infinite pursuit
searching for faith in purpose
“Jazz is about emotions. You use the melody to express how you feel at the moment. It’s different every day. So it’s infinite.” utters the aspiring jazz musician halfway through the animated film Blue Giant (2023). The film follows an 18-year-old named Dai, who becomes obsessed with becoming the world’s greatest jazz saxophone player after seeing a single, life-changing performance. What follows is his experience chasing that dream, forming a band with two others who share similar goals, spurred on by their own moments of inspiration from witnessing performances of the genre.
I watched this film at a time when I wasn’t feeling like myself. I was moving through my life as usual, keeping everything going as it should. But when I did things that I love and things that I didn’t, nothing seemed to leave any sort of emotional impression on me. Everything — even getting to scream and shout about football or dance with my friends — felt pretty neutral after some time. It had been this way since I returned from New York, maybe because of the insomnia or the waves of illness that I’ve been battling since.
Yet I found myself in tears during each performance in the film, the emotionality of the music enhanced by flashbacks to the experiences that brought the characters to that moment in the performance. Dai refers to his solos as dying in front of the audience, baring his soul to them with his last breaths. Each one feels that way, as if there could be nothing else but that solo, the culmination of so much work and life.
So, even as my own life failed to leave any emotional impressions on me, film still did. When my reality was unable to strike my heart, these fictional accounts could resonate — bringing how I perceived my own life into sharp relief.
It happened again with another animated film, Satoshi Kon’s Millennium Actress (2001). The film traces the story of a fictional acclaimed actress named Chiyoko Fujiwara, who defined Japanese cinema for generations. What we discover is that the entirety of her career, her entire life, was dedicated to reaching towards a man she met briefly when she was young. Her acting career begins when her first opportunity would take her to Manchuria, where she thinks he has gone, and every subsequent role references and is tied to her efforts to find him over the years.
How could I not sob as she saw the back of her beloved across decades? How could I not be moved by her obsession with someone she never seemed to be able to reach but saw in everything that she did? How could I not be inspired by her insistence that it was possible to find someone so elusive, one that she knew so little about?
What tore me apart about all of these characters is that they let a single idea, a thread of feeling, take over their lives, directing their energy and focus into turning them into not only works of art but into full lives. A single-minded devotion to the idea that their desire will be worth all of the trouble, the sacrifice, the pain of losing all of this time to chase something as unpromised as a dream. This requires an unbelievable amount of faith. It’s an unwavering commitment that the outputs of effort will amount to anything, it’s faith in the self that this desire is worthwhile and true and honest, it’s faith that meaning will come.
One could argue that these fictional characters are simply figments of imagination, but they aren’t. They haven’t been conjured out of nowhere. They represent the spirit of so many incredible people throughout history. It’s Quentin Tarantino building an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema for years, self-financing a feature film, and learning the craft of it all before writing and directing Reservoir Dogs (1992). It’s John Mayer obsessively practicing guitar every day after school for hours upon hours to learn how to play like the greats, long before he ever became a household name. It’s Joan Didion as a high schooler re-typing works of Hemingway to understand how the sentences are structured at the beginning of her journey as a writer. It’s Kaveh Akbar watching a film a day and reading two books a week to understand narratives enough to write his first novel. It’s everyone who has ever made anything beautiful — Bernini spending years as an apprentice, John Milton beginning the stories of Paradise Lost as a child. The thread of creation and dedication always ran through them, as if a part of their DNA.
My head asks, “How could these people so blindly commit to building on such a loose foundation, the possibility of liquefaction present beneath their entire lives?” And my meek heart quietly whispers, “And why can’t I do such a thing?” A character flaw perhaps, a result of a neuroticism that can never accept anything as it is and must search for answers, proof that everything is sorted, a guarantee that nothing could go wrong — desires for the impossible, the opposite of faith. I cry, I sob when I see these stories, in awe of their faith. They reveal the single great desire that I have, that I always have had — to have a single point of purpose that I fully believe in.
Purposelessness is what disconnects me from my life and my heart. Art is what brings me back. The lack of this purpose is what all of my existential crises are about, as I re-litigate over and over what my purpose could be, arriving at a conclusion only to lose confidence in it the next day or week. How is any of it sustainable? How could these threads survive under the scrutiny of logical analysis?
It becomes clear that this sort of purpose may be less about what the identified purpose is and more about one’s ability to stand by it, to chase it regardless of when it makes sense. It’s never about the idea, and only ever about the faith.
The lack of faith is what keeps me from fully committing to the effort of the work that the inspirational stories do. With my writing, even as I stay consistent and write weekly, I still procrastinate the work, usually only starting to write the night before. If I claim to imagine writing as my purpose, why wouldn’t I be putting more of myself into it? It’s the faithlessness, forsaking myself out of fear. If I never put my full effort into something, I never have to confront the fact that I might not actually be good enough at it, or that I may be delusional in my effort. By half-heartedly putting myself into it, I can rest on the laurels of my alleged potential and can avoid facing the reality of my work as it is.
Confronted with my weakness, I look for solace. I think about reading through writing strategies, hiring a coach, creating SMART goals, like a productivity framework will fix a confused soul. But I remember what led me to any of these realizations. What triggered all of these thoughts wasn’t being faced with my actual reality, but films that represented what life could be like. In these images, in a fiction of sorts, we can carve away the bits of reality that distract from what matters. So what if conjuring another way to look at life could help me to re-center myself?
This is how I imagine it: there’s a mountain in front of you, so tall that you can’t even begin to see the peak, if there’s a peak at all. You know you must climb, and this is the mountain you will climb. So you climb every day. Some days you climb for hours and hours, traversing enormous portions of elevated terrain, and other days you only spend a few minutes making a tiny bit of progress. But you keep going. You continue because you are meant to. You continue even though the peak never appears above your head, though it seems like there’s no end to the mountain. Because there may not be. This could be a peak that goes beyond human comprehension, beyond anything we will ever see. But when you look behind you, there’s an entire lifetime of distance that you’ve traveled. And the time spent climbing was worth it because it was what you had to do.
You can leave the mountain at any time. There are helicopters on standby, waiting to rescue you at any time. You can leave it all behind and go do something else, anything else. Everyone will remember how far you went, remember your accomplishments as far as you went. But you won’t be able to look back at it all the same way. It will simply be a memory of the view; nothing like seeing it for yourself.
Then there’s me. I’ve been climbing the mountain of words for years now, slowly wobbling my way upwards, putting in as little effort as possible at times. I consider leaving, going anywhere but here — to the beach, to a simpler life. But nothing has ever drawn me the way the mountain does, even when I hate the mountain with its uncaring face, its icy surface.
I sit in ambivalence, rolling over the possibilities in my mind of what another life would look like, what regret would feel like. Of one thing I’m sure: to abandon the mountain would be to forsake myself, if I haven’t already. Of another thing I’m sure: as time passes, as my life ticks away doing anything else, the mountain awaits. And I must climb.
We must do what we can to push back against the genocide in Gaza and the invasion of Lebanon. Consider calling your US representatives to support de-escalation and a ceasefire, donating to Care for Gaza (grassroots organizations delivering food to Palestinians), directly to families or by buying e-SIMs to keep folks connected to their families. Lebanon is suffering too— consider donating to the Lebanese Food Bank, The Zahra Trust, or Beit El Baraka to help provide relief and resources.
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
PLAYLIST - wait im goated - my pump-up playlist! mostly upbeat electronic music
POEM - “Object Permanence” by Madeleine Cravens - How many gods do you believe in? How many good men?