Yesterday, I watched a film.

I spent what little time I had alone, after all the work, all the dealings with family, the commute, feeding myself, preparing for the next day, watching a film. A movie I suppose. I’m not sure where the line of cinema is drawn or what definitions would really apply to it, but I watched it. There was a pureness to the act, or maybe to the process. I wouldn’t call it joy, the movie’s overall tone was not specifically about all good things. Sorrowful events occurred. Some of the main, pivotal points of the film were grounded purely in tragedy. Deaths that cannot be taken back. Events that eventually happened. Choices made by individuals, culminating in what we think of as plot.

It was somber. It was moving. I’m still having difficulty properly putting into words what this film actually caused me to feel. Well, at least I hope was a causal connection. I was engaged and enamored by it. I was fully swept away in its nostalgic portrayal of a world that never existed, but somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind I feel like I had been there before. As if this emotional state I can’t describe was a place and that only particular films take me there. This wistful bittersweet nostalgia for something I never experience myself. The simulacra that tastes of a teenage love never actualized, or a duty no one ever told you to take responsibility for.

It becomes more and more difficult to explain how I felt after this film, or the few other films like it. Sometimes it happened with books, sometimes with a television program. I’m sure length has something to do with it on a probabilistic scale. But with every day that passes the feeling fades and I become trapped by the realities of my daily existence within modernity. The computers and fast food. The digital relationships. The typing into endless voids. The depersonalization and the numericalization of every human interaction. A price tag to life. The unreal reality.

Is this feeling what those in the past felt, before the technological revolution? Is this line of questioning just falling for the same notions of a hauntological future’s past? Playing with something that never existed and getting lost within one’s own mind. Though, it isn’t really my mind at that point is it? The whole point of media is to try and take control of one’s perceptions. Who are these great men that can control my mind so eloquently? How do these great men leave me feeling complete and hollow at the same time?

A limbo of emotional meaning. A satisfaction rarely felt. A pleasure that is based in pain. Aristotle called it catharsis. Schopenhauer called it The Sublime. I’m sure all the eastern philosophers I’ve never read had something akin to it too. None of them quite touch it, though. A simple emotional wheel seems to be missing the core I seek as well.

The question now is whether to continue seeking the definition of this beauty or to try and make it myself, dooming my creative pursuits to a particular, only to wallow in mediocrity. A continual struggle to close the gap of my perceived self worth and the perceived worth of others. An attempt at emulating what I consider great. A value judgement based purely from the amalgamation of who I am as a person, which circles right back to the media I consume and becomes a part of me. A subjective objective. An emotional paradox that simply fades away before it can be solved.

I want to make something beautiful. I want to overcome these monotonous daily rituals that make up the everyday person I have become. The childlike innocence long gone, replaced by gasoline prices and forigen policy I’ll never use beyond getting into arguments with other people who will never use it either. What seems like a unique moment in the day to break up the monotony only becomes more monotony itself. The act of creation is the only thing that can truly bring something unique into the world. Something by my hand. Hopefully something that will invoke this almighty emotion others have made me feel, but have yet to give a name.

I just want to make something beautiful.

Yesterday, I watched a film.