Art of Life

   I want my life to be a crime of passion, and its narrative a vainglory
   opera, but that is ultimately out of my hands.

   published on Friday, 30 January 2026

   This text was dumped from starbreaker.org/personal/art-of-life.html with lynx.

   By the time the version of starbreaker.org containing this post gets
   uploaded, it will be weeks or months too late to submit it for the
   January 2026 IndieWeb Carnival hosted by Jeremiah Lee. No matter. I
   will write it anyway. It will appear when I am ready.

   That is my mortal will. I will see my will done on Earth and Heaven be
   damned.

   Jeremiah decided to go big—as in big questions— with his installment of
   the IndieWeb Carnival:

     I enjoyed reading posts from the IndieWeb carnival over the last
     year and decided to host this month’s with the theme of the meaning
     of life. The number 42 is presented as "the answer to the ultimate
     question of life, the universe, and everything" in The Hitchhiker’s
     Guide to the Galaxy. I will turn 42 years old on January 15.

   January 2026 IndieWeb Carnival by Jeremiah Lee

   Not that I can reasonably begrudge him his ambition; When I had hosted
   the carnival in September 2024 I had gone with suicide prevention. And
   he was kind enough to provide some prompts:

     The theme is open-ended, but here are some ideas:
     * What or who gives your life meaning?
     * Do you desire a strong sense of purpose? Why or why not?
     * Have you ever had an existential crisis? What triggered it? How did
       you get thru it?
     * What do you want people to say at your funeral? Does that desire
       influence your behavior in any way?

   January 2026 IndieWeb Carnival by Jeremiah Lee

   I’ve got this album playing as I write. It will eventually prove
   relevant, Occasional Reader, so please indulge me. Or don’t; you know
   how the back button works. 😼
   a visual kei album cover cover art for Art of Life (1993) by X Japan

   I have found over the years that the importance of the question of the
   meaning of life to me has diminished. I don’t think this is because of
   depression, low morale, or existential despair. I suspect it is because
   with age I have come to embrace subjectivity in more areas of life.
   This is not to say that there is not an objective reality. Water
   typically boils at 100°C regardless of anybody’s opinions or feelings,
   and the speed of light in a vacuum is no more malleable. However,
   objective physical reality is not the only reality, but the fundamental
   bedrock layer of reality. Human experience gets layered over objective
   reality as paint over canvas, and the world around you becomes—to an
   extent—what you make of it.

   At least, that is my understanding as I write this. I could be wrong.
   And I reserve the right to change my mind.

   What does this mean for the meaning of life? First, that very phrase is
   worthless because it is a gross oversimplification. As far as I can
   tell, there is no objective meaning to life. Even the drive to
   reproduce, for life to replicate itself, is not an inherent source of
   meaning. To derive meaning from a mechanism is to dare Hume’s
   Guillotine to relieve you of the burden of your head. Scottish
   philosopher David Hume established 300 years ago that empiricism alone
   is not a suitable foundation for morality; I doubt it would be a
   misapplication of his philosophy to suggest that we cannot impute an
   objective meaning of life to physical reality or insist that the
   indifference of the universe to humanity precludes meaning entirely.

   If we cannot derive an objective meaning of life from existing reality,
   what else is there? If I were inclined toward spirituality I might look
   to God or the gods for meaning. However, I have never had much patience
   for religion or spirituality; if belief works for you, however, I will
   not begrudge you as long as you don’t try to legislate your beliefs. If
   you tell me that "America is a Christian nation" I am going to roll up
   the Treaty with Tripoli and whack you with it the way my father would
   use his copy of the New York Daily News to whack the nose of a dog that
   had just shit on the carpet back in the 1980s.

   If we dispense with empiricism and religion as sources for an objective
   meaning of life, what remains? I’m not sure anything remains. The
   logical conclusion, one might argue, is that there is no meaning to
   life, the universe, or anything—or that the answer might as well be 42,
   69, or even 6-7. One might therefore argue for suicide—on both the
   individual level and that of the species—as the only reasonable answer
   to the Absurd.

   My heart rebels at the notion. I did not live the life I’ve lived,
   faced the demons I’ve faced (binding them to my service instead of
   banishing them), and forced my way through all the years and all the
   miles merely to meekly kneel before an altar and open my own throat.
   It’s not that that I have not considered suicide. I have often
   considered it. And at every turn I have refused. Not because life is
   sacred. Not because—as the Roman Catholic Church into which I had been
   baptized without my consent teaches—it is an affront to God. Not
   because it would hurt other people.

   I refuse suicide for my own sake; my pride demands it.

   Besides, if Neil Gaiman is right in his depiction of Death as a lady;
   it would be rude to rush her.
   a B&W drawing from a comic book of a slim Goth woman trying a bit of
   80s slang Death in accused rapist Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, art by
   Mike Dringenberg

   Not that good manners will stop me from stealing a kiss on my way out
   when Death finally comes for me. My mother tried to raise her sons as
   gentlemen, but I was born a bastard and I am one by birth and
   temperament alike. Besides—if you’re gonna go, why not do it with
   style?

   Here’s the deal, the Devil’s honest truth: I never asked to be dealt
   into the game. Nobody bothered to explain the rules. The dealer stacks
   the deck and the house always wins in the end. Nonetheless, now that
   I’m seated at the table with aces and eights before me, I mean to play
   my hand to the fucking hilt. Even the Dead Man’s Hand can win a pot if
   you bluff hard enough and you sit with your back to a wall. "And don’t
   forget the Joker!" as Lemmy put it: it can turn two pair into a full
   house. Besides, it really is all about how one plays the game, rather
   than whether one wins or loses—because every winning streak ends and
   none of us are getting out of this alive.
   preview image for YouTube video ID 3mbvWn1EY6g YouTube: Motörhead –
   “Ace of Spades” (Official Video)

   This raises the question of how one best plays the game. You might as
   well, even though the game is rigged, because it really is the only
   game in town. Nobody can answer that for you. Nobody can determine the
   meaning of your own life while you yet live. You must decide these
   things for yourself, because if you don’t there is no shortage of power
   junkies willing to do it on your behalf—and none of them have your best
   interests in mind or at heart. Anybody who claims otherwise is selling
   something, and you should keep one hand on your wallet and the other
   free to grasp a weapon should the grifters figure out that you see
   through them—and take violent exception.

   Note that I wrote that nobody can decide the meaning of your life while
   you yet live. I did so for a reason.

   I know what I want my life to mean to me. I have determined my own
   purpose, because those offered me by church, state, capital, society,
   and family all displeased me. I have chosen my own path, and I pay its
   price with every step.

   I won’t say that "I had no choice in any of this" because I have always
   had a choice. Recall, Occasional Reader, that one of the prompts
   Jeremiah offered was "Have you ever had an existential crisis?" Well, I
   had two before I was eighteen. The first I resolved by reclaiming anger
   and hatred as emotions I had a moral right to feel by virtue of my
   human nature. The second came when I realized that the fight that had
   defined me as a young man was finished, and I was still standing and
   facing a simple question to which I had no answer: "Now what?"

   If you are reading this, then my answer is there for you to see for
   yourself. Nevertheless, one objective fact remains: I, Matthew Cambion,
   am but the shadow of a mortal man. I most likely will not outlive him
   and take on my own tenebrous life, as if I were the Zeromus to his
   Zemus. And when that man has ceased to write his own life, its story
   will become one that others will tell and retell without him. When that
   happens, the meaning of that man’s life will be for others to decide.
   Will it lie in the work he did for a paycheck? Will it lie in what he
   wrote? Will it lie in the fact that he stood before a woman he loved
   and vowed that he would be hers for as long as she would have him, and
   that when the last star burned out he would remain in the evernight to
   take her hand?

   That is beyond his control. It is ultimately subjective. And if nobody
   tells his story after his death and that of his wife, and nobody
   mirrors his website, then his life will only have meant anything to
   him. The shadow work that gave me voice in the Wired will likewise only
   have been meaningful to the man for whom it had become necessary.

   Do I want to be remembered as man who loved a woman across 10,000
   miles, brought her to him to be his wife, and wrote rock operatic
   science fantasy pastiches while working full-time as a full-stack
   thaumaturge who built cathedrals on quicksand? Do I want to take
   Death’s hand knowing that my words reached others, and at least
   entertained them—if they did not wake others up or save the life of at
   least one person staring into the same abyss into which I had stared?
   Do I want people to remember me as one who was too goddamned human for
   any LLM to safely train on?

   Of course that’s how I want to be remembered. But it probably won’t
   happen. I would need to make friends first, and I simply can’t be
   bothered to do the work of maintaining a social life that will have
   people playing my favorite albums at my wake and roasting weenies over
   my funeral pyre. The best I can reasonably hope for is that I had
   sufficient time, foresight, wisdom, and decency to not leave the sort
   of mess for my wife that my father had left for my mother in the wake
   of his death. It will doubtless be harder to crack the passcode on my
   phone than it had been to crack my father’s phone; I was the one who
   had cracked it, after all.

   However, my desire only counts for so much. So much is beyond my
   control. I am not the sole observer, and the wave function does not
   collapse in accordance with my will alone. I might be the captain of my
   own soul, but I am hardly the admiral of yours, Occasional Reader. (Nor
   do I want the job; the pay sucks and the hours are worse.)

   Rather than fret overmuch about how people will speak of me after I am
   gone, I choose to believe in what Yoshiki called "the madness called
   `Now'". The past is read-only memory. The future is unknowable. I live
   in chaos. I walk in faith. My life remains in a superposition; I wear
   so many masks and play roles to suit. All of them are my true self, but
   none are my whole self. Even the persona I project online—Matthew
   Cambion—is not my totality.

   And if Mark Zuckerberg tries to tell you that having different aspects
   of yourself for different social situations means you lack integrity,
   remember that he’s the asshole who should have gotten booted out of
   Harvard for creating FaceMash so that he could more easily creep on his
   female classmates—because capitalism is nothing but rape culture as a
   socioeconomic system. Performing professionalism when you’re at work
   requires integrity, as does putting that mask aside once the workday
   ends. And if you think it’s unreasonable to refer to capitalism as rape
   culture, what else should we call a system where individuals are
   systematically reduced from ends in themselves to means to a
   billionaire’s ends?
   preview image for YouTube video ID qPKw_V_4pJI YouTube: ART OF LIFE - X
   JAPAN (Full ver 30 min) - Live at TOKYO DOME - Dec 31, 2020

   Why quote Yoshiki, the founder, drummer, and pianist of X Japan? Why
   not only mention his masterwork, “Art of Life”, but let it serve as
   this post’s namesake? It is a matter of respect.

   He too is a veteran of a thousand psychic wars. He too stood on that
   precipice. If I had had a copy of X Japan’s 1993 album in the year of
   its release, consisting of a single 30 minute epic song, it might have
   been the song that saved my life instead of “The Unforgiven” by
   Metallica and “Beyond the Realms of Death” by Judas Priest.

I believe in the madness called "Now"
Time goes flowing, breaking my heart
Wanna live, can't let my heart kill myself
Still I haven't found what I'm looking for
Art of life, I try to stop myself
But my heart goes to destroy the truth
Tell me why, I want the meaning of my life
Do I try to live? Do I try to love?
Art of life, an Eternal Bleeding heart
You never wanna breathe your last
Wanna live, can't let my heart kill myself
Still I'm feeling for a rose is breathing love
In my life

   “Art of Life” (1993) by Yoshiki

   It isn’t an easy song to listen to. I suspect that most people tune out
   or switch to something more accessible once the piano solo in the
   second movement becomes a nervous shakedown set to atonal music via
   dissonance. But it probably wasn’t an easy song to write, let alone to
   record, even if Yoshiki had been in perfect health at the time. He
   wasn’t, incidentally. He wrote this in his hospital bed, which is
   probably the most metal thing any rock musician has ever done.

   And I slept on this epic song—which makes “November Rain” by Guns ’n
   Roses look like a display of restraint—for thirty years. But when I was
   waiting and hoping that my wife would win her struggle against cancer,
   X Japan’s music was there for me.

   And if I had ever given up, I would not be here to hear it. I would not
   be able to make it my own: another patch in the spiritual battle jacket
   my soul always wears.

   Whatever others might say about the meaning of my life after I am gone,
   this is what I will say for myself as I depart the stage: I stood
   defiant. I was true to myself and those I loved most. Though time has
   wasted me, the only time I wasted were the hours in which I worked to
   further enrich the already wealthy in exchange for the comparative
   pittance with which I paid for my own life. I lived, I loved, and I
   left scars on the face of my culture—even if they were only cat
   scratches and not gaping gashes opened by the stroke of an eigengrau
   sword forged of my own rage, loving-kindness, and hatred of tyranny.

   Remember me, for only in human memory do any of us have any hope of
   life after death. And if you want "main character" energy, mine is
   brighter than a thousand suns and there’s no shame in my game. I can
   accept being an extra in your life, if not part of the supporting cast,
   but I’ll be damned if I’ll take any shit from anybody for being the
   villainous protagonist of my own life. As far as I’m concerned the
   world—at least, my experience of it—ends with me. What comes after is
   beyond my control and therefore not my problem.

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