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These past few weeks, maybe two months or so, have been characterized by an unusual degree of emotional instability, owing chiefly to my feeling infatuated with a friend of mine. This has happened often enough in my life that I understand that, if I like someone in this way, I do so with great intensity. I tend to appreciate this quality in myself, since it means that I feel very vividly and fully, even if that includes feelings of suffering. Many people who feel very little (such as some loved ones of mine suffering from acute depression) envy such emotional intensity, so I mean to display a minimum of gratitude that I feel this way at all. At the same time, when I feel most afflicted with jealousy, despair, anguish, hopelessness, or fear, I find it difficult to maintain this kind of gratitude. I often think about developing an attitude which, so to speak, goes beyond gratitude. (I mean that I consider whether I could actually embody such an attitude, and whether such an attitude can exist, not that I "think about it" as one thinks about moving to a new city.) I find it difficult to explain why I think such a departure necessary, but I can attest to such a thought arising frequently when I feel most unwell. Maybe because I feel loathe to express ingratitude, I try to do away with the dichotomy altogether.
This instability has been characterized at times by a feeling of intense centerlessness in the world. Sometimes I feel as though a very sketchy and volatile center rested at the object of my affection, but just as often I feel simply as though I have no particular point of equilibrium anywhere in the world. This feeling massively depreciates the longer and more honestly I speak with friends. The other day, for instance, I went for a walk around a nearby lake with a very close friend of mine who indulged in my feelings. This made me feel far more grounded and capable generally. Unsurprisingly, I tend to spiral if left alone with my thoughts.
While I ceased to write poetry, I felt far worse. I began writing again a week or two ago and have been writing with some consistency ever since. I think that, even though I've kept a very detailed diary for the past several months, this did relatively little to help me to manage my emotions. Although I tried to commit my feelings to writing as clearly and exactly as possible, this served mostly to make my emotions even more intense, rather than to dissolve or soothe them in any way. Poetry, by contrast, probably allows me more carefully to manipulate my present feelings and my memories in order to produce a more acceptable pattern.
Obviously, I hope that things go well with my friend. I also hope that things go well for them in general, of course, but I would be lying if I admitted to no selfishness on this point, since I badly want their happiness to become contiguous with my own. But I consider that selfishness as one aspect of an inextricable affliction. Otherwise, I must learn to figure out how to stabilize myself. I sleep very poorly, unfortunately; whenever I sleep poorly, my mood becomes markedly worse and I succumb to far less healthy thoughts and feelings. One may observe that a stooped posture makes for a stooped conscience.
The style of these posts so far strikes me as very neutral and very dry, but maybe I should just accept this for the time being. I often feel anxious that I communicate my feelings poorly, or that people assume I lack intense feelings. People have described me as "mysterious" and "intimidating", and I gather that this stems mostly from my being quite tall and mostly quiet, and having a face which sometimes strikes people as hard to read. I would describe myself as a very socially capable person, but I often have difficulty participating in a social setting, even with friends, unless I feel either that I can contribute a lot to the subject at hand or if I feel that my sense of humor would be appreciated. The latter occurs far more frequently than the former; I have an impression that I mostly make friends through humor. But I have to see and hear people in real time in order to make them laugh, I think; I have almost no aptitude for creating funny things.
When I read old diary entries, I frequently feel revulsion at their style, because it so often seems overwrought and pretentious. I try to write as clearly and concisely as possible in everything I do, and this apparently means that I should conform to an eye-wateringly tight style-guide, largely of my own invention. (Note the usage of predicate copulae in this entry, for instance.)
I still feel quite suspicious of poetry, in spite of my return to writing so much of it. I encountered this passage of Wittgenstein recently in 'Culture and Value': "The poet too must always be asking himself: 'is what I am writing really true then?' — which does not necessarily mean: 'is this how it happens in reality?'." In what does the value of such a distinction consist?
Suppose I actually do ask myself, while writing: "Do I tell the truth (by writing this particular set of words)?" Sometimes people write factual statements in poems, but to consult poetry for factual information about the world remains ill-advised.
"These seem the most apt words." --- But on what sort of criteria does such a judgment depend?
"Is this how it happens in reality?" --- Expressly *not* my concern, since I can, and almost always do, contrive some imaginary circumstance; fantastical things may occur, etc.
Do I consult a sensation of honesty (or lack thereof)?
And of what do I think while I *read* poetry? I feel something rather more like affection, enamoration, or a more neutral, but for all that no less intense, absorption while I read poetry which I really love (as well as, of course, whichever other sort of emotion the poems seems most keen to evoke, e.g. fear, joy, grief, and so forth). Do I often think: "So true!"? What if I said: a poem conveys an attitude towards a potential configuration of the truth; and this configuration is to be taken up and applied to one's own world, in an act of faith?