if anyone happens upon this page, well, hello.
as i continue to try to refine my writing and my online identity, i have decided to migrate to substack.
i hope you will continue to check out my work there!
keep marching,
ant
-
book discussion: It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, by Anne de Marcken
i’d like to commit to doing something like this more regularly, but here’s a new genre of post where i’ll talk about some book i’ve read recently. don’t expect a traditional review, more a cloud of associations disentangling my overall interaction with the text.
also, forgive me for not utilizing page numbers in my citations, as i borrowed this as an ebook from the library and no longer have access to the full text. quotations from the book are placed by a book-progress percentage. shameful, i know.
SPOILERS abound…
it lasts forever and then it’s over.
right away, the title of Anne de Marcken’s novella pulls you in with its conflicting temporalities, an inherent conflict embedded in its vocabulary. though “forever,” especially in this phrasing, typically stands to suggest a notion of boundedness by human imagination. for nothing is truly forever, we know now that even stars expire away, matter decays, and entropy is the dominant force of the cosmos.
what is the true meaning of forever?
to me, it is an aspirational term. contained within forever is an immutable dream, an ideal immortalized by the reverence that the subjective mind assigns to it. forever is a force sustained by the imagination of the mind that conceives of it. it’s nearly a fantasy— completely untenable—it is a concept that is entirely framed by our bounded subjectivity, as it can only exist so long as we sustain an imagination of its infinitude.
and then it’s over.
with how the world appears to deteriorate across scores of existential crises before our own eyes, the idea of ruin is one deeply embedded within our collective imagination. but, like the idea of forever, ruin is an idea that is deeply anthropomorphized, infused with melodrama, and misconstrued as a tenet of existence.
industrial society raises us on a linear timeline, espousing a defiance of natural boundaries and striving ever-upwards towards an enhanced objective reign over the world. it is from here that the idea of ruin emerges as a natural opposition to the endless push of modernity. ruin becomes something that we carry within us, an infusion of our mortality onto an imagined canvas of infinitude that informs our view of life.
That is what ritual does. It excuses us. Comforts us. Places us in a context so vast and ineffable we can confuse it with truth because it is impersonal and because it has a lineage and because it extends all the way—but only—to the limits of what we can conceive. (8%)
our ontology can only expand to fill the boundaries of our imagination, but no further. thus, we imagine ruin as a facet of the ultimate conflict of the universe, the epic clash between life and death, the fate of our existence held in the balance. a grand ending, the antithesis to infinite growth.
and if we saw the world more like nature? by all accounts, time passes cyclically in nature; seasons depart and return at regular intervals, organic matter decomposes and sustains the next generations of life. even in the quintessential scene of environmental ruin, a volcanic eruption, the process yields rich soils from which new life invariably emerges, foundations to a new ecosystem arising from literal ashes.
When you have arrived at the thing itself, then all you can do is compare it to something else you don’t understand. (96%)
we are so firmly rooted in our linearity, in that perennial hero’s journey where we believe ourselves constantly pitted against some existential threat, that we must prolong our value of exploitation indefinitely and ever-outwards into the universe. we are misled by this dream of “forever,” for it is all we can imagine when we reach out into the vast possibility of existence. but it is illusory, because no single state, process, or thing is truly infinite.
The only things that remain themselves are the ones you can never reach. The things that are too big or too far away or move too slowly to detect… They will always be only what they really are, and you will never know what name to call out to them. (96%)
we begin to internalize ruin, we grieve the violation of this perfect dream of “forever.” we constantly broach limitations as our existence grows to be defined by aging, loss, and ultimately, our looming, inevitable death. paradoxically, our imagination exceeds the limits of our biological lives while our biological lives exceed the limits of our imagination.
this need not necessarily be a source for existential malaise. though we are conditioned to search for objectivities within every wrinkle of the universe, there will never be a “theory of everything” that can encompass the entirety of our conscious and unconscious interaction with the physical universe. it’s not something that we will ever grasp in the palm of our hands. we simply have to navigate these unknowable spaces with the support of other equally mystified souls, for to know one another is the most profound action towards making sense of anything at all.
The space between me and me is you. This is a mystery. (100%)
-
Theory of Every Damn Thing
Hay everyone. I have torn my Achilles tendon and opted to get it surgically repaired. This means I am bedridden for a week while my tendon recovers from the trauma of 1) being exposed to the outside world and 2) getting stitched back together. I am trying to take this opportunity to deepen my understanding of life. This reflection is part of that process.
We exist in the margins of multiple worlds, though we labor in pretending not to. Try as one does, we fixate on lifestyles of control, disregarding the subterranean ebbs and flows of the world as it naturally appears. With our endowment of observational capacity, we profanely engage in narratives that champion the dichotomous conflict of individual fate and destiny against a confrontational nature. Life without engagement, growth, and productivity is scarcely considered a life worth living at all. Our experience is that of the waves, the ephemeral motions that rock the canoe of our consciousness on a moment-to-moment basis. These waves carry us onward, and consideration must be made to ensure that they do not cause us to capsize, critical negotiations towards righting the course of our lives.
We know the ocean of our existence is much more than mere waves. Below the surface spans entire universes, closed cosmological systems where, for those lurking below, all that ever is and ever will be are contained in a finite space. Sure, there’s inputs from the great beyond. Extra-dimensional aliens may breach the upper limits of the universe and impose their own will. Even the distant moon, pulling the strings of the tides, exerts some influence on the system. Though these factors are entirely external to the undersea itself, they constitute a tangible, shapely influence on the rhythms of the universe contained within. No system is ever completely closed, not even the universe revealed to us from observations of deep space. Incomprehensible forces push apart the fabric of space itself on a large enough scale, forces that we may never be equipped to fully understand. It would be like explaining lunar tides to a minnow.
Our journeys as living beings crest upon the rippling surface of another’s universe, a sensation resulting from infinitely complex interactions of elements that is largely taken for granted. What relevance do the circumstances of existence hold to our lives anyway?
It is not in the nature of our ontological beings to accept the world as it is without some sensation of curiosity. We tirelessly pursue grand questions – the more unanswerable, the better. But the collective with whom we grow to cohabitate tells us to dismiss this aspect of our being. Answers are abound wherever one looks, and dreams of progress fixate on a utopia where there are no longer any questions or mysteries left in the world, all to escape a nagging sensation of uncertainty.
Uncertainty is incompatible with the lifestyle of control. To have made it so far in human history only to continue to accept uncertainties in the universe feels unacceptable. Flailing against the lack of an inherent anthropocentric reasoning to the universe, we respond by forcing the world to fit within the predetermined boundaries of our own understanding. We reduce our view of the ocean to one of just its waves, and convince ourselves that this is all it ever was. The ideal life of the technological age is one entirely absent of metaphysical context.
Despite all this, I don’t think we were ever meant to flee from the incomprehensibility of the universe. To disregard its complexity in the name of an authoritative God or to simply be indifferent would be to dismiss an authentic psychological need innate to our being. We are trapped within intersubjectivity, so we should learn to grow comfortable with discomforting ambiguities and questions with no answer.
-
cold cuts: thinking too hard
hey guys welcome to a new section of my blog entitled “cold cuts” where i write short thinkpieces with no research and no proofreading. a really good use of your time i promise. anyways, do you ever think too hard and feel yourself get a little dizzy? a little discomfort swelling from the medulla oblangata? from deep within that little crook of your brain? that happens to me when i try to imagine where i’ll be in two years. hell even in one year. so many things have to happen before i can even think about being a functional person once again that i severely doubt i can even visualize that many steps ahead in the process. the human mind is only capable of so much. and thus is how modern life has surpassed the capabilities of my brain.
-
why is it difficult to imagine the future?
this whole business of trying to predict the future and the things that will happen is truly a fool’s errand. you ask any two people what their crazy prediction about the future is and they will all focus on some different aspect of life and incorporate some different philosophical lens based on whatever futurism thinkpiece they were most recently exposed to. there’s more noise than there’s ever been. and with all this noise you kinda have to choose your battles and choose what you worry about, and it’s no different for choosing which anxiety about the future that we end up fixating on.
visions of the future are guided by a sort of parable, i feel as if they typically involve the logical extreme of some contemporary phenomenon, manifested in all its grotesque horror and wreaking havoc on our otherwise fine and unchanged society. the future lives in the realm of our imagination, the same imagination in which lives all the fantasies ever told, and so the future becomes an instrument for inserting Relevance into a narrative.
is it any use to hypothesize about the future? to tell such cautionary tales? it’s as useful as any other story. arthur clarke says any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. and such is true for social innovation and cultural development. the experience of the future is one that will so thoroughly be beyond us, but stories of the future hold our hand as we begin to experience lifestyle changes that may otherwise overwhelm us. they are guidebooks for how to reconcile with change.
-
Everything Happens So Much: Blooming Ontologies In The Margins Of Online Expression
Introduction
one of the last frontiers of genuine mystery in the world of the information age was the realm of “weird twitter,” a collective of oddly-branded twitter accounts emerging in the early days of the app that shared a disorienting brand of humor that blended non-sequiturs with syntactical irregularities in order to produce a style of absurd, online speak that i would contend still influences a lot of internet humor to this day. @dril is probably the most popular and consistent accounts of this brand of humor to this day. my favorite examples of these accounts were ones that nobody had any idea of who was running them or where they came from.
this is the online environment i grew up in, and i honestly think it made some weird wrinkles in my brain that permanently informed my style of interactions with people. i mean, i tried to create my own “weird twitter” account and strove to go viral for my own silly wordplays or absurd observations of the world. today a reformed individual, i try to seek my self-actualization through other mediums, like the real world, but like i said, that wrinkle in my brain is still there.
one of the more confounding examples of this era of the internet was @Horse_ebooks, an account that would mostly rattle off purely nonsensical tweets before at times stumbling upon word strings that endowed knowledge between fractured grammar and incomplete sentences.1 the most famous is this iconic tweet that i’ve embedded below:
now, i don’t necessarily want to belabor what this tweet means, or what its cultural impact was, because others have already belabored it (check my links below, whatever). what i do want to belabor is how this mantra fits into the very constitution of my subjective ontology and understanding of self as a part of a world where meaning in general is very fractured and nonsensical.
Postmodern Grammars
linguistic prescriptivists are goddamn cowards. sure, we need a common language to understand one another, but creativity is an inherent beauty of communication through language. think of shakespeare, who would just reel off made-up words and was considered a genius. we used to be a more sensible people. think of f. scott fitzgerald talking about the orgastic pleasure that day by day recedes us like boats borne back ceaselessly in the past. orgastic wasn’t a word until f. scott revealed new truths to us through the adjectivication of orgasm. adjectivication ain’t a word but you catch my goddamn drift. perchance.
point is, we need a few rules to be established to ensure mutual comprehension, but from there, a lot of prescriptivism is just grammar police hodgepodge. pseudo-intellectualism. knowing arbitrary rules isn’t intelligence, folks. knowing arbitrary rules and breaking them like dry spaghetti to service the unique arguments of your inner monologue, which have no language, is brilliance. now, language absolutely does rewire your brain and your thought processes. but we’ll come back to that point.2
prescriptivism is something that is truly drilled in american education, as well as many others i am SURE. if you’re a french speaker you better hope you speak that prescriptive parisian french lest you get bullied for butchering the language of molière (who probably also made up words, like shakespeare). i’m gonna go ahead and call this strict prescriptive attitude towards language as modernism, because this isn’t an academic blog and i don’t have to explain why i’m adapting terminology.
modernist grammars are exactly the type of grammar, wordings, and spellings that one masters for fear of getting assaulted by a yardstick.3 and since they’re drilled in school, people get the notion that having these rules down makes you that much more intelligent. and this is perpetuated enough so that it serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy, and voila, a language digs in deep ruts with its rules for ‘proper’ usage.
enter postmodern grammars. like any good deconstruction, it comes from an excellent understanding material from which it derives. postmodernism as a movement generally concerns itself with deconstructions of modern narratives and conventions, utilizing this subversion to make new points about the world in which the expression exists.
while social media or weird twitter are certainly not the origins for postmodern grammars, it certainly provided a wide platform for the proliferation of such use in communication. part of this is the fact that it’s limited by character restrictions, part of it is the fact that anybody with internet can hop on the web and share their truly strange thoughts and ideas with a wide audience.
but social media brought more than just novel joke formats and forms of written communication. this may be more apparent in hindsight, but social media also brought about the erosion of truth and objectivity. donald trump’s twitter was the zenith of this movement for now, but with AI deepfakes and text generation picking up steam, we can see that he was only the beginning.
we are entering a post-truth world, or one could say we’re already there. the world got much too complicated for us to understand a while back, and we have little interaction with many of the actual things that influence our lives. much of what we know about far-flung reaches of the world are distilled through media, which we are constantly surrounded by.
our drift from accepting objectivities in our understanding of the world aligns with a drift away from objectivities in formal language. bent, misshapen grammars convey a greater phenomenological significance that underlies the content of the statement. language reflects the thoroughly nonsensical regressions of contemporary life by adapting the same stubborn ambiguities and absurdism that are so saturated in our daily life.
Neoliberalism and Linguistic Prescriptivism
there’s a reason linguistic prescriptivism is so drilled within us. knowledge is power, and attaching arbitrary assignments of power to language usage provides an easy thing that the highly educated can point to to assert dominance over someone who either didn’t grow up speaking all posh or someone who has an accent or etc.
some of the prescriptive rules of language are so arbitrary, that knowledge of them is really just a reflection of a kid having better schooling. i like to mention french in this context because it’s a language i have experience in that goes so heavy on preserving norms.4 there is a whole tense in french that is only used in writing that has no change in grammar. it’s simply just “past tense but literary” this is an incredibly inaccessible aspect of the language for someone who wants to go touch grass.
continuing with the french example, we start to see how a hierarchy is built around colonial lines. you want to be taken seriously as a francophone scholar? better speak with that parisian accent and throw a bunch of throaty “euuhs” in there when you can’t think of what to say. and don’t you be speaking with a quebecois accent.
the point is, the additional plus of postmodern grammar is that it is a protest against neoliberalism and capitalism. even my small, valiant act of typing in all lowercase is emblematic of a protest against the stringent rules of language that continue to be enforced by insecure scholars who want to be taken seriously.
The Cultural Moment
all this ties into the literature of our time. the current moment, baby. the here and now. we are approaching an impasse at which we are collectively forced to pay for the accumulating transgressions of unchecked neoliberalism and traditional economic development. global citizenship has become a never-ending march of incomprehensible tragedy and destruction. maybe part of it is the 24hr news cycle that amplifies stories of violence, but a bigger part of it is the proliferation of previously unseen climate disasters that are constantly communicating a sense of inevitable, global doom, the likes of which have never been overcome in human history and will require a complete reset of mindsets regarding ‘development’ that have been in progress for the last two centuries.
this shift towards the incomprehensible has necessitated creativity in communication’s form. it’s hard to respond anymore to the formality that is so tightly associated with the social movements that have contributed to the brink that we all find ourselves approaching now. for example, it is physically painful to tell someone to not talk to me until i’ve had my coffee. such a sentiment has to be coated with such an intense irony that demonstrates an awareness of the corniness and a trust in the audience that they will appreciate your postmodern take on the traditional boomer humor.5
“Everything happens so much” is a sort of play on a traditional phrase, like ‘there’s a lot going on right now’ or ‘you see the news lately? woah nelly!’, but its incompleteness suggests a sort of child-lost-in-the-supermarket confusion that communicates a loss of control over circumstances just as much as the sentence communicates a loss of control over more traditional sentence constructions that encapsulate the idea of ‘so much.’
staying sane and above it all is to just throw up your arms. everything happens so much. ‘what do you mean by that?’ yes.
Footnotes
1: i’m choosing to buy into the collective amnesia regarding the circumstances of its big reveal. apparently the people behind the account revealed themselves in order to sell some high-concept video game. intriguing, but i am a bit hurt upon learning this. articles in the atlantic (subscription required) and polygon for additional lore:
2: i’m not returning to this point. i’m not a behavioral linguist. go read some phd student’s thesis on the topic or something they need the views.
3: i’m not that old, like abusing kids wasn’t cool when i grew up. which is good, abusing kids has never really been a good thing and a lot of times i think people just want to inflict pain on these powerless innocent souls as retribution for the pain that their poor innocent souls underwent in their own childhoods. children are unbelievably intelligent and are able to learn the ways of the world quick, and they do it without a hint of the cynicism that they learn to develop later on from this cruel and stupid world. so why smack the shit out of them? to make them out to be ruthless fuck ups in their future? to perpetuate the notion of resorting to abuse in moments of perceived powerlessness? fucking get a grip if you’re a parent.
4: look no further than l’académie française, an organization consisting of a very carefully-chosen body of like 30 authors works to preserve and provide final say on prescriptive elements of the french language. as if there aren’t 400 million people who speak it regularly.
5: one of my favorite subreddits is r/AntiAntiJokes, and while it’s embarrassing to say such a thing as ‘my favorite subreddit is…’ i bring it up because it is a community that takes the idea of deconstructive humor for a postmodern audience to its absolute limit by producing ‘jokes’ that are so coated in metatextuality or just pure nonsense that they produce a comedic effect that is often confusing. also yes fiendin for the cup of joe so that you can do work is right in the spirit of neoliberalism.
-
are we makers or breakers?
lucid, i gaze upon the workings of a world so thoroughly dissolved within its own way that all else lies expected to cower. but this ascension of conscious is dishonest; there is no coming to terms with the corrupted fabrics that intertwine these impossible convolutions that suspend us. does the fly understand the web to which it is stuck? to which its fate has become subsumed? there is infinitely that which lingers beyond our grasp, our greatest failing comes from mistaken notions of control. yet in some ways is this inevitable? the ego erects steep walls to protect itself from harm, it convinces us that no, this is a story in which we are the protagonists. this empowers our existence with suggestions of glory and grandeur, while simultaneously infusing a dangerous arrogance that suggests we may have some input into fictitious grasps at grand design. to tread this balance is fundamentally human, but never before has it accumulated so much control. the natural universe is not reconciliatory, it does not negotiate, it does not compromise. when we forcibly implement the wills of our synthetic narratives, we cannot coerce cooperation. built ever higher, the walls of our ego cannot contend with the ever-rising tides of consequence, and an inevitable flood will be the only force that can extinguish the uniquely reckless flame wrought by our rampant exceptionalism.
The Ant and The Paperclip 