To all my bloggy friends who aren't on Twitter or Facebook (these can just ignore this post), I have a story at Blue Print Review called "Coffee." I think I posted it on the blog some time ago, but now it looks all shiny and new. So stop by and have a look, and then look at the other works - it's an interesting issue.
So go have a look, because right now it feels as if I may never write anything again.
Showing posts with label ambition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ambition. Show all posts
Saturday, February 06, 2010
Friday, September 18, 2009
I ditched the meaning and now I have nothing to wear
Suicidal ideation without intention. Just one more thing I think about and never do.
And wouldn’t, so don’t freak out.
That was one of a list of characteristics my therapist derived from the TAT (Thematic Apperception Test). When you take the TAT, you view a series of pictures (drawings, photos, prints) and talk about what is happening in the picture, what happened before, and what will happen after. These are my traits:
Boredom
Distractibility
Morbidity
Lack of motivation
Suicidal ideation without intention
Desire to escape reality
Well, that’s encouraging. At least I’ve always been correct in my self-assessment.
Boredom: I’ve been complaining about this from 5 years of age on. I remember my childhood as a lunar landscape of boredom, empty time unrelenting and blank, tense with restraint because movement was futile. In college I discovered hyperstimulation: late nights, clubs, drink, drugs –the quest for elation. Now I just tend to drift when I’m bored, or to seek distraction in the ever shifting world of popular culture.
Distractibility: Ooo, it’s shiny, it’s new, and there’s more here, and more there, and wow, there are just lots and lots of things/music/books/websites and I can look up anything anytime, skipping stone to stone with a pocket full of baubles.
Morbidity: The worst will happen. The other shoe will drop. Yang needs its Yin. Karma will bite back. Car accidents, abductions, murders, torture, assault, hurricanes, tornadoes, terminal disease, sudden death.
Lack of motivation: I never met a goal that grabbed my attention. I am consistent in bobbing along, drifting past the scenery, uncertain, baffled and envious of those with definable ambitions. I feel sleepy.
Suicidal ideation without intention: From the moment I understood what it was, standing in the bathroom at 16 with a razor blade wondering if I could in fact nerve myself to cut deeply enough, the possibility of slipping out of life has had its allure. But not enough to try it. I’ve talked about it and mulled it over and compared possible departure routes with equally morbid friends, and read enough Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton to induce major depression. But I’ve never collected the pills, walked into the ocean, slit my wrists, tied a noose. I want transition, but not that transition. My card is the Tower – the destruction before rebuilding, the slate wiped down and a nice new pencil, the old self burned away and the new one in the ashes.
Desire to escape reality: Fiction, fantasy, cinema, TV (all those foreign soap operas!). If you’re bored silly with what you have to do and feel trapped and hemmed in by necessity, duty and responsibility, and/or you don’t feel confident in any of these, where do you go? I am never just here, in this one place at this one time. I am not “present” as I so often hear. I am wandering over 10 or so different landscapes at once, and often not as myself.
After looking at the pictures I thought of how we filter all art this way, through our own temperament and idiosyncrasies, so that even the most objective aspects – narrative sequence, the paint and the object painted are transformed by our projected fears and desires. This is why I can’t imagine the Bible as inerrant rather than a mysterious hallway of mirrors.
In college I had to read The Possessed by Dostoevsky. The professor, it was clear, found the nihilism of the radicals repulsive. He had, after all, escaped from Communist Russia. Although I disliked political nihilism (as I like civic order), I found the idea of nihilism liberating. I thought of clearing the land for the new crop, burning the forest to encourage the trees. Everyone was so certain of what everything meant – morality is this, purpose is this, you must behave like this because of that because that is what is right because that is what everyone knows, the great immutable meaning of rightness. Useless, stagnant meaning seemed to have a stranglehold on everything. How lovely to discard the meaning and construct something more suitable.
Only, I am good at cutting away the meaning and not so good at constructing something more suitable.
And wouldn’t, so don’t freak out.
That was one of a list of characteristics my therapist derived from the TAT (Thematic Apperception Test). When you take the TAT, you view a series of pictures (drawings, photos, prints) and talk about what is happening in the picture, what happened before, and what will happen after. These are my traits:
Boredom
Distractibility
Morbidity
Lack of motivation
Suicidal ideation without intention
Desire to escape reality
Well, that’s encouraging. At least I’ve always been correct in my self-assessment.
Boredom: I’ve been complaining about this from 5 years of age on. I remember my childhood as a lunar landscape of boredom, empty time unrelenting and blank, tense with restraint because movement was futile. In college I discovered hyperstimulation: late nights, clubs, drink, drugs –the quest for elation. Now I just tend to drift when I’m bored, or to seek distraction in the ever shifting world of popular culture.
Distractibility: Ooo, it’s shiny, it’s new, and there’s more here, and more there, and wow, there are just lots and lots of things/music/books/websites and I can look up anything anytime, skipping stone to stone with a pocket full of baubles.
Morbidity: The worst will happen. The other shoe will drop. Yang needs its Yin. Karma will bite back. Car accidents, abductions, murders, torture, assault, hurricanes, tornadoes, terminal disease, sudden death.
Lack of motivation: I never met a goal that grabbed my attention. I am consistent in bobbing along, drifting past the scenery, uncertain, baffled and envious of those with definable ambitions. I feel sleepy.
Suicidal ideation without intention: From the moment I understood what it was, standing in the bathroom at 16 with a razor blade wondering if I could in fact nerve myself to cut deeply enough, the possibility of slipping out of life has had its allure. But not enough to try it. I’ve talked about it and mulled it over and compared possible departure routes with equally morbid friends, and read enough Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton to induce major depression. But I’ve never collected the pills, walked into the ocean, slit my wrists, tied a noose. I want transition, but not that transition. My card is the Tower – the destruction before rebuilding, the slate wiped down and a nice new pencil, the old self burned away and the new one in the ashes.
Desire to escape reality: Fiction, fantasy, cinema, TV (all those foreign soap operas!). If you’re bored silly with what you have to do and feel trapped and hemmed in by necessity, duty and responsibility, and/or you don’t feel confident in any of these, where do you go? I am never just here, in this one place at this one time. I am not “present” as I so often hear. I am wandering over 10 or so different landscapes at once, and often not as myself.
After looking at the pictures I thought of how we filter all art this way, through our own temperament and idiosyncrasies, so that even the most objective aspects – narrative sequence, the paint and the object painted are transformed by our projected fears and desires. This is why I can’t imagine the Bible as inerrant rather than a mysterious hallway of mirrors.
In college I had to read The Possessed by Dostoevsky. The professor, it was clear, found the nihilism of the radicals repulsive. He had, after all, escaped from Communist Russia. Although I disliked political nihilism (as I like civic order), I found the idea of nihilism liberating. I thought of clearing the land for the new crop, burning the forest to encourage the trees. Everyone was so certain of what everything meant – morality is this, purpose is this, you must behave like this because of that because that is what is right because that is what everyone knows, the great immutable meaning of rightness. Useless, stagnant meaning seemed to have a stranglehold on everything. How lovely to discard the meaning and construct something more suitable.
Only, I am good at cutting away the meaning and not so good at constructing something more suitable.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Why Count When You Can Dream?
Make every moment count. How I hate that exhortation. Like watching sand in an hour glass fall grain by grain. Each grain falls and then it’s too late, the next is upon it. Another dead moment, uncounted. How many moments in a day? Each one is a thumbtack pinning me to immobility.
What does it mean? Should I give my undivided attention to each activity? I’m no Brother Lawrence. I don’t want my thoughts imprisoned in a broom. My attention wants to soar and meander and thread its way in and out of today. If it isn’t attention, then what is it? I am writing this rather than doing something else, something I should be doing. But this thought I am riding may never come again. And yet my attention is unfocused, my eyes do not settle. They are wandering a landscape that doesn’t exist. How futile. How lax. How very un-American.
What should I be doing? Work – well, yes, the spoiler of all joy, what we do to make a living, eight hours of bondage to the One Thing. Reading scripture? Praying? Improving my mind? Plotting out each hour of my day, subdividing it into little parcels of land to be tilled? Living out the dreary Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? Because every moment is so bloody important I have to grab it, shake it, subdue it, suck the marrow out of it, discard it and move to the next. Well, I don’t want to be highly effective, like a disinfectant, like a marketing campaign.
Ambition was never my strong suit. I have never been able to settle on goals. The fear of amounting to nothing is always at war with the desire to embrace nothing, to be invisible and unconscious. The experts say if you fail to plan you plan to fail, so perhaps I will have a magnificent failure. Or not so magnificent, a small inconsequential failure. By everything holy in the world I have failed in every way. By commerce, by artistry, by faith, by consistency, by fame, by fortune, by function. I have never broken a moment and forced it to do my bidding. They are roaming free in the meadow, munching grass.
My thoughts set sail in a gentle breeze. They are lying on deck, purring in the sun. Let the day flow like a river, and perhaps I will have the courage to jump in.
What does it mean? Should I give my undivided attention to each activity? I’m no Brother Lawrence. I don’t want my thoughts imprisoned in a broom. My attention wants to soar and meander and thread its way in and out of today. If it isn’t attention, then what is it? I am writing this rather than doing something else, something I should be doing. But this thought I am riding may never come again. And yet my attention is unfocused, my eyes do not settle. They are wandering a landscape that doesn’t exist. How futile. How lax. How very un-American.
What should I be doing? Work – well, yes, the spoiler of all joy, what we do to make a living, eight hours of bondage to the One Thing. Reading scripture? Praying? Improving my mind? Plotting out each hour of my day, subdividing it into little parcels of land to be tilled? Living out the dreary Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? Because every moment is so bloody important I have to grab it, shake it, subdue it, suck the marrow out of it, discard it and move to the next. Well, I don’t want to be highly effective, like a disinfectant, like a marketing campaign.
Ambition was never my strong suit. I have never been able to settle on goals. The fear of amounting to nothing is always at war with the desire to embrace nothing, to be invisible and unconscious. The experts say if you fail to plan you plan to fail, so perhaps I will have a magnificent failure. Or not so magnificent, a small inconsequential failure. By everything holy in the world I have failed in every way. By commerce, by artistry, by faith, by consistency, by fame, by fortune, by function. I have never broken a moment and forced it to do my bidding. They are roaming free in the meadow, munching grass.
My thoughts set sail in a gentle breeze. They are lying on deck, purring in the sun. Let the day flow like a river, and perhaps I will have the courage to jump in.
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