I’m acutely aware of the power that I have - that everyone seems to have - to creatively construct the past. In particular I mean I’ve been acutely aware that my sense of the past, which one usually or naturally takes to not be created, but rather to exist objectively, is, in fact, a creation, and that I have the power to recreate it. I think this is in part because my life to date has been difficult to make sense of, so the breaches in the narrative make its artificial nature obvious, like glitches on the holodeck. I suppose you might say that I’ve been met with enough incomprehension that I’ve had to question my sanity quite often. I’m not explaining this very well. Although I’m probably doing a better job than I think - one usually is.
In any case. I’ve put a few philosophy videos on the internet in the past few weeks. I consider these most recent ones to be ‘official’, because they usually refer back to the H.A.Q.Q. album cover in some way, and because I put a little bit of effort into the A/V setup - I got a capture card to connect my Canon camera to the laptop as well as a shotgun mic. Anyway, in my personal opinion, the videos are horrible. They’re boring and unclear, and they don’t gesture enough towards existing philosophy to command respect, to like earn the benefit of the doubt. They lack style, edge, confidence. Compared to what they could be, given how interesting my key ideas are (in my opinion, anyway), and given that my rhetorical talents are actually pretty strong, they are a disaster.
But, I find that the only way to really do something well is to do it badly for a while first. ‘Badly’ isn’t even a fair adverb here, it’s an exaggeration. What I mean is something different. It’s that I still haven’t found a way to convey even a gist of the richness and depth of my system. Like, this is something that I’ve been developing for a third of my life… in a lot of ways it is more precious to me than the music of Liturgy, or at least I’ve put more work into it and consider it to be more unique and powerful. Liturgy is obviously very special, and I cherish playing the music with my incredibly talented bandmates. But the philosophy system…
Hm, I’m trying to get at something here that I’m still not getting at. It’s something about my method - the sincerity of it I guess. I suppose my attitude towards philosophy is quite similar to my attitude towards music, in that I simply despise anything other than direct contact with the Absolute. Any mediation by genre, style, scene, presupposition I consider to be like corruption or compromise. I absolutely refuse it. As soon as I can smell that there’s some theme of some kind that a group of other people take pride in presupposing, together as a group, so that a sense of identification is involved in being on the inside, and outsiders are to be shamed - as soon as I can detect that, I want to be outside. Being on the inside makes me sick.
I’m sure this is sort of a psychic disposition - it isn’t really a matter of being more virtuous or authentic, in case it sounds like that’s what I mean. You could just as easily call it a failure at socialization. Its far more common for socialization to more or less succeed, and then the socialized person’s struggle is to make contact with their unique drive, which is difficult because their unconscious is ‘tuned’ to the group; they feel what they unconsciously calculate that they should feel, and block out their real feelings. For me, and for a lot of people who might be designated ‘schizotypal’, it’s the other way around. My relationship to my own chaos is quite intense, to the point that I can barely pick up the implicit cues that others use to unconsciously bind themselves to one another.
Anyway, I’m still diverging from the point I felt I was aiming for, which was specifically about my first few philosophy videos: Haelegenic Vision, The Four Arenas and The Four Cardinals. It’s that when I’m speaking in my own voice, I can’t bring myself to refer to anyone else’s ideas, or use language that is supposed to situate my ideas as a response to a person that people identify with or not. “As Nietzsche says”, and so on. The degree to which I have scoured all corners of the philosophy tradition - the sheer time I’ve spent, all these journeys of agony and ecstasy with individual philosophers, books and intellectual scenes…it doesn’t get communicated. An insight that I feel I’ve gleaned is that there is a pandemic of obscurantism, dog-whistling and cloudy presuppositions in all corners of philosophy, and I want no part of it. But I’m left stranded with a fear that I seem naive - especially since I have characteristics that at first glance disinclined the average viewer from taking me seriously - I’m a guitar player, and I project a femininity which seems to stir up hate crime energy, or at least contempt, in people who don’t know what to do with it.
My effeminacy is another topic that’s very much been on my mind. In part this is because I was asked to write a text for a collection on black metal theory and queer politics, and have taken the opportunity to formulate the relationship between my own gender identity - which is far more trans that most people seem to suspect - and my music and philosophy. I’ve always been pretty gender non-conforming, and pretty restless about the whole topic; I’ve had waves of passionate desire to be either stable binary gender for years at a time at different points in my life. In my early and mid twenties I knew I was not a man, and was determined to become one, which actually worked out to a degree - like I did make contact with a certain masculine principle within my soul, which has been absolutely crucial to arriving at a degree of stability and equanimity. A synthetic nom du pere, if you will. More recently, both of the norm-approved cis genders seem utterly absurd to me, but I’m also allowing myself to accept my femininity to a degree that I really haven’t since high school - presenting as feminine more often - and there’s something wonderfully nourishing about it. I could not care less what other people see me as, but I know my feelings are those of a woman, and I strongly prefer to be treated like one. Not as a cis woman - and this is what I feel distinguishes me from a large portion of trans women, probably the majority, who want to be seen as an actual woman, as though they were cis. I, for my part, take pride in being a queer, feminine being. To me, it seems enlightened to step away from the entire dialectic of heterosexual gender and sex, which, in can be argued, is really holding humanity back from its highest potential, tethering it to sexual reproduction, the family and so on.
I’ve always had the sense that if I ‘came out’ as trans or even was more vocal about being gender nonconforming that it would make my life easier, since people already give me such a hard time. I think some category would make things easier than none. In fact, the fact that it would ‘make things easier’ has been a major factor preventing me from doing so, since, just like choosing a genre or scene, it would feel like a compromise.
My new thought is that maybe this notion that it would be a compromise isn’t really so honorable or authentic at all - like it’s actually a rationalization for the fear and shame I have around coming out as female, or as gender nonconforming with a very strong feminine emphasis. The more I dress and act in a feminine way, the more happy and comfortable I am, and at the end of the day, it’s probably healthier to not over think things.
How can I tie things up and end this reflection? I began by discussing the power to construct and re-construct autobiographical narrative, floated into the controversy and incomprehension I’ve encountered, and landed in a discussion of my psychic state and gender identity in the context of my philosophical output. The last thing I’ll say is that I’m glad this feed is here on my website, because it feels important to have a place to express thoughts and feelings that are personal, and which have neither a philosophical nor a poetic voice. I’m keenly aware in this moment of the way that we are always fooling ourselves in the moment, and at the same time leaving clues for ourselves to solve the riddle. I wonder what fact I’m dancing around and avoiding here will be obvious to me in six months when I read this again.