Here's something I love. Since love is a wide, wide word, if I had begun writing yesterday, this post would be completely different; right this moment, you would have been reading something different.
Lately I have been thoroughly enjoying Nancy Wilson’s “(You Don’t Know) How Glad I Am”.
My love has no walls on either side,
That makes my love wider than wide
Isn’t that touching? I adore this song and its words absolutely. Yet I imagine, in some silly daydream, that if I were to speak those very words, people would think it was corny. I think to myself, why must I choose to share those lyrics when there are thousands and thousands of other lyrics that would sound more impressive?
Unimpressive. That’s what I think it sounds like to other people, because of the very reasons I love it and would have dared to say it out loud in the first place: it’s simple and raw, and true.
I find that on some parts of the internet, aside from the blatant hunger to be picturesque or to capture a potential viral movie scene instead of the moment, they must always be poetic. For some reason, everything must be quotable, i.e., branded and commodified. They can't simply say what they mean to the point that everything they have said would be florid and derivative; a copy of a copy, and so on.
Now, everyone is a forest fire, everyone knows how Joan of Arc felt, everyone is a mirrorball, everyone is a mosaic of everyone they have ever met, everyone is always an angel never a god, or some other variation in their own contents. All of these things may be true, but there is a difference between a reference and a posed signifier of verbal abilities masked as a spontaneous thought.
Ironically, a lot of people on TikTok are scarily not very good with words. They would use the search button to look up the meaning of “secret animosity” and “yearn,” I wish they would look up what “theory” actually means as well.
I do not say these with only annoyance in my mind, but with a twinge of guilt and sympathy. I understand that if these people were to speak as usual there is a risk of being called basic and one-dimensional, NPCs if you will. And with the trauma dump competition in every other TikTok trend, it is not unlikely that they worry their lexicons might not grasp the depth of what they wanted to say and push them and their experiences into further obscurity, so they feel they must borrow and steal, something tried and tested.
Are we killing expression? It’s one thing to be brave enough to speak, another to be good at it, and another to simply be candid. To feel obligated to write an excellent prose about how you feel, in order to be considered valid instead of cringe, is to put societal pressures and standards on something as basal as existing. You are emotionally harmed for being expected to behave in a way that is perceivable as sincere just to be believed.
Funnily, in the aforementioned song, Nancy Wilson sings:
I wish I were a poet so that I could express
What I, what I like to say
“I love you” is so deeply banal but it is not contested. It is just simple and raw, and true.
It is as if that we might be mistaking life and art for each other: Life must be curated to be ideal but Art can't be pretentious or superfluous so it can be authentic and believed. Your personality can't be too contrived because then you’ll be pretentious, and you can't write a story so mundane and ordinary because then it would be unoriginal and uncreative. Also, you have to live like you are the main character, but main characters are not supposed to be people like you. But you must must must live like you are in a movie, but it's not real.
It is a tricky and dangerous subject to ponder where your words begin and where allusions take over. You sit through an average film and your state of mind decides what you'll think of it. You sit through a masterful movie and you are forced to watch it unfold and yourself be transformed. You are not less yourself for being intensely affected by the actress' soliloquy, true. However, you are not being honest if you mimick her speech, although it is natural to adopt her cadence? It is an inevitable crash I feel I must control.
Do Art and Life ever stop colliding?
No. But
Life does not need to be lived to emulate art; art is but the influence or outcome, depending on where you're standing. A picturesque life is not any better than a humble life. We must shed the illusion of thinking that aesthetics could elevate our lives into being worthy of respect. Being alive is already the highest compliment. To be simple and raw, and true, among others.
To be simple raw and true is going into my little mantras notebook