There’s something very funny about how i’ve been spending the past 2 years struggling to figure out the container for my current work. I recently decided that it’s to be called ▣ Frame Studies ▣. It’s the current name of the substack, and I hope to spend the next 2 years or so putting together a collection of essays that will bear that title before I move on to whatever’s next.

Now here’s the funny thing. I’ve tweeted about this a bunch, spoken about this a bunch, and I’ve even helped a lot of other people with it as a marketing consultant. And yet. I’ve been trapped within my own frame of assumptions and expectations of what these essays are supposed to be. And I gotta tell you it’s been fucking exhausting. I’m so tired. There’s a chance I might be mixing up the tiredness of being a parent with the tiredness of working on this project, but I don’t think that’s it. Because I know that when I’m in the right frame for a piece of writing, it absolutely just pours out of me. I don’t even have to think about it, my fingers just go ~wooosh~ and I’m barely a participant. Like that Dave Chappelle quote from Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee about letting the idea drive. You know the work is gonna be good when the idea shows up at your house, saying ‘let’s go!!’ And you say ‘I’m not dressed, where are we going?’, it says ‘you’ll be fine, don’t worry about it.’ Sometimes you’re sitting shotgun, sometimes you’re in the fucken trunk. On the other hand, there are moments were you think, “You know what? I should drive.” That’s when it likely doesn’t work, because there’s no idea in the car. I’ve spent so much time in the driver’s seat and it’s exhausting. I want to let the ideas drive. I don’t even wanna say ‘my ideas’. Who knows where the fuck ideas come from.

I guess there’s a pattern here that’s similar to why I took so long with my second book Introspect. It was a book about processing one’s personal issues, facing one’s inner demons and so on, and I didn’t feel like I could honestly present that book to the world if I didn’t do some of it in the process of talking about it. And I did. And I think it’s what gives the book it’s animating spirit. Some of the book is janky, it takes a little too long to get started, it goes a little all over the place, and there are some parts that are straight up unfinished. Would I like to fix all of those things? Sorta. But it doesn’t feel like the most important thing I could be doing. The most important thing I could be doing is actually solving this goddamn puzzle of “why am I not having fun working on Frame Studies?”

And when I write about it I know it must be because I’m approaching it the wrong way. I’m approaching it like it’s supposed to be something rigid and canonical. I remember making this exact mistake years ago when I was at work, trying to write a proper canonical guide to a particular concept that felt really important, and I spent months and months making no progress on it at all. The advice I’d have given someone in my shoes then would have been to get away from the blank page and try to have a conversation about it with someone. And maybe that’s what I should be doing here, too. I was just reading some of Scale by Geoffrey West, and at some point he talks about one of Galileo’s books, Dialogue Concerning The Two Chief World Systems (1632), which was written as a kind of socratic dialogue between 3 fictional characters, and I find myself thinking that maybe that’s what I need, to stop being “me” and inhabit a different… frame… other than Visakan Veerasamy As The Narrator. Why do I seem so averse to writing ‘fiction’? I guess my first thought is that I don’t really see anybody else doing it. But why do I care what other people are doing? It’s just force of habit, probably. Being a social animal and all that. But alright, I’m pacing my house a little and I’m convinced, I should write a bunch of dialogues.

I.

I have a large volume of notes and drafts that I have been increasingly frustrated with. I’ve decided to try tackling them by writing them out as dialogues. I have not thought this through. I’m just going to freestyle it and see what happens. For starters, I need to give my characters names. My first thought goes to generic names like “John and James”, which I feel meh about. I kinda want slightly silly but evocative names. Hypertext… Hyperion… and… longform… Laurence… Lazarus. Lazarus and Hyperion. That’ll do. What context shall I put them in? Present day? Cyberspace?

Lazarus, a young and moderately successful author, was feeling disheartened. He had been working really hard for a really long time and didn’t seem to have anything to show for it. He had a large volume of drafts which he felt suffocated by, yet the idea of throwing them all away felt like sacrilege to him. He hardly seemed to be getting any sleep, and he was chugging coffees and energy drinks and smoking far too many cigarettes, all of which he knew was ruining his rest further. But he couldn’t seem to help it. One moment of clarity, he thought, just one resplendent moment of clarity, and it might all turn around. He might finally find the magical string of words he needed that would reanimate all the material around him, and he would be able to confidently share his work with his peers, and they would be astonished, and the readers would be awestruck, and the world would be marginally better for it, and at last he would be able to sleep fitfully, feeling like he’d earned his keep.

But that moment of clarity continued to elude him, as it had for over a year now. ‘I should talk to someone,’ he mused. ‘Someone who understands what I’m doing, someone who appreciates my work, who won’t just give me clichéd advice, someone who’ll ask me the right questions…”

As he went on, he found himself thinking of his old friend Hyperion. Years ago, Lazarus and Hyperion were bandmates in a somewhat popular local rock band called Molotov. Lazarus wrote the lyrics, and Hyperion wrote the riffs. The two of them always had excellent chemistry, each of them constantly coming up with suggestions that improved the other’s work. If it weren’t for the other deadbeats in the band being so unserious about their craft, Lazarus was certain that they could’ve been far more successful than they were. But lately he’d been second-guessing himself. ‘What if I’m just wrong about everything? What if I have no idea what it actually takes to be successful, and I’m just… thinking whatever is convenient to make me feel better about myself?’ He shook his head. ‘Hyperion would know how to think about this. How has it been years since we last spoke?’

Well, life happened. The band canceled a series of gigs because one member or another couldn’t make it, and then they postponed having practice, and then everyone drifted apart. Lazarus was busy with his work in advertising and writing his novels on the side, while Hyperion moved to work in tech startups.

✱

(2024sep24) A writer is stressed, overwhelmed, distracted, uninspired. He paces his cramped little study, which has his computer and his books, and his children’s toys, and other assorted junk. He glances at his phone. An old friend had texted asking to meet for a coffee. He sighs. Might as well. Nothing else seems to be working. 

It’s a day with torrential rains. He boards a bus that’s filled with a raucous gaggle of shrieking children, soaked from the downpour. He sighs again. He just needs some time to think, he thinks. Surely if he could just carve out a little time and space, everything would become clear. Although, he notes… he had a lot more time and space before his children were born, and things weren’t much clearer then. But, he has more of an incentive now than ever to attain clarity. The question is, does seeking clarity make it likelier to emerge? Or does the seeking itself tragically kick up a dust that makes it even harder to see anything? There’s not much time, he needs some sort of win.

He stares out the bus window as the rainwater slides outside it, melting the outside world into a blurry cascades of shapes and colors. “This used to be my favorite thing,” he thought to himself piteously. “Once upon a time, or in another life, this would be a lovely experience.”

The soft mallet of this possibility strikes a dusty gong in his heart, and a faint-yet-deep chime rings out, shimmering. “This could be a lovely experience right now still,” it whispers to him. “In fact, it already is. All you need to do is to take off the psychic armor- release the muscular tension- take a deep breath- and recontextualize yourself…

Train. The light screeching of the rails.