benjaminteicher.com – freelance writer

Monique and I saw the Alan Berliner documentary Wide Awake at the Istanbul Modern on Sunday. In the film, Berliner struggles to understand the nature of Insomnia, both in general and his own nightly struggles to get to sleep.

What I found most compelling about the documentary was Berliner’s ambivalence to this condition, or lifestyle, in so far as despite the torturous drowsiness during the day, he found he was most productive in the night. In fact, he even seemed to feel that the fact that he spent his nights cutting his films might have given him an artistic edge – not simply because of these few extra hours that amount to years over the course of a lifetime, but because the brain works differently, is stimultaed differently at these hours.

I’m not prepared to give up what I feel is a gift. My body and I cooperate over the amount of sleep I get. If I need to push it a little bit, go without some for a night or so, it plays along,  so long as I make up for it later. And becaue I like to get things done, we’ve agreed that seven hours per night, slightly less than ‘ideal’, suits my body’s self restorative designs and my own priority. The best part is, when I decide its time to snooze – bang – I’m asleep, no frustrating tossing and turning.

And yet, if I am to be the successful writer that I think I might some day be, I need an edge. I really need t movoe this thing out of mere fancy and into the realm of passion. At the moment, I can usually manage four hours in a day at best. It got me thinking, what if I could do, eight, or ten, or twelve hours in a day when I decided to? And what would the work be like without all the extraneous considerations by which we mark the day?

So here’s what I’m going to do. Today, I’m shooting for ten hours of work. Ten hours. No excuses, no four hours and then I’m going to the movies. No. Simply ten hours of work.

Let’s review my sustenance kit:

Coffee. I’ll drink one of these every two hours. Its a stimulant and I’m not going to be ashamed of it any more. Not now that I’ve read My Name is Red and divined that one of the writers I admire the most relishes caffeine’s illuminatory charms.

Sesame balls. A nutritious snack that became my guilty pressure during my ten glorious days at the Sivananda Ashram. Also comprised of Jaggery, and sometimes ginger God, we were so pure at that place that eating these things was like taking smack.

Philip Glass. I’ll probably listen to Einstein on the Beach, because it is good, and it is long. I need to listen to classical music, usually twentieth century piano concertos and often symphonies. I find that I write along the contours of the music to places I would not otherwise delve.

So, for the record, I’m going to write like I’ve never written before. I’m going to write fiction until my fingers bleed, and when I can’t write fiction any more, I’ll work on some of my lifestyle articles, and when I can’t do that anymore, I’ll email people to organise interviews, and when I tire of that, I’ll write more fiction, and when I can’t even manage that, I’ll type passages out of the novels that I’m reading, just to prove that it can be done, that time is not my enemy, but my friend.

I’ll keep you updated, it is now:

10:06: Making some coffee, starting work on my novella Dead Flowers. Technically, I’ve been writing already for 20 minutes, if you include this blog which started at 9:45. 9 hours, 40 minutes to go.

10:23: Still haven’t made coffee. Made some minor adjustments to my bio. That counts as writing, right?

10:48: Got the coffee by my side and I’m ready to roll. Fire up Philip Glass.

11:45: Philip Glass doing the trick. Have the urge to call my grandmother who is sick in hospital, but then, we all have to suffer for the sake of art, even those not making the art themselves.

Urge to look at Facebook ignored.

12:45: Two hours of solid fiction. Philip Glass became distracting, switched to Rachmaninoff. Heading out for lunch now.

14:30: Lunch was delicious.

16:30: Spent two hours researching interview subjects for a couple of articles I am writing (ie finding emails etc). Not technically writing, but work nonetheless, and work I normally avoid. Looked at Facebook. ‘Networked’ with some people.

I will now spend following three hours writing fiction.

18:00: I didn’t really get cracking until 17:15, because I spilt coffee down the front of my vest and decided to handwash it and some clothes. But the last 45 minutes were productive.

19:00 Conked out. Consuming beer and KurKure with Monique.

In total, seven hours of work, although probably only three or four hours of solid writing.

Certainly, the role of caffeine cannot be undersold when it comes to my writing. Riding these highs, I delved into short bursts of mania from which I garnered little shards of brilliance.

The greatest obstacle was the Internet, where legitimate research very quickly crossed a grey line into procrastination.

Not a bad start, but do I have an edge?

While running the length of the Bosphorus River on the Asian bank of Istanbul, I listened to a discussion on art, living, and death on Late Night Live.
The guests were psychoanalysts who were speaking at the Freud Conference in Melbourne and they introduced an electrifying concept called ‘Creative Living’.
This concept starts with the familiar Freudian insight that there are dimensions to our actions that escape our awareness. It also encompasses the more obscure concept of the Unheimliche, or when rendered in english, the Uncanny. Literally speaking, the Unheimliche is that which we aer not at home with, that which is strange to us, that which makes us uncomfortable for example or arouse our hatred and loathing. By tracing an etymology of the world Freud discovered that the various meanings of and associations with the Unheimliche gradually merge with those of the direct opposite of the word, the Heimliche, the familiar. The point is that that which utterly disturbs must have some kind of hidden life within us.
The analysts partly divined the practice of ‘Creative Living’ from artists that they had treated. To live a Creative Life is to continually confront these mysteries about the self, not to pin them down so as to uncover and absolute and final truth, but the opposite, to allow the self to continually grow and change through navigating the uncomfortable limits of our awareness.
It excited me because it seems to liberate psychoanalysis from what Michel Foucault identifies as its oppressive traits. Foucault identified a set of discursive practices that had emerged in late antiquity and continued through Christian ascetic practices and beyond into the Victorian ‘repression’ of sexuality and nineteenth and twentieth century psychology. What unites all of these different accounts of the human being is that there appears something like a ’self’, and this self has a ‘true nature’ which is often characterised as sinful, errant or pathological. Finally, these errors can be corrected through the application of certain techniques through an authority or specialist of some kind.
Whereas the psychoanalyst may genuinely believe that she liberating human beings by bringing them in touch with their ‘true’ nature, Foucault feels that psychoanalysts were oppressing their patients when they scrutinised the minutia of their thoughts to find the ‘truth’ of their sexual desires.
Foucault instead looks to the philosophers of Ancient Greece and Rome. From these writers he discovers a kind of asceticism, a way of regulating one’s behaviour and pursuing a virtuous life that did not require the uncovering of a ‘truth’ about the self. For many of the ancients, this is achieved through a process called ‘Self Writing’ in which one kept journals to reflect on one’s own actions and possibly to modify them.
It seems to me that there is a lot of overlap between Creative Living and Self Writing. The analysts on Late Night Live were suggesting that when we keep the past alive and confront that which disturbs us, such as our own deaths for instance, by seeking the limits of our self understanding, we have an opportunity to remake the self again and again.
As such, the Freud’s concept of the self—as a puzzling stranger whose inner motivations can only be interpreted by an analyst—is transformd into a style of life that frees the individual to continually grow and change. I feel electrified by this possible being wandering soundlessly just over the edge of this horizon.