Around 10 p.m., when folks would be pulling up to their parties. To this oceanside hotel-patio gathering we were passing.

“Van Gogh–type Impressionism would be like etchings. Like quick lil bars,” I mused. “Like cave drawings. But a bunch of them.” I laughed.

She didn’t get the point of this, beyond that it meant something to me; or, she got that it didn’t mean anything to her. So she redirected her attention to something that did.

Started going off about a Japanese historical novel on Van Gogh she’d recently read.

About how Van Gogh had been inspired by Japanese woodblock artists. That he had wanted to go to Japan to study with them but couldn’t bc he was a broke, borderline crazy homeless person living on the charity of his brother. So he went to Arles instead—where he’d end up painting his most known works.

Didn’t make a cent off his art during his lifetime.

How his brother helped him bc he loved him, and that was what family was for.

How it was OK that I was where I was. That I couldn’t cave. That I had to keep going.

Seemingly encouraging a type of self-mythology, but actually it wasn’t about that.

It no longer was.

Self-mythology was something one indulged in.

To be able to self-mythologize was a luxury.

There was no room for indulgence when you were unable to survive / support yourself.

She was just telling me a story to help me not hate myself / give me a reason to keep going.

That was the point of stories: to help people who needed it not hate themselves / give them a reason to keep going.

The point of the only type of stories I was interested in, in any case.

I was at the part in Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book Six (2018) when he finally started talking about Hitler.

About Hitler’s struggle.

Finally getting around to explaining the series’ title.

About damn time.

How that fool Hitler initially wanted to be an artist.

Had no idea!

How he kept getting angrier and angrier when the academy kept rejecting him.

How his pops died when he was in his teens; and then his mom, right before his twenties.

Right when he started wilding more and more.

Living in boardinghouses tryna do art getting more and more alienated.

About how all of Germany and Europe got fkng floored by WWI.

Had started thinking about Modernism differently, considering this.

About Modernism as a reaction to WWI, to this seismic shift, turn of the century’s second decade.

Thinking about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) differently.

Modernism was about trying to say what couldn’t be said. Doing wild formal shit, for that purpose. To try to tap into that, the unsayable.

When Wittgenstein spoke of ‘that which cannot be said,’ ‘that which eludes language,’ ‘that about which one must remain silent,’ I used to think of trivial, navel gaze-y, philosophic stuff.