Month: December 2024

been feeling particularly caged in by the Black Iron Prison lately (the world is a vampire, history is a nightmare, etc. etc….) in no small part due to the terms of agreement I didn’t read before signing up for this particular lifestyle I have: not particularly luxurious, but comfortable, a job not particularly soul crushing, but soul sapping. each day becomes more like the next as I swaddle myself in restraints that cushion me from the untamed majority of reality.

I’ve resolved to give up. giving up is easy, that much I’ve proven to myself every time I don’t sit down to write, every time I say there’s always tomorrow. but it’s best if I apply this talent for giving up to different ends. if I don’t get the librarian job here that I’ve applied for, then I’m giving up on the idea of having a librarian career. certainly giving up on the idea that this is a system worth working for. the trajectory of my life the past decade suggests that my priority has been to have a career in libraries. a noble cause, if I may say so. but emotionally, psychically, the depression and dissatisfaction I’ve felt suggests that my priorities lie elsewhere, and it’s long past time that I take that seriously.

I’m not interested in rehashing this problem. just dusting out the cage so I can get some real thinking done while incarcerated.

because the guards aren’t my coworkers here at the library; my boss isn’t the warden. the System extends far beyond the little grievances I have with wage labor. everything is working against the possibility of living life freely; and the only possibility of living life freely is to be a creator of realities that compete with, rail against, and try to subvert the structures holding us back. ie to be an artist. and here, in the US of A, artists who don’t serve as mouthpieces for the Empire place themselves near the very bottom of the pyramid, among women the poor nonwhites and queers. but it is in this willingness to cast themselves out of the Empire’s good graces that artists gain the power of true perception, and the potential for self-mastery.

there’s one passage in Great Expectations by Kathy Acker I think often about, where she lays out the problem of being an artist in the United States. if she thought the problem was bad in 1982, no telling the depths of despair she’d feel seeing the state of the arts today. the broader point she makes is that in a country where money is the Logos dictating the conditions of existence, and this society selects very few of its artists as being worthy of attention (ie care and support), then to persist in being an artist requires either financial support from family or sexual partners, critical compromise with commercial forces, or else a pathological and self-destructive commitment to the work. that aside, a minor point she mentions is that, because so few artists are selected as worthy of attention, the vast majority of us never get the recognition, distribution, or feedback necessary to progress artistically past the personal preoccupation stage of an artist’s development. the inclusion of “feedback” in this list really hits the mark for me. the past 6 months to a year has been a steady decrease in my concern for not only sharing work, but for making work at all, because I tried for a few years to keep at the avenue most available to me for sharing work, and never got anything that felt like actionable feedback. if creating art is a cybernetic process with the world, and there’s no response to incorporate back into the original force that brought the work into being, then by the law of entropy the will to create, unless exceptionally strong and self-sufficient, will dissipate.

this was supposed to be a kind of working out of ideas I’m going to package differently on my newsletter soon (remember I have a newsletter? link in bio). not sure I did that exactly but whatever–I’m learning to be okay with making a mess I don’t know what to do with. I think I’ve come up with a System (my old boss was all about creating Systems, and something I’ve learned is that it’s not enough to have a goal, or even a plan, but you need to have a System for attaining that goal, for implementing that plan). I’m going to start writing newsletters again, and hopefully get them out more consistently, because why else have a newsletter if I’m not sharing something consistently.

despite a feeling of having my creative energies exhausted, I remain dissatisfied with a life not shaped by a commitment to art. so I’m fueling my tank up with vitriol, resentment and a hunger to prove myself.

this morning before work I watched a video that I’d seen logged or listed by a few insane randos I follow on Letterboxd. it’s a video produced by something called “Sound Photosynthesis,” editing together stock/historical footage with a couple recordings of Terence McKenna explaining his “Timewave Zero” theory. according to him, using a software model based on the I Ching (how exactly I don’t know; I’d have to read the book he wrote about it I guess), we can map temporal cycles as a fractal oscillation between various periods of “complexification” and “simplification.” his model, conveniently, predicts that the limit of this oscillation is reached at the birth of the universe and in the year 2012—remember the 2012 phenomenon? how lots of people in the weirdosphere/psychedelia/conspiratainment circles latched on to the fact that the Mayan calendar “ends” in the year 2012?

leaving aside the possibility that in some way the “world” might have “ended” in 2012, the year I graduated college, McKenna posits that time is a kind of spiral fractal approaching a “transcendent object at the end of history.” spiral because as we approach this telos, the chronic tightening compounds the complexity of being, and fractal because patterns repeat at various scales, leading to resonances of similarity across time. McKenna uses the example of Ulysses to demonstrate: how Bloom’s wanderings through Dublin on a random day are somehow cosmic echoes of the wanderings of Odysseus around the Mediterranean over the course of a decade plus.

this is the closest theoretical explanation of some intensely overwhelming experiences (yes, brought on by drugs) where I felt—not conceptualized, not imagined, not speculated—but felt that “I” (the bundle of perceptions and sensations comprising the flimsy construct of my consciousness) am the very tip of all of Time, and within me is the totality of all that had to happen—traumas personal, generational, historical, biological, geological, and cosmic—for this present moment to be as it is now.

periodically, an impulse will have me ruminating on emo music, the genre most suited to adolescent angst. I was lucky enough to be an angsty adolescent when emo gained mainstream popularity back in the mid-aughts. they’ve since made a whole industry out of capitalizing on people my age pining for the days when it was socially appropriate to feel your heartbreak at the volume of a sold-out stadium concert, but you won’t find me ever attending “emo nite” or buying tickets to When We Were Young, the corporate festival where ancient (ie 20 years past their prime) post-hardcore, pop punk and emo bands are wheeled out to perform for crowds of tattooed millennials whose knees will hurt for days after pogoing to “What’s My Age Again?”

nonetheless, the opening chords of “A Decade Under the Influence,” or the album art on Diary by Sunny Day Real Estate, or the 16-minute coda of “Goodbye Sky Harbor” from Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity—these stir up in me a feeling, of being young and in love, of being ignorant of all that I know now, of having possibilities not yet foreclosed upon, of being wide-eyed and eager to embrace life in all its messiness and pain and euphoria. friday night lights are lit over the football stadium, holes are forming at the elbows of a favorite zip up hoodie, and someone told someone else that another person is making out with someone they shouldn’t be behind the auditorium.

if I’m being honest with myself, this is the feeling I’m always trying to recapture. it seems that that former eagerness has been beaten back cowering into a corner. even just reminiscing on the discovery this music online, back when the internet felt like a place of boundless exploration, fills me with nostalgic yearning. how can I face the future squarely, with eager anticipation, as I once did in the past?

I’m not old, and there’s plenty of life, painful messy euphoric life, yet to be embraced. but I’m not quite young either, and not getting any younger, as the old ones say.

more to the point: what’s my age again?