I've spent the evening lying face-down on the bed in a dark room just sort of in general pain about the state of various things, casting occasional ghoulish sideways glances out the window when someone passed by outside. Tinkering a bit on the guitar but the buzz from the pick-ups was getting annoying and I wasn't inspired anyways.
I've finally picked myself up and turned on the light, mainly because some ideas started to form and nag a bit but they've remained disparate and disorganized, so perhaps a little organizing is in order so that I can save myself for another couple of hours (it always helps to work on something worthwhile). I also have some actual paying work to get done having to do with corporate identity and logo design and pardon me, but fuck that right now.
I tried the whole coffee and beer thing again and it worked for a bit, but I have since logged away a mental note somewhere to not try that anymore, as it really doesn't work too well with me. I should get back to abstaining from intoxicants and meditating, but then even then I run into trouble. And I love intoxication, dear me I do. Intoxicants and stimulants seem to me to be these means of "affective compression". One can compress one's pleasure or social grace or calm or speed of thought into a distinct period of time, which necessarily displaces a proportionate amount of compressed displeasure, social discord, disquieted mood or sluggishness of thought to a later period of time, hopefully when one is sleeping or isolated in some way if one times it right. But such manipulations can grow unstable if one sustains them for long enough, naturally.
Meditation on the other hand offers a more evened-out period of serenity,but then one becomes somewhat plant-like. Also perturbations, if intense and sustained enough, can throw one off balance anyways. Also there are always the environmental inputs throwing you back into the bad homeostasis if you aren't careful. Intoxicants and stimulants are more immediate and allow you to strategize and time things, and then meditation and exercise and good nutrition provide a more sustained soundness of mind.
Like with improvised dancing and music, one sometimes loses balance within a given pattern, and to save oneself from falling, one adopts a wholly different pattern that is itself patterned off the note or step or compensatory behavior belted out hastily at that point of crisis. And so survival depends on maintaining a consistent pattern until that pattern itself becomes unstable.
I'm not here to master intoxication, meditation, rational thought, or whatever other medium, but to employ each when each is appropriate in order to master the assembly of ideas in general and the accompanying right-living that goes with right-thought. And the more I learn the more I realize how much learning I have yet to do, and how I'll never really know that much really.
Getting to the point, I've been reading all day about creative bipolarity and its various manifestations in certain famous individuals across time, such as in Van Gogh, Hemmingway, Woolf, Byron, etc. mainly as an attempt to do several things, among them to feel a little less alone, to stop hurting and also to figure out exactly what is wrong and why it is happening.
It seems this tendency is transmitted in part along hereditary lines, travelling in the genes and whatnot. As a child I heard stories about an uncle that sleepwalked off of a cliff, which I thought was very odd, until I found out later that he was actually bipolar and had actually jumped off the cliff in a fit of depression, so maybe that's where it is coming from. It is always important to be aware of the limitations of labels such as these, and it is really hard to tell just what is going on in this universe of ours. Nevertheless always interesting thinking about.
Anyways, the artistic temperament hurts. It really does hurt. It is hard to explain. But then Woolf walked into a lake with stones in her coat, Van Gogh died with a mysterious gunshot wound, Wallace hanged himself, Plath put her head in an oven, Cobain and Hemingway offed themselves with shotguns as far as I know, and then I think Thompson offed himself with a pistol, not long after writing about Hemingway offing himself with the shotgun, and then so on. Then you have who knows how many of the same occurrences with people that we will never know. It seems like a lot of these characters burn bright and then burn out. It gets tiring I guess.
No reason to fixate on the macabre though. With life there's death and such and such and well none of it is a surprise really. But then why, why does this happen? What are these people? These bursts of energy, these nodes at which point there is a tearing away from the conventional cognitive maps and through great pain (and of course great pleasure, that is often forgotten) such minds dip back into the bare realities so to speak to configure new cognitive maps for a new time? It is as if they are points at which the old fabrics tear, then, or to try and conceptualize the strangeness of this universe, they are points at which the wound in the old fabric is so deep, it reaches into another universe altogether, which allows for a traffic between both worlds.
But then I better take a rest for now before this writing gets really bad. I have much more to express but it will have to wait till tomorrow. Feeling a bit blue, with a hurt heart and a hurt stomach and then I'm just kind of tired too.
