A Constellation to Make Its Own — mnchrm vol. xlvii
Incoming Transmission –
Clytie, George Frederick Watts, Plaster, 1868
It’s still hot and I still hate it. Even though it’s cooled down a bit; perhaps even what one might call “considerably”, I’m looking for an escape. Everything just seems harder in the heat. Working, for one. I’m not sure I wrote a good line between last week’s newsletter and now. I can barely relax even; often in times when writing becomes impossible, I try and go run, or at least switch to input and read or watch something. In this heat however, everything just falls apart.
While we’re doing this airing of grievances, I’d like to say I’ve been sleeping really poorly too. This, of course, I also blame on the heat. It’s just too hot to sleep well. So for the most part, I haven’t been. However, I’ve been writing a lot at night lately.
At least, writing notes for fiction. This is new for me. Lately, I’ll get into bed. Sit and try and sleep for a while, before my head is filled with a new line for a story, an image, or any other star searching for a constellation to make its own.
So then I roll over, pick up my phone, double tap the home screen which I’ve configured to open a new note in Evernote (Nova launcher gestures, handy!). This is still not ideal; I have to pick up and look at my phone, which is not what I want to do at night in bed. I could write a physical note, but it’s another thing to pick up, and I don’t want to have to turn the light on. I could use a voice recorder, but then not only would I have to listen to and transcribe my notes later, I’d have to suffer the embarrassment of having my girlfriend listen to my rambling.
I guess in a perfect world, I’d be able to just type up a small note on my phone without having to engage with it as a phone, or the artificial light in that way? I guess I’m sort of describing the “screen-off note” feature of my Note 9, so maybe I just need to work on my handwriting.
It’s not a perfect system, but I’ve gotten some good morsels out of the process so far. I’m excited to develop or work these snippets in to existing work.
Given that this has recently become another solidly productive time for my writing, I began to think about why. What was happening here that made me more productive in creative writing at night, better to get into that headspace and whatever? Perhaps simply my distance to dreams decreased.
I’ve been thinking about creativity through the frame of some things I learned in a Coursera course, ‘Learning How to Learn’. Specifically, I’m thinking of focused and diffused thinking, as mentioned in week one. The basic idea is that we’ve got two ways of thinking about something, as previously mentioned, which are both important. Yet, we mostly work on the “focused” side of things, rather than the “diffused”.
The course suggests trying to work on problems in a way that incorporates both sectors: focus on it for a while, and then do something different and allow it to be worked on in the background, such as going for a run / walk, taking a shower / bath / nap, you get the idea. In fact, this idea is sort of common wisdom; you may be incorporating this into your work or thinking already, whether consciously or subconsciously.
I think there’s also something beyond this, though; tied specifically to the way that I go to sleep. I get in bed, and unless I’m so tired that I just fall asleep immediately, I try and set myself up to dream. I tell myself stories. I imagine a world, or a feeling, or a moment. I think about something that I saw or something that happened to me today, and I fantasize a new world around it from there.
I have been doing this for years. Not only is it fun, it’s sort of a natural, primal sort of storytelling: the stories we tell to ourselves. Even farther, it’s one of these inherent applications of the focused / diffused dichotomy of thinking, in which I’m priming my mind to riff on an idea or topic.
In fact, last night I made a few notes about what to include in this newsletter, which I’m elaborating on now! Neat!
I’m sort of a natural narrator. I can’t tell if this is “normal” or not, but it’s sort of my default state to fictionalize the events that are happening to me, even before I go to sleep. I sit in the coffee shop and look out the window and I start thinking up the lines I’d use to write about it, the people around me, what I’m trying to convey. I edit as I go, and will repeat in my head the new, revised line.
I’m unsure how many (if any!) other people do this, or if it’s even something innate in the way I engage with the world or a product of my fiction-focused brain (probably both, certainly impossible to ascertain). Let me know if you do something similar.
As my anime-poisoned mind is wont to do, I am playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and loving it. For those among you who are not yet degenerates, Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a strategy role-playing-game, which means you assume the role of a character whose job it is to carry out and win strategic battles on a turn-based grid. You lead a squad of characters throughout the game from battle to battle, accumulating a few scars and worse along the way. In Fire Emblem, one of the cornerstones of the franchise is permadeath: if a unit dies carrying out a foolish order you assigned them, they’re gone for good; no respawns (at least on the “Classic” gameplay style).
However, in this game, the mechanic is taken up a notch. Here, instead of a silent tactician, you play as a silent tactician who has been assigned to be a professor to one of three houses (get it?) at a sort of officer’s academy in this world. Before, you’d go from battle to battle, forging bonds with your crew as you watched them level up, guided their progress through menus, and engaged in “support conversations”, little cutscenes to show you character’s deepening bond. Here, your soldiers are your students, your responsibility, and you shape them from zero.
To me, this lends even more weight to the permadeath mechanic. There’s no way I’d let one of these little idiots die now. I guess its effectiveness depends on how much that part of the game interests you, but I think the narrative impact of showing the audience why they should care, before you show them the consequences is a fundamental concept in storytelling. A little bit of empathy for your characters can go a long way!
Today, I went down through the rainstorm Chicago mercifully experienced to the Art Institute with my Mom. We went through an exhibit they’re running now for the late works of Manet.
Manet is an artist whose work doesn’t always do it for me, but I was fascinated by his story, especially the focus on the end of his life. Suffering from tertiary syphilis, Manet became increasingly immobile in his later years. Seeing the works he made in the last five years of his life shows this in a powerful way. At first, with some lifestyle and cafe scenes, moving towards more and more studio compositions, to portraits, and finally to painted letters he sent, still lives, and images of his house.
I was fascinated by the contrast in his life, of which I was only tangentially aware. A contemporary of and friend to many an impressionist, but always refusing to formally connect himself with the group. Someone thought of as a bohemian rogue, but from a very well-to-do family.
The exhibit mentioned a lot of details of his life, but didn’t end up providing the answers I wanted. Where’d he get the syphilis from? Surely not his conservative wife, who was his former piano teacher and perhaps the mistress of his father? Was he really such a champion of women and their interests as thought of by Morisot, or was there a less-upstanding connection between him and his many female models as is so often the case?
I think I’ve got to read a biography on the man.
Rōnin and drifters, that’s it for this week. For more before the next dispatch, follow me on Twitter. If you love this letter and want to do me a favor, consider sharing / forwarding / sending it to a friend.
Until next time; be strong, fight on.
Your faithful commander,
– I