Something More, Something Other

I’m not writing; I cannot write. Boring, dull, and vapid words and discourse keep running on my algorithmic screen and fogging my brain that I need to escape to an analogue memory of standing in front of Van Gogh’s painting “Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette” in Amsterdam. This painting was his less well-known work, done when he was a student at Antwerp around 1885-86. Someone who smokes, like Van Gogh himself, might understand that you don’t bite cigarette between the teeth. You need lips to hold them in your mouth. Biting the butt makes it harder to inhale, but in Van Gogh’s painting: the skull bites the bottom and still burns. An anatomy painting meets fantastical image of cigarette burning without the flesh.

I laughed when I first saw the painting. I felt it mocks me or anyone who sees it. I could almost see it sneers and smirks, teasing smokers, inviting them to burn their cigarettes until the end of their flesh, igniting a little light at the edge of our death.

The skull made me rushing to go back to my narrow room in Leiden. I could not stand longer in Museumplein by myself on Summer because it was crowded by tourists (not strangely, lots of USAmericans and white women with dreadlocks) and I couldn’t stand big crowd trying to have fun. Putting on my hooded sweater, I walked as fast as I could to the nearest station, brought my self back to a place I like a lot. So, I lit one in front of a canal near my building. I sip it once and let the fire burns without oxygen from my lungs. I had stopped smoking regularly, although I always missed the smells of kretek on my lips, not on my hair.

Let me bite a butt and I still didn’t write; I barely wrote.

Near the end of this memory is a more and more agony of being in between of dissatisfaction—to leap further away from the crowdedness of bad discourse and uninteresting writings—and disappointment for not doing the things. Here comes my self-annoyance. I want to write something I want to read: my impression of art and literature, a slice of history in its empirical coldness and poetic charge without sentimentality, a sensual criticism or erotic prose about lesbian porn and a keyword “tribbing” that comes with dozens of featured images of women without face, a fiction that feels false and right at the same time, an encyclopedia of someone’s vertigo episodes; but I don’t write them and keep panicking what if a better writer write those shits and of course, those better writers already did but I haven’t read all of them (and I read a lot!) so I’m stuck in the loop of thinking and not writing. I’m not obsessive enough. I’m not fixated enough. I hate writing. I love it so much. I want to be great. I want to do it so well that I cannot bear myself for publishing mediocrity.

What one can dream about the flesh of writing when all I can see right now is a skeleton, a frame that looks effortless in burning something without inhaling and digesting it? Is there a light and lite at the end of my writing that does not even start, that does not even know a beginning, that does not go through “once upon a time in a place”?

The damnation of not writing is painful for me as I try to keep sharpening my pencil without using it, and the pencil point is now breaking again. But this is not as painful as bullshit slogan of seeking softness in writing literature, uttered by someone who has made a living out of their empty words? Words, words, words: too much romanticized care in writing, too many therapy talk, not enough audacity, not enough entitlement, not enough dysregulation, less and less refusal and stubbornness, not enough hatred in good-enough literature, not enough love for a great literature.

An agony of writing as my urgency: this is what I get from finally jotting down my conscious memory of encountering Van Gogh’s painting. The ways I tremble in front of someone’s art, the ways a charismatic sentence electrifies my brain that I need to look stare on the wall for a couple of minutes, the ways brilliant writers make me look into something deeper, further, and beyond whatever I know. The feelings of overwhelm moves me toward a certain way of aliveness, a specific form of doing something in the world, a politics of claiming power and risking an opening—toward more and more of other and other.

Not writing, duh, I’m almost there.