What’s the German word for “Chronic Self-Inflicted Wound”?

If anyone has a word for it, it’s the Germans. I would say the Japanese, too, but that one’s probably beautiful and tinged with a dash of hope.

It’s odd, to discover that what you thought was a scar — an old one, at that — is actually barely held shut with a thin scab. And that might be more illusory than not. It’s a wound that I’ve only half-come to terms with; acceptance of the past and present, but not so much of the ramifications and implications cast on the future.

The narrative has changed. The scope has narrowed, and the map has shifted: certain paths are closed off, the way home is no longer what it always was.

Is it a sign of age and maturity or just cynicism that all that is what it is, and there’s no point in being sad or upset about it?

C’mon. The Germans have words for all sorts of weird shit. It’s gotta be out there, right?

Dominoes falling

As a consumer of the creative, this is exactly the sort of thing I live for.

Stumbling across this on YouTube (the drummer is also in one of my favorite bands, Leprous), my brain is knocked completely loose from it’s moorings. The polyrhythms alone at the very beginning, beating against the piano’s already off-kilter timing – to me, like being thrashed about by rapids while at the same time realizing that you’ve developed gills, so it’s suddenly comforting to just settle in for the ride, knowing that you can survive long enough to hear the siren’s song to completion. The melodies throughout, the violin and the melodic transition at the half-way mark, the shifting time-signatures, the wall-of-sound production, and my god that flawless ritardando at around 8:00, right back into a half-time march toward the end…

For me, these moments — hearing tracks like this (for another example that froze me in my tracks, check out Nils Frahm’s ‘Hammers’, above), reading a unique voice like Chuck Palahniuk or Warren Ellis, seeing your first Dali painting or video by Floria Sigismondi — are less moments of rebirth, less reminders that the world I live in is glass-half-full with plenty of things that still taste great… and more reminders of all the doors that haven’t been opened for me. Aren’t there always more of these waiting for me out there? For all of us? Maybe not even waiting to be found, but instead waiting to find us when we’re ready for them?
 
(I’ve been thinking a lot over the past year about the differences between illusion and magic, and this all seems to fall in there…)