The moon had been hollowed out for as long as anyone could remember by the time I’d arrived. What the mechanized diggers found during the process is still a mystery. We call it the pulsing mind of the moon. It throbs in regular time that has, as far as anyone knows, been consistent in interval to the microsecond. There are lengthy pauses, however, that spawn myriad conjectures. My theory is that the moon exists in a graduated, localized bubble perpendicular to the outside fourth dimension. The pauses are perceived proportionally to one’s distance from the central pulsing mind. For if one is close enough, no cessation occurs at all.

Originally the purpose was to experiment with zero gravity plant growth, but the resulting labyrinthine maze now only serves as a meditation point. We only maintain Sao as a point of rest and recreation as the organic life itself cannot be consumed. The regularity of the beats creates zen-like experiences for any who descend close to the pulsing mind. A few of the first died of thirst because they forgot where or even who they were. Since, alarms have been placed to revive those in a state of recreation so that, refreshed, they can return to the surface and then to their work on Neso or the inner moons.

A good deal of people I know or have known have Anxiety Hangovers. Or Anxiety Anticipations. Or even Anxiety Flashbacks. Or the horrifying Anxiety Nostalgia. Or combinations of them. The hangovers I can understand. They are a lesser form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And in that case, the flashbacks are related, and are also understandable. The worrisome part is the degree to which these flashbacks occur and how debilitating they are. None of the humans I’m referring to have been in a war or associated “level” of trauma. I realise that said “level” is relative. A human born and raised in a BOX who knows nothing else may receive its first anxious moment whilst crossing a busy street or peeling a banana, for example. This experience could scar them for life! For even three or for lives. Imagine it!

Perhaps I’m being callous, but in my experience, life is episode after episode containing multitudinous levels of coping mechanisms. One learns to observe, experience and detach oneself. There may be a genetic component to anxiety and if so, shame on those finicky genes mucking up various human existences. I personally believe, however, that the majority of anxiety and how it’s experienced and dealt with is an environmental issue. Our species, if nothing else, is adaptable. Just as one improves on a musical instrument or at mathematics or at worshipping goats, one can improve at moving that anxious blot in one’s head into a convenient mental bath of acid. Goodbye, anxiety!

Perhaps I’m being callous, and perhaps I was not as observant in the past as I am during this epoch of my existence, but what I term as Anxiety Nostalgia is a plague nowadays. I see, before my eyes, time and again, humans close to me experiencing “trauma” (it’s all relative, you know, especially for the BOX PEOPLE and their BANANA) and then re-experiencing it over and over again, sometimes in diminishing echoes and sometimes endlessly repeating full-force. And what pocks my patellas is that these humans seem to relish the experience. They go over said “trauma” again and again in their minds, with their voices and with gesticulating limbs as if retelling an amusing anecdote from their last banana peeling match, but with the anguish of anxiety plainly typewritten on their faces.

I highly doubt this behaviour is genetic. A deeper examination may call up perpetual exposure to sensationalist news and the truncated emotional depth of social media, all of which may contribute. But the seed is in BOXING during youth, metaphorically, of course. And, furthermore, BOXING during adolescence especially in cloistered peer groups or an isolation from cloistered peer groups that are perceived as favourable.

Perhaps I’m being callous because I offer no solution besides the omnipresent fuck um. I have felt like I needed to point out this modern human feature for some time, so there we go! When this concerns regard people close to me, I certainly have enough empathy to feel the echo of Anxiety Nostalgia and por supuesto it smarts, but I state again that I have no immediate solution.

In any case, the heat death of the universe is just around the corner. I have a couple of minutes left, so I’ll peel myself a banana.

Never mind that I must mostly remain inside the structure that is affixed to the planet’s so-called bedrock. It’s preferable to suiting up and tethering oneself during an occasional outdoor repair. The building straddles a long ravine that, in my estimation, descends at least 12 kilometres. The organic forms (that I assume are more plant than animal or fungi) respire helices that are entirely shades of grey. They rush upwards, almost violently, dancing in the false atmosphere like brutish ballerinas before finally clinging to the walls or ceiling in repose as they dissipate. The “creatures” themselves also are entirely shades of grey. Upon entering this ecosystem, it’s as if every cone cell has fallen dormant.

I once wrote:

A bone-red heart beats beneath a slope. Weeds grow to voice displeasure at stiff winds that wither it. It beats once an epoch. It beats once a time I sit on this bench and will it to life. Weeds clutter the slope. They spell the echoes of past beats, reverberating in the witchy breeze.

My iterations in Pagan Park map the manner that my psyche has grown throughout the last 19 years. I believe I first walked its pitched sidewalk during the xmas season of 2005, a few months after my parents moved to Seminole from Fort Stockton. I have no prior recollection of being in the park before then. My parents took over my grandmother’s house here, so I had been to Seminole before, of course, upon hundreds of occasions. However, as a child or even a teen, I’d never been allowed to wander. I was either in the house reading a book or listening to music or both or with my parents and some extra-solace locale.

They never strolled in Pagan Park. They never strolled in any park, as far as I know. They weren’t big strollers, you see. Again from just my personal recollection, their only forms of entertainment were television and gambling. I guess not much has changed in that realm.

The bone-red heart. The metaphor of a heart is a metaphor of my, shall I say, meditative life. It beats only when I stroll and when I sit on the myriad benches to think and jot thoughts. I can mark the rings of my growth as laps along the winding walkway in Pagan Park, at least from 2005, the year Christopher Bender called me on the antique phone in my parents’ “office” and also the year he sent me a stack of books that he checked out from a library in Raleigh to read to Seminole even though I was only to be here a few weeks. One of those books was The Long Walk, later made into a film, about escapees of a Siberian Gulag traversing the Gobi and then the Himalayas. It was a very enjoyable read. I still recall the moments lost in its paragraphs.

Weeds grow to voice displeasure at stiff winds that wither it. The winds wither the heart when it doesn’t beat. That is, when I am absent. It all sounds a bit solipsistic, but in essence, the beating of this heart are the pulsations that lunged me forward through life. I’m not saying that my time in other places were not also involved in my psychological evolution, of course, but these static epochs here have always been ones of meditation, as evidenced by the fact that I make quite a bit more blog entries whilst visiting. I’m unsure what duration I’d have to be away for the heart to wither in its entirety. I suppose I’ll know once my parents trade their consciousness for peace and my visits become sparse.

Weeds clutter the slope. They spell the echoes of past beats… I imply that my thoughts, gestating from their spilled contents originating upon one of the myriad benches or another, grow as weeds among the “carefully” manicured park. I agree (with past-self!) that “progress” or, rather, movement forward in time erodes all things. Well, that’s pretty auto-apparent, eh? An axiom, as the kids these days say! The implication that my incipient ideas seeded malas hierbas that perhaps hurl spores into the semi-desert breeze is a captivating one. If they are still swirling round, I could re-capture a few, much like I’m doing here, and enlighten myself.

One of the main reasons I write is for my future self, in any case. I cannot remember every lesson life has taught me - obviously, as time and again I still stumble into wretchedness. The “scribblings” in Martenblog are more lumpy and weighted than the diffuse spores outspread from the aforementioned metaphorical weeds. I can review and learn more easily from past horrors (and other milder forms of experience).

I admire humans (and a few choice insects, too) who are more methodical that I am at organizing their thoughts in writing, revising and updating their lives. They are an inspiration yet I don’t necessarily strive to be like them. This may seem like a paradox, but so might my contempt for “efficiency” in general.

Fuck um.

Tuesday morning and I’m sitting half-lotus in my bed in Seminole. Yesterday was my first real day of absolute productivity and the productivity was all in the form of music. Naiad threatens to be a great piece upon completion, even if I toss aside some of my bolder noise experiments because I simply do not know how to get them to function in the mix correctly. Perhaps I should take a page (as the Druids said back in the day) out of Thalassa with its sudden drop in volume to create contrast. I’ll go with my churning gut later this morning.

On the subject of productivity, my days have been so far devoid of it in the form of programming. I know I should introduce myself once again into Martin’s projects, but I’m finding it difficult to emerge from the so-called “programming stupor” after a week of torpor. Perhaps completing a smaller personal project first could be motivation. Unfortunately, not a ONE comes to mind, volečku! Ha!

Getting back into a semblance of routine writing is also a chore. My mind doesn’t want to direct itself to the task. One might ask whether I have anything worthwhile to write about to begin with and if this is the seed of struggle. One might also ask what is the measure of worthiness. If I read back, some of my most enjoyable blog entries have been concerned with the absurd and I’ve told myself time and again throughout life that self-amusement is one of the primary ways to hold the existential dread at bay. So, those “one might asks” are rendered rhetorical. In fact, I just reminded myself of a task I’d set myself last time I was in this parched berg that some of its denizens surely call a settlement. I was going to go through my jottings during walks in Pagan Park over the epochs and elaborate on any flashy or spiky insight that occurred to me. Any at all. This I shall follow up on.

Later today, I drive to Seminole to deposit my casino winnings into my bank so they can swim the tiny wires to Europe, as is the way of things.

Now shower. Breakfast. And to Pagan Park for a “stroll” amongst the stasis there.

I’ve been on Naiad for approximately forty days and forty nights now, enough to see Thalassa looming through the sky twice, and I must admit that more than anything else, I miss my cat. My “office” is adjacent to the greenhouse and atmospherically controlled at a temperature much more to my liking than when I’m strolling among the flora. Humidity has never been my bag, having grown up in a parched wasteland. There are some scabs of youth one can never quite pick away.

We designed the greenhouse here to capture the eerie glow of Neptune and bend its light into something akin to a living metrical pattern. That is to say, it pulses like arrhythmia and the flora, on their alien stalks, sway to the pattern and apparently flourish. I’ll count out its repeating phrase time and again though mostly in my subconscious. I’m fairly sure it will persist in my dreams even after my return to home and to my cat.

That’s still fifteen passes of Thalassa away.

The idea has been lurking in the recesses of my mind for multitudinous epochs now, but it’s just at this moment that I shall come out and state it. I have no interest in human history in general. Walking around the Valle dei Templi yesterday sealed the idea in stone. Fossilized it, even, and given the multitudinous fossils embedded in the once sunken remains of rock near Agrigento, it’s an apt analogy.

What most would term history in the “educational sense” has little to offer me. Mostly my disinterest revolves around the “great achievements” of humanity. In contrast, geological and astronomical history do still have something to offer to my weary mind and I will likely be found on one of my many deathbeds perusing various tomes concerning those topics. The overall achievement of our species seems diminished in contrast to their grandeur. Or at least to their SPAN.

Thus, it’s the general history of the deeds of mankind that has not held my interest for generations now. Possibly for epochs. Millennia.

The walk through Valle dei Templi did turn my mind to more narrow bands of history that do tug at me, and in some ways, very forcefully. I’m deeply invested in the history of music - very much a deed of mankind, I realize, but a very SPECIFIC one. I’m willing to invest myself in the history of certain technologies, and especially the history of computation. I can read about the history of computation for generations on end, or even epochs on end, or millennia and never tire.

Therefore, as I’ve scribed before, as I merge with the age of the decrepit and frail of body and mind, I narrow my range of interests to dive deeper into the ones that are important.

One reason why general history may not be of interest to me any longer (was it ever? - possibly) is that it is a history of the victor. Our lovely ancestors had the tendency to gouge from the earth itself any trace of the ones they conquered, leaving only their story for future folk to ponder over, as if it was the only tale to be told. This CONCEPT, or shall I be so bold as say PRINCIPLE, bothers me. (Has it always? - possibly) - And this is una desvía from the theme at hand, though I am wont to desviar, fuck um.

It’s true that the history of music has also had its “victors” and “downtrodden”, but much more has been recorded to posterity, especially in the age of modernity (meaning post 1885 or so - of which I’m even more interested than in music in general). There is less bias towards forms that have only appealed to the Lowest Common Denominator or that have only appealed to the posh.

Bulbous Lowest Common Denominator.

Bulbous Posh.

In the end, our adventure amongst the temples was rewarding, because I was reminded of some of the things that I do wish to explore in depth. And, besides, I am a fan of long walks amongst whatever type of ruination, simply because the decay of ancient cities into a more natural state - that of higher entropy - always brings a slight smile of satisfaction to my scowling mug.

In times of youth, I relished moving my living corpse about the world from city to city, discovering alehouses, ruined castles, cappuccinos and random still lives constructed spontaneously from arbitrary passer-bys’ droppings. In times of youth, times that are now long in my past, I enjoyed entering a train or even an airplane and finding my living corpse in a state of movement in space. The unknown called me, even though much later I realized that the unknown was actually variations on a gelatinous mass I’d already accumulated from a combination of limited travel, observation, reading and simple perception.

I’m “vacationing” with Marisa in Sicily during these days. Though there are enjoyable moments, strolling about the city, munching on sugary objects and commenting on what an asshole Apollo was, a stone resting at the back of my mind weighs any event down with its pressing mass: what am I doing with my time?

And what’s worse is that it’s not the travel necessarily that is the source. For months now perhaps even a year, I have heard the call of this stone. I have heeded it. It’s pulsing and rushing my days forward. I feel if I’m not using every moment of my time to learn something new and especially to work in my “art” (meaning music), then I am wasting my time.

The stone generates stress that I never had before. The stone is a sense of mortality. How can it be anything else? And more importantly, how do I escape it whilst still retaining the necessity to create music yet not have that necessity overwhelm me when I’m attempting other “diversions” from the existential Boltzmann Brain?

I’m learning ChucK paragraph by paragraph, example by example, and I feel I’m making little progress. It’s surely the bad taste left on my tonsils from my failure to create goodies in Supercollider years back. I abandoned it. Impatience doesn’t help. I have brilliant ideas, but to program them in a fairly new architecture tires me rapidly. Thus, half formed, the sequences and counterpoints I seek to replicate from my endlessly streaming brain come out compromised. Possibly no one else will notice, but surely everything can improve. Betterness can be achieved. But what is betterness but the rejection of the results of my impatience?

The stone combined with the lack of detail oriented discovery at the moment is destroying my sense of HOW to proceed in my musical projects. My sense of mortality compounds the situation. I look at the reality of how long it takes to create an album, even when working alone, and the number of years left until I possibly SNUFF IT, and despair.

There is still so much I want to accomplish, but innumerable possibilities are more limiting than liberating. I need to limit my range of expression. I need constraints. I can’t use every tool that exists to make any sound that enters my mind. The results would be a mishmash of half-baked ideas. They somehow already are.

I have too much equipment. I have too many possibilities to compose and record with.

Constrain constrain constrain.

And melt the stone. Ironically, a metaphorical stone is not an anchor, but acceleration mechanism towards the inevitable blackness of death where all ability to create ceases.

Now to try to enjoy my “vacation”. Now to attempt to shut off my mind.

I had another dream concerning Jeníček last night. It was one of the final dreams before rising from the bed and into my daily routine (I laughingly call it a daily routine). Much of the dream has faded, but several scenes remain vivid. We went to a shop, ostensibly in Praha, to buy a window covering for Jeníček’s house. House, I say? He has a house. Well, why not? Why wouldn’t Jeníček have a house? He was rising on a crescendo into the realm of the well-off last time I interacted with him (not counting the bizarre messages from a few months back) and that was 16 years ago, más o menos.

We went into a shop, ostensibly in Praha, to obtain a window covering for Jeníček’s house. We ended up with a type of lattice that folds by pressing on the width-wise sides until the whole is compressed into a narrow, vertical series of bars. Upon unfolding it, rows of rhombuses emerge from between the bars as they move apart. Thus, a lattice. How exactly this could cover a window I distinctly recall wondering within the dream.

The shopkeeper also kept a bakery of sorts in the back. Jeníčěk asked me Are you ready to do Czech, vole?. The shopkeeper looked at me and, in a thick accent, said We share this kind of joke. The pastry in consideration began with the phoneme g or k, but its morphology now escapes me.

I recall a conversation I had with Jeremy in 2013 that can be vaguely associated with the so-called music of the spheres. Jeremy was searching for music with no emotional content. His reasons were slightly different than my own, but the search itself is similar. And in addition to the search itself, I aim to CREATE music without emotional content, or, rather, with an emotional content so vague or abstract that it won’t be something enforced onto the listener. I think Jeremy’s search originated in the distraction he felt from enforced emotion in music. He was looking for two things: music to work to and music for listening that was intellectually stimulating. I don’t discount the fact that he may also look for subtle emotional emanations in his listening preferences, especially those of a dark and disturbing nature, since he is also subject to the annoyance of sloshing chemicals in his brain, but it been clear to me since that time that music that vomits heartfelt wailing isn’t much to his taste.

The connection I mentioned to music exuded from planetary movements is that they are types of bare music. I call it bare music because the lack of emotional content in the music is such that the listener must overlay, whether consciously or not, a layer of feeling onto it. No matter what the pseudo-philosophical poppycock surrounding the music of the spheres might mention, planetary (and even stellar!) movement music, interpreted, of course, by sensors made by mankind, is an extreme example of bare music. There is absolutely no implied emotional content. Any resulting feeling is placed upon it by the listener.

Glancing back at one of the topics of the previous entry, a piece of bare music can be seen as a prompt. How the listener processes the music emotionally (whether they create something accordingly or not) is the result of following the prompt. Prompts are by nature vague, so bare music can be an ideal prompt. I suggest all of you poetry groups on Mastodon (or on / in any other environment) hand out poetry assignments with each Flavigula “piece” on the Gunge album - see the Flavigula Funkwhale - and each one in order. In fact, every piece is likely to inspire a week, a month or even an epoch’s worth of poems. So several lifetimes can be consumed by these bare music prompts. Get to it!

(Flavigula Funkwhale)

For me, the process of creating music must be a vague endeavour. Any mental storyboard could taint the sonic outpouring with personal emotive landscapes, though in truth, I may be the only one to recognize them. Such terrain may be opaque to listeners of the finished piece, resulting just as well with a piece of bare music. So, I take that back. A mental storyboard might work well enough as a template for sonic exploration. I know that my fumbling “friend” Christian associates all sorts of visual and “plottish” elements to the atmospheric and wholly instrumental music he writes. None of these prepared landscapes remain in the results I’ve heard, however. Had he not told me about his composition process, I’d never imagine what he was imagining during the composition process. Thus, in these cases, he produces adequate bare music.

The point is that the focus in composition should be elements that stimulate, though only stimulate abstractly. This is in direct contrast to any emotional wailing (and I’m not just referring to vocals). Avoiding common chord progressions and especially common cadences is recommended. Let melodic phrases be short, repetitious, transformed often and certainly not sing-songy. Sing-songy hovno distracts from abstraction. Sing-songy content has an altogether different purpose, quite distinct from bare music. That’s not to say that melodies should not be memorable. Of course, memorable is a term that differs in reference to music depending on the person and their listening “competence”. It’s certainly possible that a good chunk of the populace only gets sing-songy melodies stuck in their head. This chunk of the populace will soon be consigned to the pit. But, returning to the point - that’s not to say that melodies should not be memorable. A good rule is to just not have them follow too many sequential triadic tones. When I come back to a piece after one of its resting phases and its melodies call to me yet don’t strike me as saccharine, I am satisfied.

And I write all of this whilst listening to Lifehouse! Ha! It’s certainly distracting.

Ideas that I have of texture and rhythm are not as well formed in the context of bare music. Much like the aforementioned “friend”, I fumble about a bit when it comes to these two things. Perhaps fumble isn’t the correct word. A better description of what I do rhythmically, besides avoiding commonalities, is sparsity and subtle shifting of meter and tempo. I resist adding too much swing, as I find it brings too much focus to the rhythm itself. I also find myself revising rhythmic elements more than harmonic or melodic elements. I haven’t completely found my rhythmic style yet. Texture is another beast, best left to other writings.

Or perhaps Lifehouse has defeated me!

Ah - bandwagons!

Bandwagons, I say!

I shall jump on a bandwagon now. Which bandwagon is this, you ask? It is the prompt bandwagon. I’ve noticed that over the last several months, or perhaps over the last several years or even perhaps over the last several epochs, other humans react to series of words called prompts. These reactions become creations. For example, on the only social network on which I still participate, poetry prompts come up in my “home” timeline frequently. It seems that I follow a good number of other humans who are both fond of poetry and who write poetry. So, the prompt is a impetus for the creation - in this case a poem. Being mostly oblivious to all things “pop culture”, such regularities in others’ habits escape me.

Of course, this concept of prompts isn’t entirely foreign to me. I’ve used such ideas in the past, though not as often as perhaps I should of late. A good example are Schmidt and Eno’s Oblique Strategies. I’ve been known to consult them from time to time even as far back as 1995 (the first time that I clearly remember). As elaborated on i the following paragraph, I’ve been mostly known to use my own prompts. Ah! A twist!

A twist, you say?? So, I shall jump on the prompt bandwagon. The twist is that I shall use a “prompt” I wrote some time ago. You see, I jot. I’ve always jotted and hopefully will continue to jot during the remainder of my mottled existence. And the things that I jot can easily be used as prompts for later writing. I fact, when I am jotting, that’s what I mostly have in mind. So the prompt, then, which I jotted in Pagan Park sometime during the first three eights of last decade, is the following:

People who go to great lengths to find studies and pseudo studies concerning things they like or habitually do to rationalize doing them or try to convince others that their way is “correct”.

Generalizing this, I’ve known people my whole life who go to great lengths to find any error (even the most miniscule) that those around them make (and especially, I’ve found, in chats and emails) and point said errors out with an air of restrained pugnacity. I’ve done it myself, for sure, though I hope that in more recent epochs, I’ve desisted. It is a despicable habit. Sure, it is pedantry, but it is pedantry with malice. It is pedantry with the intention to beat another human down. It is pedantry with a need to make another human feel smaller.

In many cases, I’d guess the reason is lack of self esteem in the culprit. For sure it was for me in epochs passed. In other cases it may be obsessive compulsive disorder, a desire to participate in a mythical intellectual aristocracy or even a direct need to make others miserable. Though I’ve never been obsessive compulsive, I confess the other two misdemeanors at points in my past. It’s a daily meditation to never commit such atrocities.

Atrocities!

As for the original prompt, there are those who wish to remain inside their bubble. You see - their bubble is safe. I’m writing of intellectual (and cultural) bubbles. Ideas that challenge the beliefs held within said bubble upset the status-quo. They upset the equilibrium, no matter how ill founded, of mind. They commit a kind of heresy. Thus, those living in such bubbles, and especially those living in such bubbles with a lower sense of self worth, feel they must find rationale for the ideology that maintains their status-quo.

All of this is very historically familiar.

No matter the origin or “credulity” of the rationale, it will be found, be it in a scientific article (peer reviewed or not), in a religious text, in the diary of a friend or respected family member, or from the cryptic scratchings on a stone unearthed in the field beside the sacred lettuce crop.

Sadly, bubble-folk don’t want to expand the membrane bordering their existence. They want to be right.

And comfortable. (Oh! the Peter Hammill song “Comfortable”.)