Whoever Anywhere Will Read These Written Words: Rewatched Metempsychosis Once again I woke up early I woke up early again I feel like I'm in between hearts right now The image of a Palestinian man carrying his dead child, wrapped up in white clothing, crying Woke up later The idea of

Rewatched Metempsychosis (2020). A different time. The work is good. The handwriting is interesting in respect to what I just wrote to Nilo and Zaid, inscribing in that way, and then putting into work. The film has the things - Pierre Menard, Joyce, India, that reverse of Lil Yachty and Wintertime - Remember December. I used to want to make films so badly. I make so many little videos now, but I wrote a treatment for the film, I really wanted to bring it into being. I devoted so much life to it, I wanted it to lead to something, and it did and it didn't. And now any delusions of grandeur are coming to an end, you need money to make art, and I don't have money. I could write a script and a treatment for Polly Wood, maybe there'd be a way to scrap it together over the coming years - but it'd be accompanied by certain scars. If there was art money, that would bring certain scars too. I'm writing this for myself and nobody else, to try to remember what it was like when there was nobody else. Eventually, other people might read it in other places, like Metempsychosis but I think this has to be the way for now.

I read a blog post on The Untranslated about a Catalan novel, how the novelist is a veterinarian and is basically unknown. I think this is a good thing. It's like a secret, it slowly spreads. Maybe it keeps spreading after you die. I need to go back to Flusser - Does Writing Have A Future? I need to go back to this idea of a Future, in relation to a post-Future, maybe go back to Campagna. I need to go back, not in the sense of going back like Cixous describes, rather I need to reach back into the past and bring these texts that have becomes impressions and memories into the present with me, maybe into the Future, the post-Future, whatever is to come. There is still the end of the world and all of the pain that accompanies it. Right now I'm disappearing but there's things that are holding me back. I always disappear is the thing. I think the ones who've known me long enough know this. I feel good here, in this room by myself. There have been phone calls that punctuate the silence - or do they puncture the silence? In any case, it isn't total silence, but it feels right that I'm here, even if I were to have a job and have money, I think it would be hard for me to not want to come here, where it's quiet, every year.

I'm trying to quit this, knowing how deeply it is running through my veins. That's how Moselle described her love for me. That I was in her veins and she had to get me out. She has a lot of patience to still talk to me, as little as she does. When the letters become names it becomes so much realer. But it still isn't quite - there are just words on a website, on a screen, in code.

Once again, I retired public secrets, maybe for good this time. I'm depressed and the thought of eyes on my words right now is too much for me, it's getting in the way of getting the words to where they need to go. Need to go — as though it was predetermined, as though it was written already. On Saturday I got drinks and then spent the night with Jennifer. I texted her Monday to see if she was free on Tuesday and didn't get a response. A sort of minor heartbreak. One which scares me, as I know how strongly I'm capable of feeling, how much it can make everything fall apart. I tell myself that it wouldn't be as bad as the last time, I have better friends, but it'd still be difficult. I was thinking this even Saturday night, lying there while Jennifer slept, aware of how intensely I was feeling. I rushed away in the morning, and then regretted it. At that point it was too late.

The writing emerges differently with names instead of letters. I'm reading Blanchot on Kafka and thinking about how you can't kill yourself. My mind constructs a fantasy where I get robbed in Woodlawn and ask whoever is robbing me to sell me a blick. I'd make sure that it wasn't to defend myself but to end myself. It's comical, how my mind flits here, an old habit, a reminder of so much that I've left behind that still lingers, haunting me. I didn't go back to Cape Horn this time around. It was gray and rainy almost every day. I walked in the rain, like I'd done before, wanting things to end. When I was younger I told myself that I couldn't be in a relationship for this reason, I was too mentally unstable in my own eyes, and I estranged myself from people, I worked to put my emotions into a box.

I'm waiting at the gate for a flight to Newark. There I'll take the train to Manhattan, and then the train to Brooklyn. I'll meet Jake and get the keys to his place, then I'll meet Zaid in Queens and we'll talk about these things. Jake might come too. Jackson might meet us there. I'm not sure how late the night will go. I'm listening to Numb/Beverly Hills and I'm able to feel it more. I made a draft of the VVS Lemonade video but it's pretty shit right now - a lot of filler, it's not strong work, and I'm not sure what the images should be. It's like the visuals I tried to make for Nick and Matt - nothing felt right, nothing coalesced in the way that they had in the past, when I worked rapidly from images I'd shot myself. The archive is overwhelming.

I'll be with people for the next week. And then I'll be with Pat for the following month. And then I'll be alone again. Kafka wrote that solitude only brought punishments. Blanchot is reading his diaries, which feels intrusive but we weren't meant to have his corpus to begin with, he wanted it to be burned. Along with the weight of the archive, I feel the weight of the encyclopedia, and the near-instantaneous nature of recall now. I wonder what will happen to words. I've read what will happen to words, I just wonder when it will happen. A new sort of 'whoever anywhere will read these written words' — perhaps that was the intent, the premonition embedded within, predicting the end of words in an encylopedic body of work that corresponded to the rise of the encyclopedia. Then came the ocean, sweeping away the sand: "yea like the ocean yea"

I woke up early, around 6:30 or so. Went to bed around 2 in the morning after drinking a lot of beer, but not really feeling that drunk. It's the sadness. I felt depressed when I woke up, it'll take time, on one end it's unfortunate I have to be somewhat sad here, but on the other hand it's better to be sad with friends. I talked about it with Jake when I got here, he talked about his break-up with Elizabeth, and now I'm staying at his place while he stays at his brother's place in Greenpoint which is close to hers and has him in a weird headspace. These last couple days have me thinking about how depressed I would be after heartbreak, how getting fucked up is the usual recourse.

On my phone people are dead. They aren't really people in the sense that the phone can't make them whole to me, I just get this sliver of humanity mediated to me. And they're dead but they were killed. A mass shooting in Maine, the guy's still on the run. And the bombings of Gaza. Last night we were talking about the projects in Italy, how many young people are there unemployed, how bleak and depressing it feels. I haven't been but Jake and Zaid had. When I got off the train and was walking to Jake's place I was happy to be back. It felt good to be in the city, but it's also a place where I have no means to be at the moment.

I keep thinking about talking to my dad about his sister and her repeated suicide attempts. Her life is very unhappy, it won't really get better in a material sense, and she has a painful past — I understand why she keeps trying to kill herself. My dad thinks that if God has given you an unhappy life that that's your burden to bear in this life and that you need to carry it out for the sake of those around you. I understand the thinking, but it's not possible to imagine how much pain she feels. All I can think is how hard it must be. I wonder what will come of my life. As I type that I remind myself that I need to make what will come, it will not just come.

It really is a beautiful feeling, seeing a beloved friend for the first time in months. I'm blessed.

I woke up early again, around the same time as yesterday. Last night was good. Got my mind off things and I'm not really sad anymore so much as disappointed - how life goes. I reactivated Instagram and Twitter and felt distant from them when I looked at them today. Deactivated twitter again. Instagram makes you wait a week. I didn't like what I saw, it wasn't doing anything, it wasn't inspiring. I'm struggling to write this Tek Lintowe essay because I don't believe in it. I might talk to Mike and apologize but say that I'm scrapping it.

Jake said something the other night that has stuck with me — we talk about Dolan and Jeff Joyal and these other artists in their 30s who didn't "make it" but he made the salient point that there art isn't good. Matt and I have been talking about distribution — how to get music out, find an audience for it. That conversation depresses me, but as I type it out the rationale isn't exactly clear — distribution of books and movies depresses me, the collapse of them from their 20th century ideal I suppose. The internet has this liberatory potential I suppose, but everything is channeled through Instagram, Twitter etc. — people love to talk about how there aren't websites anymore. This feels muddled. I think about Gaza and about meeting Tiffany Zabludowicz in London. And then the meetings that followed. I could write about that night now. It would make sense. I can still write footnotes.

Bunny Rogers posted a link to her new website on her tumblr. In the top right is a quote broken up into a poem:

I feel like I'm in between hearts right now. My heart big but it beat quiet. When I woke up it was racing, pounding in my chest. This happened the previous morning as well. Birds are chirping as I mull over what to write next. I think about going back to the Blanchot, to read more. I still feel the weight of the encyclopedia. And my lack of languages. And where all the time goes. I have today, I have an entire day.

The image of a Palestinian man carrying his dead child, wrapped up in white clothing, crying on my computer screen. Fragments of Farocki on my phone screen. It is painful to think about and that's why people are trying not to think about it. I spent the day alone, for the first time since I was in India. I realized how long it's been since I've cried.

Woke up later today. No anxiety, no chest pounding this time. Just this lingering sadness. I can hear the rain outside. This room is dark and gets little daylight. I remember Cody's question – how does a day become a lifetime? – as I start my day. I've been running my fingers down my forearms, thinking about what's happening inside my veins. Sometimes history is a nightmare, sometimes life is a nightmare. I have no recollection of my recent dreams.

The idea of an avant-garde today is dumb because of the weight of history, of the knowledge of past avant-gardes, of the implicit mimesis that emerges in mimicking prior avant-gardes in order to create a new one.

Perhaps one could label an activity outside the confines of traditional "Art" to be avant-garde — perhaps this explains what happened to a subsection of the internet as post-internet collapsed into itself. But then the meta shifts, the thing becomes subsumed, the avant-garde ceases to be.

To reject the avant-garde — does this mean a return to tradition? Does this act then becomes reactionary? And how is tradition defined? Which traditions? How does tradition function under the weight of the encyclopedia, under the weight of history?

I've been having dreams again. One included a lot of death. In another I was at a bar, a girl was grinding her butt against my dick, she wanted to leave to go elsewhere but I didn't know the geography. And then we saw people that I knew. Even at the bar there were people that I knew, but they were on the other end of the bar.

I see the same shape in the cobalt mines of the Congo and in the craters of missiles dropped on Gaza. There is a shape that violence takes, as violence takes shape — violence takes shape, anything can take shape, meaning that it is coming into a form. Taking shape — where does the form come from previously?