Murky Scrapings: A Dedication
Writing by Jo
Wow. I thought our previous edition, “chaos,” was going to be the most fitting edition for a rambling & disorderly dedication, but as it turns out, I am feeling just as chaotic (if not moreso) this time around. I have been thinking about our current theme, “receiving,” and frankly, not much has really been percolating.
I guess you could say that Not Much has been percolating with me in general. I’ve been stuck in one of the most ~slumpish eras~ I’ve had in a while--creatively slumpish, physically slumpish, mentally slumpish. My new apartment is dark and dingy, cluttered, un-packed, and cat-haired. I’m living in relative squalor of mind and space. I don’t do my dishes or laundry until it is a certified State of Emergency; my piles of discarded clothes are growing to record size, every square inch of my coffee table is occupied with some bit or bauble; unfinished joints and used tissues abound. It’s not romantic. It’s a highly irritating state of affairs.
I can’t point to one particular contributing factor to this state of general dis-ease; moreso it is a collection of small things that have weighed me down so much it feels impossible to come up to the surface.
Plumbing the depths of my mind for “creative inspiration” for this edition has felt more akin to skimming a murky pond for bits of algae than anything else.
Recently I was listening to a podcast interview with Dennis McCarthy (brother to Cormac) and he mentioned this concept of how when we think we gain a new perspective, we actually are still simultaneously retaining our old one. He compared it to glasses--we think of having a new idea as taking off our old glasses and putting on a new pair, when it reality, we’ve never actually taken off the old glasses to begin with. We just keep stacking more and more pairs on top. Eventually, our vision is filtered through all of the different perspectives we’ve had over time. It reminds me of a Facebook post I saw once from an aging woman, who said something along the lines of, “Today I turned 75. But I’m not just 75. I am 75 and 15 and 27 and 55 and 5 -- I contain every age that I have ever been within me.”
I resonate with that line of thinking so much. The older I get (as I write this still in my twenties, ha ha), the more I feel that I am a conglomerate of all that has happened to me. “How I’m doing” in any given period of time, be it a year or a week or a day…is the result of so many little things, all coexisting at once. I don’t really shed identities, relationships, or experiences so much as I just keep layering them on - sometimes to the great puzzlement and frustration of my rational mind. For example, I could say, I used to be a Christian, and now I’m agnostic. That’s relatively true, and one way of expressing things. But I could also say that I am a christianity-steeped, agnostic-leaning, sometimes mystic buddhist sympathizer. All of the phases of my spiritual development have led to how I exist now; none of them can be discounted or stripped away. All of it, I have received. All of it, I have absorbed. Some of it, I attempt to discard -- or I find that it falls off of its own accord when the time is right.
Anyways, back to the piles of shit in my apartment. I am writing about it, not because it feels particularly inspired, but because it is what is true for me at this actual moment. Some jungian sympathizers would like to say that the state of my home is reflective of the general state of my psyche (and I can’t be bothered to disagree with them). It’s been a sad girl summer. I’m grieving the loss of too many things to get into here. And I move through the world largely alone.
So, if you are reading this (if you made it this far…), I dedicate this to you.
-To the ones who feel the scrapings of what I’m saying;
-To the ones who think it’s softie blather;
-To the ones who skimmed to the end because our collective attention spans are ever-dwindling (and that keeps me up at night)
-And I guess, also, to myself.
Keep writing (or creating in whatever way you do). The pond may be murky, but there is still life there -- far under the surface.
