I can picture my thoughts as a fortress of solitude, each memory stored in shards and fragments, some lost for years then found unexpectedly, some splintered by heavy impact, leaving traces on my body like tree rings.

I came home from travelling this weekend, and my entire front yard was covered in yellow leaves from the tree in front of my house, and I couldn't help but smile for all the colors of my past, for the physical warmth it sends up my spine, and also for the strength it gives me to step into new light.

Consider this:
In a field of beautiful flowers, a single flower is still beautiful in and of itself, and yet it attains remarkably new qualities once it's picked and given transient, tangible value by its owner. Similarly, in a world of creative, talented, brillant minds, we may still exist as such, yet our brilliance is given new meaning and resonance when it's made communicable to the ones we love.
Ideologies splinter this process, like a diamond holding on to its parts, diffracting light, sending images and words in all different directions.

I made some new friends.

It seems that all complex matters- in time- reveal themselves to be quite simple, as the days become more quiet, reflective and immaterial. I wake up each morning and find that the sweet basil and heirloom I planted weeks ago are taking deeper root, and I can't help but feel a kinship with their struggle; amorphic creatures, un-occluded by fantasy or delusions of progress.
The sun is setting sooner, my mind is finally discovering peace, and I'd like nothing more than to be able to describe that particular mountain.
However there's little time in the day for nostalgia.

A couple years ago, there was a week where both my parents were in different hospitals- my dad for his pulmonary embolism (due to pressure on his heart from the Mesothelioma), and my mom for a surgical procedure to correct her spine. Every day I took two trips to each locale to visit them... When I think about this period, my heart breaks for the vastness of my life, for how many memories I've squandered. Drowned in sorrow, I fell prey to the bottle and disconnected from everything except the ever-prevailing terror of looming death, so that when I closed my eyes and drank or smoked my mind into a stupor I saw my own demise, waiting to take me into a spiral of nothingness.

An image I cannot relive/explain/examine in any way- which terrorizes me- comes from that of looking out the fifth story window of the Kaiser hospital in San Bernadino, and amidst all the construction and the stark white exterior was tucked a small, lush green garden, presumably an outdoor lounge for the nurses and doctors. In all my agony and hopelessness, I stared and stared at this enigmatic square of greenery, as if it was a beacon of hope, an architectural representation of everything I wanted and felt like I would never deserve or attain.

For inexplicable reasons, this vision haunts me still, as if the events that led me to the place I'm in now were experienced by a different person, by a man with no reason to live, no purpose or direction. Now, when I visit Riverside, I am pervaded by memories of a life I feel nothing for, and it's precisely in this nothingness, in the dimming of the light behind me that I am compelled to push forward to darkness, to the furthest boundaries possible.

This is no longer a pursuit of happiness. It is a pursuit of vision.
I desire now to be awake. To be in a field, running my hands through the tall grass, to appreciate the splendor and mortality of the breeze that hits my face. I desire to be able to sit under a tree and listen to the noises around me (in my case, mostly freeway traffic), to absorb the pleasures of the world and accept who I am within it; To relinquish my obsessions and hand them over to the fates. I desire these things for myself; Not for you, not for my mom, not for my brothers, not for my friends, not for the entire world. I desire for myself to be awake, with clear vision.

I've become a Hydra. If you cut off my head, five will grow back.

I would kill a small child right now, just to hear your voice. Just one word. Just a whisper into my ear, the most infinitesimal utterance. Yes, I would die to hear it.
These days move at a pace that's simultaneously slow and fast, veiled in a hue both painful and triumphant, but for the first time in years I'm hopeful for the future I see ahead of me.
I know what I need to do, and I'm doing it, but it all seems futile without you to share it with.

I recently read an article by Russell Brand (of all people) whereupon a British General during WW1 reflected on his soldiers' inability to adapt to civilian life after the war. He said, "You cannot rouse the animal in man then expect it to be put aside at a moments notice."

I am counting the days until I may see you again, so fervently that it feels like I'm drifting slowly to another planet, isolated in my grief and renewal, hoping for a safe landing.

"Capitalism culminates when it creates out of itself its own most radical- and the only fruitful- opposite, totally different from what the classic Left, caught in its miserabilism, was able to dream about." - Peter Sloterdijk "Anger and Time"

"The sovereign self-negating gesture of the endless accumulation of wealth is to spend this wealth for things beyond price, and outside market circulation: public good, arts and sciences, health, etc. This concluding "sovereign" gesture enables the capitalist to break out of the vicious cycle of endless expanded reproduction, of gaining money in order to earn more money. When he donates his accumulated wealth to public good, the capitalist self-negates himself as the mere personification of capital and its reproductive circulation: his life acquires meaning. It is no longer just expanded reproduction as self-goal. Furthermore, the capitalist thus accomplishes the shift from eros to thymos, from the perverted "erotic" logic of accumulation to public recognition and reputation." - Slavoj Zizek "Violence"

I've yet to find a more appropriate description of our current trajectory as a peoples, even most interestingly as artists who consistently exchange ideas with this tangled, capitalist mess. It's strange for me to think that the very reason I make music is to give it back to the community for the sake of self-negation, to be able to prove to my contemporaries that I've provided them a service, thus rendering all further actions unto this finite pursuit of social acceptance and transparency; I mean- bullshit aside- we like to pronounce our declaration to the arts as if we came up with the idea, but what we seem to forget is the cathartic nature of artistic interaction between communities, how it feels to present ourselves as Master-Signifiers to a world that progressively disembodies from itself day-by-day.

As social links continue to merge, and information becomes more and more free to the "excluded," one day we'll look in the mirror and see- in place of one, broken soul- a multitude of complex desires, ambitions, questions and viewpoints staring back at us, and we'll think "Jesus, how did our grandparents pull this life thing off?"

Possibilities Precede Choice, Dummy

Just finished reading Slavoj Zizek's First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.
It was definitely dense and full of tangents within tangents, but when he hits it on the nose- he really HITS it.

"We should thus ruthlessly abandon the prejudice that the linear time of evolution is "on our side," that History is "working for us" like the famous old mole digging under the earth, doing the work of the Cunning of Reason. Should we then conceive of history as an open process in which we are offered choice? Within this logic, history determines only the alternatives we face, the terms of the choice, but not the choice itself. At each moment of time, there are multiple possibilities waiting to be realized; once one of them is actualized, others are cancelled. The supreme case of such an agent of historical time is the Leibnizian God who created the best possible world: before creation, he had in mind the entire panoply of possible worlds, and his decision consisted in choosing the best among these options. Here, possibility precedes choice: the choice is a choice among possiblities."

-Zizek

Subtract Thyself

"The true question here is: how is externality with regard to the state to be operationalized? Since the Cultural Revolution signals the failure of the attempt to destroy the state from within, to abolish the state, is the alternative then simply to accept the state as a fact, as the apparatus which takes care of "servicing the goods," and to operate at a distance towards it (bombarding it with prescriptive proclamations and demands)? Or is it, more radically, that we should aim at a subtraction from the hegemonic field which, simultaneously, violently intervenes into this field, reducing it to its occluded minimal difference? Such a subtraction is extremely violent, even more violent than destruction/purification: it is reduction to the minimal difference of part(s)/no-part, 1 and 0, groups and the proletariat. It is not only a subtraction of the subject from the hegemonic field, but a subtraction which violently affects the field itself, laying bare its true coordinates. Such a subtraction does not add a third position to the two positions whose tension characterizes the hegemonic field (so that we now have, along with liberalism and fundamentalism, a radical Leftist emancipatory politics). The third term rather "denaturalizes" the whole hegemonic field, bringing out the underlying complicity of the opposed poles that constitute it...

...Badiou's "subtraction," like Hegel's Aufhebung, contains three different layers of meaning: (1) to withdraw, disconnect; (2) to reduce the complexity of a situation to its minimal difference; (3) to destroy the existing order. As in Hegel, the solution is not to differentiate the three meanings (eventually proposing a specific term for each of them), but to grasp subtraction as the unity of its three dimensions: one should withdraw from being immersed in a situation in such a way that the withdrawal renders visible the "minimal difference" sustaining the situation's multiplicity, and thereby causes its disintegration, just as the withdrawal of a single card from a house of cards causing the collapse of the entire edifice."

-Slavoj Zizek First as Tragedy, Then as Farce p. 128

I'm getting kinda sick of explaining myself, not just to others but to myself. As if the context of an experience is dependent on my ability to notice how much different it is from other experiences. We're swirling around in this soup together, crossing paths unexpectedly; who am I to say my path is correct and others are not?

Consider that our minds are fractal factories, their parts built onto each other with incremental purpose, derived from a microscopic world so small we can barely perceive it with the most powerful atom smasher.

Just as some cultures use shrines to witness the singularity of one, derived truth, we use buildings and monuments to realize ourselves. The sad thing- I suppose- is that while other cultures realize the impertinence of fetishizing a shrine, we Westerners are literally addicted to that which we worship.

Is any of this wrong? No. And Yes.

How Can Creativity and Chronic Depression Coexist?

Posted by Mary Saville on a TEDTalks Forum:

Ever since I spent my 18th birthday in a psychiatric ward, I've struggled with chronic depression. I'm 35 now and don't feel defined at all by such an unwelcome mental companion since I have many coping strategies including medication. In this phase of life I am learning, creating and innovating at a much faster rate than in many previous years and would like to know how others handle having a mind that can rapidly sponge knowledge and churn out fun ideas one part of the day, and need to close down another part of the day.

I find that if I spend a few hours "producing" with my brain I often need a subsequent reboot of sorts - a retreat into quiet, a nap, a shutting down - before I can begin again.

Sometimes I have to stop and let sadness have a turn. Working late at night is helpful. Why? I'm not sure.

This is quite relevant to me and I would appreciate any thoughts, tips, or musings on the subject. Are you coping well with depression and still enjoying creativity? Do you have a helpful pattern of work to share?

Thanks everyone, this is a great forum.

RESPONSES

Bernd Fesel 0Reply
2 hours ago:I have no experience with depression, still I can easily agree with Aaron Nielsen co-existence thesis. I dare to take it one step further looking at Niki de Saint Phalle: She was sick of depression - and "cured" herself by making art.
Creativity might be good for more than balancing - be it troubles, sadness or depression. However - is there any research or medication of this type? I have never heard of it. creativity today is promoted and appreciated as a factor for more wealth and future, not yet for more health. Are we missing a major source and power?
Bill smithies 0Reply
3 hours ago: My age and experience of depression are seemingly very close to yours Mary. One of the most interesting experiences I have had in relation to creativity and depression was a little more than a year ago when I had my first encounter with anti-depressants; to cut a long story short I ceased to be creative at all.

I have a great many friends who are also artists and some have had the same experience upon taking medication to treat either anxiety or depression. A friend of mine came to realize that his badly depressive states were usually a precursor to coming up with a great idea, that his mind somehow needed to go into hibernation in order to devote more energy to it's maturation even if he wasn't cognizant of it at the time. Years ago I read one psychologists view that a 'healthy' depression is the minds way of telling us that we need to change, to do something differently, and an 'unhealthy' depression is when we are not able to effect that change for whatever reason and we become stuck. Your observation about the need to "reboot" struck a real chord with me and, in relation to that, I think the three observations become very valid.

My experiences with medication did not 'cure' me, but having the creative well dry up on me and then slowly come back made me more aware of the role of depressive states in my own creative process. The nature of creativity, to me, is a constant state of metamorphosis; changes in our ideas, our materials, our subject matter, the way we look at something, all are in a constant state of flux as a necessity. I don't think it takes any great stretch of the imagination to view the need for the reboot as a necessary step our brains go through in order to explore new ideas or subject matter in a wholly unconscious manner. As various other people have mentioned, this is not isolated to artists but to thinkers in general including politicians, philosophers, scientists and psychologists.

Dale Graham 0Reply
5 hours ago: Some basic assumptions seem to help my understanding of this subject. Depression is a mood that we define in order to communicate and define it to ourselves and others.
To suggest it does not serve a purpose, though we do not understand what that purpose might be, is a bit short sighted. Depression, the expression of mood, whether reactive or otherwise, brings an unintended level of what I call self-consciousness. In some personalities, this seems to be satisfying.
Creativity has various forms. I suppose if the level of depression is profound, it would be difficult to concentrate or focus the minds attention. In fact this is often the case with some forms of depression. Depression however, does take a person to a place in their thinking that is otherwise inaccessible. In that state, perhaps we find the source of inspiration for writers and other artists who are able then to express those notions in symbols.

Depression brings on a level of acute awareness- senses alert to stimuli, unable to filter the information may be a sensory overload. When in a state of heightened happiness, this seems not to occur.

Depression is as much an aspect of happiness, as darkness is of light. In fact it is essential. Such an interesting question.

Tiara Shafiq Reply
7 hours ago: Oh lordy. I've been dealing with depression for a great deal of my youth & young adult life too. I find that it's a bit of a double-edged sword when it comes to creativity - it can make for good material, but that same depression is also what makes me not want to get out of bed or be motivated to do anything. The day they invent a method to do things by thinking I will be very very happy!

Chandrakanth Natekar Reply
13 hours ago: My dear friend, all forms of human creativity is an outcome of particular space and time where particular pressure will electromagnetically work in our brain cells and will emerge as a negative or positive power. This is the cosmic cycle in which the human mind is caught for ages. Here, the creativity of the so called evil and good, hatred and love, truth and untruth are also magnetically related with the particular space and time which moves based on the nature spectacular law of equilibrium..

Indeed, the great Renaissance of the 18th century was associated with the attractive character of capital and its birth time gravity. The forthcoming Renaissance of the 21st century will be associated with the repulsive character of capital and its death time gravity. In other words, the law of repulsion is connected with the law of detachment.

In the forthcoming days, the strong compressive wave of financial repulsion will give birth to a sudden change in the psychological velocity, density, pressure and temperature of the entire humanity and will spiritually move towards the long awaited Utopian dream of commune way of living.

It is the space-time that generates idea, not the human mind. Whenever the human mind or nature witness inner energy crunch it will cross the threshold of chaos and will emerge in the form of a dynamic force or an idea in correspondence with the particular space-time.

The most brilliant ideas in the history of mankind are also an outcome of the particular space-time. When the time is ripe it emerges through particular individuals with the force of revelation. William James says, "An idea, to be suggestive, must come to the individual with the force of revelation".
Eron Eron +1Reply
15 hours ago: Make friends with depression. I've had my highs and low but I had two major Lows of note. I7ll skip the story there, but after that, I realised it was worth "learning" from the experience.

Until i hit my third one.

If you can, work with the methods by everyone else. Use mine if nothing else works.

I didnt bounce back from the third. It's been a year now. I gave up, stopped figthing. From this dead place, not a place of productivity, get used to the scenery. Find a way to express this dead weight. I can't play piano but I pluncked away at one. Music felt like the best way (i didnt care about writing or performing at the time, my best strengths.) I tried to give depression another voice. Experience it with other senses. It was sad, soetimes it sucked but I got used to the scenery here. New sounds came out too. (someimes angry. Very angry.) Sometimes I still hit lows, and sometimes I'm VERY volatile. But a little like what Anna mentioned...little shoots are starting to appear.

Give the depression it's voice. It deserves to be respected.
-
Now I'm going to ruin that poetry by adding more.
Examine Process psychology, developed by Arnold Mindell. (I recomedn "Riding the horse backwards" or "working on yourself alone. ") You'll find other methods to give depression (or any kind of setback) its voice. Theres a message there but sometimes we need to tranlsate it through a medium we understand. If you feel depressed...how does it sound? Play it. Roleplay.Puppets. Or draw it.
Examine the process described in "Hero with a thousand faces" by Campbell. (It's NOT a simple breakdown about how to be a hero and fight dragons.Its about submiting yourself to the intolerable, letting yourselfget eaten by this terrifying experience.

I didn't want to mention this but I'm in Japan, 1000km south of tokyo. We're unaffected but it reminded you how easy life can be wiped out. (I have a yong son too, that's hardest.) My third low though prepared me for this so we're staying.
Aaron Nielsen +2Reply
5 days ago: I don't think that the coexistence of depression (or some other mental malady for that matter) and creativity in one person is very unusual--there are plenty of examples throughout history of famous artists and other great men who have managed to be wonderfully create in spite of, or perhaps because, of their ailments.

I've never been in ward before, and I don't take medication, but I am often sad. My depression is more the result of life circumstances rather than biological predisposition, so maybe there are differences between your situation and mine; still, the pattern you described of "producing" and then "rebooting" is familiar to me. I am a very energetic person, and sometimes I get these great flashes of inspiration where I will write and write for hours on end--afterward, I may be pretty tired or have to stop because my mind is simply worn out. During this down time, I never nap; instead I usually eat or travel or do something physical for a while, but it's important that I'm not using my mind to do anything strenuous. I'm functionally on auto-pilot during this time, which lasts for several hours sometimes, and afterward I have to wait until I get inspired again before my brain feels up to tackling some new project.

I've been pretty prone to sadness since I was like 11 or so (I'm 18 now), but I feel like I cope well with it because by now it's just so familiar and normal for me. When I'm doing something or socializing, my sadness usually goes away, so it's not like I don't like relief. I feel like some amount of sadness in life is totally appropriate, and even helpful, especially when it comes to contemplating or working on art. Maybe that's just a weird thing with me, but I feel like it grants me a new perspective or dimension on things--like without my sad spells, I would not be able to fully appreciate or understand things.

It seems that no matter how far I get, the ongoing feeling of 'total dropout' pervades me. You might know what I'm talking about; that sensation of weak chest-palpitations, loss of appetite, on the verge of screaming for no reason, like you're wrapped up in a cold, wet blanket of nothingness... So there's that.
I'm also beginning to realize my true nature, in that I only get better at the things I repeat, and the better I get- the more reliant I become on said things, and as I build conceptual models of the world around me this way- through repetition- I literally become addicted to the tools necessary to maintain my sanity and stability.

It's like stepping out of a box, only to realize you're in a bigger box.

NASA scientists report that you can successfully trick a human brain into thinking they're outside, by placing them in a room with the dimensions of about 150 ft. in all directions. The reason this works is that we experience things in two ways: The first is linear: What we see/hear/smell/otherwise is exactly the way things are. The second is non-linear: What we see/hear/smell/otherwise is NOT exactly the way things are. There are two chemical reactions going on at the same time, one telling us that our situation is real, the other telling us it's not. Historically, this has worked to our advantage. I mean, to the naked eye the earth does look flat, and it does look like the sun rotates around it, but someone, somewhere along the line had the non-linear notion that neither is true. In fact, it takes more effort to prove our superstitions wrong, mostly because institutions in place prohibit such activity, but also because we refuse to reward non-linear behavior within the species.

What if we break through so many doors and crack so many codes that we reach a box so large we hardly believe we're in a box at all? Taking that into account, perhaps the 'modern tragedy' is in the fetishization of what we consider to be "progress;" Stepping forward for no other reason than to simply do it, yielding virtually no reward, ultimately witnessing the walls of the larger box closing in, powerless to do anything about it.

One of the primary purposes of fashion is to instill anonymity within the cultures that perpetuate or expand on said models of understanding the universe (previous blog). If we feel comfortable within a specific community of fellow thinkers, the last thing we want is to appear as if we stand out or disagree with them. Therefore, when we admire an ideal someone else represents, we pull the most banal and primary things (usually physical appearance) from that experience and seek to replicate it.
Before the advent of the internet, it's easy to see the usefulness of this behavior.
However, given the incredible rate of information exchange we're subjected to on a daily basis, fashion is rendered useless. You could even speculate that the less any given community receives and exchanges information, the more fashion becomes an increasing necessity to establish rank and compliance- and conversely- the more information a community receives and exchanges, the less it has to rely on fashion-expression.

A creation in its truest form serves as a critique of all previous creations, and more locally (music/film/etc), serves as the pedestal for competitive growth. In effect, when we write a song, it is a commentary on all the songs we've ever heard before, and to an even greater extent, on a more primal level, every sound we make is in reaction to all previous sounds we've heard. We then- as consumers- base our taste in music and sounds on how relevant the said musician's critique of former musics is to our own critique. We are, after all addicted to our own models of the universe, so it's only natural that we'd be obliged to serve those models with similar or more complex versions of the same model. Genres seem to be the best way to describe this phenomenon.