drafts

do not leave your longings unattended

visakanv
February 17, 2023

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the point of this post is to have some wistful energy, some liminality… i should be feeling it right now while i’m going through my notes… what does it feel like? like i’m being disassembled? bilbo said “spread like too little butter over too much bread”, and there’s some of that… but it’s more like… i’ve been prism’d

I wish I could tell you who made the above bit of art, I tried looking but I haven’t found anything definitive. It’s been on my mind for some time, and it represents the state of both my mind and my workspace very well. I have a lot on my mind. A lot of unanswered DMs, emails, open loops, unfinished drafts, scattered longings. As I start writing this I feel compelled to close some tabs. I have maybe 20-30 tabs open across 3 windows across 3 screens. I had saved this image in a tumblr I started a while ago, HREFgopuram.tumblr.com, with a title “Hyperthreading?”, as a breadcrumb for me to consider. I know that I want to use this image in a Substack essay, because it’s just so evocative and compelling for me, and I know that I want to write an essay about “hyperthreading”, which is an elaborate idea I have about elaborate interweavings of hypertext.

But I don’t feel like that’s something that’s wants to be written right now. It’s a rainy December afternoon, and I don’t feel like doing very much, but I do feel like I ought to write something. I have many different forms of writing. Last night as I lay in bed, I found myself thinking that I don’t really know how I write, I just do. In some sense, it’s actually my fingers that know how to write, and my job is to get out of their way. When I start thinking about it, it gets all messed up. Sometimes I write with my mouth – writing can be speech, speech can be writing, especially if you record yourself talking and then transcribe it. I’ve noticed that when I transcribe my speech, it follows different paths and patterns than when I write with my fingers. Who is doing this writing? It doesn’t feel like it’s me. I’m mostly just witnessing it happening.

I have had grand visions for this Substack – in my imagination I’ve tasted something sublime, transcendent, subversive, evocative, true. But visions are always vague, and reality can be stubbornly insistent in its precision. There’s so much in me that wants to come out, and I find myself in conflict with myself, because there are different parts of me that have different goals, different interests, different compulsions. And my task as the conscious adult in the room is to play some kind of referee, mediator, negotiator, and sometimes I wish that weren’t necessary, and that everything would just be effortless and beautiful.

I find myself chafing at my constraints. I’ve come this far and worked this hard – and in this moment a part of me wants to tell you all about my journey and my efforts, but another part of me resents the very idea of that. There’s a lot to be said, but not everything

A part of me wants to do everything. A part of me wants to tell beautiful stories about what we could be, what we could do together, wants to be inspiring and resplendent. Another part of me says Fuck That, life is grim and gritty and we ought to tell the hard, painful, unvarnished truths of things, we’re so tired of all the pomp and grandiosity. Part of me wants to write small, quiet, personal memoirs, simply revisiting and retelling the history of my own life in a plain way, and maybe if I’m being a little ambitious, contextualize it against the stories that I’m embedded in. Another part of me says, to hell with boring ol’ me, let’s do some exciting nerdposting, lets dive deep into the history of scenes, let’s write about the caravans of the Sahara, about the ancient forgotten kingdoms of maritime Southeast Asia. A part of me wants to do an advice column, because I remember thrashing about in uncertainty with no good guidance available, and I promised my childself that I would figure things out and then be a good big brother figure to the next kid. Another part of me says Fuck That, I don’t want to become an AdviceBro, even if I know I’ll be better at it than most of the options on the advice market, because I’m just tired of performing that role, I want to try on something different. (And in some ways that’s the “best advice”, to demonstrate what it looks like to live well.)

I want to do all of these things and more. I want to write fiction, and I know the smart thing is to start with short stories and sketches. I want to finish 1000wordvomits, which was a writing project I started just about a decade ago, to write a million words. I’m 81.6% complete, so theoretically it should take me another 2.5 years to finish. A part of me believes I could finish it in a month if I really set my heart and mind to it. But I have so many other scattered longings, and who I am to decide what to focus on? Oh, right. I am the monarch of my life…

Well, that’s a lot of responsibility. It involves feeling personally accountable for everything that doesn’t work out, everything that doesn’t go wrong. That’s painful, and it’s probably a part of why lots of people abdicate responsibility for themselves, and for the outcomes that are intertwined with them. (The first line of King Warrior Magician Lover is, “We hear it said of some man that ‘he just can’t get himself together’.” There are great riffs on psychological integration…..)

But do I want to go there right now? Because I think it’s also true that sometimes it’s better to wait it out, for the thing to reveal itself, for coherence to emerge, rather than be forced. That’s the nature of desire paths. You can’t demand desire paths into being overnight, just as you can’t have a baby in 1 month. Some things take time and can’t be rushed, and rushing can even make it worse. Hence…

✱

you are already monarch of your life

your task, if you choose to accept it, is to step resolutely into your responsibility, to walk the path between tyrant and weakling, to use your strength to bring order and prosperity to the realm

“You will never have a greater or lesser dominion than that over yourself… the height of a man’s success is gauged by his self-mastery; the depth of his failure by his self-abandonment. … And this law is the expression of eternal justice. He who cannot establish dominion over himself will have no dominion over others.” – Leonardo Da Vinci