Meaning in Meandering

Free-writing through stasis, and select notebook excerpts

Something happens when I finish a big project, which is that I tend to feel squeezed completely dry. I’m not someone who rolls the energy of achievement immediately into the next thing - I need a lot of time to recover. I’m also not someone who’s ever been particularly ambitious in terms of productivity - I rather bristle against the concept, especially in its current influencer-poisoned form, as merely an expression of the totalitarianism of the capitalist mindset. There is moreover a distinctly American essence to the idea that one must constantly be shoveling the coal of their efforts - whether they be personal, professional, or creative- into the roaring maw of a “productive” society that, while always lamentable, has become particularly galling and nakedly exploitative of late.

And yet this latency always comes with a panic. In part due to the aforementioned mindset, the influence of which I cannot help but fall under somewhat, despite my best efforts, as a result of being raised within the bosom of propaganda while also choosing to embed myself within industries that tend to encourage such a toxic mindset.

There is another more personal anxiety at work here as well, however, and it expresses itself in two questions equal parts silly and terrifying: “Was that it?” and “Have I used it all up?” “It” in this case being my creativity, my ideas, my drive, etc. There is still, as there ever has been, a deep-rooted fear within me that I was born with a finite number of ideas, and that once I use them all up I will have nothing else to offer.

I’m not entirely sure where that comes from.

I wonder sometimes if this undergirds my frequent inability to finish things, or if maybe it has even served as the grain of sand around which has coalesced my preference for beginnings over endings. It even seeps into how I think about this newsletter sometimes. Part of why I chose the conceit for this publication that I did, as I’ve discussed before, was because it allows me to follow my interests in the moment wherever they may lead me. Sometimes where they take me is nowhere, and that’s completely fair. And yet I still feel the need or desire (it’s unclear which at times) to get something out every week. I question that occasionally - is it better to keep going no mater what comes of it, or to simply wait for something of import to present itself? Is this just a weekly blog or is it something else, something deeper? Is it all of that and none of that at the same time? Can it be?

I tend to write these more down-shifted, inward-looking, state-of-the-newsletter pieces at times when I am too overwhelmed with life or other things to write a “proper” entry. That’s certainly been the case this week - Tiff was out of town at her annual conference and so I was solo parenting, and in a stroke of cosmically unfortunate timing I got hit with a nasty sinus infection the night she flew out of town. I am only in the last few days back to feeling 100%, and I am in a more general sense than even that feeling fairly run down and exhausted before even considering that this was also the first week of summer classes (just one online writing class for now, but still).

In the end, I always come back to the chief reason for the existence of this space - to give me an outlet that keeps me writing even when I feel like I have nothing to say. Which serves as a reminder that sometimes I only even realize what I have to say when I start trying to figure out same.

I have come around to approaching my output and even my life in general as a form of collage - a random assortment of thoughts, images, and events each possessive of their own meaning, import, or beauty but arranged in a rather haphazard assortment. A random assemblage more than something with a cohesive yet falsely-imposed spine of coherence.

Lately I have been making my way bit-by-bit through Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, which is 500-plus pages of unfinished and sometimes incomplete snippets from what may at some point have become a complete and cohesive work had the author lived to complete it. As it stands, it is a fairly random aggregation - the various chapters and fragments were found in a trunk after Pessoa’s passing and have no discernible order; different editors and translators have published them with completely different sequencing. The beauty and the meaning comes not in spite of its lack of cohesion but because of it. Like our thoughts, our dreams, even our very lives, it lives as a collection of incidents and reflections into which the reader is able to impose their own meaning or even embrace that there is no ultimate meaning. There isn’t even the pressure to read it all straight through from beginning to end - you can dip in and out at any place in the book you’d like. The individual pieces themselves are some of the most wondrously beautiful and powerful writing I’ve ever read - a memoir of the internal life of the author as refracted and told through a fictionalized alter ego.

Here’s a sample of the kind of disconnected yet resonant passages one encounters throughout the work. An episode that may never have found a home within a larger entity, but that exists perfectly on its own terms within the book as we have it:

16

I daydream between Cascais* and Lisbon. I went to Cascais to pay a property tax for my boss, Senhor Vasques, on a house he owns in Estoril.* I took anticipated pleasure in the trip, an hour each way in which to enjoy the forever changing views of the wide river and its Atlantic estuary. But on actually going out there, I lost myself in abstract contemplations, seeing but not seeing the riverscapes I'd looked forward to seeing, while on the way back I lost myself in mentally nailing down those sensations. I wouldn't be able to describe the slightest detail of the trip, the slightest scrap of what there was to see. What I got out of it are these pages, the fruit of contradiction and forgetting. I don't know if this is better or worse than the contrary, nor do I know what the contrary is.

The train slows down, we're at Cais do Sodré.* I've arrived at Lisbon, but not at a conclusion.

The Book of Disquiet has become, in its own way and even in so short a time (and before even finishing), something of a cornerstone piece of art for me. I have even considered a scenario where that’s what this publication becomes for 6 months to a year or so - a memoir told in collage, each publication a random observation or reflection with no thought given to length or even overall cohesion.

Maybe I’ll be brave enough to get there at some point.

Or maybe I just like the idea of dedicating the entirety of one’s life to one single long, unending, never-finished project.

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Notebook Scrap of the Week

So disillusioned with American cinema lately, in part, because it is failing to speak in any way to the current moment. Will it? I fear that the few exceptions to this are neither common nor lasting enough, given our current media environment, to be of much help in the long term.

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The New [American] Beatitudes

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
	For their apathy and defeat pave the   way for our victory

Blessed are those who mourn,
	For their attention to the past allows us to steal the future

Blessed are the meek
	For they will be too tentative to stop us

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness
	For their conviction in the inevitability of same will keep them from direct action

Blessed are the merciful
	For they will be fooled into accepting our request for absolution when all is done

Blessed are the pure in heart
	For they are the most gullible

Blessed are the peacemakers,
	For they will be loathe to pursue the ends that are necessary now and in the future

Blessed are those who are persecuted because of their righteousness
	For they provide us the basis for our false equivalence and baseless claims of social martyrdom

-cs