Miscellaneous Thoughts
Sep 4, 2024
I haven’t been very happy with my writing lately.
“If I write enough, will it get better? If I give myself deadlines, if I demand lengthy word counts, can I squeeze new ideas out of myself?”
I feel like I’ve adopted a certain smugness, and the more I try to cast it off, the more it overtakes my writing.
Do I care too much about appearances? On the internet, my words become my face, my hair, my clothes — my whole body.
If I’m too free, my most evil tendencies come out.
When I first had the urge to write, I was dismayed by how many of my sentences started with “I”.
I tried rewriting the “I” out of them. Maybe that was dishonest? I don’t do it anymore.
It would be better to make something that, from its very foundation, has no “I”. I’m not sure I’ve ever done that.
To write without an “I” — it feels like the exact sort of restriction I need, but I’m so lazy.
What are the urges that underly my writing? Is it possible for me to speak about them without lying?
Whatever those fundamental “urges” are, they seem to get stifled by the many competing instincts I’ve developed over the years.
E.g. I try to sound cool and I want to sound knowledgeable — these instincts are somehow more “automatic” than the urge to be honest, or even to write well.
Or perhaps it would be better to say I’m afraid of sounding uncool or seeming like an idiot.
So my recent essay where I shared Kanshi and Tang poems was made worse by the fear of sounding too dumb — of revealing my ignorance.
The essay was mostly vacuous — I never said what I truly wanted to say. To do so would veer into dangerous territory.
“Not a true authority, but something like authority” — that’s what my essays seem to keep aspiring towards semi-consciously. The result is always subpar writing.
If I try to fight against one of my instincts, all the others have free rein. That’s my provisional explanation for why these last few essays have been so bad.
"Will this be the piece wherein I finally learn how to write?" It never is!
Cutting into
my corpse, you find a
second corpse.
“Whose is it?” you ask.
Even I don’t know.
When I try to “make an argument” or “engage in discourse”, what I end up with is akin to an AI imitation of logic, with no understanding of what logic truly is.
What is logic then? Logic is my enemy. Logic refuses to let me wield it. I’ve never even touched it before.
My essay about the Whole Earth Catalog was even worse. Again, of what I wanted to say, not a word found a way into the final published version.
I wanted to grapple with all the silly stories and myths from Quora and Twitter that I once grasped onto, and all the misinformation I spread myself.
But even now, what I’m doing is no different from before: I’m still merely trying to find the cleverest terms possible to phrase my groundless speculations.
Reading WEC felt like finding the hidden source of the ideal all those now distant delusions of mine were chasing after.
My right eye
tells me you’re the same
as we are.
But when I look from my
left eye, is it so?
I keep forgetting one of the most important “diversions” I went on in that essay: the burden of knowledge.
Living a life devoted to one field, finding meaning in something one has studied deeply, taking the responsibilities such knowledge entails — it’s all tiring.
Deep knowledge is never full knowledge, yet it contains many times the burden that one has happily and willingly half-knowing
If wish I could embrace being an amateur, having no formal training in anything that I write about.
If I could just return to fiction, then all my problems would be solved — but fiction is so hard!
I think my interest in Chinese poetry over the last year has made my writing worse.
Too much aspiration towards surface level imitation.
Too much falseness.
Too much insecurity.
You left us
alone to study
your soul’s depths.
We have a report, but
it’s in flower language.
“Humans think with our bodies — the brain is only secondary.” Somebody told me this once, but it always sounded vaguely sexual to me.
Does my writing come from my body? The only thing I do on a regular basis that uses my whole body is jog.
Jogging in the rain, in the sun, beneath bridges and next to trees. Massive skyscrapers, sudden winds, up and down hills.
That last clause is a distant memory at this point — Shanghai doesn’t have hills.
I dream a lot about finding the old phone I inherited from my father, on whose numeric keypad I sent countless texts to a girl named after Jesus’s mom.
When I was cat-sitting, sleeping in a stranger’s bed, I kept waking up, sometimes into reality, and sometimes into a dream.
The cat kept meowing, calling for me. Each time I’d get out of bed and comfort her.
One of these times this apartment suddenly had a basement. I went downstairs and found my old phone in a desk drawer.
I have similar dreams about the old computer I inherited from my brother, or my old DS. In dreams, they always have some dormant secret lying inside them.
However, that secret is never revealed to me.
The sublime embedded in forgotten UI.
Anyways, it seems unlikely that phone made it to China, even after all these years.
All these people who know my idiocy first hand, when will they find my website and wage war against me? When can I finally be dismembered?
Every sensation that’s ever meant anything to me has an origin I can’t reach — but sometimes I grow too used to the mystery to recognize this.
Complacency!
I hear a sound in a song. I can only say it sounds a little Brazilian. Even the writers of the song don’t necessarily know where the sounds they use came from.
I overvalue the novel. What about the short story? The Sonnet? The Lüju? The Jueju? The Haiku?
There was a Vietnamese girl at my school who wished she could be anywhere else. She read scanlations of J-Fashion magazines and indie manga.
I can’t be that, but I keep wanting to make my own version of that, a New Fashion made for me.
“Sorting your trash is the New Fashion!” That’s what all the signs next to garbage cans in Shanghai tell me.
Light’s angles —
slanted or straight or
caught in leaves —
I’ve seen them all, but
sometimes I forget.
When I started learning Chinese in 2014, it felt like politics were ignorable. I don’t know if the world’s changed, or if I changed, but now it’s not like that.
The best thing I can be here is an interesting footnote in a few dozen people’s lives.
Yet isn’t that also a pleasure?
I absorb other people’s struggles and take them as my own. It’s a misguided attempt at “understanding”. All it does is create new barriers.
To understand the origins of problems, I need a problem of my own to spend my life on.
All of these people I knew once were products of their time — a time that no longer exists.
To track them down again would be meaningless, they’ve turned into something else too. At most we could reminisce.
Looking through an email account I rarely check, I discovered that a girl I was fascinated by many years ago sent me a friend request on Venmo back in May
This was one of those people I’d text about once a year. We'd converse for three or four messages, and then not talk again for another year
My American phone number is gone — that’s the only way I could talk to her before.
Now I suppose there’s the possibility of communicating with her via memos attached to payments, but that’s too weird even for me.
The point is that after I came to China, I accepted I’d never talk to her all any of those other people again — I don’t even have anything to say!
It never occurred to me that they could want to talk to me — though that’s probably not what actually happened in this case.
She probably just saw my name recommended by Venmo and thought “I know this person.”
Blades of grass
brush against my arms —
and my cellphone.
Yet the most important of these people is the one named after Jesus’s mom. What kind of music does she listen to now?
When we in our strange little relationship, it was nice having someone who liked music so close to what I liked, who could recommend me things I found wonderful
I’m always looking down on other people’s musical taste — one of my many personality flaws.
Electronics — menacing and cute.
Changing forms with a shift of angles, like a hologram.
To be a dog
whose every howl burns
the dead grass —
and yet so fluffy, a
creature made to love.