A Mid-June Journal, Vol. 2
Day One:
It’s June again, and once again I really shouldn’t be writing, and yet it’s all I’d like to do.
I’ve been listening to Fleetwood Mac recently, which means I’m in one of my “sentimental” moods. It’s occurring to me only this time, after all these years, that Fleetwood Mac is the most important band in my life. My parents played “Rumours” on CD all the time, which is why it’s my least favourite of their major albums — the others I had to discover on my own, and it always ended up being at the most emotionally vulnerable moments of my life. Fleetwood Mac to me is sentimentality; it is melancholy and looking ruefully back at the past. The members of Fleetwood Mac strike me as “theatre” people, letting their emotions pour out in a dramatic and striking fashion. They don’t hold themselves back. I suppose I need them to unlock that part of me — left to my own devices, I would probably never properly cry.
A friend of mine posted this video on a forum a few months ago. It was clearly designed to appear on some sort of “feed,” to be scrolled to and scrolled past along various other unrelated videos. However, I came upon it divorced from any context, within a deliberately archaic online format. Perhaps this is what gave it its power — for this video almost made me cry. I felt like I wanted this guy to be my cousin, so I could see him a few times a year. Maybe he would do the dance for us at family gatherings.
I was never the biggest Fallout Boy fan, but I certainly had my time with them in elementary school. “Sugar, We’re Going Down” wasn’t one of the songs I had on my mp3 player; instead, I remember “Grand Theft Autumn” being my favourite. After watching the man dance, I found the music video for “Sugar,” and in the end that too almost made me cry — even though it’s just a stupid little thing about a teenage kid who has deer antlers, and his girlfriend’s dad wants to shoot him. At the end it turns out that the dad has deer feet of his own…
Well, maybe I am that emo kid, after all, and maybe I’m also that dad trying to hide his emo feet… I suppose, at that moment, I was coming to terms with the way I was always constraining myself to get along with construction workers. There was a part of me that was very happy to finally be recognized as a “normal man.” But it meant constant repression, transforming aspects of my personality to make them palatable to others.
Last night I had a dream where I was at a party, and Fallout Boy came on. I jumped to the middle of the room and began performing the kind of moves from the dancing man's video — everyone around was screaming and hollering with excitement. I was letting loose! I haven’t danced that emphatically in probably a decade. I was so exhausted by the end that I had to crawl off the dance floor — and then I woke up.
I’m watching the video again and tearing up! Truly, I am in a strange mood today. I don’t know what to do with myself, or where to direct this energy. I don’t have any concrete thoughts at all but just this vague and expressionless sentimentality, this feeling that I love a whole lot of people but I have no idea where they are. My injury has once again untethered me from this world of causation and forward momentum; I feel that I am not headed toward the future but pointed simultaneously in various backward directions. My past feels vivid but formless — it comes to me as waves of music, as if the associated memories did not take place on any concrete Earth at all, and might not even have involved the person I call myself.
Day Two:
I often feel like I only maintain this website for the sake of younger readers. I guess I have this sense that a lot of my readers are younger than me, although I’m not sure exactly why I think this is the case. There are certainly a lot of websites on neocities maintained by younger people, but most of the people I’ve actually interacted with seem to be closer to my own age.
When I think of what possible value my writing could have for young people, I can only think this: I’m trying to show a certain type of life that it’s possible to live. When I was young, I found it incredibly gratifying to know that people older than me had managed to carve out an existence that resembled what I was aiming toward. I can’t tell anyone how exactly to end up the way I did — in fact, I’m not even sure I would recommend it. But I can at least say that I didn’t follow any of the paths laid out before me, and I turned out okay nonetheless.
I don’t have any actual advice for young writers, or young artists in general. All I can say is that it is always possible to be an artist, no matter what, as long as you don’t concern yourself too much with fame or wealth. There’s almost nothing that can get in your way, provided you don’t become overly concerned with some abstract sense of “failure” relating to how your metrics stack up with the metrics of others. In the end, the only way to fail is to stop trying, because there’s always time left, right up until you are dead. You don’t have to succeed by 25 or by 30 or by 40 or by any age at all. You only fail when you give up. And you only give up when you give up for good — I once went several years without seriously writing at all, and then I started again, and at no point during those years had I failed. I just needed a break.
“Go ahead and do what your heart tells you. But it’s never easy when you do things differently from everyone else. If things don’t go well, you only have yourself to blame.”
This is the advice Shizuku’s dad gives her in Whisper of the Heart when she decides to abandon her studies in order to complete a project whose nature she refuses to reveal. (I wrote about the film in more detail in a previous essay.) Shizuku is a character much like many young artists, and while her father’s advice feels a bit harsh, it is nonetheless true. However, if things don’t go well, there’s always time to change tack. This is something that becomes abundantly clear as you get older. There’s just a lot of time in a life. Between now and when I’m 40, there’s an entire decade — a decade equally as long as the one between 20 and 30! And between age 20 and 30, well… I have writing in my archives from when I was twenty years old, and it may as well be the work of an ancient Sumerian.
I’m a generally insecure person and I feel a great amount of shame about my life, the decisions I make, and certain uncontrollable aspects regarding how I deal with my emotions. I often feel alienated and have this prevailing sense of being looked down on by everyone. I know that by the standard metrics all of my work has been a failure, and that in the eyes of many, I never properly “tried” — that is to say, I’ve never queried agents, I’ve never submitted work to journals or magazines, and I’ve barely attempted to promote my work in any way. Certain people have assumed that my reticence to do so is based on a fear of rejection, and at first it probably was. At this point, it is both a matter of principle and a matter of priority — I simply can not be bothered, because I don’t think the effort it would take to grow a larger audience would necessarily increase the value I get from my own work, and any amount of proper “success” would likely be deleterious to my well-being. Any amount of time spent considering how my work is being received, or how it would be received, or how it should be received, actively detracts from my ability to work.
A single comment on an essay or a Youtube video fills me with great pride that can buoy me for multiple days. A heartfelt response to my novel makes all the hours and agony worth it. These feelings don’t scale; a hundred comments would not provide one hundred times the feeling of joy.
Metrics are for business. They are valuable for commercial activities, not artistic endeavours! The only value of selling books is providing you more free time to write more books; however, in today’s world, it more often does just the opposite. There are plenty of other ways to make money — it all depends how much you need.
A lot of people can’t understand this way of thinking, or simply can’t be bothered to try. My dad is convinced that I am desperate for an audience, and that its lack causes me great wretchedness. I don’t know how to dispute this notion without coming across as defeatist or as if I’m trying to cope. I no longer tell people that I just want to write books, and that a major part of my future plans involve saving money so that I can devote more and more time to that endeavour as I get older. They see anything that doesn’t generate income as a “hobby” — certainly not something worth sacrificing potential income for. My job doesn’t matter to me at all because my real work exists somewhere entirely different, essentially in an entire Other World from all that.
Because of all this, I often want to justify myself. If things not going well means that I only have myself to blame, then I need to prove to others that things are in fact going well. I want them to understand that my life actually makes me happy and that I’m not just bumbling around in shambles. This despite the fact that sometimes I am caught up in great despair, and there are periods of time where I fail to accomplish anything at all. The truth of the matter is that most of them probably just don’t care; like I’ve mentioned before, what I think of as The World is probably only the opinions of a small few, which I have expanded over the years into cosmic proportions.
The process of accepting myself is ongoing. It is, perhaps, eternal. In a certain sense, I can accept myself; the trouble is convincing myself that this acceptance is worth anything. There’s a part of me that pretends to be The World, and that part always finds a way to discredit my acceptance. It can’t possibly be okay to be the way I am, it says. I should be trying harder, doing more, doing things differently. I should be stronger and less emotional. Sometimes it’s even convinced that I should be weaker and more emotional — whatever suits its nefarious purposes.
And when I put it like that, maybe I need to somehow come to accept even that part of myself, although I remain unsure of how that is possible. An acceptance that somehow transcends acceptance and non-acceptance: I’m not quite sure what that looks like.
Day Three:
At the end of each period of despair and melancholy, I return to life with a renewed passion for fiction.
Things are going well, for the moment. The sun has returned after a week of overcast, and the garden is evolving before my very eyes. Lulu is hard at work out there, and although I can be of almost no help, I sit outside with her some evenings, sometimes trying to sketch my surroundings (a new hobby of mine, inspired by a re-read of Kusamakura); and sometimes just wandering around the yard, trying not to step on the budding leeks, beets, or potatoes. There are a few stray cats around who watch as well, when they’re not using our newly-planted beds as a litter box.
Every other day, I can write for an hour or more before the pain becomes too much. My current inspirations are Dostoevsky, one of few authors who can truly get my blood pumping; Shelley, whose biography I am reading alongside his major poetical works; and the bizarre world of Turn A Gundam, which feels like the most unleashed iteration of Yoshiyuki Tomino’s grand vision.
The Mid-June Journal is an exercise in exorcising unwanted thoughts. I don’t want to think about money — it’s boring. I don’t want to think about The World’s expectations — they’re irrelevant. With one swift stroke — with, dare I say, a philosophical flourish — they are cast off from my mind and sent drifting away across the ocean’s vast expanse…
I will publish my second novel soon. It will be available on this very website. I am trying to remember exactly how to format and distribute an electronic book; in all likelihood, I will just have to re-learn it all from scratch again. I don’t yet have a cover. I don’t even have an idea for a cover. That is probably the largest hurdle at the moment. I don’t think the cover is all that important, but it seems that you do need one. I also need to comb through and check every “to” and “too,” among other things. After some heartening feedback and a quick skim the other day, I am more pleased with the novel than I ever have been. In fact, I almost always like the novel a great deal whenever I actually read it — it’s only when I let it sit for months at a time and start imagining all sorts of problems and deficiencies that I grow sour on it.
The best way to stop dwelling on a finished project is to move on to something else. If my second novel is not all that good, or if it’s not the ultimate embodiment of my artistic vision, then I can hope that my third novel will be. Perhaps this is another piece of advice I can offer young artists: never publish until you’ve begun work on a new project you think will be better. It helps take the pressure off. You’ve no longer got all your eggs in one basket. That’s some Balckwell wisdom.
Is it time, now, for some poetical works? I’m always wondering this. Yesterday, I went on a long walk around the river, emulating Coleridge and Shelley, and considered the possibility of poetical works in my future. So far this year, I’ve written a single poem, of only two lines. The other night, I threw together a practice sonnet, just to make sure I still had a grasp of meter and rhyme — but I don’t think that’s the format for me. I’ve never been keen on sonnets; they always feel a bit pithy to me. I prefer the roaming, wandering nature of Coleridge’s medium-length poems; and of course, Milton’s steady, rolling, blank verse.
The main use I can think of for poetry are for scenes so abstract, romantic, and imaginative that prose just won’t do. Tales of two characters who just can not have personalities, or else the whole thing falls apart — and prose fiction without personalities just never feels right to me. I have visions sometimes of stories that I just can’t tell with the tools currently at my disposal.
All this passion, while my hands are still so weak! It’s terrible!