Fantasy people are just as unreliable as real people. I can think of a name and… there they are. But it’s kind of like that scene in ‘Back to the Future’ where the picture is fading out, because sometimes there is only the shadow of a person, or the memory of what I think I remember them as. If the emotional connection is lost, they are more like phantoms of themselves. Faded. I can’t remember what was once there that held my attention. I can’t think of anything for them to do or say or think or feel. What I can think up now feels like a commercial or something shallow and plastic. It can be fun, but very little more. And then days go by or sometimes weeks and it feels like it will never end, I will never get it back and I will have to find something new to deposit my feelings into. Sometimes I will have a back-up, something to hold my interest at least, but it won’t feel the same. It’s not that central figure, it can’t take the role of a persona, it can’t hold negative feeling for long, it’s not that useful. And I think about what I was imagining before, when it was still good, and it seems far away and hard to understand. Maybe my depression has overtaken my ability. Maybe I burnt it out. And life is hard then, and empty, and I want to change everything around and I can’t defend myself anymore against myself. Then something will change. Sometimes it’s a song but usually it’s a big distraction. A project at work I actually have to think about. Something stressful and emotional, a trigger. A new story, or an old story re-told. Then it is back again, full again. I can travel the little universe where this creature lives and truly see through its eyes and feel what it feels (it’s feeling what I’m feeling, or just the opposite?) and its world is solid. And it starts again. And there are new parts of the story and new places to go. The funny thing is, everything seems to work like this. Relationships with people fade in and out and life is taken for granted. Writing can flow or be blocked. The perspective I see myself with changes. It’s the connection between thought, emotions, body. Personified in the image of some fantasy persona. Always balancing itself out. Balancing myself out. But others can see me better when the persona is gone. I can see myself best when the persona is there. The conduit seems more like myself than I do, even though it does not exist except for in my own mind. And what it needs to tell me this time. I wonder if this cycle is the same as the cycle of addition, the cycle of creativity, the cycle of the moon and the human body.
I am reading Germaine Greer’s ‘The Beautiful Boy’ and there are lots of passages I want to quote here. Coming soon. My roommate is trying to get me a job teaching. This should be a crazy summer. It’s 70 degrees here and the sun can burn skin and it’s winter still.