For the most part, I don't like to talking to or consorting with other writers. Not because I think there's nothing left for me to learn, or that I do not need "community," but that every writer thinks that their vision of the world is some rarefied and unique blessing that needs to be remarked upon as often as possible, an affliction from which I admit I am not spared. Regardless, this attitude flavors every interaction; the average writer scouts for some interpretation, insight, or expression that "lifts," that impresses the listener, that leaves some indelible memory upon the conversation so that its progenitor, when they settle down at home for the night, may consider planting some version of their words in a future story (an act that I, once again, am not exempt from). I much prefer talking to people who don't consider themselves to be much of a writer at all. Their words are much more forthright, honest. Even if they themself are not so much a forthright or honest person (in the way that we all, to some degree, try to present some favorable version of ourselves), I find their words to be less deceptive. Everyone apologizes to me, when they know that I'm a writer, that they can't express themselves eloquently, or with any pretty words. I don't think the apology is necessary. I think rather the reverse, that I should apologize, that I should stop trying to write essays into conversations, that my presence should demand some imposition on language at all. comments
I philosophize at length in my diary, and occasionally, I will eke out a nugget of wisdom that feels worth sharing. Here's one below.
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I think there are four experiences one can have that divorces oneself from the body: being sexually assaulted or raped, being trans/nonbinary, being considered ugly/disfigured/undesirable by broader society, and being disabled. So many of these experiences overlap. One comes to view one's own body as a burden, perhaps even separate. As an object that everyone else is begging you to discard of. They don't tell you it's because they want to own you. The insidious worm inside the average human's mind seeks to dominate the outcast, because the outcast is a reminder of their own fear of being outcast. That is why the proud and indignant outcast is particularly reviled -- proof that one is caged by one's own cowardice, proof that if one bothered to look at oneself straight-on without turning away, one would only find a small, shivering coward. Too many people are cowards in this world. They seek to destroy the mirrors. comments
Yesterday I attended a community picnic and brought, as I usually try to do, some of my zines, as well as zine-making materials. I do it for a selfish reason -- because bringing an activity is usually a good way to talk to new people (great tip for folks with social anxiety) -- but also because I genuinely love to introduce people to this low effort method of creating art, and because I love to make a little art project alongside other people making their own little art projects. One of the zines I brought along was one I made about making art for oneself and one's own satisfaction, which I felt was an appropriate theme for the activity, and many were encouraged by this idea. I was excited and happy to see folks actually engaging with their thoughts, feelings, and ideas to make their own little zines to take home -- and it made me think of the ripple effects of this, the perhaps long-term implications of teaching folks how to harness an outlet for expression.
Zines may seem a little frivolous to the uninitiated, but as any knowledgeable zine maker or collector knows, zines cover a broad array of themes and topics, and many are even educational. They have certainly been helpful to the trans and disabled communities, whose health is often ignored and sidelined by mainstream medical establishment, and so must trade information along informal networks. Still, I thought about how any amount of text can be tough to read these days -- even for me -- in a media environment of short-form video, which is how many zines and books with important information gets left by the wayside. Is video now the best way to communicate information? I thought about the futility of zinesters trying to make COVID public health information more accessible, only to be ignored by those they're trying to educate.
What if we could think of zines in a different light -- not as information receptacle, but as a method? I've been seeing a lot more YouTube videos and tweets about how to "fix your brain" and retrain it to hold deep focus -- so that we can watch longer movies, read more difficult books, etc. There were quite a few picnic attendees who read through my text-heavy "Start Making Art For Yourself" zine right there on the spot, and completed their own zine not long after. Clearly there is interest and drive to read, and perhaps even more so, to create something with one's own hands.
If you think of zines as small, little books, then perhaps zines can be use as a retraining tool for those who wish to read (and write!) longer books but presently feel unable to. You can read a zine, even one that is text-heavy and 30 pages long, easily within an hour. Make it a goal to read one zine per day, even per week. Something is better than nothing. And maybe you can resolve to make one per week as well. I pitched zine-making to some of the picnic attendees as the perfect project for ADHD satisfaction -- you can see an entire project from beginning to end in as little as 20 minutes if you so please, but even the more complex zines take just a few hours. As I once learned from other artists long ago, training yourself to finish projects is just as important as training yourself on technical skill, maybe even more so. The effects here will be cumulative. The more you read and the more you make, the more you will be able to regain your attentiveness for the world, to reject the fast-paced and overwhelming glut of the attention economy, and the more time and energy you will have for your own life. comments
I love a good side quest; in fact, as someone with frenetic ADHD, it can be argued that side quests are my main mode of experiencing daily life (especially now as I'm gainfully unemployed). In the past month I've notched off the following:
I am arrested again by the thought, stock-still in my midday reading, that I should be writing letters to other people, only to whom, I don't know. I have friends to write to, in theory, but is the kind of letter I want to write (daydreaming, full of yearning, hopelessly cloud-like) something that wants to be received? Out of the blue to get a letter like this in the mail — no topic, rambling, where the ends don't meet — I too would be knocked briefly off-balance, breathless. Part of this impulse is that I simply enjoy the physicality of paper and all its participations in the literary (I have this burgeoning interest in bookbinding that I'm attempting to foster), and part of is that I like to tell people what I think, despite those thoughts being sometimes considered strange to others outside myself. It's why inside me remains the mid-2000s atavistic desire to blog: a letter with no respondent, a missive to the world. This letter was meant for anyone who stumbles across it. A digital message in a bottle. comments
or, romantic narrative as some kind of restorative justice
Now I am not speaking of real life; we should all know the perils of entering a relationship (platonic, romantic, or otherwise) in order to “fix” someone, or accepting abusive or unhealthy dynamics in intimate settings. I like romance in fiction because the best romantic narratives take all that is thorny, tangled, dangerous, and vulnerable about love, any kind of love, and makes its characters endure what we would not want to ourselves, or are simply not ready for. I like that fiction is a safe space (much like roleplaying — sexual or otherwise) to simulate ideas, fantasies, or emotional journeys, bringing cathartic release. And as a die-hard for the trope known as the “childhood friends to enemies to lovers” dynamic, I have been thinking for years now about romantic narratives as a kind of model towards restorative justice, particularly how one could make amends and patch up a relationship once based in enmity to the extent that one would love fiercely, deeply, irrevocably, with perhaps the wound as a strange genesis for utmost trust, and pain as the catalyst for desire.
The easy answer is that love exists in the same plane as hate, and that anger is just another type of passion. But I am not so sure. As a notoriously forgiving person myself, I still would find it difficult to love someone who deeply angered me to the point of hatred. I maintain some of these emotional boundaries for my own safety. And there have been countless times while reading a romance where the main couple reconciled but I could never forgive the half who wronged, the slight too raw, too close to home, and I couldn’t suspend my disbelief enough. After all, we enjoy a romance that feels earned.
I am speaking now about a specific personal preference. To me, the appeal lies in more than just the shifting growth of a relationship, more than just the amends one makes in the name of love — though of course those are vital aspects as well — I like a romance that has something to say about the world around them. I suspect many do. I suspect that the popularity of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s works, for example, is precisely because her characters are indivisible from the political worlds that envelop them. The political is emotional. Political, not because her work professes to have some left-right politics legible to our contemporary world, but because her narratives are always oriented against authority, against propriety and tradition for tradition’s sake, against saving face above doing the right thing. Strip any of her works to their bare bones, and there you’ll see two characters who attempt to carve out, against the wishes of higher orders, their own sense of peace and freedom in the world. A peace that is simple and yet so vociferously denied to them. This is a metaphor for many things, but above all, it is a metaphor for queerness, woven into her works at this atomic level. In The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, the characters are even oriented against authorial power. The book (and the book within the book) traps Luo Binghe and Shen Qingqiu in its own designs, and part of the joy is in the meta-fiction, in your own partaking of these genre tropes and archetypes, and in the characters’ clever (intentional or unintentional) subversions of how those tropes play out. (In other words, “What if I loved you so much it changed the narrative,” type of shit).
But what does the political have to do with romance, you may ask. Or my claims about romantic narrative as a mechanism for restorative justice. Out of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s books, there is possibly no better example than Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, its own title a clever misdirect for how we should see its main character. For Wei Wuxian does not originate nor wield demonic cultivation; “grandmaster” of such is a moniker beset upon him by the elders of the cultivation world, who wish to spoil his reputation for daring to rebel against their unfair edicts. He represents this kind of anti-authoritarian thinking, while his eventual love interest, Lan Wangji, has a “by-the-book,” traditionalist approach to life. Because he has seen and felt the consequences of his parents flouting rules for personal values (and for love), he chooses to live his life with the strictest sense of self-control. At first, he and Wei Wuxian clash, obviously at loggerheads. Critically, though, they meet as teenagers, that volatile and impressionable time of life, and as Lan Wangji comes to know Wei Wuxian as a person, comes to understand Wei Wuxian’s thoughts, feelings, and history, it changes him. Over the course of the series, sometimes unbeknownst to Wei Wuxian himself, Lan Wangji sidesteps rules or even defies orders for Wei Wuxian, at the cost of his own body. Scars and brands serve as visible reminders of the kind of safety and comfort that he, a high-ranking noble in the cultivation world, has had to give up. This is the crux of it, I think — that the same sacrifices of self you make for love are also ones you do to make amends, and to fight for another’s agency, in and of itself a political act. Even after he reunites with Wei Wuxian and they resolve some of their past misunderstandings, Lan Wangji’s goal never is to find some role or position in polite society for Wei Wuxian to step into. Their relationship (at least to me) remains evasive, out of the grasp of authority, a bit of safety eked out from living between the rules, a kind of loophole limbo.
Wei Wuxian, for his part, isn’t faultless either. A story like this resists funneling its characters into easy moralities. Wei Wuxian harms, kills, and makes mistakes that harm and kill people. But the narrative says he is redeemable because he wants to be. In The Untamed (the live-action adaptation), he says (and I’m grossly paraphrasing) to his nephew that saying “sorry” and “thank you” is the hardest thing you’ll have to learn as an adult, but it’s worth it. That sentiment has stayed with me. A character like Wei Wuxian has descended to the depths of darkness and succumbed to all of his worst impulses, but he is still ruled by the desire to do good by all the people he loves, and to apologize to those that are owed. May we all retain such nobility of heart.
The political framework of a story creates the emotional power of romance, or you could even argue for the reverse. A romance story requires two characters at its center, and when you create one, they are where you start. Politics is about power, and romance, whether we like to admit it or not, is about power — or the relinquishing of power to another, or an exchange of power, so that one can exist in equilibrium (or what comes close to it) with another. Recently I read the Captive Prince series and deposited about two weeks’ worth of brainpower into thinking only about these books, so I can say that Captive Prince, even more directly than Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s works, is about power. The series begins with a vast imbalance of power, one character a prince, the other forced into enslavement to said prince (and is also secretly a prince; the series still centers around royalty and isn’t the most airtight interrogation of power, but I don’t think it pretends to be, either). Captive Prince is exhilarating because it starts here and asks you to imagine how true love might arise from abjection. It is about doing the worst thing imaginable to the other and still, despite that, or even because of it, finding commonality. Who but your former enemy can understand the loneliness, the anger, the hatred; there is a shared intimacy in being the only two people who know “what it’s like.” In real life, this is called a “trauma bond” and is heavily advised against, but in fiction, characters get to represent the best of our emotions. I like that Damen and Laurent don’t paper over the ways they’ve hurt each other, but it becomes part of them, their story. Things that, for better or for worse, have changed them irrevocably, and could not be this version of themselves without. They retain the best of themselves despite the abuse they’ve endured or caused each other and that is how they proceed in a trusting, romantic love, and they also try to be true, benevolent rulers. I don’t think it’s very realistic, and like I said, it doesn’t have to be. Fiction is a simulation or mirror — I can say that both characters are more than the harm they’ve caused, and then maybe I can say this about real people, too.
I think about this topic, perhaps an inordinate amount, as someone who will not forgive the people who have deeply harmed me but wishes them well. There are people I’ve reached an understanding with and remain in my life in at least a periphery sense, but there are those I do not let re-enter my life because I had done so in the past and it had cost me, again and again. People don’t change easily. I don’t either. I explained to friends recently that I can have nine out of ten relationships in my life be mutually fulfilling, but if the one goes badly and hurts me, it’s the only one I’ll remember. I try not to be like this. The trick is to remember that I’m very loved. The trick is not to listen to the lonely and vicious twelve-year-old inside me who thinks that being hated gives me latitude for my viciousness. The copious amounts of romance I read and watch, maybe, is for that kid — to remind them that after the long and painful route of being hurt, there is love at the end of it.