#22
You were in an underwater simulator some time ago, and all around you were little girls with a host of dreams and desires. Like fairies the dreams soared in the air as you glided alongside blazing fish. The multiplicity of perceptions, possibilities, perspectives is sometimes overwhelming because everything begs to be seen and heard and felt. And in the clunky machine, a line came to you, and you quickly noted it down: Brick by brick this world was built. It’s reassuring. Should you even continue writing further? This is the gist of what you’ve been thinking about: the precarity and flightiness of possibilities, the sense and rootedness of the present moment.
Last week, someone terse and smart alerted you to the idea that you don’t have to believe all your thoughts. When you give in to them, going on walks alone can often be unbearable and tiring, so this was good to know. It’s good to try to anchor yourself, good to try to be open. Some days you wake up and find the dread and shame looming just overhead. There isn’t much to be done about it but to snap out of each thought piecemeal.
You wonder sometimes why you write. It seems that you come to writing most desperately when ordinary language begins to feel bottomless. Whatever you try to say falls through until here, on the page, it can rest in some coherent form.
Enchanted as always by Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Here, an animated video of “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark.” She writes that eventually, even on:
Those Evenings of the Brain —
When not a Moon disclose a sign —
Or Star — come out — within —
[…]
Either the Darkness alters —
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight —
It is to hope you return. A few weeks ago, you finally watched Everything Everywhere All At Once. As with everything else, the occasion was perfectly timed. Waymond is beautiful; he’s achieved so much you’re striving for: to try to talk to people instead of fighting them, to choose kindness “especially when we don’t know what’s going on,” and to do things that may seem “stupid” and “silly” like tacking googly eyes on everything just because it makes the weight of each day lighter. All this is difficult to practice, but one learns.
A particularly moving moment: when Evelyn realises towards the end that “There is always something to love. Even in a stupid, stupid universe, where we have hot dogs for fingers, we’d get very good with our feet!”
Obsessed with these Evelyn Tan dream journal illustrations, this one in particular: