On slow, fetid summer days, the present is less of an object, I feel myself gathering, changing. After Last Days of Downtown, which was one of the longest and most successful runs of my theater career, in some ways one of the happiest and easiest, I feel somewhat pleasantly becalmed. Not long ago, I felt disillusioned, worn, and weary, but with a little bit of solitude, I feel how easily I can recover, recuperate, and gain a new lease on life.

I find that intelligence and courage tend to arrive together in others. Independence of mind tends to produce independence of behavior, and happily so.

The future tense is the tense of hope.

One of the most profound Christian ideas is the reminder that even persecutors are human.

A phobic fear of life is often expressed as morality. Ethical language is often an attack on vitality—and is covertly, deeply immoral, in the sense that it prefers pain and nothingness over joyful experience.

We pass ourselves through mediums, which changes our message.

But also, language is a medium for the whole human organism, and the whole human organism is a medium for the environment, and society, etc.

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This, by the way, is why I’m a little pessimistic about producing plays, or whatever else, certainly selling books—because unless you do something idiotic, unless you are idiotic, unless you squish all meaning into a dumb little button and aggregate people’s desires, then you’ll have empty seats or unsold books.

Cultures have never been particularly good at recognizing their best art in real time (i.e. Gaddis, The Recognitions).

Zoomers might have the unique distinction of not even knowing that there’s art at all, not even recognizing the category or possibility of art—and therefore failing to even fail to recognize.

To offer a variant on Yeats: the stupidest lack all conviction.

The age of empty-headed affluence and empty-headed precarity.

A bored and idea-free overclass. A nervous and titillated underclass. A tiny, nervous, educated middle.

Sometimes I think about how different sleep must have been before electric light. You can get a sense of it in Keats, for instance, from “The Eve of St. Agnes”:

Soon, trembling in her soft and chilly nest,
And sort of wakeful swoon, perplexed she lay,
Till the poppy’d warmth of sleep oppressed
Her soothed limbs and soul fatigued away,
Flown like a thought until the morrow day,
Blissfully havened both from joy and pain.

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The only hope for culture is our dissidents and outsiders, the exiles and weirdos who’ve been pushed to the margins or socially liquidated. They’re labeled as deviant, or bad, or evil, or irrelevant. In-group hegemonic institutional culture is so far gone that it can only reify itself through the blind narcissistic optimism and grandiose illusions about its own value.1

I’ve been thinking a lot about 2020 lately, and how terrible the first few months of the pandemic were, but also, in the long run, at least for me, and I think for others, salutary. It’s the only time in my adult life where I’ve truly stopped everything, and not out of choice. Didn’t make art or love. Didn’t go anywhere. I read about 100 books in my childhood home. I went for runs and walks. I watched movies. I rewrote all of my plays, and I reevaluated myself and my values.

I was forced to stop because the world stopped. But there’s certainly a lesson in that. I need a period of spiritual autophagy and turning over. They say our cells turn over every seven years. It’s been six years since the beginning of the pandemic And Dimes Square, this arc of my life. And there does seem to be something natural about restorting myself and my world.

Six years ago, in hindsight, I wanted more and more and more, to prove myself, to prove myself as a writer, to win fame and respect, to become someone. I rejected limits. Really, most limits, most commitments, anything that reined in my specialness. Unconsciously, at least, this is how I lived. I’m sure that was off-putting to people. My ambition and desire, my ego. My superiority complex.

Now, at the end of that cycle, I want less: commitment, marriage, privacy, maybe even anonymity, security. And I look forward to those things very soon, actually.

I also have to resign myself to the fundamental reality that writing some great plays and lasting works is irrelevant—that literature will not move the needle (any needle) unless it appeals to people’s narcissism, unless you yourself appeal to their narcissism, and their own strange, insatiable, Instagram-generated need to be seen.

The artist always has to escape the traps and the snares that he sets for himself, the way that mystics used to have to escape the traps and snares set by the devil. And I think that homology is very telling. Today’s artist may very well be yesterday’s mystic. They may be the same person on the whole.

The artist ultimately evolves or devolves into Tarkovsky’s stalker, living at the margins of society, occasionally getting paid a little bit to take tourists into the zone to fulfill their wishes. (What does Tarkovsky’s stalker have at the end? He has his wife and his child, who is also gifted. His dog. And that’s enough.)

All I know now is that I’m on the side of people who have romantic courage, who are not spending their time defending the last bastion of the minimal self, who care more about curating a little image and a little career over everything of value.

The small people who can’t defend love, who can’t defend art, who can’t defend the spirit of their community are the de facto enemies of the few who do.

I have so much appreciation recently for conviviality, for dinner parties and cigars and slaps on the back, for summer nights spent talking and walking around, for friendship with a metaphysical orientation. This alienated and stay-at-home, this bed-rotting era is also a great filter for people who have talent for friendship but also believe in friendship.

We have no idea what the arc of the universe bends towards, and we don’t know if it’s good in a legal or ethical sense. But we can know that the arc of our lives and our communities can bend towards decency, laughter, forgiveness, towards dancing and mutual eros, towards sonata for piano and violin, towards poetry and dialogue, if we want it to. It has to be willed. It will not happen on its own.

And I think what’s clear enough now is that an attitude of assumed-progress-and-chill means the most ambitiously pathological people will take over pretty quickly, and the most humane will find themselves living under a state of nervous supervision.

One wishes for revelry, not mimetic rivalry. For Shakespeare’s comedies, not his tragedies.

Every era crucifies its prophets and ignores its geniuses, separates its lovers, and elects its sociopaths. This is the course of history. Bad taste and stupidity. Animal spirits bent towards vapid acts rather than great ones.

What I’m talking about here is the romance of continuing, of dancing and laughing despite the tragedy that’s called for in the script. Then you see the unfathomable depths. You touch on the oceanic part of the self, the larger mysterious attraction and magnetism of the cosmos, the lovely face that speaks to you in the crowd, or that you wake up to in the morning, the eyes of children and animals full of light. The birdsong and bee-dancing that structures the time of nature and the seasons.

When you graduate from high school, you see pretty quickly how quickly hope and romanticism go away for people. How quickly they become suspicious of the outsider and the strange, the esoteric. And how much they start to consolidate their lives around a few predictable behaviors and beliefs. This is the horizonless American world. The frontierless American world.

Resignation is a liquidation event, a margin call for a certain structure of soul. When you know the fund is bankrupt, you have to give the investors their money back and figure out a new investment strategy.

The point of life is to love as deeply as possible, and if you’ve done that in a Platonic sense, you are a philosopher. You are not blameless or perfect. You might not be a genius, you might not be anyone, but you have touched the essence of things. You’ve harmonized with the greater part of reality.

The reason that men don’t read books, I think, is not just because they’ve been drawn or put into podcasts, or because they’ve been pushed out of the publishing industry, although some of the push and pull genealogy is correct, but because there’s a larger sense of abjection, of having been pushed out of themselves and society as a whole, of having been humiliated, that is projected on anyone who affirms themselves as a great writer. How dare you not accept your abjection sir?2

Of course the poet has a palpable design upon the reader or the audience. “Fight a little bit harder. Encourage mutual self-building, more contemplation. Don’t accept things at face value. Don’t be afraid of evil, because there’s good, and that’s the way to the good. Have a soul because it won’t have you. Find other souls to co-regulate with and against. Work actively to find what’s beautiful, what’s pleasurable. Be a hedonist and a philosopher, but also seek out the saint and ask for his advice. Live dialectically and trust your own genius. Enough to know what it sounds like when it speaks within.”

Part of the reason that we don’t feel like we live in a particularly democratic society is that non-democratic institutions have taken over much of the business of managing civic life (corporations, NGOs, foundations, smaller nonprofits, media enterprises), and that these extra-governmental organizations have developed their own legal systems, HR departments, and their own morality. You can’t vote your way out of it. You can’t easily hide from the many eyes of Sauron.

Americans no longer either have affinity groups or much avail to legal rights to protect themselves from institutional in-groups, groupthink, and the solar flares of various cultural revolutions that seem to shoot out every three to five years.

And I think I know that I’ll always be an artist of one sort, above or below anything else, because my senses are flung wide open—I feel I’m here on Earth to synthesize all this data streaming in.

Today a man stopped me on the street and read the lines in my forehead and my palm and said I will live a long life and that I’m a good man, said too many people are taking advantage of the gifts of my tongue or the fruit of my tongue or something like that. And he wrote three numbers on a piece of paper and said put it in the palm of your hand and don’t look. And he asked me to name a color, to say my age, and the number of people in my family. 37, 3, green. And he told me to look in my hand, and there it was written down: 37 green 3.

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The reason that I need a break from theater, funding, whatever sort of public social role I’m playing, is that what I really need a break from is the things that happen. It’s New York. Stalkers, violent threats, random social assassination. Generally loss of privacy. A loss of control, really, over my own life—and I know that I’ve done this to myself and may have sought it out, or at least contributed to the conditions under which I’m this weird object of parasocial fascination.

If you haven’t experienced it, you have no idea how fundamentally weird it is for some people to want to be you, for other people to want to destroy you, for other people to want to love you. To copy how you write, to copy the topics you write about. To mock you and meme you. To praise you, blame you.

I guess my willingness to endure it is masochistic. This is essentially what Last Days of Downtown was about—ending the masochism of social performance and trying to find a pure state in which life and art both have meaning again.

E says that there’s something passive about me, and that some people don’t like me because I won’t actually defend myself from them… and somehow I think that’s true.

I think about how Terrence Malick didn’t make anything for 19 years after Days of Heaven. There’s some appeal to that.

There’s so much peace in the leafy parts of Central Park.

Afterwards a few of us we went to the bar and drank and talked til 1am.

There’s a line in Last Days of Downtown— “non entities are the most dangerous people” — that I think is one of the truest things in the play.

I have often experienced love as an escape from reality, but now I experience it as a grounding in reality, which is why, in Kierkegaardian sense, I look forward to marriage—which is a structural version of the reality principle (so maybe in a Freudian sense too).

E says I have to allow myself to feel anger; that I am too easy of a target for peoples’ pathologies. And I think this is true.

Happiness and peace are the same thing; they magnetize and co create one another. Love is the feeling generated by this binary turbine.

I try to walk off an anxious feeling. All I’ve really wanted to do recently is walk. Spring and autumn are for walking.

Lately it really does feel like the default position in the cultural world is anti-art, anti-beauty, anti-truth, and has settled into a petrified resistance to anything that isn’t explicitly moral and propagandistic, that doesn’t flatter the audience and flatter the makers. Instagram logic has taken over everything and the ship of culture has been replaced plank by plank with bs.

I walk through the parking lot of an empty Lutheran church and look up at the little white spire in the twilight. I hear birds clacking in the trees. There’s nobody around.

To have to think about what the internet thinks constantly I know is a form of mental illness. And I’m trying not to get sick.

I recognize that I’ve been split into different modules or I’ve split myself into different modules. The self that manages, the self that writes, the self that directs, the self that yaps online, the self that feels, the self that loves.

It’d be a privilege to be whole, to be able to be whole again, or for the first time.

Unfortunately, as an artist, the structure you face is basically this: Almost everybody is completely tuned out to anything approaching the avant-garde or the aesthetically ambitious. And then there’s the tiny group of highly online people who are primed to develop a love or hate relationship, but a basically psychotic relationship, to any work, any artist, that breaks through.

Without a general reader or a general audience, without a general culture, one must choose, one is caught between antisocial and parasocial, between Philistine and obsessive.

What I’m realizing is the more the Center for Theater Research succeeds and becomes an institution and competes with other institutions, the more I’ll personally have to take the blame, that is to say, to face the implacable wrath or envy of whoever feels like they weren’t invited in or feels like they’re competing from a rival perspective; the psychological energy required to manage and deflect inbound mimesis and mirroring takes away from and drains the spirit of creativity, or rather creation itself.

I think the message of a lot of my plays is that if we don’t learn to identify with some kind of beauty over and above us—then we’ll be stuck identifying with each other… trying to manipulate and mold the image of ourselves that we see in the other forever and ever in pathetic little loops.

When a person feels that beauty is too much for them, naturally they want to destroy it lest they be tormented by it.

The irony of Kafka: Joseph K wants to be put on trial. K does not want to reach the castle.

Friday. I go for a walk along Park Avenue at two in the morning. There’s a full or almost full moon and the streets are entirely empty. There is one jogger shuffling along intrepidly. The Upper East Side feels cool and timeless in the dark and under the moon. The doormen are asleep at their posts. JG Melons is closing up. Steam billows from underground vents.

My brain feels overtaxed thanks to Red Bull and Zyns. I’ve also spent the last few days shuffling stocks around in my account, trying to make some money off the mania that the stock market seems to have entered into in the last month. And I have made some money, and I find that money brings me comfort because I really don’t have enough of it at all, and I’m embarrassed to always have to worry about it.

I live on the Upper East Side, but I have none of the bourgeois solidity of my neighbors, I don’t think. I feel almost like a spy here, a member of the precariat nested amongst the affluent.

I walk by the Sotheby’s building, which is in the old blank building quad. Look this up, I forget. On 75th and Madison. The new upscale restaurant they built on the bottom floor is empty. Staff are cleaning out, the lights are on. I watch them from outside and jazz music pumps from underneath the outdoor tables. It’s like a scene in a movie.

I have so little interest in the theater world, in fact an antipathy towards it. I feel myself drifting away from it. Not from writing plays per se, but from the general task of making it or trying to fit in or maintain a niche.

When you haven’t made your name, there’s greater incentive to be witty and a personality at parties to kind of compensate for the fact that nobody knows you or cares about you. Once you’ve made your name, the incentive is sort of the opposite, to deflate and obscure oneself. To deflect and make dull as a kind of apology for the name being known in advance. When you become someone, you become no one really. So there’s an attraction in being no one again because then you can be someone again.

If I had to describe myself, I would say that I’m a cautious gambler.

I guess my question is, how does one recover a sense of vocation from the ruins of obligation?

Books should make the soul float.

Artists are existential athletes. They live for something to represent. Representation is the real living.

A sentence lies at the end of a forking path of thought, or forking paths which converge upon the form of the thought.

A good sentence has very deep roots, it seems, that are concealed below ground.

In your late thirties, some days your body, when you go to the gym and work out or play sports, feels twenty-five and some days it feels fifty-five. The number of days it feels fifty-five gradually increase.

The naivete of great art often resembles the naivete of bad art. Therein lies much confusion.

If the whole of human history was 24 hours, the amount of total freedom experienced in those 24 hours might be a second or two.

I’m reading Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate (which gives panoramic view of Soviet life during the time of World War II). During the time of the Soviet Union, at least at the height of Stalin and Stalinism, perhaps only a few people in the whole country didn’t live with the terror of death or denunciation; very few people lived without the fear of starvation or poverty or exhaustion. The cost of building up a Soviet industrial and war machine was the servitude, the deprivation of all the Soviets, was the individual soul.

Literature seems to have shrunk because it no longer purports to have anything to say about the larger movements of history or the meaning of life. What autofiction marked was the curtailing of fiction, the folding in and solipsism of fiction, the extraordinary re-allocation of artistic responsibility from the whole to the part. I do think basically CTR has been a part of the most exciting theatre in America for the last five years, that even without money or pop star influencer level fame, we’ve managed to acquire audiences and influence and community. And I think there’s nothing better than hanging out with the cast and the audience after the show at a bar. For that’s after the show, I’ve spent my life for five years and that’s not so bad.

We live in the future now; and we’re just realizing it.

In the last days of his life, Brahms was still studying Bach. “On the piano rack lay a large volume of the monumental Bach Gesellschaft edition, completed the previous year. The book was opened to a motet, the margins of the music covered with Brahms’s notations.”

I’m near the end of this 600-page biography of Brahms that I’ve been reading off and on for a few weeks.

I’m sympathetic to Brahms’s classicism, his work ethic, his curmudgeonliness, his impish eroticism. The most perfect classical composer, if not the greatest. His whole life, Brahms responded to and wrestled with Bach, Mozart, Beethoven.

The late classicist is an early modern, an early contemporary. Pivot figures. Janus figures.

Brahms knew he was the end of Viennese music. He could feel it accumulating in him and discharging itself. After Brahms, Mahler, Schoenberg, the 20th century, the war, the end of the empire, psychoanalysis, in no particular order.

No art can happen outside the spirit of freedom. In truly liberal eras the spirit is public, joyful, playful. This is not our era. During illiberal eras—times of extreme surveillance and mimetic violence—the spirit has to be cultivated entirely inwardly, to protect itself from surveillance, hysteria, and moralism1

I can’t help but wonder if the period between 1890 and 1910 was the most wonderful to be alive.2

One interesting quirk is that liberals liked Brahms’s music, which was architecturally and sonically conservative, while conservatives preferred Wagner, which was sonically revolutionary. I wonder why that was, what that means.

The playing of today’s classical musicians—I’m thinking of a concert I saw at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center last week—is amazing. Because of the severity of training programs and the spread of classical music across the globe, especially in Asia, there are probably more great players alive today, by an order of magnitude, than ever before—and yet the atmosphere of classical music is so stuffy and geriatric. This kind of music should be played in churches and salons by candlelight amidst tobacco smoke. It’s really meant for worship and for dancing, for life.

Symphonies and opera are meant for the whole city to come talk about, essentially the modern version of the ancient Athenian theater festival—and yet so many great composers and so many great players and conductors merely serve to please rich people at galas and to assure institutions that they still have the right to exist. Or so it seems to my amateurish perspective.

If I were one of the several billionaires who is about to be created when SpaceX goes public, or when Anthropic or OpenAI goes public, I would build a castle somewhere in California or Texas and hire quartets and orchestras and composers.

Life today is unbelievably sad because nothing is real, or very little is real, and the real emerges and is culled and punished out of existence right away by online swarms.

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The strongest argument for life extension (mild life extension at least) is that everybody deserves a little more time to figure things out. It seems cruel that just as we learn how to actually live, we’d actually be near the nature of the good and goodness, our time starts to run short.1

One thing I’ve never understood is why one person would want to destroy another person on the internet, which is a proxy for real life—because there are plenty of things in the realm of ideas and in the realm of systems that would better serve for demolition.

After years of doing theater research, I think I’m ready to do research about myself again to get myself right—to develop the ideas and practices that I’ll need to make a contribution to the new and strange and somewhat sci-fi era that seems to be upon us.

(A lot of old ideas won’t work anymore, like keys that fit but the locks have changed.)

One of the side effects of memetic social media on the arts is that you end up living for approval from others, and clicks and likes, and the social drama rather than actual stuff. By forcing actors, painters, writers, directors, musicians onto the gram, we’ve done incalculable damage to the soul, artists and audience alike.

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There’s something about American life in 2026 that doesn’t seem quite real. In fact, extremely fragile. Like there’s nothing really holding any of this together, or like the Wizard of Oz will stop pedaling soon.

The permanent underclass meme expresses this feeling as an economic concern.

The simplest explanation might be that we have too much data about our lives. There’s too much information in the ecosystem, and everyone is in a state of nervous despair because there’s too much information.1

Millennials embraced minimalism (physical minimalism, a minimalism of things (Marie Kondo and all that) while embracing a maximalism of sensory inputs, sensation and episteme—and gotten things completely backwards.

Our physical systems need to be plural, sprawling, messy, abundant, and our mental systems need to be simple, clean. The physical world now seems sort of uniform, flattened and Instagramified.

The mental world is chaotic, overgrown.

Thought experiment: if you knew that every AI token you used burned one of your brain cells, or severed one synapse, caused the withering of one dendrite, would you still burn those tokens?

Lately I’ve loved wandering around Manhattan by myself at night. Even while I remain an extremely social person, my appetite for socializing has definitely gone down lately. Is it strange to admit that I sort of long for loneliness more often? That I do not think I experience loneliness enough anymore? Aloneness, rather.

The verbs have changed from reading and writing to situation monitoring and prompting.

Culture may have to hide from the internet to survive. I think my artistic projects may have to hide from the internet in the future to survive.

COVID era masking psychologically encouraged and justified homogeneity and the disappearance of the other. Masking was a visual leveler, made a uniform sameness acceptable, even good. So now when all the girlies wear the same influenced brands and all the boys have the same haircuts and muscles and it’s the same dead-eyed affect, phone-molded eyes, there’s nothing to be worried or concerned about.

The deeper question here is how does a blightness and indifference of spirit somehow accompany this spirit of dread? Why do anxiety and dread accompany indifference and passive consumption?

After abstaining all week, I got properly drunk and forgot after the last days after party on Thursday night. But I think that feels like a good rhythm. Moving between being alone and sober and being convivial and tipsy—cutting out a lot of the middle, more exhausting, more irrelevant forms of relatively generic socializing.

The e-bike is really a perfect metaphor for the ambient drug that doesn’t otherwise have a name or moniker. Suddenly in the last few years, these dangerous machines are everywhere, mostly driven by the insatiable need for people to order out because no one can cook anymore. The drivers have no regard for their own safety or others. And the streets largely serve these bikes no longer pedestrians, just as the bikes serve the apps, the algorithms. We could say that sociopathy is just the integration of machines into people, the handing over of human intelligence to machine intelligence.

You can’t walk around the East or West Village and not be aware that part of the poverty of American culture is actually poverty, that we have mass affluence and mass affluence spends itself on generic garbage, overpriced dinners and overpriced bars; people sitting in silence on their phones at those overpriced dinners and overpriced bars; a kind of numb, soulless consumption and narcissistic self-display that never ends, is never supposed to end (and metastasizes like cancer).

Algorithmic behavior drives bubbles faster and faster, so chances are if you think you made a great decision—chances are you’re in the right place for the random reasons rather than your own goodwill and intelligence and selectiveness; you’re a part of a behavioral wave.

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I think the middle tier—long-form essays, magazines, newspapers—are very far on their way to becoming either irrelevant or subsumed by one of these two broader categories. (The middle tier, by the way, the 2,000-word essay, is also the easiest thing for AI to replicate.)

Write books or write schizo posts. And if you do write an essay, find a way to get it into a book. That way it might survive in time.1

Nietzsche writes, “Our pessimism, the world does not have the value we thought it had. Our faith is so increased, our desire for knowledge, that today we have to say this. Initial result, it seems, worth less. That is how it is experienced initially. It is only in this sense that we are pessimists, i.e. in our determination to admit this re-evaluation to ourselves without any reservation, and to stop telling ourselves tales, lies, the old way. This is precisely how we find the pathos that impels us to seek new values and to grow from the will to power.”

In the arts you can tell when someone is not interested in the threshold between okayness and greatness, when they would like to have a career versus when they would like to initiate some kind of profound inner and external change that initiates a harmonious relationship with life itself—and to root out existential weakness in themselves in order to become artists in the ontological sense of the word. Primal makers.

Sometimes I feel like I vacillate between the calmness of strength, non-reaction, and the calmness of exhaustion, the calmness of being ground down and turned into a nervous husk. It’s like I have two modes, two selves at least.

Tuesday night The Punisher reading felt like launch of Dimes Square season five (or episode 2 maybe if you went to the On the Rag reading, which I didn’t).

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Once you get marked as having achieved too much or been given too much, once you become an object of envy, there’s no limit to the cruelty that actually can be inflicted upon you socially. You’re just expected to endure it as a kind of tax you pay for having crawled forward on your knees a few feet out of total anonymity.

I have to train my brain not to invest itself in fears or anxieties, large or small. Like a car radio that has a mind of its own that keeps changing from classical music to noise and static. The important thing is not to start to prefer the noise and static, the fear and anxiety, but to recognize that there’s spiritual danger there.

In terms of “nobody reads” or “nobody can read,” in a holistic, ecological sense, I would just say: there’s no reading being done. At some point in the last eighteen months, we have fully entered the era of decoding and information gathering—rather than reading; the era of reading, in the sense of imagining and living in a hedonistic world of excess of the unreal, has ended.

The contemporary brain just doesn’t know what to make of fiction and poetry and philosophy. It cannot imagine its own symbols. It does not have the energy for that. Its energy is absorbed in sifting through all the symbols that scroll by. It does not have time for excess and play.

The counterpoint is that there’s so much information, so many purported potential tentative facts—infinite facts really via the scroll—that something like a mass return to imaginative literature might be around the corner (because literature might be the only thing that can reasonably summarize the complexity of contemporary life in a way that is additive for readers).

Condensation, crystallization, and the syntax and arrangement of thoughts might be at an extreme premium the more exhausted, the more overborne our brains become.

The person who can say the most complex thing in the simplest manner will become even more valuable the more AI stimulates the production of more video, more text, more information in general.

One of the reasons I need a long break, maybe a permanent break, from administering a theater full-time, is that I’m starting to lose touch with what my thoughts are: what I actually want to write about and who I want to write for; what part of myself I want to challenge and change through my writing.

The internal process always precedes the external process. So if the internal process withers, then the external process will die too.

I don’t want to make word content. I don’t want to make diary content or theater content. I want to translate a cognitive poetic process into a semantic poetic product.

There’s a lot of desire connected to the Hantavirus rumor narrative that I see on X.com.

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Instagram is a form of gossip; gossip is a form of Instagram.

Poetry is tending the dead (Whitman); it is also being the dying (Keats).

In the unhearable beauty of death, you find creation.

The effects of a great betrayal are felt a year after, like oil spilled into an ocean basin, circulating...

Artists are only as good as the opportunities that reach them... A great culture or civilization has great commissions, in other words.

And yet, if I had homogeneity, I would resist it, probably.

I would just like a few weeks to finish all the books that I’ve started but not finished that haunt my apartment.

Maybe the central, if covert or hidden, idea of modern politics—modern in the sense of politics since 1600 or so—is that individuality is not sovereignty. Individuality, individualism, is a proxy for the sovereignty assumed or absorbed by the state or the company.

I did a lot of wonderful socializing this past weekend, but now my body feels sluggish, like it’s fighting off getting sick, which it probably is.

Robert Esposito writes in Biopolitics and Philosophy, “The idea of the impossibility of a true overcoming of the natural state and that of the political emerges in opposition to the modern conception derived from Hobbes that one can preserve life only by instituting an artificial barrier with regard to nature, which is itself incapable of neutralizing the conflict, and indeed is bound to strengthen it. Anything but the negation of nature of the political is nothing else but the continuation of nature at another level, therefore designed to incorporate and reproduce nature’s original characteristics.”

We’re at the beginning of a new feudal culture where culture happens in courts and is a function of the patronage of the very wealthy, and this is not entirely, I would say, a bad thing; it may be the only answer to banal institutionalism.

A reader commented on my last entry that we’re reading fewer books year over year because the algorithm gets better at feeding us content tailored to our exact interests, and that seems exactly right to me. If I’m on X and I want to read about an NBA game—the first NBA game this year, by the way, that I watched in its entirety from start to finish—then suddenly, subtly, I get pulled into NBA content for the next few days. There are many examples of this.

Esposito writes—in response to Foucault’s idea that “modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question”—that “biopolitics is illuminated by the twilight of something that precedes it, by sovereignty’s advance into the shadows.”

We don’t see or feel, but we can maybe sense, the complex presence that limits our sovereignty, the mechanisms of power that control our bodies; we are made to live for, and by, power. We are living at the behest of power, and we die at the behest of power. We are subjects because we are subjugated to many layers of surveillance, to many means of extraction of energy, time, and money.

It is not consoling to think that we’re alive only as battery packs to power some larger system.

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It is dangerous, conversely, to be one person, the same person(a), to everyone at all times. You make yourself an…

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I have a sense of spiritual deformity, like my ability to think in a certain way has mutated or been damaged by too much self-questioning and loss and too many inscrutable events, or maybe just the loss of habit.

I used to force myself to write every morning.

Two nights ago I was at the Carlyle Hotel with friends (thankfully on the tab of a friend with means). I had something like, in various forms, a seven-hour conversation (from dinner beforehand around 5pm to the last drink around 12:30).

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