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Bjork, Show Me The Ice Caves
Mar. 29th, 2005 05:33 pm
You know, some days I would give my right arm for an altered state of consciousness. Today is one of those days.
It's not necessarily the desire to trip my balls off on some illegal and very hard-to-obtain substance, it's just the opportunity to see the world in a different way. For some reason that ability seems shot at the moment, like the imagination has in a very real way seeped out of my bones and left great big gaps where it should be. I can literally see a grey-and-lavender swirling fog in my head. Hmmm. Maybe I should write a story about that.
I was talking to Eliahn a couple of days ago and I remember lamenting the fact that out of most of my friends I'm one of the only ones who have never been legitimately insane in a happy, life-affirming way. I've wandered the bring of mental instability, to be honest, and I don't quite have the fond memories of it that most people seem to. I can't help but wonder if I did it wrong, and if so, if there's a manual that'll teach me how to be insane the *right* way.
There's been this nagging suspicion plaguing me for the past few months telling me that I've Grown Up(tm). That between the concerns about money and media and work and food and diet and parents and work and Keeping The Room Clean and clothes laundered and body non-smelly and everything else there's no room for flights of fancy any more. What was an irrevocable facet of my personality is now conspicuously absent, and I want to know why, goddamnit.
I probably *know* why, come to think of it. I've come to think of my brain as inherently deficient. I always distrust my stories because I know they'll have some fatal flaw that will render the tragedy or humor or strangeness of it useless, that everything could have been avoided if character "A" had simply performed action "B". And since my dreams can't even hold up under their own internal logic, I've just stopped remembering them. Fear of failure inspires inconfidence, and that inspires...well, creative death.
As an artist, I feel I have become part of the ranks of the undead. Walking around performing all of the actions that Real Artists tend to without yielding any results. The afterglow of the early success of the year has burned off, and I'm staring directly at what it's exposed.
I don't like being afraid of my own voice. This calls for drastic measures to be taken, but I'm not really sure what those are. How does a zombie *live* again?
It's not necessarily the desire to trip my balls off on some illegal and very hard-to-obtain substance, it's just the opportunity to see the world in a different way. For some reason that ability seems shot at the moment, like the imagination has in a very real way seeped out of my bones and left great big gaps where it should be. I can literally see a grey-and-lavender swirling fog in my head. Hmmm. Maybe I should write a story about that.
I was talking to Eliahn a couple of days ago and I remember lamenting the fact that out of most of my friends I'm one of the only ones who have never been legitimately insane in a happy, life-affirming way. I've wandered the bring of mental instability, to be honest, and I don't quite have the fond memories of it that most people seem to. I can't help but wonder if I did it wrong, and if so, if there's a manual that'll teach me how to be insane the *right* way.
There's been this nagging suspicion plaguing me for the past few months telling me that I've Grown Up(tm). That between the concerns about money and media and work and food and diet and parents and work and Keeping The Room Clean and clothes laundered and body non-smelly and everything else there's no room for flights of fancy any more. What was an irrevocable facet of my personality is now conspicuously absent, and I want to know why, goddamnit.
I probably *know* why, come to think of it. I've come to think of my brain as inherently deficient. I always distrust my stories because I know they'll have some fatal flaw that will render the tragedy or humor or strangeness of it useless, that everything could have been avoided if character "A" had simply performed action "B". And since my dreams can't even hold up under their own internal logic, I've just stopped remembering them. Fear of failure inspires inconfidence, and that inspires...well, creative death.
As an artist, I feel I have become part of the ranks of the undead. Walking around performing all of the actions that Real Artists tend to without yielding any results. The afterglow of the early success of the year has burned off, and I'm staring directly at what it's exposed.
I don't like being afraid of my own voice. This calls for drastic measures to be taken, but I'm not really sure what those are. How does a zombie *live* again?
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