I realize, thinking back on my work and my words – yes, I think about my words – that I do not often write optimistically. I'm sure that no fewer than 75% of these posts, be they Robert or my PLogs, have an apparently pessimistic voicing.
In music terms, you'd say I write in a Minor Key.
And that's fair.
Thinking about that has dominated my thoughts the last few days – since I last posted anything. It's contributed to my silence. The Holiday did, too. It might have dominated them before – just in a different way. Which direction do I want to go in with this? The why – or the why? I have figured out some things about myself in that time, though.
Reading Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning on Tuesday of last week, (it's Monday as I write this) I learned of the concept of the Creative Illness. I'm not going to talk about it much in this post – probably I'm going to run way out of time and space. But I find it so funny. I've been talking around it, describing it, almost, for weeks – like the blind men with the elephant, I have tackled the problem of understanding my chronic Creative Illnesses without being able to see it as symptoms of one larger phenomena. That's a difficult sentence. Trust me – I think I nailed it down. I even wrote a PLog post about it.
And... well, actually – I mixed my metaphors, there. The blind men groped the elephant. It was Ja...cob? Who wrestled with the Angel of the Lord in the dark in the wilderness, which was the literary allusion I actually used. Yeah. Jacob. (Fuckin nailed it.)
But I digress.
Basically, people like me and my heroes, suicides, and prophets, follow a predictable path that Dr. Peterson describes in the chapter of Maps of Meaning titled Appearance of Anomaly.
He writes so much more eloquently and knowledgeably on the subject than I can yet, I feel like an idiot for not just directing you to him. I've considered asking his permission to do an almost line-by-line Commentary like scribes and philosophers used to do with philosophy when translating or incorporating it. But I'm afraid of rejection enough to not follow through – in fact, I'm afraid he won't notice me if I do ask, and that would be worse, I think: if Sensei didn't notice me. I'm trying to be funny, but it might be as cringingly apt a descriptions as devastating to me. So instead I'm going to struggle on.
Because I'm not here to be read. As much as I'm desperate to be read. I'm here to write. To record these thoughts and these feelings and this life experience for posterity. Like those others like me who did and are doing the same – whether they know it or not.
I don't have to get life right. That's what I keep telling myself. But Maybe if I tell my story well enough, people like me will find my observations and make sense of them. I should tie this sentence back to the first. That's what a good writer would do in this spot. A good writer would glimpse the greater profundity here and circle back to it. Because he would have something more to say about those things he has already addressed – and because he wants to pad this piece with concepts he's already crossed so he can pat you on the head with ideas you already well understand.
But we've talked about all this before. If not we, I – and you aren't here to see me walk in circles you've already walked before. You're here because you're hoping – like I'm hoping – that I can find my way out of the box, the paradigm, the prefabricated reality into which we were all born. Which is among the most pretentious (and to me loathesome) things I've ever written. But it's true. ...And also maybe that I can do something with it and show you the way in turn.
Some of these things I've already said have me thinking about Reincarnation and Origen's work on the Transmigration of the Soul (and how I don't know enough about his work to reference it so often) (and how that feeling of familiarity is, I'm thinking more and more, what Reincarnation is and what Plato was talking about when he said we only remember things we knew when we were still a part of The All) (and how I think I've already talked about this in enough detail that I don't think I need to link the wikipedia entries; you should know to google the things I mention that you don't already understand on your own time at this point – or that I'll come back to them eventually. I hope I've earned that kind of trust. Or that I will.) (God, I can sound so condescending.)
(Anyway. Why the hell am I whispering to you so much? Who is here to overhear and disapprove?)
Really it made me think about what I'm always thinking about: Time.
I have avoided making statements about what I actually believe. I don't remember what I was watching where I would have heard it, but a character in something I watched recently said of earning trust as a leader that one has to be careful to be sure that no one knows what you actually think about anything. It's good advice. For a ton of reasons, most of them I'm not getting into right now. If our dialogues are consumed with what You think and believe, you aren't as likely to put your guard up and ask why I'm worried with your thinking at all.
Indeed, in a dialogue, focusing on you is how I can change the way you think and have you thank me at the end. This is Confession, therapy. It's necessary as an educator and healer, but equally necessary of the huckster and con-man.
It's also why I don't go beyond describing your behavior to you in these PLogs. Or our behavior. I like to think I frame it as our behavior, but that means I fail more often than I'd like to believe. The goal is not to tell you what to think or what is right or what is wrong. I have no intention of castigating anyone – unless I need to, and I don't want to need to. The goal is to say something that you find so repellent that you tell me – so we can open an actual dialogue.
I saw writing advice to never say actually or very today, and I have a very real burr in my ass about it. But I'm keeping it to myself. Sort of.
I've been thinking a lot, lately, about hucksters and con-men. They're never really that far from my thoughts. The Rogue is my favorite character trope. And what are Rogues if not part-time hucksters and con-men?
I'm developing a new algorithmic aphorism (yes, I phrased that specifically to get those phonemes adjacent to one another) – which, if you don't know, is a thing I do: Confidence is a lie; “quiet confidence” by any name is competency; insecurity is incompetency; for solution, work backward.
It's a whole thing in itself, but I think I understand some things better, now – come, as I seem to have, out the other side of another period of Creative Illness.
Confidence is defined as: Full trust; belief in the powers, trustworthiness, or reliability of a person or thing.
A con-man – or confidence man – is a person who takes advantage of the false belief they have falsely manufactured to profit off another. We know this, instinctually. We understand it at a sort of cultural subconscious level. But we don't talk about it. If we talked about it, and we equipped our children with the ability – the skill – to identify it— What is it? What a huckster looks like and does. If we actually knew this and were good at it, none of us would participate on any level in society.
Everything – every level of society – is run by hucksters and con-men. Everything is a shell game – a house of cards. We know this on an even deeper subconscious level. It's why we don't question Democracy's validity even as we tear one another apart in the name of Autocratic Fascist corporations. It's why we don't question authority.
We know that religion is a con and that government is a sham and that Order is a facade – but if we acknowledge it, we have to answer the question: what is the alternative? And once you've looked at the alternative – the Void, and the Void has looked back at you....
There's a reason things are how things are. And who am I to tell you they should be different?
This is a me thing, but I see all invulnerable confident people as hucksters – they're selling a personal narrative that's a lie. And how many movies and TV shows and books and stories are about the self-identifying “confident” hero encountering the cowardice at their core?
More than that, how many times have you personally been let down by a person who was totally confident in themselves or their plan only to yourself have to overcome them and their insecurities?
Maybe this is entirely a me problem. Maybe only old women and I are taken advantage of in this way – that is to say repeatedly and to our very greatest chagrin. Let down in this way by those people in our proximities. But I know this isn't the case.
This world isn't cynical because cynical is the best way to live. Cynicism as a strategy for life is... unfulfilling, let's say. It should be apparent from that sentence alone, but I'm not a cynical person. Not really. At my core, in my heart, I'm the most positive person you will ever meet. But I am afraid to tell you how – because I am still recovering from the injuries I sustained the last time I shared that part of myself with another person.
Because I have different beliefs than you do.
The underlying assumptions which form the foundation on which my philosophies are built are, indeed, so different from yours and those that you are familiar with that you would kill me simply for stating them, let alone apologizing for them. And that's how you can know that I'm a shaman – and maybe touched by insanity.
That's the real reason I don't do this the right way. Sort of. I once heard someone say that true mastery of a craft is displayed in breaking the rules. So I'm playing fast and loose with the rules of prose – of rhetoric and logic and narrative structure – to show you that I can. To, in my way, show off – but also because the proof that the magick is working is in the errors.
The other is that I'm simulating a dialog, but with only one mind. Like the lecture of a madman or one hemisphere of a brain speaking only to itself – or a one-man show.
Which is really what this is – a one-man show, that is. I am constrained by my own conceits.
A fun and multi-meaning sentence, there.
Subtle.
I'm too subtle by way too far. (The serpent was the most subtil of all the beasts of the Garden.) It's a problem in my comedy if not everything else I do. It makes me seem like I think I'm smarter than what I am. When really I'm just trying not to spoil the experience for you. Which might mean I think I've already gotten there a long time before you – so I can get how I come off as a know-it-all, or like I'm holding something behind my back and sing-songing, “I know something you don't know!”
But, I mean—
But that's not fair. My only experience with other human beings is as an older brother – until I was an adult, anyway.
And now we're back where we started – because what the Hell does all that mean?
We'll explore it eventually.
There are two places I want to explore first. I want to explore what it means that so much storytelling is used to sell a Call to Action; and I want to discuss why philosophy as such is sold – ie packaged – in books rather than how I'm doing it. And I want to see if I can tangle them together into a working thread of what it means that I do things the hard way.
But I think that's a little over-ambitious for this piece. Like I always say – my ambition outstrips my skill by miles. (spoiler alert: I don't come close)
If I lay out the ending, I'm not only getting ahead of myself vis-a-vis my own writing, but I'm also predicting the entire thesis of what I'm doing here.
Okay— So, I'm not smart, obsessed, or savant enough to prove this – but it seems to me that if I judge Storytelling as such from a Materialist worldview, I find myself thinking about Don Draper and how he would prepare for how his clients would think. And they would want to know what storytelling could do for them.
Because that's what we all do. We've discussed it.
But rather than moralizing – or appearing to moralize – about how we all make value judgments informed first by our prejudices of the preferences of the Elite, I have a different idea: a story, what else.
When I was about 25, probably exactly 25, as things usually work out in my life, I operated a Break Press. This detail only matters in this context: I became obsessed for a short while in that time of my life with being able to sustain myself in the event of a complete systemic collapse. That, too, isn't important outside of two details: one, I had to convince myself that the World isn't actually on the brink of collapse (there are too many people too motivated to keep it going for things to just end) and I would not actually need this skill; and second that this was where my resolve to have gas station experience came from.
But it was an important period of my life. I am aware of many such moments that are describable to me now only in terms of a Creative Illness. This one is no more or less important or significant than many of them. But it is the cocoon out of which Rob emerged as a real person and not just a best-selling idea I was too unskilled to fully realize.
I was obsessed with a question. I'll have to write about what that's like someday, because it sounds unhealthy – and maybe it is. But not now.
How would a person whose skills were in storytelling and history survive in a post-Collapse world?
If you can't hunt, can't fight, can't work, how do you provide value in that world? The answer to many of you is probably simple: you teach. You find a family to tutor or something. And, sure, that's probably the solution, and I arrived there originally and settled there at last. But it's not that simple.
I don't think so, anyway.
Plotting that future world requires a working model of the present. Which— ...Is a statement more loaded than it seems. There are entire philosophical systems – that is default inherited presumptions about how to view worldviews – predicated on the assumption that because we cannot know everything about any one atom at any point in time-space we can't know anything about everything.
That's so daunting for a person of my predilections.
And then to listen to Rob confronting a goddess of Creation about how knowledge of everything actually is necessary to make any choice well.... I don't know how to end that sentence. ...Is deflating? No, not really. It gives me hope, knowing that Rob struggles with the same things that I do – and that maybe helping him learn how to get around the roadblocks in my life will literally improve Reality as it is.
But that is getting so far ahead of myself everything else I've already written feels like a waste of time.
I know something you don't know, after all.
It's equally true to say that true meaning and understanding are impossible to quantify because any one word can have infinite meanings.
I was trying to remember yesterday the equation (or algorithm or whatever it is) for figuring out how many possible combinations there are in a potential sequence. Specifically, I was trying to figure out how many times Carrie Underwood had to record that goddamned Sunday Night Football song, because she says the names of the teams playing. So, two at a time, how many times did she actually have to record every potential matchup for every team?
Now I'm thinking about that equation again. So I'm going to find the answer. nCr = n! Where n is the total number of items, and r is the total number of items being chosen at a time. And n! is the factorial (where you multiply the number by itself and the sequences of numbers descending from it to 1; so, like 5! is 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1). The answer to my Carrie Underwood problem seems to be something like 32C2 = 32!
That doesn't really matter. Stick with me for a moment, because I'm not actually going to be using numbers. I just need the idea of how the equation works fresh in both our minds for this analogy to work at all.
(And I've been thinking about this equation, so of course I already have a working model for how this works sitting in my head – not that you'd know that; knowing that is what I'm trying to illustrate)
(Always two steps ahead of where I want to be – then I have to work three steps back to get to you, all the while you're getting frustrated that I'm not talking about the thing I've hooked you to be interested in. But that's where I'm getting – that, why that is, and what I'm doing about it.)
If any one word can have an infinitude of meanings – and it can; everything means something unique to every single individual intelligence. A dog thinks the word pizza means something entirely different from what it means for me and what it means for you. Words are visual and auditory representations of ideas in our minds. But we've talked about this or something like it when we've talked about Plato's Cave. Another example is color – every eye perceives color uniquely.
If any word can have an infinitude of meanings, you can write that sentence something like 1C∞ = ∞! - right? Where really what we're talking about is a level of complexity greater than infinity to the power of infinity – right? Infinity times infinity is a smaller number than infinity * (infinity – 1) … (infinity – (infinity+1)), you feel me? And maybe reading this series of paragraphs can impress upon you the magnitude of the ideas I'm trying to grapple with.
Maybe not. And that's okay, too. I'm not failing, I'm finding one of the ∞! ways not to say what I'm trying to say.
But I can tell you that anyone who manages to survive the coming collapse and eke out for themselves any kind of security is going to fall into one of two categories: parents who know that their children should be educated about the Old Ways and parents who do not. And those parents come from a predictable dichotomy. The problem for an itinerant storyteller – in this case yours truly – is that the parents who want their children educated in the Old Ways are going to be the kinds of parents already capable of educating their children in the Old Ways, where those parents with children lacking a tutor also won't think it's necessary that their children be educated in anything besides how to survive today, right now, and tomorrow.
This all feels like a meandering tangent to me. Rather, it feels like you're going to think all of this is wandering toward nowhere, just sort of reminiscing about a thought I had once. Only recently do I understand why that is – why you think that so readily, that is. Since I've spun this circle back to the start, I may as well take advantage by repositioning again.
Talking is bullshit.
The reason you assume that I haven't thought beyond my problems past the first and most obvious solution is because we don't think about our problems before we speak them aloud. We have collectively learned as a species that the squeaky wheel does indeed get the grease, and the first person to complain is the first person not to have to work. It's kind of the primary cancer eating our Western world alive.
But you can't just believe me when I say that.
If you could hear me when I say these things, you'd hear me nervously laughing, not being a condescending prick. I sound and feel like I'm about to get smacked in the head for saying something stupid by an invisible God the Father. But that's neither here nor there.
I'm going to say it again: This is a Me Problem.
Or rather I should say that I don't know what I'm saying, yet. I only noticed this phenomenon – really, I only paid enough attention to this phenomenon to notice it – as a pattern yesterday. And now I'm actually back to where I wanted to start in time to start winding down – with plenty of loose threads left to pull on (or discourage you from returning) later.
We don't think before we speak.
That isn't true of me. But it's rude and finger-pointing to say that you don't think before you speak. Because I don't know you – and what I mean is humans as a class of living creatures, not humans as individuals. Reader, friend, I'm sure that you fret over every word that leaves your mouth like a mother duck with her ducklings. Well – I'm sure you think that.
I don't think I actually have a speech impediment – just like I'm not sure I have alopecia, but do have strange bald spots on my head and face. What I have is insecurity speaking because I do not have what I consider to be enough practice to feel adequately competent at it. But there are also moments which contributed to whatever it is that's going on with my brain when I speak.
When I was a boy, my father told me two things I want to tell you. They weren't said from a place of love. I was four years old. My father was 22. He didn't speak with love and from a place of careful instruction – he spoke from a place of cynicism and self-loathing when he said these things. But they're things that set the foundation for who I was to become as a man. And that person is a person who speaks and shares from a place of love. So trust me or don't.
The first is where I built my arrogance: There is such a thing as a stupid question: any question you could answer for yourself without asking. The second is where I learned to just keep my mouth shut: Don't speak until you know exactly what you're going to say an what it means.
I can't say I remember why he said these things. Probably I said the teacher's platitude that there's no such thing as a stupid question and he was trying to be funny. But I wonder whether I didn't have a stutter and he wasn't trying to help me overcome it – or whether I used to talk to him about what I was thinking and my thoughts would outstrip my tongue and it would get twisted and I would have to pause to recollect my thoughts. (used that phrase twice in this piece) (I double-checked I was using it correctly the first time, and now I'm feeling good about it, so I slip it in a second time. Confidence as competency, bay-bee)
I wonder if that isn't the case because that's what happens to me as an adult.
I learned to speak in short bursts – only what words I could prepare quickly and memorize accurately. Anything longer than about a clause, and I'll get nervous and words will appear in the wrong order. And don't get me started on how difficult it is for me to remember names if I'm in a quickly moving conversation. It's a practice thing, of that I'm pretty sure – unless it's not. If it's not... well, being raised gently and with care is something I should have gotten over not getting a long time ago.
And that, in the words of Walter Weatherman, is why I don't speak before I know exactly what I'm going to say.
Or why I am so insecure that when I speak you're going to know that I've given this serious thought and there should be authority behind my words.
4200 words just to say that. Jesus, I have a problem.
I'm working on it.
I promise.
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