The Terror of the Top Down View
The world is entirely built for me, so why do I still feel like I’m not meant to be here? This is a world built from Mesopotamia to Cromwell to Vladimir Putin to wrap me up in the swaddling, my every phrase perfection, my every opinion available for development, every field enclosed for my collected pennies, and yet, even when I drink a pint of Guinness, even when I sit with Netflix blaring, even when I type on a laptop built by dead slaves, I feel uncertainly not a part of what occurs around me. The only time I do feel a part of the universe is when I remember I am the universe; The Birth Caul helped me remember this, a fact we all know, but forget, and remember again. Anamnesis. The moment we are given a name, we are separated. I want to be nameless, or have multitudinem nominum. Legion. Something like that. Somewhere between god & the worm. Somewhere between artist & peasant. Somewhere between named & nameless.
I become depressed (and I loathe the term, as it feels like being a tourist in someone else’s actual health crisis) only when the analysis overwhelms the living. I had found a way of existing. A cigarette & a coffee. For the most part I would look up at the sky and see only a sky, and realise I & the sky were one and the same. On the bad days, I see the sky and I think of aeroplanes and then I think of Syrian children being bombed by my country and that leads me to knowing one of my friends might be Tory, which leads me to money, and my lack of, and my work ethic, and if I deserve work, and if I am meant to be an artist, and who I am anyway, why am I here, why should I be here, do I just listen to Camus and get in a car accident —
This is The Terror of the Top Down View. Both this and the cigarette & the sky are egotistical, so let's forgo the laughable attempts at reminding me how much of a narcissist I am, because anyone who knows a narcissist knows we don’t care we are one. So let me say this plainly: in both instances, it’s about what is without. When things are good, it's about the realisation the without is within. When things are bad, it's about seeing the network, the patterna, the systems & wheels that concentrically & cosmically align everything, from the political upheavals to the tiniest conversations between two lovers. And the depression doesn’t always stem from a manmade, post-industrial ennui, a post-modern existential crisis, it can come from realising even the strangest of elements is all tied inexplicably (or rather, explicably) to everything else. The witch-trials were both shamanistic & political. Abortion (lack of) rights are both spiritual & abhorrent. A pint is both intoxication & capitalism. Anxiety is disorder & inspiration. A child is the future & a noise. Darkness is light. Airports go nowhere. The colour of our skin both matters & doesn’t. And everything becomes kind of true, because nothing is, following every incandescent path like veins filled with radionuclides to the first cetacean in the every-sea, howling, desperate, fictional & nowhere, telling the first story which is all our lives. Our DNA is unravelling, revealing that there is only one thing that exists, this material plane, and everything we think it is, from the table this laptop sits on, to advertisements for hair gel, to empires, to diptera, to staplers, to sexual fumblings between bodies unknown, it’s all a story, it’s all made-up. In that fiction lies a qabbalistic, societal, emotional, mechanical system of rings, identical to the orbits of planets & the whirring of electrons, which makes everything we do a thing that exists, a thing that is true, from fascism to socialism to anarchism to sitting in a rocking chair in your 90s wishing you had talked to that boy more —
From out of this realisation, comes terror. This is a kind of anti-zen, in that in both zen & the terror is a great feeling of interconnectedness, and a great loss of self. But zen is the moment. This is the absence of the moment. Anything can trigger The Terror of The Top Down View. A news article. A friends Instagram feed. An enemies success. It becomes a spiralling bruise of feeling, of sensation, unavoidable, vacuum, singularity. The trick is, as I have learnt in counselling, to flip it on its head. What does this all mean, when you need the rushing to stop?
We move from zen to anti-zen when we stop being a thing that happens in the universe to thinking the universe is happening at us. The Terror is the feeling of being buffeted on the tides of time, and not being a wave itself. I show David Lynch above because here is a man making a film, where every idea is fished out of the waters of his mind, and he doesn’t know what he is doing. How can this be true? He creates sensations, dreams, built entirely from sensation, inspiration, and emptying the lobster pots collecting all kinds of fancies from the unconscious depths, entirely riding the waves of the universe, which is himself. To feel depressed — to feel that he doesn’t know what he is doing — when it all came from within, feels impossible. I believe, in this moment, he felt the film was happening to him, not with him. The Terror had emerged. To return to zen, bliss, rock on, he must be with the film. Of course, here, we swap film for life.
I’ve already established you’re not a good person, that instead it’s about comfort, what you can live with. The next bit, the hard bit, is whether you can live with it all, at all. Every villain thinks they are the hero. Every hero thinks they do nothing at all. Every single thing is connected to every single thing, a huge dadaist tableau from here to Timbuktu, a fabulous maximalist portrait of every piece of human skin, a perfect narrative where everyone is the main character, and all of it comes from within, every feeling, every moment, entirely constructed from within, because the within is the without. There is no boundary between you and the universe, so all of this madness is your fault, your responsibility. We swap life back with film. Every idea comes out from between our ears and we turn it into something. Not necessarily good, or bad, or evil. But something. We cope with The Terror of The Top Down View when we realise we were The Terror all along.
I, too, am making a film. I, too, don’t know what I’m doing. Before, I would hide in the dark, scribble away, emerge, create. Now I fill a room with people, some I pick, some who come along for the ride, and we create it together. Nothing feels like that. Within. Without. Together. Something is flourishing; it is a strange place to be in whilst writing. I believed, firmly, that I could only make whilst in a state of misery, or confusion, tapping into — but not living within — The Terror of The Top Down View. What triggered my recent bout of The Terror was the fact things were going well; I questioned why I was making something again, especially something so steeped in my usual themes of desperation, meaninglessness, love. I felt comfort, yet I was creating. I never create when comfortable. So, I began to look for reasons, and so I returned to those concentric rings of interconnected everything, that means nothing. I worried about my bank account again. I worried about my job, my life choices, the past that doesn’t exist, the future yet to be. I worried about my hair, my friends, my lack of love. I needed reasons, when there are no reasons. The thing is the thing. No more, no less. Fail again, fail better.
The pain of the writer is that the top down view is required for the purposes of the script. Mad Men (of which I have been binge-watching excessively again) could not understand the complexity of morality without that view. The Leftovers could not have written grief without grieving. The Sopranos could not have ended in that diner without feeling the weight of the world. Of course, when one is trying to Shandling it — to zen — but must also be a writer, to be an artist, you must bathe in the horrible beauty of it all. But this fails the ideology. Zen is not a verb. It’s barely a noun.
Authenticity. Vice. Legacy. Steal; copy. Create. These are the enemies of zen. These are the fuels for The Terror of The Top Down View. Yet, in my bliss, I find the writing again. I find myself quoting Lynch & old TV shows again. I find myself with imagined laughing faces at how I am pretentious once more, quoting Francis Bacon, quoting old artists with values unsuitable for the crowds of today. But do I care. The Terror comes when you usurp the self, rather than free the self. The world may well be built for a man like me, but my alienation comes from within, not without. I will ride the waves of anxiety & joy, for they come from within, not without. And the universe, with me or without me, shall spin on, a birth caul, a firework display, a voting booth, waiting for a film I’m currently making.
