Dear Reader,
It's time for me to try to tell you about a book I have been reading. I am reading it slow, languorously even. I think, as I often do, that it is a book for everyone, but don't I think that about most of the books I am reading?
Let us think on that while we listen to this, your song for today.
It has to do with the problem of audience- audience of one, or less than a million, or less than a hundred; the audience is like ants, you know, one only matters to oneself. One ant is nothing to even mention. Of course, in writing you here, I do think of audience, I think of reader, listener, viewer. It's thorny. Do I do a thing for just one person? Or, even for the hope of just one person?
Here is a page from The Observable Universe by Heather McCalden:
CULTURE = LIFE CONTENT
If you have ever found yourself on the periphery, outside of dominant narratives and nuclear-ish families, you will have passed through a period of emptiness wherein the material of your life was not 'suitable' for any of the things around you. Meaning: no outlet or form of communication existed to convey your experience, and so the experience remained caught inside you, seething. Without external channels to link to there's no way to transmit your information, so the internal landscape deactivates. It shuts down and remains inaccessible, since no actions or language can scrape away at it. Since you are, in fact, on your own.
The only recourse then is culture. Instead of one's experience, songs, podcasts, and TikToks are transformed into a shorthand for particular emotions or situations. At certain points in my life, if you asked me how I was I would have only been able to respond with data. I could summarize the latest Game of Thrones episode, or recite the anecdote about Esther's dollar bill from This American Life. I could tell you about the New Yorker story of red honeybees and the 'maraschino mogul,' but I would not be able to answer even the simplest question about myself because I had nothing inside. I felt like a ghost and quite often when I entered a room I felt people pull away from me as if suddenly encountering a cold front. Maybe this fetishizes or romanticizes the situation, puts a metaphor on a state of being that quite possibly doesn't deserve one, but how do we talk about pain in a world full of pain? We can't. We don't even try. We talk about culture instead. That's why it spreads.
Let's hope this message finds its audience.
PS
I might have given you this one, instead:
OLDEST TRICK IN THE BOOK
If life has ever scraped you out and left you with no prospects, you can use art as a coping mechanism. You can apply it to your day-to-day. Take its content or its forms and use them to patch in what's missing. Take a fictional premise, maybe even a genre, and adapt it to your situation. See what happens.
