The pit.

[shiels]

Yes what wr think about in the pit isnt necessarily related to what made us fall in. Although your mind will convince you it is! that script in your head can more often be a symptom of a bodily state

If like myself you’re the abstracting absent minded kind of person you’re probably reliant on thinking your way out of stuff, taking the right angle or logically breaking things down. And im not great with keeping life in a good physical rhythm that leads to emotional stability, so the pit is often a collapse of the basics. it shows that this unhinged churning mental trajectory, this erratic pattern of movement through life that you scrape through and surf across is not sustainable without some roots

And a lesson from the pit can be you’re not just a wondering brain, your mood is fragile and horribly contingent on other people, and what you put in your body and how you move, how you spend time and all that very important boring stuff

 

[boxedjoy]

boxedjoy cured his depression with dancefloor moments and now he's strutting about showing off and laughing at us still stumbling about in the dark

I think the most accurate description of depression I ever read was that if the cure for it was ten footsteps away and all you had to was get up and get it... you would still be depressed.

I've tried really hard to avoid the pit during lockdown. I don't get up later than 8 30 and I have a bath every day and make sure the kitchen is clean by 11am. I can see it being really easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it doesn't matter and while it's probably true it's amazing what it can do for your mindset. Even if you write off the day and do less constructive things like faff about on YouTube and Ableton it's still better than finding yourself at 7pm going oh fuck I have wasted another day because that is one of the things that can really fuck up my internal thoughts.

 

[boxedjoy]

That said when my impending redundancy occurs and the world goes wild for Xmas which I abhor I can definitely see there being a few days living in my housecoat necking Tennents watching Come Dine With Me

 

[beiser]

sometimes you’re in the pit because you’re in the pit

other times it turns out you need a good chat with a friend or some time under the sun to perk you up. must be hard to get the sunlight in the UK, I’ve never felt it’s the same getting the bright indoor lights and supplementing vitamin D. magnesium does help though.

i think the pit contains something deeply human, a kind of horror often experienced but rarely memorialized except in the paltriest ways. doing so is a thing DFW is praised for but it’s hard to believe it, the narratives have the pomp of any addict who has learned to narrativize the fall in bucolic and romantic ways; his prose exudes the sleaze of fictions descending deep into the soul.

 

[beiser]

it seems silly to criticize a fiction writer for making things up in a novel, but he was always careful about alluding to the real, yes? when I read the thing I lived about six blocks from enfield house. there’s a scene with gately in the parking lot of madison park vocational high school, and when I read it i could look up to the window and see it out there, just a block or two away. i convinced a friend that to really understand the book he would have to first get a terrible drug habit, have a psychotic break, and then get institutionalized in the right halfway house. then he would have the full experience. that’s the real pit I guess.

 

[Mr. Tea]

tidy your room, you slobs

The Jordan Peterson patented depression cure!

 

[Corpsey]

The further away you get from a stoner period the more you realise its the worst drug in the world precisely because people think its harmless, an insidious haze.

I don't disagree with this but I do miss the intensity it gives to things (I've not smoked it in five of six weeks). Particularly to art. I can only fully appreciate art when I'm stoned. I'm wondering if that's because some people (painters) see more intensely than others and people like me need to be baked to get on their level. Like it's obvious that Van Gogh saw things differently to other people. He's a painter who paints so vividly that you don't need to be stoned to appreciate this, but to see the world like Van Gogh did (to an extent) I need artificial stimulation.

 

[luka]

Yes, some people operate at higher intensities and with greater scope and depth.

 

[Corpsey]

I've struggled with this for a long time now. With poetry, for example, I'd really like to have a natural receptivity to it, to be able to read it and write it, it would really play into my egocentric desire to be a special intellectual visionary type and not just a mediocre wanker. But I don't have that heightened sensitivity, I need it to rhyme, to be full of arresting images, violent emotions, to be unsubtle. Otherwise my eyes glaze over, I can't help it.

Increasingly I'm thinking that the only artforn I can appreciate naturally without chemical intervention is music. (And that doesn't go for all music, of course, a lot of which is made almost expressly for the purpose of being listened to stoned or pilled up.)

Feels less inpressive to be into music though. Every Tom dick and Harry likes MUSIC.

 

[Corpsey]

Although today for the first time I considered the possibility that I maybe should just be stoned all the time.

 

[luka]

The actual answer is work and serious engagement but you'll never do that cos you can't be fucked.

 

[luka]

nobody starts out embodying their fully realised ideal. They see it on the horizon and they set out towards it.

 

[luka]

Nobody gets there, but the point is to grit your teeth and keep,walking in that direction, without deviation, without rest, without loss of faith. Into the biting wind.

 

[luka]

If you want a relationship with poetry you have to actually wrestle with poetry, not let it come to you, and seduce you like an airy succubus

 

[luka]

This idea that an aesthetic experience is something you just lie back, close your eyes and let it suck you off is no good. It won't do.

 

[Corpsey]

But I think if you don't feel a real pull towards it in the first place it begs the question of why do the work. With you I'd assume you felt a real visceral pull towards poetry, it wasn't a case of feeling it behoves a civilised bigdick man to be into it.

 

[Corpsey]

Then again I'm being harsh on myself. I have felt inklings, after all. Though again, drugs were involved on some of those occasions. Poetry is like art, really, for me, in being very much improved by my being stoned. And I can hold it in my head, unlike a novel.

 

[luka]

I don't think that's true. I was in the same position as you. I wanted access but didn't have access.

 

[luka]

I found that some times, on some occasions, I could get in. And that intrigued me a great deal. Why some times and not others. Why do I sometimes catch the door ajar when usually it is firmly shut?

 

[Corpsey]

I suppose this is drifting very off topic now but I have had that feeling before of breaking through a difficulty with a poem, say, and suddenly finding it very easy to understand, very lucid, like breaking through a layer of cloud and suddenly you're above it all.