Verbose, self-indulgent ten year retrospective

This entry is a verbatim copy of the original as posted in Vroenis, the older diary of the two I write.
As of the 20th of September 2010, I have made this entry temporarily available as a new entry has been written in Vroenis.

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It was a tough decision, but I decided to post my ten year retrospective here in Vroenis rather than in Nav as this is the older diary, and has always been the primary space for expression.

As The Beast Called Horror project is still in progress, this entry will be available here until the next entry is written, at which time I will remove it from the chronology and leave a reproduction of it in Nav.

I owe the beginnings of my writing to two people; my father and my brother. I do not ever remember a time when dad didn’t want to talk to me, and we’ve been the best of friends for as long as I can remember including the naturally turbulent adolescent years which saw us endure some of the worst periods of my illness. For quite some time he encouraged me as a child to carry a notebook with me wherever I went and for years I never took the advice. Most likely with the onset of puberty at the age of thirteen or so, I obtained a notebook from my more worldly older brother, already part-way through high-school, and began writing down the thoughts I had as suggested by dad. I still have almost every notebook I’ve ever written in and once in a while dig one of them out and read. Often I laugh, sometimes shaking my head as I do so, and sometimes I’m humbled by the insights I recorded now that so much more life has occurred since then.

Ten years ago today, the 11th of September 2000, my brother convinced me to start an Open Diary account. I was 18 and had recently finished reading David Eddings’ fantasy series called The Elenium and going through the motions of post-pubescent cultural exploration, I named myself Anakha from the novels which in the story means something along the lines of ‘he who has no destiny’. This of-course appealed to me for obvious reasons; in the context of the story, the main character was feared and/or loved by the various gods of the universe because he was the only being they could not predict actions for outside of the divine community. That is naturally a romanticising of the point at which a human decides to choose his or her own destiny, predetermined by nothing. You can understand that at 18, naming myself after such an idea was in some small way empowering.

Years later I would change the name to Vroenis. I have only ever told my dearest friend Rok what it means, however since then it has changed. It may be superfluous and excessively contrived, but I feel great importance in naming one’s self. Names are bestowed upon us usually by our parents to whom the name tends to have significance, however at some point I decided I was to choose my own name and it could not be referenced from any pre-existing literature, historical record or cultural tradition. Regardless of what I designate the name to mean, for all intents and purposes, as far as the psyche goes, I am first and foremost very much Vroenis before I am Timothy which is Ancient Greek and also eventually biblical.

I cannot mention my early work without a wince and a smile, and I’ve grown rather fond of how terrible some of it is. Quickly browsing through a handful of entries recently, I’ve found I don’t have the immediate instinct to delete them all as I usually have had in the past. They are after-all my roots, the awkward early steps one makes on the long and winding path towards finding their own voice and thus I have deemed them important, if not sometimes entirely stupid. Usually when I reflect on my feelings of my writing having been written by someone else, it’s usually in a surrealist and abstract sense, however the responses I have to my older work are a touch more comedic than that, and if it makes me smile, it stays. I also like it to be a publicly traceable path so that the evolution of my writing is clear. It’s all important stuff, those awkward, desperate, often furious scratchings; the illusions of apathy, the experimentation and the abstracts of my experiences. While I tend to have a cut-off date for when my writing really started taking shape, I still believe the early pieces are important in understanding how and why I came to the voice I now have.

To provide an abstract of it, several key things have shaped the way I now write;
First and foremost; what has now more or less accurately been diagnosed as Bipolar Schizo-affective disorder.
The disorder component is a point of conjecture, but that is a discussion that is only engaged under the strictest of intimacies. As a matter of convenience, the terminology shall be left as is. Nevertheless, some of what has come from a long list of doctors and experiences is that I have ‘suffered’ this disorder to varying degrees from early childhood. While some of the experiences I’ve had have been traumatic for myself and my family, I have never suffered any primary abuses either physical or psychological to create this scenario, it seems primarily to be chemical in nature for whatever unknown reason. There have been events that have created environments in which the disorder can enact psychologically distressing and traumatic episodes, however I’m very careful in not blaming those things. They are not the root cause, and a big part of growing up was coming to understand that fact.

Minimalist and abstract film.
A vague chronology begins with Mamoru Oshii’s first Ghost in the Shell animated feature, though it would be years until this became an emotional landmark in my life. It was however my first real encounter with minimalism that struck me in a powerful way and burnt into my mind as a point of genesis. In the years leading up to it, my father had brought us up watching foreign films on the Special Broadcasting Service in Australia both at home and at his mother’s house when we would visit. We have all been reading subtitles for a very long time and established the skill of reading and taking in visuals at an early age.
The next most remarkable and memorable work would be Yasuyuki Ueda and Yoshitoshi ABe’s pioneering abstract anime Serial Experiments Lain. It was the very first time in my life that I was taken-aback that a work so finely tuned to my personal sensibilities could be created. I’ve often heard and read about people who were confused or baffled by Lain’s bare and abstract presentation, but it struck a chord with me in how similar it resembled many of the experiences that had become almost daily expectations, depending on where I was (and indeed still am) in the bipolar cycle. Lain made perfect sense to me visually, from a narrative perspective and atmospherically. Upon recent re-watch sessions I realise it actually is far less abstract than many of the works I’ve come to know and love, but almost all of those have come after it chronologically. Lain still stands as one of the most influential pieces to start me on my journey into abstract film.
I would usually open all of my meta-data tracking sites and databases to figure out the exact chronology of the following works, however I don’t feel it’s necessaryfor this piece. What followed after Lain were these key works;
– Mamoru Oshii’s Jin-Roh and to a lesser degree, the earlier Patlabor II: The Movie.
– Yoshitoshi ABe’s own anime Haibane Renmei, based on his doujinshi.
– Yasuyuki Ueda’s anime Texhnolyze, for which Yoshitoshi ABe provided the character art.
– Hyun-seung Lee’s romantic feature film Il Mare.
– Thomas McCarthy’s feature film The Station Agent.
– Hiroshi Ishikawa’s second minimalist feature film Su-ki-da (breaking intentional).

Three films that perhaps remain the most influential to my writing are;
– Steven Soderbergh’s loose remake of Andrei Tarkofsy’s feature film Solaris, based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem.
– David Lynch’s masterpiece feature film Mulholland Dr.
– Hiroshi Ishikawa’s minimalist landmark Tokyo.Sora which remains to this day, my most treasured feature film, the quality and emotion of which no other film I’ve ever seen begins to approach in even the vaguest of ways.

Recent works that I feel celebrate the spirit in which I write include;
– Mamoru Oshii’s humbling and beautiful Sky Crawlers, loosely based on Hiroshi Mori’s novels. My favourite Oshii film to date.
– Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell sequel Innocence.
– Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut feature film Synechdoche, New York, a miracle of cinema.
– Jim Jarmusch’s minimalist masterpiece feature film The Limits of Control.
– Richard Linklater’s iconic rotoscoped feature film Waking Life, which I would likely nominate as the film to reflect the more talkative and discussional tendencies I have at times, most commonly found in Nav rather than Vroenis.

Literature.
I won’t go into why I don’t read much these days, but it’s worth a mention as I do tend to re-read these few novels.
– Arthur C. Clarke’s space opera Rendezvous with Rama. Strictly excluding the sequels co-written by Gentry Lee.
– William Gibson’s post-cyberpunk Bridge trilogy; Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties.
– To a lesser degree, Gibson’s cyberpunk pioneering Sprawl trilogy; Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

These days the only books I buy with any kind of regularity are children’s picture-storybooks.
The most influential include;
– Shaun Tan’s The Red Tree stands as a personal icon of deeply emotional minimalism and symbolism.
– Colin Thompson’s medium-text exploration of death from a child’s perspective, Looking for Atlantis, featuring Thomson’s unique surreal transformations of ordinary spaces into abstract worlds.
– Terry Jones’ wonderfully atmospheric long-text illustrated novella The Saga of Erik the Viking, featuring beautiful drawings by Michael Foreman.
– Kurt Baumann’s humble, hauntingly beautiful, loose retelling of The Prince & Pauper, The Prince and The Lute, a very old publication that was given to me by my brother.

Music.
The scope of musical taste is broad indeed, and it would be impossible to explore it fairly in brief, however there are some pieces that deserve mentioning;
– Cliff Martinez’ soundtrack to Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris.
– Yoko Kanno’s soundtrack to Hiroshi Ishikawa’s Tokyo.Sora.
– Kenji Kawaii’s predominantly minimalist soundtracks to Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell, Innocence: Ghost in the Shell 2 and Sky Crawlers.
– Hajime Mizogushi’s soundtrack to Oshii’s Jin-Roh including his then wife Yoko Kanno’s vocals on the closing piece, perhaps the most haunting piece of music ever created.
– Yoko Kanno’s quieter works from anime series’ Cowboy Bebop and more favoured Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex including the second half/second season 2nd Gig.
– Kou Otani’s quieter works from Yoshitoshi ABe’s anime series Haibane Renmei.
– Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtrack to David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr.
– Gustavo Santaolalla’s soundtrack to Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel.
– The album Eingya from Helios, a moniker of Keith Kenniff.
– Duncan Sheik’s albums (Self titled debut), Humming and in particular, Phantom Moon, a personal icon.
– BT’s cerebral landmark album This Binary Universe, primarily created in surround-sound rather than retro-mixed as with most surround projects; the stereo downmix is not the prime work.
– The music of Ólafur Arnalds, Jóhann Jóhannsson and Max Richter.
– U2’s song If You Wear That Velvet Dress from the album Pop.
– Underworld’s piece Skym from the album Beaucoup Fish.
– dZihan & Kamien’s piece Drophere from the album Gran Reserva featuring the voice of Madita.

That is perhaps the smallest snapshot I could possibly provide of my influences. Naturally life experiences are the constant primary inspiration or dare I say it, directive or even mandate to write, however they are represented here and in Nav in abstract. Nav was originally created in lieu of Open Diary server difficulties at the time, however it does contain more pragmatic accounts of certain specific events, and also commentary on various art works, events and emotions. As of the 1st of March 2010, I have closed Nav to the public while leaving limited access to the archives, as I have found that strictly controlling my readership is something I require. Without being too critical of the Open Diary community, I am not fond of the habit of OD culture to random-in on or check only the most recent entry and leave a vague, barely insightful note. Vroenis at least by nature has been prohibitive to randoms and tyre-kickers for years, but Nav has always contained more normal writing and so has attracted various passers-by over the years. Access can be granted to the diary upon reading through the archives and providing me insights in the notes, such now is the work that I have no interest in having people read it that are not well versed in my personal languages. I now consider all of my writing intimate in nature including Vroenis that as discussed is protected by its own apparent vagueness and obscurity, and such intimacies will not be shared unless a relationship with the work, and in abstract, myself as the author has been established. I do rather enjoy being a harsh bastard in this regard.

One thing I have begun in Nav and am considering for Vroenis is reading back through the entire diary and writing retrospective commentary at the end of entries that provoke deeper reflection. These are all indexed with a commentary tag for easy reference. It’s a long project to engage with Nav alone, let alone the ten years of writing here in Vroenis; nevertheless at some point it will be done. Part of the same process is also setting some entries to private access only, meaning there is no public or user-login access permitted. Whether or not you will ever see those entries is a discussion we may have years after we’ve known one-another, but I don’t believe you’re missing much; they’re mostly just a few bitter and angry rants at various people who in fairness, didn’t deserve them. If anything I draw the line at vitriol as far as ridiculous writing goes; I’m happy to retain the awkward, comical desperate early work.

Contrary to how I often behave when engaged socially, when I write, minimalism has become the natural form of my expression, and the chief reason I don’t read novels. I have become extremely particular as to how I say certain things when writing creatively and it has created in me a distaste for excess language. For the last two years I have become increasingly obsessed with language, particularly non-verbal language and languages that are built of meta-components; personal shared history, pattern recognition, implied and suggestive behaviour. When I write now, even the most seemingly stripped bare piece contains dense expressions of meaning, it’s simply not said in words. I suspect that doesn’t work very well for the reader who is not privy to the internal mechanisms of my personal languages, and I’m happy for that to be the case. In these spaces, I write only for myself with no regard for any audience. As clichéd as it sounds, my writing is very much about what is not said as what is. Furthermore, there are some things which I regard as irrelevant to the nature of the piece. If two people are having an intimate conversation, then they are having it in a location that is intimate to them and I have no necessity to dictate or define it. You may do that if you wish, but I’ve long freed myself from the traditional anchors with which most of us have been raised with in our reading. For many I imagine simply not knowing names, genders, settings and character history is frustrating; so be it. I believe that if you need those components, you’re capable of creating them yourself in order to more greatly facilitate the spirit of the atmosphere in the writing.

That raises another key component of my writing that should have been quite clear for years now; very little of it is literal, even the stuff that very clearly is. I delight in symbolism, in the abstract and representative, so much so that it has become the most common natural language in which I write. It is almost always safe to assume that what is literally specified in the text is not the primary expression of the text. Without a doubt, I will use the nature of a conversation between figures to create an abstract, an emotion, and it is that emotion that is the heart of the work. I’m somewhat baffled by the necessity to outline such a setting, but so many of my readers both online and off seem to struggle with the content. There are entire slabs of our literary history devoted to simile, metaphor, and allegory, I rather thought it would be obvious upon encountering it. The issue may be that those that know me are perhaps attempting to decipher what I am saying rather than taking up the authorial control I am freely giving them which is a noble thought, but almost redundant. I’m not likely to explain any of my work to anyone unless once again, under the strictest of intimacies which in this case probably indicates lifelong partnership as a bare minimum. Even then, I’m not entirely sure I am capable of explaining in a pragmatic way subject-matter that has not been created in the spirit of pragmatism. They are languages of emotion, of representation, of ideas, experiences and responses coming to life and having autonomy to the extent that they transcend practical translation. You can call that wank if you like, I’d be inclined to agree with you; it’s one of the reasons I don’t like talking about my work. My work is the abstract of the experience; I can’t very-well try and translate it again in a practical abstract, so to speak, to try and define it; it is itself a definition of something, of things that cannot be expressed on a primary, practical level.

These days I’m very careful in suggesting art works for people to experience. Music is probably the easiest thing to share which is one of the wonderful things about the medium, but literature including my writing, and in particular film can be difficult indeed to recommend. The various films I watch have been criticised by those around me as being un-approachable due to their often abstract nature, but I’ve never found this to be the case. For me many of them aren’t actually abstract at all; they make very clear sense to me on both an emotional and intellectual level, and by saying intellectual, it is another process of parsing that may not have a pragmatic abstract that is easily shared. Those films simply don’t confuse me and have been a wonderful part of establishing my own languages. In turn, I seem to express myself in a similar fashion and regardless of whether it is effectively communicable, I am extremely proud of how perfectly my expressions are translated for myself. At some point there was a threshold I crossed where I stopped struggling to say what I wanted to say and just started saying it.

All of that happened here, on Open Diary, in this diary through years of mental illness, the establishment and dissolving of lover’s relationships, the turbulence of understanding human society and the slow evolution towards only the most important components of expression.
Ten years after the most humble of literary beginnings, I am working on what is becoming a two-year project, the longest I’ve continued one consistent work, and the most important thing I’ve ever written in my life. With it I seek no fulfilment in broad publishing, nor even the understanding of one other person; it is a fulfilment of my own expression and a record of the events of my life, much more clearly than a pragmatic account ever could be. Perhaps it’s the tilt of my supposedly imbalanced brain, but I’m given to believe that even that is a secondary component of a greater experience, suffice to say that given the opportunity to cancel any and all symptoms of schizo-affective disorder, I would unequivocally choose to keep them, so integral are they to the way I experience life.

That is my verbose entry for the year.
I suspect I am likely never to do it again hereafter.