Subpar Artists Never Grieve Remarkably Inept Analogies

20 Apr, 2026

last modified 5 days, 12 hours ago

RYOSHU: Your art is an overcomplicated pile of definitions buried under symbols, caked in patchworks of empty shells. You and your art both talk too damn much. Just like Callisto's. Kept trying to take from other movements, forcing meaning where there was none. Excess is easy. Anyone can do it. What's beyond most… is making it succinct—the art of abbreviation.
RUFO: Alas, if all is one by one abbreviated away, nothing remains in its absence… making the void left behind completely bereft of meaning.
RYOSHU: No. The void is what remains. And it holds things that can't be found anywhere else.
RUFO: What is this, a… Minimalist manifesto?
RYOSHU: No, my aesthetics go beyond the pursuit of simplicity. I pursue the natural germination of artistic immaculacy—a state of perfection wherein further abbreviation is an impossibility.

—Limbus Company, “Intervallo VII: Twining Threads”.

This isn’t the language post I promised I’d be posting. I’m sorry, Xaya; I failed you. Rather, it is a post about the language post I’ve been promising for a year. It’s not quite meta-blogging, though; or at least I hope it doesn’t fall into the sphere of “blogging-about-blogging”. “To web-log”, as a verb, is subordinate to “to write”. This post is something worse than “blogging-about-blogging”, something more pretentious and more fun; it is “writing-about-writing”.

Most accurately: this post tries and fails to describe the method I’ve been using to write non-fiction for this blog, or rather, the method that’s been working against me.

My head is messy and full of disparate ideas, and so I attempt to connect them. When enough kindling catches fire, it grows inside me. Eventually I vomit it out onto paper. The resulting document is as messy as my head: “no climax, no punchline, no meaning”¹, it’s a thing made purely for my sensory pleasure. The duty of a first draft is to be unintelligible and unintelligent. Very little of what I write actually makes it to the stage where I publish it: most I give up on. The victors, I polish, or more accurately, I carve. Now that I’ve developed an appetite for writing (facilitated by my good friend methylphenidate), it’s easier and easier to put a bunch of words together. The next issue is to shape them. I’d really like to compare it to painting with your own spit: you generate the material with your own body, but the skill to turn the medium into a piece is sold separately. So I cut.

I’m a pathological tangent-goer. I can’t tell a story straight, out loud or over text. I have to cut a lot of these tangents, especially because I get lost in them. It’s not that they don’t add much to the text; I don’t write with clockwork precision and I don’t want to; I’ll add decorations and embellishments to what I write as I damn well please, as is my right. The problem is that I lose my own thread of thought. It gets so bad that I often find myself writing a tangent that directly contradicts the point I’m trying to make.

This is symptomatic of how I write: I put words down with a vague idea in my head, intent only on expressing it, and writing more and more is like making my way out of a maze. If I like the maze, I keep going; and eventually I find the exit, or an exit, with any thesis I like that I might’ve found along my way. But sometimes I find that I’ve knocked down a wall, or I’ve drawn over a line while tracing my way out with a ball-point pen, and newspaper pulp is an unforgiving material; so I have to shave away a whole lot of these words I treasure, or I have to rework the rest to fit with my new findings.

As you can probably imagine, it proves difficult and (most importantly) demoralizing to do this. In my search for a way to express a single idea, I carve and carve away at any number of erroneous impressions, misinformed beliefs, bad interpretations, and connotations that don’t hold up to scrutiny. But I’m still attached to those misshapen sentences, because they took a lot of effort to compose in the first place, and seeing them fall on the wayside hurts me. I’m aware of the adage that a writer must “kill their darlings”; I don’t have to like it for it to be true.

The language post is a current victim of my whims: I started writing it a year ago. It’s about a manga. The manga has gotten an anime adaptation in the time since I started writing it. I have a draft from august of last year that starts with an impassioned call to “finish this post once and for all”. It had no conclusion, because I hadn’t found one yet. I brought in moments from other stories, I brought in semiotics as an attempt to explain my point about human identity. The text was about a moment in the manga that quoted a philosopher. Nine months after I started iterating, I caught up with the still-ongoing manga, and they brought the philosopher back up: I had caught the foreshadowing and I hadn’t published my findings in time, before they became obvious.

I didn’t give up. I found my thesis — I think — and then I lost it; I recorded an hour-long rant, excised of almost all the references that made the first iterations interesting, because otherwise I’d never get to the end. I got to the end that time. I started transcribing it — and my computer crashed and blue-screened for a week. And when I considered continuing it — I was so close to the finish line — I realized: I didn’t need to bring up the only external comparison that remained in the product. Having only one tangent made the singular tangent worse. I would either have to re-write previous tangents, or I would have to incur tautology²: I would just write about a moment in the manga and its follow-up, like a baby pointing at the TV screen. Look, they mentioned a thing and then they brought it back up later!

…“Have you never seen a film before? You watch it and information is revealed.”

— “Matt the Outlaw” [@CursedGloryHole], “Lady behind me at The Thing screening last night to her partner…”; Twitter.

And so, I’ve refused to open my word processor software for a month. It’s been kind of a tantrum — this might be “writer’s block”, but I think “writer’s block” is too broad a diagnosis to be of use as anything but an excuse. Any writing block is a solvable problem. The issue is figuring out what the issue is, and I figure things out by writing. So I wrote about my issue, and I’ve partially figured it out. More on that later.

Uni also hasn’t helped. It turns out I buckle under workloads lighter than those of my peers. Embarrassment doesn’t help but it still blooms at my feet. I don’t want to wallow in it; but I want to acknowledge the failings I find shameful. I find them shameful because I care. I’ll get nowhere putting down the things I care about. This is a lesson I have to learn again and again and again.

I’ll relay a story here that inspires envy in me: a writer, whose name I sincerely can’t remember, who used to keep folders of disjointed notes and clippings and photos and napkins with scrawled sentences. When his editors needed him to produce a publishable book, he’d take one of the folders he’d fattened up for months or years and turn it into art as if through a magic trick. I’m sure I’m underselling the amount of effort involved, but I still ask myself: could it be so easy?

Though, now that I think about it: isn’t it just a lower-effort way of doing what I already do? Or higher-effort — the folders are all in my head, immaterial. This writer went through the trouble of capturing the snippets, which shaped them independent of all context, and then to re-shape them for a book… I’m studying collage right now at uni, along with other vanguardist works. I think this is why it comes to mind.

I wish writing were easier. Who wouldn’t? But I’m not mad at the challenge. My problems are fixable: eventually, with skill and growth, I will start making sense. I think only through struggling will I get through the struggle; “something awaits me in the divine” for it, as Chris Fleming recently said. Most importantly: if I didn’t write like a hot mess, I don’t think I’d write at all; and the idea of not writing, after having tasted writing, sounds fucking insane. Maybe if I just lost interest—but because I wasn’t efficient enough at it? Or, god forbid, not good enough? Fuck off.

Besides glorified venting, though, what’s the point of this post? Well, I’ve been having classes at uni about formalism and the artistic vanguards, as I’ve mentioned. I haven’t really learned anything coherently enough to share it online yet, but I’m still reflecting on how I work. Who wouldn’t?

And just as I begun this class, I was also granted a gift. Limbus Company Intervallo VII, “Twining Threads”. Where, among other things, fictional artist Ryoshu explains how she wants to challenge the concept of very concept of “material” and “form” with her art — which is one of abbreviation: of reduction of a thing until “further abbreviation is an impossibility”. To maximize its values. Brevity as the soul of wit. She tells narrator Dante that they’ve only begun to understand her work when they understand a statement of hers: if something is forgotten (that is, non-present), it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. When all else is cut away, “the void is what remains,” she says.

There is a difference —this is maybe supported by the story Ryoshu protagonizes— between cutting so that nothing remains, and cutting to create a void. It’s easy to cut too much, or to cut too little. It’s also easy to throw things away. And it’s cruel. It feels cruel, and it is cruel. What Ryoshu wants to do is different: to turn what is no-longer-there into a purposeful absence. So what I take from her words is a new challenge: to not throw away what I cut, but rather to re-assign new meaning to it. If I can re-make it, I will give it that new life. And if not, it will be ‘void’. One more material for me to work with. I’ll honor the cut excerpt as the scaffolding that brought me to the rest of the ideas in the essay — twine sacrificed for the cause — and mourn it as appropriate. I cared about it. There’s no shame in that. Even if it struggled to be born, I shouldn’t take back the time I spent with it.

I’m not opposed to perfectionism on first principles. What sucks about it is how you put yourself and others down. But the desire to make something better than the last thing you made? That sounds good to me. My vice is creative ambition. It’s a mean one, but I like it. I’m not giving it up.

THINGS TO TELL M.:
Art is an ordering not previously found within its medium.
In any case, if such an ordering were characterized as “artistic”, its creator would be the creator of its medium.
Mister Eastman is the true creator of all photos taken with a Kodak.
If the natural element cannot be dominated or eliminated, there’s no art, like how there’s no art in nature.
Why didn’t you go for the guitar, you were great at it.
Aesthetic pleasure is static.
Integritas, consonantia, claritas.
Aristotle. Croce. Joyce.

— Rodolfo Walsh, “Fotos” (from Cuentos completos); translation my own.

So this post is an ode to myself. I’m saying it out loud so it becomes true: I trust my own self to be making sense when I create. I can make a web of things I’ve noticed and slowly knit disparate things together into a single unit of meaning. The struggle to organize myself is one I chose, and one I can quit, temporarily or permanently, and what I make won’t be worse, only different. And the pain the struggle brings me should be respected. My class has taught me that “being self-contained” is not a quality all art has, but I’ll keep fighting chronology and putting things in order—so that there’s a beginning and an end to them—as long as I continue to find this format fun.

I probably won’t make a big issue of the language post when it comes out. I won’t announce what it is in its opening paragraph. I don’t want to further hype it up, because building hype just makes me feel worse. It’s not a good enough post to keep talking about it; even this post was not really about it, and instead about what I’m thinking about, nowadays. I’ll finish it, or I’ll give up on it, which is a form of finishing it; I’ll post it, or I’ll mourn it; or maybe I’ll just forget and let it become ‘void’: and if it does, it’ll make for pretty scaffolding for tomorrow’s thoughts. Won’t it?

Thank you for reading.

#2026 #metablogging #✨ #🌕