One wears one’s self out with thinking. And yet there’s something to be said for it. Wear yourself out through one thing or another, I’d say.
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But perhaps I am overstating the situation, perhaps I suffer from a fever dream. What is wrong, after all, with a little frivolity? Only I fear sometimes that, in the context to which I am referring, it does not end with anything good-natured, or fun, but descends into spitefulness and rage.
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I said that this vantage point has been “foisted on us,” and I suppose I mean that. But another way to think of the situation from which it arises, and that itself is to be expected, insofar as it represents a continuation in the evolution of technology (which has always been occurring, and which I imagine will always occur), is to understand it as a void, or vacuum of meaning, that needs to be filled by something of substance, or otherwise be forsaken to the powers of frivolity, banality, idiocy, and deceit that are never in short supply, and that demoralize by way of sowing discord.
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Which isn’t to say that the vantage points and categories of old are no longer relevant, for I think they are (I can’t imagine how the novel, for instance, which has managed to sustain itself in the four centuries since Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, and which seems to me a most perfect and beautiful form, would cease to speak to some longing in the heart), but that a new vantage point is emerging that wants to be reconciled to, or synthesized with, those of old.
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That this vantage point has been foisted on us, and is defined by, the ubiquity and unceasingness of the digital fabric where many of us now persist is, I think, evidence of the fact that the categories in which abstract or imaginative or intellectual work finds its domicile are seldom as solid and permanent as they seem, but are, rather, illusory things that we depend on as if they were not illusory, in order that we might get anything done.
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Though perhaps it isn’t so much a role that is coming into focus, but a vantage point from which the artist (and especially the literary artist), inhabiting the role they always have, conceives and executes and transmits their work.
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Maybe it is too early in the digital age for anyone to describe with much definitiveness the extent to which these technologies and paradigms might affect creativity, but I think that the shape of a role that the artist might inhabit is coming into focus.
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What I mean is, while the role of the artist is never new, exactly, changes in technology, and in the paradigms that a civilization establishes, and by which it abides, are used by an artist for unforeseen ends.
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Of course, one of the differences between those works and this one is that they were conceived, and brought to fruition, during the age of the printing press, rather than the age of the internet. The significance of which has to do not only with questions of distribution (though those are of significance), but also with questions of rendering and execution, insofar as the changes that have been wrought by the digitization of media, and the disintegration of the gap between author and audience (which no longer requires an intermediary or wholesaler to span it, so that an author can transmit their work to an audience with immediacy), are not only logistical, but have made themselves felt in the creative process itself, inasmuch as they have allowed for an innovation in the way that an author (or, to use that unfortunate term, ‘content producer’) understands their role, and relates to their own work.
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Like those works, this diary finds its expression in the aphoristic and the fragmentary; and, while not invested so much in the chronology of a narrative, is guided, in spirit and intelligence, by the articulation of truths that, existing anywhere in a narrative’s arc, most pressingly assert themselves into the spectrum of ideas that would associate themselves together, one with another.
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Among the works that I thus feel an aesthetic kinship with, and an imaginative debt to, are The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa, and Pensées, by Blaise Pascal. For it was by way of an encounter with these books, when I was younger, that I began to fathom the possibilities of a literature that extends the range of an author’s more arbitrary inclinations, and, in fact, validates them, without forcing that author to abandon or disregard the comfort that a reader looks for in the shape of a narrative.
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Not that I haven’t ever involved myself in the writing of narratives of extended length and singular focus, but that, the more familiar I become with my own sensibility, the more clearly I recognize that my talent finds its most natural expression in a nomadic imaginative condition, and a loose conception of plot.
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I cannot avoid it, my constitution is such that I would wander indiscriminately, if attentively, from one thought to the next, less inclined to the accumulative nature of plot than to the fragmentary beauty of association.
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The allure of which is that I am not forced into certain of the confinements produced by the singularness of narrative, and of structure, that is the lifeblood of more well-defined genres. Though what I then sacrifice is the beauty and integrity that can belong to the sustained exploration of, and imaginative loyalty to, one particular subject and means of expression.
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For I see now, I think, that my instincts were ahead of me in knowing, when I started this diary, that what I wanted, as a forum for expression, was a genre whose boundaries were sufficiently malleable or indistinct that I could move among its provinces, according to impulse, without departing entirely from the thrust of my concentrations.
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Nor will it matter if, at some point again in this diary, I express myself through drawings rather than writings, for they are of one piece, to my mind, and I do not distinguish between what my subconscious would articulate verbally and what it would manifest visually, though it is true that the impressions made by each of these modes will vary according to what is in them.
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But if I do allow my thoughts to wander in directions that seem, to a reader, unrelated to that which came before, I won’t be concerned. And if I introduce sequences of thought or of drama that are fictive, rather than ‘real,’ (as I did in vol. 1) I won’t feel the need to elaborate or explain, even if I choose to do so.
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So that I do not wish to be tiresome or banal, or to express myself in ways I would regret, but to maintain in my prose enough dignity and precision that no subject I could find myself approaching would seem to me unnavigable.
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And there is, too, I hope, some judiciousness in the way I select and order these thoughts, insofar as I’m not writing for myself alone, but am aware of the possibility (if not the fact) that this record has found some readers.
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Not that anyone is asking me to say, but that I’d say it anyway, if it occurred to me to do so. For all my remarks here have been unsolicited, the casual as well as the serious, the brief as well as the protracted. And yet even though this is a diary (or a project that uses the tropes we’ve come to recognize as belonging to the ‘diary,’ as a genre, for its structure), so that there isn’t much need to censor or qualify the thoughts that present themselves to me, I do make a habit of selecting from among them those that would seem to have the clearest association with the entries that precede them.