Random uncontainable energy

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VIII, 1923

I don’t know whether it’s a cultural thing or something more deeply biologically rooted, but we tend to characterize periods of our lives by circumstances or places or people. External things. It was back when I was working in investment banking or when I was dating P. We used to shoot the shit more often when I was living in NYC.

Where you live and who you’re dating do, after all, dictate many things. You localize your life around what you have access to in your city and even more parochially in your neighborhood — the food you eat, the culture you drink, the trails you run. In the same way, any decent boyfriend shifts his center of gravity at least some distance away from himself. How much these things impact one’s life and how steadfastly one holds on vary by person, but attachments seem a suitable eponym for such things.

I had this thought recently, precipitated by a feeling, that perhaps an alternative exists.

A few weeks ago I was hit by this sudden onset of what I can only describe as random uncontainable energy. I want to create something, and I want whatever it is to be so ambitious that I’m scared to tell anyone about it for fear of never being able to see it to completion. If that sounds crazy it’s because it is. Setting out to do something, the scope of which you can’t even fully wrap your own head around, is daunting if not downright self-defeating. Who wants to sign up for a marathon to only run 1 mile? But I feel as though anything less amounts to using a firehose to pour myself a glass of water — too little space for such vastness.

Redoubling my efforts in keeping my Substack, writing more words and more often would satisfy this urge, or so I initially thought. That has been proven demonstrably wrong as what I have come to experience is something more akin to l’appétit vient en mangeant. I’ve been nibbling and nibbling and instead of reaching some endpoint or even checkpoint of satiety, my appetite won’t stop growing. It’s even painful in its restlessness, in that somewhat sharply satisfying way extended fasting can be. The appetite analogy makes this seem counterintuitive, but I believe that’s more a result of how we view things versus some inveterate law of the universe; we accept our current perspective as if nothing precedes it.

Instead of accepting this framing, I’ve come to see the nibbler’s appetite as much more like a child’s creativity. While distance has cast on the child’s mind the bleary dullness of a dream, I think that is perhaps what has been reawakened in me. Instead of a narrowing of my aperture — the world shrinking smaller as I grow from kid to adult — an expansion is taking hold, and at an accelerating pace.

I’ve come to see it as undoubtedly the preeminent force in my life right now, this random uncontainable energy. Where I live and who I spend time with matter, but their hold on me has receded into the background. That’s not to say I won’t meet any number of impactful people, developing lifelong friendships and pursuing passion projects all the while. It’s more just that what I end up creating, whatever it may be, will be a product of this period. And when I look back at this time in my life from some future vantage point, here I will have left ineradicable evidence of the centrality of this state of being rather than something I fancifully conjure up a posteriori out of intellectual intrigue. This vitality is here now, and I feel it enough to acknowledge it.

I say this all as I write a short essay, aware that hitting publish will only make me hungrier. The truth is, I feel some need for externalizing continuity, and that solitary output fails in this regard. In some sense, I remain beholden to that arbitrary force always blurring the line between artist and performer, incessantly asking whether one is creating or being created. I believe, as I’ve spent time thinking and feeling it, that I create mostly out of some inexplicable compulsion, of which very little has anything to do with audience reception (not that I have much of an audience to speak of!). Thus far, the deepest I’ve tunneled into the raison d'être leads me to this visual of a glowing white orb within me, its source of energy unknown, casting blinding light in all directions, always seeking a way out. This feels like the punchline to one of those dumbly clever riddles: what grows larger as it escapes its confines? Perhaps, like all riddles, its answer too will be head-clutchingly obvious only after. Yet somehow I don’t expect there to ever be an after.