So that writing project that I was working on? Yep, I got me a Substack.
The nature of that project is in the name. I was explaining to a friend of mine that this was going to be the "visible arm" of my writing endeavors, and being of a poetic mind, he promptly replied, "How about Visual Arm? That could be a good name." Yeah, that was the one. I have an affinity for those abstract yet suggestive names that are head-scratchers.
So, maybe a couple more words on that.
I've been writing on this here blog - The Faster the Slower - for twenty years now, which is kind of wild to me. Before starting this blog, I was writing on that old blog engine Xanga as a teenager, when that general blogging business as a cultural phenomenon was young. At that time I was pretty inexperienced - obviously enough, being a teenager - and just wrote whatever, reaching out to whomever on there as I went. That blog started to gain traction - in a very small-scale niche Internet community way - as I was pretty friendly and making online buddies and such.
It was a good outlet for a while, but my inexperience started to catch up with me. The density of my interactions and the reciprocal writing and commenting began to overwhelm me, and I started finding that it was getting harder and harder to write naturally and expressively while experimenting with new forms, as I was writing for others and thinking too much about what those others were thinking about my own writing. And this is an insecurity that was related to a lack of life experience too. So eventually I said my goodbyes and closed the thing down, and then quietly opened this Blogger account, not telling anyone save for a couple of close friends, and left it at that.
Writing here, I began to realize that I liked the quiet and the obscurity, and could just write for the love of the writing, and develop my own idiosyncratic craft in isolation, which suited me just fine. I knew I only had a handful of readers, and I wasn't too worried about getting my writing out there. Of course everyone does want to be read and understood to a certain extent. Eventually I figured I would get the writing out to a wider audience when it was more developed and refined, but I wasn't in any hurry.
Well, time passed, and I came to further appreciate the obscurity. My life arc ceased to be about becoming a writer per se, and more just about surviving that space between the cracks that I had fallen into, in search of autonomy and grounded confidence and satisfaction in daily living. The writing was a form of personal meditation, of putting together everything that I had learned in the intellectual sphere with everything I was learning in the practical/material sphere, and that was enough.
Further, the cultural weather was really starting to turn, more so than before, with a mounting and widespread meanness and cynicism that was making that process of going out into the public ever more unappealing. Earnestness was cringe, and despite my own growing cynicism, I was also quite earnest, and consider myself that way still. Granted, that was only part of the calculus, and there are plenty of wonderful writers out there doing good work and providing online refuge for those seeking it out, offering up a model of how it could still work.
But alas, I figured I could be OK with toiling in obscurity in perpetuity, as my living conditions became satisfying and rewarding enough in their own right. And I have grown to savor those dark, quiet, candlelit caves and alcoves where I can hide and be in peace, with just enough light to see what I was doing immediately in front of me, babbling to myself in the process.
Nevertheless, there was always that smoldering ember of wanting to be read, which still glowed under the ashes. And also a little problem was starting to develop: that minor matter of increasing precarity that we are all collectively experiencing more or less. I've been living on the financial knife edge for quite some time, and was able to get a little grace from some remaining institutional resources, and some leg-ups from loved ones from time to time. But that edge gets a little sharper the more things are cut to the bone in the country as a whole. Of course, living the way that I do is also a matter of increasing personal resilience and lowering financial overhead, which does help the precarity factor. But there is also strength in diversifying one's strategies too, to be sure.
See, there are a number of countervailing forces present in the relative states of obscurity and visibility, with each separate sphere offering its own advantages and disadvantages. Of course, these forces hinge on the nature of the individual too, as there are plenty of folks that thrive in different conditions for different reasons. For me, obscurity and silence offers an intense spiritual place to plow all of my personal resources and concentration into a given craft or practice, where I can develop without distraction or interference. Personally I thrive in such conditions.
Being less visible and having less public awareness can also be good if you have a certain notoriety and personal noxiousness, so you're less apt to arouse suspicion and/or be attacked in some way. I might not be noxious per se, but I can be stubborn in my...idiosyncrasy. But it also means less social support and social opportunity, and it's not as immediately apparent to others when the invisible are being stepped on and/or are going under.
On the flip side of this, being more visible means making a lot more connections and having all sorts of opportunities open up that weren't there before. It means putting out the equivalent of a little solar or water collector, attempting to capture a little stream of social resources, so to speak. For me it also means possible overstimulation and distraction and overbooking. And in general, it means opening up oneself to more passing social forces, good and bad. There are always trade-offs. For each additional energy-collecting leaf the tree puts out, that leaf can also be a vector for water loss in the respiration process.
The interesting thing about this particular juncture is that framing things in this contrasting light provides a way to separate the approaches and possibly develop them independently, experimenting with their various effects.
What I mean is that splitting off this writing project offers an opportunity to explore those contrasting approaches and develop via different modalities, among many other things. I'm planning on keeping this blog as it is, and then continuing to do in obscurity the more weird and esoteric stuff here, which will of course inform and buttress the more visible and accessible (and somewhat theatric in a way, in the sense of developing a persona) stuff that I'm doing over there.
And you, dear reader who found this space, can watch both spaces develop and inform each other in their own ways, if that sort of thing is interesting to you anyway. The normal thing to do would be to keep private notes on the one hand, and then a public body of work on the other - and I do have my share of private notes - but I find that having a semi-public experimental sphere and then a separate public experimental sphere could be quite interesting.
Now, it could be that my Substack never gets off the ground. Perhaps it fails to gain traction and fizzles out as a place of interest, and then it is back to the drawing board. Or eh, something happens. I attempted an early foray into the Instagram world to showcase my photography a couple of years ago, and within a day or two of setting up my account, the account was promptly hijacked, flooding my unsuspecting friends with pornographic images, and so I gave up that venture on the spot.
That's of course a comical example - I did not have a very strong commitment to the Instagram project - and I don't plan giving up that easily this time, I promise. And it could be that the Substack does gain traction, and through that traction, this place is found, and the nature of both projects change too. Anything can happen. But for now, it'll be an interesting exercise to try to straddle the worlds and develop in different ways in the different spheres, and see how it all pans out.
The other thing about splitting off this other writing project is to combine its public purpose with a very different set of intentions from the get-go. With Visual Arm - and as with everything else I do it'll change and evolve over time - I intend to more intentionally ground the material in a specific place (or places) and within a certain community striving towards certain ends, as part of a broader project to develop a positive vision of action which is connected to - and results from - the ongoing critique which will continue to take place here. What does one do with one's life, considering that one takes to be true the state of affairs continuously rendered here? Well, I've flipped the switch, and I'm going to get to it.
I'm also working on a shit-ton of posts on here too; more to come.
