Saturday, June 14, 2003
It's Saturday morning, almost Saturday afternoon, and I'm still very much not awake.
I'll be working on the Threshold screenplay today, using Final Draft. I still haven't quite gotten the hang of the software, so that should be an adventure. Today I need to get through two scenes, because I have a meeting re: the screenplay on Tuesday.
I'm trying desperately to rediscover my inner workaholic. I fear that my work habits are suffering from a diminishment in my general degree of misery. I won't point fingers. You know who you are, you who are responsible for making me less miserable. This is your fault. I actually smiled yesterday. No telling what I'll be doing next. Hell, then again, maybe I'm just getting old. I have to simulate now what was once foremost in my mind. More often than not, I have to manufacture a state of anxiety or horror or despair or sorrow, in order to write. I'm thinking of Wordsworth, and what he said in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads. I quote: "I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplantion, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind." For Wordsworth, this is not a Bad Thing. Earlier in the preface he writes: "For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; and, as by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each other, we discover what is really important to men, so, by the repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings will be connected with important subjects, till at length, if we be originally possessed of much sensibility, such habits of mind will be produced, that, by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits, we shall describe objects, and utter sentiments, of such a nature, and in such connexion with each other, that the understanding of the Reader must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and his affections strengthened and purified. That's what I do now, in this diminished state of misery, as the actual misery grows somewhat less distinct. I work to discover those kindred emotions, banishing the essential (though, I would argue, distracting) tranquility, so that I can write. I am much in agreement with Wordsworth, I suppose, though he neglects to inform the reader that, ironically, this is a miserable enterprise, producing its own species of powerful, immediate and unhappy emotion. Round and round and round. We swallow our own tails.
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