It was an emotional reaction. Sometimes, and I believe I’ll get to this in a later post, you feel like you’re broken down inside — soupy — and it’s not your fault. Or everything lights up for you, not in a way that makes anything clearer — the opposite of that, really — but everything lit up. Or you feel like you’re very far away from where you’re supposed to be, but that you belong where you are. Or you feel like nothing really matters, that everything that worries you is a subtle riddle (like an LSAT problem), and that finding answers to them all is not important. That finding answers to them actually means you got them all wrong.
When I watched that movie, which ended up closely tracking how the album came out, more or less, it felt like discovering that your favorite and most pleasurable activity in the world also actually was beneficial for the world, made it work better. Listening to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is an endless task for me, and I know on an intellectual level that it’s pointless and not even that interesting probably. I know people who read Ulysses every year and make their living studying it and actually finding new things to say about it. I know people who are, like, scientists and they’re actually making things. But transcendence always only has as its root, material cause an accident, a contingency. You can trip on a pebble and transcend, but it has nothing to do with the pebble. That won’t preclude you from setting up a shrine to that pebble, though.
Today’s vanity reblog. I tried writing about how listening to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is like a religious experience.
I think I just got talked into listening to Kanye West.
