Sentimental Value                                                                                                                                                                                           Jan 8/Jan 16


Everyone has left the city.

December was so full, of people, events, crises, and good conversation. As winter begins to shed its skin, real life must be returned to, and return everyone will. I don’t ever remember being idle during this time. I have always had somewhere to return to and something to get to. I have always been in commute or preparation and bid farewell to the joyous holiday season, chained to some machine of productivity that needed me back on the clock. For the first ever time, at the start of the new year, I am left to my own devices. I am my own machine, unoiled and functioning off an instruction manual. As a person, I feel quite okay. But, as a bird, I feel without a flock and left wandering post the migratory winter. 

S. recommended I watch Sentimental Value. In our ritualesque fashion, of having watched something we really loved and immediately urging the other to watch it so we can discuss, he brought up the movie with me. And since I was feeling like a sentimental movie anyway, I had it downloaded immediately and ready to watch. I had no particular interest in watching the film, even though it looked interesting, owing to my general disinterest for, well, everything right now. But Trier dragged me in, as he always does— each time, to my surprise, but always so consistently. The emotions that cloaked this world felt Bergmanesque and naturally so, this felt like good inspiration for the script I have been (not) writing for the last three years. Rather than leave it at just being inspired, this time, I’m making notes as I watch the movie, of elements that captivate me, to later draw from.


A bar of Tony (brought by E. & L. from Amsterdam): an old comfort of mine,
now reduced to just one perishable bar — something of sentimental value

To part with friends is to have so much joy lost. I feel that departure dually, for my friends E. & L., to whom I said goodbye a few days ago as they returned home to Europe, and for N., with whom I haven’t spoken in so long. Today marks what, over the years, became sort of our anniversary, or rather a day symbolic of the beauty and celebration in our friendship. I wrote to N. last night, when it was still a different date in her country and nowhere close to turning today. It will be many more hours, if not longer, till I hear back from her. Patience is all that can combat distance, and every day I exercise it as best I can. I was her a year ago, in a foreign timezone, celebrating a different New Year’s from everyone else. It was cold and lonely and called for a stream of tears, inevitably so. I fear harsh winters, grey, and living in a different time from the worlds I call home. It is the most unfortunate thing that throwing myself to the wolves to do what I consider good work will drag me away to a distant place so cold and grey. I always know that it is partly in that fear that I keep myself from progress and migrate home, seeking lost comfort. 

Love and work will always exist oppositionally, and either path I take will strip me of something. 

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism 
I was reading an old letter from A. in which she had written the words “a particularly cruel kind of optimism.” That was in May. Later that month, while working on the final chapter of my thesis, I turned to Berlant, seeking guidance on affect. And today, as I reflect on the year through my letters with A., and feel more than existential about my place in life, it feels like Berlant is calling back to me, in more ways than one. I have also been thinking of Yeats and whether, this year, the center will hold. I have bet all my horses on the center holding, but it is hard to envision a stable center, and what or where that is.
I cut myself shaving — evidence of impatience

While watching the movie, painstakingly, I see my future in Nora— participating, on cue, in the projective self-recognition her character was built for.
Click to read
The dread of longing to succeed in itself may be some strange kind of optimism, or so I gathered from my reading of the first section of “Cruel Optimism”: “Optimism and its Objects.” 

“impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic”


      Took a break to make passion fruit jam
In describing cruel optimism, Berlant inclemently connects hopelessness and blind faith to desire, and its inevitable attachment to ego and its continuity. 
In despondently waiting for a job to land on my lap, and money to come with it, and finally a fruitful creative career to follow, I have invested my ego continuity in anticipation of email notifications that often turn out to be spam or kind words from friends; other times also updates from Patti Smith, which still count for something. 

It’s mythical to view from the outside the path of someone who has reached their north star, their object of desire, against unconquerable odds. The reality of this myth takes 3 years in a city and eight years wandering, and 12 years in the making. Still, in all these stories (beyond possessing what Berlant calls “x”), recompense finds its way to people through folds and folds and folds of seemingly miraculous coincidences. 

In reading “Optimism and its Objects,” I have come to realize (thankfully) that providence is nothing but indirection working out. 


there are two directions that this can take from here

1. that the center cannot hold.

2. there is no center.

1.  

hopelessness really kicks in when you have stayed on beyond your last hurrah.
i have always felt burned just in proximity to the sun, and promptly flown away. 

This lies in accepting there is a center and that I have strayed away from it




hopelessness really kicks in when you have stayed on beyond your last hurrah.
hopelessness really kicks in when you have stayed on beyond your last hurrah.


Phantom Thread, 2017

 
At this point, I have taken a break of many days, unable to speak of hope when I have none. But, I still must make the point I need to because my conclusion has already been written; I need to reach it. 


E.B. and I are sitting on a katte on Edward Road, me with my laptop and them planning a menu. Today has been the first okay day of the last many days. I have spent the last many days pondering if I even ever will reach “x,” soaked in the cruelty of my desire of this ambiguoiusly-shaped fruitful career. A week ago, I had more hope— too much of it, in fact— and now I’m perhaps just in a comedown of hope, brought on by the reality of, well, a lot of things. Optimism is cruel by way of patience and the difficulty to discharge and practice it consistently and over so very long.





Tea, spilling, the more I mix it.  


Returning to Berlant,

2. providence is not arborescent, it is indirectional and rhizomatic.


In the last one week, I have come to realize that I might not actually be switching time zones anytime soon. I had seen my future as a scale tree, growing from one root, straight, finally flourishing some meters above. Then, subscribing to Deleuze and Guattari, offshooting from Berlant on indirectional analysis, it made most sense that the future has no straight structure, and certainly not one that makes directional sense — to not get too corny in my explanation, I will leave this image to do exposition’s work.


“A horizontal, rhizomatic structure of grass that can grow vertically at any point.”


Lepidodendron

This belief of rhizomatically flourishing future [ideally] leaves me in a state of optimism with “less pernicious outcomes,” a phrase Berlant uses while speaking on free indirect discourse (p. 26). Wherever I am, so be it. If I am nowhere too, then so be it. Action and inaction work symbiotically, both towards and against each other. One must trust providence, forgo the aching for stability, and fall face first, hoping roots are growing all around you.


so, finally, to answer my question of whether the center will hold, i have come to conclude that
there is no center

I feel today as if the world is turning inside me, a gyre in and of itself, powered by everything in my world, interconnected. I want to trust the rhizomes of this world and where it is taking me. The center will not hold; it is an illusory cloak to soften the world’s concurrent tides, a handlebar to hold on to while riding the waves. With heaviness, I wish to accept this and believe it as truth.