Deep Immersion

as presence, binge watching as intimacy

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

For the first time in a long while I felt seen. This is what I read for. To hear/ see others express what I can’t name. It’s not just about giving words to something, it’s that specific textured expression of a vague notion I’ve had, approaching it in different ways to see, to resolve what’s jarring.
When something is named, it can be addressed in practical terms, but, more importantly, it becomes known.

Perhaps the mind is always trying to work out how to open the next door.
Knowledge is not only power, but sometimes it is entirely enough, sometimes it is the key. Sometimes, when a(n intangible) thing becomes known, something resolves within and I am moved to a new place.

You talked about a long history of loss (you, referring to my friend, specifically her newsletter: Ghost Losses & Bodily Gains throughout).
I’m right there with you.

And it is not a question of why, we’re old enough to know that ‘why’ brings no solution. We’re old enough to ask better questions, and to know that when something lingers, it’s rarely only about that event.
You talk about the insatiable thirst for life.

I’m thinking of Hunger by Florence & The Machine:

‘At seventeen I started to starve myself
I thought that love was a kind of emptiness
And at least I understood then the hunger I felt
And I didn't have to call it loneliness

We all have a hunger’

I’m also thinking of Alok, who said in a recent video that loneliness has been their lighthouse to find connection. That it is how we know that we need others.

And you didn’t write about loneliness, I just associate it with the hunger for more, more intimacy, more connection, and I’ve been feeling it in the past weeks. Surprisingly it came with a lack of wanting to connect, a kind of anti-thirst. Where I would usually search out people, be curious about them, have a thirst for touch, there’s been just a dull disinterest lately.

You know how they say that you need to kiss many frogs before you find a prince? Prince aside, but I’ve been feeling like I’m in a lake of frogs when it comes to connection. They quack away and sometimes one approaches me, blows themselves up and shows off how loud they can get and how shiny they can glisten in the sun, and I don’t get moved.
All I want right now is that kind of intimacy that goes bone deep, or a spark that cuts through the everyday.
I’m not interested in much else.

And so I’ve retreated into my cave although I know that isolation doesn’t help.
‘I have tried retreat into shadow, and that didn’t work either’, you wrote.

But I think I found it here, in my flat-cave.
I find it in books, in writing, like you do too, and sometimes in a good movie or series.
That larger-than-life-but-therefore-just-large-enough-for-life-realness, rawness.

For the past weeks I’ve been binge watching Buffy. I had forgotten to cancel my Disney sub and checked out if there was anything I wanted to see. I’d never watched the series before, but it was on my mental to-watch list.
Much of the past weeks I’ve spent in that parallel world. In a world of heightened love, loss, magic, late 90s/ early Naughties style, with the internet in its infancy, and trousers sitting very low.
I haven’t held back. I’ve been up till 3am many nights, took a day off just watching the series. I’m in it. When I go for a walk, thoughts like mini revelations come in the form of insight into series situations/ problems/ questions.

Somehow, this deep immersion has restored me back into my creative (happy) space.
Letting myself get fully engrossed in another world, in those characters’ lives and feelings has been nourishing.

I spent a lot of my childhood watching TV, and I’ve often frowned on my young self, thinking how much I could have done, creative stuff, hobbies. But now I think it saved me, nourished me during an absence of care and connection and stimulation.
It showed me worlds where people did care and believed in themselves and each other, where crazy things were possible.

Before starting the series I played with the concept of radical presence, consciously not listening to any audio and just sitting or walking and being in the moment.
When I was stressing about something, I tried to become as present as possible. I also stopped watching as many movies. I wanted to become super present to deal with stuff and not check out.
But now I think that deep immersion is deep presence too.
Allowing for what draws your intention to really engross you.

Allowing is the topic of the month for me. I had my first private physio session last week (after another back injury flare-up and the pain not going away and being on the NHS waitlist which is too long). It was a revelation.
I thought that I’d need strength training to get my back muscles stronger, which I’d read about online.
But what happened is that because I was scared to put stress on my lower back, I’d adjusted my movements and limited mobility there, which actually stressed those muscles! So what I need to do is just allow for natural movement.

After that session I felt my entire body relax, I got so tired that I spent Saturday in bed and had the best rest in a long time. The kind of rest you get after you’ve achieved something major, after working on something for a very long time and finally getting your first real break.

And the word ‘allow’ echoed through my body.

By allowing myself to completely immerse into a series instead of restricting and trying to be productive, I had gotten my creativity back.

After over a month, maybe two of a dry spell, it’s back.
Without it I don’t feel the same, I feel floaty, like I’m not really living.
Maybe some of us need this intensity; the hungry ones.
There’s no ‘everyday’, every day is real and we need to feel alive alive alive.
And so it becomes hard to engage with people who have an everyday, who have hobbies. The pottery course was great, but to keep something up as a casual hobby feels like a dulling of that time. I think my issue is not with hobbies, my issue is with casual.
I hate casual.

I’m on a dating app and one person wrote that they’re looking for casual intimacy.
Casual intimacy, paradox of paradoxes.

You can have intimacy without long term commitment, but who comes up with casual intimacy?! This is how society as a whole feels like to me. Casual intimacy. Bull shit.

If we had more intimacy in our day to day, maybe it would feel easier.
Maybe we’d feel more supported by each other, strangers or not.

This includes both emotional intimacy as well as non sexual physical touch.
In old movies, good friends kiss, as an act of affection without any sexual connotation.
In Buffy, people are leaning over each other’s shoulder when researching, which would now be seen as too close for comfort.
Affection has been neatly packaged into boxes labelled: family ‘ok’, friends ‘limited’, and strangers ‘no no no’

Relationships are more casual. We can stay in touch while living far away from each other, ‘follow’ what others are doing without being involved at all.
I still long for the real thing, for leaning on your friends while watching a movie and kissing someone I appreciate.

When I can’t find it in the present, I go to books and movies. You wrote: ‘I still think writing and reading is an act of attempted intimacy. And when it works, the reader and writer are closer still.’

When mentioning my creative dry spell, my friend Charlie said to start my writing with ‘I have nothing to say’.
It’s good to start with the truth, with where you’re at. Deep presence requires acceptance of where you are.

I’ve been having this idea of an ‘autobiography of nobody’, to write from the ‘unsuccessful’ place.
A part of me wants to wait & only write an autobiography ‘when I’m a successful actor’, but I enjoy reading people’s stories, no matter where they’re at. All that’s needed is the writer’s specific perception. Those that are compelled to write usually have that, a specific perspective, a way of noticing, a way of perceiving the everyday that, I want to say elevates, but it just sees.
We can slip into their skin, see the eyes though their (or the character’s) world.

It has been my worst mistake, to want to be somewhere else, someone else.
Creativity always finds us in the present.
Every day, my perspective changes, something else is in focus.

This is what writers really do, they transform presence into script, alchemists of anything that touches them.

Which closes the circle (don’t ask me which one) and brings us back to deep presence.

Recently, the series seemed to decline a bit, and it seemed like the end was approaching, like they were perhaps out of inspiration. So I checked and there are only 7 seasons (yes, I’m an addict). I’ve been preparing myself for the end (drumroll) and tonight I’m watching the last episode.

What happens when we get immersed in a story?
I remember crying when I read the scene in which Dumbledore dies. I remember how strange it felt when I had finished reading all of the books and arrived back in my auntie’s garden, warm summer sun, bright green life everywhere, and something overlaying it, a grief of having to leave that world.
This grief was so visible that my auntie gave me a new book to read: Inkheart.
I didn’t want to read anything else, everything else paled in comparison, but I started Inkheart anyway. I read the beginning, and it was paced so differently, had a completely different feel to it that I didn’t like it at first, but then I became engrossed, and ended up reading the whole trilogy.

What is this grief, of having to leave a world that was - what to me?
Does a part of me live in it, is it about caring for the characters? There’s no part for me in those worlds, I’m just observing, through my laptop screen, or through the words in those books. So what is that grief of having to leave an immaterial place I started to love?
I could rewatch the series, reread the books, but it’s not the same. The magic lies in going on the journey with those characters.

It can’t happen a second time. I know that there are people who love to reread their favourite books, rewatch their favourite shows and films. I have done this too (though I’m not usually inclined to), but then they become comforting, familiar, it’s not the same.

Is it about stakes then? Not the ones to kill vampires with, but the ones that are what fate is riding on.
We can only experience the stakes the first time. Then we know the story.
I find that rereading a book many years later can reclaim the magic, or at least some of it, because I’ll have forgotten a lot of detail, and sometimes big plot points, which allows me to go on that journey again.

You opened your newsletter with this Clarice Lispector quote:
“I write to you in disorder, I well know. But that is how I live”

I love this about Lispector’s writing. The constant disarray of the internal life of her protagonists, as if they walked around cut open, all thoughts displayed, like we experience our own lives.

Life’s messy, we should not be tempted by glossy pictures. They are not real. There are glossy moments but we do not need to make our lives into movie worthy material for it to move, to be in flow, to flow through us, to be here in our messy glory and too much thirst and much dissatisfaction.
It will not be stilled, nor could it.
It’s our life thirst. If we went fully fed for too long we’d lose our lust. I dance to Iggy Pop while cooking a healthy vegan meal, getting a carrot juice and sitting down for a 10 hour binge.
Fuck perfection, fuck ‘the way to success’. Fuck the recipe.
Let’s sprinkle in a bit of bland, a bit of old school frugality, of new age ethically sourced crystal, and vegan delivery meals to cook yourself, and going out for a wild night and coming home buzzing but alone.
There is no standard to a successful night out. There’s no standard to how you ‘should’ spend your evening in. There’s no standard to when you should be satisfied.
Being satisfied doesn’t make your life a better one.
We walk on the knife’s edge and call it existence and call it an attempt at living fully and try so hard to live fully that we lose the simple living part.

It’s always been hard but it’s always been simple.
To live is to dance with grief.
Grief is always about worlds.
It’s about change and ending.
It’s about having to leave a personal world that we became attached to.
It’s about a shared past, a specific flavour of having this person in your life, the flavour that only you know, the existence of that person in your perception.
Grief can be about an imagined future that did not become manifest, about absence.

Being raised with grief is being raised in intensity.
To feel it before knowing its name.

There are no answers. All I know is that it’s important to open, again and again.
To stay open as much as we can, so life can ebb and flow through us.
To attach and detach and to share our stories around the fire or the bright light of our displays.

// Siris