Sometimes my mind involuntarily puts pieces of information together—a day, or two days, or even a week after events or non-events—and so it's very hard for me to live in ignorance, because my subconscious defeats it. Immediately, I see things that I can't unsee. Sometimes these flashes of insight are innocuous, and sometimes they're painful, but the larger point is that I can't control them. I think the way I interpret my reality is connected to writing plays in particular.
Seeing that when a character leaves or enters the room, something very interesting or surprising may have happened in the interim. And that when they refuse to answer a question or explain something—there's a reason there. There are many things I don't know, but I have an excess of knowledge about the people around me—or sometimes even just strangers I see sitting at the table next to me; I get the whole download very quickly, automatically…
I stumble. I stumble and stumble. I don't really arrive anywhere that makes sense to me. I'm just in a version of the same place that was before. I think all the stumbling and all this walking in circles has to do with not mastering my thoughts—not mastering myself.
My fantasy is to become a writing machine, an art machine, a genius machine hooked up to the great mystery of the soul, which just pumps out perfectly formed thought poems. But the better AI gets, the more absurd this commodifying fantasy becomes. I cannot make infinite Substack posts and write infinite books, and I cannot be infinite at all. I am finite, and I must cultivate the finite.
Animals and little children have the joy of living, and so people who don't know how to interact with animals or little children have really lost something.
Everything that doesn't have the sacred in it just gets sucked into the vortex of the commodity. There are really only two objects in reality: the sacred object and the commodified object.
Why do I have the urge to take nicotine after midnight, and to drink tea, and to stay up?
I realize how much I'm not really present in so many of the things that I do, and this is my constant regret—that I float above myself, calculating and worrying, rather than plunging into the noetic center of reality, of God's creation…
When you're in a game, the world is flat. When you're in creation, it is well-rounded and full of splendor.
I think to be healed is to stop playing a game and to exist in creation.
You do a great deal of damage to yourself and flatten yourself out to participate in the two-dimensional game of winning and losing things.
You grow cold when you scatter yourself, and grow warm the more of yourself you gather together and center. Like any fire, the fuel has to be concentrated and bundled together, piled up.
In the past, the world was small, and people were full of feeling, and full of prayer, and we really can't imagine how often the people would pass prayer, but it was basically constant. People were networks of prayer and religiosity. I don't necessarily mean that they were morally better than us, but life was simpler, and there was no illusion that everybody would die. Death was constant, and so prayer was constant. Now everybody lives with the illusion that they won't die, that death can be forestalled. Rather than broadcast prayer, we broadcast self-advertisement. Maybe that's why we're so miserable. The world is big and interconnected, and there are billions of people, and everybody's competing with each other—rather than praying, or making, or preparing for birth, or preparing for death.
The most embarrassing thing is habit. The only people who should feel pride are people who don't have habits, who don't repeat themselves, who are always fresh and original. Those are the masters and the mystics. You can always tap into existence, drop their fixed attitudes. You can just be windows and not projectors.
I'm reading Lawrence Stone's The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641, which argues that the English Civil War was above all enabled by the decline of the aristocracy, which, in the transition between feudal and market societies, became gallingly feckless. In the years before the Civil War, earldoms were sold at increasingly cheap rates. “The insatiable demand for status and honor between 1558 and 1641 is proof of the truth of what has been called Tawney's Law, that the greater the wealth—and even more, even its distribution—in a given society, the emptier become titles of personal distinction, because the more they multiply and are striven for.”
Like a little boy who doesn't want to go to school, I want to avoid reality. I keep my head under the covers. But reality instruction begins whenever you're there. The instructor will hold the lesson until you show up. So there's no avoiding it—it can be weeks, or months, or years—but reality won't wait for you to get up, brush your teeth, shower, go to school. The whole point of reality is to instruct you, so you can't avoid it, and it can't begin without you.
Attention-lust is the enemy and love is the friend. Attention seduces, but love gives.
Reality is only a tiny quotient of what I experience, which is largely unreality—the screen world, that world of false incentives, which is extractive, destructive, has an symmetric advantage over us.
I think about how I might regenerate myself, the soul in me that is me.
We're all suffering from a kind of shell-shock, but not from mortars or bombs, but from screens, which destroy intention.
And intention is the mark of free will, and by extension, a signifier of trustworthiness.
If something is done for totally compulsive reasons, how can we trust it? We can't. What we can trust is the highly intentional gesture.
James Bridle writes in Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines, The Search for a Planetary Intelligence that we “must learn to live with the world rather than to seek to dominate it” and “discover an ecology of technology.”
Thinking is hard work. My brain wants to conserve its energy by not thinking, and that is the hardest part of my day: forcing myself to write, to think.
Don't save your energy. I have to tell myself: don't hold on to this, don't try to get it exactly right, because unless energy is being pushed out of the skull, then all these entropic forces coming from without will crush it, like a submarine crushed in an ocean trench.
The goal of all of this is self-transformation through communication, reintegrating your thoughts into the new sphere, realizing that the writing tools have agency of their own, that we can join ourselves, that our agency can extend ourselves through it. Give care, in other words. It's all a major part of being humans—using tools the right way, using tools to make yourself more human rather than be used by tools to become less, to find co-conspirators with our daring attempts to have a soul, agency, and to have vivid mythological lives that have turned out beautifully.
Weds evening. I've been scrolling through my (flip) phone and my text messages for the last six or seven months, just reviewing the different phases and periods I was in. It really feels like I've lived a new month, a new life each month.
I put my phone down and watch smoke meander into the 6 p.m. light from someone at the next table. I don't feel like going to rehearsal; it's very hot out. I don't feel like doing anything. I feel like I should get better at doing nothing. It's been a long time since I've lived with the flat door in any sense.
I'm writing this on a legal pad in the Elizabeth Street Garden.
To my point—about not being able to slow down—I've already made a list of projects for the summer:
- Three screenplays
- Two novels (revise one, complete one)
- A new play
I have no idea how I intend to accomplish it all. This is a kind of wild mania.
Summer makes me feel kind of crazy because everything slows down and I don't know how not to do that myself.
I feel like I'm pedaling on a little bicycle to keep my life airborne, and if I stop, it will all crash. I'm driven by fear, in other words. But that fear might be realistic, so it's not really a flaw.
I feel like a gambler who can't leave the table.
I should stop searching, seeking. I should let things come to me for once.
“If you love, simply love more,” Osho the spiritual guru writes in the book I have before me.
“Consciousness needs freedom.”
i have been thinking of james bridle nonstop since that knausgaard piece came out in harpers, nice to see them quoted here