2026-01-17 Journal Entry

I’m going to start typing and keep going. I feel like I have several things to really sit here and say, and I don’t know how to actually approach them in narrative form. I think often of the way that the endless worlds story works, that something perhaps strange about the ending of Sonny Boy is that they go back into the “Real World,” but the real question is what exactly makes that world any different from the lives that they lead before? Clearly they could die before, as evidenced by the death of Hoshi and whats-her-name. And while the whole rules structure impressed upon those worlds is interesting, rules too govern the world they returned to. The immensity of the Other Worlds was surreal, but it seems strange to then abandon the surreal immensity of our own world. In a way, I actually don’t know their perspective changed, the more that I think about it. It certainly feels good to watch, and there’s an understanding that I feel like I walk away with, but it’s incommunicable. And I think that’s actually what essentially all the real truths end up coming to – they’re incommunicable. And even attempts to communicate them end up in some Kierkegaardian nightmare in which “““faith””” as a piece of terminology is used as a substitute for that which cannot be uttered. And as always, that of which nothing can be said thereof one must remain silent. The more I think about that phrase, the more I see it as some kind of truth arrived at in a bizarre fashion, a truth using logic to be seen as eternal and yet while it is eternal it comes to nothing but ash in ones mouth. Le Guin wrote about how we deserve everything and deserve nothing, and once we get past the concept of deserving one is finally capable of thinking. And I think therein lies some amount of truth: we can know everything and we can truly know nothing. All knowledge is itself some kind of game to be played. Perhaps it is merely to survive as long as possible, perhaps it is merely to accustom ourselves to being crushed by how wonderful and terrible the whole thing is. In all things there is beauty and terror, that all human endeavors are running on a treadmill. I see no other way out of it. And even to say “well then one must endeavor to be happy” or “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” are actually mistaken. The point of life isn’t to be happy, the point of life is to live. It seems perhaps too obvious, too tautological to be some deep profound truth of the world, but it’s all that we have. That’s David Graeber’s line, that the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it’s something we made and could make differently. I wonder often whether Graeber’s level of construction is too high or if one should always consider how we ourselves as idiotic and brilliant individuals construct our own worlds. There’s a Zen ideal of “returning to town”, returning to one’s daily life after englightenment, but I wonder whether that’s all that good. Is that an ideal over any of the other alternatives? Everything is dependent on everything else, the world we put together at every level of abstraction could indeed be another way.

Perhaps that’s all that writing is: attempting to pick apart the very ways that we see the world and to put them back together in another way. I was watching a lecture on Blood Meridian, and the lecturer (this is the Yale lecture series online from ~15 years ago) made a really lovely analysis of the world with respect to the Bible, that at the end of the novel the man (née “the kid”) has a Bible in his pocket yet cannot read, and that Blood Meridian almost seems to aim to carry with it the weight and tone of the Bible, to encompass the whole world, its cosmology and meaning and direction, and yet to also be devoid of any true content, devoid of plot or morality or meaning: it’s like a Bible to those who cannot read it, it may as well be anything. The ways in which these things feel related I have really not enumerated here particularly well, but they feel like they rhyme. I should watch that lecture again and not completely butcher its argument, but there’s something there.