nightmares/mourning/insomnia/limbo

So, today Lilia writes of nightmares and Chloe writes of mourning. I imagine these ghastly themes are somewhat a result of the holiday--Halloween, for which I feel not the slightest bit of motivation to celebrate this year. Back to the topic(s) at hand, at the risk of sounding trite in writing about these subjects on a day that we're supposed to think about them, I would like to add my two cents. Perhaps my motivation to celebrate has been squashed by the fact that I have currently been in mourning, and not so much as me but even moreso my artistic collaborator Jessica, having lived the NIGHTMARE of seeing our project die right before our eyes. I liken the experience of losing art that you created from mere ideas due to technological failure to killing your unborn child. All last week, I woke every single night from one definition of the word nightmare (the kind when you're sleeping) to be faced with the other definition of the word nightmare (the living nightmare) that the precious beautiful thing that we were creating is really gone, and it was my fault, and the only time I feel any relief about this subject is when I'm asleep. And yet, I cannot sleep. I wake and stare at the walls and ceiling until the sun finally comes up, watching my cat change positions next to me. Waiting for a new day to begin. Waiting for the tasks of my daily routine to usurp these feelings of loss, sadness, guilt, regret (etc., etc., etc., etc.) that pass through my body and mind and spirit while I lie restless.

The only way I see to recover from this mourning is to not give up. And to not give up and start anew means that I have to really accept that the data on my dead drive really is unrecoverable, and that we have to create the project from scratch, a brand new film. And to start over means that I have to get over the embarrassment that everything that we did before that we were so proud of accomplishing now exists in the technological afterlife of our memory, and we have to do it all over again, for a second time, at a later date, pushing our dream of sharing our art with others into an intangible and scary space called the future. So at the moment, I am simply stuck in the mud between the nightmare and the dream.