Upon Repulsion from Art, or, The Very Meaning of Life Itself

I wish I'd spent more time on this blog ranting about how much I love Michael Nobbs. He's a Welsh artist with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and he runs a website community about CFS and art. It's convenient, since CFS and art are basically all I think about. In a stunning feat of Jungian synchronicity, he and I are doing the same thing right now. We are doing absolutely nothing. We aren't making art, because we don't feel like it. I'm glad I have company in this, because it's terrifying. 

A few weeks ago, making art suddenly stopped being fun. In the midst of my newfound discipline of daily fiction writing, the joy evaporated completely. It wasn't just writing’s periodic spiral into neurotic, self-flagellating insecurity. That's no big deal. I'm well aware of my perfectionism, judgment, and lack of patience with myself. I'm getting better about that, and usually I don't care if I'm writing crap, because it's fun to make stuff up. This was something deeper and bigger and more disturbing. When you've come to rely on that mysterious feeling of creative satisfaction, what do you do when it goes away?

Artists are supposed to be intuitive, so what if your intuition says stop making art? Do you have to obey it? Please, God, say it isn't so. Please, Mysterious Intuitive Creative Force, don't make me stop. I hate stopping. All I ever do is stop. And now, just when I've found something that I like, something that gives me hope, something that makes me feel like less of a useless lump under the covers, the one thing that I can ACTUALLY DO, the one thing that brings ONE SMALL OUNCE OF MEANING to my STUPID INVALID LIFE, you want me to stop?!? You take away all joy from it, and send me back to bed. Fuck you, intuition. But you can’t say “fuck you” to your intuition. I stopped. 

So I’ve been thinking about my life, suddenly devoid of meaning because I now hate making art, and I’ve had some ideas about it. Creativity has always been a fetish for me. I've never been more than a dilettante, but creativity has always been what I care about the most. It's what I've demanded from myself, and what I've demanded from my friends, to be worth my time. I've had wondrous, important, beautiful moments of making art, as well as horrifying and despairing moments. I've been scared of it, and scared of my desire for it, and fear and desire have inflated it to monstrous proportions. It's become something it was never meant to be.

 I've always been desperately searching everywhere for The Thing to Do with My Life. I was so excited at this latest idea, that maybe I could find it in art. Wouldn't that be comforting, if I could just think of myself as an artist, and have that be my identity, my security, my meaning in life? CFS has taken away most of my abilities, and I'd like to say it has taught me to value myself because I am a human being, not because of what I can make or do. But instead of getting off the treadmill, I have readjusted to its smaller proportions.

It's an old formula, and I think it's almost always true. Take something you love, turn it into something you need, and it becomes something you hate. Especially since becoming housebound, I've been looking to art to give my life meaning. But it doesn't, and it can't. Art, as I make it, is tiny, tentative, embryonic, inexpert, bumbling, delicate, and new. It's like a little kid barely out of diapers, and I'm asking it to support my entire life. It can make me happy sometimes, but it can't give my life meaning. It can barely feed itself. It collapses under that kind of pressure.

If I want to be an artist, or a sane human being, I’m going to have to change my entire relationship with art. I'm going to have to stop making impossible demands of it. I think I could just let art be itself, with no greater meaning than being itself. How can I learn to enjoy the abilities I still have, like imagination, without gripping them so hard I choke them to death? How do I untangle my identity from what I can make and do? What does identity even mean, to the sick or the healthy?  I thought illness would make me wise, but I really don't know. I should probably stop trying to answer impossible existential questions about the meaning of life.

In conclusion, an existentialist manifesto about the meaning of life:

Art can't give your life meaning. Writing, music, painting, theater, and dance can't give your life meaning. Friends can't give your life meaning. Jobs can't give your life meaning. Being a daughter or a wife or husband or a parent can't give your life meaning. Political allegiance can't give your life meaning. Sex can't give your life meaning. Loving someone can't give your life meaning. Hating someone can't give your life meaning. Nothing can give your life meaning. It just has meaning. Meaning is just an inborn quality of life. What is that meaning? I don't know, I think it's just meaning. So stop trying so hard to find it, and stop freaking the fuck out.

All Rest and No Play make Jack a Crazy Bitch

Oh, hi Johnny.

Every year about Halloween, I start wondering if the basic components of my personality have changed, and I'm now a person who can watch horror movies. I have lots of pseudo-intellectual excuses for watching The Shining last weekend. I'm interested in the horror movie as modernity’s morality-imparting mythology, Jack Nicholson as our puckish, trickster God, and the subconscious machinations that find supernatural violence entertaining. I just read Stephen King's excellent memoir, "On Writing," which inspired all kinds of deep thoughts about literary snobbery and populist storytelling. I also just wanted to give myself some cheap thrills.

I started watching it Friday night, and I only made it through the first few scenes of bloody elevators and dead sisters when it got too scary and I had to turn it off. Big mistake. There is nothing more frightening than a void for my imagination to fill. I thought about it all night, in between crumbs of Ambien. The next day, in the daylight, I bravely got back in the ring. No Goddamn movie is going to get the best of me at two in the afternoon.

The rest of the film was scary, but not as bad as I imagined. At least the plot resolved. It imparted its cultural messages, both comforting (good triumphs over evil) and dubious (writers are insane, intuitives get axes in the face). The Magical Black Man sacrifices himself for the white protagonists, as usual. The innocent woman and child survive, free-floating evil retreats to its lair, and I attempt to escape fear through intellectual deconstruction. Business as usual, in other words. Nothing to think about late at night. 

Unfortunately, I did think about it late at night. I wish I could say that identified the most with the psychic child, or the courageous wife, but I have to say that Jack Nicholson had a point. Living in an isolated house, unable to leave, interacting only with two other people, trying to sustain yourself on creativity alone: isn't this basically a recipe for insanity? Isn't this a sort of unhealthy and unsustainable way to live? Wouldn't it drive any normal person crazy? And, now that I think about it, does it seem at all familiar? Like anyone else's life that I know? Ummm…uh-oh.

I'm not making out with corpses yet, or chasing children through hedge mazes, but the plot does hit a bit close to home. Sometimes it's hard not to scream, "Give me my fucking life back!" at the empty space between my bed and ceiling. Sometimes it takes effort to calmly hold a teacup and suppress the urge to smash it against the wall. So far only one teacup has become a casualty of my illness. I am mostly fine and okay and even happy with my life as a privileged, rural invalid; then suddenly I am not. Somehow the rage has to be vented, and I understand how good destruction can feel.

But I also think it might be time to change some things, to see if I can circumvent the rage and the destruction that seem to always come back no matter how I express them. I've done some healing over the past few months, and now I am at an awkward stage between extremely sick and really sick. I'm getting a lot better at sitting upright on couches, and I'm a champ at making ten minute meals. It's been almost two years since I've done things like order food in a restaurant, exchange money for an item in real time, or walk down a sidewalk. But if I can sit on a couch at home, I think with a little ingenuity I should be able to sit on a couch in a coffee shop. And how much would I love spending my ten minutes of kitchen energy at a thrift store? Just wearing shoes is exciting at this point. Think of all the adventures I could have in the mundane world outside my home.

Yelling "Give me my fucking life back," makes several false assumptions. Who am I yelling at? Nobody except myself can give me my fucking life back. And do I really not have my life? Or in my stubbornness am I just not accepting the small things I can do because I want everything at the same time? Going back out into the world is intimidating for a lot of reasons. It's going to take humility to accept my limited abilities in the world of people with "normal" abilities. It's going to take a lot of careful energy budgeting, last-minute planning, realism, monitoring, and laughably tiny goals. It's probably not something I can do very often, but I think just getting out a little bit would make my world so much bigger. More time drinking coffee in public is less time drinking whiskey with evil itself.

I write for Recoving Yogi!

This week, I wrote an article about my semester at acupuncture school and resulting loss of faith in acupuncture for a delightfully snarky online yoga journal called Recovering Yogi. Click right here:

http://recoveringyogi.com/confessions-of-an-acupuncture-school-dropout/

A Half-Remembered Irish Folktale

I think my mom read it to me, or maybe a teacher at my Montessori preschool. I associate it with that shadowy period of childhood when reality and imagination blend seamlessly, and images from stories stay in your head and reverberate. There was one from this era about a terrifying nose that detaches itself from its face, and one about a sad country house getting swallowed up by a dark expanding city. And there was this one, about the lazy Irish farm girl and the leprechaun. I've made halfhearted attempts to find it over the years in various collections of Celtic folktales, but I haven't found it yet. If anyone has seen my missing Irish folktale, please let me know! I'd like to know the real story. I'll tell it to you as best as I can, and I'll fill in the parts I don't remember.

The Farm Girl and the Leprechaun

Once, far away on the green Isle of Erin, there lived a young farm girl. She was a farm girl of many qualities, but the most important one for this story is her laziness. She was so lazy that her farm and fields were falling into ruin, and she dreamed of inheriting a large sum of money and emigrating across the water to live in the sunny southwestern United States. It happened one day that she came upon a leprechaun sleeping under the flowers. Now, everyone knows two things about leprechauns: they always have a pot of gold hidden somewhere nearby, and the laws of their fifth dimensional fairyland prevent them from telling lies. She grabbed him and stuffed him in a sack and brought him back to her farmhouse for interrogation.

"Okay, Patty. Where is the loot?" says the farm girl. She has about four feet and one hundred pounds on him, and he cowers in the corner behind the stove.

"I hid it in the barn!" says the leprechaun. "I put it underneath the hay! Don't hurt me!"

"I don't want to have to hurt you," says the farm girl, and she goes out to the barn to look for the pot of gold. She's so lazy that she hasn't been to the barn in weeks. Hay is strewn everywhere in untidy heaps, and dangerous rusty tools stick out of it, threatening tetanus. The poor cow is starving to death. She realizes that she'll have to go about this systematically, so she bails the hay and stacks it neatly in the loft, she gives some of it to the cow and mucks out his stall, she goes through the tools and put them back on their hooks, and even after she's gone through every inch of the barn and made it tidy and spotless, she can't find a pot of gold. 

"You lied to me, you wee fairy bastard," she says to leprechaun. She rolls up her sleeves. She's quite muscular for a lazy person. "You'll pay for this."

"No, stop, I didn't lie!” says the leprechaun." I did hide my pot of gold in the barn. But then I moved it. After I hid it in the barn, I hid it in your kitchen."

"You better be telling the truth this time," says the farm girl, and she goes off to the kitchen to look for it. The kitchen is even worse than the barn. She hasn't done dishes in months, and pots and pans are stacked everywhere in tottering towers held together with moldy mashed potato glue. She boils some water on the stove and gets to work washing dishes, reorganizing cabinets, matching the tops of Tupperware containers to the bottoms of Tupperware containers and removing the science projects from the fridge. In the end, the kitchen looks and smells better than it ever has before. But there was no pot of gold.

"You wee shite, you bloody-arse bastard West Briton!" says the farm girl. "I don't want to hurt you, elf, but in life one is often called to do what one doesn't want to do. Have you ever heard of a Belfast sixpack?"

Indeed, the leprechaun had heard of a Belfast sixpack, but it never came to that. Fairy tales are repetitive; you know where this is going. He didn't lie about hiding the pot of gold in her kitchen, but then he moved it, and he moved it, and he moved it again. He got her to clean out the chicken coop and collect the eggs, he got her to bottle the beer and distill the whiskey, he got her to clean and organize all the weapons and ammunition that were scattered around her living room. In the end, she worked harder than she ever had in her life and did all the things that she should have been doing all along. 

Eventually, the farm girl wises up. She comes down off the roof, which she had just finished re-thatching, and holds her portable drill up to the leprechaun's tiny, white kneecap. "I want to hurt you now, troll," she says. "And when life presents one with the opportunity to do exactly what one wants to do, one must take it as it comes."

"Wait, wait!" says the leprechaun. "I did hide the pot of gold under the roof. But then I moved it."

"Aye, I know you did," says the farm girl. "I'm not falling for that again. Tell me the last place you put it, now, or I'm going to have one more mess to clean up." She conspicuously changes the battery in the drill.

"Alright, don't hurt me!" says the leprechaun, who was finally beginning to get scared. "I'll tell you where it is. I hid in the garden, underneath the spring potatoes. That's the last place I put it, that's where it is right now."

"It better be," says the farm girl.

So she goes out to the garden, where the potatoes are lined up in rows and ready to be harvested before they rot in the ground. She works and works, digging potatoes and filling up her sack until she's almost at the end of the last row. She hasn't found a pot of gold, and she wonders what her chances are of actually finding it. She's dirty and tired, and the leprechaun probably has more tricks up his sleeve. You can't outsmart a leprechaun. "Foock it," she says, and she takes her sack of potatoes and goes back inside, where she drinks a good measure of the whiskey and falls asleep half on, half off the living room couch. 

That night, as the farm girl sleeps among her bountiful harvest , in her pristine farmhouse in its ordered fields, the leprechaun sneaks out. He goes up to the garden where just one potato plant remains. Carefully, he digs it up, and finds his pot of gold underneath, just where he put it. "Hee hee," he laughs, "I said I wasn't lying." He takes his gold and slips back across the diaphanous boundary into the dreamworld of the fairies.

 *               *               *

Okay, maybe that wasn't exactly the story that an adult read to me so long ago, but it's the gist of it. 

Folktales are meant to be retold and repurposed. Its pagan Celtic wisdom has grown more applicable over the years. There is my unending pursuit of good health, a goal that has been as illusory and elusive as the end of a rainbow, and there are the actual things I've gotten done along the way. There are the relationships that I've repaired with my family, there are the addictions that I've given up, the self forgiveness I've cultivated, the art I've made, the art I'm making, the millions of ways this illness has made me face reality and live in reality, in the present moment, where I actually am. These are all really important and positive things that I probably wouldn't have done if I had been given any other choice. 

If I'm a lazy-ass farm girl with a subtle tendency towards violence, pursuing an empty goal, prodded onwards by supernatural beings, at least there are some tangible rewards. Of course, I still want to be healthy again one day, so I don't want to apply the totality of this myth to my problems. I'm not quite ready to give up on health yet. Or maybe there are some illusions I still need to have in order to not give up completely.

Oh, and I know that this story is terribly offensive to all Irish and Irish-Americans. To that I just have to say: Suck it up, Whitey.

Limits in all Dimensions

Chronic fatigue syndrome is all about limits. Exceeding them, testing them, being horrified by how small they are and then learning to live within them. Now I'm finally not pushing my body to go farther than it can, but I'm beginning to realize that I have spiritual as well as physical limitations. Apparently I can't just make over my life in an instant. 

It seems childishly obvious, I know. But I'm the person who moved across country to go to grad school full time when I was too sick to even work 15 hours a week. I have a history of unrealistic expectations of myself. And sadly, being aware of this fact does not now make me immune from it.

The other day I actually made a list of the strategies I am going to implement to turn my life completely around. No more will I be a bored, maudlin invalid! I will transform myself through art! I will go from somebody still mourning my losses and caught up in my own insecurities, somebody who is been afraid for at least 17 years of taking my creativity seriously, to a person maintaining the schedule of a professional writer. I will follow a strict timetable of writing and reading, I will discipline my imagination, I will drink vegetable juice every day and do more yoga, and I will start wearing button-down shirts. Life up until this point, it's sad and undisciplined wasting, will be completely obliterated. Goodbye, old life. Make way for Homo Superior.

I got really excited about this for about two days. I wrote a lot. I made myself. I wore the shirt and I drank the juice, but I couldn't do the yoga because after two days I was completely crashed. I was in way over my head. All my fears and doubts and expectations that I can't possibly meet right now just fell in around my head. It's too bad that my brain has to work suspiciously similarly to my body.

I hate being afraid. I hate being afraid so much that I have made it my personal mission of my adult life to seek out, hunt down, and destroy everything that holds me back. I hate fear and I hate being a coward. Every fear I find I have to run at full speed, sword in each hand, screaming and clad in bear hides like a berserker Viking tripping on mushrooms. It is a bloodsoaked mission of vengeance against all the ways I am weak.

I really have freed myself from a lot of my fears. I used to be terribly shy, really afraid to open my mouth in front of people I didn't know. That had to go. I was afraid of moving to new cities, so I moved to four of them. I was afraid of making art, and I made myself make it. And I loved making it, often. I’ve really won a lot of freedom for myself over the years. But now it's pretty clear my tactics have to change; I just don't have the energy to fight so hard anymore. I'm going to have to figure out how to do this the easy way.

I guess the things that I'm seeking, things that I think will make my life worth living again, are subtle qualities. They are positive things; they aren't just the absence of fear and hate and all the other fucked up things in my brain. They are things like creativity, gentleness, play, forgiveness. Actual and practiced love for myself. I can't intimidate them into working for me like I'm used to. And I can't just decide that I have them and act like I do. Otherwise I'll have anxiety attacks while trying to write short stories, because I don't know what I'm doing and I'm failing and I am NOT having fun, yet I cannot be a person who doesn't know what she's doing or fails or doesn't have fun, and thus I am living in two mutually exclusive realities simultaneously, which is hell on the nerves.

So I'm going to have to live within some psychic limits. I just don't have the spiritual resources right now to do what I want to do. No more running into the jungle to shake out my demons. I think I'm going to let some of those demons just hang out for a while. I'll take embarrassingly tiny steps and lay some groundwork. I'm pretty sure I know how to do this.

Yes, The Olympics are Inspiring

Gabrielle Douglas Enacts the Human Experience

Feeling evil and watching the Olympics with my family, I accidentally did the thing I always try not to do, which is to go on a loud long bitter rant denouncing everything I'm jealous of. "I hate the Olympics. What is the point of the Olympics? All these young, beautiful, healthy people spending their entire lives in the pursuit of a meaningless goal? Fourteen-year-olds flinging themselves around bars, young Asian men with synchronized concussions, people making their bodies hurt when their bodies don't have to hurt. If I was healthy, I wouldn’t waste it like that! I mean, what's the fucking point?" 

My dad, who loves sports, answered my rhetorical question. "It's about being alive," he said simply, and turned back to the TV.

"I guess I just don't know what that's like!" I said, and stalked off into my room, feeling like a stereotype of a stereotype of a stereotype of an embittered invalid and a reverted adult living at home.

The weird thing is that half of the time when I make these out-of-control public rages, what I'm saying is actually the opposite of the truth. Honestly, I'm inspired by the Olympics. It's an appreciation that I've only recently acquired, and only fully recognized as I lay on my bed where I had tearfully flung myself after my teenage outburst. The Evil, i.e., my bitterness and jealousy, would have me not be able to take any joy from the things in the world of bodies I can no longer do. But there’s some good left in me, too, letting me get over it and begin to connect with something that's always been alien and opaque to me: sports and their mysterious meaning.

I've never understood them before. Perhaps there's a joie de vivre about moving your body that I don't have anymore. That's true often enough, but I didn't get sports even when I had a healthy body. Sports always seems so pointless to me. Get sweaty, hurt, lose, all to put a ball in a certain place a number of times. Of course, I've heard the "metaphor for life" theory before, that sports are about teamwork and strategy and hard work paying off, and outlet for warfare and survival in this tragically civilized society. But it wasn't the kind of metaphor I connected with. I am still a teenager; it's jocks versus art kids, and you gotta know where you stand. I always got picked last, never got the ball passed to me, never made friends with any of my teammates, and if you want a metaphor, write a fucking poem. 

Of course, this line of thinking isn't exactly sophisticated. I think it's more symptomatic of my tendency to elevate the intellectual over the physical, a tendency that is by no means the cause of my illness, but has tripped me up over and over again when I try to take care of my body. I'm not good at sports, and I don't understand sports, and if there's one thing I hate it's things I'm not good at and don't understand. I'm still the nerdy kid hanging out in my high school's gifted office, desperately looking down on the popular kids, channeling all my warfare and survival drives into the highest SAT scores and the most nuanced direction of No Exit. My economy didn't value moving your body for the sake of moving your body.

I guess it's the classic lesson learned too late, or scarcity creating value. Now I think it's bizarre to like art and not like sports. They are both about pre-intellectual motivations, about the defeat and glory of being human. Why would the arc of a dancer's leg move me, but not the arc of a perfectly executed spiral pass? Why is one method of contacting and expressing the subconscious better than another? Particularly when the athlete has to be so disciplined and rigorous in the pursuit of her goal, when so many artists (and I'm talking about myself here, obviously, illness aside) are really deep down lazy narcissistic bums? If I had even a fraction of the dedication and perseverance as these athletes, do you know how many novels I would've written by now? Do you know how many, uh… blog posts I would've written by now? And comics I would've drawn? And pugs I would own, and friendships I wouldn't have let slip away?

And so, slowly and very much from the sidelines, I'm beginning to have a genuine appreciation of people moving their bodies competitively for no intellectual reason, and drawing real inspiration from the Olympics. I'm sorry if this sounds like a 90s Nike commercial. Of course I'm ignoring the money, egos, exploitation, drugs, and concussions, but right now I'd rather just buy the Hellenistic Ideal that can't be completely destroyed by being sold so vigorously. And perhaps I can take even more direct inspiration from these athletes, not even filtering it through the language of metaphor. Because our bodies aren't just metaphors. If there's one thing I've learned from illness, it's that sometimes bodies just mean themselves. I can learn to joyfully move my body, for no reason, even now on such a humble scale.

Grendel

Grendel

I know that any good blog needs pictures, and I'm afraid I've been terribly remiss in this. Please accept my apologies, and this picture of my pug, Grendel. Tragically, she was disabled at a young age when she chewed on an electrical cord and brought an iron table down on her leg. Although the healing process was long and painful, she developed an abiding spiritual resilience and sense of humor that in the end made her a better dog.

Late to My Own Funeral

Well, so far it's fun being an angst filled teenager. It's better than being a bitter old woman. I can claim I only want to complain, but I don't really. The shameful truth is that I do want to be happy. Or, in deference to certain philosophers who make sense when they say happiness is impossible, I want to be at peace. The 15-year-old covers her eyes with her hand, and pretends to be with someone else. I totally sympathize, but I'm afraid I have to be sincere at this point. I have to do the one thing I really don't want to do. I have to accept my illness.

In further proof that this year has been one slow revolution around nothing, I keep coming back to acceptance. I've had moments of acceptance in the past. They are beautiful moments.  At the very bottom of your misery, and realize you just have to give up trying to change it. I really believe that something sees that white flag, and comes to help you, even if it's just a part of yourself. These moments are real and cathartic and even dramatic in their own way. I've usually mistook these moments for the real thing. I thought, "Now that's over! Now I won the spiritual acceptance game! Can I get back to my real life now?" And I went back to my primary occupation, which is waiting to get better.

And I keep waiting, and waiting, and all of a sudden my patience wears out, and I can't wait that long anymore. Here comes the 15-year-old: I have to live my life! I want my life to feel like a life again! It's my life, God dammit, my shitty, mundane, disabled real life. And it's not my illness that has made it so small, it's my lack of imagination. Or rather, it's the profusion of imagination in the wrong place.

I can imagine the future easily, that's where I am young and strong and winning everything constantly always. And I can clearly see multiple parallel universes and all the fun and friends I have in them.  It's in this reality right now where I can't imagine doing anything else but lying in my bed reading a book I'm sort of into. Acceptance must mean more than this. You can live with something, but still have it hurt you every day.

This year hasn't been a total wash. I've gotten into some good things. I've read a lot of books . I have tried to let go of the life I used to live, but I haven't replaced it with very much. I've been resting, and I've been grieving, and that is a process to respect. Right after you get hit by a car and you're lying on the pavement semi-conscious and bleeding is not the time to write poetry about it. But now I want the mourning to be over. The life I had is dead. I went to the funeral, saw it in its coffin, but I still persist in pretending it's alive and walking around with it like it's the corpse in "Weekend at Bernie's." I want to put it down, but I'm not exactly sure how. I don't know what to replace it with. The closest I've been able to come to grabbing my disabled life by the balls is writing personal essays about how much I would like to grab my disabled life by the balls. I guess it's a start.