Days 17 & 18: The only life you have to live is your own
My mind couldn’t get out of obsessive circles these two days. I’ve never thought of myself as an obsessive-minded person – mostly because I associate obsession with artists talking about how obsessed they are with an idea, and I wish to have that problem. But a wise friend pointed out to me, when I was explaining a head-cycle I’m used to, that what I was describing was a classic example of obsessive thinking.
Merriam-Webster’s definition of obsession : a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling
*Neon blinking sign to my head*
When this obsessive thinking is occurring, it feels impossible to pinprick a light-hole through to awareness. Thankfully, I was able to achieve a pinhole at one point, and I realized that I was constantly detaching from my life in order to maintain the possibility of living someone else’s life, or future me’s life. It is this inane distrust in being accepting of the present me because I’m convinced there’s a future, better me and I need to take action now to actualize her. This means, I disassociate and I do not take in the details or the significance of every piece of life that is always surrounding me, wonderfully and overwhelmingly surrounding me.
This pinhole gave me enough intuition to follow an instinct and open a book I’d picked up at a thrift store months ago called The Awakened Eye by Frederick Franck. This is a follow-up book to his The Zen of Seeing, Seeing/Drawing as Meditation which is mentioned as a resource book in The Artist’s Way (serendipity at work). The book is meant to imitate one of Franck’s in-person drawing and meditation workshops. He explains how he began understanding seeing/drawing (his own phrasing) as a Zen practice.
This book really got to me. Franck describes an early childhood experience he had with his grandfather’s stereopticon, a hand-held pair of lenses with two images at the end of it that, when you look through the lenses, become transposed on top of each other creating a 3D image. Franck would look through the stereopticon at the 3D images for hours. He explains how he eventually found that he could choose to have stereopticon vision without the device when he looked at objects or people. “People, when looked at through my mental stereoscope, underwent an extraordinary metamorphosis: each one became the impressively unique, mysterious being he never expected himself to be.” This is the approach Franck uses in his day-long drawing workshops – to treat whatever you are drawing as the most important, all-encompassing thing in the world and draw it exactly as it appears to you. Trust your eyes. He describes imagining the pencil as a seismographic needle, feeling the contours of the leaf or flower you are imitating. When I was drawing, I kept thinking how no one likes when someone else transposes them incorrectly or hurriedly makes a copy of them. And no one likes art of that nature – dishonesty doesn’t work.
This way of thinking and seeing Franck gave to me felt like the first warm day of spring. I had been so exhausted by my obsessive thinking detaching from everything so that future me could have a chance. Even though my drawings did not look as I wanted them to (which wasn’t the point), I have been amazed by the plant-life patterns I have been staring at. Every plant in my vicinity has become important to me when thinking in this way.
There were multiple moments in this “write a song every day” dedication that I wanted to just vomit and say, “You’re hopeless.” But, the idea of the stereopticon really kept me with myself.
But I continued falling back into the emptying, detaching cycle. The degree of absurdity in my thought-line disturbs me. How is it possible to live with such an emptying perspective? It seems like it shouldn’t be allowed humans to be able to be so distant from themeslves. But, if we didn’t have that degree of self-will, the victory would not be so great.
I also read some of Jung’s Red Book and a few lines that stuck with me are as follows:
“Turn your anger against yourself, since only you stop yourself from looking and from living.”
“‘It seems as if I were more real here. And yet I do not like being here.’”
