This is my new blog.
My last blog I believe was just called chestnutvinegar, which is an alias I use online so that the crazies don’t stalk me in real life.
The name of this blog is inspired from the short story (or novella perhaps) by Hermann Hesse called Klingsor’s Last Summer. I flipped it on its head, and made a last summer become a first winter.
I haven’t read it in quite a while (despite having bought a physical copy of the book last year), but to summarize, it is about a painter’s last summer alive. The painter is engulfed in passion and spontaneity for life and love and all that jazz. He dies. A similar thing I have heard about is a “Dance of Death”. I’ve heard about that from 1980’s DC band Rites of Spring, but I think it’s from something much older than that.
In youth, there is something so attractive about frantic undefinable self-destructive passion for life. I first read Klingsor’s Last Summer on my Amazon Kindle in a Saezeriya drinking chilled red wine alone, eating salad with little shrimps and Cobb salad dressing. I felt self-destructive passion in my own way at that time.
But then something changes.
Perhaps you pull a Klingsor and die, so nothing really changes except that you die.
Or perhaps you don’t and you live, and you did not self-destruct and you continued to live after the story is over.
This to me is Klingsor’s First Winter. If summer is spontaneity, then winter is ordinary. When Klingslor’s Last Summer failed to burn out life, Klingsor’s First Winter begins.
As you may know, I am still alive (as of this writing).
So the idea was perhaps to document that.
I don’t mean to be a slave to ideas though. I’m drinking red wine as I write this. But it is true to say there is nothing desperate about the wine I’m drinking, if that makes sense. It’s calculated. It’s part of a budget.
It just is what it is, and we best not think too too much. Don’t want to go crazy about it or anything. Just felt I better explain the name of the blog, because it may not roll off the tongue for some.
Klingsor's First Winter 