Disclaimer: Review based on experiences from High Violet’s studio version of Sorrow repeated 50 times with the other 55 coming from recordings of A Lot of Sorrow.
Does progress ever feel like true progress or is the definition of it that it is subtle and you suddenly get pangs of disgust when you look back on your past? Is it just more subtle when you feel like you have stopped stumbling backwards and have started falling forward? I feel like I have found something to occupy my time with and that is wonderful, it takes me away from the distracting self-loathing and gets me out of bed in the morning but it also eats at me, drinks my passions and takes time away from me to be given to something that isn’t even real – I am not creating anything new, not adding any new value. I’m not confident that that even matters and in many ways I feel less sorrowful, I feel like I have purpose, like I am going somewhere, like I have other people to live for. It comes and it goes, it frightens me, and every stumble forward is good I suppose. Things are blurrier than ever in that they are more defined. One thing that is for certain is that I am much more confident, much more purposeful and much less scared. I have realized that the majority of people don’t and never have really mattered and that is frightening in a way itself because it means that most people will never amount to anything and what if we become one of them, eternally waiting emptiness and having it – drowning in our own middling mediocrity.
But perhaps that is not my fate and that is a frightful thought in its own way. I want to feel some sort of companionship and it is lonely here at the top of my self-created mountain, in self-imposed isolation from old colleagues and quote-unquote friends. In feeling superior, I have abandoned people that were meaningless, people that were purposeless, happy to wallow in being just like everyone else, middling, but at the same time there is no glory in feeling miserable, it is not something that is to be embraced either. I am funded by the pharmaceutical industry, I am feeling good but for how long. I do not want to be artificial, I do not want to be a creation that is sustained by chemical corrections – I want to be a real boy with real aspirations, needs, dreams but they slip away, slip through my fingers, burn as they slip away and leave me with a burning, stinging sensation, endless as they are just grains of the desert, infinite in its boundlessness. I feel attached albeit tenuously now to existence as it continues and I have made myself make tentative plans for the future – finish this, finish that, do this, do that to get somewhere. I want to be financially independent so that I can earn my own respect, prove myself to myself, and finally wallow in misery on a 45% tax rate, living in a Manhattan apartment but that feels so lonely – it feels wrong too. Maybe if I earn enough I can break free of the cycle and lock myself up with my family, get off pharmaceutical tributes, get money and get funny again, create something that feels significant to me, write fulltime until all the writing flows out of me until I no longer have anything swirling around in me, no more words or sentences or clichés to swirl out with my fingers in cursive shapes in endlessness repeating ad nauseam, I am going to live but I was never going to die.
What keeps me here? What keeps me both trapped and consistently going forward? It is that thing that can never end or it would be the very end – it is hope that springs eternal and it is both a refreshing and life-giving spring and an immortal source of pain, something that can never stop or else it is all over. I want to be able to make someone else happy, to live for someone else’s happiness, to create a childhood for someone who would be able to get something out of privileges that are afforded to them instead of waste them, to wallow and to whine and complain about them. I want them to be happy and to be legends, I no longer want to be one myself, I want to be a father, a creator, something lasting and significant if only to myself. I want to love and to love myself, I want to stop destroying myself and everything around me and I feel like I am getting closer. I now know that I can care about someone and that I can fight to try to keep them and they feel more significant to me than I do to myself. I could live in salt even with a delicate, mucousy membrane or live underwater for over a month – I solidly believe that anyone, myself included, can become anyone they want to become if they so wish, it’s just a matter of mettle and determination. It is a question of whether it is all worth it and I feel like it just might be.
To become someone who sells out but buys back their soul after, with interest, be someone who does something they do not believe in for sixty hours out of the week but for the rest of the time, it all makes up for it. To write in a Long Island villa, locked up and staring out of the windows into the dreary, rainy weather but to feel almost accomplished, almost satisfied in the study with a loving, caring wife with beautiful, bewitching, brown eyes and children sometime down the road – I feel like the ends would justify the means and that could be a reason to strive and to live and I want it so desperately. I must remind myself again that it is important not to get lost in dreams…
And yet what are dreams for but to have goals or understanding of what one’s strivings are? Without them, we live in the present, never looking forward nor back to get a greater perspective of what things actually do matter beyond addressing the here and now, the significant and insignificant burning issues that seem so important right now but are ultimately insignificant. It is like stopping in the stream and looking around, feeling the cool autumn sun on your back and feeling the icy water between your toes, looking, - get dazzled for a moment by the sun ray’s glare and reflection of it instead of tromping through the river and never pausing to think. It is so easy to get lost in the immediate and I am guilty of it as well, letting the present goals overtake me and possess me because I want to get lost in them, to not have to think of the bigger pictures that may be much more difficult to combat but solving the present day robs me of my time, steals months of time from me and leaves me suddenly looking around, blinking in surprise at how quickly time has flown. It is complex and delicate and it escapes me from time-to-time but I like to think that I have gotten better. I am now realizing the ultimate insignificance of most things that can be bought. Sure it might be fun to purchase something high-quality and expensive but it is not a lasting high, it is like having a one-night stand with a hot girl, it does not mean anything and in the end gives you nothing. It comes and it goes, it flees.
This is in stark contrast to true love, or creation. It could be more immediate pleasurable or fun to just watch a film or even a TV show but it is so much more lasting to create something, to write something, even if immeasurably insignificant it still develops you as a person, has a real effect. Similarly, from time-to-time, people will grab you in stronger ways, tearing parts of you away and leaving their marks – claws into flesh, teeth into sore wounds, to tear away their own memories, to create their own keepsakes for you to claim. They will take permanent pieces of medium-sized American hearts but maybe someday you will find someone to whom it is worth giving and who will give you the same in return to exchange and replace and become better, more refined, more developed people who together inch towards fulfilment and quasi-happiness, quasi-contentment which is inescapable, which other people can feel and may be envious of but it is not created for that purpose. Unlike haute couture fashion or jewelry or other such tokens, their primary purpose is not to exist to elicit self-confidence from other’s jealousy and self-doubt but rather are their own reward – they exist despite and independently of everything else, permanent in their effective effacement. Easily, we are affected by æolian processes but we also become more beautiful in the process – the wind strips at our masks and gradually tears the paint and foundation of it apart, rips it apart and hurts as pieces of skins are torn off in the process but the end result is true beauty, not one that is drawn but one that is created. It reveals who we really are and exposes us to the elements, to be made into real people, with real personalities and flaws and gives us the power to live as we have always wanted to – like true people. We are not meant to exist permanently, unaffected by season or by time but rather to be slowly eroded, fading of color and making away for the future generations as best as we can. That, and not clinging on to fading beauty, is the token of nobility, of true blue blood that knows its worth despite nay-sayers and yes-men alike. The fact of the matter is that only longing can bring us together and only love can tear us apart.
I wish I was closer to the sea but I am trapped for now, by choice locking myself in and out. I need to feel lost and sad and miserable every now and then but that is healthy, it is necessary to cry every now and then to feel human just as much as it is to laugh and smile and to kiss and to hold and embrace. There is nothing that means everything as much as things are trending towards absolutism these days – it is a false pretense for pretending that things are more significant than they are. Everything is much more convoluted than people try to make it out to be – we are twisted and blown in the wind but we are not on our own path – unique perhaps only in our own destruction. Repeat.
Where does this leave me to stand? It can only be said by looking both back and forward, the circumstances that have brought me to be where I am right now and where I am looking to go. I know that I am looking to continue to progress, to become a better, a more well-rounded, stable and loving person – one who is successful enough to be able to be enough to be accepted by a beautiful, fascinating girl and then to become beautiful and glittering heirs to the world together, bound together not by necessity but by desire and will to give up everything else. I, myself, must go forth – get off crutches, fight for what I want – move from a chemical strength and stability that is artificial and thus rotten from the core to something more real, more true and something that will hold. Perhaps an adventure in the desert would not be unwarranted, a trial and an adventure rolled into one. My current circumstances will me forward, entrapment is necessary to desire and to appreciate freedom and so I sit, to an outside apparently comfortable and complacent but inside, every muscle tense, every muscle ready to spring forward. There is no real harm in sipping a fine, single malt whiskey and staring out into the rain as long as that is not the extent of one’s life. To truly understand one’s appreciation for another person you must love and miss – I need it and as I wait it becomes more and more all-encompassing and yet it is a good pain, a pleasantness of knowing that this is right – I never thought about love when I thought about home.
