Splash No. 199 - At a Distance

At a Distance

In pre-school, four-year-old Nikhil used to sit on the side of the playground during recess and watch the other kids play. I didn’t really know what else to do, and it seemed interesting enough to watch the kids run around, doing whatever small children would do. I was perfectly content to be an observer. Even though I eventually made friends and started to do normal child things, at the time I didn’t see what was wrong with just watching. 

I’m writing a poem every day this month and have successfully written six so far. In a couple of these poems, without really thinking about it, I found myself to comparing myself to a caveman statue in a museum in one and a ghost in another. These poems were hinting at an idea I’ve always internalized, that I have always lived at a distance from everything and everyone around me, a little bit too in my head and unable to act. More than anything else, I’ve felt like more of an observer than an active participant in the world I lived in.

And why wouldn’t I be? My body has always felt so slight compared to the expanse of the world, enormous and incredible. My mind felt much more powerful, able to phase into the worlds on TV, in the novels I devoured and the video games I played. I wasn’t limited by the world when I entered into these fictional worlds, and anything was possible. Art could make me cry more than anything in my own life, experience beyond my senses. When engaging with real life, it was much cooler if I could sit back and simply watch it all unfold in the same way. 

For most of my life, I wondered if there was something wrong with me, a crossed wire that made me fundamentally unable to live life in the same way that other people seemed to. I would try and force myself to be more extroverted and sociable and be more a part of life in the way that everyone else seemed to be. And at times, it worked, and I could fully live in the moment in these experiences, which still happens from time to time. 

But now, I realize that this same ability to stand outside of experience, to simply be able to observe from afar is probably what inspired the art that I care so much about. I realized that when I experienced something beautiful, I wanted to take a photo of it, or write about it, or make an illustration of it. The moment itself was almost secondary to being able to capture it at all. Perhaps I’d always had this thread of observation within me, an embedded power to help remember the world as it was in the small moments. In an interview with the Creative Independent, one of my favorite writers Hanif Abdurraqib talked about his own practice similarly: 
 

What I like about the history of poetics is that before they were anything else, poets were essentially people who delivered news. So, in the villages they were people who delivered news to people they cared for. People relied on them to archive the day, and I feel like that was more my skill first starting out.

These archives are imperfect, a single perspective chronicling a life over many years and many places. They aren’t always true and honest, they aren’t always expository or clear. They sometimes have typos and incorrect titles, but they’re archives nonetheless. So I continue, haunting the streets of San Francisco, standing a little bit apart, phone in hand, capturing the flowers and the trees, and logging it all, the best I can.

Drops of the Week
 

• SONG - "100%" by Air Apparent - new Air Apparent song 

• ARTICLE - "The Millennial Aesthetic Comes for Your Vacuum Cleaner" by Kyle Chayka - my guy Kyle back at it again with a breakdown of aesthetics

• POEM - "Night Heron" by Edgar Kunz - just a brilliant poem

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(from all the way over here),
Nikhil