019 - epochs and jg ballard
it feels to me like my life in my own head is often defined in epochs. the kind of colour, the texture that blankets my memories. periods of joy or suffering or people or places or anything else that bookend sections of my life. so often, periods of suffering.
i have spent a lot of my life feeling quite broken. this is not to say that my life is awful, or even particularly bad, or without happiness. i think that i simply tend to feel and remember the negative emotions more readily, more strongly. whatever the reason, this has left me with a number of weird views that i keep around as means of coping with this.
the strongest and longest standing of these, of course, has always been the belief that there is some inherent beauty to be found in suffering. that my pain is not without meaning, not without value. if i can find art in the things ive seen then i can make them worth it to me.
recently, i feel like i have spent a good amount of my time feeling quite bad. there are reasons for this, which don’t really deserve to be on this blog, but suffice to say, i spend many of my days in a loop, feeling bad, feeling flat, feeling upset, feeling exhausted. go to bed and try again tomorrow. feel the days blur together.
the other day, in a conversation about transsexuals on the internet, one of my friends got me thinking again about a book that i don’t like.
crash, by jg ballard. it’s about a group of people, alienated from society, who search for sexual pleasure in fatal car accidents. it’s a book both hated and loved in equal for its shocking sexual nature and i can’t stand it because of how boring it is. sure, the accident/sex scenes did genuinely upset me the first time i read one, but by the end of the book i had seen them enough times. we’ve seen your suffering, now show us something interesting.
recently, i feel like i have spent a good amount of my time feeling quite bad. i try to find some kind of meaning in my pain, but it feels like im just replaying the same scenes, over and over and over. only so many times i can do it.
so what do i do when my suffering’s getting boring?