I wish I could destroy every thing I've ever made
I've got some neat little things I draw. I've been doing them for years, they're kinda weird doodles not really anything special. Abstract drawings, usually shapeless and incoherent. I'd work for hours on just one, scribbled onto a sticky note or a page from a work notebook. The result didn't matter. The process was the point. It was painful somehow, and that made it worthwhile.
I would share the completed pictures online sometimes, and I'd occasionally get some likes and praise. I hated that, though. Why did I do it? Captured by the machines, I guess. Feedback loops I didn't even enjoy, every interaction terrifying. But it was better than the bland unease and anxiety of everyday life. I did it to myself so that I could be afraid, which is often my favorite thing to be.
Yesterday I opened an old box, looking for some stuff I lost, and found a whole bunch of those drawings. I'd stuffed them away as an attempt to get rid of them, even though I couldn't bring myself to actually throw them in the trash. It made me so upset to find them. I wish they weren't there to be found. There's something self-destructive in the attempt to preserve or record anything, something I can't seem to rid myself of. Something driven by fear. I'm afraid of being known, of knowing myself. And I'm afraid of not knowing, of being unable to understand. I often don't understand my own actions.
I've decided that my art, just like most of my writing, is for me and not for anybody else. Sharing it sometimes feels like the thing you're supposed to do, I guess. The thing that gets me what I'm always pretending to want, the thing I'm afraid of. Can you imagine keeping work to yourself? How selfish. If you make something it has to be for other people. But I'm not going to do it anymore, I'm going to be more true to myself, keep my creative stuff private. Can I do that for myself?
Speaking of things I do for myself. I play the piano, wrote songs when I was a teenager, but at some point started improvising. Each time I sit down to play, I try to play something unique. I go through phases of repeating similar melodies or chord progressions, eventually moving on. But any time I've recorded my improvisation, something was lost forever. Allowing it to exist in the here and now, and then disappear, is the only way to preserve its meaningfulness.
That inevitably reads like a paradox. It's hard to explain what I'm trying to explain here. Language (and especially written language) already does the thing I'm objecting to. How do you explain the failure of words using words?
Sensitivity is sensibility. Growing a thicker skin means growing a thicker head (both questionable metaphors). Being controlled corresponds with a sense of power, and being free comes with a sense of being out of control. Likewise, being in control produces a feeling of impotence, and being out of control a feeling of powerlessness. And so, to be preserved, meaning must be allowed to disappear; and if recorded, meaning is destroyed forever.
What I want to say is that the effort to preserve or record something destroys the very meaning that makes it worth preserving. The drawings I found brought up all the feelings that I was working through and getting out when I originally made them. If I had simply thrown them away, or perhaps even burned them, I could have banished the awful emotional turmoil I'm feeling now.
But truth be told, I missed them. I missed some of the thoughts I wrote down on those pages next to the art, thoughts I'll never share with anyone. And I missed this pain. I missed being able to cry like this. Is it really as harmful as it feels to look back at that stuff?
Among the old art I found was a scribble of a figure in a straitjacket with sound pouring into its ears, labelled "All speech commands, to listen is to obey." I look at it and feel the sense of being confined and consumed by language. It's a familiar feeling. It's killing me, it's always been killing me. Expanding a bit on what I already said, to make a record or fixed representation of something, to encode it into language or image, it to murder it (symbolically if not literally). Language terrorizes, more so when it's written and fixed in meaning. Therefore all writing, including this post, is a form of terrorism.
Interestingly, among the thoughts I totally won't share from those notes are thoughts about writing and poetry as terrorism. Maybe I got those ideas from the Situationists, I'm sure there was something along those lines in The Revolution of Everyday Life. Either way, it drew my attention because I'm currently reading T.A.Z., by Hakim Bey, recommended by my partner. The author's problematic tendencies aside, one of the key concepts in that collection is poetic terrorism. It's ultimately used very differently from what I'm talking about here, but there's some resonance.
Poetic terrorism is meant as something that causes action rather than simply constituting a spectacle. Art as agitprop, the artist as terrorist by mean of revolutionary inspiration, often in the form of disruption and sabotage. What I'm experiencing and describing, however, is that written language and static art terrorize the artist/writer by means of preservation. What could be released is instead ensnared and weaponized against its creator. Look at what I made and how it hurts me. It lashes out against me. And not only can't I bring myself to destroy it, I even cause myself this harm on purpose.
I write to torment and abuse myself, to continue the various forms of spiritual destruction I've been subjected to, now transformed into the aforementioned self-destruction, the paradoxical unwillingness to stop or to eliminate these horrors now that I dug them out of me and locked them away in a box. The urge to preserve and perpetuate them, to share them with the world, refuses to go away. I speak in a voice not my own; there's no way I could ever mean anything that could be said in words because words can only destroy meaning. Words are the corpses of those that use them. These are my corpses. Do you understand?
Art doesn't fix anything. Words are never healing. Writing and drawing only tear open more wounds, keep the blood flowing. The only life I have is in music, so long as I refuse to preserve it. The only thing I'm honest with myself about is what I say with music, the unsayable which must dissipate in order to perform its function. I cry when I read. I'm unreal when I'm spoken. But when I play a one-time song, I can know myself unknown. But I can't even do that for myself without missing and longing for all of this!