1: write about what ways writing plays a role in your life
Writing is communication. I made this website in hopes that strangers would email me and become my friends. But that’s a theme I’ve already dealt with enough. Other aspects of writing are interesting too.
Writing allows for non-visual abstractions. One creates images and scenes in their own mind, then tries to construct the right words to (one hopes) inject those images into the mind of the reader.
Of course, it’s impossible to know what a reader who isn’t oneself is feeling when they read.
I had a friend when I was 17. For several months, I wrote her emails almost every day. It felt like my duty to experiment and structure every one of my emails differently. It’s not like I had very much to say back then. I’d dropped out of high school and was spending all day every day in my parents’ basement. I’d go weeks without leaving the house. The only place anything was happening was the inside of my brain. But even then, there wasn’t much to say. All I could do was experiment with form.
I was more or less embracing the idea that it’s through writing that I can think. I wanted to always be thinking thoughts I’d never thought before, so that meant writing — a lot.
I’m a lot older now and I’ve lived through a few “adventures”, but those are never what feel worth recording. I’ve tried to write about my journey through China’s quarantine system in 2022, or all of the nonsense that happened to me in Beijing in 2018, experiences that felt real and unusual, yet which lend themselves well to a narrative form — yet I’ve never really been able to make much progress turning those periods of my life into stories. It’s the everyday nothingness that I find myself overflowing with thoughts about.
As writing has become my primary “mechanism of digestion”, I’ve found my taste in the other art forms has tended towards that which is least renderable in words.
In this partial identification between writing and thought, I’m constantly oscillating between which of the two I value most. Different structures lead to different thoughts, so if ideas are my end, literary experimentation is a necessary road to take me there. However, I can also look at it the other way around: by thinking new thoughts, I create new forms of writing. Just as thought is linked to writing, it is also linked to perception. One yearns for a new kind of pain, new kinds of ambiguities, that force the mind to confront other possibilities.
I never studied art in school. All I studied was math. Somehow I have to use that training, which was meant only to guide me through the worlds of manifolds, rings, cohomology, and so on, to plunge into the very real non-mathematical world we live in and come up with new perspectives on it.
There’s a line in the Wikipedia article for Mou Tun-fei, director of Men Behind the Sun: “Mou graduated from National School of Arts (now National Taiwan University of Arts) that could not even afford equipment for the students. Mou thus was forced to learn filmmaking by theory alone, mainly by watching films numerous times in theaters and identifying how many cuts the films contained.” This kind of study of cinema in the abstract is inspiring me. I’m not sure if I’m ever going to find myself behind the camera, making my own movies — but the theory of film seems like it could be as applicable to my writing, my music, or my drawings as it is to actual film.
It’s often stressed in any educational endeavor that practice is more important than theory — learning something by theory alone is imagined as some kind of lopsided perversion. The student gets all kinds of lopsided ideas about how one goes about doing something, without any experience on how to actually do it. To me, something is endearing about that. After all, I’m not engaging in art to make something beautiful, built in the model of the masters who preceded us. I’d like to meditate on the masters, and then totally misunderstand them. I’d like to create something unexpected — but which is mine and mine alone.
Compared to other art forms, in writing, the divide between theory and practice is so hazy as to be non-existent. Right now, I’m thinking about writing, but in doing so, I am in fact writing. The two are almost the same.
Sometimes I go days without seeing the sunlight, and sometimes I find myself suddenly outside, exposed to the light. Whether I feel like a monster, or like a beautiful angel released into the world, I’m constantly contemplating the gaze of others, as well as my own gaze. The word “gaze” feels so sinister to me, precisely because the writings of others made it that way. Yet I too can write — I too can take innocent words and use whatever idle thoughts I gather around them as I drift through life to change their connotations. Just as this language, English, has poisoned my mind, I can poison it too.
So that, I suppose, is this ulterior purpose I have in all my communications with others. I’d like to understand you, and I’d like you to understand me — but I have a certain distrust of the medium that we use for understanding each other, so I’d like to see if I can change it, distort it, or turn it into something new.