For the actual composition, click here.

the sixth one took a lot more faff to get to look right. I remember being quite meticulous with the aesthetics in the original blog. porting it to HTML and CSS was pesky. had to remember how to do custom fonts. but hey, here it is, in crisp mobile-friendly Website form.

number 6 came a few years after the previous ones. we’re in 2019 now. this was maybe halfway through the Weed Years for me. I’d wiped my brain clean a lot more times by then, and I was clinging onto the books of James Joyce like they were a life-raft. but these two avenues of my life produced an unexpected conflict.

I had to go somewhere to get ahold of weed, right? and I had to spend some time there, with other people. the situation that was available to me was.. functional, but did not quite mesh. I ended up having to meet a lot of people through that, some of whom were an actual physical danger to me (but that doesn’t happen until later). but even with the friendliest of those people, we had very different interests. he was somewhat younger than me, and he could handle his weed a lot better than I could. like, this is something I’ve had to learn about myself: when I take weed, I pretty much immediately go non-verbal. I needed something to focus my thoughts on. and naturally I’d come to bring Finnegans Wake with me so I could read it while other people played, like… car racing video games, or watched darts on TV, or listened to 80s british live guitar music on youtube (ugh…). I had grown to view this as peaceful, even polite! I could still be around, and if they asked me a question I would answer, but I would otherwise quietly read my book and let my brain process its shit.

I much preferred being high at home, in my room. and I did plenty of that, but when I had to get more of the stuff, I had to do a social call. and this was just the routine that developed.
there’s other factors that went into this, and I don’t want to give a blow-by-blow of this rather seedy time in my life.

anyway, over the years this routine wore thin too. people want me to talk. sometimes I want to talk, or to do something, anything. and the whole routine was itself just a masking-over of an actual gulf: I did not.. have much in common with the people I’d encounter. I’ve had a different kind of life, and it had led me to withdraw and need to take care of myself.

god I’m still rambling.

there’s a part of composition no. 6 that I’ll quote directly.

When people see me reading a James Joyce book, I feel like a mummified fossil decomposing in the sun. Each page is another scrap of linen fluttering under the eyes of an observer, the words those personalized funerary spells covering the cadaver, making him an Osiris just like me. Preserver of a corpse, that’s how I look compared to the man six feet away playing Soul Calibur II.

that’s where I was when I made this blog. I was still rotting away, just as I had been a few years prior, only the rot was advancing, and I was mummifying myself in old books. I could engage in more modern, or social, things. I can play video games! but I was around people who had very different interests than me. (I did play a lot of Soul Calibur II with him in those days! I was much worse at it, but I gave it my all, I learned some tactics, I learned what characters I was good at. we’d do tournaments. sometimes I even managed to win. in hindsight, the Soul Calibur II days were alright. the chess days were when things turned sour.)

the next line is also important.

No one mocks me but I, and only in the eye.

I did feel mocked. I couldn’t really be sure, but. I mean, I did reach out, I did try the things other people wanted me to try. and I tried to talk about what I was reading, I tried to involve others in my interests too, but that never worked.

that.. is a point of contention too. it’s a two-way street. I did try, and I’d get shot down.

but I could never really be certain it was out of mockery. and an important part of coming out of your shell is coming to terms with mockery, or the lack thereof. and definitely coming to terms with the ambiguity of a social situation. if you aren’t certain things are going bad, then it might just be anxiety.

and while I’ve mentioned that things turned physically dangerous later, that wasn’t because of any of the people I was involved with here. they did actually enjoy having me around. it just was awkward for all of us, as none of us were really in the place in our lives we’d wanted to be. we were bonding at mutual rock bottoms.

anyway (x2).

composition no. 6 is defined by fiction. the background, the only conventionally visual element in the piece, is the title page of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. that’s a hell of a book, honestly might be my all-time favorite of Blake’s. it’s a heretical spin on the teachings of organized christianity– in the Marriage, Satan is the good one, God the Father is the bad one, angels are misguided, demons are wise and creative. and there’s a metaphysical system to back this up. (it’s not that God is evil, or that angels are bad. it’s that God is Order, and angels find joy in order. but Order systematizes the living, refining life into restrictive nubs, dividing the world into borders and ruled lines. Satan’s rebellion came about because he believed in the creative fire, the freeform freedom of the “poetic genius,” which sounds incredibly pretentious but it’s just two archaic words. “poetic” as in “creative,” “genius” is an older way of saying “drive.” your genius is your drive, the fire leading your thoughts.) I found this remarkably interesting, I took inspiration from it. when we at Blind Man’s Book released the comically epic Summer Sucks in 2020, it included a piece of fiction that I’d written which was heavily based on Blake’s metaphysics; it was basically a retelling of Urizen and Los creating the world (that’s Reason and Creativity, analogous to God and Satan).

so. so this headspace I was in, that led to composition no. 6, it evidently did lead to creative fruit. things I’m extremely proud of! crystallizations of these things my brain was processing. I think these later compositions were me trying to process where all this density fit into my own life, directly. and as such, there’s also references in 6 to the stories I had written by then!

here, let me break down the “Song of Shade” for you.

it’s a song with three verses and three choruses. each verse is rooted in a different Fear from the Fear Mythos, and equally, each verse references a different story I’d made, and each verse reckons with the stresses that I’d found hardest to process at different parts of my life.

first is EAT, my early blogs (Jordan Eats, Genera, Early Rapture) focusing on EAT, and the drives that led me to blogging in the first place. I called my blogs at this point “Fearblogs.”

EAT sings to me in my solitude as I recover from a drug habit. Fear is not her name but a misplaced epithet, O it and her but never she, otherwise known as our dear sweet mother Earth, daughter of our creations in her metaphysic, only audience for our great masturbatory Human race.
What is a Fearblog but an ode to an essence we cannot speak? Smoldering.
I miss talks and bardic jocks; I miss news and friendly reviews.

second is the Dying Man, the blogs I made as I became an adult (Dekan = PLAN 31, underscore and Mum and Sampo and Totality = Later Rapture, series of cenotaphs = Viceking’s Graab and experimental blogs), the changing and possibly fading of my creative output. I called my blogs at this point “Deadblogs.”

The Dying Man latched onto my habits long ago and forbid me from creation. That light is now absent which once could have powered a city named Dekan, a conspiracy called underscore, a planet dubbed Mum, a void of space named the Sampo, a place called the Totality. Replaced it did a darkness deep which I used to guide my hand in sculpting a series of cenotaphs of sizes varied.
What is a deadblog but a tomb for something not there? Smothering.
I miss dreams and productive schemes; I miss wings and eyeless things.

third is the Cold Boy, and the more musical focus which replaced my fiction (and at that point in my life felt like it would completely replace any drive to create text works). the Cold Boy is a Fear I had almost never written with, and in my isolation in the Weed Years, I was growing fixated on him as an unexpected force in my life. also present in this stanza are references to Finnegans Wake, and to Rapture’s Sleepville, which was another instance of me finding the concepts I’d write about would become prophetic for me.

The Cold Boy will, ah he will, I know he well, visit our patch of grass. He’s coming around the bend we call our Aire, sailing on a dinghy asearch for a friend he’ll deem an heir, yes an endless business, yes that’s all there is, yes. He’ll play any game you want him to, he’ll cover you in blankets and usher you into your hole, the angel to your devil, the contrast to your color, he’ll play any game you want him to, and you’ll wake up in a place called Sleepville.
What is a song but an arrangement of intervals webbing senses into someone else’s patterns?
A thoughtless cry for help.

and that’s the Song of Shade. named for Shade, the protagonist of my very long fanfic DCA, the one I made as a little kid.

I’ve basically talked in depth about the two biggest posts in 6 so far. I’d may as well talk about one more post.

“entropy as catalyst for the transubstantiation of joy into absence”

first, that title. definitely the result of my more scholarly research into Joyce. of course it’s not nonsense. I’m calling entropy the catalyst that turns Joy into Absence. “transubstantiation” is the Jesus thing, and it’s metaphor. Jesus’s body is metaphorically the crackers, his blood metaphorically the wine. there had been historical schisms over this, but the metaphor argument is sorta where history landed, and it’s sorta what led to the ‘transubstantiation’ of theology into Art. the techniques we have for studying Art today have their root in how people studied the Holy Texts, so in a way we can say that religion became art, maybe as sort of a child/descendant relationship. art is the child of religion. it’s doing its own thing, of course, going its own ways, as children are wont to do. but religion was our past.
I thought a lot about lineage in those days.

joy into absence. that’s a really sad subject, and I probably wanted to acknowledge its hold over me without dwelling on it, so I made sure to word it in this clinical scholarly way.

the contents of that post are.. more directly addressing the sadness. it’s where I have clarity and respond to my own fear from earlier in the blog. I had feared that Joyce had led me down a cul-de-sac, that no one could relate to me anymore, that I was a mummy. but here I respond that there are people in my life I am spiritually quite close to. my obstacle was physical distance.

honestly that’s still been a struggle for me. (do you know how crazy it is that I met ellie? my current girlfriend? I met her on tumblr. we were tumblr friends. and then it turned out we live, like, a city away from each other. sheer coincidence enabled me to finally fight against the specter of physical distance. obviously in 2019, at the writing of 6, this was not yet true, and it’d be another few years at least.)
by that point in my life, it felt like the true source of the rot at the core of my brain. thousands of miles away from my hometown, my schools, my childhood friends, my memories. and at the other side of the country from Cornwall, where I’d made a new circle of friends. it was the recurring banshee in my life. it still upsets me to think about! really a sore point for me!

but. I really like how that post ends. and I think I might end this ramble by quoting it.

That banshee that outlasts every reckoning, the first and last obstacle for the living, more resilient than death and broader than time: Physical distance.

composition no. 6 was less traditionally “visual,” a rebellion against the depression that came with the traditional “comic” style of 5, a pointed attempt to make the “visual object” of a.. text! text, which I was comfortable with and had found meaning in.

text. it can be poetry. it can be prose. it always looks pretty. I really like thinking of formatting, spacing, margins, the structure of a text or the structure of a Website. headers and footers! sidebars or lack thereof. it’s all boxes to house the text, and the text itself is so pretty to look at. reading is fun. reading is a joy. it may feel like a dead-end joy sometimes, but that’s just circumstance. you gotta keep going. you gotta keep making what drives you. you gotta follow your drive.

I made poetry in blogs. I made blogs because I still wanted to make Websites, and blogs were an easier (if more restrictive) way to make Websites. and now I get to make a real Website. and, in the songs we publish, I get to write poetry too!

I carry my memories with me. I don’t want to wipe my brain anymore. my past may be physically very far away from me, but I carry it with me. and it spills out into my creations, interacting with the formatting and making shapes and colors in my head.

this is my way of staying human.

...oh. wasn’t actually done rambling. well!

so the first four compositions had their post orders “reversed” for the Website release. the reasoning for this was explained in a previous ramble.

5 has the same post order on Blogger and on Website, because even on Blogger I had intended it to be read from top-to-bottom and had posted it backwards to force it to read that way. this was for the purpose of making a conventional “comic.”

6 also has the same post order on Blogger and on Website. I had intended this text to be read from top-to-bottom even on Blogger and had thus written the blog “backwards.” while I did consider reversing the order for the Website, as it still reads interesting that way, I realized that there are direct connections in the posts that imply a linear “order.”

finally, if you’re wondering what the text “Space wields Time” means!!! I mean, it means something! it’s philosophical, it’s in the line of William Blake and Finnegans Wake. I think it’s something like a poetic rendering of the harm that physical distance causes. space wields time as a weapon. but I think there’s more to it than just physical distance. I think it did actually have a lot of thought put into it. I just can’t remember it all right now. but it’s poetry, you can interpret it and keep interpreting it. I sure do.