02: we live in time
living in yesterday, making bad (good) stuff and the music of a moment
fui sum ero
I wake up with a stunning desire not to.
It is a miracle that I get out of bed at all because I do not believe that I will. I imagine that I might sink into the bed, my body merging with the mattress’ and not have to carry on at all.
I awaken the same way, over and over until movement becomes inevitable. I search for my will to go on in the splat! of toothpaste juice in the bathroom sink, in the white shirt I put on haphazardly, forgetting to do the second button, in the elastic band I pack my hair in when the black scrunchie is nowhere to be found. It takes me a while to remember where I might find this elusive will, in the bus ride to my posting. I remember that I fall in love with living in that kind of movement.
In class, I write down the date—15/09/2025—but when the person beside me writes his, he writes tomorrow’s date. I dismiss it until he passes me the attendance list. I question him:
Is this today’s date?
I realize I’ve been living in yesterday since the day before. I learn in the first class. In the second class, I desire violently to leave.
The man is talking about falls and accidents but I’m thinking of the giant billboard keeping Mi-jeong alive in My Liberation Notes.
I’m thinking of weeds and how they are purely defined by where they appear, by whether or not they are wanted. I think of the email I promised to reply over the weekend, all the time I’ve spent not studying and how difficult it is to reach for hope this morning, to remember that what is gone is gone and only what is here remains, not even what is ahead.
The man’s desire to teach is commensurate with his compulsion to humiliate. It is difficult to learn in these conditions. He wishes aloud for a gun, in laughter, to someone who can’t answer his question. He spends almost an hour over his allotted time. More importantly to me, he delays my bus ride. I am raging in silence.
By the time I’m on the bus, my insides are broken glass. The tension has sped up my usually delayed registration of hunger and it takes me a while to remember that I slept too early to eat last night. I can’t think of what has happened, it feels tragic even though it is not. I can’t imagine what is ahead, another day of trying to learn a million things in little time.
I settle into my seat, eyes closed. No desire to find wonder, to look for the perfect door at the end of my suffering.
https://hellopoetry.com/poem/20581/the-wild-iris/
I plug my ears not to listen to music but to block out noise. I want to kick off my shoes. My eyes remain closed throughout the bus ride. Today, my best might be impossible to see.
making bad stuff
I began writing as a purging. I have said this to a number of people in the past month. Almost a compulsion, I vomited my feelings as they came without any heed paid to structure or style. I felt my way through everything and the reward of this rawness was more than enough to keep me going.
I have written a lot more over three years and it shocks many that I haven’t been writing for longer. I began taking photos about a year after that. I felt my way through that, too. Something has bothered me about this recently, the (almost purely) instinctual nature of my creation.
I have been ill at ease with this state of affairs, the fact that I color-grade based on how I want to feel, I feel my way around the form of a poem, around the progression of my stories. And it’s beautiful, this discovery of self by self. But I do not understand any of it. It is dreamy to think of creating from talent, natural skill as someone recently put it, to know that all of this beauty is in spite of systematic learning of any kind. It must be romantic at the beginning of any pursuit: the stumble, the mess. It conjures up the image of an artist speaking directly for God, untainted by the stiffness of structured teachings. And, very well, I could decide to act like I’m the first person on earth, stumble around in the darkness of creation until I find, and understand, all the lights.
Certainly, I have stumbled upon truths just by thinking and writing out thoughts, as have many people. It is, however, neither time- nor energy-wise, nor is it even feasible for me to rediscover all that has already been discovered rather than sit down to do the grueling work of learning how is Tartt making me feel jitters with such a simple sentence for the love of God! Painstaking, heart-wrenching and gut-twisting as it will and has been on the occasions that I’ve tried this.
After a few years of creating and sharing, I am aware that I might have a talent. And certainly, I haven’t done everything based entirely off this talent. as dramatic as I may have sounded at the start. Yet, as much as progress is a natural by-product of practice, it is unstructured progress. I do not know what I’m doing right or wrong, I only know how it makes me feel. I also recognize that a kind of good taste may have been developed from reading (plus consuming other forms of art) and the subconscious study that occurs when that happens, which means I would feel what is wrong in my own work. But this is not enough, it is a recipe for creating the same things in the same manner until the once-a-year epiphany after the creation of many such things.
Better than I could, Mary Oliver puts it in A Poetry Handbook,
It has always seemed to me curious that the instruction of poetry has followed a path different from the courses of study intended to develop talent in the field of music or the visual arts, where a step-by-step learning process is usual, and accepted as necessary.
In an art class, for example, every student may be told to make a drawing of a live model, or a vase of flowers, or three potatoes for that matter. Afterward, the instructor may examine and talk about the various efforts. Everyone in the class recognizes that the intention is not to accomplish a bona fide act of creation, but is an example of what must necessarily come first—exercise.
Is anyone worried that creativity may be stifled as a result of such exercise?
Not at all. There is, rather, a certainty that dialogue between instructor and student will shed light on any number of questions about technique, and give knowledge (power) that will open the doors of process. It is craft, after all, that carries an individual’s ideas to the far edge of familiar territory.
The student who wishes to write a poem, however, is nicely encouraged to go ahead and do so, and, having written it, is furthermore likely to be encouraged to do another along the same lines. Quickly, then, the student falls into a manner of writing, which is not a style but only a chance thing, vaguely felt and not understood, or even, probably, intended.
Continuing in this way, the writer never explores or tries out other options. After four or five poems, he or she is already in a rut, having developed a way of writing without ever having the organized opportunity to investigate and try other styles and techniques. Soon enough, when the writer’s material requires a change of tone, or some complex and precise maneuver, the writer has no idea how to proceed, the poem fails, and the writer is frustrated.
It is (a change of) the last part I am after.
After all my thinking and talking, I have been made to understand that this is a sign of growth. There is an intense dissatisfaction that comes from creating at a level below which you are aware you are capable of.
Sometimes, when I think about this, I circle back to unintelligent questions like who was the first writer? And what was the first book on writing? After all, the great first writers couldn’t have had much to go on. How did they arrive? Who are the people we are based on based on? Where is the beginning of this circle?
I believe in creating as badly as possible but it gets to a point, when your interest is sustained, that you desire to create better, to stretch your limits, to taste magic. And when I say bad, I do not mean mediocre, like when I say amateur, I do not mean bad. I only mean that there is better ahead, refinement ahead. Ahead is an understanding of why any of the bad was ever good enough in the first place and how the next will be better.
Initially, I thought it a kind of complacence, (it can be) but sitting firmly atop that is confusion. It is less satisfying to do, over and over, without a possible end in mind. It is only that we must learn to love, more, the doing. To figure out what to do now, I must know what I want to be, what I wish to be doing later. This cluelessness is part of what pervaded my entire being in recent times. A lack of direction was (is) sharp as a tooth in the meat of my being. I crave such clarity that will trigger an overhaul, a restart, a reinvention of myself and, if I am to keep going how I am, an understanding of why and how to do it better.
People assume, for reasons that are beyond me, that I have my life together. I do not. I am a jumble of unanswered questions. I wonder how long and how quietly I will have to sit with myself to answer them.
five things about September:
There was a lunar eclipse on the seventh and I missed it. According to my gloating friend, it was blood red and absolutely stunning. In her defense, she ran (and Malyshka doesn’t run) to get me but by the time we got back outside, it was gone. It stayed gone. But the night was full of other things like the fact that I convened with my gloat-er and another friend as we searched. Three other friends who were a town away called together and asked me to look up. I told them I’d been doing that for hours.
There was a heartwarming ruckus as the signal played yo-yo with my heart until eventually we switched to a video call and they showed me the moon over there. It’s not that I’m tired of creating magic but I did want to be included in something universally acknowledged to be wonderful. I bet I could feel very sad if I really thought about it. And it was never quite the same but my friends were determined for me to see it. It was something else but it was beautiful.
I found this waiting for me the following night.
I was speaking with someone when he mentioned the fact that I no longer need to be prompted to speak. And I even seem to enjoy talking. He is right. And I think it is important that not only has this happened but that it has been acknowledged.
The same friend also mentioned that I needed to draw badly. And I do, not because I want to get better at it, although I think that is a natural by-product of practice, but because it is a special kind of attention that requires you to look at things as deeply as you possibly can. The first thing I ever painted wasn’t inspired but was rather prescribed by a therapist. I think it will be something better to do this all of my own free will. To do it joyfully and terribly.
I have never felt tethered to a place. I do not necessarily like to arrive because it means I must have left and I do not like to leave. But on my last trip home, when I saw the falling-apart stalls by the roadside, the yellow márúwá’s which through my eyes seemed to be moving slowly like stills from a movie, and the man with the bag that said iPhorie climbing up a hill. A strange feeling, not unkindly, not unlike home, settled over me, making me wonder, what is this I’m feeling?
I thought I hated to travel but I don’t. It is in movement—mine and others’—that I fall in love with life. Mine and others. If there were no orchestration of leaves by the wind, no gentle migration of clouds across the sky, or that thing the stars do when they twinkle, it might be easy to get bored with existence. You can only stare at a painting so long.
little mystery box
I traveled at the beginning of September and I listened to (exclusively and almost entirely) the discographies of these artists—Teledalase, Simi, Dwin The Stoic and Asa—on my journey to and fro. And that was all the music I was going to share but when the doors were closing on September, I listened to a song for the first time and the circumstances around it compel me to share that instead.
It was like math, the way it happened: inevitable. Crescent moon, bare couple-trees on bare ground, and me, listening to this song by the roadside. Someone walked past me and I’d just mumbled a greeting when his perfume hit me. The scent entered into a note of music and burst/ Like it was 2+2, a memory flew past me. I stood still, right there, chasing this memory that I would not eventually catch.
When I got myself back, I couldn’t even remember the note nor could I reimagine the smell. It didn’t matter how hard I tried, it was a scribble in ashes and the wind had blown it away. It was gone. The song remains, though, and that I share.
I haven’t had much time to watch My Liberation Notes so I started listening to the OST earlier last week. I was pleasantly surprised to find that one of the songs has practically the same title as a story I “wrote” (see: started) a couple of years ago. I love when there are tangible and referenceable coincidences between my life and art that I love.
I’ve been reading Donna Tartt’s A Secret History and, let’s be honest, her proficiency, and all the words I have to Google search every few minutes, layer on to my feelings of inadequacy. They are like little stones in the pocket of my dress and I’m underwater. I don’t hate it.
This happened:
And Marigold because:
(I’m really into Ted-Ed animations these days).
Toodle-oo,
S.
The second half of this rings so true! I many times do most things by feels (even though I claim to be logical) and now I'm thinking that there can be systems to my creativity.
And that I need to learn and maybe refine my skills. I also think that by refining, we get to hear our authentic voices clearer.