Sehnsucht

Exposed publicly as opposed to the hidden, private pages of a tucked away diary, there is a freeing quality about posting vulnerabilities here. Where else in our contemporary lives can everyone we know access shared experience? In so few years we’ve become utterly digitized and distanced from the zines that once felt like a shining ray of hope signaling connection. Publications are geared towards a particular readership; this place is filled with the people I know and a few stragglers. While this dumb platform is dangerous and divisive on a number of levels, its algorithms continually upset the possibility of equalized accessibility, it’s a way to share information quickly, much like the terrifyingly futuristic printing press has provided these past 500 years, in varying and frustrating degrees of access. Writing in excess on a photo-sharing app is also a way to hide in plain sight: the people who want to read will stop, but those who only scroll won’t give it a glance. I am aware that my generation is plagued by sincerity, but at least we are tapped into something earnest. I have no interest in relying on irony in what may be the crumbling final years of Earth as we know it. If these displays of honesty are so upsetting in an endless field of intentionally over-zoomed photos of something absurdly ephemeral (“it me”) then hopefully it is also disruptive of the way this app is supposed to work. Perhaps cringe is the real wrench thrust between the cogs of consumption.

Currently unemployed, injured, everyday retracing footsteps of my youth, I have had little opportunity to do much but reflect. I planned to come down here to be wildly creative but instead have been taking some sort of inventory of my past. The thing that has supported me through this emotional investigation is writing. In turmoil I find solace not only in venting but keeping a record of how I feel. It can act as a litmus test of my growth, it can be a reminder of the shitty situations I put myself in again and again, it can be a way to ponder thoughts and questions about the universe. Looking back can remind me what I want, what patterns I repeat and how my body chemistry can be more cyclical than precipitated by particular events. Writing is a validation of the feelings, even if we later doubt them.

I’ve never thought of myself as a writer, it’s simply a practice. My oldest sister would reward my good behavior with blank notebooks from the pharmacy when I was a child. My parents encouraged daily journaling with travel—my mom taking dictation before I learned to spell. The journal was my place for secrets, it was a space to explore, it was evidence of something I knew to be true within myself. On New Year’s Eve 1999, I decided I wouldn’t skip a day writing in my journal for a decade. And I didn’t, not a day. The majority of these journals are at my parents house. But I stopped writing as much in my late twenties. Stopped reading as much too. I found different outlets.

My lifelong guide has always been voracious reading and consistent attempts to articulate the ephemeral (and I’m utterly grateful for the multiple teachers who supplied me with books under the table, things that might have been uncouth to recommend at that age but completely changed my life). I read endless fiction as a teen, nearly only fiction, excluding the journals of my idols at the time, such as Susan Sontag’s and Sylvia Plath’s, who gave me some inspiration for how to write about my inner life and desires. When I finished Borges Complete Works of Fiction, I hugged the book, just sat there hugging it, eyes closed. He came and spoke to me in my dreams. He served as an uncommon role-model: His famous works weren’t written until his forties, he lost all eyesight in his fifties + was later appointed director of the National Library of Argentina.

Borges also introduced me to the term Sehnsucht that has been a lonely blanket across my life, comforting me in a sort of endless melancholy, cloaking me from reality. My lifelong journals have been the chronicles of my wanderlust, my longing to find this unattainable thing I think will make me whole. I think this indescribable feeling has bound me to so many of the close friends I’ve made over the years, who’ve felt a certain isolation in the present, a gilded reverence for a fast fleeting past + a pained desire to search, explore and eventually arrive, somehow, somewhere.

This feeling of being infinitely lost is almost sweet: a slight high arises, an ability to zoom out and hover over mundanity. Recently I have found myself wanting to toss off the smothering thing, a yearning that is too heavy for the life I want to lead, so I just looked up the German antonym for some guidance on how I shall be instead. Überdruss, defined as: weariness, aversion, antipathy. I certainly want none of that. Maybe there is hope in the yearning, or maybe there’s a third thing untethered to the Western dialectic. (Be Here Now)

My Bolivian-American highschool English teacher, knowing my adoration of Jorge Luis Borges but also of punk, introduced me to the works of dyslexic dropout Roberto Bolano before his novels had yet been translated to English. Mr. Urioste brought the books by the Chilean author back from Latin America and kept me updated on when they’d one day be translated to English. Bolano loved Borges most of all, too. I’ve been reading Bolano’s books for 20 years, most posthumously published in a brilliant scheme to keep his daughters financially afloat. Bolano seems to be writing his life story over and over, new anecdotes entwined with fantasy in every novel, recounting some other memories like pieces of evidence. Like he’s cursed to keep pouring these out to understand why his friendship with Lima changed, how he couldn’t go back to a wild youth in Mexico City, why he couldn’t find happiness, how everything catches up with age. Sehnsucht. I’m happy to go on those quests with him forever even when gruesome or trivial.

Someone I fell in love with once on the other side of the world has also been guided by sehnsucht throughout his life and, as a German speaker, told me the depths of its definition. Sehnsucht, he told me, is a wistful longing for a part of ourselves that has been lost, not so much a twin flame but actually a piece of the soul, a yearning so deeply foundational to our will to live, the shape of our existence, the guiding force propelling us with vivacity and passion on an eternal pursuit. We are unfinished without this unknown element and we may never find it, rendering us defined by our action as seeker. I felt with him as I have with a few special others among presumably more to follow, momentarily suspended from the weary journey of eternal upendedness by having found another. We find each other again and again in this life if only for a brief time, still unsatieted in our quest but at least found for the time being. Maybe this is actually the plot of all books. Maybe this is the basis of all writing.

The one creative writing class I ever took was a seminar on memoir my senior year of college with the seminal Hilton Als in 2007. He made space for personal investigation alongside reporting that had been absent from so much scholarly writing I’d interacted with. It wasn’t until I discovered Maggie Nelson and Rebecca Solnit that I realized one could be taken seriously for academic writing situated in experience. Nelson’s work exploded my universe–she made it so clear that the only ethical way to reason through an idea or to possibly contain a lifetime of gray areas, contradictions and context is to weave between it all, the way my brain so naturally and infuriatingly does. And now as I pore over Hugh Raffles deeply personal anthropology, I can’t imagine another way to read or write history than through the geological strata of relationships and memory. Raffles makes me want to write a research paper, if only I could be a fraction as lyrical and precise as he.

Sometimes I wonder if writing is actually my practice and visual art is an experimentation that allows me to experience the things I get to write about. I’ve always staunchly believed that each creative pursuit supports and enriches any other, but it’s interesting which endeavors we choose to give weight to, define ourselves as, or drain resources to support.

To conclude this meandering reflection on words and saudade, perhaps you’ll enjoy the images I’ve included here, snapshots of some entries penned across my nearly four decades. Since my journals are all boxed away and stored at my parents house as my most precious possessions, these are all pictures I’ve taken while visiting them and forayed through the portal to my past. Therefore, what I have is random, scattered and simply what I found saved on my phone.