“Sad clowns, hapless figures in a cosmos that doesn’t want us in pursuit of redemption we can’t have.” But not soulless careerism. Not that.
An anniversary on the horizon for this navel gazing and it seems like at least the following is worth noting:
The future keeps winning. Even when it seems unlikely.
Riding in a Porsche on a late spring day and eating up a mile in a matter of what seems like moments: affirming.
Sleep. On the regular. Oh if only.
Do you mean to tell me there is no deep further fact beyond the multitude of adjacent mental moments and psychological states that make up a day a week a month, other than that such moments and states are habituated (firing makes wiring)?
That there is no deep further fact to the idea of having or being or embodying a self?
That - knock on wood - sometimes the sense of having hit bedrock is just like the sense of having felt inspired by a trumpet blast and the crescendo of the felt mallets on the skin of a timpani?
a peace piece by bill Evans yes I suppose that is the one, I would like it played when I die and anyone who is here still still hearing this will see that it is played then when I am no longer here to hear it played. A peace piece a piece of the peace
***
This is not a sentence.
This sentence is false is not a sentence
“A quotation appended to itself” appended to itself is a sentence to purgatory.
***
Here I was, trying to talk about things, to you, and I open my mouth and out comes more things. The more I tried to talk to you, the more things came at you. Which is not to say it was unenjoyable: this constructive monologue of mine.
***
It wasn’t just that he was a narcissist. He was a wounded narcissist, which, I mean, like, come on.
***
Bear with me, no - wait just bear with me for one second. You don’t want to do this. You don’t know what you’re doing. Please, just stop. Stop and think. For once in your life - No wait I didn’t mean that. Not like it sounded. I don’t mean things how they sound, it’s true.
You tell me, if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich? And I tell you I don’t know how to talk about money, anymore than I know how to tell you what you missed in not making a choice to alter your brain in high school.
Do you have anxieties that your sensations of the world sit across an experiental divide from the things of the world about which your sensations cluster/from which they emanate/to which they attach? If this experience-phenomena-thing gap is still a thing for you, even at this age of crumbled empires and factional reality, I wonder whether there is much chance of me falling in love with you at the same time as you falling in love with yourself. I also wonder whether aesthetics is not a subset of philosophy but a form of consumption.
If you’ve never eaten a thing whose life you took on purpose, does that make you slightly less human? When did the category human no longer necessitate a trait of “killing what it eats?” Not to get all Fertile Crescent and onset of agricultural practice on you.
I started beholden to the idea that this time I might actually say something. I have become arrested by the idea that for too long I was assuming that the work was a puzzle, and it turns out it just be a mystery instead. That this doesn’t feel momentous, and also doesn’t feel like a loss, is some indication of how far I’m come or how the shiny allure of a closed and comprehensive belief system has just never taken root. For me at least. They say work masochism bears a family resemblance to virtue signaling which bears a family resemblance to compulsive signifying activity, to which I say, to them and those their ilk, very well.
The reason I’m so smart and not rich (one might answer) is because I recognize the illusion of wealth for what it is. But that is a luxury, that recognition, isn’t it?
The shallow expression of that persistent itch is just “something new and shiny.” The underlying absence that gives the itch purchase on your brain patterns and carves out a home there is “something enduring that keeps kicking out meaning.” Maturity is a name given to boring acquiescence, so as to reduce its sting. Like cardiac arrest is to heart-stopping death.
Having money in amounts sufficient to keep people at bay is a very American ambition. It is as though security comes by way of insulation and the absence of worry comes by the absence of unintended friction when people pass in and out of a life, this life, your life. It is a peculiar sort of wisdom to recognize that this all may be a symptom of alienation, in the way that making a living puts use values and meaningfulness at odd clashing angles. Actionable wisdom, rather than empowering affluence - but (being American, after all) why not both?
Why not the Peace Piece by Bill Evans and the first two tracks from entroducing? Why not a small spliff on a walk in the woods and the twirl and shuffle of a hand on her back, spinning out and pulled back close with the hand she holds in yours? Why not all the why nots now?
A sagacious ironist or an ironic sage, I forget which, once observed that to become human does not come easily. And it is this idea of becoming human as an achievement, a thing to be worked out in time, that resonated with our protagonist as he went from project to project, downloading packets of information and accepting new targets with amoral aplomb and near-sociopathic bonhomie:
down and out in Sanyer, with a crooked but decidedly self-aware businessman to smear and then blackmail (the latter to be done by someone else). The businessman was a wholesale grain trader, but this dispute had something to do wirh oil and the sale of tractors. It was simple: he would plant illicit imagery on the mans home computer, which he was able access with rope and an actual grappling hook, and afterward, it would be discovered, security services would become involved, and whomever or whatever the man had been impeding would be free to move. When it was done he hired a boat to ferry him down the Bosporus toward Istanbul and sat down to a meal of lamb and strong yeasty beer at a little family joint in the Tarlabasi district;
down and out in Lyon, where he used a garrote to end the days of a small-time gangster who had drawn too much attention to a smuggling operation from Mexico that had been in place and more or less accepted by local authorities until the gangster tried to use the same method to start importing guns and declined to increase the total of the hush payments. It was “hogs get slaughtered, pigs live on” logic, which came with the territory. Still, the insistence on the garrote - the immediacy of it was what was emphasized - struck our man as unnecessarily baroque and risky. But he was well compensated and was permitted to come two days early to feast and consume what he could of the city. And then he shuttled back to Cologne, with at least three weeks off before he would head back out again . . . .
And the people made powerpoints
And the people made powerpoints
slide after slide after slide
trying to reinvent a presence at the vanishing point, you know the one, the gravitational mass on the horizon where all lines converge and the inflow of money might be pinned to a map
The people believed that having faith in having faith would be (or simply is always) enough.
As though declaiming could make this confounding mystery into a puzzle, with coordinates and rules and the magnetic pull of a template endgame to which you might refer every hour on the hour.
Like a scurrying centipede, but of segmented concepts instead of churning limbs, all akimbo and with no logical progression, reading slide after slide after self-referential slide climbing up the walls and scattering my force, every hour on the hour.
Kvetch as kvetch can, have no fear, I will lap up what no one else is spooning out. A thousand internal monologues fall by the way.
It is never enough, this stolid 8 wants to be a palpitating 10, let me show you
Just-cleaned gloss is the fixed look staring back at me like a transparent omen of cemented insight.
Have I mentioned that this is costing nothing, my wisdom wrought from fierce design and slandered title. All of it just background music, counterpoint in a minor key, and I lord over this gloomy scrim of a window pane I’ve peered out of and breathed into, role playing skillful lookout, every hour on the hour
I am in that everlasting niche mediating the gap between insular mind-games and lambent group text grandiosity, five of us now, none the wiser, arguing over whether a cyclone or a tornado could serve as an epigram to the (r0) and the f(n) of serendipitous dread
That no one will ever ask for this is not the biggest fear. Martin Luther says that penitence comes first and pounded it with nails. Luther Martin says that Chase was scavenged before he was ravaged. and the people making powerpoints say that no matter what, this idea of an insurrection will pound onward.
on the hour every hour, standing here feeling what it feels like to feel like this, muted until the sign off
(not another word)
standing here feeding a well-fed thing that feeds on this newfound zeal for slick budget graphs and epistolary pitches
(not another word)
Starving hysterical naked
Explicating Seneca
Salivating over so much pithy cant
(not another word)
****
When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos liked to say. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.
**** {contra}
That 99% of compulsive thinkers’ thinking is about themselves [and] that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and then getting ready for things that are going to happen to them and then weirdly that if they stop to think about it that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences are never good
Saying it doesn’t make it so, except sometimes when it does. Like a coin flip that comes up heads five times in a row. An Amanuensis makes for a pneumonic midwife, so consider that or perhaps you are more enamored with a mental flight instructor with more amplitude than the situation might bear. An anagram of an acrobat whose tympanum has burst and can’t stand not being able to stand still at great heights before stepping out ever farther out onto that wire, is perhaps more your speed.
I have a distinct memory of being told of an event about which I have no memory: I am in Oshkosh overalls, shirtless, brown toddler body and ringlets of blonde hair, playing behind a ring of bales of hay. The bull is out and the family that is babysitting me can’t find me. I am clueless, in the reverie of pretend play and the only lived moment of the present that is the only lived moment ever for a child like me. I get pulled out of the reverie and back to my powerlessness when a strong hand with a steady grip plucks me from the ground and runs with me, strung up like a fish on a line, to the nearest outbuilding. I am told - or else I conjure up this detail to help make sense of why I was uprooted - that the bull was panting and snorting and pawing the ground outside the ring of bales.
No not quite like this . . .
Horse shoes and hand grenades
If she had only had a drone, and
of the maze had made a game
Much less strife might have been sown
and her calling could have saved her name.
She should have could have might have done
Those dirty deeds with Zeus’s son
Her body minded, it kept full score
She long outfoxed the Minotaur.
A thousand pictures not worth one word
When it comes time to pull on the thread of memory, and remember what these days and nights felt like, there will be a greater or lesser tendency to fall into the rhythms of coherent declaration and speak in dulcet tones of soothsaying hindsight. And it will take someone brave to shout out that nearly everyone was clueless and beholden to that ignorance, like a moral cripple is beholden to the unfairness of affliction. “We had no idea what might come,” if said, will be poorly understood, because it will have came, come what may, and the equal parts of its promise and its wreckage will have already become encoded in the minds of parties whose poor understanding will hold us in good stead, I hope. I hope.
The downstream consequence of this collaboration between my time and this entity’s list of objectives is money. Presumably an amount of money that exceeds the value I contribute, satisfices my need for enough stuff to feel comfortable and at the level of status I strive to achieve, and overpowers my desire to chuck all this nonsense and live perilously, without resource or any level of security to fall back on.
i have more humorless, obvious sentiments to throw down after a brief word from our sponsors . . . .
I had intended to assemble a diary that might read like a how-to guide in handling the delamination of self. It was to be anchored to the idea of loss as a repulsive gift, something that however difficult or bewildering, was also bracing in reminding/insisting that stability is not to be taken for granted. Very little should be.
Except I am probably the last person capable of outlining how to do anything, not because I don’t know how to, but because I can’t seem to consider the perspective of the person to whom I would relate / to say it simply without becoming buried in abstraction.
Instead of a steady diet of riffing on the repulsive gift, I am trying to distract myself with art, or daydreaming about travel, or reading abstruse theory from media-software savants or 70s-era psychotherapists who play with meta theories about capitalism and selfhood - lots of self-hoisting topicality in other words. and also trying hard to have basis to reject (better: disprove) the notion that I am doing something other than distracting myself.
having seized the means of production, I am my own boss, and he is, in most regards, a real demanding son of a bitch. That is a chief and primary means of distraction, which is a tacit refusal to accept the repulsive gift.
As long as every man and woman who crowded into the cathedrals on Easter Sunday was a principal in a gorgeous drama with God, glittering angels on one side and the shadows of evil coming and going on the other, life was a rich thing. The king and the beggar had the same chance at miracles and great temptations and revelations. And that’s what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own individual lives. . . . Art and religion (they are the same thing in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.
Writing a history of love, as opposed to the history of love, and avoiding getting carried off into the ether of autobiography for its own sake. Check that box.
Avoiding the idea that recounting an idiosyncratic history is enough, as though the story will take care of itself and momentum is a function of quirky pastiche . . . Check.
Being grounded without seeming uncool or disconnected from the vibrant pulse of present creativity - mmmmm.hmmmmm.
Also funny: also voiceover narration but who needs Puritanism: also Beginners femme fatale be still my beating heart.
An aside:
the thing about grandiosity is you can’t feel ok with just being a normal non-descript self, happy for those who you care for and happy with yourself too. Contentment becomes inachievable; it seems impossible to live outside the terms of comparative assessment. So that so much of the cognitive metabolism is bound over to what someone else has or doesn’t have, what someone suffers from or excels at - and the someone exists as a foregrounding for the self’s obsessive shadow. that comparative lens is THE lens through which all the data points get filtered, and all the most piquant self-involved flavors are contradictions waiting to get sharpened. I prefer not to see in this way and eat at this table.
A disjointed stand in for the fear I have of liking art that appears tied to a milieu to which I can’t relate and that is in all material respects too cool for me, which is to say
I like my LA with a strong dose of Nova Scotia re the design side of things. Lambent austerity.
The final consisted of one essay question, a take home, for which the intemperate professor had allotted 72 hours. It read:
assume a crow and an eagle have each lived a long, full avian life. Each will die today. Is it better for the crow to die in mid flight so it it rebounds, lifeless, off the ground, or to die with its feet on the ground and wings folded in? How about the eagle - which form of death would be better? How would Parfit answer? How would Diogenes? How would Cavell? How do you?
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.
€€€€ ~~~~¥¥¥¥ ^^^^
Astral America. The lyrical nature of pure circulation. As against the melancholy of European analyses. The direct star-blast from vectors and signals, from the vertical and spatial. As against the fevered distance of the cultural gaze. Joy in the collapse of metaphor, which here in Europe we merely grieve for. The exhilaration of obscenity, the obscenity of obviousness, the obviousness of power, the power of simulation.
Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It's no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.
Go and sit in an Epicurean garden and fix on the idea that perhaps the well-lived life is not examined and measured to the infinitesimal, but consumed down to the marrow. Neither an original nor a profound thought, but better than a poke in the eye perhaps. Better than a cough in the mouth too.
Different horses for different courses, obviously. Perhaps Diogenes, with his discarded cup and idolized child, is more to your liking. Or one of the systematizing Germans, the old ones who liked and still believed categories could be like walls. An Estonian who could say, in his doggerel accent “I’m pickled pink and I got nowhere to go but my shrink and nothing to show for it but my paycheck.” I am ecumenical. If I occupy a mind that is delaminating, I feel the pull of one school that might pull me from the deep immense. If I am in self-improvement mode, having grabbed and pulled the thorn with time to spare for counting shekels, then I may construct and cross conceptual bridges of a different order.
“Love of wisdom” is not the only loosely structured vocation built from a long line of plastic neologisms. Chief best most primary modern bequeather of course wears the uniform. Collateral damage. Enhanced interrogation techniques. Smart bombs. We are of course now far afield of the garden. It turns out all the fructifying rain falls only in America. Of course, that damned phrase, I say it so often it’s like a hiccup.
And yes but it was my best thinking that got me here. Guilty as charged. I have been absent but not idle.
“Self-destruction is a control freak's way of monopolizing their own fortune. It's gotta be the most narcissistic thing to hijack God's cockpit and go, ‘No, I'll decide whether it's a good day or a bad day.’ ”
“I lived,” writes poor Teufelsdrockh, “ In a continual, indefinite, pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, apprehensive of I knew not what: it seemed as if all things in the heavens above and earth beneath would hurt me; as if the heavens and the earth were but boundless jaws of a devouring monster, wherein I, palpitating, lay waiting to be devoured.”
Bedevilment is as bedevilment does . . .
Borges teaches that the obscure and forgotten are not the chaff. What counts as wheat does not causally correlate to merit.
Yes, essay means to try. And for however long, it was my particular defect to pledge only to try to try harder. Not simply to try harder, much less to just do the thing - period. To essay a change - so what? To change in fact: and off we go. To try to not have insomnia. To not have insomnia. To structure a life in which sleep can happen at anytime.
Lest this be taken as too precious or rich, I can say that I was walking on public land that almost everyone assumes is private and came across a dead Canadian goose whose bottom half was beneath the ice and whose wings and neck were above it.
I am against it.