37: That Thing You Do Or Don't Do
recalibrate your relationship to your own desires in order to destroy capitalism
Let me describe the feeling of not writing, of not having written for the past three weeks: on one hand it feels like three years, probably both because I have been—or had been—writing quite a lot, as well as because while I was not pointedly, compulsively not writing (a choice to not, but a positive choice nevertheless), I was aware that I was not writing—and therefore aware of the difference between the (active, positive) choice to not (the compulsion), and simply just not writing. Perhaps a good way of thinking of it is that the compulsion involves a choice (of sorts), while what I have been (not) doing does not. I simply didn’t do it.
Getting closer to (describing) the feeling: what I have been doing is working. Building things, hauling materials and tools, planting things, digging, driving. After that I have been coming home and not doing much of anything. I get my cold coffee and I sit on the porch and I check my timelines and play my game (Sudoku atm) and then if I have time I take a nap. But more importantly what I have been is ok with that. With coming home and being too tired to write, specifically. To tell you the truth it hasn’t been much unlike that feeling when you are trapped in a lucid sleep paralysis dream and you wake up—the difference between the sensation of breathing between the former and latter states is that the feeling of breathing when you wake up feels fuller, fresher, like you’re getting more oxygen. I don’t mean to say that it’s “been a relief” to not write, just to approximate the affect. And the affect, I think—and I’m just now sort of realizing this— isn’t of not writing, or of not doing [fill in the blank]/ anything, but the emotional experience of having adjusted (I like to use the word “calibrate”) my own relationship with my own desire(s).
I write about writing because it (writing, not nec writing about writing) is this thing that I do and love to do and that is special to me. It’s ever-potential recursivity—that it can be so explicitly “about” itself—is probably one of the reasons I specifically like it, and an sort of special characteristic of writing, when considering the long list of things one can do. A part of the mystery or hubbub or whatever around writing also has to do with the nature of that which is there when you are “done” writing it: that is, it is something that perhaps more than most things, requires (a term I apply loosely here) sharing. Or a special sort of sharing: it needs readers. I mean it doesn’t, but embedded in its form is the strong suggestion of having or needing readers, or just readership in general I guess. Anyway my point is the reason I mention what I have been doing (other than writing) is because building things occupies a sort of antinomical role to my writing. But I often don’t need or want everyone to see the thing I built: engendered in that which I build isn’t the mass sort of sharing potential that an essay has, but simply that it works to fulfill its function. Yes I like to make things beautiful, but there is something in the nature of the (printable, distributable) “written word” that isn’t shared with the dry-stacked rock wall in someone’s backyard. If that, or any of this, makes sense.
Mostly I wonder if you, if writing isn’t “your thing,” experience the weird wide field of affective possibilities between you and the thing that you do, whether or both when you’re doing it or not— and then if all those feelings and the relationship with your desire to do that thing is something that is addressed directly in that thing you do, in the way that I can do it here pretty blatantly. I think most of this weird wide field I’m talking about is structured for us by the bleak capitalist totality we’re born into: productivity, profit, celebrity, blah blah blah. I suppose articulating a relationship to one’s work, to one’s art or craft, or articulating a strategy for unhinging the structure of our desire in relation to those things we produce or want to produce, would be a worthy pursuit. How to make it so that the way I relate to that which I am passionate about doing—and therefore that thing itself—not only divorces itself from the fucked up hegemonic and toxic influence of this capitalist reality, but can be used to destroy this capitalist reality. I guess part of us hopes, when we endeavor to do this work, that at least a little bit of what we do is doing just that. That our words or whatever the medium is can be like a hammer and nail that builds, or a weapon that tears down so we can rebuild—or better yet!: something that does both. Abolition is presence, after all.