No Fun

I am struggling through some difficult things right now. I use my blog to write through them, which results in more than a few moments of total incoherence. I tend to expect that most visitors will not want to read the majority of the more intensely critical theory involved posts. I am aware that this has become the bulk of my postings of late.

Each of these fragments seems to me to be the link in an indeterminate chain. I try to sustain them, but I am usually seduced away into something else. The map for all this exists purely in my head. They are not really indicative of my writing style as a whole. Gradually, some things have begun to take shape in my head, which would not be apparent to even a careful reader of my progress. Each step forward results from writing through the theoretical knots, leaving behind a strange trail of breadcrumbs here. Often, I think that at this particular moment, if I surfed in, I wouldn’t want to read myself.

Many of these pieces will probably be severely edited, or grossly expanded into something else. This is just a record of becoming.

I was reading one of Walter Benjamin’s final letters tonight. It was a letter to Theodor Adorno which discussed his projects. Among them was a projected work on Baudelaire, which Benjamin related to a recent article by Adorno “On the Fetish Character of Music.” The character of music is deeply related to the concepts of memory and of aura which were rapidly evolving in Benjamin’s late essays. Benjamin said he was hoping to get to work on the project in a few days. The letter was dated May 7, 1940. In June, as the Nazi’s approached Paris, he had to run.

Within a few months Benjamin was dead. I cried when I read the letter, so full of ideas that were never completed. I thought about these fragments, and hoped that I might someday connect them. I get up each day and work, and hope that the Bush nazis will be deposed and my work will continue without interruption. There is a problem with projecting yourself onto tragic figures. It makes you no fun at parties at all.