The White Rabbit
'Lo child,
D'you like foxes? I'm a big fan.
My fondness for foxes is not one of those unpopular opinions of mine. Being a fox fan is really normal. It's what people who don't know any furries think furry conventions are like - just wall-to-wall foxes in a rainbow of colors, each with a different number of tails.
That annoys the hipster in me a bit, because one doesn't like to be accused of just hopping on a wagon, as it were, when one has genuine personal reasons for being interested in the wagon. You understand.
Synaesthesia makes my thoughts an amalgam of sensory associations - often what I retain most strongly about something isn't immediately related to what you see, and that makes my recall... idiosyncratic? Ask me about a place I went, and I might only remember the noisy color of the walls and the way the music felt on my skin. I realize this is utterly unhelpful to you, who would like to know where exactly you can get a good meal, but I'm afraid the name of the place is down at the bottom in tiny letters, if I even noted it at all. In my filing system it has a more descriptive name - "The Bumpin' Red Potato Place."
So the reasons I like foxes don't have as much to do with foxes as they have to do with... little princes, and elephants, and World War II, and Tad Williams's Otherland. And the point I'm making here doesn't have a whole lot to do with foxes either, that's just how I got there, via the Party Way as usual.
The point I'm making is about art, and passion. I'm struggling to recontextualize my art and work with this new job, and I've spent the last few weeks vacillating wildly between a burning desire to do ALL THE THINGS, and utter exhausted despair. This isn't awesome, nor do I imagine it's awesome to live with, especially when I arrive home at 7:30 in the morning wanting to have a good cry on the wife. Not the kind of morning shower she had planned, that's for sure. Say you just got up - is that what you're in the mood for? Throws off your whole day.
Yesterday I had a bad time toward the end of the night - a combination of things, but mostly I hadn't had enough to eat. I usually find that when I can't manage my emotions, I need to eat. Not that I don't have problems beyond that, of course I do, but... do you know how hard it is to eat while crying? Seriously, have you tried it? Don't. It's horrendous in the most banal way, such a terrible experience of both crying and eating. You have to stop one of them more or less immediately, or ruin both.
It's not that the only reason you're upset is because you're hungry, it's that if you devote your attention to fixing something you can immediately fix in your life, like making yourself food, that's going to help you regain a small sense of agency and accomplishment, regardless of whether it was causing the problem in the first place. It'll help even more if you do something physiologically soothing... like eating. Or a bath, or a run, or a cup of tea in the sunshine, you do you. It's just impossible to eat an eclair and feel suicidal at the same time, that's what I've found. How can you think about the void when there's an eight-inch chocolate-covered dong on your plate?
So yesterday I was crying into a bag of Cheetos, which is the most 2022 thing I've done all year, and I said something about... feeling like I've spent a long time just summoning the drive and passion for my artwork out of nothing. I haven't ever made art because someone paid me to, and that's not me bragging in some way, like Oh I haven't sold out or whatever - no, man, I would LOVE to sell out! You got some spare selling out just laying around, I'm havin' that. Fuck the line of thinking that shames artists - shames anyone - for surviving under capitalism.
I've just never made art because anyone was clamoring for it, because there hasn't been much clamor. I do it because I can't not, because if I go to bed and I didn't make anything that day I feel like I don't exist. I need the world to be different because I was in it, every day, and changing the world (you might have noticed) is hard, but by comparison, adding something to the world is fairly straightforward, especially if your standards aren't high. I don't need to make something brilliant every day, I just need to make something.
The upside of that is, I'll probably continue doing it regardless of whether I ever make money or anyone pays attention, because it's how I keep myself (dubiously) sane. The downside is... I sometimes fall into pits of existential despair and wonder if I can keep summoning passion for what I'm doing out of nothing.
It feels like a conjuring trick, pulling a rabbit from a hat, just deciding for no reason that what I see is worth moving the world to make real, and finding the strength to do that. It's tough, and it's not based on anything rational - rationally I know, because I don't really put myself out there the way one must in the Attention Economy, that what I make won't go anywhere. I know that most people who see my artwork are either confused or repelled by it. Most people who read my writing don't make it to the end. I know those things from long experience, from all the other times I've done this trick onstage. Remembering those other times makes it hard to find the rabbit now - I feel like it’s exhausted. I think the rabbit went on strike.
But then there was another day, like there usually is, and it did the usual thing - made me reconsider my nighttime angst. I do this semi-regularly, fall back in the hole and then climb out. That's recovery, baby - it's not a straight line. You're gonna climb out of this hole over and over until you can do it backwards on your hands and feet like Linda Blair.
Since getting this new job I’ve been paying a lot of attention to what's going on internally, maybe too much - I have a tendency to get too granular with my self-examination, and overcorrect for small negative responses that ultimately I would have been better off pushing past. I’m concerned about sublimating stress. At my last job, which became horrendously stressful toward the end, I wasn’t really aware of the stress until it started making me physically ill. I had a consistent problem on my days off where I would get feverish and nauseated with pain in my stomach. I don’t know what an ulcer’s like, but I don’t want to either, so I was pleased when the pain and nausea stopped right away when I quit working there.
But I didn’t know that I was sublimating anything. I didn’t particularly feel stressed until long after the pain started. That’s one of the sucky things about trauma, or a chronic pain condition, of which I have both - you get a bit inured to your own pain, and it doesn’t serve so well as an alarm system anymore… when your body could really use one.
I long since got used to living with a certain level of low-grade discomfort, both physical and mental, and so I find it hard to tell when a given badfeel is worth problem-solving about, and when it’s a momentary fluctuation - or a bit of old fish, honestly, because that’s the other potential false positive with that system. My therapist’s excellent advice at one point was, “Don’t mistake physical sensations for emotional ones. A lot of your neurons live in your gut, and so it’s easy for physical discomfort in that area to trigger an emotional reaction.”
She told me something else that I find pertinent when I’m trying to figure out what’s going on internally, which is that the analytical brain is not especially good at figuring out the body and the chemicals washing around inside it. You can’t cogitate your way out of feeling bad, and thinking your feelings rather than feeling them only makes them worse. “The brain can’t stop working or it dies, so it’s doing things all the time, but not very many of them are useful. It’s only really good at calculation and concrete decision-making. When you’re having an emotional reaction, the best thing to do is tell the brain to sit down and shut up until you need to solve a math problem.”
The synaesthesia is my way of getting around that, of feeling my feelings rather than thinking them, as it were. I provoke emotional responses via sensory stimulation - listen to music, usually, or dance - and then examine the resulting feelings to see if any of them are feelings I would like to have more of. Not always goodfeels, these - it’s not about whether I like it, it’s about a strong, immediate response, a sensation that this feeling is pouring out as soon as the music triggers it, that something was under pressure and needed release. In this way I can poke around and find out what I’m actually feeling, like finding a friend in the dark by stabbing wildly with a finger until you sink knuckle-deep into their nostril.
What, you’ve never done that? Y’all don’t know how to have fun.
The dowsing-rod this time was punk rock, because punk rock from my childhood still has the power to cut through my scar tissue like a blowtorch and light my ass on fire. It made me feel that same strange ping in my stomach, that precursor feeling that might have been anxiety… but provoked by that music, it couldn’t be anxiety, didn’t feel like stress. It felt like excitement, which I thought I couldn’t really feel anymore. I forgot that anxiety and excitement feel pretty much the same when they’re small and nascent. I forgot that I’ve always had to use music to get my system going, to gin up the energy I require to get through a day.
I’ve always had to conjure the rabbit. I didn’t arrive with one - I arrived with this hat, just the hat, and sometimes the rabbits want to come out, and sometimes you have to play some Flogging Molly to get them riled up first.
That’s where the imagery crashed into itself, the magician-hat-conjuring stuff and the fox-stuff, because that’s a goal the magician and the fox have in common - both want to find the rabbit. The rabbit in our culture often symbolizes passage to another world. The rabbit stands for birth and death, and the transition between the two. He’s an interloper from the other side, who just by passing through opens up a portal in his wake, a split-second opportunity to escape, if you’re ready to jump when he does.
And I’ve spent my life chasing him. Chasing the rabbit, looking for the door in the hill, trying knobs - I’ve spent my life trying to find more in the hat than what you see when you look in the hat, y’know? There’s something else there, if you close your eyes and reach. But you do have to reach.
