following the brush
...wandering forward, sometimes only by inches. But I am moving. And so is everything else. I will never truly get to pause everything and have a proper look around to get my bearings. But I can keep dropping pages like breadcrumbs as I go, and following the marks on the trunks of trees left before me, and keep chasing the sunlight I see streaming through the trees ahead.
And that will be enough.
Okay funny story – I wrote the below little post over a year ago, and for some reason, never published it. Instead it was hiding in drafts nearly lost to history and my memory.
Spoiler Alert: I did end up rejoining Tumblr, but then got back off of it around the change of the year as part of a general rejiggering of my internet/media/art-experiencing habits and routines. I do miss some aspects of Tumblr (again) but not enough to got back...
Anyway, original year-old post follows:
As a service, Tumblr’s lack of commerciality and consistent inability to successfully monetize itself is part of its whole appeal. There’s a whole genre of Tumblr posts that just screenshot and mock the bizarre hosted ads that spawn on the dashboard like mutated fish in a radioactively-poisoned river.
But it’s a loving kind of mockery—users seem, for the most part, to be genuinely grateful for the state of the site. For many, it’s a refuge from the dystopian insanity that the rest of the internet has come to represent. “It’s like anti-social social media,” says Bec, regarding Tumblr’s continued paradoxical appeal.
[…] for those who value creativity without the pressures of “hustle culture,” and wish to avoid the current-events performative outrage that has crept in, kudzu-like, and swallowed up almost every single other area of open expression online, Tumblr remains ideal.
The corollary of that, of course, being that those who appreciate that creativity without necessarily needing or wanting to express it themselves can also find happy homes on Tumblr, as spectators to a healthy culture of simply liking things.
Tumblr was absolutely my social media “home” for a long time – though I never saw it has a social media platform, per se. It was communal blogging and celebration of cool shit. It was the only platform I ever amassed any sort of following on, and the only one I ever saw my self wanting a following on.
I deleted my account and my tumblogs (hell yes, that is what I did and will aways call them) when the porn ban came down – mainly because the site/admins/corporate overlords were handling it, oh so badly. But it sounds like a lot of that has calmed down now…
And now, I’m nostalgic for it? I am feeling… things? This will not do, not at all.
I’m not considering getting back on Tumblr? …am I?
Oh no.
https://www.fansplaining.com/articles/the-ever-mutating-life-of-tumblr-dot-com
I am intimidated. I feel pressured by them.
I understand and agree with their usefulness in the world of 'blog as archive', but the other parallel worlds of what a blog can be, I kind of like the ambiguity of posting without them. Does it really matter that you know exactly what day I said this? Or, how close this is, temporally, to the previous post? To the (hopefully) next one?
I mean, it might matter! I don't actually know! I'm asking you!
Undecided. Is there a date on this post? Depending on when you are looking at it, there might be. Or there might not. I'm not sure if there is a third option.
“The only one among us not free to change their mind is the one who does not decide...”
Offline, I wrote:
I’ve been spending some time, literally tonight and in general, bopping around the current, uh blogosphere. I’ve found a few sites, I believe from ooh directory that are doing basically the exact thing I could see myself doing which is… this, right now. Except in a blog instead of privately, talking to myself in Notion.
Why not do this in a blog? Why I am here? Because I don’t think anyone will read it? I just read a bunch of random blogs. So its clearly not that hard to get it in front of some eyes.
Because I don’t want to invest the effort? That’s very possible, but that’s also the kind of energy I’m trying to transform.
Because…it will suck? Well probably but that’s a bad reason not to do something.
And so, I'm here. Again. For the first time. Again.
I don't need to know how this will all go in order to do it at all. I need to keep telling myself that.
Something I read tonight, from this new personal blog I discovered discussing their love of 'daily bloggers':
I also like it when they don’t have all the answers, as prescriptive blogs aren't my jam. The more they write without an overactive filter, the better. It allows me to learn/discover things alongside them.
That's... facinating. Because, trying to actually answer my above question of “Why am I not just blogging?”, I realize a large part of my hesitation to engage with blogging specifically (as opposed developing and writing more polished “essay” posts (which I don't do much either but for different (bad) reasons...)) is because I devalue what I write when I “write without an overactive filter”. I doesn't feel “real” and I can't imagine anyone would want to read it. I literally don't see the value in it for anyone outside of myself.
...and then I think of all the time I've spent reading other people's personal blogs and zines, and things like published diaries, notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.
So yeah. I think I just need to get out of my own way and type stuff on the damn internet. And go from there.
Thanks, Veronique.ink!
[Nietzsche] accepts the inevitability and suffering of reality (eternal return) but insists that the person, the self, must change perception. This change of perception must address only oneself, for no other expectation or altered circumstance but only sheer will, insight, and perception, can give us a new ability to understand, tolerate, and transcend suffering. The present moment of existence must become the tablet on which to etch one’s aspirations, intentions, conclusions, directions, not change any external circumstances but to see through everything, to live in its contradictions. [Emphasis mine.]
Eternal return is purgation of past weaknesses, failure, error, desire. The self must embrace not only the will to pursue a new self but what would be associated with Nietzsche as the will to power, meaning no more than the taking control of one’s self in life and destiny. Because this self-made destiny is the fruit of a personal struggle, the self must overcome much that is irrevocably external affecting the inner person. The will must transform the self not through attack but through transvaluation, the will overcoming obstacles, subjectivities, falsehoods, not reliant on society, culture, others, but forging one’s own path and system of thought and values.
From: Eternal Return via Hermit's Thatch
Once again I've been thinking about eternal return (heh).
Once again I find myself circling, hovering around the periphery of action.
Once again I find myself going through all of the motions and preparations leading up to an actual change. I make the run up closer than I ever have.
Yet still the gulf remains. The gap. The canyon between me and It.
I have been at this point so many times before.
I just need a better approach, I say. So I retreat back. I plan the route. I clear the path. I wait for favorable weather. The wheel turns again; I set off running. It's easier this time, I am gaining speed. I see the Other Side. I see where I can land. I just need to jump, and...
And I skid to a stop, right at the edge. Again.
It is easy to get lost in that. Here I am making the same old mistakes. Here I am again, not doing the thing I claim I want to do.
The gravity of my goal, my task, has no doubt captured me. But I can't come into land. I simply spiral tighter and tighter around it. And sometimes I drift away and maybe that's what I need – to let it go and float off somewhere else – but no, at the farthest reaches, the arch of orbit tugs at my back, my retreat slows, and my path bends and I am on the approach again.
How many times will I do this?
But to think that this isn't yet another repeat of every other failed attempt... to realize that I am not being cursed with another frustrating iteration, but blessed with another chance to get it right...
...that despite how many times I have found myself here, the only thing that exists is this present moment...
”...the person, the self, must change perception.”
Sometimes, alone, I feel like a ghost. Unmasked, I walk through the world as if I’m embodying impressions. I channel the wind, the sadness the rain brings, the spring gloom. My identity is composed of memories, of spirits of places, of things I tell myself, and of things others tell me. I know it’s all in flux. The masks are shifting.
…this reminds me of:
Miles walking, the sound of breaking waves the other side of me, Paumanok there and then as I thought the old thought of likenesses, These you presented to me you fish-shaped island, As I wended the shores I know, As I walk’d with that electric self seeking types.
from Walt Whitman’s “As I Ebb’d With The Ocean of Life”
In times of crisis, we set out to find ourselves. Perhaps we will find whatever it is that constitutes us out there in the Himalayas, or somewhere out west. Perhaps we’ll find ourselves in another person who teaches us to see, or in the sun that sets over the Pacific ocean. Often we’ll gain access to another part of ourselves through a story that inspires us.
But this quest to “find yourself” is somewhat self-defeating when the more precise goal ought to be “to create yourself,”
Discovery: Searching for a fixed point; you can miss it, never find it
Creation: Always happening, and especially when you realize it, and do with intention. Never has to end. Is complete when you say so…
In Hinduism, the ego is a trapping of the physical world. The body is often likened to a flesh tomb, and the ego is like the glass that contains our true self and shapes it. The true self—the atman —is a silent, conscious witness. It exists within every creature at its core.
I really enjoyed this piece, and find myself returning to it. I’ve read it two or three times already, and though it doesn’t necessarily contain any revolutionary, knock-me-off-my-chair epiphanies, it does that amazing and crucial task of giving form and structure to the kind of wordless questions and wonderings I often have, and allows me to re-engage with them, chew on them in more tangible forms than when they are swimming in my head…
Source: https://www.cunning-folk.com/read-posts/who-are-we-really-and-who-can-we-become
January lasted about 37 days. It wasn't a bad month, but it was a long month. 2023 has come in like... a... Do we even have anything to compare to anymore? Whatever it was, here is how the start of 2023 went for me:
from: Year End: On moving to the woods
Something I'm coming to know in my bones is this: I've come back to what matters over and over again, even when the timescale exceeds my limited perspective. I have every reason to have faith in myself.
Lucy Bellwood in Winter Bottleship, 2022/2023
[…] realising, properly, for the first time, that one day in the future I would no longer be here on earth, existing as the small but very definite and palpable thing I had become.
Tom Cox in Old Photos
What began as an impulsive project on a Friday afternoon turned into a 4 – 5 day extravaganza.
The arch-book is actually a Dell Chromebook 11 from a few years ago. It is old enough that the newer ChromeOS updates didn't run great on it, but it is otherwise a good machine with a nice, simple, utilitarian form factor. I really like it, and always lamented never using it to its fullest potential. A few years ago, I messed around with putting GalliumOS on it. That was fine but a) I never worked on it long enough to get all of the kinks out, and 2) I never really decided how I would use it once it was set up. I never integrated it into my daily practice and habits. And that was fine, I suppose; it was a hobby project. But I still felt like I was wasting a cool piece of tech.
Then last week with no warning, I decided to dust off this machine to see if I can make it a usable part of my day-to-day practice.
Quotes from Steinbeck's journals:
never temper a word to a reader’s prejudice, but bend it like putty for his understanding.
...and:
I have tried to keep diaries before but they don’t work out because of the necessity to be honest.
Source: How Steinbeck Used the Diary as a Tool of Discipline, a Hedge Against Self-Doubt, and a Pacemaker for the Heartbeat of Creative Work via The Marginalian