Take a photo of a barcode or cover
I know I have an ocean of sadness inside me and I have been damming it my entire life. I always imagined that something was supposed to rescue me from the ocean. But maybe the ocean is its own ultimate rescue—a reprieve from the linear mind and into the world of feeling. Shouldn't someone have told me this at birth? Shouldn't someone have said, "Enjoy your ocean of sadness, there is nothing to fear in it," so I didn't have to build all those dams? I think some of us are less equipped to deal with our oceans, or maybe we are just more terrified, because we see and feel a little extra. So we build our shitty dams. But inevitably, the dam always breaks again. It breaks again and the ocean speaks to me. It says, I'm alive and it's real. It says, I'm going to die and it's real.
Everyone is dying. I must remember this always but especially whenever I am on the phone with my mother and she is telling me that her mother has died. I must begin to treat everyone I meet and visit as if they are, very soon, going to die. I too am dying. I need to begin believing this, especially whenever I have a goal of spending the day in my study concentrating on nothing but my writing and do not spend the day in my study writing. I need to begin treating my thoughts, observations, and inclinations, that find themselves manifested as rhythms, that then suggest words and paragraphs and landscapes of syntax, as if they too are dying and will not be remembered again, will never again present themselves with the opportunity to be written down. In order to be a better writer and better reader, I need to believe in my own death and in the death of others.
IN THE DARKNESS, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.
Amidst such lunacy I had to find a territory that belonged equally to us all and would hurt us all as little as possible. And the only thing that could be, I thought, was our common past. Because another thing we all had been deprived of was our right to remember. With the disappearance of the country came the feeling that the life lived in it must be erased. The politicians who came to power were not satisfied with power alone; they wanted their new countries to be populated by zombies, people with no memory. They pilloried their Yugoslav past and encouraged people to renounce their former lives and forget them. Literature, movies, pop music, jokes, television, newspapers, consumer goods, languages, people—we were supposed to forget them all. A lot of it ended up at the dump in the form of film stock and photographs, books and manuals, documents and monuments—"Yugonostalgia," the remembrance of life in that ex-country, became another name for political subversion.
What I didn't realize abour mental illness is if you hide something inside yourself for too long, you break.