There is No Redemption: On Writing and Obsession
I have a new blog post over at Bleed, Jaded Ibis’s awesome new blog. I talk about a bit about the relationship between writing and obsession, and a bit about my writing process for my forthcoming book Damnation.
An excerpt:
The long takes of the film opened up for me, not the possibilities of aesthetic contemplation, but ethical and moral contemplation. Redemption, as a possibility, was impossible, but not nonexistent. The feeling of eternity could penetrate my being over the course of minutes. The images weren’t just inviting me to contemplate, there was almost an ethical obligation to mirror back and contemplate the situation of my own particular self, a strange connection between their hopeless situation and my own, a strange hope in the landscape of hopelessness. In my mind, I was giving confession while immersed in these sustained gazes. (To whom?) The experience was meditative, hallucinatory, compulsive.
