April 16, 2025: Headstones
first post on this blog
dont think it is my first post on wordpress
it is not my first blog post
many have come before
whether others come after is not for me to decide
a blog is not a monument
it is a way for me to talk to you(, to imagine perception, to interpret imagination)
item 1: january 9 2025
If it isn't written down, it doesn't matter
It doesn't count
You're wasting time and space and energy
But I'm never going to read it
You're never going to read it
So what are we all doing?
---
I'm trying to write myself down, so that I can distill myself into what's interesting, what's important, what I'm proud of. I write down what I feel so that... so that I feel like my feelings are important enough for that? Because I
believe that they are?
My short memory means that I exist in a shorter time window than most. I may be a sum of my whole life under the hood, but to my own perception I'm only a sum of the last month, a collection of memories from the last year, and the few evergreen moments that persist from day to day, decade to decade. Who I was outside of this window is not important to
me.
I write so that others can read, but though I hope they benefit from it, the most honest justification for this motivation is that I hope that I can connect with people, even if that connection manifests in that moment as one-directional. If someone reads something outside of my window, they are reading the words of a dead man, and I am kept out of the equation.
I write as a headstone for that dead man so that I can read it. But this cannot be true. In reality, I write as a headstone for myself, so that when I die, my future self can read it. Reading the headstones that lie behind me seem to me largely inscrutable and meaningless. I have long wished for a way to keep myself from erasing my past -- I do it habitually. But I do it because I wished to create a testament to myself, and now what I am left with is many small fragments of testaments to various souls who have left the earth. I do not see myself in them, nor do I see their own selves in each other.
item 2: january 9 2025 and april 13 2025
I'm going to stop keeping long, pruned lists of my favorite songs. A song is a pattern that you enjoy memorizing, a twitch of the body, too short to circumnavigate the island it surveils. One can love a song through the years, but there is a difference between the feeling a song conveys and the feeling of its pattern, and after time has passed and these two decohere, you are only left with the former.
I've come to see these lists as these headstones, and I've managed to put myself under the impression that if I just focus on things that are a bit longer, even just an hour as opposed to a few minutes, then it will be truly worth something.
item 3: april 4 2025
The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the same. The bubbles that float in the pools, now vanishing, now forming, are not of long duration: so in the world are man and his dwellings.
[1]
If I can only build sandcastles, then I must grab toothpicks and carve beautiful designs into them. I've been guilty of overfitting to the idea that
all of the thoughts and understandings that have accumulated since humans first began assembling culture, don’t require a human observer, or any observer at all for it to matter.
[2]
Understanding is a window from the self, either into the other or back into the self, allowing joy to enter.
item 4: april 16 2025
holy shit have you guys seen this mishima movie??? crazy right
item 5: media
Mishima: A Life in Four ChaptersAmazing movie. Lots of discussion about what it means to create art, its perceived purpose, narcissism(?)... fascism... an inability to look beyond the sphere of the platonic
Nine Inch Nails,
Pretty Hate Machinesong that most caught my attention was The Only Time; this album is not claustrophobic, but its definitely a soundtrack for being in a small space, or an abandoned warehouse at night, big shiny fan slowly spinning from the wind and letting moonlight in to shine upon dirty insides, sweaty and godless places. the music itself does a great job at being ugly. it is a dryness around wet things. go listen
Black Midi,
CavalcadeFinally got around to this - long standing item in my music queue. Telling you to listen to this a few listens shy of when I should, mostly because I want this blog post to be UP! But it's got some cheeky rhythms and rhymes, smooth songs mixed in with the chaotic, if you like the musical feeling of having control and then losing it (as opposed to, say, hyperpop, where you are never given it to begin with, here we begin with a base of familiar instruments, familiar patterns, and they dive with us into madness) then give it a go!