from weariness to hopefulness
Art making can help us alchemize the weariness of this time into hopefulness.
First post in a series on the macro to the micro of exploring novel interfaces for diffusion models.
Before we get into images, I’m going to tell you a story.
And I’m going to tell you a story about telling that story.
That’s a picture of my Dad, Dennis.
About three years ago in April 2020 he died from the coronavirus at his nursing home, the Chelsea Soldier’s Home in the greater Boston, MA, area.
It was start of the pandemic.
Everything was chaos.
Dad and I were deeply close to one another.
I talked Dad through his death - not by his side, as I’d planned for the prior five years - but over a Skype call.
It is unsurprising that after this event all of the light switches in my brain turned off. Raw animal instinct took over running my life. The animal moved me out of San Francisco. Moved me to Portland , where I’d barely spent any time before. Rented me a house. And parked me there for almost a year, to sit, quietly, underwater, doing my time on the strange syrupy realm of grief.
A year passed. I got vaccinated. I collected Dad’s remains and a few of his things on the east coast. And then eighteen months after I returned to Portland.
But now I wasn’t underwater. I wasn’t consumed by grief. I was just in an ordinary, everyday pandemic-appropriate depression, now in Fall 2021. Eighteen months out.
—-
Around then a new thing started in my life. I began to write.
I read a book - Claudia Rankine’s Citizen - and thought: if she can put form to her experience of as a woman of color in America, maybe I can put to form my experience of saying goodbye to my Dad in a pandemic onslaught over a 30 minute Skype call.
So I began to write.
I told the story in fragments.
I told the story in braids.
I told the story with an eye to governmental failure.
I told the story from the present.
I told the story from my past.
Again and again. A class turned into a second class turned into a third. An essay turned into a second turned into a draft of a book. A book about COVID and Grief.
Now here is the interesting thing.
About two months ago - a year and a half from when I began writing - my need to tell the Dad’s-death story started drying up.
I was signed up with three friends for a year long writing program. I still had three months left. 60 pages to hand in. What was that going to be about?
You keep mentioning psychedelics, Writer Friend said to me, and I have to say most people don’t make quick asides to psychedelics in their writing. There’s something in there.
I started writing into the theme. And the book began to feel three dimensional. LSD as the meeting point of my father and I. Ayahuasca as an eight year practice that I still don’t understand. Trips where I became explosive with anger over the conditions of my Dad’s death. Ceremonies where I cried so hard that eventually the facilitator asked me to stop. Trips that were just fun, amusing, messy, sexual, ridiculous. Trips where I was on my own personal search for God or Equivalent.
My dad’s death, and the circumstances around it, are a large story, to be sure. But what I realized is that somewhere, in writing out the story, cleaning out the wound “word by word” [1], I no longer felt that any blank page in front of me needed to be filled with the story of my Dad’s death.
I could take a step back, breathe a bigger breath, and think about the story I wanted to tell. Which, for this particular body of work, was about optimism and the blank slate reality of psychedelics. But I realized that I’d made a transition — from weariness to hopefulness. I had gone from telling the story I had to tell to the story I wanted to tell.
I don’t know who is conscious these days and not feeling weary. Acceleration permeates our culture. Things are getting faster and weirder and faster. But not necessarily better. Just harder to keep up with. And I think as we struggle to process our own personal experience amidst a backdrop of an accelerating culture, it wears us down.
I posit that art-making and image-making is crucial to alchemizing that weariness into hopefulness.
And that diffusion is a treasure chest of opportunity for that alchemy, waiting to be interfaced into and unlocked.
[1] Roxane Gay’s formulation in “Writing Into the Wound”