Saturday 18 July 2020

ugly feelings

A blog cannot just be a bin to put rubbish emotions in. The unvarnished record of aspects of a bad time couldn't ever be a happy thing to write but honesty and honest exploration always prove to have value. Nevertheless I often feel so appalled and so worn out by my own inner landscape that I just wish, as I know I already wrote and not very long ago either, that I could find my way back to the early funny ones. And isn't that observation, itself, now one which is securely mired in the vast realm of the Problematic; and I also know, even though you can't, that in the long stretches of my life when I found it piss easy to be more funny than probably anybody else who's ever lived, I lived a curiously broken life psychologically. I certainly don't think there was a causal connection between a mild but persistent habit of dissociation and a capability and predilection for wit and silliness. I'm just saying I don't wish that stretch of my life back, at all, even though it might've seemed superficially happier.

Some years ago an American poet called Sianne Ngai published a compact and allusive book of literary criticism called Ugly Feelings. The book is about minor negative emotions / affects: anxiety, paranoia, disgust, envy. You can see why it's a book for the zeitgeist. 'Affect' is the bodily correlate of emotion, a meaningful and useful distinction but one that for some reason doesn't seem to be understood outside the walled garden of academic cultural studies. I have this book, I know, but it must be at Dorian's house. When it first appeared I read it in a spirit that I read quite a lot of that kind of scholarship, that is, distantly. I thought of it as a brilliant demonstration of how criticism can change the way people see their own culture. Ngai cut through the febrile posturing of poststructuralist bit-o-this-bit-o-that high theory. The intellectual tradition went back to Wittgenstein, but through Cavell and Said. I appreciated the achievement but I think I was a bit nonplussed by the specific content. But now, this week, today, this evening, I think 'minor unprestigious negative emotions' are everything and I would really like to have the means to read the book again and see how it feels. See if it helps.

The best substitute I could hit upon among the books I have in the flat was F R Leavis's hack job on most of the English literary canon, Revaluation. A very different tack but it did provide me with some of the respite, or the air, the breathing space, that comes with taking a perspective upon your own difficult notions and tendencies. When I'm worn down and afflicted by the shittiness of, oh, everything and everyone it's not the sadness of depression I feel, but a sickly sort of crossness and confused irritation that they're not being better,  morally and aesthetically, not taking this precious irreplaceable gift of being here now with more seriousness, not trying harder. It's a completely infantile state to want that of the world. Who doesn't regress when they're tired of shit, right? I say this from a position of sympathy and compassion towards babies and their horrific inner lives but also a conviction that baby states of mind belong in babyhood and not in adult life. So it was cathartic and literally reflective to watch Leavis savagely, witheringly point out all the ways in which the minds, gestures, behaviours and outputs of various major poets were shit (but especially Shelley - who really is a bit shit, truth be told).

I finished the cemetery drawing


and also another one - a Lancefield late summer evening, breaking my heart now and filling my eyes with tears to think of being there - drawn much faster, not drawn particularly thoughtfully or well but as the above, the below, all of the proximate should show, if my life is anything now it is a conscious exploration of the possibilities opened up by deferral of snap judgements and unbidden demands, and toleration instead of hunger and uncertainty. 



I have not found happiness and fulfilment by any other method so it's worth giving it a try. And incredibly conveniently for 2020 deferral and toleration is something I can practice without special equipment and without leaving home. All I have to do is be quiet, breathe, listen to what's here, let the emptiness and darkness come rolling slowly in.

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