Present Day, April 2026
Some people who have heard Black Sun Rising have described it as pessimistic. I want to address this directly because I think the characterization misses something important about what the song is doing and what the album is doing.
Pessimism is a disposition toward the future: the expectation that things will go badly, held as a settled conclusion rather than as a provisional assessment based on evidence. What I am doing is not pessimism. It is diagnosis.
A physician who identifies a dangerous condition in a patient is not being pessimistic. The physician is being accurate. The accuracy of the diagnosis is the precondition for the treatment, or for the patient to make informed choices about what they want to do with the information. A physician who withholds an accurate diagnosis to avoid being called pessimistic is not performing an act of kindness. They are performing an act of evasion that limits the patient’s ability to act on accurate information about their own situation.
I have watched blind optimism lead to catastrophe more often than clear-eyed awareness has done so. The testament is not doom. It is diagnosis. Recognition is the first step toward anything. The wheel only repeats when the pattern goes unrecognized long enough for the conditions that sustain it to solidify. Recognition is not sufficient to break the pattern. But it is necessary. May 22.