Dim / reflections

Positions... different ways of viewing life – my life, my life as it is now, my life in my imagination, or if you prefer, life generally....

(a) Resistance to writing is a neurotic symptom, related to being a rigid and immature judgmental personality, constellated with various feelings/strategies of fear/laziness/self-justification, etc. My anxious reactions to the impending restart of the school year are more neurotic symptoms, from someone who is both rather self-indulgent and also somewhat oversensitive to the emotional eruptions and conflicts that all humans engage in as entirely normal social practice.

Or: (b) Health concerns (minor symptoms relating to a major condition which are not in themselves, however, major) and side effects of medications (notably Ritonavir and Efavirenz) together form a general and long-term physiologically depressive state that makes it difficult to be energetic, to approach problems proactively, to engage smoothly with others, etc. This is exacerbated by personal isolation (lack of supportive personal relationships at home), a weak social life out of the home, and poor adjustment to an alien climate with less sunshine, warmth, etc.

[Addendum: (b1) generalized toxicity related to medications mentioned in (b) exacerbated by current liver problems; liver reacting to subject taking numerous commercial food supplements that are overburdening it and causing rises in liver enzymes, etc., creating a general context of a body out of balance.]

Or: (c) Writing in this context is just a way of being coerced into various cultural/institutional structures – commercialization/consumerism applied to academic writing, and to writing generally. The book is a product – and worst of all, the academic book is an unreadable product (a consumer object that is not consumable, something designed purely to maintain a financial/institutional structure of production, purchase, measurement, etc.). My worries around productivity are actually elaborated versions of a need to conform, and my battles with it are a bid for freedom, or at least a bid to show that I know what my bonds look like.

That would mean that my doubts are rooted in a wider awareness of the very real falsity [sic?] of my position – a realization that my world is indeed both trammeled and dependent on political/cultural structures that are only internally viable, and in fact are simply one rather minor kind of nonsense that is common in my time. Consider in this context Proust's fussing about what people think of him, or even more appositely Musil's tangled ideas about a Viennese culture that is rotting to pieces around him – one cannot help feeling from time to time when reading Musil, 'oh get over it', since all the things he is anguishing over will have vanished a few short years later in any case. Maybe in fifty years, climate change will be such that anyone reading about such worries as these would be similarly thinking, 'oh get over it', and wonder why I didn't give everything up and go live in the Orkneys.

(This is the kind of interpretation that could also encourage giving away all one's goods and becoming some kind of monk, or joining a commune, or moving to a South Sea Island, or even joining the Foreign Legion. Unfortunately, my postmodern, passive position dictates that it is more probable that I will simply buy a DVD of a film about the Foreign Legion – I'm thinking of Beau Travail, of course – and watch it to look at all the muscular soldiers and their engagements with life and death, instead of actually going anywhere, instead of actually doing anything.)

All this, and much more equally useless analysis and reflection, has occurred in a context of two days of dimness, of a shadowy sense of reality, of the past and the future held in a suspended world of temporal fractures and multiple possibilities... a sort of quantum-universe awareness of one's life....

***

As we are once again in the hall of mirrors, what are some of the reflections of these moods and ideas, lying around on my Parsons table? A book of Karl Kraus' aphorisms (distilled bitterness, like Unicum, that peculiarly named, unpleasant-tasting digestive liqueur Joe was so proud of having bought back from Hungary); South Park flickering by on television, with Kenny's parents telling him the story of Job, so he can get over his troubles (hemorrhoids, as it happens); and Stephen Micus playing through iTunes – a fine musician whose graceful, dignified mixtures of traditions perfectly fit my mood.

How can, in fact, these extended chants in Persian, in the strong 'belt' region of his baritone, have such power, as they repeatedly and fierily hit the note above the tonic and wail around it, holding yet longing, falling and returning, mourning yet resigned –

One flings one's hands open to the desert winds, and tries to give everything up to them: take it, take it all....

Comments

[blahfeme]

This is beautiful: I know the Stephen Micus stuff - gorgeous. I've also always felt that the struggle with writing is neurotic: my own struggles are with finsihsing, with polishing and making things smooth, shiny, impermeable to critique (hopeless, of course, but the rational rarely has anythign to do with this, does it?). Hang in there you are not alone... (and, of course for we neurotics, the 'you are not alone' can sound so threatening - I mean it in the other way the, you know, 'give me a call if you get lonely' kind of way....)

big hugs