Botched attempts (a broth, of sorts)
Botched attempts
Attempt the first, begun in desperation.
Most “can’t”s are “won’t”s is a bit of cant I’m wont to cart out now and again. Another is “Can’t write? Then write about how you can’t write.” I suppose that can be done, but no one will want to read it. That’s one of the troubles - starting to wonder if anyone will want to read it. It’s odd how writing is a kind of connection to someone else but the connection if approached too directly can fall apart, often needs to be circled around to from the side.
Type it badly, edit it better, I suppose, and type your way to feeling better as well. Is that the point? To dignify a lived shambles with clacking? No. Really, no. The goal isn’t a product but a flow state, and a self-fashioning - get up off the floor and over and over until it’s not hard.
Attempt the second, begun in frustration.
Sometimes I think the point of doing much at all is the achievement of flow states, the dissolving of consciousness into an ongoing activity. There is a kind of evil twin to flow states, a sort of record skip of judgmental perfectionism that thinks a line only to explode it.
“On my wall hangs a painting my daughter drew of a sea monster from a novel she loves.” Drew a painting? Come on now, and who cares anyway? “I could describe all the paintings on that wall, the rivers painting she did, the turtle we bought from the artist at the state fair, the blood red fingerpaint by the youngest child.” No one will care and you’re no good at description.
I remember a meditation exercise I read about at 20 or so: picture the mind was a body of clear water. Picture thoughts as bubbles that float up from below and away up to the surface. I no longer remember the point of the activity. In the judging of my ideas I practice something like this exercise except I pop the bubbles. My mind never goes blank and I don’t quite hit a flow state but the second level - the balcony seats from which I can see everything else below - can empty out as I become lost in my thoughts. They’re shit thoughts to be lost in, though, that’s the thing.
I type the above listening to a hypnotic sounding ambient/post-rock record after midnight until I find my eye lids heavy, my head nodding.
It passes the time.
Attempt the third, in attempt to capture an observation.
I title it in my computer, something about wanting to want to write. That’s part of the issue - the drive and the challenging. I want to feel the energy, aspiration, and commitment I’ve felt before. I want the creative and intellectual routine (and the community that can go with them) that I’ve had before.
Attempt the fourth, begun in hope of fleshing out or at least remember what I noticed.
Lately I can’t seem to get out of my own way. A sentence drips out of my brain. As the sentence drifts toward my fingers at the keyboard, an oily drop of its essence oozes from the top of my spine into the back of my throat. I roll the taste around my mouth, decide it’s terrible. My fingers jitter, refuse to type, leave the sentence to break back into its component chemicals and collect somewhere around the second knuckle, awaiting recycling. That’s an overly elaborate way to say I’m fucking up my writing. But at least I fucking wrote something. Brain keeps breaking the phrases before I can commit them to the electronic page, clipping the wings of any thought before it can get off the ground? Fine. Make phrases about that, make that the thought.
It’s not just an internal problem, of course. The news is an ongoing car wreck and I get gaper’s delay. Circumstances get in my way as well, and encourage me to get in my own way. People do not write, and they non-write in ways and under circumstances they did not choose, with apologies to old Marx.
Attempt that doesn’t even get a number, written in self-assessment, denied in a spirit of staying honest.
I decide I will get to a thousand words. I count the words, type that I’ve done so, further decide that bit (that is, this bit here) of typing doesn’t count toward my thousand. Fine. 320 more remaining to do.
Attempt the fifth, begun through discipline, abandoned in dictate
Two of the cats sleep next to me, their heads touching, bellies rising and falling. The third is likely upstairs in a bedroom, enjoying the heat that my wife or kids radiate. The cats are getting old. We got them when our oldest child was our only child, when she turned two. She’s eleven now. While the cats stay young in my mind despite the advance of time, my older self - my prior self, I mean - gets ever younger as I age.
In that retroactive change to my agedness, I can feel regrets pressing in sometimes - at things I did and said, and things I didn’t - and resentments, at the encouragement and the structural pressures to do and not do those things. The in-pressing retreats and resentments are magnified by pandemic life: it’s harder to keep mental hygiene under these circumstances.
That fact is the only hand we can play is the one we’re dealt and wishing for better cards will just get you a ride on the bus, if you have the fare. (I stole that - that what? Device? I lack the words… the poverty of my language and the wealth of my emotion….) I’d gotten alright at a lived fatalism - I still believe in a better world, but I am unsure if I will get to see or enjoy it - but under the pandemic in particular my children have thawed that fatalism or at last supplemented it with rage. It’s one thing to plan to just live with the indignities. It’s another thing to see my children do so in their own small ways and to know they will increasingly have to do so over time. That is absolutely unacceptable and makes the world newly so as well. And yet we have to live in the world, somehow without accepting it.
Along with getting in my own away and the world crowding in, smaller and more palatable distraction loom too - TV shows, for one, taken as a palliative and a distraction. They work, and then they over-distract, leaving less for artistic projects and deep connection, because time is to scant.
Balance sheet.
Perhaps with enough repetition mistakes and failed attempts can gel into something more, or maybe they break down together like compost, nourishing something later. Ever over-invested in typing, I want both product and process to be a metaphor for the life that the typing fails to dignify, a want that siphons already sapped energy from the reserves that power the typing, and as ever the attempted way out is to go further meta and look for a moral. There isn’t one. Just pass the time.