There is No Later
8-11 December
8 December, 1:17
Cause and repair harm. Do everything in your power to avoid discomfort. Pick up a book, but do not start reading it. Discover a new way of concealing yourself from the world. Discover a new way of talking about fear, or death, or the passing of time. Drive your car very fast down the center lane of the suspension bridge. Violate federal law using only your mind and your balls. Revisit old wounds and regard them like postcards from faraway lands. Tell on yourself in subtle, easily refutable ways.
Practice withholding. Practice dishonesty. Practice revenge.
You could also say: flirt with insanity. Flirt with the frightened woman at the post office. Realize things you forgot you already realized. Question the loyalty of everybody in your life. Think on time scales that make you uncomfortable. Build trust and watch it burn like a big grey building. Offer judgements and issue criticisms. Have something to show for yourself, and pull it out like a quaint little parlor trick. Observe the soft idiocy of other people. Observe the casual brilliance of other people. Question if the world might’ve been built for everyone except you. Chase fantasies and extreme weather events. Direct every ounce of blame back at yourself.
9 December, 15:29
Brecht reminds us that because things are the way they are, things will not remain the way they are. This not-remaining–this inexorable not-remaining of all objects and circumstances–this is the center of the mandala. We will return to the wound time and time again, raw and bewildered as though encountering it for the first time. It will sting like a betrayal, but it has always been this way.
If I could only fly, if I could only foreclose time, stop things from changing at the very moment when conditions settle and the equilibrium that I quite stubbornly believe to be some sort of birthright is at last achieved.
That might be my most favored illusion: that I will eventually arrive at a point, after which change ceases to be this inexorable brute force and instead becomes a kind of option. This is magical thinking at its most pernicious.
There is no later. This is later.
17:51
The grief of our situation is, basically, insurmountable. Everything changes and nothing lasts and the whole thing is just primordially devastating. You will be crushed, in time, by the weight of how impossible it is to stop things from changing.
The only fate more devastating, more insurmountably awful: things staying the same.
10 December, 13:13
New York, and I am reminded of the possibility that art–the struggle to make art, and the even more pathetic struggle to be seen as the kind of person who is capable of making and understanding art–is, at its most debased, an obscene competition to demonstrate the superior quality, depth, and worthiness of one’s inner experience.
A competition to determine whose interiority is the coolest interiority.
The artist demands that you affirm the unique depth and worthiness of their inner experience. The consumer’s anxiety around not getting it invites a signal cascade of alienation: I don’t get it, which means that I’m not the kind of person who’s capable of getting it, which means that I will live forever outside of this amorphous understanding, it will forever evade me, and my life will forever be so much less rich as a result of this foundational lack.
Taste–that hideous metric by which we measure our own and one another’s worthiness–is a proxy for this obscene competition. If I can’t have the coolest mind, I can at least consume the coolest media, thereby signaling my superior understanding of all the most important matters to understand (beauty, love, sexuality, power, politics, etc.).
I demonstrate my perfect taste as a collector might display his most cherished objects, asking less that you evaluate the actual contents so much as you evaluate what all of this suggests about me. What kind of person devotes themselves so wholeheartedly to these pursuits if not someone possessed of a higher-order sensitivity and intelligence, someone capable of refinement down to the most granular level? Someone who feels, notices, and is able to contextualize things that lesser creatures simply never could?
Something must be deeply wrong with me if I don’t get it–and something must be deeply superior about me if I do get it. These attitudes trap both consumer and artist in a neurotic struggle to prove something that can never be satisfactorily proven: that we have inner experiences–deeply personal and powerful inner experiences–most of which will never see the light of day. The aperture is just too narrow, and the pressure is just too much.
As is often the case, it seems a simple appreciation for the simple fact of our simple capacity to be moved by the words, sounds, and images that somehow bridge the gap between our narrow, lonely minds and the great big World ought to be enough. Ought to be, but demonstrably isn’t.
11 December, 19:58
Cameron Winter insists that everything is lying.
Stevie Knicks asks her mirror in the sky–what is love?
Stevie’s mirror was lying to her. Your mirror is lying to you.
21:40
We have decided that we hate weak men. We had no choice in the matter: weak men awaken some sort of deep current of primordial disdain in us. The probability of their violence, the unfathomable specter of entitlement that haunts their every impulse.
If only we could hate them in to discovering their strength.
23:17
“Main character syndrome” is a real, thoroughgoing problem—but so too is something we might call “minor character syndrome”. The minor characters are those who fetishize their smallness and overestimate their irrelevance, instantly capitulating to any person, movement, or cultural object that might offer them a cozy justification for their chronic lack of impact on the people and situations that surround them. These are the people who let it slip that they “don’t really believe in original thought”, the people whose convictions are jerky and unpredictable as the movements of the crows across the sidewalk.
The main character harbors a secret desire to be consumed, to become a pure symbol in the cultural-affective matrix, unmistakably large and irreducibly unique in the savage expression of their identity.
The minor character harbors a secret rage at the powerlessness they’ve mistaken for their will, their inheritance, their lot.
It’s all by design—both dispositions are grotesque expressions of this cosmic-scale disempowerment that has us all ricocheting between utter capitulation and psychotic aggrandizement. Neither do justice to the true nature of our struggle, which has so much more to do with bare survival and animal instinct than we’re ever given a chance to recognize.
Beautiful, beautiful writing. Buddha’s Shorter Discourse on Emptiness speaks to this; IMO really it’s the only way forward (not that there is a way forward):
"They understand: ‘Even this signless immersion of the heart is produced by choices and intentions.’ Liberating insight comes from insight into the state of signless meditation, that is to say, it is the insight into insight itself. They understand: ‘But whatever is produced by choices and intentions is impermanent and liable to cessation.’ Knowing and seeing like this, their mind is freed from the defilements of sensuality, desire to be reborn, and ignorance. When they’re freed, they know they’re freed. They understand: ‘Rebirth is ended, the spiritual journey has been completed, what had to be done has been done, there is nothing further for this place.’ They understand: ‘Here there is no stress due to the defilements of sensuality, desire to be reborn, or ignorance. There is only this modicum of stress, namely that related to the six sense fields dependent on this body and conditioned by life.’ They understand: ‘This field of perception is empty of the perception of the defilements of sensuality, desire to be reborn, and ignorance. The “field of perception” (saññāgataṁ) is the scope of awareness. There is only this that is not emptiness, namely that related to the six sense fields dependent on this body and conditioned by life.’ And so they regard it as empty of what is not there, but as to what remains they understand that it is present. That’s how emptiness manifests in them—genuine, undistorted, pure, and supreme.
This feels like you ripped out my soul and displayed all of its contents. This feels like the true song of Life. Of Existence. Forever, I’ve been trying to capture the feeling, the intricacies of this living, of this breathing, the seeming contradictions that exist within the stretch of days, the principle patterns of this universe, both un-chartable and recorded, and still not fully known or understood. And yet, it feels like many of them exist here, in this writing.