Mindful Indolence
And the breaking of a promise.
Process
A hallmark of amateurism is being in awe of a process that eventually you hope to be so proficient at that it will be second nature and unremarkable. While I try to write, I still continue to be distracted by the shiny objects I encounter along the way. It must be nice for the naturally talented or practiced enough writer who is able to pay no attention to the process while it happens. Many of my favorite authors appear to write / have written that way; Didion, who I reference all the time, being my favorite example. Even if it weren’t actually the case, the illusion holds, which is just as good.
I’m breaking a promise to myself not to engage in that most-irritating habit - writing about writing - that amateurs are prone to. Previously I kind of disparaged this tendency, which I had been seeing so many Substack contributors indulge in, but as in most things it turns out I’m no better than the least of them. And honestly life under the self-imposed prohibition was oppressive. Wannabes like me find the writing process endlessly interesting as subject matter, like a toddler gleefully clutching and slinging spaghetti instead of just eating it like a mannered adult.
Eventually it becomes more tedious to avoid writing about writing than even reading about it is. So I’m absolving myself of that commitment for the time-being, and I don’t promise not to write more about writing next time too. I have some juicy stuff in the hopper!
Tone
Putting your stuff out there, your art, writing, or other expressions of the self, can feel very… self-important, and risible. Earnestness is cringe, a cardinal sin of our time. “I took myself seriously … ewwwww!” The best way to disarm this? Irony! As if vulnerability were the most debasing behavior imaginable. Pretty rich criticism coming from someone who registered a domain name about their feelings just to beat anyone else to the punch, right?
Detached irony seems to blight so much of the current age’s cultural output. Cool and knowing but aloof and disinterested… and strangely authoritative. Is it intentional, accidental, or inevitable that this tone would be so rewarded by memetics and algorithms in an increasingly fractured, unpredictable, and tech-deranged world?
Anyway, I’m not breaking new ground offering finger-wagging commentary on detached irony, but I reckon it merits the opprobrium it receives. At its root, this cynical posture’s coolness is cover for something sad; avoidance of vulnerability and preemptive defense against criticism. I know because it’s a part of the writing voice I have cultivated too.
I want it to be believed that my little essays are just found objects; trifles that I hold no real attachment to. Not labored at or endlessly edited and worried over, or else they would be more perfect. Nah, I just stumbled onto these odd little fellers myself.
Perspective
To further ratchet up the self-consciousness and self-seriousness of my project space here, this week I tried writing a thing not only earnestly but also in the third person. Yikes! I have a strange reflex (that might be widely shared?) to judge amateur writing in the third person, especially if autobiographical in nature, as grandiose and pretentious. Why?
My brother recommended that I try it. Not the grandiosity - I already do that - the third person. I did. I squirmed. Then re-wrote the piece in the first person. It seemed silly though to backtrack like that and it appeared to lose some honesty in the process, even though the content is highly autobiographical. The point was to try something new, bravely even, and to resist that ironic detachment that comes so easily in the me, me, me voice…
Well, it’s not without a blush and groan (and a long, distracting smokescreen of a preface… my strategy for detachment and distancing I suppose) that I hit publish. Incidentally hitting publish is also the most reliable way to manifest the missed edits and glaring typos. Here they come.
Storytime!
He sinks deeper into the couch, blanket drawn over his head and face, warm exhalation circulating back through his nostrils. The air lean, wrung out of oxygen, shortening his breath. He likes it in here, like this. Since he can remember he's been good at this thing that everyone else claims to be bad at. Stillness. Modern life is meant to be relentless busyness, but he has little trouble checking out for long stretches of time, like this, sunk deep into a tattered old couch, stowed away and daydreaming. If that's what it's called. Navigating a sea of memories and visions, stories woven with truths, embellishments, and fantasies. Indolence someone called this daydreaming habit, but in the trance of stillness the recrimination is a far-off voice disarmed of sharpness.
Daydreaming through a sea of stories, he remembers a book he read as a child, also of the sea and of a stowaway, belowdecks on an icebreaker navigating arctic waters. Seeking some northern passage and the riches promised on the other side. Where slowly the ice closes in around the ill-fated wooden vessel, sticking it fast and squeezing it tighter and tighter in a gelid embrace. The ribs along the keel cracking and popping as the ship heaves up, listing as deck boards splinter from the pressure. From a certain vantage the boat might still look well, like it is sailing into a strong wind and heeling hard, racing fine across a jet white sea. In fact, other than crushing in place, it's deathly still and racing only into a cold and treacherous winter that meticulously slays the members of the crew, one at a time. By hypothermia. By starvation. If he remembers right, by polar bear encounter too. One survivor alone remains; the stowaway tucked in a corner of the misshapen hold, generating heat enough to sustain himself, barely, under a tremendous heavy pile of furs. Reindeer? Seal? Impossible to remember. He read the story decades ago as a child, but with such an acute imagination that he might as well have been in the ship with the lonely survivor. No, been that survivor, as he fights off a hunger that squeezes tighter than the ice outside, nourished only by meager portions of hardtack discovered in the wreckage of the galley. Eventually he resorts to chewing the leather from the edges of the pelts, working up saliva to quench thirst and hunger, a pitifully short-lived relief.
Mostly, inhabiting the experience of the stowaway, he remembers the warmth of the brandy and the comforting drunkenness buoying his mind and his body, floating in a strange disorienting bliss, pitch dark and suffocating under the heavy pile of skins. Day by day he draws down one cask of brandy then another with larger draughts as the season progresses. Thankfully it's the one comestible not in short supply on this ship; the one thing that sustains him through the long dark season. He passes months of darkness, hunger, and impossible cold like this, in his blanket midden, alone, imperilled, but drunk and at an incongruous peace. He, the child reading all this, had never actually experienced drunkenness of course but that fine-tuned imagination, aided by the simple descriptive language of the forgotten author of the forgotten book, had been enough to recreate the state of mind with remarkable precision. Years later, head swimming, and gut wrenched from Boone's Farm and Mickey's Fine Malt, he'd remember having felt just this way in the frozen hull of an icebound ship long ago.
He imagined that this retreat into himself was his unique form of bravery; surviving against these slim odds, wasn't he tougher than average and cooler than most? But under that veneer of confidence he felt at times pangs of survivor's guilt. A term he, the child, wouldn't have heard for many years but understood perfectly when he allowed himself to remember his shipmates' frozen and gnawed bodies abovedecks.
As the indolent daydreamer sinks deeper into recollection, the microfiche machine of his memory abruptly jumps forward, reels whirring, warm backlight illuminating racing film and blurred print, scrolling until it halts on a different time and place. In the viewer, the image resolves into another record of head swimming and stomach turning, and an evening breeze carrying wisps of sand across a mostly deserted beach along the Pacific Rim.
Sometimes in these prolonged moments of stillness and dreaming the recrimination does come for him, and from closer to home. Even practiced in mindful indolence, the lack of production at times takes a psychic toll, paid for in anxiety and self-doubt. Shouldn't he be doing stuff? He giggles at the thought; "doing stuff" always calls to mind his highschool drama teacher directing her plays with a manic energy, running the aisles and stomping her feet frenetically, long wild tresses of unnaturally red hair waving madly, as she bellows "DO STUFF!" to the lineless extras milling on stage. You must always be doing stuff. Especially if you are only an extra.
Far south, where most of the constellations are strange and the people's tongue is not his own. Where he's learned to communicate with few words and no grammar. Grunts and gestures and at this moment guitar chords and laughter, interrupted periodically by fits of nausea as he sits with his host brother on the expanse of soft sand by a lifeguard tower looking out on the cold dark surf. Strumming, singing, pulling big slugs of la cerveza verdadera, these fits grow more intense as the night closes in. The steel coils of the thick guitar strings sting his finger tips. The shared beer glass empties and is inverted, rolled in the palms, and the last drips slung to the ground, pa’ pachamama, before being quickly refilled. He takes his turn and passes it back, then digs a pit in the sand and vomits there where he sits. Searing saliva and tears run down his face after. He wipes it all away on his gritty beach blanket and shoves the mound of sand back over the improvised catchment. On they go, singing and drinking until he, increasingly haggard and depleted from the sickness, vomiting, and surging fever, can no longer hold the guitar, and finds in trying that he also can no longer stand on his own.
He has become a wrung out husk, like the dried kelp pods by the tide pools, gummy and crusted in salt, smelling of decay.
He only wanted to keep the party going, to not be a burden, to be seen as rising to the occasion. As tougher than average and cooler than most.
Acrid film coats his mouth. The beer goes down easy but comes up tasting of the same acridness.
He becomes acutely self conscious. Is it noticeable that he is dying?
He comes to briefly at the sound of grinding gears from a sticky clutch in the rusty Volkswagen he's been shoved into; his host brother still laughing as he pilots the little lurching vehicle forward over the crest of the hill that slopes down toward the center of town. Lights out in all save a couple of buildings where generators pop and whine in the otherwise bashfully silent seaside village.
He comes to again with hard cross bars bearing into his skinny frame, through the impossibly skinny mattress of a hospital bed. He's in a sparsely appointed medical clinic, one of the buildings where up on the hilltop the lights could be seen glowing. A dusty cinder block rectangle like all the rest of the buildings in this dusty cinder block rectangle of a town. A miracle this clinic was here, staffed, and ready. The IV needle strains against his forearm as he rolls over and pukes clear saline IV fluid onto the floor. The fever and nausea make an efficient liquid processor out of his body, refusing to let anything rest inside him, until the nurse injects sedative into the line. Soon the body relaxes and goes heavy, pushing into the bedding as though it were buried under the weight of all those reindeer pelts. Ears muffled with cotton balls, head swimming, stale oxygenless breath stifling under the blankets.
He comes to with a start on the beat up couch, bolting upright and clear of the covers to draw a deep lungfull of fresh air.
Excellent reading ! Dream / reality mixed and drifted together like clouds up here in the mountains.
Keep it up. Your writing is getting better and you made some good points about irony I haven't considered before.