One week ago from today, Lou Reed died. He's still dead, and he will remain dead. I found myself obsessing over his death, to the point where it took on a life of its own. This morbid vitality manifested itself in many forms, from reflections on the history of music, to scattered eulogistic poems, and finally to more introspective moments regarding my own identity in relation to aesthetics. It's important to pay homage to figures like Lou on a recurring basis, for the cultural obscurity at the core of his art bestows upon his legacy a certain resistance to recognition. Unlike the Beatles, he did not sing about peace and free love; his was a preoccupation with the beauty of tension, and the strangeness of being.

It was Lou who taught me that night is also a sun, that darkness — provided one endures its uncanniness — yields secrets that glimmer greater than knowledge. He also taught me that morality and artistry, at their most developed, have little to do with one another. In this regard, it was Lou who taught me what it means to be an individual, the intense pain that accompanies qualitative self-development, and the artistic agony entailed in the struggle against mediocrity. In my eyes, he was a poet at best, an exemplar at least, and somewhere in between, a kind of undead martyr: half-crucified, half-enslaved to this thing called life. For having cracked open an irreversible fissure in the history of subjectivity, I couldn't have gone much longer without openly paying respect to him.

In hopes that this message will inspire others to continually learn from his experience, I end it with a song I wrote — dedicated to you, Lou.

venirhere