I didn’t really get the fact that recognition is a feeling and that feeling can be utterly mistaken, until I witnessed a guy having auras all day, ahead of his first grand mal seizure. He kept “remembering a dream” in drowsy moments, followed by a rising sense of nausea. It felt like he was remembering a dream, but he clearly was not. One of them referred to a piece of media we had consumed together after the last time he had been asleep.
So déjà vu. Being reflexively materialist, believing in nothing supernatural, I presumed there was an explanation for it that nobody bothered to mention, and this was it. You can feel like you’re remembering or recognizing something that you have no prior experience with, very easily. This can be associated with epilepsy, so get yer brain scanned if you have that feeling a lot.
That brings me to the point of the post. There are other feelings that can be misled, can be a trick of the light. The sense of the profound, of deep emotional meaning, that one can feel in a dream or in a piece of surreal art – that feeling can be total bullshit. Yet it moves. In fact, I’m kind of a junkie for it. I love surreal art. Touch the dreamsauce, feel some type of way. It feels deep, but it almost certainly is not.
Does recognition of this diminish its power? Perhaps. Then I have to move onto the hard stuff. David Lynch not enough, gotta pound Andalusian Dog into my weary veins. That’s just consumption of the stuff; what about production? I’d like to make art that feels important the way returning Excalibur to Betty Boop can feel important when you’re asleep.
How can I do that if I don’t genuinely believe it is important? It’s like writing romance when you feel unromantic, writing comedy when you have cancer. All I have for this right now is a question. No answer. If you have any ideas, hit me up.
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A lot to unpack there, and I’m no expert but I have my opinions. (Yes, Flex, everyone knows you have your opinions.)
Let’s start with the easy part;
Why are you attempting to do this? There can be many reasons. The most banal reason is that writing romance, or comedy, is how you get paid. You may not feel like doing it, but you know your life will get worse if you don’t. Worse as in, no money for medical bills, or food, or shelter, etc. Writing, like pretty much everything we humans do, is a skill. We trade the use of our skills for other things, money mainly but also recognition.
But there are other reasons why we might attempt something which we are not in the mood for. We might be looking at trying to change our mood. Forcing yourself to do something emulating what we yearn for is not a bad method of effecting a change. Forcing yourself to write romance, might, help develop your own feelings of romance. And writing comedy while knowing you are at risk of a wasting disease and an untimely death might just lift your sprits. Some great comedic works have been written by people who suffered from depression, John Kennedy O’Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces being one example of many.
And of course, there are people who are driven to act in certain ways. Driven to write, or climb mountains. Such actions may not be entirely practical, or even understandable to a lot of people, but there are people who have an undeniable urge to perform some action.
Finally, and maybe most importantly, there are people who have something to say. People who feel some of the lessons they have learned are important enough, or useful enough, to share with other people. While these may not be in the nature of comedy or romance, there is no reason they couldn’t be.
But that’s the easy part of your request for thoughts on your post. The other idea, of how can human beings attach such significance to dreams, to the surreal, to feelings, things which belong to the world of thought and imagination? Such things may be artifacts of our brains, they may only interact with the material world through our actions, but that does not make them less real. They may not be material, in the sense that you weigh them on a scale or measure their energy. They may be confined to humanity, I can’t imagine a horse finding anything profound about a David Lynch film (although a dog might). But these things are real, they modify our behavior.
There is no particle of justice, no atom of respect, nor quantum packet of beauty in the universe. But we humans not only believe in all of these; we believe we can measure them all, and we have proposed methods for doing so.
The recognition that all this is in our minds does not diminish their power, no more than knowing how DNA directs the growth of a rose affects its beauty. The recognition that this is all in our minds should both increase our wonder that it occurs and our critical thinking about what other people are telling us. Surrealism is largely innocuous, it plays with our conceptions of reality. Other constructs on the mental landscape are less innocent. Learning to laugh at surrealism, and thinking about how it challenges our thoughts, makes it easier to laugh at religion which often demands restrictions, a confinement, of ideas. The recognition that other people have different feelings, even feelings we might believe are the result of biochemical malfunctions in the brain, does not mean these are not real. They are, in fact, real enough that we should recognize that such a person may be in difficulty and need help.
While infinitely malleable, and without tangible existence, the mental landscape is very real . The boundaries of that landscape are what make us human, I can’t say that a dog would have the same opinion of beauty as any human (although they also may, I just don’t know). But our opinions/feelings of beauty does impact the way we see and interact with the world.
Our feelings are real. What is real is important. Important to you, even if to no one else. That’s enough.
maybe trew, but… what is that feeling, the surreal profundity? if i want to put myself in mind of love, to write a romance, i have a lot of things to think about, broad and narrow. watch a romance, read a romance, read poetry, think about my husband, listen to love songs. for surrealism… the experiences are too narrow and ineffable. very hard to eff.
in response to yer comment i refine my thoughts a bit. what is the thing i’m terming surreal profundity, and how can i call it to mind when i need it, without just watching the same three david lynch scenes on yewchoob until they lose all meaning to me? i’ve nouned an adjective, and maybe it shouldn’t be nouned so easily.
it occurs to me the times i’ve felt it the most strongly was in conjunction with another emotion, like the tragic romance in mulholland drive culminating in a big surreal play within a play. so maybe surreal profundity is to romance as blue is to sky, just an adjective that modifies something else.
one of these days i’ll crack the magic formula and make a bank full of… indie cred, i suppose.
as to the why, it’s so i can be a pusher for my drug of choice.
Heh. I wrote a longish reply, but when I got to three pages I decided that I should probably summarize. It’s not the writing that’s the problem, it’s the editing.
The summary is that I believe the state you have characterized as surreal profundity can be reached independently of repeatedly watching David Lynch films. I suspect that horror fans may get a similar feeling from their preferred genre. I think you can get that same feeling by close examination of a grotesque. I believe that, with practice, you could invoke that mental state almost at will.
But it would be hard to market because everyone’s triggers will be different. We know a subset of humanity get the feeling from Lynch films, but another subset of humanity just considered them weird. Yet, I think, with a little practice, you could invoke the same feeling through a consideration of the absurdity of bowling.
Such feelings are likely the origin of many religions.
i dunno i dunno… i think the rarity of the experience might have something to do with its potency? but maybe not. i do know my day job is too damn thinky to really escape into a different headspace. maybe when i retire at 75 i’ll originate a religion.
I get it. My experience has been with two of what I would call “mystical” mental states and then there is a third, unthinking, mental state which I fear most people reside in most of the time.
The first mental state I can invoke, not at will but with some preparation, is what I would call ‘sardonic detachment’. It feels like a deep understanding of the futility of everything, but it goes beyond nihilism. It finds humor, black humor, in the antics of humanity. It compares the antics of today’s scrabbling insects, like Trump and Putin, to those of the past, like Napoleon, Nero, or Cheops, and recognizes that for all their impact on the world of the moment in 100 years they will be largely forgotten. It is the laughter of the gods. There is a feeling of power which comes with being in this mental state, but also a recognition that even that power is transitory, composed of dust.
The second mental state I can invoke is much harder to reach, and can be easily broken. It is what I would call, “interconnectedness”. It’s an incredibly peaceful state of mind, where I believe I can feel the grass growing, the sap flowing, the small animals in their burrows/nests. It is a subsumption of self into nature. You feel that you can caress the world with the wind, and feel the bending of the grass and the bark of the trees. It includes an impression that you could control the breeze, but also that you have no desire to do so. Obviously, this mystical mental state does not enable you to control wind or commune with animals, but it creates the impression that you can.
Finally, there is a mental state which many people spend much of their lives in. The mental state I could call “inertia”. In our youth, particularly in our teenage years, we are learning how we fit into the world. We might worry about it, we might train for it, we look for and get advice from hundreds of sources, and we spend a great deal of time learning and thinking. Many people, by the time they are thirty, have settled all these questions for themselves. And they stop thinking. I fight with this daily as engineers are replaced with checklists. People are taught, trained, that by following the checklist everything will work out fine. So there is no thinking needed to do their jobs. Many people get so used to their checklists that they use them in other areas of their lives. For example, every year they take a week’s vacation, and they always go on a cruise, sometimes the same one. If they have a lot of money they may take a tour of Europe. Then they are herded like cattle past incredible architecture, or through art galleries with mind-blowing artwork, or museums of technology illustrating how much we’ve learned and suggesting how much further we have to go. And they have no interest. They go because it’s on their checklist to have gone.
Don’t get me wrong, many, probably most of these people do have interests which they study and learn. I like to get to know the hobbies of my reports and co-workers because they are always interesting and they are interested themselves. They come alive when they talk about wood-carving, or hiking, or birding. But they are not interested in their job, their church, and in many cases not even their families. Their default mental state is, “follow the checklist and don’t think about it”. To a large extent I believe this is why we allow fascists to grow; people are not paying attention, either to the fascists or to the people who are warning about the concentration of power which is an underlying requirement for fascism to develop.
That’s not quite three pages of blather, and it may not be entirely intelligible. To be clear, I do not believe any of the mystical states I described confer any special knowledge or powers. They can feel like they do, but they certainly do not. Our minds are amazingly able in deception, and especially able to deceive itself.
I try to spend time in that second state. The third … doesn’t even seem to be possible for me, not really. I can do something on autopilot but my head will be filled with something else that I find more interesting while I’m doing it, rather than being empty.
I suspect there’s two large subsets of people. One can’t switch it off, like me. One can. The ones who can’t end up nerds, or at least bright and thoughtful people. Since they can’t switch it off it gets constant exercise, making them smarter than average and making commonplace cognition and the like easy and near effortless — think someone who weight trains having no trouble moving mid-sized bits of furniture when the need, or just the mood, strikes.
The ones who can, don’t exercise it very much and it’s weak. They’re not just duller; they are weaker. Thinking about a significant decision or any kind of serious congition hurts, like heavy lifting you’re not used to and are out of shape for. They try to avoid it as much as they can, relying on rules, checklists, heuristics, or if all else fails on some boss figure telling them what to do and, crucially, absolving them of moral responsibility to think for themselves. Boom: Altemeyer’s authoritarian follower type.
If I’m right, then, with one perspective, people like me who can’t switch their brains off have a disability. We’re stuck. We get easily bored. We are prone to overthink more minor decisions sometimes.
But from another perspective, it’s the rest who have a disability. They’re weaker. They have a mild form of learning disability. It dominoes into other problems, including moral defects. Who is more abled, someone who can pick up and move an armchair without much effort or someone liable to herniate a disk trying? This is the intellectual equivalent.
Moreover, the disability isn’t the ability to turn their minds off. It’s actually a by-choice disability, like being out of shape physically when you don’t need to be (are physically able to exercise), abetted by an education/etc. system that doesn’t require “mental PE” so that people are less likely to get out of shape, even while it does require “regular” PE.
flex – my relationship with nature isn’t so mystical, tho i like it a lot. i hunt for sensations, but am always grounded in physical limitations that keep me from getting spiritual about it. lay on the grass, bugs on my neck, stand up and remember how difficult it is to stand up, etc… my dark humor for the continuum of human foolery is undercut by an ache for the tragedy of it all… i think it’s interesting to see how different people characterize the modes of their lives. and yeah, almost can’t help but use the language of spirituality and mysticism while being acutely aware of the non-existence of the supernatural. maybe a cultural habit or limitation of language itself.
syl – oooh this rolls right up on my ableism ban and sticks its toe over the line repeatedly, if more in the ideas than the words. i know. probably the best way to avoid hitting that line is to avoid speculating on why people en masse are so incompetent at maintaining a decent society, why everybody talks in cliché, why nobody has anything interesting to say or can spare an ounce of attention to something outside their immediate experience, etc etc etc …
at least, in my comments lol. i know it’s impossible to experience the pain of living in this world without wondering why why why.
to the first part of your comment, that is rough, not being able to shut off the thinkin part. seems i am much more capable of that than you are, and it’s a mercy. i just got 86’d from jury duty again this morning by characterizing myself as an anarchist, but the experience came with some unconscious bias training, which is kind of a cool thing to force randos to experience. they say that biases are mental shortcuts that help us function in an overwhelming world but that one should be aware they have them, and do their best to put them aside for doing the jury duty.
the relevant part here is the mental shortcutting. my job is very taxing on my mind and my feelings, so i recognize the ability to go zombie from time to time is a blessing. sorry that’s not one you get to experience. ich habe manchmal denkenschmerz. es gibt einer urlaub. (duo have mercy)
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