2023-03-16 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Thursday 🗓 Date: March 16, 2023 📅 Week: Mar 13 – Mar 19, 2023

I listened to the end of Crying in H-Mart over breakfast today. In the last chapter, Zauner talks about releasing the first Japanese Breakfast album Psychopomp, which was mostly written at her parents’ house after her mother’s death. I liked the book, it was good, but the real treat was listening to the album directly after it.

There’s the argument that art should stand solely on its own merits, that it should exist in a vacuum devoid of outside reference. This is bullshit: art exists in reference to the entire world, inextricably intertwined with the moment of its creation, its creator, and its broader culture. Psychopomp does stand on its own in a way, but to ignore the context of Michelle’s life is purely missing out on a more rich and nuanced understanding of the work.

Anyways, go listen to that album, dear nonexistent readers.

I don’t really know what to write about at the moment. I suppose it would be good to try and put what I felt this morning into words, but that’s difficult. (But putting difficult things into words is the job here, huh.) You would think an album dedicated to someone’s recently deceased mother would be pure sadness, grief. But that’s not really what I felt as a listener, and I don’t really know if that’s what was intended from the creator: instead, the album felt broad, expansive, effusive, overflowing. My heart felt like it was expanding, like it was filling with the love they wished they had been able to show but couldn’t.

The thought that I had while I was listening to it was that it made all of the struggle fit together. I was listening to it and thinking all the shit in life is worth it for this. It felt like the moment when life is at its lowest but there’s still something beautiful in it.

It made me think that our purpose is to rally back, to push against all the hardship of life for as long as we can. Even knowing that death is coming, even knowing that the ones we love will be taken from us, even knowing all that we come back to life again and again.

It also changed my view a bit on how meditation works, that meditation is only partially freedom from suffering; in actuality, a better phrasing may just be cultivating an affectionate relationship with suffering. Suffering is inevitable — we’ve known that from the start — but perhaps affection and freedom are intertwined here. Is it really suffering if you love it? “Love” here being wholly different than “enjoyment,” because obviously suffering is terrible. But that’s the whole idea of “imagining Sisyphus happy,” that we have to revolt against the absurdity of the world around us.

To embrace the absurd implies embracing all that the unreasonable world has to offer. Without meaning in life, there is no scale of values. “What counts is not the best living but the most living.”

That might not be the “correct” take away from the book or the album, and in fact it almost certainly isn’t, but that’s at least what I felt listening to it this morning. I don’t really know if Camus’s framing is the one I resonate with specifically, it does feel meaningful (heh) in some way. There’s something about finding that joy and expansiveness in pain that felt important here. That might not be philosophically validated, but who gives a shit if it is or not.

Anyways, I don’t have time for a full journal today, so I’m going to end it here. I love you, I’ll see you in the morning. Mwah.