I spent the last few months utterly convinced I needed a Substack. The orange bookmark logo of the app beckoned to me from my phone homescreen; I thought it a kind of lighthouse directing me toward the truth. I began writing, drafted post after post, and never hit publish. In the time since I have decided that it is too much of a social media site nowadays: too scary, too public, too algorithmic. I don't really believe in the analog year or whatever it is people are making into their 2026 resolutions, but I do want to protect myself from the Internet cesspool I'd be entering. Lately I've been reading a lot of Blogspot and Wordpress archives from over a decade ago: little websites designed for hobbyists and amateurs with in-depth knowledge of some niche subject and an impressive, aspirational fixation on research and reading and communication. They weren't chasing fame, not at all like most people on Substack these days, but they created wonderful little communities. I don't have a particular field of choice to design this blog around. I'm no presidential biography aficionado or art historian, although I'd like to try my hand at both of those subjects. For the most part, I'm driven by a desire to enter the pre-algorithmic era of the Internet to the best of my abilities. I missed those years almost completely, but maybe they're still waiting for me.
Comunque
I can't speak more than a few words of Italian, but I do love this word. It roughly translates to "anyway," but it also functions as an interjection. The word exists to pass time, to change the subject, and to indicate a shared moment of understanding. It's on an trial basis as the title of this blog, but I want it to refer to the conversational and ultimately tangential nature of what I'm getting at here. I hope you like it! (Note from late 2026: my blog has a new title, but I want to be just as digressive as I was under the former title. That's the purpose, after all!)
Readings
I'll usually preface my readings section with a little mini-essay, but today I'm getting right to the point (plus this is a reading log, after all). My first read of 2026 was Mieko Kawakami's masterful All the Lovers in the Night, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd. It's a short novel, under 250 pages, but beautiful in its simplicity. Not much happens to Fuyuko, our protagonist, but she spends a while in a sort of situationship with a much older man and in the throes of alcoholism and in her tiny Tokyo apartment trying and failing to read books instead of words. In this time she ruminates on light, sound, and truth, but mostly light, I suppose, and there's this sublime paragraph I'd like to share. The man she's in love with recommends Chopin's "Berceuse," a lovely little lullaby:
The melody was full of the qualities of light, as if pointing gently toward something, or guiding something along, each sound twinkling through the veil of darkness that surrounded me when I closed my eyes. In my chair, I surrendered myself to a world of sound that could only be described as sparkling. It made my head sway, and my breath grew deeper as my legs climbed up that evanescent staircase, each step a sheet of light. They would shimmer to life the second my sole made contact, then fizzle into stardust when I lifted my foot, only to be reborn as yet another step, gently showing me the way. That slowly winding spiral stairway of light ascended freely through the dark, and though I was unsure where it was taking me, or what I would find when I arrived, as long as the music was playing, I knew that there was nothing to fear, that I could go anywhere at all. As I climbed one step after another, I ran the soft part of my finger over every gleaming note, stringing them together in a necklace that I placed over my chest, or stretching them with both hands into a hoop of light that I could step inside and pass through, over and over. I took a giant breath, my utterly transparent chest sparkling with light as if I’d swallowed a nebula from tens of thousands of light years away. My exhalation, sparkling with a mist of light, hovered before me, but if I scooped it up in my hands and took another deep breath, my arms and throat began to glow from the inside, down to my palms, and as I gazed into them, I realized I was floating in space. I shut my eyes and held out my arms, shaking my body and head every which way, dancing and stirring up the light as I waltzed endlessly around my apartment. (Kawakami, p. 147)
Isn't that beautiful? I'm reminded of a brief scene in the pilot of the television show Only Murders in the Building, in which Oliver, played by Martin Short, recalls a performance art piece to the tune of "Clair de lune" where a dancer falls off a staircase and bounces back up again and again and again. There's a dreamlike quality to both works in their visualization of music in space: a sequential yet interrupted progression of both thought and sound appears in these strange illuminations. Here music is confined to an enclosed yet expansive space within the mind, a model physicalization of the spirit.
Gaston Bachelard considers such a possibility in his The Poetics of Space, a wonderful work of philosophy that I read while traveling last May (I distinctly remember crossing the bridge over to Cape Cod while Bachelard meditated on the poetic nature of paths and roads). He says that we must "give an exterior destiny to the interior being" through psychoanalysis and the placement of the unconscious into physical space––in this case, the house in which we were born (Bachelard, p. 32). This house "has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting," as this almost-Freudian linear vertical progression of floors propels us into society and imbues our childhood selves with a sense of structure (Bachelard, p. 36). These floors contain the kinds of dreamlike stairs that Kawakami and Yoann Bourgeois, the dancer and choreographer in the original video, envision: expressions of a path forward that become the signifier of our human obsession with vertical movement.
But then the music moves beyond that passive visualization and becomes a thing of reality, just as Bachelard says it must. This doesn't really happen in Kawakami's novel—Fuyuko climbs no real staircase and takes no real fall beyond a confession of love—but it appears not even an hour later in Only Murders. After visiting his son's home, Oliver experiences the same fall and rebound from a literal staircase as "Clair de lune" plays once more. For him, this is the start of a new life: he's investigating a murder, he's got a new crew of strange friends, and he's living the dream telling stories about that one time he met a friend of a friend of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. For Fuyuko, it's really just more of the same, except that she opens herself up into the world, if only for a moment, and is rewarded in attention and introspection. Music lets us live a life beyond our physical capabilities and unlock a sort of dream-world; I experience profoundly beautiful visions of an expansive wilderness while listening to the Crane Wives, for example. All that these two portrayals of music and light have taught me is to become comfortable with the fall.
Music, by this logic, is the ideal purveyor of the nature of light; on the inverse, space is the perfect representation of music. More than any other art, more than poems or paintings or cracked Greek pottery pieces littered with crumbling bits of clay, music goes one by one, note by note, until it at long last strings itself together into a coherent experience. This experience is dependent on the passage of time, serving as a conveyor belt for the transmittance of light. Light reaches the eye through waves that cascade toward us; it reaches the human mind through sound, in a way, that allows us to visualize it. Maybe I have synesthesia, but I think that the association of music with color—really just wavelengths of light—suggests, in connection with Kawakami's words, that art gives us the opportunity to understand light. These staircases, one step after another after another, "hoops of light," absorb distance and time, transcend those silly constructs of light-years and galaxies, give us a sense of universal hope. I'm reminded, actually, of the tesseract from Interstellar as I write this. I don't really know what I'm saying and have in fact returned to update this two months after its first publication since I'm still unhappy with its direction. I know, however, that I've hit upon something fundamental to the way I perceive the world, and that giving "exterior destiny," as Bachelard calls it, to these ideas has provided a chance for me to escape and comprehend these structures.
Bachelard, who walked miles upon miles to philosophy class every day, moving his place in the universe in order to comprehend it, asks in the introduction of his book: "How can an image... appear to be a concentration of the entire psyche?" How can a song appear to explain an emotion; how can a single note convey a moment in time so perfectly? He asks these questions with a view to knowing the answer, and he starts with the psychological symbol of the dwelling: "Great dreamers profess intimacy with the world. They learned this intimacy, however, meditating on the house" (87). I am no great dreamer, instead some thing of a doer, but this intimacy with the world I too derive from the place I call home. I've been experiencing some health issues lately, and I'll describe to you one among the many. When I stand, I find that I can see for about fifteen seconds, but after that I lose my vision for around thirty. As it blacks out, I've discovered I can navigate to my house and down the stairs totally blind before my eyesight recovers as I turn the corner. I can go up and down again and again and again before my clumsy limbs try to stop me. This is home, I think, as the light shines back into my eyes and I hop down the final step. This relentless blur across my vision, warm and fuzzy, stuck within my memories like the hook of a good song: this is all I have.
the hague, NL, june 2025
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