The panel on new musical ontologies: OK, so music is always the other to whatever field of knowledge you're talking about, music lets you have something like a field with a boundary that keeps it defined and real and tamable. And then you want to try to describe the impossible thing itself.

One way of defining what the music does is negatively: what does it foreclose, what does it smother, what does it make you fail to heed? (Ahmed's work on feeling or not feeling part of a group.) What does it wash out, what does it drown out? What does its underline, its emphasis, emphasize? How does it direct you to value and organize your pursuits (which pursuits does it mark as happy ones)?

Subjective realisms

I was stuck, in one of those episodes or chapters that will either turn out to be a transitional crescendo to some stable good form, or will, in retrospect, be remembered as just the beginning of attrition, the useless kicking action of a thing that needs to die. The problem with optimism is knowing when to apply it.

When we finished our meeting, I turned with profuse thanks to M, a touch on the shoulder and wet eyes. What did I want? To make it personal. To feel loved. To actually thank her. To re-establish the solid ground of a consensus of upward mobility and things being OK - things are basically OK! Look, we are joking and making plans and saying, see ya later. But this feels wrong: I need to feel tragic in order to be tragic.

I hate knowing that my projections of affects and moods so obviously affect people's strategies toward me. If I want reassurance, I project gloom. I project ease and confidence if I want to move to the next thing. But what if I feel both gloomy and confident about what I am doing? I feel both these things at once way more often than I feel either on its own.