Matt Cahill's blog
Dear Reader,
It may have come to your attention (those who visit semi-often) that I have not been posting here that often (aside from the Twitter-y things on the right column).
This is true.
I am a little swamped these days with non-Imaginary Magnitude-y things (i.e. work). I have not, I insist, lost interest.
Please stay tuned. I will eventually return with more consistency than what is currently on display.
Cheers,
Matt
Tomorrow (Monday) is a newly-created holiday (which, if you’ve been in Canada in February, is crucial for mental survival), called “Family Day”. This is its second year in existence and nobody really knows what to do with it. Okay, when I say “nobody” I mean me.
I’ve never been someone who makes elaborate plans in advance of long-weekends. For me, weekends are about plugging-out of work and relaxing, writing, photography, and the occasional neighbourhood brunch. I suppose if I had a cottage up north things would be different (not that February is necessarily when you want to be at a cottage up north).
Add to this the ree-coc-u-lous name “Family Day”. The premier of Ontario deemed it so, pinning its creation to his rationale; whether said rationale is window-dressing or solemn honesty is beside the point. I hate the name. 
I’m not a militant sort, but what of those of us without children? Should I spend the day meditating on my biological error? Are all those people gearing-up to get drunk up and down Ossington Avenue tonight doing so as a testament to the strength of the Ontarian family? Doubtful.
Rather than spending it with our kids (who don’t exist, though we do have a lovely cat – her name is Selchie), I shall be mending clothing with holes, cleaning up some paperwork, filing things away, and reading. And yes, we’re going for drinks tonight.
So, from our family to yours, have a lovely Family Day tomorrow, gracious readers.
For the last few years, I’d get the odd inspiration to write something suitable for the Facts & Arguments section of the Globe and Mail. For those unacquainted, it is a daily feature of one of our national newspapers; a personal essay between 800 and 1,000 words, open to the public for submissions.
Easy, right?
Truth: no. Every time I’ve tried in the past, I can’t pull it off. Can’t even get past two paragraphs. It’s not a question of writing 800 words of personal essay, but rather pulling off 800 words of personal essay that actually is interesting to a wide array of people which isn’t intellectually disingenuous at the same time. I say this because it’s easy to make fun of the Facts & Arguments essay (or at least I find it easy). “In the end,” I’ve joked to my wife, “what I learnt from my cat is that it’s not the travails I endured, but the lessons contained therein which have enriched my life. Ha, ha“. They are all, clichés aside, about personal experiences which lead to larger realizations. You could compare this (somewhat) to the essay featured at the back of the New York Times Sunday magazine, only longer and not as consistently curated.
Again: easy, right? After all, it’s just 800 words of personal stuff. You’re a writer, eh Cahill?
Truth: no, not easy. No, not at all. One misty Sunday morning over the Christmas break, I got the inspiration and decided that I was going to finally hunker down and do it. Me, the fiction-writing blogging sorta guy was going to sit his ass down and write an honest to goodness Facts & Arguments-style essay if it killed me. And it had to be good. And it had to be honest. No bullshit. No cynical kiss-ass formula-copying. It would, after all, have my name on it, published or not.
I realized several things immediately:
It has been torture. I’ve spent more time on this than I care to mention (at last count, thirteen revisions in two weeks). And yet, I didn’t want to give up. The format was a challenge and as a writer/artist/whatever it’s important to be challenged, especially if one wants to be versatile. In the end (ha ha), I’ve finally got something worth submitting. Whether it actually gets published (and, God knows, I’ve done my best on this sucker) is no longer a chief concern. The goal was to submit my best effort and that is what I’ve done (though of course I’ve cursed my chances of this ever happening, having written about it beforehand and all).
Many lessons learnt, indeed.
Inevitably, you will go somewhere, some informal gathering of friends, perhaps a party of some sort. You will discover that you are surrounded by people your age who all seem to be doing pretty well in life: active, successful, progressing in their art (whatever that word may be construed to mean), and content in a non-complacent way. And it will slowly make you feel like crap. Particularly the morning after.
You look squarely at your day ahead, at your day-job-slash-career (the thing you do for money), your achievements (or things you hope to achieve within a certain time period) and you have realizations of which many are negative, self-critical, sometimes despairing.
You know the colder months do not treat you well. You know that you suffer silently from something which begins with a “d” and rhymes with “repression”, and that there’s sweet-dick you can do about it short of spinning the midway crown-and-anchor wheel of pharmaceuticals. You also know that there is no cure, that winter has only begun, and that your public transit reading material is a collection of essays written by someone who suffered similarly and recently committed suicide.
It is one of those moments when the warmest of jazz songs on the radio does not warm you, that despite the windows in your apartment the January daylight is too cold. It is one of those moments where you look outward for signs of optimism, but in doing so you also make yourself susceptible, where both good and bad pass freely through your unarmed perimeter. That, given your disposition, you see more bad than good (or even worse, emptiness; after all, even “bad” is a symptom of humanity). You know the good is there, but for some reason it is not as visible or vibrant as “good” should be.
You find solace in writing about it in second-person (a format you’ve been wanting to try) and by an unfinished roll of film in your camera and the possibility that there are things outside that could be captured as means to portray these unanswered questions. And that a long walk will do you good.
Dear readers,
Sorry for the lack of posts lately. Been working hard completing one film and drumming up new jobs in the meantime. All is well here. I promise to provide no less than two book reviews in the next while, as well as assorted thoughts for your perusal.
It’s a long weekend in Canada, and Tuesday is a federal election (!)…and we’re having a couch delivered! So, yes, new posts will be coming…just not quickly.
Hang in there.
As reported in the news over the weekend, spilling into the papers this week, American novelist/essayist David Foster Wallace took his life. He had hung himself in his home, only to be discovered later by his wife.
To be honest, I’ve only read one piece by Wallace – an essay in an issue of Harper’s almost ten years ago on the release of the revised Oxford English Dictionary – and yet it left an indelible impression on me. It made me laugh out loud with its quirky honesty and his style was unique and strong; in short, it made me take notice of writing and writers at a time when it simply was not on my radar (for various reasons). I always swore I would read one of his books, but the prospects of picking up the one he is best known for, Infinite Jest, all 1,000 pages of it, was intimidating. It still is, but that has more to do with the fact that I’m in the middle (or, factually, just past the middle) of War & Peace with Joyce’s Ulysses staring at me from the bookshelf longingly.
Wallace’s suicide is the second in the last few years by an artist who’s work I’d kept an eye on. The first was that of American humorist and performer, Spalding Gray, who – it is assumed – leapt from a ferry into the Hudson River and drowned. I saw him at Massey Hall (one of the most venerable venues in Toronto) many years ago. As with Wallace’s essay, I remember crying with laughter during Gray’s droll monologue.
Which brings us to the question of artists and suicide.
Someone on Bookninja had this to say in reaction to the story:
In my work (psychiatry) I’ve seen so many creative people who are so tortured inside. I’ve often wondered if, given the choice, they’d choose peace over creativity. Maybe suicide is exercising that choice.
I thought about this. I wanted to respond, because I had something to say, but in the end I decided it would only be a tangent and while tangents are allowable in most online situations, an obituary is not exactly the place for one.
The answer is that artists do not want peace, or at least an artificial peace. To do so would be to abandon the tension which is inherent in art (and science, for that matter). In their art, over the course of their lives, artists attempt to resolve this tension; to articulate what it is that is at the centre of a storm which motivates them to create. The tension is the artist. Them against an outside world which does not work. Art becomes a philosophical expression of an existential dilemma. With this as the case, how many artists would willingly barter peace for creativity if such a trade were even possible? Not many, I would wager. What is peace when art allows you to reach higher than ever before, to touch the cookie jar of euphoria with your fingertips?
Like Wallace and Gray, I too suffer from depression. Their passing gives me pause, to put it lightly. Last night over dinner, Ingrid and I had a long talk about this – Wallace, Gray, art, and suicide – and she used a quote from Wallace that she’d read in one of the obituaries, that suicide happens very slowly. He is right. It is not, as commonly portrayed, an impulsive decision, but rather something which gestates very gradually within the mind of the sufferer. The danger is that this internalized dialogue, over the course of years, may eventually lead to the rationalization or acceptance of suicide as a logical option or self-fulfilling prophecy.
Art, however, is not depression, and depression should not be construed as something which only afflicts those in the arts. When you are depressed, anything can inflame the situation. Both the fire and the water used to douse it. It is for this reason that I take a moment to bring this up. So that people may understand what is, for lack of a better term, a mental illness. Allow me to suggest a wonderful series in the Globe and Mail, perhaps the best collection of stories and first-person recollections on the subject to be found in any newspaper.
I tip my hat to Wallace, to Gray. I mourn for the grief experienced by their loved ones.
My “day job” in film and television (which often bleeds well into the evening, depending upon what part of the process I’m involved with) is to supervise what is known as “post production” (sometimes hyphenated as “post-production”). This is the rather Deconstructivist (as opposed to deconstructionist) process which involves picture editing (which virtually assembles the footage and sound back into a comprehensible story, if all goes well), sound editing (including sound effects, dialogue replacement, foley – that’s the man with the track pants and high heels – and music), and, depending upon the project, visual effects (whether they be corrective or something more snazzy involving CGI and goblins running down an exploding volcano).
It can all be extremely interesting – even if you’ve done it for years, sometimes you just can’t wait to see the end result – or nightmarishly absurd. It really depends on the project, the people involved, and the budget. Working in post, as opposed to working on the set during production, I get to see the various bits that were shot slowly congeal into what eventually gets delivered to the broadcaster or film distributor. I end up seeing the shows I’m working on many, many times before anyone outside gets to see it once. Regardless of whether it is a sensitive, intelligent Canadian documentary or a Hollywood torture-horror film, they all kind of dovetail into one another. I sometimes wish the sensitive, intelligent people in the documentary were in the horror film. Sometimes I wish the people who work on horror movies were profiled in a sensitive, intelligent documentary.
Big or small, there is a lot of money hanging on any given project, so the pressure put on those, like myself, overseeing the process can be profound. Stress is like alcohol; it can be habit-forming as a motivator, but it can also engulf your better reasoning. Thankfully, I don’t think I’ve worked on a project where I haven’t been able to openly poke fun at it with my peers. Laughter is a wonderful antidote, particularly when you don’t have a creative stake in what you’re laughing at; the important thing is making sure that it isn’t the mirthless, bitter laughter of someone whose sanity has been frayed by deadlines and intermittent bullying. If the latter is your case, you need to step away. Soon.
