2023-03-11 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Saturday 🗓 Date: March 11, 2023 📅 Week: Mar 6 – Mar 12, 2023

In the past 24 hours, I’ve been incredibly obsessed with “Big Mike’s” by Dijon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiGhRcruIJY

This song is great — it feels like mixing Frank Ocean’s Blonde with newer Bon Iver tracks. That’s a powerful duo, I won’t lie. And it got me thinking: what’s the writing that makes me feel like that?

To start, how does that music feel? It’s colorful, it’s walking this whole range of sounds. It starts simple but becomes incredibly expansive from simple tools. In “Big Mike’s” it’s the stepwise “da da da” that pierces throughout the song. And I always love the straightforward questions that are so revealing: would you take me? would you take me?

Importantly, it’s music that takes you out of your body for a bit. Expansive is the key word to all of this. I think Wolf in White Van had moments of this, where the narrator would escape to these vast realms and the stories grew beyond the bounds of their limited physical body. I think The Name of the Wind also had moments like this, but those moments feel a little different to me. NotW felt epic, which has an expansive nature to it but feels simply large and not limitless. I don’t think I yet know how to pinpoint that distinction.

I guess the way to pinpoint it is to think of times where I felt limitless. The short answer there is that it’s almost always through music, but I want to know why music does that and not other art forms. Writing totally can do it, but I think the writer strictly needs to orient themselves towards that as the goal. Writing so often, at least we’re told, is about the characters and about the story, but stories are by their nature (or are they?) bounded, there’s a beginning and an end. The same could be said for music though, so I don’t know if that’s a reasonable distinction.

I think this is where we start to have to toy with the notions of “fiction” and “poetry,” which are pretty arbitrary categories in and of themselves. Poetry I think is more aimed at evoking that limitless, expansive quality, whereas fiction is generally more about connecting with characters and their emotions. Why can’t we have both? I posit that we can, we just don’t try hard enough to.

(I feel so lame writing this as if it’s a manifesto, but I do feel like there’s some nugget in here about why we write in the first place. Why do you write? I write because it’s the way I can make any sense of the world around me, which I do by not making sense.)

What feels important to me is to come back to the Big Self, less the individual and more the whole world. But the world comes from the little things. It’s like how Simple Song from Leonard Bernstein’s Mass goes:

Make it up as you go along: Lauda, Laudē Sing like you like to sing. God loves all simple things, For God is the simplest of all.

The biggest things are really the simplest, the most underlying. Getting in touch with the movement of the earth. Feeling supported. The earth hurtles around the sun and yet here you are, not paying that any mind. The bigger things protect us. The universe is orienting itself towards complexity, but that in turn yields more complexity. Do we lean into that, or rage against it towards simplicity?

I don’t think I know what the right answer is. I think the actual answer is to write a whole bunch of stuff and see what comes up. Period.

I don’t know why I’m so terrified of writing. I think I feel like I’m committing to something when I write all these things out. Even though what I’m writing out right now I’m clearly not committing to, but when I write stories I’m like I am writing a story instead of just writing and seeing what comes out. That’s what I’m going to do now.

There was a day where Carmen split in two. The whole earth kept spinning but half of Carmen’s atoms stood still for a whole minute, a earth’s rotation pulling one half from the other as if exfoliating her entire body.

It happened without notice, as these things do. She had only recently returned home, the home that was now only hers and no one else’s, a recent change of state, and put on an album she had bought during her midday walk. The movers had come while she was out and left the keys on her kitchen table. It’s over, she mused, and pulled a half-empty bottle of white wine from the cabinet beneath the stereo. She swirled the wine in her glass and lifted herself up on her toes, swaying, Turning, turning. A gentle, three-point waltz with no partner, no body to catch her.

As she spun, she felt farther and farther from herself. She like she falling asleep, her vision pulling farther and farther back. It’s the wine, she thought. She had never considered herself a lightweight, but with half her belongings gone from the apartment, she wondered if her body was in shock. She thought back to their