'The negative result is this: philosophy does not permit itself to be grasped or determined by way of detours or as something other than itself. It demands that we do not look away from it, but apprehend it from out of itself. Philosophy itself - what do we know of it, what and how is it? It itself is only whenever we are philosophizing. Philosophy is philosophizing. That does not seem very informative. Yet however much we seem merely to be repeating the same thing, this says something essential. It points the direction in which we have to search, indeed the direction in which metaphysics withdraws from us. Metaphysics as philosophizing, as our own human activity - how and to where can metaphysics as philosophizing, as our own human activity, withdraw from us, if we ourselves are, after all, human beings? Yet do we in fact know what we ourselves are? What is man? The crown of creation or some wayward path, some great misunderstanding and an abyss? If we know so little about man, how can our essence not be alien to us? How can philosophizing as a human activity fail to conceal itself from us in the obscurity of this essence? Philosophy - as we are presumably superficially aware - is not some arbitrary enterprise with which we pass our time as the fancy takes us, not some mere gathering of knowledge that we can easily obtain for ourselves at any time from books, but (we know this only obscurely) something to do with the whole, something extreme, where an ultimate pronouncement and interlocution occurs on the part of human beings. For why else would we have come along here? Or have we arrived here only because others also come along, or because we happen to have a free period just between five and six when it is not worth going home? Why are we here? Do we know what we are letting ourselves in for?'

- Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics

Ned had always preferred Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements as the best Stereolab album because it melted his brain the most, but I could never quite figure it out. He made it sound as if it was because of the sheer force of the music, an unstoppable, unstopping wall-of-noise deal. So of course listening intently I could never hear it. Today while woozily lying on the couch, ceiling spinning and wavering slightly from the effects of the music at excessive volume (and other things), I realized that my brain had melted without my even noticing. Which I expect is just what should happen with this kind of dangerously-close-to-interminable rhythmic drone.

The really interesting thing is that one's brain having been melted is not the most pleasant thing in the world, yet at the same time it's pleasant enough that one doesn't feel like getting up to change the stereo. Maybe because the state feels so precarious. Can't break the mood (or fugue).

'For those who are racked by melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancholia. I am trying to address an abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief that at times, and often on a long-term basis, lays claim upon us to the extent of having us lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself. Such despair is not a revulsion that would imply my being capable of desire and creativity, negative indeed but present. Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic—it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable.

Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?

The wound I have just suffered, some setback or other in my love life or my profession, some sorrow or bereavement affecting my relationship with close relatives—such are often the easily spotted triggers of my despair. A betrayal, a fatal illness, some accident or handicap that abruptly wrests me away from what seemed to me the normal category of normal people or else falls on a loved one with the same radical effect, or yet … What more could I mention? An infinite number of misfortunes weigh us down every day … All this suddenly gives me another life. A life that is unlivable, heavy with daily sorrows, tears held back or shed, a total despair, scorching at times, then wan and empty. In short, a devitalized existence that, although occasionally fired by the effort I make to prolong it, is ready at any moment for a plunge into death. An avenging death or a liberating death, it is henceforth the inner threshold of my despondency, the impossible meaning of a life whose burden constantly seems unbearable, save for those moments when I pull myself together and face up to the disaster. I live a living death, my flesh is wounded, bleeding, cadaverized, my rhythm slowed down or interrupted, time has been erased or bloated, absorbed into sorrow ...Absent from other people's meaning, alien, accidental with respect to naive happiness, I owe a supreme, metaphysical lucidity to my depression. On the feeling of being witness to the meaninglessness of Being, of revealing the absurdity of bonds and beings.

My pain is the hidden side of my philosophy, its mute sister. In the same way, Montaigne's statement "To philosophize is to learn how to die" is inconceivable without the melancholy combination of sorrow and hatred—which came to a head in Heidegger's care and the disclosure of our "being-for-death." Without a bent for melancholia there is no psyche, only a transition to action or play.

Nevertheless, the power of the events that create my depression is often out of proportion to the disaster that suddenly overwhelms me. What is more, the disenchantment that I experience here and now, cruel as it may be, appears, under scrutiny, to awaken echoes of old traumas, to which I realize I have never been able to resign myself. I can thus discover antecedents to my current breakdown in a loss, death, or grief over someone or something that I once loved. The disappearance of that essential being continues to deprive me of what is most worthwhile in me; I live it as a wound or deprivation, discovering just the same that my grief is but the deferment of the hatred or desire for ascendancy that I nurture with respect to the one who betrayed or abandoned me. My depression points to my not knowing how to lose—I have perhaps been unable to find a valid compensation for the loss? It follows that any loss entails the loss of my being—and of Being itself. The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.'

—Julia Kristeva, Black Sun

I made Britt a copy of Kish Kash. Her favorite song on it (well, more like the only one she liked, probably) is 'the meow meow song', which I needed to be told is 'Plug It In'. It does sort of sound like meowing. Now I hear it every time. It makes it feel more fun; the riff during the chorus is a little menacing, sort of amped-up scary-dystopian-movie, so it's nice to have it tempered by some kittens.

It might not be a totally good thing that my first thoughts on reading, in a message from the university administration, that 'NOVEMBER HAS BEEN DECLARED A MONTH OF CARING AND KINDNESS', were: fuck that shit.

But, I mean, come on, really.

Or perhaps it's 'afraid to succeed'. Either way, I don't understand it at all. There are so many idiomatic phrases like that that I just can't fathom once I try for a moment.

I don't think I've ever understood the explanation (of failure, especially failure of talented or capable people) that some people are 'afraid of success'.

Dizzee Rascal just made a kung fu noise. Then he said yee-haw.

Things are not going well. They were going so well yesterday.