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April 24th, 2012
11:31 pm - drastic tonal swerve
There is a tool called LJ Book that will convert your LiveJournal into a downloadable PDF. I have used it, although I have no immediate plans to delete this blog. You may also wish to use it. (Who knows how long LJ's servers will endure? On the Internet, so much has been lost already.)
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11:28 pm
I haven't checked this account in a long time. My friends page is full of feeds grinding away at no one. I think I have a filter I could use to check if any real people have updated, which I will do, but I'm a little afraid to do it right now.
I suspect that at most two people are reading this. It's pointless to write here if I have such a specific audience in mind. In any case, most of the things I would want to write are slight variations on things I've already written. This journal was the last thing to be left behind by the receding tide. I'm not sure it is possible for it to exist anymore in anything like the relationship to the world it once did. The decline in use of the LJ platform is less a cause than a mirror of this fact. (If we started now, would we be on Tumblr? On Tumblr, no one creates anything.)
But I have nothing to replace it.
I have plans. They are likely to eventually fix certain problems. They may even fix the most important problems. But I have no reason to believe that they will, nor am I sure of the possibility of such plans.
It is painful to strain against the capacity of language. In that case, you are denied the only interaction with the world that you might press into symbolic service as a resolution. You know that you cannot grasp yourself. But when language seems adequate you know you've lost.
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May 27th, 2011
04:50 pm
[Also from my abandoned documents folder: something that says exactly the same thing I just said, but better. This was written on January 24. The words are straightforwardly familiar, but I don't know what, if anything, prompted me to write them. This also reiterates some elements from earlier posts, I think, although the outcome of writing about abstract topics and not looking back at what you've written is that you can't remember whether you wrote something or just thought about doing it, and in any case you'll repeat yourself a lot.]
When I was young I was convinced that everything was meaningful. If I was out walking and took a turn into a certain neighborhood, it seemed to me that this neighborhood was a passage in the story of my life, and thus had some significance, a significance that made it almost luminous. I could never put words to it, but somehow it mattered that the sequence contained these places. It was a composition, though it could not have been composed. Every event, emotion, attachment, severing was part of a secret order. Things changed, and I felt them change -- subtly and yet very strongly. In my journal I used the phrase "silent roar" to describe it. Tectonic plates shifting, groaning across each other in the dark depths of my mind. These things seemed most tangible in twilight, or half-light of other kinds; a dimmer-switch dimmed, or streetlights reflecting on snow.
When things change now, I can't feel them. Years later, I suddenly remember something, and reel as I suddenly sense the vast space that separates me from it. There is no sequence anymore, only this, and then that, and it could just have well have been something else. Trees are only themselves -- or not only themselves, since they were never more than that, but once they were full of themselves and glowed with themselves. Yet part of me hasn't lost faith in the order, and is convinced that each tree is the wrong tree and each street the wrong street.
It seemed to me that the universe was presenting me with a series of puzzles to be solved, but the essential clues to the solutions were written in a language I could not understand, and each puzzle would pass by without yielding up whatever it hid. I cannot begin to suggest what the solutions might have been like; my intellectual realization that they could not exist did nothing to dispel the impression that they existed. Now they are gone, and I would like them back.
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04:43 pm
Forgot something: when I do post on the Internet lately, I do it here. Less writing-intensive.
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04:32 pm
When I first started listening to music – which happened rather late for me; I was twelve or thirteen — it was just after the beginning of the Internet music revolution. Since I knew very little about bands, I started not with Napster (you couldn't browse on Napster) but with Mp3.com, which, at that time, was a site on which any band could post its music under various genre headings. Some of the bands I listened to had been active in the early- to mid-nineties, and had presumably posted their music because the CDs had gone out of print or simply sold very poorly. It recently occurred to me to revisit some of those bands on YouTube (everything's on YouTube) and I found it somewhat painful to see the remnants of a social phenomenon that I was not, and couldn't have been, part of. If I'd been there I doubt I would have been interested. The music wasn't particularly good.
In high school (and of course also in college, although then I cared much less), there is a natural sorting into overlapping but differentiated age cohorts. (And those who were older than me will always have been older, and ditto for those younger, even as we are all older now than any of us were; it is still strange.) Each cohort does many of the same things, but always in a different way. The flavors differ, the meanings differ, and you can never quite tell if it's just the interaction between different personalities or the expression of a general historical change. You have your own world, but it exists beside the others, and you can see just enough to wonder what it's like. What you don't see. If you are one way, you can't be another way. When I was small, I would sometimes work out every path to a maze, even once I knew the right one. Probably that's not the same thing. In any case, one perspective has never been enough.
(I was listening to that music some weeks ago, or probably months, but I was reading a book set in the 1950s and was reminded.)
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04:26 pm
I haven't posted much here in a long time. I haven't declared this journal closed, because I don't really want that to be the case; I actually have a few different draft posts that I never got around to finishing. (Actually, I might go finish one after writing this post. So if I was planning to announce an indefinite hiatus, which I can't really remember if I was, I guess that won't be happening.)
The heyday of Livejournal was arguably past when I started posting here in 2004, and it's certainly past now with respect to my particular circle. I know that when I do post something a few people I know will eventually see it, but everyone I follow here has either stopped posting or posts very infrequently. That said, there are various things I sometimes want to put on the Internet that don't fit into any of the other venues I use, so I'm reluctant to abandon LJ altogether. It's just that I haven't been feeling very creative recently. That will eventually change, I think.
I was lying awake last night and I heard something outside that I don't remember. It reminded me of an occasion in the late summer of 2005 that I think I mentioned here at the time. I was sitting in my room in an empty house sometime after dark, and I heard people talking. I couldn't distinguish the words, but they seemed happy. And against the noise of the insects – was there any? there must have been, but my memories of summer nights generally include insect sounds, regardless of whether I could hear any – I thought about what I was leaving, and what I was going to. Indistinct voices so often represent something desirable, but inaccessible, something indefinable that might, if I reached it, turn out not to exist. And since then I have lost faith that it might exist, even if in some cases, when inanimate and abstract things were beckoning me, it was always perfectly obvious that there was nothing there. The knowledge that the desire points toward nothing makes its unfulfillment more painful, although it oughtn't to make any difference, but even the desire is less and less frequent now. And how to find those vanishingly rare moments when desire and fulfillment are the same, as they rise without object into the unknowable?
That paragraph would be a fitting conclusion to this journal, if it were going to be one.
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April 10th, 2011
07:48 pm
Going out for a walk. Where? There are no lilacs here. The streets and the sidewalks are new, without any of the imperfections that would mark them as real. No building is older than fifty years. There is none of the possibility – however slight it was – that something unexpected might happen. Illuminated windows inspire no faith. The park has long since been full to capacity with disquiet.
But it's April, and I can't ignore that any longer.
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March 25th, 2011
02:54 am
I just met up with a friend from college who was making an inadvertent trip to San Francisco. I made an impromptu decision to lead the way to Corona Heights to observe the night view of the city, as I had only been there by day before. (Aside: Corona Heights by night is the setting of the opening scene of Fritz Leiber's novella "Our Lady of Darkness.") The decision to do this in rain, which became hard rain, which became a hailstorm, proved a bit questionable, especially as (1) our route to the top turned out to be inside a fenced-off construction zone, so we couldn't actually reach the top, (2) I brought my short raincoat, and (3) her boyfriend had no hood on his coat. We were rewarded, though, with some clouds that scattered the city lights — I miss the way that the snow reflects the light upward, and it rebounds off the clouds again, but this was something like that. The view was nice, but it would have been nicer if we had the luxury of looking at it longer without being pelted, and I possibly shouldn't have involved others in a night visit to a hill, since those always feel to me these days like a frustrated attempt to access the numinous. (Visiting the top of Montara Mountain for the first time (during the day) did sorta demonstrate to me why mountaintops have sometimes been considered sacred sites. So quiet, and so different from what was below.)
There was a bit of time for conversation, although I wish I had been able to carve out more, and I found myself lapsing slightly into the cataloging/infodumping mode I occasionally use to attempt to fill in silences. I love conversation, which seems to be a rarer thing than you'd think; in my experience (I am not referring anymore to this particular conversation) many people are relatively uninterested in it, which explains the popularity of alcohol and of social venues that are very loud. Possibly this is because most people socialized much more than me in their youth, and are conversed out, although I no longer think that a particularly likely explanation.
(I might have posted some of this material before. I can never remember if I posted something, or simply thought about it, or if I wrote it in TextEdit and never posted it. There are a couple of the latter things that I should really put up.)
A really good conversation, where everything flows for hours without any hesitation or deliberation, is rare; I've only ever found a few groups of people where that's possible. In a way it almost seems like a form of transcendence or self-loss; much more subtly so than, say, dancing or music, or what I assume sports feel like to passionate athletes, but something like that is there. I don't really have career-related daydreams anymore — I tend to want to become very wealthy for no apparent reason now, although the only things I badly want to buy are housing, plane tickets, and security — but it occurs to me now that one of the more admirable things to be would be a person for whom someone would feel the need to write a Life of Johnson or a compilation of table talk. (Do those exist anymore?) It would also be very satisfactory to write one about someone else.
Granted, I might have trouble doing that, as my memory for conversations is not so comprehensive as it used to be. Indeed, it seems to me that my memory in general is suffering. That's not to say it is bad, but it isn't as it was when I was a teenager and could quote long passages from months-old conversations or technical documents I'd only read once. That may have been one of those abilities peculiar to youth, like the capacity for rapt concentration that I know I am not the only one to have lost.
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January 1st, 2011
03:26 am
I was walking with Matt and Simon and we went through West Park. We stopped to watch the rain falling on the frozen pond. The trees were like dendrograms or clouds of dust. I examined the overcast sky, which was lit from the east by the city. I have never seen a photograph that depicts that kind of light, or the look of grass underneath it. I said "This is the kind of thing I like to do, but usually I'm alone" and Matt said "Same" and we looked at it for a while and I knew eventually I would step away and the need for that decision became uncomfortable and I stepped away, and we walked around on the boardwalk, because none of us wanted to say anything and none of us wanted to leave. We couldn't see each other's faces. And after a while I could not see any other way to look at that place. We walked away and there was a short conversation I wasn't really a part of and the trees by the street were not electrified so every drop of molten snow shone under the streetlights. And we walked to Miller and Simon took a phone call and then I left, because it doesn't end until it ends.
And then I wanted to write about it, because that was what I always did, but I don't feel any different now. I'm not sad, exactly, or not only sad. But the chord is still sounding, unresolved. There were streetlights, house lights, lights in apartment windows. The windows announced nothing, but this time I expected nothing.
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December 29th, 2010
01:04 am
I was reading a book in the Starbucks at Liberty and State, and for a few minutes couldn't concentrate because I was too busy thinking about what it was like to do that. Defeats the purpose, really.
In every other place I've lived I've been walking on borrowed ground. Here, only, I still have the unthinking adolescent conviction that this is my city. Other people know more people here, or know more of the history and politics and business, but I know it as it is in itself. The genius loci does not exist, but I see it anyway, and it sees me.
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