Adventures du jour!
A gray day in Tampa. My brain is sludge.
Yesterday while writing I got bogged down in a scene, hit a spot that shouldn’t have been that difficult, and lost all will to live, as it were. I went to bed early and finally slept pretty hard after a number of days of weird half-sleep–although I did wake up in the middle of the night dehydrated again.
After several days of internal chaos, more settled. On the one hand, I feel like I’m going through these endless bouts of internal drama. It never seems to end; it’s exhausting; I feel like all I do is complain. On the other hand, well, I get to have emotions of my own that don’t reflect anyone else’s priorities, and when I look back, I can go, “Everything since July/August has been valuable so far.” It’s almost like I have decades of repressed emotions to handle or something. When I have moments of distance, I can see that I’m closer to accomplishing my big goals. The universe keeps throwing me treats (or, really, I stop shoving good things away; same thing). And for all of what feels like unceasing drama, I have more equanimity in public than I’ve ever had–I’m not having panic attacks in Target anymore, for example, and catcalls don’t throw me. But when I don’t have distance it feels terrible. Hurricane DeAnna.
Got up sore. Last night, at a friend’s recommendation I added some Body Weight Exercises (BWEs) to the “cannot sit still instead we DANCE” breaks. Unsurprisingly, they were fun. Also unsurprisingly, this morning was a bit of an ow. Mostly squats, some baby lunges, a couple of tricep dips on the back of one of the chairs.
This morning’s yoga was sharply curtailed by soreness. This morning’s walk was shorter but not abruptly short, and one of those *very* rare times where my brain slowed down a little and I just walked. It annoys me when the brain and body aren’t in overdrive–I don’t know how people do it all the time; it seems so sloooooow–but I also know that if I push hard just now, I’ll get sick. I may play some video games later.
I had a good call with someone who might hire me to do marketing/AI stuff with him; he recommended a Coursera course with Andrew Ng on AI. He said, “But you don’t have to take it!” like three times. Hahahaha…don’t underestimate the power of weaponized curiosity, my friends. I may or may not be able to pass the course (that’ll depend on the level of math I need), but I will certainly strip-mine it for concepts.
…Side notes about “After Images,” the Borges essay…
After reading “After Images” by Jorge Luis Borges umpteen times at a slow crawl, I can now comprehend the damn thing well enough to read it straight through. It’s a 500-word essay that’s taken me weeks to tackle and process. I thought his stories were tricky and densely packed with meaning. HA.
I read it one more time this morning and realized that I’d completely missed the point.
I think Borges hoped to accomplish *something* with this essay and his essays in general. He wasn’t just ranting or explaining. It’s more like he was writing to change the world in one very small, focused regard.–One of the few thoughts out on the walk today was, “An essay tries to accomplish something. To essay means to try.”
In “After Images,” Borges keeps talking about trying to do something: he writes about craving, imploring, hoping, wishing, making manifest, and revealing. He’s asking the reader to do something. But what? He *says* he wants more art and poetry from Argentina, and make it original, please.
Given the rest of his work that I know, I think he did want more art and poetry from Argentina. I also suspect that he was essaying to reprogram the reader into becoming a part of that effort somehow, either as creator, consumer, or critic. “I know it’s selfish, but I want better art to come from Argentina” was all he’d have to say, otherwise.
Instead, what he says is that after love poems, after trite cliches, after metaphor, after *images*, comes art that is so real that the art itself becomes self-aware, and is ashamed not to be real: “We must reveal an individual reflected in the glass who persists in his illusory country (where there are figures and colors, but they are rules by immutable silence) and who feels the shame of being only a simulacrum obliterated by the night, existing only in glimpses.”
The writing in the essay is so particularly dense that I feel like he’s using the density as a technique to exhaust the reader’s ability to cope with densely written material. He even points out that densely written material is exhausting: “At length we exhausted [metaphor], in sleepless, assiduous nights at the shuttle of its loom, stringing colored threads from horizon to horizon.”
Yeah, if you think I write dense text in the daily adventures…nah. I just have ADD and more experience writing fiction than nonfiction.
It feels like this essay is an attempt to create a fertile ground for art that comes after images: the individual who persists in his illusory country.–As I noted elsewhere, Borges’s work influenced the work being done on AI today, so it’s not like he was unsuccessful at this attempt, either.
This just makes me wonder: is every essay, not just Borges’s, like this on some level? When we explain things, we want others to understand; when we rant, we want others to be affected emotionally. When I’m writing essays, I don’t think, “How can I change the reader?” I think, “What do I really think? How can I put my thoughts in order?”–But then again, I don’t offer up prayers to heaven to give me more Art, the way Borges does in this essay.
But I *could.*