22 07 2024 morning
An acute sense that I have to do something about a hundred times before it starts to happen, that I would need to be married eight or nine times before I was really married, that I would need to die eight or nine times before I was really dead –
But despite this, despite, in objective terms, our general condition of peak historical thick-skinnedness, our historical moment also requires that we claim to have no skin at all, that we claim total emotional and spiritual nudity. Our historical moment requires, in other words, that we interpret our inability to imagine a way out as evidence for an infinite number of ways in.
Any legitimate secular affirmation of life requires you to be able to say: it would be easier for me to take my own life than to believe. And to be fully Nietzschean requires the qualification: and by easier, I mean ‘more enjoyable.’ If you would in any sense prefer, I wanted to tell him, belief to suicide, then you’re still religious. But I mean this as a compliment, as the highest compliment!
The relatable part of the truth is always the most tedious; all the interesting parts of the truth are destroyed in communication. But this is already a theory of forgiveness, because the ability to distinguish tedium from tenacity has been lost.
The Victoria & Albert Museum (A Review)
An aesthetic education assessed by a final exam of throwing up at the Victoria & Albert Museum would be much more legitimate than one assessed by any given ‘qualified individual’ –
James stood directly in front of the Fragonard for three hours, but displayed no signs of nausea whatsoever… he simply stood there, straight as a crane… I’m very disappointed of course, several years ago he had shown signs of real promise in my ‘Charcoal and Constructivism’ class… I continued to follow him around, to watch him as he passed by ‘Dame Edna’s Breakfast Dress’ (Room 55) and two paintings by Thomas Gainsborough (Room 52), apparently still feeling perfectly well. Finally, at around 5.30pm, with his hands tight around his neck (while this is technically allowed, I can hardly condone it), looking intently at Louis XIV’s ‘virgin birth dressing table,’ room 1 –
23 07 2024 evening
The white cliffs, about which it is impossible to say anything (and if I could think of something to say, I have to hope I wouldn’t) with J, about whom it is impossible to say anything (and if I could think of something to say, I have to hope I wouldn’t). But good weather that’s a fact of historical record. An older couple, white and blue chairs strapped to their backs, pushing on over the shingle dune. You look so much better, I wanted to tell them, than how you actually are, than how you must, surely, be –
(Begin by declaring that every word names an emotion. If someone wishes to claim, e.g., that the word ‘stone’ does not refer to an emotion – well, they can make their applications to relevant regularity body. I’d love to read their arguments, their little numbered references to certain pictures of brains – )
And what else: crows, rabbits, sheep, horses, cows, people, individuals, cowslip, a girl too close to the edge of things (cowslip), the old couple just mentioned, a dog mongrelling in the shadows. Walking around, drinking it all in… Four or five flavours of ice-cream, her sports bra, a Russian accent (fishing rods at the ready), Toyota Yaris, some Kias, too much rain (but just for an hour or so), and all the gulls, the clean noise they make, which makes you think of laundry, which makes you think of an elite Mayfair laundromat powered entirely by the translucent power of gull-cries –
Taut cries which, like guy ropes, will hold the memory down –
A diary! A diary of factual events! Can’t factual events take care of themselves? What could I possibly offer them, when they have all the laws of physics on their side?
24 07 2024 afternoon
Watched that drug documentary1 wherein rich people with their own personal greenhouses sit in them and make arguments about legalising lysergic acid, but don’t mention legalising access to their greenhouses. But did you ever consider that it might be quite therapeutic for me to own your greenhouse? That it might be quite therapeutic for me to tell you that you can’t go in your greenhouse anymore, because it’s mine? Yeah, I guess we really are connected.
I want someone two points stronger, two points faster, two points more willing to deliver the final blow.2 A version of myself just ahead of me, or rather just behind, since at a certain age this hypothetical motivational being would of course cease to be two steps ahead of me and be, rather, two steps behind. This need not affect its motivational efficacy, except for this disconcerting fact that at a certain point – in a sort of Zeno’s paradox of self-help – it would have to pass directly through me –
25 07 2024 morning
Speeding up a piece of music destroys it; reading faster leaves the meaning entirely alone. And yet somehow people think music is ‘universal,’ somehow people think Thomas Mann ‘can’t be translated’ –
To say a word is to baptise a word. Any theory of language must therefore begin with a theory of saliva. And perhaps would do best to stay there.
Our historical moment is characterised by an obsession with the process by which power becomes meaning; more precisely, by an obsessional tracking of the rate of exchange between meaning and power. At the same time, our historical moment has no interest in what makes such transactions possible, what stamps every transaction with its alien authority. Our historical moment has no interest, I mean, in the memory of God –
In fascism, the will to power is subsidiary to the will to meaning; the will to power follows the will to meaning around, trying to please it. Marx invented communism by severing the will to power from the will to meaning, by liberating the will to power –
It’s Nietzsche hatred of meaning, his insistence that we throw it as far away as possible, that we hide it somewhere we can never find it (the future), which makes him the only true inheritor of Marx -
Hermeneutics: fascism without a plan
To have power over someone on the condition that your power means nothing. Only this would guarantee freedom –
‘Look, I only said that because it was sayable, not because I thought it was true.’
‘Look, I only said that because it was true, not because I was sure I would be able to say it.’
If I had a more entrepreneurial spirit I would start a fundraising campaign with the slogan you aren’t an atheist if you have any money –
26 07 2024 afternoon
The insane power of sunlight, not so much to illuminate the world, which it does so in a, to be honest, largely derisory fashion, but to determine the face. Only here does sunlight know what it’s doing –
The future of the human race will depend, chatbot concludes, on the angle at which the light of our fake, geo-engineered sun finally falls –
The beautiful – as true of noses as of breasts – always appears to be moving upwards, always appears to be on the point of being finally sucked up into heaven. This (and nothing else) explains the fall.
I mean if you had to be enclosed for eternity in a minimally small physical space, I asked her, wherein a certain time-washed face would flow permanently through you, but beyond this nothing else would or could happen, I mean there would be a sort of self-moving sculpturo-spiritual face-memory that would permanently inhabit your mind, half looking at you, half looking away, would you rather it be a male face or a female face, you want to know now, she said, yes, I said, obviously I mean now, when else could I possibly mean –
These streets, instead of providing a series of interconnected livelihoods to hard-working family-centric men from the Anatolian plateau, enough of that, what I want now is the pointlessly expansive windows of the various inner city Prets, their dumb cleanliness, over which her image could slide with no resistance –
Overheard in London:
‘Don’t you see, the travelogueification of your body–’
‘He’s the Doubting Thomas of Eva Longoria fans’
‘Yeah, he’s really the Joan of Arc of e-vape resellers’
‘You were right about him, he really is the Agamemnon of NYT paywall evasion’
Etc., etc.
27 07 2024 morning
My despair has sufficient depth and quality to float a certain type of love, as with a ship of a given tonnage being granted access to a certain harbour. One should say to a man who complains of despair, who says ‘I can’t love her, the pain is too great’: but only a bad workman blames his tools. No one asked you to love in spite of your despair, only to love with it, since after all your despair has the advantage of existing –
He does annoy me, I do find his mannerisms frequently repulsive, and almost always ill-considered, but he has, in the final analysis, the advantage of existing. This type of reasoning characterises much of adulthood, maturity, etc.
Much like the ontological argument, which becomes exponentially more persuasive with time. If I can get to, say, ninety-five, well, how could I not believe? How else to interpret such an absurd quantity of existence –
You can also read the mirror diary entry covering the also interesting days 22/07/2023-26/07/2023 from the year of our lord twenty-twenty-three here:
Oliver Burkeman wrote of the book in The Guardian: "How to Change Your Mind is Pollan's sweeping and often thrilling chronicle of the history of psychedelics, their brief modern ascendancy and suppression, their renaissance and possible future, all interwoven with a self-deprecating travelogue of his own cautious but ultimately transformative adventures as a middle-aged psychedelic novice."[14]
Sensuality, politics and Agamemnon, who after every death (including his daughters) and catastrophe he engineered, was murdered by his wife’s lover. But made for some great stories.
I love your writing.
"What could I possibly offer them, when they have the laws of physics on their side?" Is such a raw and accurate description of why the best writing throbs with a sort of poetry of unreality (though it is very real, real psychologically). Attempting to write down things the way they are is first of all a pursuit doomed to fail, but second of all, I don't think our minds ever follow the laws of physics.