“Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought   
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,   
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always   
(Still the dead one lay moaning)   
I was much too far out all my life   
And not waving but drowning.”

— Stevie Smith’s Not Waving But Drowning (1957)

✱

(2023aug13) Having published Introspect, I’ve been stewing for almost two years now asking myself, what’s next? One obvious thing to do that’s on my todo list is to work on updating both of my books to make them better, with all of the things that I’ve learned since. I could make the structure better so that it’s easier to read. I’ve come up with better phrasings and framings for many of the ideas. But I don’t feel compelled to do it. There’s a slightly strange and funny thing that happens when you begin to develop inner clarity. You start to notice knots that you used to overlook. It’s sort of like how your house starts to look messier when you’re in the middle of the process of cleaning it up. Because previously you had become accustomed to the mess. You don’t think of it as a mess, you don’t see it at all. You don’t notice how it bothers you.

“Have you ever used a new program or system and found it to be obnoxiously buggy, but then after a while you didn’t notice the bugs anymore? If so, then congratulations: you have been trained by the computer to avoid some of its problems.”

I’ve noticed a similar thought-feeling every time I clean my windows. I get accustomed to the slow accumulation of dust and grime and don’t really notice it.

Here’s what I wrote in 2019: “Just cleaned my windows, which is always a rather therapeutic and philosophical experience, and just a pleasant repetitive task (I also like restringing my guitars and polishing my boots). But windows are fun because you see *through* them. Very metaphor. The first thing about dirty windows is that you don’t really notice it. The dirt and dust accumulates slowly, imperceptibly. It takes weeks, maybe months (ymmv) before I notice “huh, my windows aren’t so clear anymore. Windows are two sided, so they accumulate two kinds of gunk – dust from the outside, and – if you have slidey windows like me, and are too lazy to be super careful about it – hand/finger oils from the inside. In my experience I find that it’s never smart to try and get a window perfectly clean on the first pass. This is because you need to step back after the first pass and allow new light to come through and show you where the rest of the dirt actually is. I find this quite profound. When the window is dirty on both sides, it just has a sort of generalised unclearness. Once you clean one side, the dirt on the other side becomes much clearer, which can strangely look a little counter-productive. This too I find quite profound. When you take care of the inside you see more clearly what’s wrong on the outside. When you take care of the outside you see more clearly what’s wrong on the inside.”

✱

(abandoned substack draft)

I’m feeling knotted right now. For me, knottedness looks and feels like tiredness. So it can be a bit tricky to tell the difference. And they are certainly quite a bit tangled together. I want to detangle, deknot myself. I made some good progress earlier today by cleaning up most of the mess in my living room. Next, I know I will feel marginally better from cleaning up the mess on my computer, and at my desk. But as I set out to do this, I also know that it isn’t the core issue. It’s more like… something I can do to make my immediate circumstances less unpleasant, so I can face the core issue.

✱

One of my biggest and oldest challenges in life is around sleep. I have dozens of blogposts dating back to when I was a teenager…

I think there’s a decent chance I might have a non-circadian sleep rhythm

I remember writing a series of blogposts about ‘hacking’ the 7 deadly sins and how each of them can be reinterpreted to be something like a “drive”, which can be channeled into healthy means. And the one I struggled with the most is “sloth”, or the drive for rest

I don’t know if I’ve internalized the idea of a Protestant work ethic, having been born and raised culturally Hindu in Singapore

I’ve done…

✱

I remember being really tired in school when I was a teenager. Around the ages of 13 or so. Maybe that was puberty. But I think I was mostly done with puberty by the time I was 16 or 17, and I remember being especially exhausted at 17. Yeah, I would stay up fairly late at night online on the family computer, and then I would sleep on the bus on the way to school, and I would take every opportunity I got to nap, in classrooms, in lecture halls and so on.

Now I’m looking back and wondering how much of it was also ‘emotional knottedness’. I have more experiences now to compare and contrast.

A startling thing that happened for me was when I was working on my second book, Introspect. I would sometimes wake up in the morning bright and fresh, shower, have a coffee, sit down to work on the book, and then in a matter of minutes I would find myself nodding off and craving a nap. I felt a little bit bad about this, but now that I look back I realize it was probably because I was processing a lot of emotional, psychological stuff. I would sometimes have really vivid dreams during those naps.

I slept pretty well while I was in New York (which I will write a separate post about), and it was a largely dreamless sleep. I was just physically exhausted, I think. Dreams seem to fulfill some sort of purpose which I think is quite important. They seem to be the exhaust of a process of remodelling interiority. It’s a little strange that we don’t talk about dreams more in modern life. We mostly seem to either write them off as meaningless brain farts, or otherwise it’s relegated

✱

stuckness: when i’m feeling a little stuck i ask myself questions like, what’s going on right now? how am I feeling? What is my highest priority right now? (making money to fund my trip to NYC, and to renovate my house). What am I most excited about? Well, this substack. I really want it to go well. And I’m reminded of a video by Kenny Werner, where he talks about how… really being desperate for something to go well, of course, tends to sabotage the thing. And you then fall to the level of your training, and you don’t get the magic that you sometimes hope you’d get. But falling to the level of your training is not that bad if you’ve been training well! The problem is that lots of people don’t actually train very well. Training well means facing your weaknesses, and it can be painful and difficult to face your weaknesses. So maybe that’s what this post shall be about, about me facing my weaknesses. Which is something I don’t think I’ve done in a while, as a writer, and a creative?

I like good structure when I see it, but I won’t claim to be good at making it happen. I don’t really like outlining things very much. I like to freestyle. I like to let my fingers dance and go wherever they please and see what words come up.

I have all these drafts lying around and I don’t really like looking at them. I’m now questioning the premise of this post – is it a little too soon for me to be writing about writing, when I already have 2 essays – “I don’t wanna” and “the essays I haven’t published” – about the nature of creativity, and my internal frustrations? Out of 7 essays? I should do something different, probably. But I don’t have to frame it in this way. I could frame it differently. I could talk about something else and then happen to mention this. Or I could edit this later. I used to have more of an abundance mindset when it comes to throwing words onto a page, and at some point I got overwhelmed, and then I got scared. Don’t be scared, Visa. You got this. Just keep writing. You can correct everything else on the side. You can set aside time to edit and delete things.

Be not afraid, vs take heart, feel the fear and do it anyway. The nuances of language is tricky. The job of the author, writer, creator, artist, is to seek aesthetic resonance in a way that makes everything make sense, whole again.

list of tensions. I want to look back and I also don’t, there’s another tension. Maybe I should publish the list of tensions post. But that too feels… like more of the same. What’s something different from all of that? What if I wrote something that doesn’t talk about writing at ell? What would that look like? A portrait of something maybe? I wrote about Justo a little bit, although I didn’t go too deep into his life. Maybe a memoir? But I’ve said that I don’t want to write a standalone memoir. Maybe… 2006? A year? How about 2013? That was 10 years ago. Lol it’s dawning on me midway through this that technically this is a wordvomit, and maybe I’ll publish it on /1000/. That’s not a bad idea. Some needle gets moved. It’s all so arbitrary.

I was thinking earlier that I’d like to plan a meetup 20 years in advance, kind of just to have something to look forward to? Is that a bit silly and crazy?

Let’s revisit the words. Serious. Santa. Constraints1. Earnestness. DontWanna. EssaysUnpublished. Voyagers. What’s divergent from that? Maybe Gong Xi Fa Cai? (singapore draft)

✱

longevity and the passage of time

it feels like for months now i often wake up in the morning and sit down with the intention of writing something and then end up not publishing anything. i’m often conflicted about whether this is a good or bad thing. maybe both, or maybe neither.

(facebook) i’m scrolling through my facebook friends list. there are people on here that i haven’t spoken to in years. I clicked on the mutual friends of one old friend and I was confronted with a list of 6 people that I knew when I was 8 years old. I’m so curious to meet them and hear from them again.

I don’t quite believe in writer’s block, even when i’ve gone months without publishing anything. there were in fact i think years where i wasn’t very happy with anything I had published. I don’t like the imagery of the block, I suppose. How is the block supposed to look or feel? I suppose people mean “a blockage” of some kind, but I’m always imagining a big block

every day when i wake up i feel like a slightly different person than the guy who went to bed. I’ve often suspected that this is part of why I generally don’t like going to bed. I seldom feel like I’m done. As I write this though I think about

even now as i write this i’m tempted to “change the channel” to “see what else is on”. I have all these other tabs open in my browser, and in another monitor I have my notes app open with 1,115 notes waiting to be sorted. I just showered so I have a little more clarity of mind than I usually do, and I find myself thinking… okay close the tabs…? make a note of the thoughts you have when you close the tabs… but don’t get lost. And I often get lost. Let’s try it. I have a bunch of facebook tabs open, I was thinking of spending a while (this could be hours) going through my friends list and checking out how everyone’s doing, maybe message a few old friends and ask them if they’d like to hang out. I’ve been thinking about the passage of time. It’s striking how some people that I used to talk to all the time have sort of just faded out of sight. I hope they’re doing well. A part of me grieves that “the good old days” are over. I feel a sense of loss about the people who don’t talk very much anymore. I know and respect that there’s a good chance they made decisions that were right for them. It’s not very normal to want to spend decades of one’s life in public, thinking and talking and working in public. Many people give it a try, get a taste of it, and feel it out and find that they don’t necessarily want to be right in the bustle of things. I’m vaguely reminded of how some people talk about New York – about wanting to live there for a few years to really experience the thrill of the chaos, but eventually you grow tired of it and leave. I’m more like Fran Lebowitz, who’s still adamantly a New Yorker in her 70s. (I wanna say that I’ll write more about New York separately, but I’m not sure that’s ideal. Maybe I should just write about it here.) We live in new times, we are always living in new times. There’s this lady– girl, when I knew her– who lent me ten or twenty bucks when I really needed it as a teenager. I wonder how much activity has since moved to Instagram. How many people who used to have some interest in their broader social graphs have now settled into a comfortable nook of their own. Lots of people are married and have babies now. There are bunch of people whose opinions and approval I really cared about 15 years ago who I barely remember until I jog my memory with their profiles.

(feeling trapped) I remember when I was about 18 and 19, I had some friends who were studying abroad in universities around the world, and I was quite jealous of that. I felt trapped in my hometown, talking to the same people with the same accents about the same topics, swimming in the same culture, making the same assumptions and taking the same things for granted…

(wow see now that’s a sentence that just came out of me without any planning on my part. I overplan my essays. And I know what I tell people who feel overwhelmed by their plans: make elaborate plans and then discard them and do whatever feels compelling in the moment. It’s easier said than done, but if I’m going to say it then I’m going to do it.)

I can say more about being trapped. Being trapped by one’s aesthetics, one’s vocabulary, one’s grammar, one’s social graph, environment, culture. You could say “everything”, but that’s almost too broad to be useful. A list of specifics can be more comprehensive than “everything”. This is why poetry works. A few well-chosen specifics can bring up all sorts of interesting, compelling associations in a person’s mind. Sometimes a two-word phrase is all it takes to make something hauntingly beautiful. The phrase “hauntingly beautiful” is a little clichéd in my phrase-bag, but it should do the job.

I try to remind myself that there are all these new people who haven’t showed up yet. And there will be people from the past who make some sort of ‘return’ at some point in ways that I cannot know or anticipate. What else am I feeling? I want to talk about knottedness. This ties back to [writer’s block]. I’m thinking about callbacks. Should I unknot this callback and put it together? Maybe. Let’s keep going until this feels like it’s done, and then we can edit it, and it isn’t necessary that everybody knows every detail about my process. I used to think that I ought to be radically transparent about my process –I felt compelled to, as a gift to my younger self who felt shut out in the dark – but I’ve come to realize that there’s some amount of opacity that’s almost necessary in order for creativity to function. And while initially that seems like a bit of a betrayal, when I give myself some space to think and talk and feel and renegotiate it, I realize I can do justice to all of my past, present and future selves. I can be translucent about my process, I can share enough of it to be useful, while not killing the process itself… in the process. Ha ha.

What else?

(internal frustration expressed outwards) I’ve been conflicted about how I feel about… what I perceive to be weakness and incompetence in others. I don’t even really want to talk about it. Mainly I think the most elegant way to resolve it is to face my own weakness and incompetence. I’ve noticed a recurring thing over the years – I get more frustrated with other people when I am inwardly frustrated with myself. I haven’t published a substack in a long time and so I get frustrated with other people. I think I’ll cut this paragraph out because I don’t like repeating myself. Maybe I’ll put it in a word vomit or something.

The above paragraph is itself interesting in some ways about the conflict I have with this whole voltaic verses project. How much self-doubt and confusion should I include? I think there should be some. But I don’t think it should be paragraphic. This is something that I don’t get to practice in tweets because every tweet is just a tweet. So I should go a little easier on myself. The only way to get good at this is to write paragraphs.

✱;

As long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in books and magazines and media. They were my… way of making sense of the world. My window to the world. I used to read stacks of magazines in the library instead of doing my homework, and my only regret is that I didn’t read even more.

I’ve been thinking about blessedness and wretchedness a lot lately. I’m always pouring some love down the drain… because I used to be a sewer rat who needed it

✱

thinking also how wack it is how difficult it can be to know just how much someone likes or dislikes you. wtf is it with people who love you and then hate you?

// abandoned