walking away
but not really
In phonetics, a “hiatus” refers to the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pause between two vowels that each house their own syllable in a given word. Think words like “cooperate,” “poetry,” or, indeed, “hiatus” itself.
This is, to me, deeply wonderful. The vowel denotes an open sound and therefore implies curiosity and trust, with which it’s capable of welcoming the closed, corporeal, architectural consonants that also belong to the word. It falls to this word, meanwhile, to remember that it’s the vowels — the trust, the curiosity, the faith — that are the crux of its existence.
Thus, in the macro, we can understand “hiatus” as the pause between two different breeds of curiosity and openmindedness in a given life; one at the end of its architecture, the other preempting theirs.
Though I admit — with the pride one can only find in humility — that I was not curious nor openminded when I woke up the other day and found that my cognitive shorthand with film had vanished from my mind.
No, I was horrified, angry, desperate, and hopeless. For over a year now, I’ve made a point of building my criticism around grokked subtleties and anchorages in culture, history, linguistics, and countless other knowledge bases, all in hopes of helping my readers expand their perspectives and bring a similar toolset to the films they may yet see. It was my superpower, my offering, my proof that I could be useful as a person and not just as a body.1
And now it is gone. Maybe not forever. But right now, it is gone.
Those of you who are particularly familiar with my work may think this is normal. I’ve spoken openly about my bipolarity and how, some days, my mind turns into a creativity vacuum that only metastasizes despair whenever I try to engage it in something. But I don’t struggle with that. It brings inconveniences and unpleasant emotions, to be sure, but I’m at a point where it doesn’t interfere with my life or schedule in any meaningful way2; that I’ve written about so many movies over the last year with the consistency I have is testament to that.
What’s happening now is different, and exclusive from the neurological cocktail that I live with. As I write this, I am having absolutely no trouble existing in creation; in addition to writing, I can read, think, and feel with full presence right now. I am having a good day, and it is getting better.
And yet, in the last week or so3, I must have watched at least 15 movies — some of them being NonDē/Filmstack requests, and some of which I already had a mental review blueprint of — in search of something new to write about, and each and every time, there has been a massive crater in my mind where those critical train tracks have always been. I watch a movie and my brain does nothing.4 Last week I did gymnastics on The Drama, and now I can’t even step onto the proverbial balance beam. I cannot give life to any coherent — let alone truthful — thoughts in regards to a film, despite being perfectly able to comprehend and articulate the beauty I’ve recently found in the word “hiatus” in a similar manner to how I’ve always unpacked film. This enterprise frightens me with its inexplicability.
My working theory is that my body has made an executive decision to moderately decouple my sense of self from such worldly attachments as my film criticism ability. I see its point.
The lone clarity in it all is this: I am being asked to step away from reviewing movies for the time being, hence the opening paragraphs of this post and their contemplation of the word “hiatus,” which is a thing I will now be taking. I apologize to any Filmstackers or indie directors whose work I agreed to take a look at prior to my realization of what’s happening to me (to one of whom I foolishly gave the go-ahead as recently as Sunday).
The most upsetting part for me personally is how this will inevitably — if not necessarily permanently — affect my relationship to film. But at the same time, that would simply be a case of my life rearranging itself to accommodate for something new, evoking a vowel on the backhalf of a given hiatus, in all its preemptivity. Still, I will miss the experience as long as it eludes me, just as I do old friends who I may be in the midst of outgrowing.
But to that point, Filmstack, know that I’m not done here by a long shot. This is only a hiatus from writing new film reviews, and while that will of course impact my presence in Filmstack and the NonDē movement, my mind is as present and hungry as its always been. I’ll still be shuffling around, posting the odd note or update or film/film criticism-relevant piece (anyone want to see what I have to say about Armond White?), and re-uping old reviews to give newcomers a window into what I’ve been doing this last while. I’m also in the midst of putting together a very exciting reveal that just might have something to do with a website that rhymes with Betterloxd; that will come when it comes, but lord is it coming.
I’ll also be pausing paid subscriptions until the future of The Treatment becomes clear to me. Maybe it’s a matter of finding the right film5, maybe it’s a matter of taking a break from film, or maybe it’s a matter of accepting that I will never write a review again, and must find new ways to excavate truth and possibility for those who read me. Maybe I will teach and write manifestos on criticism. Maybe I will write stories. Maybe I’ll diversify the types of media I write about. All I can really say is that the genesis of tomorrow’s paradigm is as mysterious to me as the termination of yesterday’s.
Thus, this is not good-bye; it’s not even a “see you later.” I suppose I don’t really know what this is; just as well, because that’s how the consonants snap into place.
To be clear, I do not consciously subscribe to any of the implications — and there are many — in “useful as a person and not just as a body.” Emotions don’t particularly care about your principles, though, and sometimes you need to make space for pungent and empirically false sentiments in order to understand or elucidate the dynamics of your wounds.
If anyone feels like challenging me on this with reference to the post I made last week that I’ve since unpublished, go right ahead; I have no apprehensions about acknowledging that nor articulating my peace with it.
My “bad” periods usually last a day and a half; maybe two days.
My body and spirit and heart still feel things — hence Disclosure Day — but my brain does nothing, so it’s woefully less potent.
Doubt; heard a lot of this one as a young queer.
Take care and hang in there. Maybe a sabbatical? According to Wikipedia the word sabbatical has a Hebrew origin. In the Old Testament, "it refers to the shmita, a mandatory 'sabbath year' where Jews in the Land of Israel let their agricultural fields lie fallow every seventh year to rest the land." Yes, this seems like a good thing, resting the land for a while, letting it ferment and grow things below.
Hi C.C.,
I’m feeling chills of recognition reading this.
There is a singular particular dread in discovering that the thing which once felt like one’s most reliable faculty, not just a skill, but almost the defining wavelength of selfhood, has suddenly become inaccessible. With a regular circularity, I go through phases of feeling like I am inside a kind of cerebral blockage, where the synapses refuse to cohere into anything, even within the ballpark of a meaningful thought. The world is still there, the film is still there, the language is somewhere nearby, but the connective tissue between them seems to have temporarily dissolved.
I don’t pretend to know what it is like to live with the bipolarity you describe, nor would I want to flatten the specificity of that experience into some universalised rhetoric of “creative struggle.” But I do recognise something in the terror of suddenly feeling estranged from the faculty through which one has learned to become legible to oneself.
At the risk of sounding overblown, I’ve regularly babbled on about those for whom cinema is a vocation, yes, but more than that, a kind of prism through which one is oriented to the world. For me, it has given shape to friendship, work, teaching, thought, identity, and probably more of my interior life than is entirely healthy. And yet there are times when the requirement to articulate something about a film becomes almost absurdly oppressive, especially when what I actually feel in response to it is little more than a fog of generic banalities.
I sense, perhaps wrongly, an underlying guilt in the tone of your piece. Not guilt in any crude or self-indulgent sense, but something subtler that comes when we feel we are disappointing the projected, ideal version of ourselves.
I have a guilt-tripping inner productivity tyrant. A total bastard who, at any moment, can remind me of any number of shortcomings and mediocrities.
But these selves we torture ourselves with are chimeras. They look like ideals, but they are often just punishments wearing the mask of aspiration. They are made of our best qualities, yes — discipline, sensitivity, seriousness, care — but can easily metastasise into poisonous self-recrimination.
It has been around six weeks since I last went to the cinema. In the context of streaming and the reduction of film to content, I’ve increasingly used cinema-going to restore a sense of symbolic significance to the act of watching. In some ways, the cinema has become a kind of meditative space. However, since being diagnosed with blood clots, which have affected my breathing to some degree, I’ve found myself navigating a new anxious reticence about being “out” in the world. With that comes another layer of psychological self-loathing: the sense that even my retreat from the world has to be judged, interpreted, and held against me.
But your poetic excavation of the term hiatus I found so moving. It articulates something fundamental about consciousness and the need for a form of space. Yes, it's easy to talk about taking a break, digital detox, or the idea of positive boredom. If you're anything like me, then such processes often feel like another form of labour in themselves.
You point to something deeper, I think.
Like the idea of the need we have for what the psychologist Donald Winnicott calls the "potential space". Not an empty gap where the self has disappeared, but a fragile interval in which the self no longer has to perform its own coherence.
Take care.