David Lynch, Wild at Heart, 1990
I
On an unmarked corner of a service road and residential boulevard in North Williamsburg, I’m thinking about the difference between writing and conceptualizing. Writing could be an emanation of the self, a direct transmission, iridescent communication. Conceptualizing is discerning, piecing-apart, slipping into imagined minds to notice and invent as they do. It’s devising machines that work without the sanction of authorial intent. It’s anti-artisanal.
I’ve staked my career on not being an artisan. I’m worried that if I write rather than invent, meaning will self-destruct, blessed as it would be by someone with very few natural convictions. Better not to speak from a recessive point of view.
This is where I’m at when the sharp sleet comes, which makes me think that injecting some real life into the work might not be as cheap as I think, that maybe the autotheorists and autofictionalists are onto something. Just because the rain is cold and runs around my boots just so.
There's no such thing as what I’m calling writing. There’s always tedium and break, sneezes, diffractions. I don't believe anyone ever wrote automatically. There’s the self-reflexive wince, the mirror I had to polish to start working on this piece, which is in lieu of the propositional essays I might write when the spirit of invention moves me.
There’s an idea for an essay in which I defend the idea that among all qualities of written communication, only fictionality is beyond digital capture. In other words, AI can tell the truth, but it can’t tell lies. In this sense it’s different from you and I, but especially me. I’m a good liar.
II
There’s an idea for an essay that links entropy as it’s celebrated by right-wing technocrats (you know, the logic of disruption, systems-level chaos as a necessary precursor to innovation) and entropy hypothesized as the key to psychic rejuvenation. “Resetting” the brain, as psychedelic people say. Computer metaphors again. Psychedelic science and its affinities with techno-fascist thought.
An essay on how AI is speeding up the dissolution of abstract meaning in favor of the irrevocably empirical, since meaning-bearing speech acts, imagine this, need no grounding in the transcendental. Is what I’d argue. Since we inhabit the age of post-symbolism in computation and also culture. All that is solid melts into air faster than we can assign it a form. This is the world of undinge, non-objects, where meaning itself becomes an elusive fantasy. It’s not crazy to love fiction so very much these days.
So: onto defending the unreal, vindicating what could be described as escapism and magical thinking, occasioned by… just put your head up. Reality is the sum of a million lies told by an armada of -crats who knew all too well what they were doing. All strategy, all cynicism. Our attempts at according with reality have not proven successful. They were never going to. Put your head down.
The rain is very cold. I’m not there anymore. I have drawn a bridge between past and present: this is the ideal of the book, all books, including the ones I haven’t written.
Cast a line to the future like a tesseract or trompe-l'œil. Make yourself a go-between for the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story. I mean write, persist in the art.
III
I labored to the point that my identity dissolved in flows of necessity. All my stamina went with it. This is the sickness I can’t shake, since I can’t execute as anything other than a project of self-actualization. If there’s no self to actualize, nothing gets done, but I don’t know where I begin anymore. All my weapons have been extracted and stored in the battery of an impersonal intelligence. The men who see universal remote control as the road to eternal life.
All my thoughts, my feelings, this rain.
The amniotic comfort of just staring at it.
If you don’t know where you begin, you can’t go anywhere.
And so I set myself a new task: listen for God’s voice intoning my secret name, then register absolutely everything to that address. Like David Lynch. Remember that all this nothingness is the open center of a needle’s eye, and there’s a thread for it somewhere, and that thread goes to the future.
Discussion
This is a post about writing and not writing. (Anne Boyer has illuminated much about not writing.)
I started writing it on Christmas morning. Today is February 12th. I have done some scary things between then and now. I am going to keep doing scary things in the interest of ensuring I can keep writing, and to help others do so. I was going to write something else but then I discovered this bit in a drafts folder and decided to give it some air. I’m scaling a wall of self-consciousness in doing so, so this is a hail Mary — thank you for reading.
This touches on many themes I've been thinking about recently. I love this line: "The men who see universal remote control as the road to eternal life."