Forceps - Organizes

This chunk taken from my work of today:

Throughout my CEP, I have relied on various systems of organisations, or systems of ritual, to keep me on track, or to keep me as efficient as I can be.

Why?

A lot of the activities we do, especially around the times of work, are activities we require to keep us in the quite narrow state in which we can work. We have to be comfortable, well fed, not tired, not distracted, possibly in silence, possibly with the right kind of music on (I find lyrics too distracting), etc.

There are many parts of us which all want to do different things. Parts of us are impulsive, wanting social contact, food, to check Facebook, etc. We can be tired, we can be bored. But there is always a part of us that knows what we really should be doing. A kind of 'work superego'.

In some people, this superego is dysfunctional, too strict or too puritan, a 'work ethic', that proves counter-productive by drowning us in guilt.

I have put a lot of effort, over time, into making systems that allow me to be maximally productive when I choose to be. It started when I was drowning in GCSE ICT work. It came to the Easter, two weeks of holiday, before the hand-in. I itemised everything I needed to do, worked out I needed to complete three of these items every day to complete it on time. If I completed these three items, no matter how much work it actually was, I would give myself a generous reward. This system of goals and rewards placated my work superego and my id, and I completed all of the work on time, without getting stressed. I felt like I had done the impossible.

I have refined these systems ever since. The 8/2 rule, whereby you work for eight minutes and break for two, is very effective for making yourself start working. But at its core is a set of well-defined tasks, a comfortable amount of time in which to do them (I must believe it is possible), and a well-defined and generous reward.

Above all, to not be your own slave-driver.

What am I doing?

To remain in control of yourself is the most important thing. To neither let a 'work ethic' or an id take over. When either one gets hold, it is important to wrestle control away from them again.

Organisational systems are a way of keeping the right part of yourself in control. By allowing this 'ego' to write the rules of your existence, which are followed even when it is not so present, your control over yourself is extended.

The most important thing is joining this up. I can set myself a task, and do it, but then what happens? A moment of unsure takes over and I get into the notifications-loop and shed hours. For this reason I have strictly-defined behaviours, or rituals, to follow when I get to a loose end.

Currently, this behaviour is 'check the ToDo list', and one for the finishing of the ToDo list 'Make a ToDo list for tomorrow', after which I can rest until I sleep.

The main productivity black hole at the moment is when I wake up. There are a whole host of things I need to do after I wake up that are not codified and so can be stretched out, and I'll often start working many hours after I wake up.

Why am I doing this?

Though I am careful to not have a puritan work-ethic (I despise 'work-ethic', as if work was an inalienable good), these behaviours do seem problematic.

For about a year I have been interested in forming a working-practice that is less defined by ideas of 'work' and more by ideas of rest and play.

It is difficult currently due to my position in an institution expecting that I conform to ideas of work. I have been told that I am expected to work 30 or something hours a week! I am sure I exceed that currently, but the reference to a quantity of hours is striking in its resemblance to employment and also its absurdity.

Absurd, partly because it seems this course was drafted as an underhanded way to allow people to experience the transformation of this degree, with all the positives of getting a degree, but with the absolute minimum of work required. The module assessment criteria are transparently designed to let people get a high grade with a minimum of effort required.

It may seem that I am putting down the degree as a joke. This would be true if I saw required work as inherently good. I don't. This degree allows people to focus on their own development as performance writers and people rather than hitting criteria and ticking boxes. The lecturers proceed as if the assessment criteria was this personal and artistic development, but the secret-in-plain-view is that this is nothing to do with the degree-on-paper.

This raises the question: why do I make so much work for myself? All of my projects infallibly require me to do large amounts of work, and I end up spending the last month before the hand-in just about solidly working, at maximal productivity, exhausting myself totally in the process. I don't need to do it. So why do I?

Systems

First Phase

Early on in my CEP, my system consisted of coming into the library every day, staying for a long period of time, and writing a blog every day. I thought these things would keep me structured and focused. Eventually they proved to be insufficient to keep me from getting distracted, and insufficient to force me to produce work.

Second Phase

Here I fell into structurelessness, and got caught in constantly setting out to work, not knowing what 'work' was, and then getting distracted while I despaired of working it out. In this way I wasted(?) a few weeks in aimlessness and infatuation.

Third Phase

This is characterised by rigid structure.

• I have a number of mini-projects (or mini-CEPs), that I have to manage simultaneously. Infatuation sonnets, Things I'd Rather Be Doing, etc, all exploring particular themes.
  • Each of these projects have their own page in my notebook.
    • If a project requires more than one page, the number of pages to turn to get to the next page of the project is put in the title of the previous page.
• I have a numbered list of 'next actions' for each of the projects, so that I always know what I have to do next, and nothing gets lost in unsure.
  • After I finish the 'next action' for a project, I must immediately add a new one for that project to the list.
• I have a ToDo list, titled "TODO" and the current shortened weekday.
  • I have to complete all of these tasks in that day, crossing them off as they are completed.
  • One of the items will usually be a list of circled numbers corresponding to tasks from the 'next actions' list. These, I 'x' out when completed.
  • Recently I have been putting a section titled 'REW' to the right of the list, for rewards for completing the tasks.
  • Before I go to sleep, usually last thing before, I write tomorrow's ToDo list. This is so I immediately know what to do when I wake up the next day, wasting the minimum of time.
• To give myself energy, I drink one can of Relentless Juiced Energy Drink a day. Masturbation to orgasm brings my energy down enough to go to sleep reasonably easily.

Forceps - Poetics

Since I last posted here I have been in a bit of a panic. I've spent the long weekend trying to force myself to produce something. I made the dubious choice of reintroducing caffeine into my life and the bad choice of sating myself with ice-cream, but finally today I have a plan about what to produce.

I've been doing nothing but research since I started. The CEP is about responding to a context, so I need to do that, especially considering it's almost week SEVEN. But glandular fever is still here for the most part, so I'm finding it hard to accumulate enough energy (hence the caffeine) to write. I wrote automatic for a while and that helped, but it was really just a different kind of research.

Today I struck upon the idea (I'm still working with my idea about Antarctica and contexts being transformed by infatuation) of writing sonnets. It works perfectly because Sonnets are so often talking about women by talking about nature¹, nature and the countryside strongly modified by infatuation. (My CEP, and I'm sure plenty of other peoples going on right now, has been heavily tangled up with/by infatuation.) So I'm interested in strained metaphors, sexual frustration, helpless and pathetic desire, desperation, the uncanniness of men's love, vulnerability, love-failure, onesidedness, blindly seeing the person of your desire caught up with everything else. In short: love poetry.²

The Shakespearean sonnet is the obvious choice.

To end, a little bit of prose that fell out of my brain yeseterday, unnerving me a little, and amusing Scarlett:

Ice queen. I lost it at the thought of you, semen all over the ice, frozen instantly, preserved but impotent, like the memory of you in my head.

¹ Hmm.
² Is poetry really a form suitable for expressing or even describing infatuation or love?

Forceps - Returns

OK, back from distractions again. People are like landmines, you know, most are safe enough, but occasionally one will blow (my mind). But, luckily I can call it work, even if it was a bit disproportionate, and I am calmed down enough now that I can start writing some.

So currently I'm researching the Antarctic (well, mostly, the Arctic too), with a view to writing about someone who sets out there for their CEP, but finds it inescapably and maddeningly transformed by the last person he saw before he left.

(I feel less and less comfortable with writing in the feminine person. It becomes more and more apparent that I am actually writing in the man-writing-as-woman person, which I think must have marked differences. This whole thing is very problematic, so maybe I'll do it anyway. Thoughts welcome.)

Forceps - Deceives

Today someone asked me about my block. Where I think it came from, or what it consists of. I had, earlier that day, realised what it was, but I didn't tell her, and I acted like I would have done before I realised. I was embarrassed.

The fact is, though my anxiety may be more obscure in its origins, my block is fairly obvious. I am distracted, and trying to get away from the fact that I am distracted. I don't want to admit it,

Suddenly, like cockroaches under light, like bleach through a sink, the block clears. I am writing already, what I intended to write many days before. It is clumsy, filled still with chunks of the block, the current still uneven and dysphoric... but it is writing. I am writing. Writing am I. I can only write myself. My CEP cannot avoid being about my CEP, or it fails (like any). The title: SAVAGE PICTURES/DISTRACTIONS.

Forceps - Doesn't Write

Terrifying.

The only thing I can really analogize this with is Performance Anxiety, in the sexual sense.

I have come to a point in my CEP at which I want to do some writing, some prose poetry, in a similar style to Calvino's in Invisible Cities, but I find myself unable to. I know I can, that it's possible for me to do so, that I have enough creative brain to produce ideas good enough to write, and skill with text enough to actually produce some, but I end up staring at something blank. Something I intend to fill with writing, but find myself unable to. A lack, in other words.

And it feels very much like not being able to be hard. I know what I want to do, I know what is wanted of me, I know it's the simplest thing in the world, and it should be nothing. But even though I know I can do it, I can't. The scene in the latest series of The Inbetweeners where Simon has this exact problem depicts the frustration perfectly (if you're willing to sit through two blocks of ads, you can view this scene by skipping to 21m45s on this video.)

I can't recall the quote, or the author (one of the French feminists, possibly Kristeva?), but the analogy with the famous ink/milk metaphor is obvious. The two states of mind are quite similar, for me, that of Performance Anxiety and "Writers' Block" (possibly better named "Writers' Flop' in this case).

I would take solutions from one and apply it to the other, but neither are solved problems for me. I have managed to stimulate my writing-phallus manually before, but it seems like the solution can never quite be remembered, like a dream, or the sensation of pain.

Forceps - Accelerates/Decelerates.

My current preoccupation is with speed.

Various things are altering the 'speed' of my brain. Exhilarating stimuli, danger, desire, caffeine, masturbation, exhaustion, food, music, moving image, illness, glandular fever, coding, writing, these are all things that affect the my speed.

I need to keep my activities and my speed compatible. If my brain is running too fast, I can't read, there's a bottleneck somewhere in my processing of language (maybe my eye movements) that means I accumulate energy and can't concentrate. If my brain is too slow, reading makes me sleepy, and I can't concentrate. If I do something too understimulating, too slow in other words, for the my current speed, I'll get anxious and stressed. If I try to do something that requires a higher speed than I am currently, I just can't manage it.

Yesterday someone told me they wanted to kiss me, someone who hadn't told me that before. At the same moment—it was a digital-textual communication—I was just coming back from jumping the fence at the Performance Centre VIP Opening to avoid security (turns out they'd all gone to dinner anyway). At that moment, I had the right speed to just let that go through me (the analogy that strikes me is being at a high enough speed in a vehicle to go up a gear without the jolt). But nonetheless, the rush was quite intense.

I had hoped that taking some caffeine would step up this morning's sleepy anxiety into a productive euphoria. Unfortunately, and oddly, I feel absolutely no difference. Next route is music and maybe some writing. I tried reading already but I was too fast for it, and then watching a video—usually slowing me down—which made little lasting difference.

Is this a masculine phenomenon? I realised yesterday my utter terror in the face of women. They have the power to make me more vulnerable than I could ever let anyone make me. Perhaps all of my romantic relationships are a process of me regaining that control over myself. Perhaps that is the masculine approach to relationships, to try to resolve this sudden loss of control. Perhaps rape comes from that direction too (loss of control over sexual desire, resulting in a need to resolve this through control over the object (necessarily objectified, for the act of rape) which took said control away from him.)

I suspect men to be the more vulnerable gender, and possibly the more vulnerable sex.

[I have heard men on a few occasions lamenting their loss of productivity and ability to work due to having their minds disrupted by women.]

Which is why I experience women's emotional masochism, desire to have control taken from them, to depend on me, as the most insidious betrayal. It fuels my madness, my paranoia, my overload, my heartbreak.

Forceps - Goes Back

That's Marco Polo, by the way.

Caffeine defeats glandular fever. Today on the bus, or somewhere before, I had the idea of working from the form Italo Calvino uses for Invisible Cities. How to describe it... perhaps serial prose poems? His are prose poems describing cities, framed as by a fictionalized Marco Polo to inform the great Kublai Kahn on his vast empire. One of my favourites:

No city is more inclined than Eusapia to enjoy life and flee care. And to make the leap from life to death less abrupt, the inhabitants have constructed an identical copy of their city, underground. All corpses, dried in such a way that the skeleton remains sheathed in yellow skin, are carried down there, to continue their former activities. And, of these activities, it is their carefree moments that take first place: most of the corpses are seated around laden tables, or placed in dancing positions, or made to play little trumpets. But all the trades and professions of the living Eusapia are also at work below ground, or at least those that the living performed with more contentment than irritation: the clockmaker, amid all the stopped clocks of his shop, places his parchment ear against and out-of-tune grandfather's clock; a barber, with dry brush, lathers the cheeckbones of an actor learning his role, studying the script with hollow sockets; a girl with a laughing skull milks the carcass of a heifer.

To be sure, many of the living want a fate after death different from their lot in life: the necropolis is crowded with big-game hunters, mezzosopranos, bankers, violinists, duchesses, courtesans, generals - more than the living city ever contained.

The job of accompanying the dead down below and arranging them in the desired place is assigned to a confraternity of hooded brothers. No one else has access to the Eusapia of the dead and everything known about it has been learned from them.

They say that the same confraternity exists among the dead and that it never fails to lend a hand; the hooded brothers, after death, will perform the same job in the other Eusapia; rumour has it that some of them are already dead but continue going up and down. In any case, this confraternity's authority in the Eusapia of the living is vast.

They say that every time they go below thei find something changed in the lower Eusapia; the dead make innovations in their city; not many, but surely the fruit of sober reflection, not passing whims.

From one year to the next, they say, the Eusapia of the dead becomes unrecognizable. And the living, to keep up with them, also want to do everything that the hooded brothers tell them about the novelties of the dead. So the Eusapia of the living has taken to copying its underground copy.

They say that this has not just now begun to happen: actually it was the dead who built the upper Eusapia, in the image of their city. They say that in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.

They say that in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.

I have an idea to use this form to utilize this form, except replacing 'city' with 'CEP'. I think the CEP has enough relevance as a form beyond the course to sustain this. The CEP more generally stands for a project, a coming of age, a journey.

Which is where it comes into play more subtly. Marco Polo's feats were that of the journey, of what sights he saw, and that's one big analogy to the CEP. But similarly, in Invisible Cities and elsewhere, Marco Polo's truthfulness is questioned: did he really go to all of those places? In Invisible Cities, he responds to the effect that he never left Venice, and that all of these cities are to be found there, through different perspectives and understandings. Equally, I will not embark on any of these CEPs (or will I?), but note that they must of course exist within my CEP too.

Or something. I'm moving, it looks like, to Penryn. It's all happening very fast, someone's coming to look at my room tomorrow and I guess if it suits her then we'll be moved by the start of November. It'll be good for me, financially, dietarily, and emotionally. I hope.