#but I’ve had my poetry published and remarked on by more accomplished poets. ANYWAY. anyway. my point is. i have credentials

[kaftan]

You know when you see a post and you’re like. Well. I do hold this opinion. So I guess in that sense I agree. But everything about how this take is being communicated is so repellent to me that I want to disagree on principle

[deanessner]

I Can't Give Everything Away

I have a cycle. When I’m bored or lonely, I break up my un-momentum with a little dance: checking my Facebook, then my email, then my Facebook again (keeping this tab open for easy access in case someone wants to contact me), then my Twitter, then my email again, then my Twitter again, and so on. Maybe I’ll disrupt the routine by wandering onto a New York Times article I discovered in my Twitter feed for a few minutes, but it’s only a brief footnote.

I read somewhere in some article — probably in one of those aforementioned “footnote” sequences — we approach this cycle the same way a lab rat presses a lever over and over again hoping for a food pellet. For us, those pellets probably seem to vary. Nourishment can come in the form of being up-to-date on the news or being in on a funny joke or knowing that an old friend received your birthday message.

But I think there’s a darker, duller edge to that gratification. I may check my Twitter in the focused spirit of seeing what inflammatory stuff Trump said today. I may check my email to see if an editor got back to me about a pitch. I may check Facebook to see if someone liked a song I shared. But, I also check for the sake of, well, preventing the pain of not checking. I’m not even referencing a fear of missing a crucial, time-sensitive thing; I’m talking about the deep, guttural, language-and-logic-defying need to check just to check. Even after pulling on the lever a few times and it yielding no pellet, a rat is bound to just keep pulling, right? (Sorry for the annoying Thomas Friedman-esque metaphor here — it just seemed appropriate.)

Why am I like this?

I used to think the main purpose for making and consuming art was to share  and experience it with others. You didn’t just have an opinion, you formed it, sculpted it. You thought about the right words and vocal cadence to describe something. You considered your audience. You ranked things, not for your own compartmentalization but so others could see the breadth of what you’ve seen. Art was something to advance your ideology and self-worth in the eyes of others. Art absorption was a proxy for power-grabbing and knowledge-accruing. What a piece or work actual meant to you was important, but, then again, that “meaning” was probably also informed by a restless fear, and also an excitement, about how others may see you. If a tree falls in the blah blah blah...... well, you get it. 

Peppered in with that perspective was a thirst for originality. I remember feeling a wash of sadness and futility after a college lit class I was taking studied the Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author” — which suggests that writing is inherently unoriginal because words are finite and each reader attaches his or her own meaning to sentences and paragraphs and stories anyway. If I couldn’t be new, then why should I bother to try and do anything?

Then, the need to try regardless of any audience came to me. In the summer of 2013, my previously bulky and broad-shouldered grandfather developed cancer and started losing weight at a rapid clip (he passed away in February of the following year). One afternoon, while I was alone with him, I suffered an intense panic attack. Then I suffered another one that night. It would keep happening. It was a bad few months for my mental health, but it taught me a valuable lesson: people make art to survive. 

I could barely play guitar (or any other instruments for that matter), but I started making music. I wrote and recorded a full 9-song album and 5-song EP over the course of three months. I now consider myself an accomplished songwriter, but not a musician, because I haven't really taken the time to learn music theory or chord patterns. I just know the way I feel when I press my fingers on certain keys or strings. Maybe I did this to run from and resist Barthes’ thesis, but, regardless, I knew I had a lot of emotions to purge that summer. I knew I needed some way of articulating and understanding what I was going through. I needed a way to feel more alive.

Since that summer, though, I’ve fallen back on old habits. I created and religiously monitored a Last.fm account: a social media platform for music lovers that let’s you see what you and your friends are listening to. I grew obsessed with the idea of others looking at what I was listening to. What did they think of me? Every time I’d listen to an album, I’d check to make sure it was also “scrobbling” (aka recording) to my profile. I recall a conversation with a friend where he remarked that my Last.fm account showed I didn’t listen to music all that much. I was devastated. In my quest to scrobble obscure artists as a way of displaying a depth of taste, I fell in love with some of my favorites bands: Stereolab, Can, The Dismemberment Plan, Shabazz Palaces. But still, was any of this authentic?

This obsession with exaggerating the extraverted parts of myself makes me think of the recent Jim Jarmusch film “Paterson,” which is about a bus driver (played by Adam Driver, ha ha) named Paterson who lives in Paterson, New Jersey and writes poetry (his favorite poet is William Carlos Williams, who has a book of poems titled “Paterson”) in between shifts. The audience’s intimate connection with Paterson comes in the form of these poems — he doesn’t share them with anyone, not even his loving wife Laura, except us. He stores them in a secret notebook. 

Paterson has the same routine every day. He eats his lunch by the same waterfall and walks home through the same industrial complex. Coupled with the fact that he doesn’t own a smart phone (by choice), Paterson lives an extremely boxed-in life. He writes poems, a form of escape and expression for sure, but for the most part, Paterson just listens. He listens to Laura discuss her dreams of becoming a country music star. He listens to a heartbroken man named Everett talk about losing his lover. He listens to Doc, the owner of the dive bar he frequents, tell stories of Paterson folklore. He listens to the chitchatting of his bus riders. 

Jarmusch doesn’t paint Paterson as a hero or a gifted genius as much as he does an observant vessel to frame the movie around, however I saw his character in a different light. For Paterson, poetry wasn’t a means to any end. He seemed to have no ambitions of getting published or sharing his work with the world. Rather, he wrote to survive. He wrote to make sense of everyday life. It’s easy to see Paterson as docile and powerless, but in reality, he was fully in control of himself. He didn’t need to open his mouth or share his art for it to mean anything. It existed for him.

As I consider my social media tendency with that “language-and-logic-defying need to check just to check” in mind, I’m reminded of David Bowie’s last song “I Can’t Give Everything Away” from the album “Blackstar.” The song concerns itself with two topics that mean a lot to me: how difficult it is to control the way people think of you (and in the late Bowie’s case, remember you) and whether it’s possible to keep anything to yourself. 

In reference to the latter, Bowie’s speaking about the pressures of celebrity. But, for me and my life, I view this theme through the lens of temptation and pressure. “Seeing more and feeling less/ Saying no but meaning yes/ This is all I ever meant/ That's the message that I sent/ I can't give everything away,” he sings. Translation: Let me die with some secrets. 

I also see this lyric, though, as a warning: Words are malleable. Ideas are interpretable. Nothing is fixed. But you know what isn’t subject to the whim of others? Your feelings. Your thoughts. Your secret notebook. Don’t give it all away if you don’t want to be hurt, he seems to say.

And maybe that’s the key to freeing myself from the cycle of checking Facebook and then Twitter and then email, and then doing it all again: Keeping some things to myself. 

Maybe the sooner I learn that only I matter in the network of me, the sooner I can learn to just exist in the poetry of everyday life.