Since I stopped consuming caffeine sometime about two months ago I have lost nearly all desire to be creative. At first I interpreted this to be a good thing—once I removed the drug I no longer felt a compulsion to produce. Writing words and music are the primary ways I have been creative recently, and even though I have no one demanding any of these things from me (no deadlines to meet, no one to impress or appease; my livelihood is not tied to this work in any way) still I felt compelled, to make something of my thoughts and feelings, to mold and shape them into artifacts of my life. Now though, I began to realize it was as if my habit of drinking caffeine brought with it not only increased energy but an increase in feeling like I must put that energy to some good use.

Even Thoreau commented on this in Walden:

I would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America. Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes? I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also. 

It is no secret that caffeine (but not only caffeine) consumption and overconsumption is intimately connected with market demands to produce more and more, thereby increasing the demand for more stimulants—the relationship between coarse labors and eating and drinking coarsely is ouroboros-like. So I spit out my tail. But if my cup had become more transparent immediately after abstaining it has since grown cloudy and murky—not because I have started drinking caffeine again but because whatever clarity I was afforded by my initial abstinence has now worn off.

As an entrepreneur of the self, the achievement-subject is free insofar as he or she is not subjugated to a commanding and exploiting Other. However, the suject is still not really free because he or she now engages in self-exploitation—and does so of his or own free will… The neoliberal dictum of freedom finds expression in the paradoxical imperitve, Be free. But this plunges the achievement-subject into depression and exhaustion. Even though Foucault’s “ethics of the self” stands opposed to political repression and allo-exploitation in general, it is blind to the violence of the freedom that underlies auto-exploitation. …You can exercises even greater constraint than You should. Auto-compulsion proves more fatal than allo-compulsion, because there is no way to resist oneself.

Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros

Whatever coarse labors I have felt less compelled to do since abstaining from caffeine have nonetheless plunged me into exhaustion. Generally speaking I think my mood has improved these past months, my patience increased as well. At first I felt more energetic and I even slept better—easier time falling asleep and easier time waking up. But the exhaustion has returned, tempting me to bite my own tail again.

Initially, back when I started professionally caring for my brother over 15 years ago, I struggled with the switch from pursuing a creative life to pursuing a life of caregiving. I felt it was the better path morally—spiritually even—to care for my brother than to perform and teach and music—labors that didn’t seem to matter that much, at least not in the same way that caring for someone who cannot care for themselves did. And so I found my footing and began to walk that path, though I frequently found my shoes were caked with shit and piss. Naturally I had to stop making music, stop creating, stop performing. There was no time and besides I had more important things to do.

In the past three or four years I started writing mainly as therapy, but it quickly became something I enjoyed and looked forward to. It seemed to be a creative pursuit that could—I hoped—coexist with the life of a caregiver. I began writing music again too, rehearsing and recording with some old friends, and even playing a few scattered shows. However, trying to spend what little free time and energy I had making music or writing only made it harder for me to take care of my brother. Maybe I could do both and not plunge into depression and exhaustion if I overconsumed caffeine…

Yet even these past two caffeine-free months I still feel just as exhausted and exploited as I did before. Somewhere along the way I began to equate my creative pursuits with the You can and caregiving with the You should imperative. Over the course of the 15 or so years taking care of my brother being creative slowly transformed into a coarse labor, a distraction from my primary, more elevated and noble labor of caregiving. Time spent rehearsing, writing and reading, making music—they were taking away precious resources from what was really important. And yet now, I feel more and more like caregiving has become the coarse labor, or more accurately, that I am performing those labors coarsely.

Against the popular or common sentiment that creative pursuits or hobbies can help insulate me from the devastation of difficult work like caregiving, my own experiences are a bit harder to parse. The You can proves to be impossible to overcome, with or without caffeine. I find myself stuck somewhere between the You can and the You should, each of them coarsely feeding on the other. I at once desire to be creative, to touch the source of things, and to share what results, and also to devote my life to caring for my brother. I cannot, it seems, do either for very long, without feeling compelling or pulled towards the other, and there is no balancing them, because each of them demands everything that I am.

My son was riding his bike up and down the alley by our house and I found myself bracing for some terrible accident, broken limbs and bloodied knees—that sort of thing. Not that I had any reason to worry but because, even now, going on seven years of being a parent, I still find myself getting lost in the abyss that is imagining the worst-case scenario. In the summers we go to a family cottage on Lake Michigan and always take a ferry trip to Mackinac Island. Without fail, we sit on the open top deck and right at the edge (so my son can crane over the side and watch the waves). Visions of him tumbling overboard fill my head the entire drive up to the cottage, yet while we are actually physically sitting on the boat, with the wind in our faces and my arms securely around him, I have never once felt like he was unsafe.

In How Forests Think, Eduardo Kohn describes a moment of panic while traveling to the Amazon in Ecuador. Landslides are a common occurrence on those mountain passes and on one particular occasion the bus he was on got caught between several:

Traffic was backed up in both directions, and we were trapped by a series of landslides scattered over a distance of several kilometers. The mountain above was starting to fall on us. At one point a rock crashed down onto our roof. I was scared.

He notes, however, that no one else on the bus was fazed. Sensing that his experience of that moment was out of sync with the people around him he began to feel a sense of alienation, first from his fellow passengers, then from his own body:

This discrepancy between my perception of the world and that of those around me sundered me from the world and those living in it. All I was left with were my own thoughts of future dangers spinning themselves out of control. And then something more disturbing happened. Because I sensed that my thoughts were out of joint with those around me, I soon began to doubt their connection to what I had always trusted to be there for me: my own living body, the body that would otherwise give a home to my thoughts and locate this home in a world whose palpable reality I shared with others. I came, in other words, to feel a tenuous sense of existence without location—a sense of deracination that put into question my very being. For if the risks I was so sure of didn’t exist—after all, no one else on that bus seemed frightened that the mountain would fall on us—then why should I trust my bodily connection to that world? Why should I trust '“my” connection to “my” body? And if i didn’t have a body what was “I”? Was I even alive? Thinking like this, my thought ran wild.

These feelings—thoughts of future dangers spinning out of control, of being so mistrusting of your own sense of the world that you begin to doubt your very being—are familiar to me, and I imagine to most parents. In addition to reminding me of how I felt for the better part of two years after my son was born, Kohn’s words also reminded me of Thoreau’s infamous contact passage from his first trip to the Maine woods:

I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?

There is a shared experience here, between Kohn and Thoreau, even including the aftermath of these rupturing events. For the next day or two both continued to feel the anxiety of this disconnection. In The Maine Woods, Thoreau’s description of the return journey is filled with anxiety and unease, describing waterfalls and portages with uncharacteristic nervousness. Kohn describes the racing thoughts of what might have happened, “different dangerous scenarios,” that would not relent even a day after the landslides had been cleared and they were able to pass safely through. Yet in both cases they were able to find a path out of the abyss and back into the world.

For Thoreau this path was an encounter with a Penobscot man, Louis Neptune, whom at first he didn’t recognize: “…we discovered two canoes, with two men in each, turning up this stream from Shad Pond, one keeping the opposite side of a small island before us, while the other approached the side where we were standing, examining the banks carefully for muskrats as they came along. The last proved to be Louis Neptune and his companion, now, at last, on their way up to Chesuncook after moose, but they were so disguised that we hardly knew them.” This was enough to bring Thoreau back to the present moment, to the actual world and its inhabitants, and to his own body.

Kohn had a similar encounter, but with an indigenous bird. After deciding to go for a walk with his companion he spotted a tanager and grabbed his binoculars to get a better look: “I rolled the focusing knob and the moment that bird’s thick black beak became sharp I experienced a sudden shift. My sense of separation simply dissolved. And, like the tanager coming into focus, I snapped back into the world of life.”

In all three cases it is symbolic thought that has proliferated, cancer-like, unchecked and untethered to the larger world beyond the human.

One of Kohn’s points is that symbolic thought isn’t separate from but emerges out of other registers of thought but that this separation is exactly what symbolic thought has a propensity to do:

We tend to assume that because something like the symbolic is exceptionally human and thus novel it must also be radically separate from that which it comes… If, as I claim, our distinctively human thoughts stand in continuity with the forest’s thoughts insofar as both are in some way or other the products of the semiosis that is intrinsic to life, then an anthropology beyond the human must find a way to account for the distinctive qualities of human thought without losing sight of its relation to these more pervasive semiotic logics.

[Panic and its dissipation] point both to the real dangers of unfettered symbolic thought and to how such thought can be regrounded. Watching birds regrounded my thoughts, and by extension my emerging self, by re-creating the semiotic environment in which symbolic reference is itself nested. Through the artifice of my binoculars I became indexically aligned with a bird, thanks to the fact that I was able to appreciate its image now coming into sharp focus right there in front of me. This event reimmersed me in something… a knowable (and shareable) environment, and the assurance, for the moment, of some sort of existence, tangibly located in a here and now that extended beyond me but of which I too could come to be a part.

I am new to semiotics and admittedly know very little, only as much as I have read (and understood) so far in Kohn’s book. But contemplating these three scenarios side-by-side-by-side reminds me of the importance of those modes and registers of thought outside of the human and symbolic. Kohn doesn’t mention this (perhaps he will later in the book) but I have a feeling that much of our technology also functions as some sort of hyper-symbolic realm, generating entire worlds disconnected from the elemental conditions that gave rise to them.

We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life. Our present senses are but the rudiments of what they are destined to become. We are comparatively deaf and dumb and blind, and without smell or taste or feeling. Every generation makes the discovery, that its divine vigor has been dissipated, and each sense and faculty misapplied and debauched. The ears were made, not for such trivial uses as men are wont to suppose, but to hear celestial sounds. The eyes were not made for such grovelling uses as they are now put to and worn out by, but to behold beauty now invisible. May we not see God? Are we to be put off and amused in this life, as it were with a mere allegory? Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?

Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

The older I get the harder it is to push myself into uncomfortable situations. Not difficult ones, and not even dangerous ones—just uncomfortable. Yet it is still something I believe is important, not just for me, but for my son as well. In those uncomfortable situations I am forced to confront the world and my body—I cannot hide behind the comfort of the symbolic. These are situations where I cannot avoid the discomfort that accompanies embodiment, both within and without. The elements insist and I cannot stop them; I hike miles into the woods and have no choice but to hike back, despite my body wanting to stop. Allowing myself to feel this kind of discomfort has long been a way for me to reground, to reconnect to the wider world around me, to include myself in the world rather than isolating myself from it.

I didn’t intend to talk about both of these things, instead attempting to just present some of my scattered thoughts in a scattered way. But I do think there might be some connection between these two.

Attempting to balance creative pursuits and caregiving is impossible, perhaps, because balancing is an act of the achievement-subject, and the creative, non-symbolic forces of the world, Nature rightly read, can only cause imbalance.

Eros is a relationship to the Other situated beyond achievement, performance, and ability. Being able not to be able represents its negative counterpart… A successful relationship with the Other finds expression as a kind of failure. Only by way of being able not to be able does the Other appear.

…Achievement society—which is dominated by ability, and where everything is possible and everything occurs as an initiative and a project—has no access to love as something that wounds or incites passion.

Byung-Chul Han, The Agony of Eros

Eros is not just about passion and the erotic, but concerns, necessarily, the Other, and that gulf between self and Other is where creativity resides. “Therefore,” as Byung-Chul Han says, “in the inferno of the same, which contemporary society is increasingly becoming, erotic experience does not exist.”

For Thoreau and Kohn both, an experience of the Other was what led them out of the symbolic abyss and back into their bodies and the world. The distance between themselves and the Other was what allowed them to leave the symbolic and come into contact with their bodies, with creativity, with Nature. But that distance is crucial and collapsing it—whether through the symbolic or through an aversion to the discomfort of that distance—annihilates not just the Other but Eros, Life.

I very much feel that I am able not to be able. Perhaps my failures at both caregiving and at writing words and music, is, actually, a good sign.