Me vs Myself

I felt like I was heading for a burnout, which was strange, because I’d only been seriously working on this project for a couple of weeks. But here’s the thing:

Interviewing people about the toughest times in their lives is, unsurprisingly, exhausting.

I totally underestimated that. Going in to these initial 5 interviews, I thought I was experiencing tiredness from the online nature of the calls — that “Zoom fatigue” we’ve all suffered through the pandemic. And as I started to schedule further conversations — I had about 10 on my list in total — I felt a bit of dread about how tired I’d be at the end of it. But I wasn’t thinking in emotional terms.

It came to a head on Monday morning when I interviewed a very close friend and we ended up talking about their suicide attempt, which happened many years ago. At one point when I was listening I was just clutching my chest, as if to bottle up the tidal waves of emotion that were trying to pour out. My friend and I talked for two hours. By the time I hung up the phone, I felt shell-shocked.

It was then, five interviews in, that I realised I had to cancel the other five. I’d set myself up a ridiculous schedule of two interviews a day max, with the view to talk to each person for up to two hours… it didn’t sound like a large amount as I wrote it all down in my planner, but I realised that it was. I had no boundaries, either. I would be listening, open and searching, sometimes sharing parts of myself, holding space for people as they talk about their deepest fears and perspectives. And I wasn’t taking much time in between these conversations to process, unwind, or take care of myself. I was all “go, go, go!”

The irony isn’t lost on me. I’m on furlough and I thought I should use this time by working really hard and fast on the research process of the project, so I wouldn’t have to apply for a research project grant. I wanted to impress people with how much I was getting done. I wanted to smash this stage of the process. I thought 10 interviews was barely enough. More was more, I didn’t want to be left behind. So here I was, anxious about wasting time on a project that was all about reconciling emotions on wasting time.

Kinda dumb, huh?

This project is absolutely about myself and trying to make something for myself, as well as everyone else who experiences anxiety around time. I didn’t think it would get under my skin so quickly.

So now, my plan for the next few weeks is this:

• create a reading list

• read!

• write out interview notes

• add to my research book with lots more notes and ideas as I continue reading and thinking

• write this blog a few times a week

From what I’ve learned, sometimes things move slowly and imperceptibly. So that’s what I’m going to do. Keep doing stuff but letting that underground river (I haven’t written about the underground river yet! I will do soon) run on, to its unseen destination.

Zoom Out

I’m not in my house right now — I’m staying with my parents up in Scotland as the winter wave of this pandemic hits London hard. For the most part, being away from London has been fine. I take things day by day, and that’s helped. Trying not to look at the big picture, you know?

But this morning I got a text from one of my flatmates saying she’s got a negative test result and is returning to the house after being away in Italy. Another flatmate is also getting a test and returning.

It’s been easier to not think about London, to think about my house, my flatmates, the distance between me and my regular life. My boyfriend. But those texts made me zoom out from my small, day-to-day focus and see the bigger picture: a pandemic which is disrupting our lives so hugely.

I’ve started to do interviews with people and there’s these perspectives on lost time which are totally different, yet work together. There’s the microscopic, stir-my-tea, look out the window perspective, and then there’s the bigger picture.

During the pandemic, when I look at the bigger picture, I get sad.

I like to think of it as a boat metaphor. I’m in the cabin, passing the time as I wait to arrive at my destination (life post-pandemic). Something prompts me to draw myself away from my writing/painting/card games and I go up to the top deck to take a look out at the sea. From the deck I watch these huge waves rise and fall, a storm is brewing in the distance and there’s no land in sight. I go back to my cabin but I can’t shake the feeling of unease.

The sea is dark and the way is unknown.

That’s why it’s easier to deal with the smaller things — what’s inside my cabin, what I have in front of me.

Is there a way to love the bigger picture even if we don’t know what it means? Is there a way to love the black, unfurling sea? Do you know what I’m saying?

The bigger picture is usual put together and contextualised after the event has passed. After the pandemic, I’ll be able to make meaning out of it. But for now, it’s the small stuff.

(…but is there a way to love the big, unknown picture?)

The Slow Curve Back To Björk

In 2015 my interest in Björk finally blossomed. Up until then there was a vague awareness & appreciation. She was on the edge of some large mystery and I wasn’t entirely ready to go there yet, dark weirdness. When the spark finally hit, I was in love: merging sex, death and science with instrumentation that both pulls from imagined futures and romantic pasts. I mean, she dresses like a galactic moth and her music videos are robots fucking. It seemed on a totally different level from any other artist I listened to. I sat in bed one day and watched the entirety of her concert at the Royal Opera House in 2001.

Musically, I was in the middle of searching for an identity. Identities are always flowing and ever-changing, but I felt like I hadn’t even found the essence with which I was flowing. I hung on to Björk and studied her melody lines and the intricacy of her arrangements. I wanted to sound futuristic, like her. But only in terms of sound. My song content was still deeply entrenched in my life, my experiences, my immediate longings. Stories of me.

After a few attempts to get some sort of electronic pop sound going, I walked away and a few years later, picked up my acoustic guitar again. A producer came along and said “hey, your acoustic songs are so good, I want to help you make them,” and I took that as a clue towards my sound. I left my dreams of becoming some incarnation of Björk on the shelf.

In my research for “Wasted Time” (or should I call it Lost Time? I think a name will emerge the more thinking I do), I came across the work of Timothy Morton. I stumbled on him through the Caitlin DeSilvey essay on Rewilding Time, and happily found that there was correspondence between Morton and Björk made public.

I’ve only just started to dip my toe into Morton’s Dark Ecology, so I can’t fully talk about all the ideas yet, cause I’m still trying to understand them. I think the conversation with Björk is helping, though. Also, they say some interesting things about pop music & songwriting:

What is original does not come from absolute blank nothing (“oblivion”), but from an electromagnetic tenderness— from remembering not forgetting . . . The song as entity is a physical being in its own right

And then Morton goes on to talk about how art helps the “almost-now” eco society to “rediscover enchantment”—

our mission maybe is to allow people to feel this and think this with full crystal clarity, not departing from reason for one second, yet allowing the inner space to sparkle madly

Allowing the inner space to sparkle madly. I love that and I feel like songwriting fits in there, rewilding time fits in there, transforming ways of looking at lost time fits in there, moments of quiet and wilderness fit in there.

Look at this beautiful tiny sparkling void, it isn’t nothing at all, it’s beautiful

And they bring up the North!! Talking about it as a realm of enchantment. As a place where society can maybe learn about the sparkling, magical unknown:

there is part of me that just wanted to talk about elves and sprites. . . you can feel these entities coming out of the rocks up here in the north of england, the pools and fountains. whether you like it or not, believe it or not. irish woman i heard once: “sure i don’t believe in them, but they’re there all the same…” bang on… somehow the further north you go the more vivid it becomes. i expect it’s super vivid in iceland?

Also on the table is the idea that thinking the world is separate and evil actually makes you the evil thing. You are the world and to think evil of it is to make evil of yourself! View time the same way! Lost time? Stuck in a sparkling void? Hate the void and you are the hate! Starting to care for the world begins with being caring — caring for yourself. Love yourself = love your neighbour = love the planet. Narcissism and nihilism and finger-pointing break that down.

What about merging with the void? Merging with care & eroticism towards the wilderness of stale, dormant time? Merging with the unknown, merging and caring about the stillness, the staring out to sea from an unmoving chair by the window?

Also, the song Isobel. Leaving it here for later:

The lyrics also relate to sparkling voids / dark forests / being alone:

in a forest pitch dark / glowed the tiniest spark / it burst into flame / like me / like me / my name isobel / married to myself / my love isobel / living by herself

Is Isobel a character of Björk’s personal mythology?

Finally finally finally, I am still figuring out what Object Oriented Ontology truly means in dumb, pop music terms, but here is a definition of it which I think makes it easy to grasp? Maybe?

Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is Graham Harman’s variant of the Speculative Realism movement. As an enquiry into the existence of objects it gives objects the same importance as humans. In doing so, humans are not all powerful over objects: we co-existing on planet Earth.

That’s from an essay by Joshua Speer. My understanding of OOO (apart from the fact that I love the roundness of three Os together) is that things exist, and without human interest/understanding/gaze, things still exist and have power, timelines, lives. Everything is an object, even concepts and massive things like climate change or Jupiter. Objects are also created from disparate things which can get lumped together — the human species is an object, with its own interactions with the planet which might seem separate from any individual human who is a part of the species. For example, I’m a human writing on my computer, drinking a cup of tea. But as part of the object “human species”, I’m currently devouring the planet’s resources and wearing away the Earth’s climate. This interpretation of OOO might not be perfect, and will probably develop the more I read about it. Currently reading Morton’s Dark Ecology which is helping with that.

So. Back to the Björk. Morton mentions a coral reef in his final email in the chain:

i think of OOO as the discovery of a gigantic sparkling coral reef too deep for most philosophy to notice. sharks floating about, anemomes with tendrils. things that could be alive, could be dead. could be plant, could be animal. could be a whole entity yet made of all kinds of things that don’t add up to it

When I thought of the dark coral reef, I felt it as a place which was deep and secret, which people couldn’t even visit. When we are lonely and within the lake of lost time, we might feel like we’re at a similar place. Not a sparkling coral reef perhaps, but something like it. Something which is unseen by other people, which feels very far away, like the bottom of the Mariana Trench, but at the same time there is something magical and sparkling about it.

I am calling this The Sparkling Dark.

Does being in lost time, the sparkling dark, allow us to access a realm of the magical? Or the mythical? What mundane experiences would back these claims up?

I have got several interviews with people I know coming up, mostly about chronic illness, but also about psychology, unemployment, creativity and recovery. I wonder what we will discover about the sparkling dark then.

To put a very long, rambling story short… from all of this, I realised that Björk is still a huge inspiration to me. She can be an influence even if I’m not emulating her sound. I’m taking a different view now — ecology made pop, art made mainstream, academia in emails about coral reefs and sparkling Nordic landscapes. Philosophy and weirdness and dreaming all whipped up and put on a stage for people to sing and dance along to. That’s what I want to do with this Wasted Time project (which I am now leaning towards calling “Lost Time” instead of Wasted…. ‘wasted’ implies more blame than ‘lost’).

Making the sparkling dark a place to dance in.

Into The Dark Ocean

i’m reeling over this essay about creating personal mythologies by Buster Benson.

He describes the personal myth as a way of looking at the dark, universal anxieties we have as humans and creating stories which serve as reminders to love, look and understand these problems. As Buster writes, the universe is a “dark forest,” and our awareness of this dark forest is our awareness of its mysteries and chilling truths. For example — we can’t stop bad things from happening, we’re all going to die, we may never have the lives we dreamed of living, etc, etc…

Mythology is about creating a sense of connection to the universe, ourselves, and thusly, creating a connection to meaning. Why is this happening? How can I make it make sense for me?

When I started to think about personal mythology, I also thought about personal symbolism — stuff that has specific meaning to us just because of how it shows up in our lives. For example, the traditional symbolism of a horse might be speed, messages, transit, freedom… but for me, horses make me sneeze and I think of my sister’s attempt at horse riding when she was a kid. Horses make me think of the forests by my hometown, trying something you’re not good at, mystery and weirdness (cause horses have this otherworldly quality to them).

Personal symbolism comes up naturally in dreams. It’s where our subconscious speaks to us through visual messages which can only be deciphered by ourselves. I have one dream I remember vividly, which also feels like it serves as the beginning of a personal myth:

I’m at Cape Horn — the most southernly point of South America. I’m standing high on a viewpoint, it’s a blue sunny day and I can see a small town. On the edge of this town by the ocean there’s a scientific research centre. Looking towards the research centre, I can see there’s an expedition of a submarine which is going down and off the edge of this most Southern point of the continent. It’s not a submarine that’s already submerged in water, but instead a vessel that starts on the land and then rolls off the edge of the rocks into the deep. Now I’m in the submarine that’s about to be submerged and I’m terrified to be this far South and going underwater — it feels like I’m heading into entirely unexplored territory with no way back. The water is icy and a deep blue and after the initial stomach-churning splash, we are moving through the water and down, down down… Looking out of these huge glass windows which panel the front of the submarine, I get an overwhelming feeling of the sublime — that experience where you are simultaneously in awe and on the edge of terror, but somehow it feels good. Swimming past us as in the distance I can see a large whale, a whale shark, a giant manta ray, everything is huge and formidable. It’s so beautiful. The terror doesn’t leave but I start to become thankful for being on the submarine, seeing these incredible, otherworldly things.

The ocean in this dream is also like the dark forest, in which it’s mysterious and potentially deadly, but also full of wonder.

Question: can we create personal mythologies that help us out of quiet times in our lives? Can we create personal mythologies around “wasted time” that turns it into something meaningful and full of connection?