thursday
"are you never truly happy?" c. is asking our protagonist [back then that night @ the café]. he takes too long to answer.
"is that a 'no', or are you still thinking?"
"you know..." he eventually answers "the sort of tragic thing is that the things that make me happy simultaneously make me sad. there are two things that make me happy, that give me joy : encounters with people whom i love and good music, good literature, good images = good expressions. in the first case there's always the fear of losing that loved person inscribed in the encounter. in the second case it's the too-muchness which i cannot cope with. good expression is by definition one that 'inspires' [unfitting term] me and makes me restless. but as long as i have not created an 'infrastructure' so i can use this 'inspiration' and restlessness and make it work for me, it turns bitter and stale. therefore, right now, i don't think that there are moment of 'pure' enjoyment."
"you think too much."
"i don't know. honestly i don't think i do. i might feel too much, though. there's a constant sense of overflowing and i don't know where to... hm... the closest thing to 'using' this restlessness is the gym. but it's dead energy that i create there, i only feed the machine, nothing more. but it's the only form of acceptable transition, because i'm not 'wasting my time'. in the gym i do something for my health (like a good citizen subjecting himself to biopower) and hence i'm doing something that's socially allowed and valuable. plus unreflectedly buying into cultural stereotypes of youth and well-formed bodies always secures acceptance from mostly everybody."
this week-end, jamie and sharon spent a couple of days in berlin. they took some 200 lurkers stickers with them. here are some of the results:
i am asking these questions because the "loop" of how to process inspiration adequately is very familiar to me.
i suspect academia and literary studies, at least a certain mentality that prevails in some places within that field, is unhelpful: it inflates the "inner censor" and teaches you to think in impossibly big terms you can't "live out" yourself. (Comment this)