What do I do about myself? Writing and making from within.
Personal reflections while attempting to map the field.
I woke up this Sunday morning
and read a quote by David Lynch saying that every day is a Saturday morning: “you got a great feeling, and it grows, and grows and grows”. Knowing that he is able to have this approach to life is inspiring in itself. I always loved quotes. Sometimes motivational, sometimes not. I like depressing quotes, too, if they come from people I admire. It makes me feel like I’m not the only sad person in the world, and this is why I am inspired by vulnerability in general. Fragments of books and speeches, taken out of context and printed in that book of quotes my mum had, that I read as a child and copied my favourite ones, translated to Polish of course, into my notebooks, with colourful pens. Now it would be verging on the cringe of a motivational quote post, on the concept of which many built whole meme accounts, which I indeed enjoy. I still think there is something exciting about an out of context sentence, capturing importance with very few words, like a line of poetry, a fragment that hits on point, a short moment of experienced feeling or a cognitive click, a sudden understanding. I write I write and I write, and I know that most of it doesn’t have any value, I wonder if you can put yourself down with writing just like you can “translate your unconscious into the conscious” in the process of healing trauma. Does it work both ways?
I have been remembering recently.
Linking the points in the past. Where was I a year ago? What was I doing a year ago? I felt comforted by how far I have come. I felt happy that someone close to me is still alive. But when it comes to career, to doing what I love and sharing it, everything feels so small when I keep comparing it to other people’s achievements. I feel so unexperienced and unworthy of anyone’s time. I know that I just can’t do some things as easily as others can. Sometimes I speak and the person in front of me doesn’t hear my words. Sometimes I want to be invisible and everyone sees me more than ever before.
This week I re-recorded the monologue for my film again, and decided to keep a single voice instead of the overlapping overwhelm I had before. I worked on subtitles and some layering. I watched the export today and couldn’t feel anything. I need perspective, comments, and feedback. I like being and working on my own, but I am aware that valuable works are rarely created in isolation. I am looking forward to my next tutorial, counting on being able to discuss my practice in more detail. I also enjoy how my attitudes to the film are changing, the sinusoidal pattern. It seems to represent emotional waves of my everyday life, grounded in the premiere timeline. I sometimes try to pretend that I don’t feel, then I see my reflection in the screen superimposed on the edit sequence on a sunny morning, and it all comes crashing down.
Steady pace.
I keep finding reading materials that expand and inform my project, papers and books are piling up, folders filling up with pdf-s, and it seems like I have been reading all day every day, but there is always more and more. I tried organising the schedule of materials to go through, but I keep deviating to every new thing that captures my attention, so now I just evaluate weekly reading after I’ve completed it. My problem is that I do not like skimming or scanning. I do it only with materials that I see for the first time and want to find out if they’ll have any relevance to my project. Once I chose to read something, I read every word of it. I feel I’m slow, but I don’t really have a way of comparing. How do other people read? Recently I devoured three books in a week and a half, because they were what I consider an easy read. But reading papers and chapters for my research has to be active, so I can’t do it fast. Steady pace.
I want to believe
that I can make every day predictable and organised, but it’s not possible. Emotions and physical feelings keep getting in the way. I crave sameness, but I’m also terrified by it in some way. I feel stuck between the need for routine and yearning for change, and it takes away my ability for balancing on the thin line of now. Sadness and resignation permeate my steps. I dive into those papers and keep reading about psychedelic film, grateful to find that not everybody dismisses it as a drug-fuelled exploitation and incoherent obsession, but that some acknowledge its impact as a tool for modifying perception and consciousness, wider understanding of the self and interconnectedness with the world, planting the seeds for social and environmental change.
What do I do about myself?
The time when I thought that I am somehow completely separate from my work, and that I should keep my feelings away from my ideas, has ended a few years ago. I see creating as the only way to heal, by making the truth visible, providing it with words, colours, images, sounds, and movements within which it can operate. The truths that stem from inside of myself but are released into the physical, phenomenological world. Letting go. They become something different from myself. If I kept clinging on to avoidance of involving what I think and feel, my personal path and subjective experience, into my work, it would seep through anyway. But it would infiltrate my work with the blindness of the ego, an unacknowledged bias, a self-indulgent point of view, and idea as the holy grail, unencumbered by awareness of the real need and reason for its expression.
I remembered that my poetry have ever had any value only because I was writing from within myself, and so it needs to be with filmmaking. I cannot just skip the fact that I am a person. It has to start with subjectivity in order to access collectivity. By omitting the subjective, the truths of motivation, intention, yearning, and need are all ignored, and any ideas planted lack roots. I might be conscious of an interest in an idea, and what it can mean in a wider context of an audience, a community, a society, but I started asking myself why. Why do I feel its importance? How can I suggest solutions and improvements, and new points of view, if I don’t know why they are important to me?
As a child I had been told I’m selfish so many times when I attempted to meet my needs, that most of my early adulthood I have been afraid of myself. I don’t want to here talk about personal development, self-care, and individual expansion, as these ideas can be connected to ego-centric societal tendencies. I am talking about being able to look within and understand, and if understanding is not immediately possible, to feel and acknowledge. My looking into the notion of self and subjective experience in the context of object-subject boundary blurring in psychedelic film, in delirious disorientation and experiences that push one outside of the framework of expectations, logic and rationality, has roots in my own struggle with the idea of being a person, with the effort to position and understand myself as an interconnected fragment.
I see vulnerability as an ability to share the truth. It is marked by a great courage, like in writings and works of many artists I admire. To me, truth is always poetic. It is heavy. I think it can be just as difficult to admit to a persistent positive attitude as it is to admit to a cycle of sorrow. To express desperation as it is to express hope and faith. It all depends on the stormy skies within one’s own heart.