Clarity.

So I don't have it on me, because I lent it to a friend, but I read recently a book by the film director David Lynch (Mulholland Dr., Eraserhead, etc.) about his film career and his fascination with transcendental meditation. In the second chapter (each is only a couple of pages long), he writes about the "Rubber Clown Suit":

When I started meditating, I was filled with anxieties and fears. I felt a sense of depression and anger.

I often took out this anger on my first wife. After I had been meditating for about two weeks, she came to me and said, “What is going on?” I was quiet for a moment. But finally I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “This anger, where did it go?” And I hadn’t even realized that it had lifted.

I call that depression and anger the Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity. It’s suffocating, and that rubber stinks. But once you start meditating and diving within, the clown suit starts to dissolve. You finally realize how putrid was the stink when it starts to go. Then, when it dissolves, you have freedom.

Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story, but they’re like poison to the filmmaker or artist. They’re like a vise grip on creativity. If you’re in that grip, you can hardly get out of bed, much less experience the flow of creativity and ideas. You must have clarity to create. You have to be able to catch ideas.

There's more that I liked, but like I said, I don't have the book on me. He mentions something else about how he never was into drugs because that would ruin his clarity. It made me think how that's just another reason not to smoke, drink excessively, or use any other kind of substance. I want my work to be purely the result of my thoughts, not the result of an altered state of mind.

It also made me think of how we ruin the clarity of our experience of everything in life by hiding. There are so many things we hide behind, whether it's through substance use, a facade of toughness, fictional worlds, materialism, or fear. I suppose in some ways these things could heighten our experiences, but more than anything else, I think they lessen it. In excess, at least. In small doses, in moments, I guess they're merely isolated experiences in and of themselves. But if you make a habit of hiding behind these things, they become a way of life, and a way of cheapening life. If that makes any sense.

In that sense, part of me is determined to live with as much clarity as possible, as much strength as possible - embracing pain and fear instead of relying on something else to numb it, take it away, to dull it, to soften the blow. Because really, that's what all that stuff does. It makes it easier. And I guess in some ways, we have natural defenses to help us through life, and it's okay to rely on them when the going gets tough, but at the same time, I can't help feeling like I'd rather either fight or embrace everything that comes than try to make it go away without facing it. And hiding behind these things, that's not facing the pain. It's running away.

I'm fairly certain tomorrow I'll reread this and disagree with myself entirely. Well, maybe not entirely, but I think I'll feel differently. After all, "I know that night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started." One of the two parts of A Farewell to Arms that I liked. Haha.

Speaking of literature. I'm presently finishing up Edward Albee's Three Tall Women, and it's absolutely fabulous, like everything I've ever read by him. I'll probably write more about it soon.

----------------
Now playing: John Mayer - New Deep