Sleepless last night, and thinking hard, the way I tend to do when I am pinned to the bed by exhaustion. (A sort of captive audience for my mind!) It occurred to me that there is something very sad and personal at the heart of all my working and my thinking; that no matter how much I might believe that I am making something outward-facing, really it is quite the opposite; the signposts point, obliquely, inward. This does tie in with a lot of my beliefs about subjective reality, everything seen through the prism of the Self, but I was surprised by the extent of this inwardness, when I considered it fully.
The truth is, I’ve had some bad luck, and I do have difficulties, and there have been bad things; there are a lot of ghosts around me, a lot of things that haunt me. And I’ve never really felt able to talk about these things, having always been (well, since adolescence) the sort of person who prefers to exist just outside of the spotlight, in that halflit, shadowed space. (This is a reason why I am so uncomfortable with “networking”.) I’m too solitary/private to deal well with attention, & for this reason counselling & talking with friends has never been for me, despite attempts. (I’m yet to try psychoanalysis.) But when you carry things that haunt you, & when you are, somehow, in spite of yourself, an expressive person, I suppose it is only natural that these things will seek an outlet. But I do not want my work to become a form of therapy; I loathe the idea of being so self-referential, self-pitying, self-focused. I do not want to become literal, obvious. I do not want to play the part of the Tortured Artist. It’s about transcending the self, not pandering to it! What I want to do is to try to resolve (or at least explore) these tensions between Self and Other (aether); and, at the same time, to allow the knots and lumps inside me to slowly unravel, loosen and expand.
I wonder if it is the same for everyone; this struggle to be expressive & heuristic in one’s work – without feeling self-indulgent or crass? For myself, I am not at all sure that I can escape nor erase this one fundamental four-letter word that sits at the heart of everything I do; everything I am. At times like this, I feel I’d really benefit from an older friend or mentor – a parent (or elder sibling)-like figure who could share the benefits of their experience with me. My 20s have been a strange voyage, blown in all directions; & I feel that slowly out of the fog, a solid shape is emerging, and that shape is who, or what, i am; in short, they’ve been a gradual process of coming to know & understand myself – but mostly I feel adrift, unanchored, lost in the fog. To have a guide would be a wonderful, wonderful thing.
