This here’s a bit of a weird one, don’t say I didn’t warn you, but hey, at least no dead mice

I keep finding myself pulled between wanting to write in order to think about the pandemic and wanting to write in order to stop thinking about the pandemic - in the rare moments when I want to write at all, of course. The same goes for reading. The lack of interest is, I think, normal for me in this life stage, though the pandemic scrambles the meaning of normality. Maybe normality was always scrambled, and it’s just scrambleder now and so the enscrambleding is more visible. I’m unsure.

It’s tempting to describe writing and reading as solitary pursuits but they’re social acts, acts of human contact, just at a remove and with an enscrambled temporality - you write it down, I read it later, maybe write a reply… It’s human interaction at a slow pace, sometimes glacial. I’m having thoughts now about live performance. Can the arts be divided into those that involve the lived simultaneity of persons and the lived non-simultaneity? Again, unsure.

The point though is that reading and writing means being alone and also being oriented toward others and so my embattled interest in reading and writing expresses a lack of interest in being either alone or attentive to others. I think I am feeling depleted. I think what I crave is some hubbub, to be around people but not the object of their attention nor to have to give them my attention in any sustained way. I think it’s my attention specifically that is depleted. Too much news (too much pandemic, economic crisis, uncertain future, interminable present, unrelenting anticipation of the other shoe dropping and the fear that it is a large shoe that will fall from the sky to land here on the sidewalk in the exact spot where I , an ant, am slowly, pathetically crawling), and too much interaction due to being cooped up and so not enough time to recover and maybe also too little interaction and so not enough time to strengthen those muscles. I worry I’ll be weirder when this is over. I worry this won’t be over.

Well, there’s the aversion sorted out, I think. But why the drive at all, why read, write, now of all times? I think partly to connect, partly to understand and so reduce some of the uncertainty, but above all to be better, grow a little I guess, and to make something, to spend time in the doing of making something, in that strange state of forgetting myself because absorbed into the activity - flow states, I believe they’re called - where consciousness locks in to doing something and comes close to turning off, attention as a snake eating its own tail. It’s not that I want to stop being me, I like me, I don’t want to escape me, it’s that this particular way of being me where I am not directly aware of me for the duration of the doing, it’s really enjoyable. I have a murky half-thought, the muddy kernel of a pet theory, that there is something important relating flow states and human togetherness and what Marx called species being. I have a second proto-thought to the effect that in making one externalizes one’s self and so becomes an object for others - “me” and also for one’s self, and further that maybe flow states are an experience of the gap narrowing between the subject “I” and the object “me,” as one becomes more aware of one’s own objectivity and also one’s subjectivity specifically as self-perceiving, self-reflexive being, and that this can be share or at least experienced in parallel with others having similar experiences, again related to species being. All of this is to say, of course, that I am a crank. Anyway, the point is I like the process, once I get over the initial start up costs - once the weight is off the ground and moving through space rather than at a dead stop, then the motion becomes enjoyable. So, yeah, the zone? I like to be up in it.

I also like the acquisition of capacity - the hope is that writing more makes writing better and ditto for reading, achieving a kind of greater freedom, I think. Occasionally artists are referred to as ‘at the height of their powers.’ I’d shudder to call myself an artist and I’d want to stress that artists aren’t the only ones with powers (intellectually I want to reject the artist/non-artist distinction; at a gut level I feel the world is populated by artists and I am outside the world), but in any case the point is that whatever my powers are, they are not especially tall but I might feed them better - they grow on a diet of time and attention to craft and I don’t know what else - and they could get a little less minuscule. (At the very least, you could stand up straighter, you powers.) Craft eludes but I can at the least feed them some time and see what happens. So that’s the other part of the drive, I suppose, to improve a little, and to have a record, an object of some kind.

700 words later the assessing voice tisks in condescension, a curt assessment: too abstract, not funny, no concrete details, try again. That voice - I typoed that as “that vice,” equally apt - doesn’t recognize as much as it should the value in the time spent, another 20 minutes closer to ten thousand hours, says a second voice, one that tries to cut off the assessing voice and speaks over a third which say even ten k hours from now it will always be hard - remember Didion, a room papered with false starts, words refuse to come out any more - an observation that brings a note of panic to the second - j-j-just keep typing, it says- and despair and resignation to the first - maybe best to stop trying? - but the third swallows hard and says that the difficulty creates the reward, the satisfaction of not flinching, or flinching but carrying on anyway, deciding to decide, committing to committing again, a bit like doing the occasional set of push-ups.

A final thought and then I’m off to bed: I wonder if the drive to read and write and to get into a flow state is also about subtracting out myself from the welter of [waves hands] it all, of everything else. What I mean is that as other things fall away - running is like this too, it occurs to me; first an aversion, second in the early minutes a crescendo of the world’s noise (and my mind’s echoes of that noise), then third the falling away of that noise leaving, fourth, a quiet - what is left is both a reduced direct awareness of myself but also a disenscrambled sense of, and contentment with, being myself. In subtracting myself from the buzzing confusion maybe I find there is less self there than I thought, or at least less self looming up within my perceptions - or less perception prioritized by my brain; I can see my fingers as I type this but I largely have not noticed them until just now; maybe that’s the point, a contraction of noticing - but by perceiving less I find all at once a return to, simplification, and celebration of myself - again as embedded within an orientation to others. I guess it’s like getting a tune up or some shit.