I’m not-even-half watching Bourdain and he’s somewhere I didn’t catch, maybe Brazil. He’s talking to a psychotherapist, lying on her couch in chiaroscuroish light, and saying he doesn’t know why he’s not happier, look at his life, he gets to travel and do all these great things, why isn’t he happier. And it’s like, geez, dude, it’s not like you’re travelling to nicely sanitised pristine paradises and just cooking and snorting lines all day. He confronted things. His heart was big.
Bourdain had an adorable soul and also whatever that thing is. Charisma. He had a lot of that. It’s so intangible. Like a perfume but not attached to any organ to detect it but something much more blessedly immeasurable. But you know it when you rub against it.
Anyway, apparently I can’t write unless I’m dosed up on some sativa-based hybrid that provides creativity, focus and energy. Which is disappointing. Part of me – Sue14 she called herself when I daydreamed her up in one of my playdates with my 144,000 different parts – Sue14 says she hates me vaping weed, even if it’s medicinal. Even if it’s made such a difference. I know why she didn’t like it at 14. She didn’t like its sensual abandon. Sue14 would say that actually, CBD oil has been what’s made the difference in my symptoms, and there was absolutely no need to sneak the fun stuff in sideways along with it. Apparently Sue14 is a puritan. What a pain in the bum. And also a hypocrite. What about the Peter Jackson Extra Mild you’ve just graduated to from the Alpines, Sue14? What about the two cans of UDL vodka and orange that gets you drunk every single weekend at the ice skating rink?
She’s just trying to protect me, of course, but maybe she explains why, in the time I’ve had CFS (23 years), I’ve stopped partaking of that bad awful stuff twice and both times my health worsened, at times alarmingly, and then when I started it again, years later, my health improved. Let’s hear it for the functioning endocannabinoid system and its homeostasis effects.
The active imagination stuff has stopped now in its intensity – maybe I’ve done enough for now. It’s weird how it just seemed to switch off like a tap, after a certain time that I wasn’t party to. I’ve been turning a few taps off lately. Have had the desire to write something more here but the absolute terror at the very thought of doing such an exposing thing kept me unable to do so even if I wanted to. Which I didn’t. Though I did. Strange times.
Anyway, I’m glad I at least made notes about my active imagination interactions. At least I’ve managed to do that. (I knew I would regret not starting a journal at the beginning of the Great Motherfuckery. Maybe if I looked back now the entries would read dreamlike and would be worth me doing them. I suspect so. But I just couldn’t bring myself to write to myself about covid and its giant logic gaps and lockstep authoritarianism at the time. 2020 felt like a dream that had escaped its banks, so damn all-encompassing, I wasn’t about to start journalling about it as well. Ergo, damn).
These interactions with the unconscious which plenty of people would read as me being barmy are like an antidote to a world that’s ever-trying to make me smaller. Fine, I’ll just expand on the inside then, motherfuckers. Dreams, active imagination, daydreaming, they’re all so vivid at the time that it seems impossible to forget any of it, and then 10 minutes or even 30 seconds later on a fog day and it’s all faded already. They’re made more special for their slipperiness, knowing I have to make notes right away or not at all, or they will flit.
It surprised me, this part of me making itself known that it disliked something that the majority of me quite likes and benefits a lot from. It really makes me feel an extra appreciation for the warp and weft of SusieLand. The space and complexity and at times distressing ambivalence of it. I feel mysterious to myself. Like I’ve come across another wall that I thought was an external wall, and realised there’s another five hidden rooms behind it. I feel a little too mysterious to myself at the moment. Too much of a good thing. A little too much agoraphobia. Oh, the terror.
Talking to Sue14 felt pretty much like talking to someone I’m having an imaginary conversation with when I’ve partaken of some of the aforementioned. (One of the funnier weed strain reviews I’ve read: “Be careful with this one. I just finished having an invisible conversation with 30 people in my car”).
I wish I felt this level of communication when I’m writing fictional characters, but I don’t. I’m quite jealous of everyone who does. I’m sure it feels just like this. It’s impossible to say whether I’m communicating with a part of myself that has existed for years or if I’m just making it all up at the time, like doing improv with myself. It doesn’t feel like I’m just making it all up. And anyway, it doesn’t even matter in this space, whether I’m making it up or not. How do you measure that? It’s beautifully immeasurable. That’s the beauty and freedom about it. It doesn’t need any proving or measuring. It can’t. Bliss.
Humans are such trippers. It’s a shame we’re so corralled into such tiny spaces.
I have stopped dream journalling these days, mainly because I haven’t been remembering my dreams much, but for quite a few years there I was writing down all the dreams I had. I look back on them now and they’re startling, as if they were automatically written by someone else and I’m reading them for the first time. I really should go back and start writing short stories out of them. If I was going start writing them again. I wish I would. It makes me feel good. Carl Jung was of the opinion that we are all dreaming all the time, but the conscious space of the spectrum you’re occupying now reading this and getting ready to do the 160 chores is soooooo strong that it can drown out the voices of the unconscious in your waking hours, unless you’re actively cultivating it, in which case it may go silent on you. Because it can. It’s like a cat, like that. But then the night comes, and the dreamtime, and wham, shut up, conscious, you’ve had your time.
The dreamtime. I had a nightmare two nights ago. It’s been a hard fortnight, some big things happening, neither of which I want to write about at this point. I feel flayed open. I feel like this:
I found two things I loved watching on Netflix this week, which is insane. Two of them! One was the documentary about the above sculptor, Stanislaw Szukalski:
I do actually think the guy was a bit of a genius, although points off for referring to yourself as such, Stan. There’s no need. Less is more, let your stuff speak for itself. Which it does to me. Szukalski didn’t seem to like any other artists but himself. Pic-Asshole, he called him. How infantile and also amusing, which is probably why I’m reading Catcher in the Rye for the first time and laughing out loud, finding Holden so much fun, but also complex, thus incurring the ire of 500 million comfortable white western women. I’ll join in and say it’s more refreshing than ever seeing someone say outrageous things that get up people’s noses because at least it’s a change from all the fakes and the phonies.
Szukalski’s stuff is so strong and interesting that I feel like I really love it on some days and don’t care for it as much on others. Which just shows how strong it is. He invented his own font, rather illegible, really, wouldn’t pass the legibility scale, and used it his whole life. Of course, the worst possible moral things about him get dragged out when he gets spoken of, which he doesn’t much because the art world is a corporatised deadzone like everything else in this dying wineskin. Here’s his driver’s licence with his signature in his font:
Anyway, so I had a nightmare two nights ago where I was talking to someone, I don’t know who he was. I thought he was a really lovely person at the beginning of our conversation but as it went on I started feeling more uncomfortable, in a vague way that I couldn’t pinpoint, and then suddenly his face transformed, warped into this sinister mean-eyed scary man, which sounds a bit naff on the replay but was exceedingly scary at the time. He looked at me as if he could see right through me, this kind of head-toss glare, and the contempt was so strong I was scared I was going to disintegrate right there in front of him, until I started going, hang on a minute, and rearing up and yelling back at him. And then the dream stopped.
I wonder who this was. I think it was a protector part of me, some ill-formed part that is trying to keep me an iceberg, frozen and terrified, instead of acting in my world and blowing shit up. He felt so ancient. So corny because his tropes are so old. Maybe he comes to all of us, in different guises, a gatekeeper ensuring that people really do want to do that growing or evolving or expanding.
The other thing I loved on Netflix was a movie, Outside In, which is an appropriate title to be talking about here, and which I’ve already seen three times since I first came across it a couple of years ago. I don’t know what it is about it. It feels like a perfect satisfying storyshape for me personally, the way What’s Eating Gilbert Grape does, and fills the need I’ve had to watch familiar things for their nostalgia analgesia in these times of deep and great fuckfuckery. Lynn Shelton directed it and co-wrote it with the male lead, Jay Duplass. It’s quiet and gentle and sweetly mumblecorey. Lynn died a couple of years ago, way too early, and tragically considering her and Marc Maron were happy and in lurve, and it’s sad because I’d loved to have seen where she’d go over the years. The movie was beautifully shot, and the main performances from Edie Falco, Jay and Kaitlyn Dever are all so clear and raw.
Carol (Edie) was Chris’s (Jay’s) high school teacher 20 years ago and now he’s just got out of a 20-year prison stint after finally getting a retrial through Carol’s years of effort. Probably not the strongest part of the movie, that whole thing, but that’s okay, I forgive. Chris struggles to adjust to a life he lost, and to what suddenly feels like a lost closeness him and Carol had developed after years of multiple phone calls each week. You can probably see where it’s going. Ooh, scandalous. But it’s lovely. It’s nothing miraculous or radical, but it’s loving in the way that feels radical these days, the gentle fillumy loving of people as being okay to be flawed, vulnerable, turning and finding each other there, while meanwhile we’re all being raped out in the public square by the machine. All of those comforts loom so much bigger these days. Art. Carol’s daughter, Hildy, making something touching in an abandoned house. Escape from and escape to. Beauty from the outside in.