A Net for Water

Writing has been difficult recently. Every idea I think to write about feels obvious, trivial, or disingenuous. I like to take threads of ideas and follow them back, to see what each idea implies about its underlying antecedents, to tug on each thread until the construct begins to unravel. Most of the time, when I do that now, I just find myself back where I started, thinking the thoughts I’ve thought before, writing the words I’ve already written, or words which sound nice together but don’t actually add up to anything meaningful.

The hard part for me has usually not been in finding the words to evoke an idea, but in finding an idea interesting enough to be worth evoking. Or, just as often, the difficulty comes in finding a way to cut each topic away from other topics, to somehow find a discrete pattern that can be described in the midst of the noise of infinite interconnected patterns.

If half of the challenge is in writing something interesting, though, the other half is in somehow convincing myself that it’s actually interesting. Even just trying to write about a game I’ve played or a show I’ve watched is difficult, because everything seems obvious, trite, contrived – and, of course, the stakes of art criticism seem agonizingly low now. Art and how we react to it, how we make it, how it shapes us – these are things I value, and things I think are important, but everything is relative, and it feels awful and tone-deaf to talk about anything but the elephants that are crowding the room. So I try to tie it all together. I try to find ways in which the way we relate to art ties into the way we fail to relate to human beings. I try to find ways in which media has lead us into these horrors and which it might help to lead us out. To talk about anything less seems insulting and self-indulgent.

What do I have to do that’s better than playing music while the Titanic sinks? Nothing in particular.

I’d rather, though, be writing about problems which I feel capable of solving, futures which seem tenable, paths that seem navigable. I miss the trivial thought exercises. I miss the search for enlightenment underneath the couch cushions. Everything is too important for me now. It’s outside my skill set. I can’t escape the sensation that tremendously important things are happening, the world rotating out of place like a secret bookshelf, and I’m not a part of it. I am a witness, and that is all. It might be a privilege to be present, but my presence is not required.

I’m committed, though, to whatever it is that I do. I’ll keep finding stupid words to write. Everything still needs to be sorted out, to be put in order, to be thought through – and, though indulgent musings won’t shape the future, they may at least have a tiny part of shaping those who shape the future. Overthinking things is, at times, a necessary skill set. For now, I’ll cling to whatever shred of relevance this sort of writing can muster, another breeze in the storm.

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