#53 - Together Alone
Hello hello,
Welcome to the final Patelogram. Sorry for taking a week off - I was thinking a lot about what I wanted this to be used to say and I've landed on it not being too much of a departure from my usual fare. If there's anything particularly urgent or insightful that comes to mind later I can just...write another one. All hail the Forever-Never sequel. The delay also means that this goes out on An Occasion, that being my thirty-forth birthday which it will be by the time you read this and that only feels right.
Thank you for your responses re: Brown Chekhov In Space last week. So very, very helpful and I promise I will get around to replying to everyone who wrote to me about it. For now, let's get to this. It's a little length but from what I understand most of you are 'working' from home anyway...
SELVES HELP
So I wanted to try and make this last letter useful rather than indulgent but then I realised, joy of joy, there was a way to do both. I could do some bits of advice covering what I wish I'd known before I got into this whole thing. I figured that this would be aimed at someone like a seventeen year old Vinay, the me that is half a life away now.
To help bring truth to this, I'm flicking through a diary I kept very briefly when I was sixteen, going on seventeen. Oh God. I'm not sure if it's conscious or not but the mapping of my feelings onto received structure of drama is painful to see. There are sketches for song lyrics for the band I ended up in across this year and...I mean. You will never see of them but I promise they'd instantly make any of you feel better about your own writing.
Going through it, there's a lot of him that I still carry with me, and a lot of him that's gone that I miss. It's a dynamic I played with in a short play I wrote for Paines Plough's Come To Where I'm From called Tor Tale Recall (which is still one of my favourite of my own titles) and it only felt right to briefly revisit it for this so I'm going to bounce this from me then to me now and hope it sparks something for all youse.
THINGS I WISH I KNEW
1) Your Tribe Is Out There
You're so nervous that your dreams have no foundation because you can't see dreamers directly around you. You're not doomed. Get yourself out into the world as soon as you can, find those people who get you and like you enough to be critical on the terms you're presenting and not just their own. It'll change you artistic practice and your life too. This doesn't necessarily mean escaping your home town or anything. It might just be turning up to a few groups you didn't think you'd be interested in and finding out that those Guys You Hate actually care about stuff you do too.
2) It's Ok To Let People Go
The other side to the above. There's a lot here about being devastated at friendships falling apart. You turn that in on yourself a lot. It is partially your fault, in truth. And is there a bit of vanity in it? Thinking you're letting people down while actually it's you wondering how they'll cope without you? It's hard to tell from how you've talked about it. But also, this is just going to be what happens. There's so much churn at this moment in your life and guess what? All of those people you're worried about are all happily settled. Don't sweat it. Them being in your life at all was still worthwhile.
3) Lack Of Motivation Isn't A Creative Failing
You also seem to be terrified that - outside of breakups and unexpected deaths - you don't have the 'right' emotional responses, the 'right' soul because you don't feel creative all the time. If there's only one thing I could tell myself (and for you to hang on to) is that both art and artists are all about the process. I've said it multiple times across these letters but it really is the most freeing thing. Consistent diligence is worth a thousand sparks.
THINGS I NEED TO REMEMBER
1) You Can Dance
Well. Not like as in having any real technical ability but you really enjoy throwing yourself around with little self-consciousness. It made you feel joyful and powerful and like you belong. More of this, please.
2) Fountain Pens Are Nicer To Write With
That micro fine ballpoint life feels more pro, but god the flow and madness that comes out of a good fountain pen is like nothing else. It literally bends to your style. Maybe get one as a treat. Ink cartridges aren't the most environmentally friendly, but you can get a big pot of ink and a refillable cartridge with a fun sucking action that will introduce some nice mechanical process into your angsty art times.
3) The World Will Surprise You
There's an account in here of your trip to the Czech Republic which you were definitely nervous about and had plenty of preconceptions about. You got very/too drunk on new liquids, your exchange partner was amazing (and possible some sort of king pin?) and you think differently about Europe now. Maybe you've let your views get entrenched now because of things beyond direct experience? Forget it. Go see for yourself. Have a few late nights. And keep listening to new music. How have you let that slip out of your life? Music was your life and now your Spotify playlists are frankly alarming, I'm embarrassed for you.
BONUS...
There is, and still is, no need to watch X-Men 2 multiple times and I don't know you did/would do that.
END OF MESSAGE, END OF DAYS
So this is the thing that I wanted to talk about a couple of weeks back, for a while actually, just I knew it was a big topic that needed space and actually the final Patelogram feels the fitting place for it. And errr...I've run out of space again. But! It'll help me keep it pithy cause the idea is likely more compelling than any exploration of it on my part would've been. Forgive my jumping around within it a bit...
Basically: For a long time now, I've been worried about the collapse of our shared story spaces. I see how we've gotten here. More publishers. More content. More voices. Fewer gatekeepers. Fewer bottlenecks. In so many ways, it's glorious! A world without so many referees, that's good and right. You can find your truth in a manner that excites and empowers you. But there's just so *much* that I don't know how we're meant to sit together with anything and a world without some shared narratives starts to get a little scary. Without them, there's little hope for a cohesive society not based on biological or religious doctrine.
On my recent trip to New Zealand, the story of the modern state there was described to me as "a lie we go along with for the good of everyone". I can't speak to the truth of that, and it's no doubt missing some perspectives, but I can see how there is something in it as a broader idea. What big lies are we willing to embrace for the sake of a cohesive society? Who gets to decide? Critics? The government? Consensus? I don't know. Yet those communal lies - whether it's national narratives or simply stories feel so important.
As a kid from a minority background, there was a part of me that was (and slightly remains) grateful for the idea of a canon, and of having a curriculum at school. It meant that - no matter who I met - I had some connective story space that wasn't directly related to my identity. Of Mice and Men still gets me out of a conversational hot spot to this day. I absolutely agree with calls to create a more inclusive canon and curriculum, though it's curious to me that such an arcane concept might actually have greater social worth than it used to, if it allows us a metaphorical language found through those shared stories. Or perhaps we just will have to get better at sharing them, embracing each other in the process, rather that assuming it's possible or desirable to have what is, in some sense, indoctrination.
And then, as "luck" would have it, Covid-19 reminds me that there is another site of collective story storytelling: Calamities. Potentially the biggest one of all. There's something quite dispiriting about it taking an absolute international crisis to give us a new mythology of mutual connection although I guess that's not new (and it's very Watchmen where, what is effectively the bad guy, dumps a massive squid on New York that appears to be from another dimension and the tragedy dissolves the polarisation created by the Cold War. Yes, really).
Maybe this is great opportunity. Live-streamed addresses as we sit with our loved ones by our mutual fires...health and hope to you all.
KITTY KORNER
If you thought I wouldn't end on this segment, you'd be wrong.
My cats, like their owner, are getting on a bit. Chill Cat is often so sprightly it's hard to know, but Pretty Cat lowers himself to the ground so carefully it's like an old man who fears he may never stand again if he gets this bit wrong. It makes it hard not to constantly contemplate their mortality and pets, after all, will almost always outlive you. (Though this is making me remember a conversation with my maternal grandfather where I encouraged him to get a cat and he said "I love them but I can't bear to see it die" - he was 88 at the time of this conversation...)
But while the signs of ageing does give me pause, I'm heartened to see their personalities express themselves more fully as they go on as well. Chill has become, if anything, more personable. Pretty has become more in need of reassurance. They are so very much, unashamedly, their own souls and there's a lesson in that for me.
Yet in their constance, they have allowed for a change in myself. They are entirely uninterested if I don't feel like getting up in the morning and in that they have made me less likely to wallow. Their needs have kept them in my thoughts when I'm usually very good at forgetting and moving on, so in training myself to remember them, so other important things linger also.
Finally, my affection for them has helped break a story I would tell myself about myself and have been doing for years, if not decades. I'd become too steely, too focused on what's in front of me and with a reduced capacity to think of that which was around me. When you get to that place...well, it's hard not to believe that maybe you don't have the capacity to love anymore. Having these boys in my life, I know that's not true.
Ok, that's me done! If all goes well, I'm off to do some work, watch The Princess Bride and play Act 5 of Kentucky Route Zero.
I've tried to be as honest as I can with these letters and while I no longer feel like I can do that, I hope that they've been a useful resource. I wanted this to be the access to a writer's mind that I never had when I was that seventeen year old. My hope is that it will have encouraged some of you to get going sooner, others to stick it out and others to go "who is this guy? I can do better than this." Please, please do. Nothing would make me happier. I'm cautiously optimistic about my years ahead, but I'm unreservedly excited about the work that's coming through.
On that note, it feels fitting to leave you with someone else's words, a message someone wrote in seventeen year-old me's journal. From a friend, but they didn't leave a name. It's pink ink and the handwriting is outrageously neat so I'm assuming it's a girl (indulge my foray into stereotype here but I think it's true here). Presumably at that point it must've been obvious who they were but I've not a clue now. I'm not even entirely sure to what they're referring. But the sentiment still holds up so I'll share it...
See you out there, folks.
Vin x
If you're new to Patelograms, like what you've read and want to read more, the archive is here.
If you're an old hand, thanks as ever for sticking this out with me. It was nice to have the company.
Welcome to the final Patelogram. Sorry for taking a week off - I was thinking a lot about what I wanted this to be used to say and I've landed on it not being too much of a departure from my usual fare. If there's anything particularly urgent or insightful that comes to mind later I can just...write another one. All hail the Forever-Never sequel. The delay also means that this goes out on An Occasion, that being my thirty-forth birthday which it will be by the time you read this and that only feels right.
Thank you for your responses re: Brown Chekhov In Space last week. So very, very helpful and I promise I will get around to replying to everyone who wrote to me about it. For now, let's get to this. It's a little length but from what I understand most of you are 'working' from home anyway...
SELVES HELP
So I wanted to try and make this last letter useful rather than indulgent but then I realised, joy of joy, there was a way to do both. I could do some bits of advice covering what I wish I'd known before I got into this whole thing. I figured that this would be aimed at someone like a seventeen year old Vinay, the me that is half a life away now.
To help bring truth to this, I'm flicking through a diary I kept very briefly when I was sixteen, going on seventeen. Oh God. I'm not sure if it's conscious or not but the mapping of my feelings onto received structure of drama is painful to see. There are sketches for song lyrics for the band I ended up in across this year and...I mean. You will never see of them but I promise they'd instantly make any of you feel better about your own writing.
Going through it, there's a lot of him that I still carry with me, and a lot of him that's gone that I miss. It's a dynamic I played with in a short play I wrote for Paines Plough's Come To Where I'm From called Tor Tale Recall (which is still one of my favourite of my own titles) and it only felt right to briefly revisit it for this so I'm going to bounce this from me then to me now and hope it sparks something for all youse.
THINGS I WISH I KNEW
1) Your Tribe Is Out There
You're so nervous that your dreams have no foundation because you can't see dreamers directly around you. You're not doomed. Get yourself out into the world as soon as you can, find those people who get you and like you enough to be critical on the terms you're presenting and not just their own. It'll change you artistic practice and your life too. This doesn't necessarily mean escaping your home town or anything. It might just be turning up to a few groups you didn't think you'd be interested in and finding out that those Guys You Hate actually care about stuff you do too.
2) It's Ok To Let People Go
The other side to the above. There's a lot here about being devastated at friendships falling apart. You turn that in on yourself a lot. It is partially your fault, in truth. And is there a bit of vanity in it? Thinking you're letting people down while actually it's you wondering how they'll cope without you? It's hard to tell from how you've talked about it. But also, this is just going to be what happens. There's so much churn at this moment in your life and guess what? All of those people you're worried about are all happily settled. Don't sweat it. Them being in your life at all was still worthwhile.
3) Lack Of Motivation Isn't A Creative Failing
You also seem to be terrified that - outside of breakups and unexpected deaths - you don't have the 'right' emotional responses, the 'right' soul because you don't feel creative all the time. If there's only one thing I could tell myself (and for you to hang on to) is that both art and artists are all about the process. I've said it multiple times across these letters but it really is the most freeing thing. Consistent diligence is worth a thousand sparks.
THINGS I NEED TO REMEMBER
1) You Can Dance
Well. Not like as in having any real technical ability but you really enjoy throwing yourself around with little self-consciousness. It made you feel joyful and powerful and like you belong. More of this, please.
2) Fountain Pens Are Nicer To Write With
That micro fine ballpoint life feels more pro, but god the flow and madness that comes out of a good fountain pen is like nothing else. It literally bends to your style. Maybe get one as a treat. Ink cartridges aren't the most environmentally friendly, but you can get a big pot of ink and a refillable cartridge with a fun sucking action that will introduce some nice mechanical process into your angsty art times.
3) The World Will Surprise You
There's an account in here of your trip to the Czech Republic which you were definitely nervous about and had plenty of preconceptions about. You got very/too drunk on new liquids, your exchange partner was amazing (and possible some sort of king pin?) and you think differently about Europe now. Maybe you've let your views get entrenched now because of things beyond direct experience? Forget it. Go see for yourself. Have a few late nights. And keep listening to new music. How have you let that slip out of your life? Music was your life and now your Spotify playlists are frankly alarming, I'm embarrassed for you.
BONUS...
There is, and still is, no need to watch X-Men 2 multiple times and I don't know you did/would do that.
END OF MESSAGE, END OF DAYS
So this is the thing that I wanted to talk about a couple of weeks back, for a while actually, just I knew it was a big topic that needed space and actually the final Patelogram feels the fitting place for it. And errr...I've run out of space again. But! It'll help me keep it pithy cause the idea is likely more compelling than any exploration of it on my part would've been. Forgive my jumping around within it a bit...
Basically: For a long time now, I've been worried about the collapse of our shared story spaces. I see how we've gotten here. More publishers. More content. More voices. Fewer gatekeepers. Fewer bottlenecks. In so many ways, it's glorious! A world without so many referees, that's good and right. You can find your truth in a manner that excites and empowers you. But there's just so *much* that I don't know how we're meant to sit together with anything and a world without some shared narratives starts to get a little scary. Without them, there's little hope for a cohesive society not based on biological or religious doctrine.
On my recent trip to New Zealand, the story of the modern state there was described to me as "a lie we go along with for the good of everyone". I can't speak to the truth of that, and it's no doubt missing some perspectives, but I can see how there is something in it as a broader idea. What big lies are we willing to embrace for the sake of a cohesive society? Who gets to decide? Critics? The government? Consensus? I don't know. Yet those communal lies - whether it's national narratives or simply stories feel so important.
As a kid from a minority background, there was a part of me that was (and slightly remains) grateful for the idea of a canon, and of having a curriculum at school. It meant that - no matter who I met - I had some connective story space that wasn't directly related to my identity. Of Mice and Men still gets me out of a conversational hot spot to this day. I absolutely agree with calls to create a more inclusive canon and curriculum, though it's curious to me that such an arcane concept might actually have greater social worth than it used to, if it allows us a metaphorical language found through those shared stories. Or perhaps we just will have to get better at sharing them, embracing each other in the process, rather that assuming it's possible or desirable to have what is, in some sense, indoctrination.
And then, as "luck" would have it, Covid-19 reminds me that there is another site of collective story storytelling: Calamities. Potentially the biggest one of all. There's something quite dispiriting about it taking an absolute international crisis to give us a new mythology of mutual connection although I guess that's not new (and it's very Watchmen where, what is effectively the bad guy, dumps a massive squid on New York that appears to be from another dimension and the tragedy dissolves the polarisation created by the Cold War. Yes, really).
Maybe this is great opportunity. Live-streamed addresses as we sit with our loved ones by our mutual fires...health and hope to you all.
KITTY KORNER
If you thought I wouldn't end on this segment, you'd be wrong.
My cats, like their owner, are getting on a bit. Chill Cat is often so sprightly it's hard to know, but Pretty Cat lowers himself to the ground so carefully it's like an old man who fears he may never stand again if he gets this bit wrong. It makes it hard not to constantly contemplate their mortality and pets, after all, will almost always outlive you. (Though this is making me remember a conversation with my maternal grandfather where I encouraged him to get a cat and he said "I love them but I can't bear to see it die" - he was 88 at the time of this conversation...)
But while the signs of ageing does give me pause, I'm heartened to see their personalities express themselves more fully as they go on as well. Chill has become, if anything, more personable. Pretty has become more in need of reassurance. They are so very much, unashamedly, their own souls and there's a lesson in that for me.
Yet in their constance, they have allowed for a change in myself. They are entirely uninterested if I don't feel like getting up in the morning and in that they have made me less likely to wallow. Their needs have kept them in my thoughts when I'm usually very good at forgetting and moving on, so in training myself to remember them, so other important things linger also.
Finally, my affection for them has helped break a story I would tell myself about myself and have been doing for years, if not decades. I'd become too steely, too focused on what's in front of me and with a reduced capacity to think of that which was around me. When you get to that place...well, it's hard not to believe that maybe you don't have the capacity to love anymore. Having these boys in my life, I know that's not true.
Ok, that's me done! If all goes well, I'm off to do some work, watch The Princess Bride and play Act 5 of Kentucky Route Zero.
I've tried to be as honest as I can with these letters and while I no longer feel like I can do that, I hope that they've been a useful resource. I wanted this to be the access to a writer's mind that I never had when I was that seventeen year old. My hope is that it will have encouraged some of you to get going sooner, others to stick it out and others to go "who is this guy? I can do better than this." Please, please do. Nothing would make me happier. I'm cautiously optimistic about my years ahead, but I'm unreservedly excited about the work that's coming through.
On that note, it feels fitting to leave you with someone else's words, a message someone wrote in seventeen year-old me's journal. From a friend, but they didn't leave a name. It's pink ink and the handwriting is outrageously neat so I'm assuming it's a girl (indulge my foray into stereotype here but I think it's true here). Presumably at that point it must've been obvious who they were but I've not a clue now. I'm not even entirely sure to what they're referring. But the sentiment still holds up so I'll share it...
"Your (sic) not on your own". Put your bum in the chair, your head in the clouds and your heart somewhere it's needed.I know, Vin. I think everyone worries about stuff like that sometimes. I know I do. I don't think people realise they were happy until they aren't anymore.
Don't be embarrassed about being melodramatic, sometimes that's the only reason why people don't tell their probs, cos they're scared other people will think they're weird. You're not weird, Vin, nor are you melodramatic. You'll find it one day - don't give up. There's other people who feel the same - your not on your own. xx
See you out there, folks.
Vin x
If you're new to Patelograms, like what you've read and want to read more, the archive is here.
If you're an old hand, thanks as ever for sticking this out with me. It was nice to have the company.
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