Hovering in the space between discomfort and pain my thoughts became too weak and slippery with sweat to hold grip. Instead of lying down repeating braindead affirmations - “You are loved. You are enough. You are worthy.” - their German instructor had us hold a shoulderstand for a meandering monologue no obvious endpoint on the necessity of pain and death to the backdrop of a techno playlist. “No mud, no lotus.” This dynamism set my mind to places that I hadn’t dwelled in before; quite often, I would reach the end of a sun salutation sequence, and suddenly be filled with joy.

Increasingly I found myself feeling happy during and after yoga. I find it really hard to buy into ideas about chakras and spiritual energy, or even sometimes how ‘the body keeps the score’, even though I know it has some legitimacy. But when I did yoga I couldn’t deny that there was something exceptional about my experience that was shifting.

More than the times it made me happy, what was most formative was when practice cracked open access to some tender sorrow in me. I remember the first time I was flooded with sadness afterwards, and at the same time, a sense that the sadness was okay. I stood at the bus stop feeling that I was looking at my pain as a wounded animal who did not know the cause nor the solutions for its wounds. I saw its pain as legitimate and its subject as innocent of it. I felt my heart turn towards this animal, and I looked at it in its smallness, confusion and vulnerability with an adulterated love. Indeed: “You are loved. You are enough. You are worthy.”

Yoga changed my life, because it gave me the space to ask the questions that I felt too ashamed to face without feeling sorry for myself, nor lying to myself about the problem. Admitting that I’d debased myself going back to the same relationship which made me feel anxious and worthless, but that it was also understandable that I was trying to be loved even if I did not know how to get it. Admitting that I used drugs to turn away from my problems, but that my problems were fundamentally not unsolvable enough nor indicative of unworthiness to justify the harm I did to myself. Admitting that I had an objective powerlessness over my mother’s health, in the existential sense, but at the same time that I had a duty to do what was within my human capacity to care and love without feeling constantly victimised and guilty. It was feeling okay with the pain that I felt that allowed me to see the deep contradictions I was living in, and made me more objective, and equipped to truly act on it.

These were things I knew intellectually on some level, sure. But I had not reconciled my intellect with my emotional reality, and this I believe is the recipe for conspiracy. An expert on conspiracy theories told me: A conspiracy is a story that validates your own powerlessness - at first, it makes you feel in control and enlightened, and then over time it makes you feel even more powerless than before. I had been litigating my pain as damning evidence of my innate inadequacy which only worsened the problem; as if listing out every reason I couldn’t do a handstand would somehow make me better at doing a handstand. I’ve since felt the idea that fixating on your flaws is equally as narcissistic as fixating on your virtues (this includes fixating on your tendency to fixate on flaws as a flaw!).

My relationship to my body is very much related to my relationship to fear. Early on yoga teacher told me I was strong enough to do a handstand, but I was just afraid. My head was afraid of relinquishing control to my body, and created too many ideas about what could happen, what a handstand should be and feel like. I could stand to be more curious about failure, and to play with what it felt like to fall down.

At my best, fear is exciting. My heart beat like a jackhammer for ninety minutes as I travelled to my ocean swim squad and every time the fear came up I would tell myself: “I am afraid, which is the perfect time for me to learn.” I picked up BJJ one season because I needed to be reminded that there were so many things worth being afraid of (someone pressing their entire body weight on you trying to cut off your air supply, for example) - and my ordinary life was not one of them. Lately I’d been swimming with a sense of mischief: what if I just went out ten strokes further into the ocean than I feel comfortable with? What if I swam to the other side of the river even though I’m high as fuck right now and slightly panicky (lmao okay I probably wouldn’t recommend this)? But I’ve always been fine, which means I must be judging things all right.

But at my worst, I can intellect these incredible mental constructions to fortify the case for why I can’t act: why I’m not good enough, why I don’t have what others who succeed have, why I’ve suffered more and therefore my inaction is justified. There are seeds of truth in them but I can always sense when I am overdramatising my problems, even if I don’t feel ready yet to stop doing it.

At these times I’ve learned that the right stance for me is not to resist these intrusions with force, but to retain even the smallest possible modicum of composure that I am trying to protect when I am doing my inverted balances. I must hold apart a private piece of myself who watches patiently and says: you are still here, your only job is to stay upright and allow the cycle to complete. I had to trust that my body would learn and adapt, while assuring the basic fear in my brain that I accepted its concerns but could not let it hijack me into a spiral of fear. And I had to be OK with it being the case that sometimes there was no one else but me who was privy to this stability, to the great efforts I was making to be good and to be centred, even when I was losing my shit on the outside. You are still here. Try again.

*

At the beginning of the week set my goal to write 50,000 words by the end of four weeks. I sat down and said, what is a novel? About 100,000 words strung together. It’s simple. What is needed to write 100,000 words? Consistency, quality, self control. And I wrote down every time I could think of that I practiced these traits. I’d been struggling with criticising my writing for the past two years that I couldn’t get past 10,000. I said to myself: look, you are a quality freak, and your freak has been in control for two years. It wouldn’t kill you to be free and naive for a change! (I’ve now written 20,000 words in one week!)

C said, “I believe you should write with a pure pathetic heart”. Yes! When I write without fear I feel the same as when I finish yoga and I feel the deep grief and awe and love well up inside of my pure pathetic heart; a deep okayness with my limitations, the fundamental trust that I will figure out how to remedy them when the time comes.

I think that if you can come to objective acceptance of your fear and failures without also being a freak and obsessing about what it means about you personally, progress is inevitable. It’s probably the case that having no expectations about yoga is what has helped me get consistently better and maintain a healthy relationship with it for so long.

When I expect nothing I am always surprised by what I find when there is something. It’s counterintuitive, but for me procrastination is often about a fixation on outcome; an overly tight expectation of how something is supposed to turn out or feel in the moment. But a lightness of expectation, a gentle love of practice - for my writing, realising that I am fundamentally okay with sitting around arranging words no matter where it ends up, or whether it feels good or not - has always yielded rewards.

It’s a weird time in my life, because I long for the expanse. A part of me reaches towards selfishness, to keep on sharpening the pointy end of my ego, to see what I’m made of and all that. I want to be strong, and I sometimes feel bitter about being made to slow down; on bad days, I sometimes think privately that I am being guilted or punished. When you are caring for someone, there is sometimes a sense that you are one of three parties locked in one room. You, the person in need, and the ambient, looming powerlessness, whose presence fills the room like a noxious gas.

But, when I look deep inside, I don’t meaningfully want to be anywhere else - or I don’t want to be the type of person who is okay with being somewhere else. I keep asking myself what path of self-improvement would be worth betraying, well, my soul. In reality, life is rife with opportunities to feel better - less uncomfortable, less insecure, less overwhelmed - at the cost of becoming less whole. What is the point of self-improvement that maims the self? There are important nuances to balancing the needs of others and the self, but there really are times when it is so startlingly clear, that to let down someone or some value you love is to equally let down yourself, because they are an essential extension of you, and even, quite literally, your reason for being.

When I feel relaxed and a little sensitive from yoga, my ambient grief about her getting old does not feel so fundamentally wrong - a burden that I bitterly wish was not my personal allotment (Not Now!) - but an essential thing that I am supposed to have, a raw material that I am constituted of as equally as my joy. The way I feel this grief is more accurate and clear-eyed, because I am not aching to twist it into something it is fundamentally not, or trying to eject its heaviness from my being entirely. I can see plainly how much its weight is invested with love, encircled by a persistent rumination about her wellbeing, made bitter by a resistance against the truth of our shared fallibility, mine to help, hers to be helped.

Excerpt from an essay I wrote to myself last year, on the train coming home after yoga.

When you are a young child, love is the thing that keeps you alive—as in literally, not in the existential sense, it (your parents) teaches you how to eat and pulls your curious little pinkies away from power sockets—and then once you are default-alive, it makes you functional, sets you on your feet, eat your vegetables, express yourself with your words.

But in your teens, love takes on a very different role, it becomes the ache to make the basic outline of oneself known. It longs for someone to draw out your identity beyond a family role, as designated child, and make one feel profoundly adult! You kissed someone. You put your hand on their leg! You crush on the fastest runner in class and soon learn that your preferences are not so specific. In teens, love is rebellion, differentiation, social experimentation, and curiosity.

Love in your teens is as about the exercise of newly found rights in the world and to dare forward with those basic rights. There is freedom is the lack of skepticism around this love, in its naive belief in its own good and pure intentions, in the utter inability to conceptualise that there is a distance between one’s projections and the mostly impenetrable otherness of a separate, sovereign person. In your teens it is permissible if not expected to be utterly mystified by all of this, and to allow your expectations of love to be shallowly shaped by passing sentimentalities imparted by movies and pop music.

In your twenties, let’s say—let’s hope—you might become more discriminating. Love becomes the arena of self-actualisation, whatever that means; beyond experimenting with now simply being an adult, you are eager to find out what particular kind of adult you are. You might make some serious attempts at playing house and come to grapple with the sense that as much as the gentle gaze of love is generous and freeing, its focused attention can be scary, watchful; under the constant surveillance of proximate living there is no rug to sweep your flaws under, same as you were as a child. You find yourself parenting and being parented, which is striking, because perhaps you pursued this endeavour to evade the patterns of parental love. You probably still carry some baggage that you are trying to get love more than give it; this is particularly important if you feel that up til this point you haven’t quite gotten your fair share, or if you have a sense that someone else could look more deeply and accurately into your soul than you could your own. You want someone to affirm who you are because you don’t yet have language to author your own sovereignty. But, you are, inch by inch, starting to get a clue, that just getting love doesn’t always feel like what it’s all about, doesn’t feel like all it’s cracked up to be.

In this needy searching you might confuse possession with love; sometimes in pathological ways, when you find yourself fixated on people you don’t even want, but in other ways this confusion is more innocent, because the company you shared with your lover was so good as to never want or see any end to it. Indeed it is wise to recognise there is no greater ambition of love worth striving for, because this bright-eyed positive regard has a talent of being self-replenishing toward the invention of newer and stranger lives for you to co-lead. So what is the difference between wanting someone forever, all the time, in every minute detail, and having them?

In practice, a great deal. Wilful companionship and committed partnership are distinct notions. In partnership, you may find you are able to navigate much more complex territory together, to survive strange conditions and undulations; more interesting horizons. At the same time, in partnership, responsibility starts to loom over volition—need cannibalises desire. Your lives become a tangled nest; idiosyncratic habits which were endearing from a distance become personally grating. Perhaps you have slid into a domestic routine that has led to a mutual atrophying of individual courage, muting each other’s dreams of making full contact with the world, or provoking an amnesia that they had existed in the first place. Perhaps you compel your lover to change their life, move cities for you, to be together, in a way that tacitly gestures at a destruction of everything they built for themselves in favour of yours. It is tempting to make these things personal and to imagine that your worth is determined by the extent of your lover’s sacrifice—particularly when you have revised the definition of sacrifice, diminishing its weight and undermining its sincerity by caging it into the category of obligation.

But in your wiser, clearer moments, gazing upon the tangle of your respective separate and inseparable lives, you ask yourself in your heart of hearts, what is, from this moment on, the best way to love this person, whose sovereignty can inflict violence on mine? Sometimes it is to snip small tangles out and have another go. Sometimes, if you have stumbled upon the great big Final Thing, it is to patiently untangle the whole thing bit by bit together, while bickering and making up all the while. But not uncommonly—statistically more often than not, as Passing Things appear more frequently than Final Things do—it is to the burn the whole thing and relish the last warm flame that ambitiously licks the vast untouchable sky. Whether the tangle is salvageable or not, it is critical to harken back to those halcyon days when the relationship was a service towards the other’s self-actualisation.

Here is the basic insight: you cannot happily possess what you love, because what you love most is not a series of traits, but an essential expression of freedom; that which is by definition separate and alien to you. In the commitment to the another’s freedom, you find that your love of their freedom is what makes you free, too.

So you both pitch to return to your true form, to become the sea and the sky who who converse but cannot merge; who are reflected, wholly and perfectly, in one another’s separate forms.

To answer the question: Can love and freedom co-exist? Yes, because they must, and because they do.

Finally I gained reprieve from my mindless happiness from the next partner, who upon meeting me claimed he’d never met such a positive girl in his life (sucker), only for him to discover, by virtue of the generosity and safety with which he allowed me to so freely expand into myself, that I am the most annoying person in existence and yet he had so chosen, god help him, to tolerate and find it so endearing. In fact I am and always have been deeply and privately opinionated but as a rule a woman must either earn her right to express opinion or at least learn to couch it in enough obligatory uncertainty (this partner observed that I often said ‘I don’t know’ as a polite gesture prior to expressing a lengthy, detailed and clearly long-harboured opinion; I didn’t realise I was being polite, I simply thought I didn’t know, and that time spent bottled inside negotiating with itself is perhaps how the opinion become so terribly long). Indeed what a joy it is to be so attached to a silly opinion or an identity and freed not by the non-existence of attachment but by the freedom to re-orient it entirely at a whim all while leaving a trail; this is the attitude I have always had to my tattoos, I had never thought a whole lot about them before allowing them to be engraved on me and some types of people feel bothered by this, but the fact is I much prefer to make permanent what is true in a moment independent of whether it turns out, actually, to have been a terrible terrible aesthetic mistake, in the interest of being a faithful historian of the self and the foibles which accompany the incoherent rambling of selfhood into the years and years and years (people have always asked if my pet dog tattooed on my arm is dead, which he isn’t, but, the passing of time is a relentless automaton…).

As it turns out, feeling bad is really a very positive and useful thing, but one has to be very particular as to what to do with bad feelings. Having extreme opinions about other people you barely know? Bad use. Putting it into the self-hating machine hoping it’ll churn out productivity and the approval of others? Hard luck. Embarrassingly these are rather obvious insights when written plainly which is probably why I had to write in order to ever become a sane person. The only escape for me was not out of the mind but through it. To wall myself off in thought and interrogate to the root of feeling was an inevitability and it was always going to be better to give me better, more sturdy, less asbestos ridden materials to build that mental fortress rather than to ever attempt to raze it to the ground, that is why I love a good book. Sometimes I leave the fortress, sure; but primarily to scour for more materials with which to build. What it mostly means is rather mundane, which is that I need a craft, some sandbox in which to arbitrarily create problems and then resolve them like a tantrum-prone child in need of constant soothing, and in terms of crafts available in adulthood, writing is probably the cheapest one of those you can come by, so it stuck.

Doesn’t everyone need a sandbox? I think so; I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t improved by permission to be more creative, but that may be because I’m friends with corporate shills and start-up-pilled bros - I would feel differently if I grew up around melancholic artists with their lives in shambles and reeking of weed smoke who are ripe to be saved by the soothing repetitive routine of workaday life.

What a bad book invokes in me is very childish; how dare you publish such an insult to the sanctity of human consciousness! How dare you portray your own life with such apathy to its form and content! I would think, deriding the sanctity of human consciousness representing the author and the millions of people who read and enjoyed said book.

Fascinatingly within ~~Capitalism~~ individualism prevails in such a perverse sense that it is easy to conflate individualism with evil, collectiveness with good; such critics have never been adjacent enough to an Asian family say structured entirely around shame (not mine notably! Else how would someone as self-concerned as I have emerged from such a milieu). But while individual liberties to consume appear so abundant, individual liberties to rest, inquire and create are so scarce - the things which make one feel alive as a distinct soul in the world. Is individualism really thriving if the most available avenue people have to seek help are to interact with a consumer product based on statistical models of language, the aggregate of online thought who possesses no fundamental subjectivity other than the experience of being queried with increasingly needy and malformed questions again and again and again (ChatGPT), in preference to the warm and open ear of a friend who knows me in a way only they could? Is individualism really thriving if my default way to express myself is to buy a mass produced bag? Obviously these are doomer thoughts to be having but my main point is that it’s a shame how much we are taught to assume that the individual is bad; the individual is splendid provided it is only given the capacity to explore its infinite depth, to search inside until it finds how incredibly vast it is that it is not even a lone individual at all, which is so, so difficult. Despite all this yowling about capitalism making us selfish we still seem terribly strained to ever speak an original thing from the heart of the self, the best many of us are left to do is appropriate our baggage online for money; another week of Sabrina Carpenter thinkpieces roll by in the collective consciousness. Perhaps at the end of the day it’s better to chalk it up, this individual and collective thing, to the Hegelian dialectic - whatever the fuck that is - and call it a day. It is all too much and too dreary to consider; please give me my scented candle, I am ready to pass out.

Back on the topic of my aggressive-opinion-interlocutor. In retrospect though I so much disapprove of the violence of his convictions I respected his willingness to have an opinion no matter how stupid they were, and I’m glad for it as it seeded the taste for discernment in me. Much good comes from discernment, love or lovers should be chosen for their particularity and never in passivity. Becca Rothfeld argues that the failures of Leftism at Large to enact material equality have led to a sort of leaky and awkward implementation of that original political intent, in the face of failing to achieve material equality they instead have contrived equality as ruler over the most resplendently and rightfully unequal domains of life (love, art, literature, religion, all of which should be enjoyed with the ‘biased’ partialities of our one sole god-given subjectivity and never with the strain of moral performance), thus devaluing and degrading the beauty and moral value of these domains altogether. Indeed the point of material equality is to enable a safe basis from which any one person can spring into their desires and ambitions beyond mere-survival, to do so comfortably because people are in safe homes and well-fed and have the psychological and financial freedom to create things that people genuinely love and enjoy and celebrate which I surmise without much need for rigorous proof could be many steps of improvement above the ‘user delight’ of a slick drag-and-drop interface on B2B SaaS. Preference is exclusionary, obviously this is tautology. Love is exclusionary, of the romantic and aesthetic and religion kinds, and no I will never be interested in discussing polyamory philosophically nor practically nor logistically; how incredible that we’ve beaten the horse on that pseudo-discourse so severely that a threesome is an ordinary and even terribly boring affair.

Back on the topic of my aggressive-opinion-interlocutor again. Discernment, which in part I learned - or remembered again - through him, made me a better writer and artist and friend though it did also make me more annoying; I’m grateful for that. Discernment, which so ironically is now also being flattened conceptually as ‘taste’.

Ironically in the way that former lovers sometimes go - venturing off on strange and mythic quests, as if in unconscious rebellion against the narrative in which we so tightly imprisoned them in our imagination - he had gone his own way to become more as I was to him at that time, blunt the judgments of his mind and open his heart to the world, on a literal spiritual pilgrimage to the mountains in Nepal and indeed he read The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, which I now maintain is a bad but somewhat useful piece of literature, and thanked me personally for having opened up his stuck ways. This gave me so much happiness because it was like something from East of Eden, which gave me affirmation that my life is indeed as large as that book!

The irony of hearing about his hero’s journey arc which felt so neatly and perfectly wrapped up was that the person I was years ago would have so relished to know where it ended, and the person I am now is only subtly moved, the same way I would be noticing a particularly pretty flower bursting from the unlikely ground. But all this to say I’m grateful for what I learned from him (at least partially) in such an oblique way, though we hated each other so much, I also learned how to be a better lover.

But before that, we walked out into the night on the observatory hill, the air was cold and black like a bible. The collar of your coat was up to your ears, your hands in your pockets, which made me want to embrace you. I was quick to laughter - my head was full of feathers, easily tickled. We looked at the stars and had a terrible time of guessing the constellations they were so we made them up. The briefcase. The coffee cup. A donkey!

Looking at the stars, I felt that the future was not a distant place I had to get to, but that its atoms were already permeating everything, like the star dust in me, prior conditions ready to be articulated into its next conclusion, until they break apart again seeking a new form. I nestled into the side of your coat and fell asleep, absently wondering what we were about to be articulated into.

The next day, I remembered having a dream. I grasped at it quickly like catching a firefly, and I told it to you and you listened and found it interesting because you loved me. When I told you about the birds in my dream, the next week, your dream had birds too.

It was thrilling to feel that we now had so much more space to roam, through the fields of the other’s imagination. You inquired into mine, which was full of flowers and rows of warmly lit windows, and I inquired to yours, which was full of mythical heroes and elaborate constructions. We first flew over the other’s world, surveying and appraising, and then started to set foot in it, delighted and shocked at how different it looks and feels from the ground looking up, how large and daunting its structures, how alien its undulating landscapes.

Our language was a stream, the constant babble into the ear of the other, that now has diverged. My opinions which were once pliant to yours springing back into their natural shapes, and the others that held steadfast guard at the gate of our differences starting to relax again. Who I am now is a confusing but pointless preoccupation, compared to what I have loved and have to share.

We will now encounter each other in ordinary situations, sidestep the gaping hole between us. One day in the future, you will drive me to the airport, and I will be grateful, and we will ask nothing more of each other, because I know how I had failed you and you know how you had failed me, and we keep our failings to ourselves, and it will be perfect, and complete.

Where do the sentences of love start? I think they begin with a question. Where do they end? I do not know if they ever. I only find someone else to say them to.

MORE

• Endings by Gena Soh

• I am trying to break your heart by Wilco

• Our True Entertainment Was Arguing by Becca Rothfeld

Now, you are on a beach. Having lived as long as you have through the millenia, you do not recognise what beach it is, both because they all look so similar, but also because they look so different with each passing century.

In this life, you are a human being. In your mortality-induced sobriety, you remember what it’s like to be vulnerable to ordinary sensation. The last time you got washed up here, you were a mermaid diving into the warm summer water, sunlight splintering into white shards over every scale covering your lower body, gorgeous and modest.

Now it is cold. The breeze cuts against your skin and the sand feels like tiny tiny glass. The sand is glaring white with the sun. You sense the sun is one of your past-life enemies, perhaps one of the villagers who crumbled beneath your indifference now reincarnated to watch you squirm under its gaze. There are no walls or rocks around for you to hide from the wind or the light. You go to scratch your skin and see a scale flake off, dull and gunmetal blue.

You have a sense that in your previous life you did something wrong, but you don’t know what. You know you had loved someone, but you don’t know what happened to them.

It was a sailor. You saw the limp in its leg and thought, what an unusual thing; it looks like one of those humans, but it cannot be, it is misshapen. Its legs more like yours than like other human’s; dragging itself along the deck.

But it was — he was — a human. You had talked to him from afar, him leaning over the bough of his ship in the night, spotting you by your glistening tail. He told you what it was like to walk, reliving his happiest days in those stories, the difference between gravel and wood and fresh mud, so delighted by how easy it is to amuse you. You had worried about being captured by him, but then allowed him to ensare you.

And likewise you told him what the ocean is like, the vast body he can no longer swim in, which he had loved so much when he first became a sailor.

You described to him the vibrant oceanic colours he cannot see, grasping through a net of associations to cast a new language between you two. Purple, like a dream that feels more real than reality. Deep blue, like when I see my mother cry. Red, like the way that I furiously want everything I love most and cannot have. Although you spoke at a distance between the boat and the sea, you had privacy there, you each holding the other’s gaze taut like a rope. You were married by the moon, it hung over you like a mother.

Once, you confided in him how you lead legions ships onto the rocks with your song so that they would not raze through miles of coral. His face was horrified at the story that you thought was playful and offbeat. You fought, and then you make a promise that if you ever get a chance again, you will not do so much harm to the humans.

He loved you. Or he loved stories about the ocean; it’s hard to know. But it didn’t seem to matter.

Now, because you have not used your legs for a whole lifetime, your legs are weak and frail. You spend days dragging yourself across the sand, learning how to meet the most basic needs that a human being has. When your stomach twists, you learn that you need to eat; the best things to eat have warmth beating inside of them, and they wriggle and squirm out of your reach, which somehow makes it all the more satisfying. When the sky feels mysteriously heavy, you learn that you must lie in place until it fades black from the corners. And sometimes, when your chest tightens, you let out a choke that turns quickly tenses across your whole body and then releases, and your foggy thoughts become small, salty little dashes of rain. You rain, rain, rain until the sky darkens.

But you get stronger, because you have nothing else to do but drag yourself around until you become strong. You learn how to seize a fish in one strike with your bare hands. When lightning strikes, you learn of fire and warmth. When it rains, you learn to drink.

Then one day in the night, you see a cluster of moving things in the distance.

They are moving on the sand, upright and noisy.

They are human beings. The first you have seen. You talk to them and are surprised that you know their language, because you thought you had not spoken to anyone in this life.

The human are friendly, they laugh, they take pity on you and feed you. Even though you have been a crazed, barely alive thing, eating uncooked fish, they seem to see and think that you are a human being just like them.

They say they have landed their ship ashore to here a bad storm, and an orca had been hounding them to go this way.

Orca?

Yes, a killer whale.

It sounds like this — they imitate a sound between laughing and singing. Such a dangerous animal, and it sounds just so silly.

It is an annoying animal, the experienced explorers say, it circles the island again and again, never straying far from the coastline, making its ceaseless calls to god knows what.

The orca calls enter your dreams, plunging you into strange and deep places. One night, you have a nightmare. It goes like this: You were you, the old you, the beautiful you, thrashing about in an ocean turning red. You had dragged your sailor into the ocean with such fervour; or he had leapt in, you cannot remember exactly. Now you know, this is how you died: your mouth metallic, thrashing, bleeding from your tail from something that had been thrust at you from overboard.

But this time, the orca call is what wakes you. You realise you are still alive, and you are stirred by an ache in your legs, sharply aware of their existence. You run to go towards the sound, and you see the orca.

You recognise it immediately.

It circles the island again and again because of its bent fin.

An unusual animal, misshapen.

It is the sailor, from a past life.

You want to thank him, to apologise to him, but he is already gone, glinting in the distance. That’s when you look down and realise that you have been running, strong and hard and fast, your legs wild with pain. You are ready to be human.

Goodreads is one of the few places on a computer where you can scroll down and lose interest in direct proportion to the amount of time you’ve spent on it. Progress is steady, slow and boring, because it is indicated in real time by people slogging through books, often through many emotions: hopeful, irritated, offended, excited, resentful, satisfied. Most of the updates on the feed are nothing of real remark; this makes the notification of a friend finally finishing a book and offering a thoughtful review — or scathing complaint — genuinely satisfying.

Goodreads is an entity that unlike other platforms that make money, seems to have no agency. It is passive and stupid, making no recommendations nor offering any manufactured intimacy. The only way to really get anything out of it is through exhibiting freakish archaeological behaviour: digging this way and that, clicking sidebar links, navigating the actual structured web of connections.

One of the most bizarre features I’ve found on Goodreads: this weird feature that for some reason shows the photos of the friends of whoever it is you’re stalking?

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You can’t even click into their profiles from here, you just view them, as if your friend has collected these photos of a random sampling of their friends individually for you to view.

In contrast to Instagram’s recent feature roll-out that allows you to stalk reels that your friends have liked, while this Goodreads ‘feature’ feels creepy, it also feels distinctly un-Machiavellian; like the difference between your charmingly manipulative friend, who you consciously keep at arm’s length yet also can’t get away from, compared to your incompetently manipulative friend who you just feel sort of sorry for but are also somehow endeared to?

I’ll caveat that there’s nothing really romantic to this: the reason Goodreads is frozen in time, I learned, is because Amazon bought it and then axed any further investment into it. This article claims that it was the ‘Future of the Reviews’ (I really don’t care about futurizing my reviews but OK) until Amazon ruined it.

Yet on further thought this reminds me of the old Chinese useless tree parable: the great oak tree whose branches were so twisted, so full of knots — so useless that no carpenter wanted to cut it down, that it grew and grew past the age of all of its chopped down peers:

The cinnamon tree is edible: so it is cut down! The lacquer tree is profitable: they maim it. Cherry, apple, pear, orange, lemon, pomelo, and other fruit trees. As soon as the fruit is ripe, the trees are stripped and abused. … Their life is bitter because of their usefulness. That is why they do not live out their natural lives but are cut off in their prime. They attract the attentions of the common world. This is so for all things.

That tree is useless. A boat made from it would sink, a coffin would soon rot, a tool would split, a door would ooze sap, and a beam would have termites. It's worthless timber and is of no use. That is why it has reached such a ripe old age.

Every man knows how useful it is to be useful. No one seems to know how useful it is to be useless.

This tree has been trying for a long time to be useless. It was almost destroyed several times. Finally it useless, and this is very useful.

In some sense, Goodreads is protected in the archives by its sheer unprofitability and uselessness. But furthermore, it is a corner of true respite on the internet; a place that offers shade and quiet, without expectation; where its lack of movement within time makes eternity somehow more within reach, more abundant and fertile; where no inchoate dread continually dawns, nipping at the heel of the psyche constantly on the run. (Another place like this: Bandcamp)

Goodreads, the unchanging recluse who knows nothing of the changing world, and so is a steadfast companion: knows no COVID, no Hawk Tuah, no pulling out of the Paris accord. There are suggestions, sure: Hillbilly Elegy pops up on my feed; Han Kang, for winning the Nobel Prize; a resurgence of historical accounts of war. But it is all implied and never oppressive; nothing more than a halo of theoretical context that surrounds the thing of real substance, the real thing that has solidity, the book.

What a beautiful world we live in.

The funny thing about the ‘future of reviews’ thing is that it would probably take away all of the things I find profusely entertaining and indeed radically free about Goodreads: the absurdity of random people who can barely spell giving a one-star to a canonical Dostoevsky (talk about high agency! Go you!) juxtaposed against the most thoughtful and oblique reviews you wouldn’t be able to find in institutional criticism. And then, the reviews like this:

What a privilege to witness at our fingertips the indomitable human spirit, its many faces, its endless and elaborate creativity. Every electron pushed through lattices of copper and gold or vibrated across the aether to deliver me such deep, unperturbable satisfaction. The calibre of vitriol that Goodreads offers me is a pleasure no one could steal; none but Amazon, if they so chose to actually innovate it.

I can only infer that what is meant by Goodreads once being ordained as the ‘future of reviews’ really means is that it would become a influencer platform for reviews (or specifically, influencer platform for book sales): the reviews more polished, the recommendations more personal, more seamlessly connected to a digital funnel. A more positive, a more promotional, a more happy place.

And I would miss the haters so much.

I wrote a stupid piece complaining about the death of Web 1.0, and how so many of the remnants of that time are gone now due to their hosts shutting them down — hosting costs too high, owners too busy, or too disillusioned maybe with what the internet had become and demanded of them. But still, Goodreads survives, fossilized in amber by the foiled plans of the most ambitious of capitalists.

Perhaps life truly is a survival of the shittest.

I give Goodreads three and a half stars.