Corrosion

I'm in a good mood

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The modern malaise is less powered by a deluge of pressing existential questions avoiding capture but a mind not designed for holding every single aspect of it in abstract, when you stare up at the sky and apply meaning to it, what, exactly, does it mean? What does meaning mean? Actually? Significance? Impact? Identity? Longevity? Essence? Passion? No one really knows, because a label of mean or less couldn’t mean less about the ing in itself. You’re here anyway, and the definition you’re chasing is about as vague as can be, at least in the modern connotation.

Previous generations found meaning innate, a burden to be carried that would vary by luck and circumstance of birth. The prosperity of your family, village, city, nation were of existential importance and not optional. Though born to constraints of status and class we would call barbaric I imagine little time was given pondering their true purpose, though given, maybe he made boots better than shoes and we’ll never know because of the patriarchy. The truth is that a very small minority of people excel in complete autonomy, most reach their peak form from navigating non-optional hierarchies and impediments, and as its compulsory meaning is irrelevant. We get to browse the shelves now, true. What options.

Meaning in our era is corrosive. We’re all sent off to find our own, to be the truest you you can be, The only problem being meaning cannot be recreational, by definition. No matter how hard you try to convince yourself that this is it, yep it was Pickleball waiting for me at the end of road all this time, the soul recoils from this conceit and is embarrassed. If you pick something out of a listicle it doesn’t mean anything. If it comes with a dress code it doesn’t mean anything. If you articulate instead of act it doesn’t mean anything. Choose carefully, lest you share your meaning with an earnest dork. What would the rest think? About your meaning?

MF Doom was an incredible musician.

Portion of his fanbase was pretentious.

Now he’s ick.

And the same applies for cliques, philosophy, literature, film, religions, diets.

Saturation of opinion and surveillance makes association certain.

One retard with your thing, you’re retarded.

Meaningful.

What meaning really means in a modern context is the achievement of self-actualization, an equally amorphous notion. Where are those people at? The actualized? Let me know if you’ve seen them. It’s become a status marker with all the baggage that comes along with it. I’m just, sooo happy to have finally found my true self after all these years searching. You can’t imagine what a blessing it is guys (takeaway being that her true self is better than you and her meaning is taking pictures at restaurants at angles that hide her nasolabial fold.) I would suggest anyone still enraptured by the notion of the real you, the one that doesn’t suck, waiting impatiently for your therapist to tell you it wasn’t your fault one last time so you finally emerge from your cocoon, intuit the universality of it all, discover latent abilities - and go fill out an excel sheet, actually read Jung’s Red Book, useful if for nothing else outing the occult's puerile nature through the stripping lens of nordic autism: 'to go up you have to go down but only from being up can you begin to go down' is the exact sentence structure consuming 80% of the book, and if you’ve done your research, any occultist text. I’ll let Pessoa have a word.

What really shocks me is how these wizards and masters of the invisible, when they write to communicate or intimate their mysteries, all write abominably. It offends my intelligence that a man can master the Devil without being able to master the Portuguese language. Why should dealing with demons be easier than dealing with grammar? If through long exercises of concentration and willpower one can have so-called astral visions, why can’t the same person - applying considerably less concentration and willpower - have a vision of syntax? What is there in the teachings and rituals of the Magic Arts that prevents their adherents from writing - I won’t say with clarity, since obscurity may be part of the occult law - but at least with elegance and fluency, which can exist in the sphere of the abstruse? Why should all the soul’s energy be spent studying the language of the Gods, without a pittance left over to study the colour and rhythm of the language of men?

I don’t trust masters who can’t be down-to-earth. For me they’re like those eccentric poets who can’t write like everybody else. I accept that they’re eccentric, but I’d like them to show me that it’s because they’re superior to the norm rather than incapable of it.

-Pessoa

More pernicious still our instinct is we don’t warrant recording let alone romanticization, that’s why any media featuring modern tech is tagged as gauche, our lives are embarrassing. They’ve convinced us that living and narrative are synonyms in an arc famine. Straight line right 65 degrees and a sudden 90. A matter of stage design if nothing else, 40 years ago walking down the street held a certain aesthetic neutrality, meaning it was an apt setting for say a short story about a pigeon or some shit. We are now decidedly of negative narrative or aesthetic value, in form and function. Phones, screens. You’ve heard it. Descent is movement, and demands momentum, but I’ve seen that plot through to termination. Lord Byron used Baby Bell wax to plug a hole in his air mattress.

The real formula at play is our conviction that pain has to mean something, endurance has to be rewarded. I couldn’t of gone through all that for nothing, it’s not possible. There’s rules.

And I believe that despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s load bearing.

There’s no ascending ‘but’.

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