Thoughts and feelings I had to pull out of me before they gave me blood poisoning lol

Hurtling towards death, the synthetic reconfiguring of time etc.

Our networked being flattens objects which would otherwise proffer a slowing gravity in our experience of time. Objects here includes people in as much as we’re reduced—and actively reducing each other—into thumb-nailed presences-without-presence. Bodied matter is divorced from it’s bodied-ness, stripped of presence by way of our inability to linger. Distraction and convenience as primary values coalesce into rapid momentums against lingering. As Buang Chul Han says, lingering or contemplation are what give bodies and things their gravity, their presence. It is how we attribute what Badiou might name the objectal or evental—that which disrupts a continuous or smooth gaze and holds attention, mapped as momentous. Think also that Deleuzian-Guattarian trope of smooth and striated vectors of subjectivity, the specific textures of psychically traversing phenomena. The act of worlding, or creating a world picture in which the subject (that’s us) then feels confident it can move-think-act. ‘Creating’ is perhaps too active a word, when a lot of the time this process is unconscious. We are generally hardwired to rapidly block superfluous stimuli, this filtering process itself coded from formative experiences which become gradually more entrenched—and in that entrenchment, notoriously difficult to re-programme. It takes a shock, or what’s known in the Tarot story as a Tower moment—the frequently cataclysmic encountering of some truth which our perceptual biases have refused to confront, the lagging result being gratuitous energy invested in patterns and behaviours which are perhaps no longer serving us. The Tower, though painful, practically releases us from those tired citadels, enabling us to expand and evolve towards a more integrated and fulfilling modality.

Mental structures which contain us, leaving us to flounder in the confines of limited perception, are akin to prisons. The crises which ensue from those unconscious parts of ourselves sniffing out potential beyond our thankfully porous limits, have been both canonised and demonised in the most literal ways. At least their agents have. Think the demonic angels from Jacob’s Ladder, by which I mean the supernatural thriller from 1992 (94?), in which the titular Jacob experiences reality-bending encounters with scaly deities who are able to insinuate themselves into his life in human form, influencing the course of events towards a reconciliation of everything he’s been letting block him from forward motion—towards death. In the end he’s been on a hospital bed the whole time having a really bad DMT trip. The takeaway is that these beings were simply figurations of his own mind trying to resolve it’s own cognitive deadlocks with a sort of solvent-narrative. Maybe narrative and story itself is an evolutionary tool towards wider cognition, which definitely informs modern schemes of ‘authentic living’, but also primes our ability to adapt and thus survive.

There’s a scene in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia where Justine and her new husband, freshly married and being driven to their own wedding reception, cannot manoeuvre the limo around a bend in the drive up to the venue. Contrary to this above idea that all cul de sacs can be reconciled with crisis, this particular scene and the rest of the film seems to rebut this as naive optimism. According to Von Trier there are some ontological discrepancies which cannot be rectified, even with the assist of angels demons or respective Tower moments—whatever form these might take. Depressions that cannot be filled, impossible tasks and imbroglio which cannot be out-manoeuvred. Just lay down and die I guess?

I sometimes feel sick of being myself, which I think in this climate of intense self-scrutiny and promotion, is catching (and if it’s just me, meh). I sometimes feel sick of being this one thing and having to wait until I die to be something else. Is it illusion thinking that I’m one consistent thing. I know on a cellular level we are constantly dying and regenerating so that moment to moment we aren’t the same vessel, physically speaking—but that’s become a pop-science platitude sung-spoke to sooth the ennui of modernity which, so efficiently, has mostly sapped the mystery from life. If only by subjugating the fact of life and it’s comprehension—including the occluded margins of our cognitive faculties—with neoliberal directive, with convenience and distraction, with a loathing of any and all friction. You can’t post away uncertainty. You can’t fuck away anxiety—though as a palliative there are worse options generically available. But I feel Iike everything around me is telling me that I can do these things, that the friction which otherwise generates life’s meaning can be effortlessly surmounted, and worse that it should be. Maybe being opposed to friction is the same thing as being opposed to meaning, a declaration of war on the more profound coherence earned via duration amidst adversity. Not saying we should go out and seek crisis, drama, cataclysm, because it’s objectively ‘good’ for us. Just saying suffering shouldn’t be flailed at or hastily smoothed over. I like to sit in it, wait til it turns nourishing. I think that’s a vibe.