The Tarot of Songwriting 11 - Justice

epistolary influencer personality disorders

When I lived in the States, I used to write a lot of letters. I didn’t know many people in my new city, so spent a lot of time alone—quite happily. In the evenings, after dinner and with a glass of wine, a surfeit of words would rush out of me, trying to describe what madness and beauty I had encountered on any given day. Like the time I was walking home from a show in Echo Park and passed a homeless woman I had passed every day for a few months when, without warning, she punched me in the chest. It hurt, but not badly. I stopped still and looked her in the face, but I couldn’t catch her eyes; she just looked right through me with a slight smile, so I carried on walking. No one walks in LA, I probably said in my letter. Or the time I was driving alone and I pulled up late into a town I’d never heard of called Mount Shasta on my way to Portland. I checked into a motel and drove a few minutes down the road to the only restaurant that was open. I sat at the bar and overheard an old man, a flute shaman (what I later found out was his profession), talking loudly about his recent encounter with Big Foot in the woods just outside town. When I returned to my motel, which backed onto the woods on the outskirts of town, I backed the car right up to the door and slept with the keys in my hand. I would have rounded this out in the letter with the relief of being able to say that when I woke up, it was the most beautiful little town, intersected by a river and overseen by a magnificent mountain (inhabited by aliens, according to the flute guy).

I had left London on a kind of rumspringa from the life I had made there, to go away and become my own thing for a while, free from the structure of friends and family and mildly oppressive sense of self-awareness I had begun to feel as occasionally people started to recognise me when I was out and about — but I was not gone forever. The letter writing, the solitude, the various eating disorders I picked up while living in the bullshit capital of the world - it was all part of a major exercise in emotional avoidance. No more evident than in the fact that apart from my actual correspondents, I also made a practice of writing letters to people I admired but who were either dead or I did not know personally, writers or artists or whatever - which I have kept in a box somewhere. This was at some point suggested to me as a writing exercise intended to get you to understand what it is you admire about whatever person, and I guess suggesting you might be able to siphon some of that by knowing it. And being as it was both slightly occult and avoidant, it struck me as genius.

I like the epistolary form—by that, I mean a novel in letters, a relationship over many years revealed in an exchange of letters, or decoding the origin of intellectual thought in the discussion conducted between two brilliant minds in letters. It’s part of my inclination towards the second pass—the filtered. An indirect exchange. It gives both parties a chance to indulge themselves in hyperbole and frivolity, space and time to say things that would have lost the attention of a conversation in real-time. It allows passion to erupt, self-consciously or unself-consciously, depending on how adeptly you have tuned your tone of voice to the written form. While a writer of letters is still finding their voice, you will notice a painful lack of consistency in tone, fog-horning their self-awareness.

You could, of course, apply that to all writing - until you find your voice, you will appear to be wearing clothes that don’t fit you (to mix a metaphor). But more importantly, you may be missing an aspect of your personhood that contains an entirely unknown side of you. One aspect of what psychoanalysis deems a healthy existence is the importance of the fact that who you are to yourself roughly aligns with who you are in the world. Not who you think you are, but who you actually are. There are, crucially, three dimensions at play there.

While studying psychoanalysis, I began to use social media more directly, a consequence of being slowly worn down, like everybody else, into accepting it as central to life as a contemporary person. As I contemplated the idea of lining up who we are in the dimensions of society with that of our real and imaginary self-image, it occurred to me that social media has consecrated a fourth dimension of being - whose first and softer incarnation was letters. The softness of letters is that they demand no strict formula; precedence is placed on expression, not attention, whereas social media allows only a narrow space in which you may contort your fourth form to its demands, a space that conveniently doubles as a waste pipe.

People who do very well on those mediums find a persona, a voice/image specific to the market demands of that platform - for some, the process is obviously contrived, but for others, it is as natural as breathing. I would guess that the latter do not possess entirely stable personalities IRL. I once genuinely heard an influencer of several hundred thousand followers say that they no longer felt comfortable using their private account (with a few followers, mostly friends and family presumably) because they didn’t feel comfortable in that persona anymore. I wish them peace. I will forever be suspicious of people who are naturally good at social media. But then again, there are now two (?) generations of people born into a world in which this fourth dimension of being is running alongside us, permanently attached to our hands - so no doubt it will feel second nature to them and perhaps even without the sinister undertones of a personality disorder.

This is all to say that, in my experience, a lot of my writing has been about alleviating a sense of dishonesty and, therefore, disharmony in myself - something akin to an original sin. It’s a never-ending and non-linear battle; a lot of what I like in reading the letters of other people is spotting this battle in them. A lot of my criticism of others comes from the disharmony I sense in them. I equally take a lot of joy in witnessing people align with themselves. It's a feeling reflected in a really well-written book. In songwriting, if you can get out of the way of what you think the song should be, what it really is will appear, though it may take you years to understand what it means, which can be scary as you might say something you didn’t want others to know. Even the most proper smarty-pants literary writers I admire cannot help but let the truth say something about them that they didn’t intend me to know. Truth can be terrifying, but dishonesty is, in this way, the enemy of art. Even more importantly, it is the enemy of the self - and this is the spirit of Justice, in my understanding.