Dear Me,
I just thought that I’d pop by and check in again* and see how you were doing. I kind of get the impression that you've been feeling increasingly melancholic about this whole business of sharing your thoughts with the big wide world lately, as if somehow the actual doing of it diminishes the joy of it for you, which is, as you know only too well, a fairly ridiculous way of looking at things. None of us should really care what anyone else thinks when it comes to our own little creative outpourings. We should do them because we want to, or need to, and, so long as nobody else gets hurt, chucking out a few personal opinions and thoughts every now and again isn’t ever likely to be something to get yourself worked up about. After all, you’re supposed to be doing this for you, what does it matter what the rest of the world thinks...? Or doesn’t...? Whatever the case may be…
But then, you knew that already, didn’t you...? And yet it still gets you down because day after day, you sit there typing away, dredging your mind for a new thought or angle, wondering why you are doing so and knowing that you really should just stop doing it, and then finding that, despite the obvious drawbacks, you really can’t bring yourself to do that. This then leads to much introspection and mental self-examination and then you feel guilty about being so self-obsessed when there’s a bloody great big universe of wonders out there, in addition to a real life all of your very own, that you could be focusing your attentions upon.
Certainly I recognize that there was a trend just after the turn of the year for people to seem to take more interest in your words on the days when you chose not to submit any than on the days when you did, which is always something of a paradox and does very little for the self-esteem, but it’s hardly something to beat yourself up over. It’s just a coincidence, that’s all, not a reason to jack it all in and fritter away those sleepless hours on night-time TV or something even less productive.
No, I know you don’t really think of it as being “productive” per se, but it is, at least, something to stimulate the little grey cells and stop you from vegetating and wasting away as the creeping unknown that is the inevitable outcome of all those diminishing braincells starting upon their inevitable process of succumbing to the effects of entropy, whilst the aging process wreaks havoc as it rips brutally through your once relatively passable body.
I know that you’ve tried to put yourself in the place of one or two of the minds that you once thought might have taken a slight interest in what you had to say or do and yet have palpably not done so. Why is this, do you think…? Is it really because, as you seem to believe, that they have no time for what you say...? Or perhaps because you believe that what you have to say is of no real interest to them, you choose to take that as meaning that they have no interest in you as a person either…?
You can already hear their voices in your head sarcastically saying the same old judgmental things: “Same old you, always looking on the bright side!” and even you begin to wonder quite what there might be of any real interest to anyone else in these pages that you nevertheless still seem to keep churning out. I can read your thoughts, knowing that it’s hardly a feature film, or a soap opera, or a decent comedy. Not really the stuff that dreams are made of. The jokes that there sometimes are aren’t really all that funny, and certainly don’t appear often enough, and the observations you’re making are hardly the most original or all that entertaining. But at least, you suppose, you are making them and whilst you feel that they might lack any wit or charm or passion or originality, they serve that obscure and tantalizingly enigmatic function that sometimes seems to be just beyond the limits of your outstretched fingertips, somewhere beyond being on the tip of your mind that still seems, however, to give you the reason to carry on, whatever it might be.
Perhaps, after all is said and done, all of this wittering on for no real purpose really is purposeless, perhaps it truly does have no meaning other than what it is: An idle and mostly harmless pastime to while away those long, sleepless hours when the brain won’t rest and the thoughts keep on rolling in to keep you just on the wrong side of consciousness.
So, what did you expect? Did you hope to turn out great art? Did you really think that you’d change the world? After nearly half a century on this planet you’d think you would have learned by now that it’s not people like us who shape and change the world. That is work for heroes, people who believe in things and have a plan, people who have come to use their time wisely, not the likes of us, cautious cowards who are scared to cause offence and whose self-confidence was shattered before they even had chance to move on from short trousers.
I also know that matters closer to home have recently disappointed you. A sense, possibly unfounded, possibly not, that the vultures are once again circling, another generation perhaps attempting to play the same tired and familiar old games, trying to take advantage of the more vulnerable members of the tribe, playing upon their much concealed better nature to gain some kind of toehold into grabbing a slice of what they think of as their pie, smiling a villain’s smile despite the truth of what they say when not in earshot, being the polar opposite to what they say when their hand is outstretched. Perhaps you do them a disservice, perhaps you’ve read them incorrectly and you despise yourself for possibly leaping to all the wrong conclusions, but then you despise yourself further because there’s also the possibility that you might be right.
And I know you are becoming increasingly troubled about your professional status, that skills that you used to be so confident of having seem to be somehow ebbing away from you, that somehow, more and more often, things just seem to go wrong far too many times and, even though you know that quite often this is not your fault, and there really was nothing else you could have done, still you feel that frightening old feeling that somehow you’ll be blamed and held to account and found wanting.
It’s all too easy to become dispirited by your own shortcomings whilst forgetting those that everyone else also has. It’s far too easy to persuade yourself that everything you know or do is wrong and that everything everyone else is doing is fabulous and marvelous and done with the kind of creative zeal that you can barely hope to achieve yourself, forgetting that everyone else is wracked with their own guilts and fears and doubts and live inside very similar vulnerable human bodies.
But the possibility and actuality of illness is, you believe, corroding your soul, worrying you into a state of abject fear. Those aches and pains that seem to be increasing in number and hanging around for far longer than you’d like, and that daily dosing of a cocktail of pills, designed to keep you alive still seems to instead remind you more of your own mortality. That sense you get of those eyes of yours, upon which so much that you do, both professional and for what passes for “fun” in your world, being not quite so sharp as they once were, not quite so easy to focus, not quite so easy to keep open is a constant source of fear, even though you know that it is just the effects of time’s crucible, the one in which we all burn, catching up with you.
Even the telly you used to seem to enjoy doesn’t seem to divert you in quite the same way any more. Nowadays just slumping down in front of it, all passive and expectant, seems to be something of a waste of time you no longer feel you have to spare. Something to suck away the precious hours that you still know that otherwise you would squander anyway on other, even more frivolous pursuits, that serve just as little purpose as time continues to grind away at you.
So now I’m struggling. The last time I tried to talk to you like this, I managed to end on a positive note by trying to give you a few crumbs of comfort to help to lift you out of the general air of gloom and despair that you seemed to be surrounding yourself with, but all this talk of decay and time running out is making the zing of positivity so much harder to dig out from amongst the crevices. However, I am nothing if not persistent and I will try to remind you, even if it doesn’t really feel all that relevant or appropriate, and perhaps seems to make precious little difference to how you feel right now, that there are plenty of people in a damned sight worse position than you currently are and facing far more problems than you currently have to, even if, as you know only too well, the bigger picture really never comes into it when it’s your own pain that you’re trying to deal with.
So, whilst I know it’s not much, I hope it’s something to hang on to, at the very least.
Sincerely,
M.
If I were to write to myself I could never be as honest as you Martin - and I need to be.
ReplyDeleteI really don't know... When I read your stuff (the link is listed below, boys and girls) you always strike me as being the most honest person I know. Of course, you could be lying... and I am very gullible... M.
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