Zelda breath of the wild death stranding cigarettes ecological dysphoria

I can't think straight enough to say anything about the world right now so I'll talk about video games. 

Video games have always fascinated me, like from a distance because when I was growing up we could never afford a recent console (don't worry I'm not going to use gaming to demonstrate closed access to leisure-as-commodity, though obviously that's a thing). When I was a kid we picked up a decrepit sega system from the late eighties at a garage sale and that was me for the summer, addled by an increasingly violent world (post 9/11) and the then inarticulable suspicion that I was a raging homo. It was the system that had in-built game Alex The Kid, which anyone familiar with the console and that particular era of gaming will tell you brings back fond memories; which in reality is a retroactive sugaring of what were probably reasonably dissociative childhoods with high instances of trauma (lol). 

But whatever the reasons people throw themselves into games, and at whatever age, I find myself immersing in Legend of Zelda; Breath of the Wild like I haven't since I was a kid, whether on our ancient sega system or on a neighbour's or cousin's more up-to-date unit. This probably has something to do with the fact that we are in lockdown yet again, a combination of excess time on my hands coupled with the lure of escapism against a backdrop of societal collapse (which of course is the founding gesture of this blog). There's no way of knowing if I would be as readily embracing this Zelda game without a pandemic, without a lockdown. But that remains beside the point, the point being I am so enamoured of this game that spending time with it, pouring over it's narrative devices, it's eerie and desolately beautiful landscapes, meandering between it's loftier quests in details so infinitesimal you'd swear they sprouted from their own immaterial ecologies; the point is, this game has the sublime feeling of bonafide literature, the transcendent aura of high fantasy which works as both political and spiritual allegory, and then goes further than metaphor in being a numinous property all it's own.

Literally another world.

Again, my haphazard experience with games means my opinion falls short of what I imagine is the male-ish purview of more 'committed' gamers. That said, my respect and druggish thirst for pop artefacts won't let me ignore gaming. I mean,  it's a billion dollar industry and still only of marginal interest to cultural studies. I feel like the internet happened, so arbitrary demarcations of high and low culture are exactly that; arbitrary. So why the nearly total lack of critical attention to gaming?

I used to have this absent notion of video games as indoctrinating media that was persuading a generation in it's youth to think and feel reality in certain ways. Of course mass media does this to a certain extent anyway, or attempts to; but for some reason I had this bias around video games, that they were particularly insidious examples of 'immersive propaganda'. Nowadays the fractal deluge of information is so great that I wouldn't deign to pretend to know from where and in what ways I'm being manipulated into this or that mindframe. And I wouldn't peg video games with being particularly responsible for this state of affairs.

If anything, perhaps the haphazard accessibility of gaming offers alternatives to mainstream narrative-building in as much as it's audience is less managed, and in that respect retains radical potential where cinema and television (and even News) reside in agendas of mass-produced homogeneity. 

A scarier (expansive?) thought; I pertain to criticality but in all seriousness, what does that even mean? Where did my register of alleged criticality come from? How do I know that criticality itself, as a mediating looking relation, isn't another methodology of mediated knowledge-formation; of designer world-building?

Ironically this ability games have to world-build easier than any other medium is the source of both my suspicion and adoration of gaming, perhaps because the worlds of games are 'given', disguising their biases more easily than in the mediums of cinema and literature. Or so you'd think.

Could this possibly be because we are more familiar with the diagetic methods of cinema and conventional text, as opposed to being a textual feature of gaming itself? 

One of the reasons I think I love Breath of the Wild so much is because it's so gorgeously rendered, the world so layered, and yet the questing of it's protagonist is so gently imbued with what feels like organic exploratory relations that you're barely aware of the story moving around you as you follow your own whims; basically picking a point and heading out with the faith that eventually everything will tie together. What makes Breath of the Wild so special is that a lot of breathing space is allowed between player autonomy and story; and I do mean a lot. At times the map seems so vast that it's like throwing yourself into a high-resolution void. Am I meant to be here? Should I double back and find some path, some recognisable gaming feature; a side-quest, a boss level. That sort of thing.

While these features exist in Breath of the Wild they are few and far between, and also end up feeling secondary to the pleasures of wandering. 

It bears similarities to another recent release, Death Stranding. 

For starters, both games are set in a dying world, or worlds that have seen a cataclysm and are subsequently inhabited by survivors. In both games players learn the history of each world's fall, and it's with this knowledge that you 'wander', always with the sense of being in a fallow aftermath. The painterly construction of both games is in this respect Gothic with a capital G, as much as the genre of gothic storytelling spends time flashing back to tragic histories juxtaposing memory with a present laid waste (Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein etc). 

The most striking similarity here is that Death Stranding and Breath of the Wild, while bearing elements of gothic storytelling, offset an ambience of gothic despair/desolation with the possibility of reconstruction. In Death Stranding you are literally rebuilding America which has been laid waste by a legion of science-magic demons, connecting fortress cities by putting an old communications system back online. This is done by physically visiting regional sites and re-activating the network terminus by terminus. Between sites you wander, which comprises the majority of game-play. 

To any die-hard gamer reared on violent button-mashers such as Doom or even God Of War, this might seem boring. To anyone not habituated to the tropes of gaming this might seem esoteric, considering the shoot-em-up formula dystopian science fiction normally hews to (in film and television anyway).

And to the discerning aesthete, this gorgeously experimental and oddly high-profile provocation is the gaming equivalent of an Andrew Tarkovsky film. I'm not even kidding. 

Breath of the Wild also opens on a broken world, ravaged a century ago by a demonic entity named Ganon. And just as in Death Stranding you're tasked with visiting and bringing back online a grid of ancient technological sites, shrines and towers which belonged to the kingdom of Hyrule before it was destroyed. And between these sites which are numerous you wander, traversing vast swathes of empty lands that are riddled with interactive flora and fauna. And just as in Death Stranding, for huge stretches of the game you are entirely alone.

Though both games have other characters for the most part the biggest character is the land itself. After a while, and without the didactic trappings of games in which story oversees a players every action, gameplay becomes meditative. The minutest fluctuation in weather, a change of the wind or bolt of lightning or fresh veil of rain all becomes a phrase of the game itself, standing in for story in when moves towards narrative coherence are absent.

This has been a dormant possibility of gaming ever since 'open-world' became technically possible with last decade's rash of consoles, from the PS3 to the XBOX ONE. Nintendo missed out on a console with open-world capability so they're reasonably new to the party, but whatever the reason for the wait it was well worth it because in my opinion Breath of the Wild takes the existing formula, more conventionally explored in games like Dark Souls and Batman's Arkham Trilogy, and elevates it.

What comes through more strongly in Breath of the Wild than Death Stranding is a romantic loneliness, a sensibility of sweeping-spiritual environmentalism harking to colonial conceptions of the commons, of the wilds as mirrors of the human psyche. On top of this we have two worlds whose destructions were brought about by industrialising gone awry; in Death Stranding a subtle weapon which rent the seam between the worlds of living and dead, and in Breath of the Wild a kingdom whose guardian-machines were hacked and turned against them. Both doomsday scenarios were ushered in by measures of war, and both can only be remedied by rehabilitative wandering from post to post, a gradual rebuilding on an intimate scale as opposed to the oppressively totalising metrics of Defense. 

When 'open world' first started being thrown around to describe this new type of game I thought it sounded like a gimmick. But now I think it's nothing short of a new art form, a medium which 'game' falls short of describing in all it's possibility. If a book or film or television show makes allusions to vastness, it is gaming now which can actually approximate it. I think we've only just scratched the surface of what profound implications these open-world statements are making.

Anyway, I've gone full rabbit-hole with Breath of the Wild. Wading through a mythical place where new life pushes through the rubble of ancient ruin kind of makes me want to lay waste to this world rather than endure the long, slow, agonisingly drawn out demise. Is that the appeal of utopian/dystopian fiction? I would call my relationship with Breath of the Wild escapism is I wasn't having such an intensely emotional reaction to it. 

Maybe I need to up the ante on my cardio game. 

Identity is a bust and am I even human? Maybe there's something in post-humanism beyond silver eye-paint and art-parties where they try and pass noise off as dance music lol

Here we are in a wasteland of netflix and home cooked meals. If I see one more post about resisting capitalism by not being productive then I am going to fucking kill myself. I mean, does capitalism own productivity? And what is so fucking radical about not doing anything for twelve fucking hours, what's so fucking radical about binge watching a series or sitting on your bed staring into the wall like a piece of mould, sad and thoughtless? (Or wearing track pants until they're discoloured and masturbating until your dick or clit falls off).

Also; I do not care if you are using this time to dig deep and learn how to cook, or acquire a second language. These are things that no one should be advocating or that no one needs to know about, not your friends or family or colleagues. People are literally dying. 

What I am interested in is thinking about how life will 'carry on' on the other side of this fucking shit show, with respect to the fact that we have endured a pandemic and people have lost their lives. Anyone brazen enough to reduce this period of enforced isolation to an 'opportunity' to clean out their Tupperware drawer or spend quality time with their family is a brainless fuck-wit with the emotional intelligence of a mole-rat. 

PEOPLE HAVE DIED. END OF DISCUSSION.

What matters now and what everyone currently identifying as human should be concerning themselves with is whether or not the previous capitalist status quo, comprised of collective human misery and socioeconomic uncertainty, is something we feel like resuming after this breather. 

Important questions to ask oneself before we exit level-4 lockdown; 

Does mindless consumption make you happy?

Does having an unthinking unfeeling complicity in systems of third-world exploitation and deliberate impoverishment bring you happiness? Are you content with this being the premise of our lifestyles, and the legacy of our generation?

Are you content with the bombastic inequality within our society, in which you can enjoy relative comfort while others struggle through subtle blocks of discrimination which disable them from attaining the same levels of basic subsistence? 

I hate to bring 'discrimination' into it because it serves a bullshit identity politics which would like to think it is transcending the raced and gendered biases of history, but which uses history as it's ultimate signifier, has wrung cultural/social/cognitive capital from the late-capitalist model of immaterial currencies while masquerading as some kind of disruptive force. The truth is identity is never a disruptive force. Identity is a commodity and will NEVER have a radical influence on the way society organises itself because it is structurally identical with the commodity form. Identity is a product, whether you're gay or straight or white or non-white; it is all up for grabs in the metric of capitalist value. So even though I am firmly sided with the majority of Leftist values and crusades for re-distributive social justice, if you are someone who thinks that society can be renewed through this crusade then you are fucking deluded. 

The only radicality available to us is yet to exist, will only come into existence when we find a means of extending beyond identity, the endgame of which I cannot see but an action towards which might be in acknowledging identity itself as a technology, as something akin to the avatar and it's systemic function of mobility through an existing matrix. 

Right?

Fuck identity. Is what I'm saying. Alienating people on the basis of what they are has somehow become the Leftist argument du jour, and I refuse to participate beyond this point because the stakes are too fucking high. 

So with that behind us, is there a possibility now of a more profound and spontaneous solidarity? If this crisis has any benefit at all perhaps it's in this, levelling the usual socioeconomic demarcations towards a unity of an elite billionaire ruling class versus everyone else. I'd like to think so but I'm also aware of how deftly capitalism has proven in the manipulating of it's own crises towards an even stronger position for itself. Look at the 2008 financial crisis for example, in which governments bailed out banks with tax-payers money, despite the low-income tax-payers being the obvious victims of deregulation and the double bind of systemic debt and credit. Instead of state power disciplining the recklessness of speculative value and it's corrosive effects on production, the most vulnerable were left footing the bill so that a toxic status quo could be maintained indefinitely. The end of the world is apparently a minor obstacle when it comes to the up-keep of executive lifestyles. 

And it's those lifestyles and their ecologically devastating modes of production and consumption which have brought us to where we are, a pandemic symptomatic of an ideological manoeuvre pitted against the environment in service to capitalistic efficiency, an efficiency which tabulates human life itself as equal in value to the methods and materials of production; just another resource. And so this pause is a breath being taken by the world machine which has two options before it; either implement a more mindful model in which profits are distributed evenly, a reconfiguring of production to serve actual human welfare (including a more infinite-minded approach to environment-as-resource), or total barbarism. 

Democracy and it's free-market mascot have always been heavily flawed but within them the symbolic value of a world order, allegedly pitted against exploitation and war, has kept total global barbarism at bay (if only selectively and in fits and starts).  That symbolic order has just taken a heavy blow, and utopian thinking has all of a sudden become less of a fantasy and more of a viable solution. That is, compared to the alternatives. 

An unpopular opinion; recently my IG feed has come up with anti-Jacinda sentiments which I find hard to swallow. Firstly because she's in a coalition government and so the logistical failures of a bipartisan cabinet, not to mention an eight year neoliberal legacy which there's no way one person can rectify in a four year term, are disconcertingly being lumped on Jacinda in the manner of scape-goating. This is something I would expect of alt-right agitators such as Mike Hosking, but never of mutual friends and acquaintances who I'd assumed fairly intelligent, or intelligent enough to recognise the reluctant value of 'lesser evils'. Secondly this sentiment, which apparently includes a failure to acknowledge or meet needs of Maori, is dividing the left all over again, which during an election year bodes ill for the ballot. Certainly, if I have anything positive to say about National it's that they efficiently managed Iwi reparations for which I am grateful (even if Nga Puhi couldn't organise themselves in time to get a decent slice of the pie). However, I wouldn't have them back in a million years even if it meant more money for Iwi's, because they're operating from distinct neoliberal premises which have otherwise destroyed the middle-class and created a terrifying new world of precarious working poor. The Left cannot afford to splinter now lest in our confusion we let National back in, which will surely mean a tipping of the scales towards barbarism. 

A solution to Jacinda's allegedly sub-par approach to Maori (which admittedly includes neglecting to visit Ihumatao) is to vote double red, to give her full authority so she's not bound by anyone else's racist conservatism (Winston Peters, cough).

Ardern's competency and compassion cannot be understated. I know for a fact that she is in direct conversation with small business owners and renters, keeping herself informed on a grass-roots level which I can't imagine there's too much of a precedent for. 

If you have an issue with how she's conducted herself to date, check yourself, repeat the words 'bipartisan government', and on Election Day tick red. Otherwise shut the fuck up, because the Left cannot afford to be divided right now. 

The banks are evil, Japanese animation is lit, and nothing feels real anymore, least of all the flimsy routine I've set up for myself in isolation which frankly feels like the performance of denial, leisure in crisis etc

Defamiliarising ourselves with a way of life that is undeniably closing is the theme right now. I wondered why I was having such a grief-like response a full week before lockdown and realise now it was a visceral reaction, a piecing together with faculties outside my 'conscious' mind, of these facts; the fact of collapse, the fact that a pandemic was slowing the world down in ways which it should have back in 2008 when it became evident the current order and it's privately centralised banks, just would not do. And here we are, having had that defunct world system dragged out for a further twelve years, miseries abound, and to the detriment of the species it is not rationality or radical praxis that's bringing cogent attentions to this system's gross discrepancies, but a fucking virus. 

Was it really so difficult to isolate and contain a problem of it's scope (the insidious leverage the banks have over every world government, their usurpation of welfare and public access with gig-economies/harrowing fluidity which we're meant to read as 'freedom' etc) only under duress of a secondary crisis, one to exhume the first and create dialect alongside? Not getting overly technical, but historical dialecticism seems to have won out here but amazingly in service to the potential dismantling of it's own structural violence (FYI historical dialecticism is a mode of discourse which gives primacy to history as a narrative and justifies everything and anything in the name of a binary consistency;  meaning anything from war to genocide to a pandemic can be turned towards the benefit of the whole, as a kind of transformative collateral). Here's hoping the global reach of this crisis, it's literally-fleshy intimacy as a threat, might topple the mind-tricks otherwise used to justify resuming the status quo when the dust finally settles. Here's hoping the villain of this story (if there needs to be one) ends up being the banks, and that governments can finally out-manoeuvre the hostage situation we've been in to them since certain reformations that gave primacy to finance. 

Fuck the fucking banks.

Drinking and eating and generally consuming is like, my life now. I guess it always was but now it's really apparent how the domestic space has been coded as a fortress of 'entertainment', and I'm asking myself what implications does this intimate proximity with a rabid media complex have, what is it's value outside of a crisis, who does it serve?

Obviously industry pundits get a dollar, food production gets a boon because there are junky-caffeinated-sugary consumption habits around entertainment which have historically been sold as 'comforts', which in reality are as insidious as smoking because marketed to be habit forming etcetera. I live with someone who is a gamer, and who has recently admitted to me that when they're not being constantly inundated with media (gaming, frankly terrible music, watching a shitty movie) they feel acute anxiety. I know there's not much to do in isolation if you don't have clear 'working from home' parameters but this person's clear addiction, seeing them deny what could otherwise be a period of introspection and a re-inscribing of themselves in a shifting world order, is really starting to bum me out. 

But I also don't want to judge any person's reaction to this, or how they see fit to wile away the enforced time at home; but on the other hand I don't want to endorse infantile behaviours which might seem harmless but which mostly lead to active disempowerment. Yuck.

So yes, actively defamiliarising with everything we've taken for granted about this way of life, the petty consumption habits which we don't necessarily think about in terms of  a resource expenditure because their initial cost seems trivial, is perhaps something worth doing right now, because if anything what's happening should teach us that no cost is trivial, that every expenditure (monetary or other) accumulates and plays out in time. This lesson is inherent to this pandemic because the virus and it's spread are the ambience of industrial-consumerist processes in critical stages. They are the result of a metric that has no remainder, in which every factor of late-stage capitalism has contributed; population bursts in urban areas, global warming, the privileged accessibility of travel etcetera. The concept of waste also probably needs to go, or at least our pathological avoidance of it's trajectory; knowing that nothing is ever simply flushed down a toilet or dropped off in a desert in a lead vault, cleanly removed from the world of operations which somehow exists over and above it's own refuse. This concept should die, because it's a fiction. 

And look where it's gotten us.

More thoughts on old movies I've been rewatching in isolation;

Howl's Moving Castle is more queer than I remembered, the flamboyance of it's main character which as a teen should've been proof enough to me of a queer agenda but which at the time I couldn't see past Miyazaki's painterly sensibilities. Not that I could really call it an agenda, but it's fun to indulge this idea of a conspiracy of queerness underlying mainstream culture (especially cinema and television), which is probably just the love child of cultural post-modernism and queer theory. 

But outside the conspicuously dapper figure of Howl just how queer is the film?

If queerness can be cited as fluid otherness, as a mode always against the normative, then perhaps Howl's queerness can best be exemplified in his anti-war stance. Which is actually more of a passive anti-war stance, because it's not that he disagrees with or is preaching against the war fundamentally, only that his interests do not enclose the war and so it is of minimal importance to him. Howl's interests we are told are more vain, and that vanity is in turn pathologized. But why?

If Howl's vanity pits him against war categorically then why is he seen as 'incomplete' until love interest Sophie restores his heart (literally, if you haven't seen the film go watch it now for reference) and he can finally consummate his partial being in a heterosexual union?

Well, Sophie's got her own flaw or erroneous element seeking consummation inside the magic circle of heteronormative coupling. A witch has put a spell on her turning her into an old woman, but also she has terrible self esteem and this is repeatedly offset against Howl's own (pathological?) self-love, a self-love which the film measures as pathological by his indifference to the war and his refusal to lend his magic to the king's military. 

Sooooooo, what's the greater good here; Howl's vanity/self-love lifestyle as a sorcerer and romantic adventurer, or the consummation of self-love and self-loathing when Howl and Sophie end up together in the film's climax (during which they accidentally discover the missing prince over whom the war is being fought, effectively ending it)?

Again, the value of these modes is measured against the war and with that in mind the film seems to be saying that though Howl's Don-Juan-escapades and wizard's indulgences neutrally ally him with a pacifist stance, it's in coupling with Sophie and (only very accidentally) ending the war that the greatest good lies. 

However, Sophie's deprecating servileness is also presented as the flaw of an indulgent character, even if negatively. So it seems it's not 'vanity' per se which is pathologized, but self-interested behaviours and attributes themselves, a romantic excess of introspection leading away from an engagement with the polity and wider society (especially when the latter is in crisis). 

But then why is the effectiveness of political engagement paired so emphatically with a normative coupling? Or perhaps their coupling is not so normative in as much as both Howl and Sophie operate as inherently queer/fluid personas; Howl a shapeshifting sorcerer, Sophie an ageless victim of a witch's curse posing between old and young, maiden and crone. 

But more importantly who cares?

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa (I was in the park yesterday and this fucking cop told me I wasn't allowed to be on the grass doing my crunches, that if I was to be out of the house taking my state approved exercise then I had to keep moving; I hope he gets cancer because when we come out of isolation and I have no core to speak of and zero self esteem then whatever I do as a result will be on his head)

Feeling myself disintegrating in a not completely unpleasant way, like there's this caustic dissonance between the roving anxiety inside me (about things like financial ruin and premature death) which when I leave my house for my designated walk is incongruously offset by abundant leisure, which in any other circumstance would be a sign of national abundance. Instead it's the result of this ghostly pause on everything. There were birds in my window box the other night, who never normally venture this far from the refuge of the park come dusk. The city is that quiet. It's unnerving and gratifying all at once; gratifying to that part of myself that's too lazy to think constructively through crisis and would rather there be a conflagration to clear the slate. Harrowing to that part of myself that hopes there'll be enough time to have a nice life with an admittedly vaguer hope (if only for lack of a radical program) for equal access of the same to others. 

But that's definitely not going to happen. We will not be afforded the luxury of a singular event with bells and whistles. Instead collapse will be prolonged, agonisingly so. People will die, are dying. Meanwhile other people will play music and video games and watch movies and get high and cook their favourite comfort foods, all under duress of public health. Disaster, and leisure, deployed in amounts equal to recognised citizenship, to existing privileges; the more the merrier, the more the easier to weather an unprecedented global event such as this, the more a quarantine resembles a working holiday. For some. 

Funny how this virus has thus far, or until recently, had a character of severity only to those in certain age brackets and with pre-existing health conditions; in the circulation of these facts and to the layman (myself included) a profile has formed, definitely inaccurate, of those prone and those practically immune. But now people in their twenties are dying too, and I feel stupid for ever thinking a virus would make demographic selections on which hosts it would infect and to what degree. I keep thinking about low income families and how my mind is melting here in my relative privilege, which is basically only a privilege of not having dependents and certainly not a privilege of means. It's also a privilege of community. I've chosen to root myself in one particular area and as a natural result I'm basically surrounded by support. There's a lot of mutual leaning happening right now and it's kind of fucking great. I'm wondering how long this will even be possible though, when the dust settles and no one has jobs and there's no economy to speak of. What then? Is it counterproductive to be having these concerns now? Or is it reckless not to, to just sink into an ennui that I swear these walls are whispering me towards? 

Just kidding, I'm not hearing voices just yet. 

I don't know what everyone else's situations are during isolation but mine can barely be called isolation in as much as I am sharing a flat with seven others, boyfriend included. But then this is also giving a false face of pleasantness to the situation. It's collapse and we think the storm has started but it hasn't, and that might've sounded hysterical last week but this week it's too fucking true. I can't believe how easily disrupted, how vulnerable it turns out our world order actually is, that something complaisantly relegated to the dark ages (a virus!) could bring us to our knees practically over night. 

I have never felt so revoltingly close to history. 

Some thoughts on one of the many movies I've been rewatching of late;

Alex Proyas, the 'visionary' behind The Crow (which let's be honest must've been a fluke because everything he's done since has been characteristically stylish but not remotely ballsy enough to carry his ludicrous plots), released a film in 2009 which I think is the best apocalypse movie this side of Deep Impact (another insanely underrated end-time movie). The movie is called Knowing and stars a typically hammy Nicholas Cage as this science professor who's grappling with his purpose in life after the death of his wife. He is also now raising their hearing impaired son and having the same Shamaylan-esque crises of faith as Gibson's ex-priest character from Signs, despite being an academic and not a man of the cloth. The first half (or generously two thirds) of the film runs like a well oiled machine of suspense and intrigue, truly unpredictable and riveting enough to make you forgive it's cheesier riffs on cosmology and determinism. The ending is insane, far-fetched pure science-fiction nonsense and really after the impossible promise of the first half it could only have gone down the road of bonkers. Far from a negative though, the dizzying ambition of the film's conclusion is what makes this stand out for me. 

Spoiler alert. 

Basically the deaf-ish son pulls a letter out of a time capsule at his school, which has been buried in the ground for roughly fifty years. His astro-phsyicist (or something) father figures out that it's a cypher with the dates, coordinates and fatalities of every significant disaster (natural or otherwise) from the last twenty years. Three dates remain and Cage realises these are disasters which are yet to occur and that this cypher is an act of prophecy, which by unseen forces has made it's way into his hands so that he might prevent them from happening. The trouble is the last date is actually an extinction event, the end of all life as we know it. 

Turns out the predictions were made by a little psychic girl who could tap into some higher-dimensional communication by extraterrestrial beings who've known for a very long time that our planet had an expiration date, that a massive solar flare would wipe out all life. Though never confirmed in the film it's implied that these extraterrestrial beings are something like interplanetary guides, perhaps the race that seeded humanity in the first place;  not an overly original idea, but linking this up with exegetical notions of biblical revelation, insinuating the prophecies and angels from the bible are actually alien in origin and not celestial. That's a nice touch. 

The film ends with the children being taken to a second planet so that humanity can continue which leaves more questions than answers; why only kids allowed on planet B? (there is of course a bible passage in which we 'must be like little children to come unto The Lord'; don't ask me which). Also, if they knew earth would burn eventually, why even set up shop here? Why not start on planet B in the first place? It would certainly save an excessive waste of human life, considering they only took like two percent of the population and let everyone else die. Did the adults do something wrong? Is it another romanticism of childhood innocence, when actually we know children if anything are feral instinct-driven bastards and if such a thing as innocence exists then it is learned, acquired through rigorous moral lesson. 

Maybe we were seeded to terraform the planet with carbon, extract it as a resource where they couldn't because the earth's natural atmosphere was poisonous to them? 

Or maybe, and this is more likely, the aliens are bigoted geneticists who feel their creation has been muddied. At the film's conclusion it turns out they're only just taking kids to the new planet, but kids who've 'heard the call'. The criterion remains vague, but what with the nazi aesthetic of the beings themselves, there's a definite eugenics vibe which makes all the existentialist talk before it seem ideologically nasty. 

Some thoughts on Timothy Morton's book Hyperobjects; Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World

Ultimate reality is always experienced as wrongness and failure because human beings are restricted to partiality of perception by their finitude, or so says the stodgy book of theory I'm reading by Timothy Morton. It's called Hyperobjects and essentially it's about phenomena and their 'thingness' which are so vast in time and space that human beings can only glimpse them, and yet in their absolutism they've shaped the formation of our species and the way we grasp the world itself. They are inescapable and yet their existence is only ever smelled, sensed, gleaned as an ambience and never in their totality as an 'object' (thus the prefix Hyper). Does that make any sense? 

As it's most obvious example Morton talks about climate change being a hyper object, but only as a knock on from global warming, because apparently confusing climate and weather itself as fixed objects is a mistake; weather is something we've only assumed as fixed because it's existed in a certain patterned way for as long as humans have existed (in this specific historical strain anyway), when in reality weather is a radically contingent process, like a scale on a dragon so huge it spans our entire galaxy with it's snout at the sun and it's tail at Pluto. And we are microbes on that scale assuming the absolutism of it's features as a reality, as a whole, and suddenly the dragon shrugs and it's scales ripple and behave in ways previously unseen which obviously rocks our whole world (or worlds) and forces us to overhaul everything we've taken as ontological givens. 

Or something.

And as we already know, things like pandemics are ripples from the dragon shrugging, because industrialising our environment and pushing it to it's absolute limit has rebounded in a rapid increase of global temperatures and so an acceleration of certain negative (to us) geological potentials, or a natural entropic process of eventual renewal (one which humanity will probably not be around to see) that in our limited life-worlds can only be experienced as a conflagration, a cataclysm, a dismantling of a world that was premised on borrowed time anyway. Oh well.

It's like existing in a single petri dish, which we've made singular by globalising, and then maybe putting that dish in a microwave so that every wriggling bacterial presence is jolted with directives of virulent growth and starts vampirising the bodies around it. Oops.

Anyway as far as an anthropocene is concerned, I'd been thinking about it in exclusively dystopian terms, but that would be to think lowly and separately of humanity itself. The very word suggests an inherent separation between ourselves as a species and natural processes, when in reality no such division has ever occurred, we are still inside 'nature' (whatever that is) and the notion that we have somehow splintered off from and then attacked 'nature' is an aesthetic consideration. A false marketing rendition of our world, of our role in it. 

But then how am I to think about global warming when I also think we definitely pushed the pedal on climate shift by industrialising so aggressively? Is it maybe that our actions have always been intimately enclosed within nature's script (as the anthropocene suggests) but in choosing to consciously alienate ourselves (a dream) inside nature we deliberately blinded ourselves to this intimate reality, and thus are only coming into collective knowledge of it because industry (an aggressor) has goaded some very immediate effects? 

Why did we choose to alienate ourselves in this way? What comfort was taken and from what perceived threats? Was a short term sense of dominion really worth the apocalyptic price of admission?

I think modernism has a lot to answer for.

There's a consideration in Morton's book of the economy itself as a hyperobject, and as a sprawling diagnostic of value which is wildly speculative, acculturated, impossible to predict even with all the corruption and insider trading, then certainly the economy counts as a spatio-temporally massive 'thing' which can never be grasped in it's totality. Only sensed and gleaned, sometimes effectively and sometimes futilely. If it was anything else then a little bump or jolt (like a credit crunch, or a few months of isolation for the good of public health) wouldn't have such catastrophic results; knowing it's dimensions and directives with wholeness would not make it, or us, so vulnerable. But it is and we are. 

Yes, we are fucked now. 

But then maybe if hyper objects can only be registered as wrongness and as failure, and it's impossible to find a workable angle, grasping for coherence itself is a waste of energy. What then should our energies be directed towards? As the life-world we've built around ourselves deteriorates and reveals itself to have been a chimera all along, what becomes a worthy investment for the immediate future? 

Firstly the aesthetic category of nature ('I love being in nature, getting back to nature etc') has to be abandoned, because it means absolutely nothing. Considering humanity and nature as separate, or even humanity and nature in themselves, is nonsensical and goes against reality. Whatever we are it's not as contained local entities but as viscously interconnected aggregates with other objects around us, their particularities and their management of our behaviours by vector of relationship. Our sense of ourselves as contained beings moving through 'stuff' is incorrect; the 'stuff' around us consists of objects like ourselves, which in turn are made of smaller objects, which in turn are made of smaller objects etc (microbes made of molecules made of atoms, that kind of fractal shit). Each of those objects has needs, demands, unique modes and registers, effecting the behaviours of objects and entities around itself in an interpersonal field, an ambience of exchange by which we're aware of ourselves only in debt to awareness of others. Literal debt, because the subsistence of life is transactional, exchanges of energy and order (not in an economical sense, but as Morton puts it, in directives). We are all symbiotes in a parasitic orgy, which the further back you step starts looking like an infinite machine with an unending number of modules interlocking with sound and fury. Perhaps galaxies themselves are the microbes on even larger bodies outside our spatio-temporal grasp. 

Anyway, Beautiful Nature must be forgotten. It's an ideological weapon that makes us blind to complexity. 

Maybe beauty itself should be forgotten. On a social level it directs our gaze and desire, conditions our behaviour to strive for certain outcomes, holds our thinking and feeling to tailor-made vectors which, more often than not, serve a complaisant ruling class. It's consumerism's whole motor, and as the world is making abundantly clear consumerism has kind of reached it's limit. 

Fuck beauty. It's an affect of normative standardisation, removing freedom and criticality and substituting them with aesthetics. I'd rather identify with and behave inside the directives of this planet and it's myriad objects (wind, rain, city infrastructure, hormones, grindr, party etiquette) and let those shape me into whatever form they do so long as that form coincides with survival (and even if it doesn't), an anthropocenic sincerity rather than a guilt about how inescapably entrenched we are; the anthropocene is not an arrival point, is without beginning and end because since humanity has existed we have been in radically contingent relationship with environment. The idea is old, only the word is new. 

The spontaneous solidarity expected of the working class in Marxist tracts is nonsense because it excludes the nonhuman and thinks around matter the same way the capitalist algorithm does, which is in exclusive terms of resourcefulness towards human requirements.  

Fuck profit. Fuck beauty. Fuck anything that prescribes or imposes a mode of conduct outside the immediacy of situation, of context, of matter. 

We should work against alienating ourselves any further, embrace the smouldering ash-pile our world will become, because it's as much a product of nature as your lifestyle block in Piha or the organic biodynamic produce you spend triple the standard amount on. The difference is aesthetic, are merely preferences inside the metric of consumerism. If it's beautiful then you should probably kill it. 

Not really knowing what to say right now but writing for it's own sake, also probably hornier than I have ever been but simultaneously feeling a horror at being a human body during a pandemic (yuck!)

Drove out of the city yesterday to drop off some supplies to friends who are quarantining, and in the suburbs which are systemically alienated from the commerce and social capital of the city centre there was an eerie or ghostly sense of unreality, almost peace. Like maybe the universally-posed threat in the city had tapered off out here. But no, it was obviously a delusional impression and the threat of transmission exists wherever there are other human beings, other flesh-sacks capable of hosting microbial populations both good and bad. 

So this is the last day of Level 3 leniency before we commit to a month (more) of confinement in an attempt to halt the annoyingly rapid spread of covid19, an unholy contaminant whose disruptive presence has brought the world to a screeching halt unlike anything I can remember from history books or old-timey movies about the war. Maybe it's because this is a uniquely contemporary situation, not so much the disease but the manner in which we have responded made possible through the hyper-connectivity of the internet. I've said it so manny times in the past week but I'm grateful for our leader who is setting an example for rational, humane government in times of crisis, who had already set a pointed example to the United States about gun-law reform and what they could do about it if they were even remotely competent. But of course they're not and they're choking to death on corporate dick that can't acquiesce from a parasitical push for profit even amidst a global pandemic. 

Much like everyone else right now I am contemplating how to a)ensure housing security for myself considering my (everyone's) financial situation has become unprecedentedly precarious, and b)fortify from going completely insane while trapped inside my house with the same people for weeks on end, by which time their quirks will probably feel like personal attacks and I'll have to hide sharp objects from myself so that I come out of this without a manslaughter charge. Just kidding.

I am already sick of television. I fucking hate it. 

I keep wondering what 'the stars' are doing and then also keep guiltily realising that reliance (even casual) on daily horoscopes, specifically tabloid ones, is a partial forfeiting of what personal power I have over my own life, and right now that might not actually be much but if there is any at all I'd rather conserve it, nurture it, exert it as frequently as possible over the next few months; if only to have the (potentially illusory) feeling of engagement. But you never know; the opportunity might present itself down the line to really flex, and I'd rather be prepared than limp, flabby, made soft by a few extended weeks spent indoors (how I'm going to keep fortified at this time I have no idea; a strategy is still being formulated).  Astrology is a funny one because it's internet popularity bares resemblance with the internet itself, in how it's a vehicle for co-presence, or how just like the internet it allows for the simultaneous mental holding/imaging of two or more separate, parallel realities (my life, and the hidden influence of the constellations as an omnipotent co-present influence). Perhaps co-presence has been something that's existed for as long as any media has (even the media of storytelling itself), but nothing in existence has facilitated the absolute global co-presence of the internet, in which any one individual world (mine, yours, anyone's) will at the same time have the heft and texture of it's foundational one as dictated by an amorphous platform of consensus reality, a never ending script that seems to give populist sensibilities an instant shape and voice.

I am relieved that we will be allowed to go on solitary walks. I don't think I would be able to get through any of this without a daily bit of cardio. It's my number one coping strategy for any and all of life's bitch-slaps. And this is a bitch-slap, or what feels like an unending succession of them, one after the other without a moment's respite between. Ouch. 

I do like the vague optimism around what impact locking down for a few months will have on the environment. Apparently there's heavily reduced emissions in China right now, something about clear water in the Venice canals etc. And I guess it does make sense, with no one on the streets and no one in the air, of course the planet will be taking some kind of active pleasure in a virtual pause on industry. I mean don't quote me on this, you'd have to ask Her. 

I watched Lord of the Rings; The Fellowship of the Ring last night and tried contextualising our current situation in it's allegorically neat tableaux of good versus evil, and realised I couldn't. I then wondered how many other assumptions about the way the world works, how many other little stories we tell ourselves, will be proven flimsy inaccuracies, ideological niceties with no basis in reality. Is it sacreligious to talk about benefits to this pandemic, to this lockdown? I personally can't handle any more celebrities giving advice on how to 'pull through', and I'm certainly fucking sick of certain celebrities going live on IG, mining the situation for creative branding solutions; are you fucking kidding me? 

Also also, thirsty gays promoting sales on their onlyfans accounts via IG is one of the most dystopian things I have ever seen, if only because it feels like this gig economy's grandest punchline. 

When I started writing this blog it was as a vent for unassailable anxieties about the world's pending demise, which my imagination had a specific image of, something more akin to the spat of natural disaster movies from the nineties; but things are happening a little differently, feel much different from whatever I'd been expecting. Also the timescale of collapse seems so much slipperier than I imagined it would. I guess that even in light of things like increasingly violent foreign policies by our world powers and global-warming related cataclysms, I had thought we had more time before this way of life was unequivocally disrupted for who knows how long. I hadn't factored in the kinds of changes I would have to make as a person, had only really imagined it as a no-holds-barred Mad Max-esque free for all. But actually, here at the beginning of the end (an end?), I'm not feeling violent but contemplative, quiet, shamed even. My own complicity in the consummate effects of industry, my participation as a passive consumer; these are emotional labours that we are probably all going through right now, and which we will have to efficiently deal with before coming to a place of grace, a place of radical acceptance. Because I guess it's only in the latter that we will be able to find a way through.

But I'm as green in this situation as anyone else, I don't have informed advice to offer. I do think we need to be patient with each other though, especially in our various isolation scenarios. 

Ultimately this is a time for grief, a time for processing the specific paths taken which have brought us collectively to this particular point in history, and how we might make different decisions in the future. 

God help us.

Is this it? 2.0

I can and I can't believe what is happening. My brain is having difficulty piecing together all the facts into a coherent thread, a story I can get on board with. But then my darkest dreams and private fantasies about a 'clean slate' crisis seem to be happening, but the feeling isn't giddy joy but choking anxiety because as much as I'm loathe to admit it the status quo, despite it's traits of exploitation and quantifiable miseries and structural violence, has it's hooks in me. Even if my conscious mind has criticised and reviled it, it has still been the ground of everything. And now that ground is trembling and fragmenting and threatening to shift and upturn, again in ways I've fantasised about since I learned the very word capitalism, but still; as a bull-top might say from one of the many gay pornos I've been watching in my anxious exile from group activities, 'this is gonna hurt' (cue exaggerated moaning from an underpaid amateur bottom who is probably high as a kite on some unholy cocktail of GHB and poppers). 

 The people around me feel like echoes of themselves because the lives and dreams and plans that stilted them up or reinforced them in my mind's eye as an imaginary assumption, all of those intangible supports have gone, vacated, evacuated, emptied out into the void of non existence which feels closer than it's ever been. In my lifetime anyway. I've never lived through anything like this before lol.

We're in this strange transitional time between business as usual and formal closures and lockdown of businesses and schools. In this period I'm still going to work and putting on an admittedly threadbare smile and actively dissociating while I bring people their meals and take their drink orders. Also I'm splitting right down the middle as separate, kind of mutually exclusive concerns about isolating but also about supporting small business at this time yell each other down in the street. I mean, I've been serving families, large groups of revellers who are treating these past few nights as their last hoorah before going to ground, like it's a lark or an inconvenience and not a global health crisis with a steepening gradient of fatalities. Maybe I am being melodramatic, but which mode of operation is appropriate at this time; overly cautious or devil may care? The fact that I'm seeing the latter being performed by so many adults, and the fact that the knee jerk reaction of stressed out middle-class white people is to go out for dinner and drinks after a day of working from home and getting groceries delivered, exacerbates to me the difference in experience of a global crisis between the rich/comfortable, and everyone else.  Not everyone has the security to treat covid19 as a novel chapter in society's flawed unfolding where they can stay home and catch up on highly-rated shows they've missed. If anything most people are experiencing it like you would a mental illness, because though psychology likes to pretend socioeconomic statuses have nothing to do with mental illness, it has EVERYTHING to do with mental illness; which means people with relative material security right now, who are outside the demographic of viral severity (under sixties, standard immune health etc) will be fucking fine, and are selfishly acting like it while the rest of us scramble to feel normal. If inequality was a bottomless source of disease before crisis, then I can't help but predict those wounds brought on by structural violences will only fester and worsen now. 

The morality of the thing is freaking me out too, akin to McCarthyism or similarly paranoid witch-hunts with a vaguely ethical 'community-minded' basis. We are accusing each other of misconduct, establishing a precedent of shame and guilt, which is probably not ideal considering we've barely scratched the surface of what collective isolationism will mean when and if (but most likely when) level 3 closures are announced (at the time of writing this they hadn't, lol shit's pretty real now). I'm wondering how many thoughts and feelings and compulsive-anxious activities I can recycle over the next few months, whether I'm going to develop any nervous tics, using this time to expand my skill set and be 'creative' like my IG keeps recommending, or just go full feral and deep dive into the kinds of existential malaise normally reserved for immortal beings who are inconveniently and impossibly suicidal. There are certain movies I keep thinking about, the most obvious being Steven Soderbergh's Contagion (which I'm seeing on Google Play is currently one of their most popular digital rentals) but also that graphic-novel adaptation 30 Days of Night about a small town in perpetual night as per their arctic winters that has to survive a band of vicious nomadic vampires. 

Obviously in the latter movie there's no virus spreading except for maybe the viral contagion of blood-sucking undead-ness, though in the film's climactic scene only one character is 'turned' while every other victim is dismembered and consumed (after prolonged sequences of torture, which the vamps seem to enjoy; like tenderising beef with a skillet before frying for optimum results?). However, the reasons I'm thinking about the film right now is the lockdown the town goes into as they realise somewhat incredulously (but which they are finally forced to openly acknowledge) that they have an infestation of vamps, and being super-strong and otherwise supernaturally endowed, their only chances of survival against vamps are in hiding out. Hankering down against a virulent, spectral enemy stalking the empty roads and eerily vacated sites of everyday life. Sound familiar? 

Though of course the reality of covid19 doesn't look anything like this; ghosts/demons/vampires traipsing the skeletal remains of an abandoned city-scape sniffing humans out like rabid truffle pigs. But this image in it's hyperbolic narrative heft has something of an emotional realism to me, hews closer to the picture in my head and how various media sources have suggested I frame the situation. Is it a meta-narrative? And if it isn't, what is the current over-arching narrative and what consummate impressions (from friends and family, the internet etc) have synthesised to give said narrative (if it exists yet) it's particular flavour? 

Do you remember 9/11? I barely do because I was ten years old and had recently discovered masturbation, so that was taking up a lot of head space with little left over for a consideration of geopolitics. But I do remember picking up on this sense of the world having changed in the course of a few hours, the strain on the faces of the adults around me as their world-picture was called into intense and rapid overhaul re America's  reactionary call to arms, and that country's failure to acknowledge it's own invasive foreign policies which may or may not have directly caused the attack. The world had become a different place in a very short space of time, even if only symbolically as yet (especially for people as removed from the world-stage as New Zealanders, though we are now less naive about our actual place in the global order; there is no such thing as being outside the totalising metrics of this world, really, which becomes even more true under duress of crisis). 

I remember as a child reading this in my childish way and experiencing a burst of euphoria, the same feeling I would get when there was an unexpected day off, like a teachers only day or faculty deciding school would break for the year a day or two earlier than expected, because just fuck it! It was the pleasure of disruption, of the status quo being shirked in favour of something more carnivalesque. The feeling was contagious and suddenly my friends and I were chanting '9/11!' And swinging each other round like it was a game, until my teacher growled us and said we were too young to register the situation's gravity but people had died and our response was insensitive. 

Which it was.

But I feel the same weird joy-cum-horror right now, only this time it's struggling with the more adult realisations that disruption is never materially simple, that processes of liberation along the way induce suffering and demand collateral, and who is to say what (and who) is and isn't collateral? What will be cast into the flames of this conflagration and what will we conserve? Do we even have as much power as that to make some of those calls ourselves, or are we completely powerless to make significant shifts and resistances over the next few months? 

I don't know. Uncertainty is my bread and butter right now.