Sometimes the place where Rob ends and I begin can be confusing.
Confusing is a fun word if you take it literally.
I want – or I wanted, I guess, before I started this – to take a break. To take five minutes or ten or maybe an hour, but probably the rest of the day, and just have a really deep, cleansing cry. Despair is a difficult emotion to describe, and it feels impossible to justify.
But, if I let myself do that, I wouldn't get anything else done today. And accomplishing goals, like living with depression or addiction or a partner who isn't pulling their weight, is all about taking things one step at a time. And I still want to write about all of tomorrow's games before I finish this day.
I started with Rob, rather than with myself and my feelings, because I'm not sure how many (or how much) of my feelings are from existing in the liminal space between Rob In The Past and you, I guess, in the present and potential future we're trying to build; and how many of them are habitual mistakes I don't know how to stop making – and which have nothing whatever to do with Rob.
For a long time I wouldn't talk with Rob when I felt this way. Would definitely not have put myself emotionally into a full scene. These scenes – I try to keep them to around 3000 words – used to take me days. Not days to write, but days to channel in their entirety. Days, sometimes weeks – often months – to complete. But I wouldn't work on him, either communicating or editing his words. Because I was convinced that I would inject my voice into his words. And terrified of it.
Writers work magick, man.
I'm not here to include myself among their class. You'll read a lot of How-To books that will answer the question of whether or when you can call yourself a writer as an amateur by telling you: You are what you call yourself, and you can call yourself what you do, right? Kind of an egoist inversion of the Aristotelian idea that you are first and foremost what you do, not what you say of yourself.
I am fascinated with creators who don't need to remove themselves from their work.
It's probably entirely my upbringing, that I can't do that – or, I guess, that I feel the need to remove myself from my work. Growing up poor, but more than that, with the Protestant Work For Work's Sake ideal, creative pursuits are hobbies – if they are that, right? But that doesn't mean you can't still be creative. If my father weren't who my father was at the time, he could have been a pioneer, an innovator in the CNC Machining industry – because he thought like an artist, but was a producer. But even though all those words I said are true, they're wrong – work for work's sake, the faceless, selfless approach to work, the feelings of guilt or that you shouldn't draw attention to yourself – that's Medieval. That's a serf's mindset.
That's the mindset of someone who is conditioned to give his labor for someone else's profit.
That's a slave's minset.
I don't think I'm a writer. I don't even know if I'm an artist in the modern sense of the word. If you want to use the archaic form, sure – arte is the Greek word for craft – I'm a craftsman. A producer. A maker of things.
Artists in the modern sense, are magicians – wizards, again, to use the modern meaning. Actually – the archaic meaning works, too. Because there are wizards, charlatans, among those who chain letters into words and words into manuscripts, aren't there? Just as there are the false among the prophets, there are the vainglorious and egotistical among the creative, the blind among those who would see.
Writers, painters, poets, sculptors – I'm not going to try to list all of the arts; I'm sorry if I didn't mention your favorite, I always get upset when a comprehensive list has omissions, too – artists in the modern ideal, are working an ancient magick.
In a very real sense, they are, as the Serpent tempted Eve she would be, as gods. They are creating a form of life.
I recently watched the movie, Finding Altamira, with Antonio Banderas. (He was a great time – we had nachos.) (Man, syntax is weird.) It's about the guy – and his daughter – who found the Altamira cave paintings. In that movie, they make a deliberate point to illustrate how alive the paintings look.
That's the effect a visual image can have on us, right? To convincingly recreate reality.
The written and spoken words, too. Right?
That is something that I would like to help Rob evoke: the world of his time.
It is so easy to overlook important things when we live in memory. Things which are important then only because they are important now.
Rob would leave out any description of any building, any person who isn't either Peitho or Metus if I let him. He would have skipped over everything that happened between Venice and today's episode in the Alps near Susa, Italy. Two weeks, he would have just said, “Yeah – nothing happened.”
Nothing actionable, like he kept insisting to Peitho.
Maybe he's right, though.
And maybe that's my insecurity talking.
You know, I started to write this piece earlier today, before I decided to transcribe what Rob told me yesterday. But it was going to be about that: an artist's insecurity.
I start to talk about insecurity a lot. But then I realize that not only do I have no answers about what security even is – I don't have honest answers for myself about whether I am insecure and manifesting it in a way I either haven't' noticed or haven't accounted for, yet. So, in a word, I get insecure about talking about observations I've made about how others manifest insecurity.
Because, remember: when we point a finger at another, three are always pointing back at us.
And observing another's behavior is always interpreted as pointing a finger. Always.
The very act of pointing the finger is almost always an indicator of projection.
When I do it, when you do it, when people we don't like do it – when people we do like do it. It's Projection.
Let's get this baby back on track.
Those How-To books, the self-help and motivational speakers you'll find out there in the corporate and artistic worlds, even the educators you'll find in colleges and SkillShare courses, will tell you to take the thing you love and inject into it what you want from it.
What do I mean by that awkward phrasing? Phrasing, by the way, which is exactly the same as religious and esoteric promises. It's the same give-and-take reasoning behind dogma – behind all ritual. What's the line from Fullmetal Alchemist? The Law of Equivalent Exchange, right? Humanity can't have anything without losing something first? Something like that?
Sacrifice.
But what do I actually mean? That anyone with any measure of worthwhile wisdom would tell you the same thing: If you're the kind of person who complains that some group of people isn't represented well enough in movies, for instance, to make a movie representing those people – or if you don't like some aspect of superhero comics, to write your own - or if you think that your favorite genre of fiction is missing some element, to add it yourself. Take your love, your joy, the skills which you have accumulated in your life – be they deliberate or happenstance – even if you hated learning them – and combine them in some way which creates an almost-perpetual motion machinery in your life.
It's sort of the same thing you see in the Alternative History crowd, right? People like Graham Hancock saying, basically, Well, there are gaps in what is talked about and what is clearly there to talk about, so let's talk about it!
That was sort of the place I was at in my life when Rob and I had that conversation in that Waffle House. I was 25 or 26. Around there. I find it very difficult to keep track of the years of my life, sometimes. Right around that time in your life you start to think you've got a handle on things and you're smarter than the rest of the world.
You know, the persona you have to broadcast for social media.
Or really just to find success in this world. People want you to fake it til you make it. To perpetually be 25. To pretend to be something you're not until you are. To become, to refer back to another thought I let fizzle out in another post, The Man.
I get in a lot of arguments. So did Socrates and Plato. Are those people I want to emulate? They're people I admire. So did Siddhartha Gautama, for that matter. And Jesus, while I'm thinking of it. For Chinese Buddhists, Mastery is a state of constant conflict with non-masters.
In every tradition, it is the responsibility of the wise to question the unwise. Not to call them foolish, but certainly to show them the foolishness of their ways.
Now... in the West, the tradition has been to kill those wise people. Because they're inconvenient.
Not inconvenient to you or me or the rest of the common people. But to the Rulers of the World and the Powers That Be? Hell, yeah, we're inconvenient to them. If people start to question them en masse, they have big problems. Not problems they won't, can't, or haven't solved often – but problems are the kind of thing a Well Ordered System is designed to prevent – not so much to solve.
Does that mean that I need to just get over these feelings? The pain of constant internal conflict over whether I should desire anyone's respect or admiration? The pain and frustration of rejection? Cus I could just go back to flipping burgers. Blithe and— Hah hah! More like bitter and resentful and just waiting to explode. Going back to that life would be suicide, whether I remained upright and out of a coffin or otherwise.
Or does it mean that I need to learn from their mistakes and figure out how to remain alive?
Asking that question is how I have spent the majority of my life. You'd think I'd be better at answering it. Or enjoy the process more.
I began this whole Producer's log project by talking about how many of the people I identify with in history and fiction have been suicides. I don't identify with the suicide. Like— Elliott Smith is one of my favorite artists. Maybe the musician who has stuck with me the tightest throughout my life. I discovered him after he had already left us. Actually, I fell in love with his music before I knew.
So that question kind of defined my early 20s: Do I need to learn from Elliott's mistakes and figure out how to remain alive?
I thought the answer was to hide myself away from the world. I don't think that's the answer anymore.
So, what does this have to do with Rob? You are probably asking, and you are right that I need to be wrapping this up, soon.
Sometimes the things Rob goes through are exactly what I'm feeling. It's uncanny. And of course that's because we're all human and we all feel these things all the time. I'm not the only person to ever go through this. I just find my role models in exotic places. I get that. But....
I wish I knew what Peitho looked like. You know?
I spend so much time with Rob, attached to him with my mind— I see her in my dreams, in images and icons here and there.... But I don't know what she looked like. Not any more than you do. All I have is the descriptions Rob gives me. The ache of his love for her. It's like a scar that won't stop just slightly tearing itself on the inside when you move the muscle. I try to draw her. I sketch her more than anything. And it feels weird, let me tell you, drawing someone who someone you feel like you know loves so much. It feels blasphemous.
But it also reminds me of that scene in El Cid where the Queen Mother gives one of her sons a portrait of the woman he's about to marry, and it's a Medieval painting and maybe 2x2 inches. It looks and could look nothing like she actually did in life. Which makes me laugh all the more to think that King Henry of the Headless Wives fell in love with a woman from a similar portrait.
Dude just fallin for every girl who happens to right-swipe him on Tinder.
Ahem.
I have sketches of her lying around. And I've started drawing again. Gonna teach myself digital art – on top of so many other things for this project. Don't feel sorry for me. I'm excited to do it.
They say the job won't get done right if you don't do it yourself, right?
Maybe that's the overall message I'm trying to tweak out of this episode like Jane Lynch's nipple through a chain-link fence.
I need this. And I think there's something in here for you, too.
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