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MarvinGardens
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Hockin' Loogies
   Wed Mar 02, 2016 3:06 am

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Hockin' Loogies

Permanent Linkby MarvinGardens on Wed Mar 02, 2016 3:06 am

The writing itself is an act of splitting; my intuition was right about that. It's an attempt to discard from myself all the things I don't want or am ashamed of.

So what gets ejected from the self during the writing, and why? Or rather, what gets injected into the writing and why, since not everything that goes into the writing is necessarily from me.

I think there are three groups of attributes. The first is the most obvious: It's things I'm ashamed of in myself. This is the classic maneuver of splitting: Taking attributes that are shameful and projecting them onto something else, then rejecting that object. It's a form of denial, though an active one instead of the typical passive form of simply not acknowledging imperfections. In this bundle of crap you'll likely find things like my fear, my unattractiveness, my insecurity, and my physical cowardice. All of those attributes can be found in the characters that act as the targets for these projections and devaluations.

The second group of attributes is my emotions. I believe that I'm ashamed of my emotions, perhaps for different reasons for different emotions. But in general I guess I've grown to feel that emotions are inherently shameful, perhaps because I can't control them. Isn't that what I've been trying to do for 30+ years? Control everything to essentially eliminate all of my emotions, even the good ones? And so emotions are bad even if it's only because they're symbols of my failure to control or eliminate them. And so the emotions themselves get put into the character or the projection. My love, my hate, my fears, my insecurities, my arrogance, my spite--all of it goes into the foreign body in a clear act of splitting.

The third group of attributes is key, and is actually related to the two previous groups, though in different ways. The third group is truly foreign characteristics. It should be conspicuous, at least to me, that my characters contain attributes that are truly foreign to me. Not just denied or repressed, but distinctly foreign. The drinking and drug use. The promiscuity. The tattoos, the Swedish ancestry, and all sorts of blatantly false characteristics like that. Why? What purpose does it serve to inject into this creation qualities that don't need to be rejected from myself?

Plausible deniability, of course, which is the very purpose of the split. If I derive the split purely from my own attributes, then I run the risk of recognizing and having to acknowledge it as myself. "There's my fear. There's my insecurity and ugliness and stupidity. Oh sh!t, that's me." It's too likely that I'll recognize it as myself, which is the exact opposite of the exercise's purpose. So I imbue the image with things that throw me off my own scent. Things that are so conspicuously "not me" that I can comfortably say (subconsciously), "See, I'm not Swedish. This disgusting creature is someone else. I'm clearly better than this awful thing." I can disavow myself of the identity and my goal is accomplished.

But there's another obfuscation that occurs, and that has to do with the emotions. In the same way that I have to confuse matters to not recognize personal attributes as my own, so too do I have to do something to deny the emotions as my own. And to do that I use exaggeration. In rare instances I'll inject an emotion I don't feel, or project an emotion I do feel onto something I don't feel it about. But more often than not I use my actual emotions, only in an exaggerated state so that I can sort of... look down on them as ridiculous. "I'm not this pathetic. I don't feel things this ludicrously." And once again the purpose of the split has been accomplished. I feel love for something. I find that shameful. And so I write something so outlandishly flowery and saccharine that I can deny it as my own.

Like all splitting, this splitting through writing is unhealthy. But it does serve an unintended...

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