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.
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.
And you, Dario; right there with you. Without question, film was the means through which I came into myself, and I had already been well into young-adulthood (a state which, at 28, I still inhabit) at the time. To feel my shorthand with the medium slipping backwards (at least, it seems backwards as far as my current perspective can tell) is perhaps analogous to slipping back into the scarcity of being that was woven into the surroundings I grew up in; terrifying.
I think what also might be contributing to it — and this ties into the sense of inner productivity guilt that I share with you — is that I’m reaching the natural conclusion of a sort of pseudo-infinite growth mindset applied to creativity rather than its natural(?) habitat of capital, where the standards of originality I demand of the scaffolding of my thinking become so unrealistically exacting that the whole system short-circuits beyond utility, as it were. I suppose insofar as those standards I hold are an expression of who I am, there are ways to diversify that more healthily. Bonus points — and many of them — if it leads to a catalyst that gives me my own life back post-layoff.
Re: hiatus, happy to know it resonated. I’m reminded of that scene from Small Things Like These where Bill discovers Sarah locked in a shed near the asylum, and the camera moves unsteadily to suggest the instability of the situation; the danger of being discovered and the equally-prevalent possibility of escape. Perhaps seeing beneath the clouds necessitates a state of free fall, no?
Y’know, it’s not a bad thing to take a break. We’re not machines and the pressure to PRODUCE often leads to burnout. Besides, if you don’t have a life, you have nothing to write about. So go have a life. You’ll be surprised what corner of the world you’ll find yourself again. For me, it was in El Goléa, Algeria. Who knew?
Maybe you need to read some books to knock something loose in you! You're the sharpest cinema mind, maybe different media will reprogram you a bit, in a good way. Spread yourself out, you'll touch inspiration, no matter what it ends up looking like.
That's the hope! I'm 200 pages into Antkind as we speak and have built the bookshelf backlog of at least one of my dreams. Been all of 8-9 hours since I posted this and I'm already plucking inspiration like mad; hope to hope itself I can share it with y'all in full.
If you haven't read it yet. as an Antkind chaser (and man, Antkind gets weird), I recommend Jim Carrey's autobiographical novel "Memoirs And Misinformation" (cowritten by Dana Vachon) that seems heavily influenced by Kaufman's work.
You know, D, in hindsight (so, in essence, foresight), there's probably some correlation between what happened here with my criticism brain and the fact that I had Antkind hooked to my veins for the past several weeks...
We have nothing but love for you here Charlotte! It’s a beautiful thing to not only try to understand yourself and give your mind the space and time it needs to do whatever undoubtedly brilliant thing it needs to do but also to share it openly with us. ❤️❤️❤️ Thank you for sharing so much with us and may you enjoy sorting it all out and hopefully give yourself plenty of rest and grace as well. xo
I don't necessarily mean to heart this post, because I love seeing your writing appear in my inbox. But, I can relate to feeling as though something has abruptly disappeared in regard to our relationship to the things that felt automatic once. you've given us a prolific set of essays that we'll have here to stave us off awhile. And, while I'm not good at condolence, or comfort...on account of my own fried concept of the world, I hope that whatever is on its way to you brings you as much satisfaction as the rumination on cinema has. we'll be here for whatever manifests from this hiatus, slight departure, regroup, shuffle round. I think we'll all be right here for it.
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.
Love this, James; eager for the crops yet unseen!
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.
And you, Dario; right there with you. Without question, film was the means through which I came into myself, and I had already been well into young-adulthood (a state which, at 28, I still inhabit) at the time. To feel my shorthand with the medium slipping backwards (at least, it seems backwards as far as my current perspective can tell) is perhaps analogous to slipping back into the scarcity of being that was woven into the surroundings I grew up in; terrifying.
I think what also might be contributing to it — and this ties into the sense of inner productivity guilt that I share with you — is that I’m reaching the natural conclusion of a sort of pseudo-infinite growth mindset applied to creativity rather than its natural(?) habitat of capital, where the standards of originality I demand of the scaffolding of my thinking become so unrealistically exacting that the whole system short-circuits beyond utility, as it were. I suppose insofar as those standards I hold are an expression of who I am, there are ways to diversify that more healthily. Bonus points — and many of them — if it leads to a catalyst that gives me my own life back post-layoff.
Re: hiatus, happy to know it resonated. I’m reminded of that scene from Small Things Like These where Bill discovers Sarah locked in a shed near the asylum, and the camera moves unsteadily to suggest the instability of the situation; the danger of being discovered and the equally-prevalent possibility of escape. Perhaps seeing beneath the clouds necessitates a state of free fall, no?
Y’know, it’s not a bad thing to take a break. We’re not machines and the pressure to PRODUCE often leads to burnout. Besides, if you don’t have a life, you have nothing to write about. So go have a life. You’ll be surprised what corner of the world you’ll find yourself again. For me, it was in El Goléa, Algeria. Who knew?
110%; I’ll leave no corner unexcavated!
Maybe you need to read some books to knock something loose in you! You're the sharpest cinema mind, maybe different media will reprogram you a bit, in a good way. Spread yourself out, you'll touch inspiration, no matter what it ends up looking like.
That's the hope! I'm 200 pages into Antkind as we speak and have built the bookshelf backlog of at least one of my dreams. Been all of 8-9 hours since I posted this and I'm already plucking inspiration like mad; hope to hope itself I can share it with y'all in full.
Much, much love, my friend!
If you haven't read it yet. as an Antkind chaser (and man, Antkind gets weird), I recommend Jim Carrey's autobiographical novel "Memoirs And Misinformation" (cowritten by Dana Vachon) that seems heavily influenced by Kaufman's work.
You know, D, in hindsight (so, in essence, foresight), there's probably some correlation between what happened here with my criticism brain and the fact that I had Antkind hooked to my veins for the past several weeks...
This tracks!
Take care, Charlotte! Nothing is more important than our health!
We have nothing but love for you here Charlotte! It’s a beautiful thing to not only try to understand yourself and give your mind the space and time it needs to do whatever undoubtedly brilliant thing it needs to do but also to share it openly with us. ❤️❤️❤️ Thank you for sharing so much with us and may you enjoy sorting it all out and hopefully give yourself plenty of rest and grace as well. xo
And I've buckets of love for you all in turn! Cheers, Amanda!
I don't necessarily mean to heart this post, because I love seeing your writing appear in my inbox. But, I can relate to feeling as though something has abruptly disappeared in regard to our relationship to the things that felt automatic once. you've given us a prolific set of essays that we'll have here to stave us off awhile. And, while I'm not good at condolence, or comfort...on account of my own fried concept of the world, I hope that whatever is on its way to you brings you as much satisfaction as the rumination on cinema has. we'll be here for whatever manifests from this hiatus, slight departure, regroup, shuffle round. I think we'll all be right here for it.
Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude; appreciate you a ton, Holly <3