Part 1 is here
Recently, the way I have been more aware of past selves and future selves has led me to log the disappointments of my life more markedly. Or at least, the disappointments of my life so far. I don’t usually indulge in regretting, but when I do it feels potent. These regrets are most likely boring to anyone else. They include, however, my potential inability to write, which feels weightier than my potential ability to write, even if one is no truer than the other.
My inability to write, as I conceive it, is due both to a failure of imagination and material constraints. My imagination feels corralled in comparison to my idea of “creative” people’s. If I really should write, I feel I should have written more by now, not for publication or for accolades but simply as a completable project. As it is, I feel unable to finish anything. I am flippant with ideas, believing them to be pointless or passé, letting them go before I get too attached. I am also very tired a lot of the time, and put a lot of my energy into basic chores of survival (eating, cleaning etc.).
I want to create (more) but perhaps I am not the creator I thought I might be. A rule, that I have not adhered to, seems to be that creativity flourishes despite the material difficulties of life. When I had the lyrics to Favourite running through my head, I was also envious. As well as it being a song about time passing, it’s also a testament to creation. Grian Chatten sings,
Did you know
I could claim the dreamer from the dream?
Make you feel
Everything you've never even seen
It is bold to claim you are making someone feel everything they've never even seen, but it’s right. Just as it is true of any art or artist, it goes without saying that I have no direct experience of Chatten's life (as a man, as a musician, as anything) and yet I can feel it. This is perhaps one of the apexes of creation (depending on your proclivities).
The lyrics also speak to youthful disenfranchisement:
It's a cry far from bed radios
And days spent playing football indoors
When they painted town with Thatcher
And they never even wanted to know ya
And of course, the pull towards creativity often comes from a felt sense that no one (personally or politically) is listening to you. But who is it available for?
Just before I fell asleep last night, I thought of Aphex Twin’s We Are the Music Makers, a song that samples Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka who himself is quoting Ode by Arthur O'Shaughnessy: we are the music makers, / and we are the dreamers of dreams. There’s something menacing about Wilder’s Wonka (which the Aphex Twin song also captures), a man consumed by ideal consumption: a garden made of candy, a chocolate river, everything and anything sickly sweet. His admirers don’t just feel it, they taste it. In Pure Imagination the lyrics soar, of course, but the bells in the background spell an ominous warning. There is no life, I know / To compare with pure imagination / Living there, you'll be free / If you truly wish to be. My other worry is that in indulging in “pure imagination” you ignore the world as it really is.
I really didn’t think I’d start writing about Willy Wonka, nor how this notion of unadulterated pure imagination reminds me of the recent furore over Fossil Free Books and their successful campaign for both Hay Festival and Edinburgh International Book Festival to drop Ballie Gifford as a sponsor. I worry about my failure of imagination, when there was an upsurge of Book People who couldn’t imagine the existence of book festivals (apparently the main source of uncontested good in the world) without taking money from a company with links to Israeli occupation, apartheid and genocide. It is really a failure of imagination to imagine “pure imagination” as a moral well, as if all books are good and all book readers are kind, as if the candy garden doesn’t have the ability to make you sick, and the bells in the background, rather than signalling danger, are ringing out for the saviours of civilisation (writers). Book People also conveniently ignore the material reality of writing—the people who cannot afford to attend book festivals as they are.
This is not to say that I don’t believe in writing. I don’t know whether it’s right to call it arrogance, because I think self-belief is much more complicated than that, but the first song on Fontaines D.C’s first album is Big repeats, almost unendingly,
My childhood was small
My childhood was small
But I'm gonna be big
But I'm gonna be big
But I'm gonna be big
This, a committed and not uncomplicated belief in the ability to live a certain life, is one of the things I regret not keeping. When I was 19, I was waiting: I thought there would be a designated time to write all the “proper” things I imagined I would write. Now I am too busy worrying, worrying that my ideas are weak formulations that fall apart as soon as I commit to them. I am not sure if the problem is the idea, or my inability to commit. And I am not sure if my inability to commit lies solely in a lack of so-called discipline, or in the material depression we are living in.
The ambition that I held on to throughout my youth, not to be successful but to be creative, feels contorted and perverted by the constantness of trends, the pervasiveness of think-pieces, and other demands (mainly of the market). I want to exist outside of those things, as well as fitting into them (for the ease of fitting in). At the same time, I don’t want to blame my inability to commit solely on a force outside of me. If I am a victim of a system, then we are all victims of it. The way I experience writer’s block does not make me special.
When I formulated writing this collection of some feelings, I thought about the time I wrote a weekly ‘Dear Diary’ for Rookie. I have a lot of thoughts about this experience of my writing being published as a teenager, the strange and sometimes disconcerting way I can dip into what I was broadcasting on a public forum from age 16 to 20, the belief I had that this experience might propel me to finding it easier to make writing an everyday job. But mainly, I thought about how I had to write something every week no matter how I was feeling. It makes sense that I had a belief of writing as ordinary, as an everyday thing, when that’s exactly what I was already doing. I wasn’t waiting for the proper time or the proper subject.
Perhaps I can make writing ordinary again. I cannot necessarily make it a living, or make it easy. I’ve taken claiming the dreamer from the dream to mean the dream can die but the dreamer (somehow) can remain.