my button!
neighbours' buttons

melxncholyman is my summer house, if summer was a spacetime continuum in which I delve to immortalise a piece of myself whenever it fancies me. It's also an attempt to find/consolidate an identity. I'm never sure of who I am, I feel like someone who is easily swayed by the people I care about, who cannot hold their opinions when challenged, even in situations where this might be detrimental to me. So what makes me, me? I'll leave this ontological question to be hopefully answered by this website.

Have a look around, sign the guestbook, I hope you can find a comfortable corner in my humble virtual abode :)
You could also write me a letter via electronic mail at @foxinthewoods3.14@gmail.com

Est. January 2024, in construction until forever
Entirely hand-coded but inspiration taken from multiple sources which you can find on the credits page.

((Best viewed with a 1920x1080 screen in Firefox))

you are visitor number:

Required readings for my page:

1. Les Fleurs du Mal, Charles Baudelaire
2. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury

Supplementary reading:

1. A Memory called Empire, Arkady Martine
2. Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
3. Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong
4. Blue Period, Tsubasa Yamaguchi

Q:

why {wise//cursed}?

A:

it's something Baudelaire said once, in his Ébauche d’un épilogue pour la deuxième édition des Fleurs du Mal (Draft of an epilogue for the second edition of The Flowers of Evil). The opening line of this epilogue—also a poem—is as such:

“ Tranquille comme un sage et doux comme un maudit,
J’ai dit: "

there has been no translation of this forgotten, unfinished epilogue, which was intended by Baudelaire to justify himself to the scandalised backlash of French society after the publishing of the first edition of Fleurs. nonetheless, i find it of the most poetic lines he has ever written, so i took the creative liberty of translating it to:

“ Calm like a wise man and soft like a cursed one,
I said: "

and there you have it. it's a mysterious greeting at the front page of my website, which i hope invites the viewer to explore what the webmaster has to ‘say'.

Q:

you think yourself wise, then? or cursed?

A:

in the end i'm no suffering poet, despite what the masks try to convey. not wise yet but i'm working on it.

as for the curse...... hehe

[an awkward pause.]

Q:

um...okay. who is the ‘melancholy man’ then?

A:

it's a song by The Moody Blues. it's also Leone Abbacchio. and the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. and the man in the painting O, what's that in the hollow...? by Edward Robert Hughes. and me. basically, a bunch of dead guys + yours truly.

[see my button for the aforementioned man in the painting.]

Q:

why are you doing this?

A:

what do you mean, this?

Q:

this inane self-interview, if it can even be called that.

A:

because i like to be silly sometimes. and you get to know a bit more about me without actually knowing anything substantial.

[also because tennessee williams did it and i thought that was cool.]

Q:

minesweeper or tetris?

A:

why must you pit two bad bitches against each other like this

Q:

final question. what inspires you?

A:

nothing. everything. eyes. napes. ink saints and grass stains. holding someone without touching them.
the universe sings, all we have to do is listen.