Not so much a checkup as it is a flood of sortof feeling. The title came in the same manner: climbing a wall by feel alone. As though I were blind grasping at a rockface, suspended. Because maybe something I’ve learned is, I myself can’t think my way into creating anything memorable. Solely to myself. Or maybe meaningful is more the word. I edit, yeah, but it’s more that I guess the raw mineral that’s shaped is the part that “matters.” See what I did there? I don’t know. But again it’s like, knowing is what my problem has been if my spot is on. If you even can know, I for sure don’t, and trying to understand by knowledge alone will never really get me there. Of course again all this’s under the pretense that nothing I’m saying is for sure, so, when I say “x is y,” there’s an understood “(I feel like)” stuck right in front of it. At maybe all times. And that can be pretty cagey feeling. Yeah. But maybe it’s freeing and I don’t know. The point is that, if I really think my way into a sentence I like from the get-go, it often just doesn’t work. And that energy feels wasted. And it’s spent, so I’m drained. The way that feels best for me is something like listening for what pops in the brain first. It’s pretty crude or whatever I guess. Like how the egg accepts only the first-there spermatoid. But it’s much better for me than pulling my hair out over what sounds best or gets to x meaning most artfully. What the hell does art even mean?
All of that pretty much a dragged out thought. Explaining something I can’t explain—which is what language in general does for me.
A story I want to get in the midst of. From a midnight signal. Recurring throughout my life as epic things inspired always by some media source on the outside. And mostly hypothetical. I skirt narrative with scenes involving characters never returned to. Settings and people it’s assumed are already part of pages and pages of a story that is going on. Some mostly do recur. The protagonist is vague and vague and vague. It’s been over a decade since I first started working on it. Maybe twelve years, now. Or thirteen. In junior year of highs school, I wrote a page about a conference in an office building. I was avoiding work in computer class. I would always do that. I think. That page became the springboard for everything. And that speaks I think to what really resonates with me about stories and media in general: atmosphere. It’s most always something oblique or tangent just far enough out of frame. Like what even is atmosphere? To me it’s another one of those things that can’t really be described or created. It’s interpreted. And comprised of the variable everything involved in what’s being perceived. Like, sure there is birdnoise at this park, but the birdnoise itself isn’t the atrmosphere. And sunlight, and moms with strollers, and a chimp throwing darts at a panicky zookeeper with a fu manchu. But these things themselves: none alone is responsible for the atmosphere. And even my definition I think now is wrong. Because even all these things together, when you perceive them, are not alone the atmosphere. And maybe alone they are, and together. But what I’m wondering is if there is something even more beyond what’s perceived. You can never put your finger on it with words, it seems. But it’s there. As though to begin to describe it changes it. In which case the perceived thing is not the actual thing itself. Or whatever. I often do this: I talk myself in circles. And it’s involuntary. But so: the atmosphere is for me kind of like an indiscernible white space between the lines of the matters at heart. You get this sense but cannot describe. I love that. That is what speaks to me. That’s what I mean when I say I love something. It has often to do with the atmosphere. It’s inspiring. Or motivating. Or I’m in awe either way at least a little. It’s that “one hand clapping” Zen koan sort of thing. You cannot put your finger on it because to do so would mean you don’t have a finger. I’m probably totally off there. Whether it’s doubt of truth that makes me want to say. Addendum. Could be both. I love the atmosphere of David Lynch films. That’s a marked quality of his work. Like a signature in how he translates what he imagines. You can describe it. You can describe it. Over and over again. I don’t know that the description is really the thing. What makes it valuable is that it’s something words can’t reach. That’s like an essence. That’s what makes it feel real to me. All of this, I’m reminding myself, applies only to me. Even if it applies to everyone.