3.3.23. - 5.9.23.
Wayne. 3.3.23.
I cried when Wayne Shorter died. Celebrity deaths have meant little to me up to this point in my life–but I grew up with Wayne. My father runs a jazz program at a university, so Wayne’s music graced the walls of my home from as far back as I can remember. While I sat in his office after school watching the Bionicle Movie on his 90s desktop, I could hear my father belting instructions to his bands as they stumbled through big band arrangements from Speak No Evil and Night Dreamer. And so Wayne is wrapped up with my childhood (though he continued to change my life when I discovered Weather Report and Native Dancer in college).
As my brothers and I learned how to improvise on our own instruments, we played over Wayne’s songs–I still do, today. And when my father watched his performances (North Sea Jazz, 1986; Stuttgart, 1991), we listened to his ideas so intensely because we could imagine ourselves as the virtuoso onstage. Given our own aspirations to play before others and, more immediately, to express ourselves, we could see ourselves in Wayne precisely because of our difference in ability, precisely because of the hierarchy in place between devotee and leader. After all, most young people who listen to jazz also play it themselves.
And this hierarchy between Wayne and me is undeniably religious. Critic and canon-lover Harold Bloom found the same relationship within the “American Religion,” particularly among Southern Baptists and Mormons. In the American realization of Christianity, followers perform duties–chiefly, to refrain from certain temptations–in order to walk like Christ, to suffer like him in order to know for oneself. Guided by an “inner light,” or the heavenly spirit already inside each person, these religious doctrines enable believers to activate the democratically evident piece of Christ already inside of them. When we ‘give up’ our pockets to charity or renounce premarital sex, our resistance against sin nourishes the holiness buried within ourselves. Or so the logic goes.
Though I’m no Christian, I can’t help but appreciate this quintessentially American feature which is present in all aspects of today’s mass culture. At our best, we find ourselves in our G-d’s, our Wayne’s, when we are inspired by their difference, their supreme ability compared against our own. At our worst, we relish in narcissism, forgetting this difference and believing ourselves to be equal with Wayne or, worse, enjoying the feeling of discouragement, the feeling that we will never be as good as our G-d and so why bother with the business at all? What’s more, how can we achieve anything ourselves if our only model is Wayne? Wayne contributed to the canon because he broke from its mold. We must hold on to the parts of Wayne he himself gave to us, but we must remember that we are different, we devotees.
I wept as I scrolled through a wave of tributes last night. Terri Lyne Carrington, Shabaka Hutchings, Christian McBride–the tears erupted with Herbie Hancock’s Instagram obituary:
“Wayne Shorter, my best friend, left us with courage in his heart, love and compassion for all, and a seeking spirit for the eternal future. He was ready for his rebirth. As it is with every human being, he is irreplaceable and was able to reach the pinnacle of excellence as a saxophonist, composer, orchestrator, and recently composer of the masterful opera ‘...Iphigenia.’ I miss being around him and his special Wayne-isms but I carry his spirit within my heart always.”
Wayne had long been invested in the idea of rebirth, for 50 years a member of the Nichiren Buddhist faith. And in these tributes, particularly those from younger musicians who have been touched by Wayne personally or indirectly, it feels as though he lives on through his own connections–and, of course, through his music. As I listen to Wayne while writing this, I think of the man himself, but also of my father, who listened to Weather Report in the 70’s. I think of when he taught me the changes to “Footprints.” And I think of him each time I play my own trumpet, which he played for thirty years in symphonies and big bands alike, when money was light and when things were good. And I think of him each time I play his flugelhorn (I had asked for it for years, but he only really seemed convinced when I learned how to play standards from memory). And now, without my father’s sheet music, I play alone in my room, with Wayne.
Take In. 3.06.23.
A childhood friend of mine–white–would regularly say the n word. “N**** what.” Indiana, and all that. I was turned off by the racism, of course, which was indifferent more than malicious–kids in my place and time took on the language through the media they consumed, and they wanted to emulate that media more than anything else. Still bad, no arguments here.
More to the point, I was primarily turned off by my friend’s passive relationship to consumption. Yes, he was indifferent to the contrast between audience and character, between his own experience and the Black one on tv. What was truly unforgivable though, to the high school version of myself, was his reflexive emulation of culture in the first place. Why should you want to be like some character? I believed in enjoyment, don’t mistake me–I watched tv. But let it pass over you for G-d’s sake! Take it in, consider it, let it change you, but don’t become it! I was repulsed with myself each time I heard “Stupid Flanders” come out of my mouth, an involuntary mark of identification with whatever cultural affect I happened to identify with at the time. And if a friend happened to overhear and commiserate with a fellow @Simpsonsenjoyer99, I was unable to bond over these shared mass cultural tastes. This all changed when the conversation came to literature, however. Books, authors, names, refinement: back then, these were intensely, self-consciously niche subjects which welcomed me with open arms. Here, I found a community of nihilists who were scared that pop culture might actually interest us if we would only let it in.
But then again, isn’t there a kernel of truth in that apprehension towards mass culture? It was always ridiculous of me to pick and choose which identifications I would let into myself without question (floating signifiers above their actual content: Nietzche’s mustache, Yeezy’s, etc). But blind associations of any sort ask us to empty and refill ourselves with whatever McDonald’s toy comes on our next plate. This is how all items of consumption operate, niche and mass culture alike. We are invited to rebrand with each piece of media as we are incorporated into the larger media whole, a culture drifting from bell bottoms to alternate fasting and back to bell bottoms again year after year, assimilating itself into itself with each contraction and progression. So while embracing niche in the abstract was surely misguided, who can say that I was wrong to be sketpical of what they were feeding me? I unquestioningly ate what I believed I had control over, a fault to be sure, but why condemn skepticism as a whole?
We are invited to rebrand, and we cannot say no. Well, we won’t, at least. I once dreamt that we could: not to retain some pure version of myself; but to enjoy, consume, take in, and evolve alongside myself and alongside culture.
4.14.23.
Tripping tomorrow for the first time in two years - the last having taken me completely out of time and away from any sense of meaning (what is this blanket for?). It was a difficult, painful experience, but one I’m glad to have had.
In the last two weeks, I finally feel as though I might be able to be happy, something I haven’t felt since long before my breakup three months ago. Warm weather might be a factor, fair enough. But the possibility of sensation itself is foremost in my mind: few times in my life have I been as locked into my phone, my headphones, my compulsive addictions of all sorts, as I have of late. Some of this is contingent on my unpredictable bedside outlet: no bedside lamp, no reading before bed–scrolling ensues. Nevertheless, tripping has brought me out of these depths before. What interest could scrolling have to me when I’m truly clear-eyed about life? I know I’ve felt this before, I know I can again. When I’m clear-eyed, it’s possible to focus upon sensations rather than distract myself from them. To really taste my food rather than ingest it absent-mindedly while watching tv–attempting to do both at once is a futile attempt to hoard sensation, maximize pleasure, maximize having had pleasure. This is why I scroll, too. And this is so often why we are driven by legacy, why we choose to have children, why we feel as though we need to join a political movement whose importance extends beyond ourselves and our own lifetimes: we don’t take seriously our own perception and experience of life. Instead, we need to quantify our toils in the historical sphere. “Did my life improve the material conditions of others?” Rather than, “Did my life make other lives’ better? Happier?” And certainly never, “Was I happy in my own life?” We choose to obsess over the first question to cope with our inability to prioritize, much less answer, the others (Matt Christman).
And a day before tripping, which I hope will bring me out of this stupor, I am still scrolling. I could join my friend for a drink, who desperately wants me to meet two of his other close friends. Or I could continue scrolling through an ocean of Hinge women, asking them for a drink, try to fuck them, and never speak to them again. This can still be a beautiful thing, of course–a connection between humans far superior to any death-drive-scrolling I could do on my own. Even so, the impulse is still derived from that death drive. So the hope I place in tripping is exactly that, hope, demanding fat nothing from me: I don’t have to do anything to change my life, the tripping will do it for me. Even better, my trip is an extreme form of consumption, completely in-line with the scrolling I intend to perform up until the moment of truth tomorrow afternoon when I may or may not stumble into an ego death.
4.15.23.
We value only when we can tell others how we feel; we tend not to value those feelings when they’re felt alone
Should I
w/ Divinity, I’m allowed to at least feel w/ other ppl → but I also enjoy bourgeois pleasure (the art I’m around every day; but I’m so detached from it). And am I really getting closer to anything w/ where I’m allo
Being pulled apart from just experiencing… what am I allowed to do?
Allowed to do… is all I can ask, can’t feel… not
Easy enough to have half ideas; I need to get better @ getting to the end of those thoughts of what I want
I’m trying to plan my life on an exclusively cerebral plane; not feeling it as it happens
Only when I pray am I strong. Am I allowed to be myself. Alone. Not needing, because I can feel what provision is in the profound sense that it asks for itself. You must treat provision, providing, in the most serious, most divine of states to understand it. Before we can provide
Before we can provide what we need for ourselves. To take ourselves seriously.
Religion + Strengthen,
Ways to be alone;
Important to stay attached to symbols (parsley on the seder plate like the trees I see now)
When I’m writing the most it means I just need to feel; it is feeling, to write
Is the empathy we’re feeling on psychedelics some interplay between us; or is it when we can have the conviction that we’re feeling more or less the same thing as one another? There’s truth to that 60’s sureness that we’re so similar, so same, to each other; but we’re only able to participate in communal certainty when we’re certain of ourselves, alone.
Had mostly bread + water today. That’s not true – quite a bit of sushi too. Thought a lot about pilgrimages (going somewhere to engage in whatever I have to → excesses of the regularity of life) and about self-sufficiency. Think I’ll go to Walden Pond soon to think about Thoreau.
There is immeasurable dignity + meaning + strength in self-containment.
4.16.23. 2:00 pm
Why would I leave Boston? The people I love are here; the people I hate are here. This is where I have to be right now.
4.16.23. 12:30 am
Tripped today. Had a tremendously difficult time communicating w/ those around me (also tripping). Is the empathy we feel w/ psychedelics due to a keener intuition about the space in between us, or is it from the conviction we feel under these circumstances that we all must surely be experiencing the same thing? And maybe we are, after all. There must be some interplay between my own interpretation of the world and the group’s relationship to the world. What it is exactly, I can’t say.
My trip wasn’t a retreat into myself, but a withdrawal + refortification. I’m stronger now, alone: the precondition for stronger relations w/ anyone around me in the future.
-- -- --
Sex is great, but I pursue it in the first place for those moments after sex, intimate + possibly fleeting, spoken in hushed tones, lips to the other’s ear. This is also why I write, for this humanity shared between passing vessels of experience: testaments to our truest essence b/c it is experienced, not memorialized (the written word is interpreted w/in time, not out of it; though we can return to Shakespeare throughout time, each reader receives it in a certain moment; the art is permanently dead, and only brought to life temporarily each time a reader/viewer engages w/ it).
4.18.23.
As you know, it is incredibly difficult to experience things directly. It might be impossible. My own experience of life is interrupted by how I imagine others will interpret that experience.
But until this weekend, I had crucially misunderstood this relationship: I don’t experience my life through others’ experience because I did not care what they were experiencing themselves. I was simply caught up in their interpretation of my life–as I suspect most people are. This outer-narrativization gives away our control over our own lives (the most principal of human rights). And this can only result in a cosmic goop where each of us are only concerned with the interpretation of our lives by each other, with no regard for the experience of that life. It’s a pity that we’re unconcerned with other people’s experience, but the first corrective step is to take an interest in our own.
5.2.23.
Double-bind: I see others desiring the autistic, that subject so completely caught up in his own obsessions that his desire for the world is mediated alone. He is out of control and uninterested in others, but in his self-directed mode of feeling, he has taken the reins of life in that most human fashion: the notion of an “authentic” desire which originates from within.
I too desire this life, desire those who I imagine to live this way. But if I have to think about obsession, I am already too detached from myself. So follows my confused logic: “This is what others want, for me to be unconcerned with them. Therefore I must forget them. That way they will want me!”
5.5.23.
I’m only at ease around others when I can believe that they enjoy my company; and to believe this, I must do more than please them. I cannot know for myself that they sincerely enjoy my pleasing them until they have pleased me.
How strange–I can’t believe that they enjoy my company until I enjoy theirs.
I'll come back when it's good again. 5.9.23.
Unable to communicate in casual conversation the past few days, my typical objects of focus have also proved difficult to put to paper–how can I analyze the train or the $30 I paid for a disappointing burger and beer? How can I describe the forced interactions between my boss and the contracted painters currently working on the floor below me as we looped a hose down from the third story of our building through a labyrinth of still-wet walls and onto a collection of dead, yellowed bushes which line our building? My clothes got wet as I tugged the green snake from shrub to shrub, mostly-elderly passersby smiling or scoffing in succession as they strolled by my cumbersome toils. Good thing the police like our institution–their station is just down the street and our fuckery on the sidewalks isn’t strictly by-the-books.
These are my usual subjects, the things which ordinarily fill my head and, consequently, the things which ordinarily fill my pages (google docs, the notebook on my bedside table). The self-reflective forces inside of me sustain this lifestyle, demanding myself to analyze and worry and assume that any other souls who might pity me enough to read this will understand what I mean: the self-reflective attract each other.
What was the point of that writing? Writing which was, at many times, an obsession to exhibit either to myself or to the world my own caricature of myself? I had leaned into all of the worst qualities of nervosa and not just allowed myself, but masochistically rejoiced at my descent into anxiety, into analysis. What was the point of that self-reflection? The solution, I told myself, was simply to feel.
But didn’t I feel during the worst fits of writing in the last two years, alternating between screaming alone in a dusty Honda Odyssey on the highway and writing alone drunk and high in the late hours of the night? No, not as I wanted to. I felt according to a mediated image of myself, mediated through the engraving of those feelings onto paper or, worse still, onto some digital space whose timelessness is even more unforgiving than a physical slip of parchment. And I felt according to the meeting of wandering eyes–how I imagined others must think of me when our gaze meets in the middle (how easy it is to pontificate when you release yourself naked and blind into choppy waters: “Here is my diary, please read as you will!” what must they think what must they think?).
But now, once again, I am content enough to let Knausgaard pontificate for me. I picked up the second volume of his seminal work last night–sublime–and recalled that the last moment of ‘peace’ I had felt within myself was probably when I was occupied with the first volume of Min Kamp. So then, is all I have to offer some mangled Western Zen? The same advice which any other internet auteur worth their salt can provide? That we should strive towards feeling on our own terms, uninterested in its overcomplicated distortion from the presence of third parties? To enjoy writing or drawing or playing music on its own terms, or at least for our own enjoyment, rather than the drive to share it with others? But then, is it so bad to share?
Recently, I’ve felt. Unfortunately, my writing has taken a hit. I’ve tried my hand at poetry, in moments like these–a more direct window of experience calls for a more direct mode of expression. But these continue to fall flat, I feel. So consider this page a bookmark: I will continue to write but I can’t trust its merit. I’ll come back when it’s good again.