Chickens, eggs

A collection of thoughts

I have had a hard time writing lately because it feels as though everything happens too quickly—not just things in the world happening quickly, but thoughts in my head moving in and out too quickly, too passively for me to be able to commit to writing about it. Writing an essay with references and concrete thoughts feels formal, almost like a marriage, a sort of pact that aligns your trajectory. Sometimes it feels as though the more I’m reading and thinking the less I can write because of the speed. I feel like I can only write when there’s more space and vacancy, which seems backwards, so I should probably work on that. Maybe we are experiencing stagnation because some of the best ideas flowed out too quickly to be written down. 

I have been writing actually, but mostly with a pen in my journal, or in notes on my phone if I don’t have a notebook on hand. But still I want to share something to get me going; sharing words makes thoughts feel more concrete, that relationship works both ways. So this is a collection of some recent journal excerpts. It’s not chronological. 

---

Just write, just write, “write without thinking” they say; too bad I’m such a slow writer and fast thinker. I can never do that. But I hate typing—I hate the screen and I hate the sound. 

I found a book in the street right in front of a car. If I hadn’t picked it up it would have gotten run over; not that it mattered much as it is already torn to shit. It’s the Complete Poems of John Keats and inside there was a bookmark from a book shop in Rome. I made up some story in my head about how the bookmark made it’s way from Italy to East 6th street as I lit my cigarette and then I thought “God, this book is so torn to shit it looks like the cover might fall off.” But I want to keep it for the annotations, because whoever wrote in this book drew lots of hearts with arrows that pointed to underlined words like “more full of visions than a high romance.”

I have been reading a book on the Situationist International and for the first time every I’ve experienced reading about a mode of thought that felt like looking in a brain mirror, especially the chapter on revolutionary romanticism. “Quintessentially, it is characterized by the contestation of modern capitalist civilization in the name of certain values of the past.” “Romanticism is a protest against mechanization, abstract rationalism, reification, the dissolution of social ties, and the quantification of social relationships… in many respects, it embodies, a desperate attempt to re-enchant the world”

She still stares out the window while the plane descends and she stares at the buildings as they grow with the increasing proximity—she stares as if she has never travelled before, or as if she hasn’t been living in New York City for almost 5 years now. And while the romanticism was, for a time, undeniably charming, it has become increasingly clear that she keeps her head in the clouds not because she gets caught up in dreaming, but because she is actively trying to keep her head from going somewhere else. So the romance is no longer fun at all, in fact, it is a constant reminder that there is something being avoided, every poetic phrase uttered is a reminder of weakness and it’s pathetic. I’m disgusted.

Everyone expects art to be honest, but artists are the least honest people in the world because it sometimes feels like honesty requires something fixed; it’s hard to conceptualize a fixed truth if you’re constantly in a state of creation. 

This is why I think it’s bullshit when somebody says to “be honest with yourself”. You are constantly creating yourself, so what is there to be honest with? If something is true to you in the moment, then it just is.

Do I have an easy time lying because I question the concept of fixed truth or do I question the fundamental concept of truth to justify lying?

Chickens, eggs. 

Alienated labor means being alienated from the production of desire and results in submission to (sometimes even craving of) exploitation. Or as Deleuze put it, “why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?”

“There is only desire and the social, and nothing else.” 

*The thing that can be said if there’s nothing to be said.*

NO GENERALITIES NO SINGULARITIES OUT OF MULTIPLICITIES

A multiplicity of idiots… I’m an idiot.

I put on red lipstick for the first time in a while. It makes me want to kiss everything. I like the way it looks on my cigarettes. 

There’s no such thing as poetry in motion, but movement is quite poetic. 

“Moral choice is like constructing a work of art” -Sartre

When Sartre talks about man’s inability to be more than “his own project” existing “only to the extent in which he realizes himself,” it kind of makes me like the idea of social media. I think under different conditions, conditions in which we are not pressured to be constantly marketing ourselves, but rather, encouraged to be constantly creating ourselves, social media would be good. It is really strange, how much we talk about marketing ourselves, because marketing is usually a final step in commodity production to advertise a completed product. So not only is it strange that we speak of our Selves the same way that we speak of commodities, but we are also implying that we are complete, ready to hit the shelves. Maybe this is what lead to the commodification of process, selling a process; “the process is the product” seems to be the only way to mitigate the conflict between the self as a commodity and the self as never complete.

Can collected sounds mean more to us than words that we’ve defined?

Life is full of floating heads trying to say things like the one on the cover of Baudelaire with no hair. 

Sit & let the sound destroy you.

I am always critical of normalization discourse. The only thing we should normalize is the idea that people should not care if their weird tendencies are considered normal. If you want to be normalized, be normal, don’t eliminate all possibility for transgression, you’ll ruin all the fun for the rest of us.

Homogeneity is b o r i n g

“Culture” and “identity” are not interchangeable. Neither are “culture war” and “identity politics”, but they seem to be used interchangeably sometimes. Is culture war a war between cultures? Because if so, that presupposes the existence of any cultures. The culture war to be fought at the moment is not a war between existing cultures; rather, there is a war to be waged against a way of existing that is seeping the world of anything of cultural and artistic value.

Nothing really means much or anything, but everything means exactly as much as we want it to.

Ferdinand wrote in his notebook that “poetry is a game of loser takes all”. He was right. It was annoying that she kept calling him Pierrot. It makes sense that he dynamites himself at the end of the film.