...I don't know how to end that sentence should be the title of this whole fucking project.
I'm not even mad about it.
That's basically what I wanted to say the other day when I sat down to write in a nutshell: the reason so many of these posts are written in a Minor Key – regardless of the very many whys – is that I don't know how the song ends. It's like the outro theme to Lambchop – This is the song that never ends. It just goes on and on, my friends. Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was, and they'll continue singing it forever just because this is the song that never ends. I keep seeing this one Bluesy refrain playing throughout history.
And I'm not going to blow smoke up your ass. Even if it would be profitable for me.
I talk a lot about my reasons for writing. What I want, what I don't want— That's a symptom of what I'm about to talk about right now.
This thing I do – these Creative Illnesses I get— I obsess on an idea, rolling it around in my mind until I come to something more than Cognitive Closure with it. What do I mean by that? Cognitive Closure is something like the human impulse to pick up a rock, examine it, then put it back down when we're convinced we know enough about it to satisfy our curiosity. A creative illness is something like never putting the rock down until you understand everything there possibly is to know about it – something like that.
I rarely if never put a thought on a shelf and leave it alone. That is to say that I rarely “close” any thought, never come to Cognitive Closure with a topic. What I do is work it around in my mind until I know what I want to say about it, then I share it with the world looking for feedback – then I spend the rest of my life evaluating that feedback – and the idea itself, of course.
Except I didn't really bring the metaphor to closure. What I do is I kind of put them on a table or some other available surface – or an out-of-the-way spot in the floor, whatever, someplace in my periphery or in the path of my routines through my life - someplace where I can see them even if I'm not handling them – for the rest of my life. Sometimes I'll pick them back up and tinker with them as new information becomes relevant.
Really, for me it's like one of those intractable video games I would invariably play.
I loved RPGs. Especially JRPGs. But when I was a kid, I would never finish them because there was always some puzzle or some boss I could get past. That's just the nature of those things. So what I'm describing with thoughts and ideas and beliefs I've developed over the years is kind of like picking up an old video game or an old puzzle or an old unfinished or maybe unopened boxed model and applying the skills and knowledge I've gained in the intervening years to the old problem. This is a necessary... thing I do. We should all be doing it all the time, but we aren't all equipped with the knowledge that who we are now is only a temporary and flawed thing. We all believe that we have to defend who we are now and who we have been or we will be crushed beneath the trampling hooves of stampeding time like Mufasa, our projects and our goals and our wants and desires and loves watching from on high as our destroyer takes them for himself.
That metaphor got dark and specific. Sheesh.
If you don't leave the idea up for further evaluation, you start to believe things like UFOs are Extraterrestrial Intelligences and that the world is flat and that Democracy works.
But that state – further evaluation— Everyone hates that. It looks like clutter – it looks like hoarding. It's why unscientific people will tell you they're unscientific: “Well, are tomatoes good for you, or aren't they? One day they're the best thing you can eat, the next day they give you cancer. Science doesn't know what the fuck it's talking about.”
That's me – my philosophy – my thoughts. I can write something on Monday and by Wednesday think I was the biggest idiot in the world.
But that's part of the Shamanic process, I have since learned.
There's something about writing a thought down that makes us feel committed to it, right? And culture teaches us to commit to things – that is what a society is, right? A long-term commitment to a set of beliefs and behavior patterns? We even call it the Social Contract.
That's why I struggle getting in the headspace to write about football right now. Talk about feeling like a total fraud. My feelings about football, my observations and what I think are real, vacillate from week to week – and that is 100% a me thing.
These PLogs could be titled It's A Me Thing, But ...I Don't Know How To End That Sentence.
Hm. I should explore that. I bet I could come up with a whole Jeff Foxworthy-esque line of It's A Me Thing, But... quips. Like, “This might be a Me Thing, but your hair makes you look like a stupid person.” Well, probably not that – something funny.
I'll workshop it.
My humor is not always – or maybe ever – nice. My father was a prick. And my grandfathers had very good reasons to be very angry at the world. They were both abandoned by their fathers. Maybe not my tale to tell, but told it is, now, I guess.
They'll be gone before they know this exists, in all likelihood.
I promised to not actually talk to you about this in the last post I tried to talk about this, so maybe I can give it a shot here. I said something to the effect that by my count, everything is selling you a Call to Action, and that Philosophy is written in books for a reason. And I think the two things are maybe intimately connected, but distinctly independent phenomena.
Let's tackle the Call to Action first, because I think it's going to be the most difficult and I've already wandered around with some silly ideas in this piece. Also because I think it's pretty obvious why Philosophy is written in books rather than in blogs or on Twitter – or any other social media-type platform. But we'll talk about how it hasn't always been written at all – and whether that might have been better for it – later. ...Maybe. Probably. Maybe.
Probably. I wrote it on a sticky note.
I'm also writing on a sticky note that the Academy was the ancient equivalent of a daily blog.
Maybe that's why I feel compelled to read these as well as write them.
What do I mean when I say a Call to Action?
I would like to avoid anyone else's definitions for this. Because I'm sure Joseph Campbell has one and motivational speakers have another and publishing agents have another – you feel me? So we're going to use what I mean by it so that every time I say it the definition remains the same – rather than some sort of vague, Cloud-consciousness definition which pulls from whichever of the infinite meanings is convenient to the context.
When I watch television, especially, but this is a phenomenon in all media – I notice that I am being compelled by the storytelling to do something. They want me not only to relate to the characters or to like them, they want me to act in a similar way to the characters. The reasons for that can vary.
The cynic in me wants to say that most of it is motivated to sell culture. A look, a behavior. But there is a marked difference when you start to look into, let's call it, Educational Material. That's what my mother would call it. Not so much because of its capacity to educate or the quality of the education on offer, but because of its intention to educate.
So, like, when I'm watching documentaries – and I don't just mean from the alternative crowd; I've mostly avoided watching their work – I can't help but notice that they're trying to get me excited about whatever it is they're talking about. Because if they didn't do that, I wouldn't watch. But by the end, they're trying to get me to go out and do something. Whether it's eat better or vote better or find the missing piece of evidence in the Kennedy shooting – or go to Dr. Grier's summer camp where he'll teach me how to talk to aliens – everything is trying to sell me on a Call to Action.
I don't think this is a bad thing.
In fact, I think this is a relic of storytelling as it was originally developed and an artifact of storytellers not wanting their audiences to truly understand their craft.
I have spent the last six posts trying to talk about magick. Tarot is a very low form of magick. Now I'm talking about writing, and I have to describe it as magick, as spellcraft – because it is. But even with another honest week's practice at the subject, I feel no more competent to say what I know and what I mean than I did this morning. We'll get through this.
Storytellers are magicians. As such, we're somewhere in the center portion of a Venn Diagram that includes hucksters, prophets, narcissists, savants, and assholes – if you understand assholes to encompass both the lazy and, you know, assholes. Because most writers are assholes who want to make money for the stories in their imaginations – and fuckin good for em. My life would be so much simpler if I were that kind of asshole. Instead I'm just a self-important prick with cripplingly low self-esteem.
I talked about what it would be like to be a storyteller post-collapse, but I didn't really talk about how I convinced myself there would be no collapse – or... how I reconciled the need for storytellers and my ability to improvise with the inevitability of the collapse, is maybe a better way to put it.
I studied the past.
Actually, I'd gotten over my anxiety long before I met Rob – part of why I thought he was a crazy person and nearly forgot about him was because I had moved from The End is Nigh to Scientific Skepticism is Life by the time he sat across from me in the Waffle House. But I'm nearly always studying something about the past.
There was a time that the only thing separating an entire class of people from starvation and death was their ability to tell stories from the past.
Priests aren't called clerics in the West for no reason. But that's not the tradition I mean. I mean the pre-writing world, when the only thing anyone knew of the gods – and by extension everything else – is what storytellers and shamans told them.
Every religion was founded by a storyteller and a shaman. Not always in the form of one person, and not limited to two of them. Joseph Smith was one hell of a storyteller. Maybe not one hell of a scripture writer (I don't know, I haven't read his book) or a Science Fiction writer, but one hell of a storyteller.
At their cores, people who learn to tell stories know what they're doing. And if they're naturally deceptive – whether of themselves or others – they will use that storytelling talent to deceive. This is obvious. We use the skills we have. There is no sense in tearing off an arm just to say you've done it.
In fact, being honorable in a society which is not honor-based has proven me a fool – not the people who have deceived and taken advantage of me. Bully to them, I say, now. Really. I get it. The world is hard. We have to be tough to survive it.
That doesn't mean we have to be mean. Just... durable.
I saw on Twitter the other night an idiot asking whether the world needs more emotional toughness. All the responses said that emotional toughness meant callousness toward other people and that we needed more empathy instead. I think I've written about what empathy is and how we get it wrong in our culture. But that might also have been a Twitter burr I got in my ass and quickly moved on from.
I do that, too. Which is okay – that's what the platform is for. I'm just not especially good at it. I probably could be if I really put my mind to it.
But I'm still fine with one or two new followers a day. The landslide will come. I need to be prepared to produce enough content to keep the sliding land satisfied for long enough to retain enough of them to live off their alms.
I wish I were joking.
But I did that thing where I overthink an obviously shallow question. The asker didn't have deeper thoughts about the subject – isn't apparently capable of deeper thoughts. And that's okay. But I got to looking at the definition of toughness.
Toughness does not by the nature of the word mean callousness. In fact, toughness doesn't seem to actually mean roughness as in calloused skin at all. That word seems to be roughness, as I already said. Which is neat, and I like that. Because a tough dog is a dog that can withstand the elements and maybe even a fight with a bear if the two of you are hiking cross country (long enough for you to get to safety); but a rough dog is a dog who bites too hard when you want to play.
Maybe I'm just impressed with the sound of my own farts, but it seems pretty profound to me that we've conflated the two words – words which have a very traditionally masculine bent – words which are, besides sounding like one another, really not at all like one another. Sounds like is not like in this case.
You win this round, anthropology.
So, since I brought it up, should we have more emotional toughness? Or should we have more empathy?
The answer is that if we have more empathy we will already have had more emotional toughness.
We are soft, emotionally. This is something I've been thinking about with the NFL, actually – and have written about, a little. We just are. Like I said before: the squeaky wheel gets the grease. We all know it. We all do it to one degree or another – cry wolf about our pain. It works. If it didn't work, we wouldn't do it.
But because we're all so obsessed with loving ourselves and making sure that our emotional wellbeing is catered to, that's all we know. So we don't know when we're being callous to other people, when we're being unaware and unresponsive.
If we learned not to obsess over ourselves and our emotions – our pain – and to focus instead on observing and being aware of and present for the people in our proximities, everyone would get what they wanted. Individually we wouldn't hurt so bad – and when we did hurt, we'd know we have entire communities of people there to help us recover and heal in safety.
You know that's why we live in cities in the first place, right?
Fitting, maybe, that I should talk so much recently about my obsession with the coming end, then twice today think of the Beginning.
Yeah. We started living in cities because not living in cities had become too dangerous. We think of humans as apex predators – as having bested and tamed nature – as having no natural predators. But humans are animals. And we predate upon one another.
The most dangerous game isn't a... joke. It's an apt description.
Çatalhöyük https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk, among the first cities of which we are aware in the world, was recognizably houses, defensively built with their walls all together. But instead of having doors in the fronts – or even in the little courtyards they left hollow at the centers of the house-clusters – they used ladders and holes through the roofs to enter and exit the houses. And those courtyards weren't courtyards at all: they were where the people threw their trash.
But why?
Because a human with a weapon couldn't get you or your family if they couldn't get into your house.
It's very much the story of the Three Little Pigs. Or Ark: Survival Evolved. Straw then wood then stone.
There's safety and prosperity in numbers. That's my point. Empires and nations only became necessary as cities became populous and interconnected to a degree that's too complex to really look at here. Instead of having tribes of tribes of people who care for and love us, however, we have allowed our cities to become cancers – worse, to become unthinkably vast sacrificial altars, something even the mad priests of the religion of Tenochtitlan couldn't comprehend – oil presses, crushing human dreams for... what? The amusement of the ultra-rich?
I don't know. I've gone from feeling like I was giving you a hopeful message to feeling like I've swung pessimistic. Maybe it's my own awareness of the profitlessness of my hatred for those things who profit most from our suffering. But Rob and I will arm you against them, and someday we will fight. Maybe it will be long after my death. Maybe long after the deaths of your children and your grandchildren. But we will fight and we will beat them.
But maybe that's Romancing SaGa 2 speaking.
If we couldn't beat them, they wouldn't need Men In Black policing the time stream, they wouldn't need revolutionary thinkers and prophets to die young, they wouldn't need serial killers and mass shooters to keep you afraid of your cities, and they wouldn't use the isolation of your towns to keep you too stupid to know what to be afraid of.
If we couldn't win, the world wouldn't be the way it is.
It would be so very much worse. It would be how things were at the turn of the tenth century, for example.
I'll ask the question soon, but I've started to frame it in my mind, and I'm going to explore it a little bit here before I move on from this for the day. What is hope?
I'm not sure I know.
I'll look at the definition some other time.
Hope....
I thought we all understood that hope is foolish. I thought that's what the 8th Star Wars was about: how Hope is dumb. Hope is a waste. Hope is sitting on your hands when you could be balling them into a fist.
But I think I'm wrong.
I think hope might be that feeling you get when your arms are bound behind your back and you're on your knees and your neck is bent and the headsman has raised his ax – and you're innocent of your charged crimes. I think... I don't remember who she was. Peitho and Rob talked about her, I think. I think she was a Saint Catherine. I'm not going to look now, because that's not what this is about. But— There was a saint whose story went something like that.
She was fictional. The women she was based on both died – horribly.
But this one, the Saint – it's interesting to me that the title Saint isn't gendered; i.e. saint, saintess, – she was bound and kneeling and her head was about to be removed from her shoulders, and then an angel appeared and killed the man about to kill her. He freed her, and then killed every other man that tried to harm her. Or something like that. It might have been even cooler, where when the sword struck her neck, every man in the room died or something.
You know how miracles go. What you can get away with is determined by the credibility of your target audience. Or the gullibility.
But sometimes Tom Brady does pay for your dying child's medical bills and they do get to live and the only debt you will live in for the rest of your life is the gratitude you will feel that your baby gets to give you grandbabies.
So what is that? Is that not hope? Or... I mean, is that hope foolish?
Usually Damocles's sword falls. That's how life goes. But sometimes it doesn't. And is it wrong to hope that it won't? What's the opposite of that? Expectation? What is it to expect that the worst is going to happen at all times without preparing for when it doesn't?
Is that what Hope is? Is hope living like the best thing is going to happen even though the worst thing is happening? Is hope identifying as not rich yet and then living like it in the expectation that you will be someday?
Maybe hope is magick. And maybe I've said too much.
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