avahuang

[avahuang]

I’ve been wondering about the nature of endings—some staggered, some abrupt. I’ve been thinking about how the brain withdraws before the body, and the body before the heart. I am grieving your life without me before it’s even started. I picture the kind of house you’ll eventually own—spacious, bleached birch floors, white walls—and the woman you’ll end up marrying. I imagine her mostly as quiet and luminous, but maybe she’ll be earthy and loud. I know that life does not consist of possibilities sweetly branching out into infinity, that my own is already constrained by who I’ve become and the choices I’ve made, but at my age it’s easy to feel like it does: every imagined future is the moon reflected in a swimming pool, nearly close enough to touch. I’ve been thinking about how praying is just asking nicely to switch multiverses. About how in every parallel universe I think I’d be allotted at least one moment of holding your hand. About how when alone you don’t cry or rage, but rather keep your sadness deep inside yourself, far away from air and light, until it’s eventually smothered into submission. On some days the way you keep emotion stifled leaves your presence devoid of force, a mere optical illusion. On others just the heat of your body beside mine is a form of completion. Oh, to live in a world without language, where everything is tactile, amorphous, ripe with feeling like a mango ready to be plucked off the branch, where the only expression of thought between us is your hand on my thigh, your palm on the small of my back, your mouth pressed gently to my forehead. That’s a world in which we could be and stay together.

Updike: “The Old Testament God repeatedly says he wants praise, and I translate that to mean that the world wants describing.” I am trying to describe the world, and you within that world, before what I see before me now becomes irrelevant. Did you know that in legend Buddha meditated in the shadow of the mango tree? Mangos are my favorite fruit because they are the sweetest the moment right before they decay—there’s a metaphor there, but I don’t quite know what. I want to peel a mango for you, have you lick the juice off my fingers. I want to stand clean in front of you right before the world changes forever.

[avahuang]

Cy Twombly, Nimphidia

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bij Studio Oliver Gustav https://www.instagram.com/p/BrhVrUYlJax/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1au6oezbuo1ys

[avahuang]

by Patricia Thomas [ flickr ] [ instagram ] [ website ]

[avahuang]

Onzuiver: a play in one act

C: So say you are 18 years old and you meet this guy. And he’s good-looking—it doesn’t really matter, but it makes the story easier if the protagonist is good-looking. And you are too, but you’re insecure about it. And it’s your first summer in Boston, you’re interning, and he asks you out. And he takes you out for dessert on the second date, and you have sex with him, and yadayadayada. At first it’s all fine, maybe for a month or two it’s all fine. By “fine” I mean that you remain intact, critical, in fact a little bit detached. You’re along for the ride, but you haven’t been thrown into the water—you’re not immersed, you’re not drowning. And then you leave the city, and the two of you break up—rather, he breaks up with you over video call, he knows it’s not right, long-distance, whatever—and then it begins. The really interesting part. Because you feel something really remarkable, a kind of acute panic—you can’t bear to lose this guy. All of a sudden it becomes evident, the pain makes it evident, that you’re really quite attached, that you feel deep inside you somewhere between the sternum and your sixth left rib a kind of wild floundering. And you become convinced that this horrible agony can only be rectified by rectifying the external situation, i.e. the two of you must promptly get back together. You need to once again seal the envelope that has been ripped open. But he fights your efforts, and then you push back because you can’t accept the reality of a world without the person you’re now convinced you’re madly in love with, every single thing that is not him seems leached of life, totally incapable of holding your attention. I mean you read all the advice about being strong, no contact, respecting yourself and respecting your partner, really good advice, but it has no sway over you emotionally whatsoever, you’re so far from any anchor to sanity, calm, self-respect: for the very first time in your young life you are completely immersed. Completely at sea, all alone, and you know this isn’t a novel experience, people survive it, but the thing about the chemical insanity of youth is that everything feels so incredibly zoomed in and an experience like this—really being in love for the first time—swallows up your entire horizon like a giant crimson sun emitting incredible heat. Just imagine staring at a huge red sun that seems unbearably close to you—you can feel the uncomfortable warmth, you have the peeling burns on your skin—and all around people are telling you that it’s an insignificant thing, ignore it. And you wonder aren’t they flooded by the sunlight, can’t they feel that it hurts? But of course they can’t, the sun’s only there for you, and you feel isolated by this private phenomenon, you can’t really talk about it because you know there’s something shameful about the outrageousness of it, how divorced from reality you’ll sound. It’s like admitting that you think a novel with elements of magical realism is actually true, that you can live in a totally sane and functional world and then cats just come up and talk in human voices and giant suns descend and hover meters away from the ground. It’s madness. But that’s the funny truth of it—our emotional lives are madness, especially the first time we experience really significant events. Everything’s so wildly distorted and things that have very little impact on your life objectively have a massive impact internally. And because they have a massive impact internally they begin to change your real, external life in significant ways. Believing in that giant red sun actually alters how you act.

(Silence)

C: So for a long time you’re just trying to get this guy to love you. There are all these things that happen—you graduate, and you get a new job, and you move back to Boston—but these are not really things that matter to you at the time. There’s a part of you that acknowledges that they are new and profound, but the central fact of your existence, sad as it is to say, has become this guy. And remember, you’re still super isolated by this, because there is an objective world in which you are a high-functioning young woman, care about your career, care about your friends, are even-keeled and self-confident and cheerful, and it’s shameful to admit that you have a private obsession that’s totally consumed you. And the thing is that because this guy’s a little bit older than you and he’s been through the wringer already with someone else, had his heart masticated and spat out on the ground a couple of times already, and through unimpaired eyes understands that the two of you really are a bad match, he likes for your good qualities—you’re attractive, smart, fun to be around—but the phenomenon that you’re experiencing, this mad love which seems in the moment like the first real thing you’ve maybe ever felt, is totally one-sided. And he can tell something really serious and strange is going on with you, that you’re obsessed with him, and he’s bemused and a little repulsed by it. And he’s trying to be decent, but it’s confusing because you’re totally incapable of having an emotionally honest conversation with him--I mean, think about it, you can’t go to the guy you’re desperately trying to win over and say, you’re this giant red sun in my life and I think your heat is kind of frying me to death--so he can only observe from outside symptoms what’s going on, a good deal of it you’ve managed to internalize and isolate from everyone else, and you’re telling him all these totally bullshit things, trying to sound reasonable--I want to be with you, it’s okay if we keep things casual, it’s fine if we’re not a long-term match--and he really does like you some of the time, and of course it’s flattering to be the focus of such intense, seemingly irrational attention, it would make anyone feel special and powerful--so he keeps wavering between what he knows he observes in the objective external world and the pull of you--your urgency--and things continue like this for a while, time passes.

(Silence)

C: And then the really bad thing happens, which is that through sheer force of will and pure relentlessness you manage to convince him that dating you is maybe not a terrible idea and the two of you get back together. Yes, really. [looks at audience] And the thing is of course that no one explodes or dies, it’s all relatively anti-climatic after all this time, all this longing. The two of you aren’t really that compatible with each other, he was right from the beginning, in fact he’s kind of a shitty partner--hypercritical, hypocritical, jealous, emotionally unstable, just as he warned you. But because you’re so invested at this point and he kind of is too--after so much time and pain you both just want things to be stable for a while--you go on dates and have sex and message each other cute emoticons, the normal stuff, and you’re too needy and he’s too absent, and then after a couple of months you realize that you’re actually, uh, not really happy. You have what you want, this beloved person, this glowing ball of sun, and in fact most of the time it just feels kind of lackluster, kind of wrong. And of course there are really tender moments, transcendent wonderful moments, because there’s some inherent compatibility and quite a lot of attraction and he cares about you after having known you so long, it’s just the mere exposure effect, and so there are bright spots, glints of the light on the dark pond. But you begin to understand what’s actually been going on all this time, which is that you’ve actually been madly in love with a narrative layer on top of the real person, some idealized person who looks like your actual boyfriend, has the same blond hair, same crooked nose, and you’ve wedded all these fantasies to them, believed they are the answer to the mundane parts of your life, your dissatisfaction, thought they would elevate your life, save you from your uncertainty about your job and all your insecurities about yourself and your desire to find purpose, find meaning, be capable of one single independent thought separate from all the ingrained values that’ve been fed to you by your parents and society and all the capitalist institutions around you and all the mid-brow whitebread media you consume. But of course this idealized person doesn’t exist, godfuckingdamnit, you’re in love with someone who doesn’t exist and never will, and instead you’re stuck dating someone who you have all these confused feelings for because he’s become inextricably intertwined with the person in your head, you’ve been interacting with him believing that he’s this person all the time, and now turns out he isn’t, he’s just some 25-year-old who has good qualities and bad qualities like anyone else, and you see that it’s not going to work, I mean he’s not going to fall madly in love with you, and you guys could continue maintaining this thoroughly mediocre equilibrium, this relationship where neither person is miserable but both are kind of vaguely dissatisfied, but why bother? So the plot culminates in the only way it can, in a breakup, and you cry for a bit while listening to an Adele song and then you chug on with your life. And it takes a while to really be able to process and understand this experience, to articulate all of these things to yourself in a coherent way. For a long time you’re really ashamed of it, and then you realize how common it is, that in fact it’s just a kind of side effect of being that age the same way weight gain is a side effect of Lexapro: being swallowed up by your emotions and interacting with an idealized version of someone instead of trying to really understand who they actually are. So it felt in the moment Capital-S Shattering but now that you can zoom out you realize that it’s actually quite normal, and in fact some people never grow out of it. And then you’re hit with the final heartwrenching revelation, which is that now that you have sort of reprogrammed yourself into a healthy mature adult and you’re aware that you should never idealize your partners and probably never will again, you’re thoroughly insulated from that all-consuming madness, the heady temperature and magic. It was purely a production put on by your teenage hormones and that glorious feeling, which made every tiny thing seem so significant, which could alter time in ways that were beyond language, is not going to be repeated. You could date every incredibly cool person in the world (and for a period of time after the breakup you make a real go at exactly that), but you’re never going to feel the same way again because it was just an internal thing, a reflection of your emotional and mental state at the time, and you can’t replicate it. Tragic but true: adulthood cannot be undone. And so all that energy you put into the guy and into trying to win his love can’t just go into another partner, at least not right away. You consider the possibility that real adult love could be (well, more subtle hopefully) just as significant, but decide you’re probably not ready for it. And then you realize that all the care and thought and time--all that momentous effort--has to go into yourself, into the person who generated all of those feelings in the first place. You have to redirect your focus into your own life and address the emptiness and dissatisfaction that made you susceptible to this whole madness in the first place. It’s not a good revelation, it’s like looking for keys frantically all over the house and realizing two hours and one locksmith later that they were in your front left pocket--like what a waste, couldn’t I have just been a little less stupid in the first place? But all of us start out kind of dumb I guess, and all you can hope for is that every iteration of yourself is a slightly better iteration. That’s all we’re ever given.

(Silence)

[avahuang]

Frederick Hart 

[avahuang]

Needing to believe what you do is a way to God in order to not want off this earth with its peonies, irises, wild berries, spring grasses and dirty sidewalks, lush low voices and Percocet-soaked songs, floorboard squeaks at night when the dog comes down sniffing for food, sex dreams gratuitous violence and street signs. Even in motion constantly petrified by the absence of something evasive as a koan, dropping no word to describe its loss. Approximation: meaning. The best case scenario is to love someone 50 years for the privilege of watching them die while clutching your hand. Hilarious & intolerable design flaw. So far no evidence found    to disprove theory of life as extended Kafka joke, alternative to daily reality of being adrift without anchors, future shocked, playing water polo in the pool of our own boredom, ironic, overeducated, toys expensive, humanism calculated. Basking in the sun reading Berryman: friends, life is boring... Paging through memories of listening to Nelly explaining how East Coast, Down South, West Coast shake it between fevered rounds of binge-loving & binge-reading. Lolling in chair while psych points out very earnestly subjective wellbeing has nothing to do with objective wellbeing, thinking of a boy running hands through your hair strand by strand while you thought about strands of time, strands of space pinning you to life unwanted & untended to, circling labyrinthine around a truth you didn’t want to stick around to discover. Such a buzzkill--meandering through sheets perfecting intimacy as a way to obviate personhood, wanting only to be fucked strand by strand out of being.

[avahuang]

Coffee shops in SF with consistent wifi, outlets, seating

MISSION

Haus Coffee - I love Haus. It can get a little competitive on weekends and weekday evenings. Hours: 5/5 Crowdedness: 2/5 Wifi: 4/5 Appearance: 4/5

Dandelion Chocolate - Also competitive but actually surprisingly workable considering the location/popularity. Hours: 5/5 Crowdedness: 1/5 Wifi: 5/5 Appearance: 4/5

Muddy Waters - it’s kind of ugly but the wifi and outlet availability is good. The hours are truly incredible (11 PM!! 12 AM on Saturdays!!!!!) Hours: 5/5 Crowdedness: 4/5 Wifi: 3/5 Appearance: 2/5

Borderlands - Cash only. Borderlands’ biggest flaw is that it only has wifi until 5 PM but it’s otherwise great. Hours: 3/5 Crowdedness: 3/5 Wifi: 1.5/5 Appearance: 3/5

Mission Coffee - good. Like Muddy Waters, it’s less sleek/attractive and therefore easier to get space if you’re looking to go in on, say, a Saturday afternoon. Hours: 3.5/5 Crowdedness: 4/5 Wifi: I don’t remember but they do have wifi Appearance: 2/5

Tierra Mia Coffee - Killer drinks. Plenty of seating plus wifi. Hours: 3/5 Crowdedness: 5/5 Wifi: 4/5 Appearance: 4/5

Laundre - THIS IS A LAUNDROMAT AND A COFFEE SHOP. -wipes forehead-  Hours: 5/5 Crowdedness: 4/5 Wifi: 4/5 Appearance: 4/5

SOMA

Coffee Cultures - SoMa is a barren wasteland. Coffee Cultures is literally the best you can do. Hours: 3/5 Crowdedness: 3/5 Wifi: 4/5 Appearance: 3/5

Contraband (SoMa) - Actually, Contraband is okay as well. Hours: 4/5 Crowdedness: ⅗ Wifi: ⅘ Appearance: ⅘

FiDi

Capital One Cafe - Meh hours but very spacious and the wifi is fast. Hours: 3/5 Crowdedness: ⅘ Wifi: 5/5 Appearance: 2.5/5

Asha Tea - There’s one in Berkeley that’s better but I like the tea here. It’s competitive because it’s so small but you can usually just wait around for a couple minutes or sit across from someone. Hours: 3/5 Crowdedness: 1/5 Wifi: 3.5/5 (depending on the day) Appearance: 4/5  

NOB HILL

Nook - Nook is so good! It’s this cozy little wine bar that serves great food, is open until 10 every day except Sunday (when it closes at 9), and is filled with people on their laptops. Don’t start going to Nook because I want to keep it to myself. Hours: 5/5 Crowdedness: 3/5 Wifi: 5/5 (depending on the day) Appearance: 4/5  

Contraband (Larkin) - Contraband is so aggressively bland but they’re open until 8 every day except for Sunday, when they close at 6. Hours: 4/5 Crowdedness: 3/5 Wifi: 4/5 Appearance: 3/5

FILMORE

The Social Study - This place is elcectic and cool and doubles as a bar. I’m here all the time. Hours: 5/5 Crowdedness: 3/5 Wifi: 5/5 Appearance: 5/5 

Jane - competitive but if you go during weekdays (do not go weekends during brunch time, God forbid) there’s usually somewhere to sit. Hours: 3/5 Crowdedness: 1/5 Wifi: 4/5 Appearance: 5/5 

HAIGHT ASHBURY

Stanza - I don’t love Stanza because it’s dark but they’re open until 8 and have outlets/wifi. Hours: 4/5 Crowdedness: 3/5 Wifi: 4/5 Appearance: 3/5

Wooden Cafe - The wifi is eh so it’s better for reading than for working but THEY HAVE A PARROT. Hours: 3/5 Crowdedness: 4/5 Wifi: 2/5 Appearance: 4/5

Matching Half - cute place. The outlets currently don’t work :( Hours: 3/5 Crowdedness: 3/5 Wifi: 4/5 Appearance: 3.5/5

Hayes Valley

Cafe La Vie - tons of outlets, fast wifi, usually not too crowded. Hours: 3/5 Crowdedness: 3/5 Wifi: 5/5 Appearance: 3/5 

POTRERO HILL

Farley’s - Fairly crowded most of the time but there are two(?) outlets and the hours are good. Hours: 4/5 Crowdedness: 2/5 Wifi: 4/5 Appearance: 3.5/5

COWORKING SPACES

Workshop (Fidi, Spear Street) - Workshop kind of makes me feel like my soul is being tweezed out of my body but it is a good place to work. Hours: 5/5 Crowdedness: 3/5 Wifi: 5/5 Appearance: 4/5

Covo - Covo is large and has so much space! It’s a shame that it’s so dark and gloomy. Hours: 5/5 Crowdedness: 5/5 Wifi: 5/5 Appearance: 3/5 

CHAINS

Reveille (Mission Bay, Chinatown) - Reveille has great toast and the one near Chinatown has outlets.

La Boulangerie (Noe Valley, Hayes Valley, Cole Valley) - The Noe Valley location has outlets but none of the rest do.

Peets (Marina, Cole Valley) - Peets is the best large chain coffee retailer because there are always outlets/a good amount of seating and it’s less crowded than Starbucks usually is.

Starbucks (Laurel Heights) - The only 24/7 coffee shop in San Francisco, as far as I know.

Illy Cafe (Marina, FiDi) - They have great drinks and outlets/wifi is usually available.

PLACES THAT ARE NOT ACTUALLY COFFEE SHOPS BUT ARE GOOD TO WORK IN:

LinkedIn building lobby - They have a really good matcha latte!

Hotel Kabuki - Tons of space, beautiful location.

Hyatt on Embarcadero - I’m pretty sure I could just start living in the Hyatt lobby and it would take two months for someone to notice.

[avahuang]

“I AM A CONSERVATIONIST and a farmer, a wilderness advocate and an agrarian. I am in favor of the world’s wildness, not only because I like it, but also because I think it is necessary to the world’s life and to our own. For the same reason, I want to preserve the natural health and integrity of the world’s economic landscapes, which is to say that I want the world’s farmers, ranchers, and foresters to live in stable, locally adapted, resource-preserving communities, and I want them to thrive.”

Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table

[avahuang]

Lydia Davis, "New Year's Resolution"

I ask my friend Bob what his New Year’s Resolutions are and he says, with a shrug (indicating that this is obvious or not surprising ): to drink less, to lose weight… He asks me the same, but I am not ready to answer him yet. I have been studying my Zen again, in a mild way, out of desperation over the holidays, though mild desperation. A medal or a rotten tomato, it’s all the same, says the book I have been reading. After a few days of consideration, I think the most truthful answer to my friend Bob would be: My New Year’s Resolution is to learn to see myself as nothing. Is this competitive? He wants to lose some weight, I want to learn to see myself as nothing. Of course, to be competitive is not in keeping with any Buddhist philosophy. A true nothing is not competitive. But I don’t think I’m being competitive when I say it. I am feeling truly humble, at that moment. Or I think I am—in fact, can anyone be truly humble at the moment they say they want to learn to be nothing? But there is another problem, which I have been wanting to describe to Bob for a few weeks now: at last, halfway through your life, you are smart enough to see that it all amounts to nothing, even success amounts to nothing. But how does a person learn to see herself as nothing when she has already had so much trouble learning to see herself as, something in the first place? It’s so confusing. You spend the first half of your life learning that you are something after all, now you have to spend the second half learning to see yourself as nothing. You have been a negative nothing, now you want to be a positive nothing. I have begun trying, in these first days of the New Year, bur so far it’s pretty difficult. I’m pretty close to nothing all morning, but by late afternoon what is in me that is something starts throwing its weight around. This happens many days. By evening, I’m full of something and it’s often something nasty and pushy. So what I think at this point is that I’m aiming too high, that maybe nothing is too much, to begin with. Maybe for now I should just try, each day, to be a little less than I usually am.

[avahuang]

Fox and Bird

The fox was curled up in the grove when the heron found him. He looked up with heterochromatic eyes--was it just a trick of the light?--as she settled down in the grass in a flurry of wings.

“Hello, fancy seeing you again.”

“Bird. What brought you here?”

“Well, I’m heading home to my colony. But while I was enjoying the stillness of a perfect April night I had a sudden premonition that a familiar fox was tucked away below reading an extremely sad book, and was compelled to pay you a visit.”

The fox self-consciously draped a front leg over the cover of his novel. “Hypothesis: literature is real and everything else just happens to be.”

“You don’t believe that. You can’t be immersed in the beauty of the physical world and have the dew on your paws and believe that. What’s wrong?”

The fox yawned languidly and stretched his body. “I’ve been thinking about indecision. Often when I’m in conflict with my girlfriend, I entertain a thought experiment where I model that her brain works according to the laws of quantum mechanics and she’s in some sort of superposed state. So, for example, State A is that she’s thinking “I love Wesley and he’s a devoted boyfriend,” and State B is “I’m sick of Wesley’s bullshit and I’m going to go fuck another fox.” Now, it’s very difficult for me to live with not knowing whether she’s in State A or State B, so I can choose to force her into an eigenstate, i.e. make her pick a stance. But this can end up negatively impacting the situation, and I think I’ve just ended up wishing that I had just left things superposed.”

“You’re saying she fucked the other fox.”

“She did, and it was exquisitely painful. But now I’m left with a philosophical dilemma about eigenstates and I have no data to support my claims either way. It’s all just speculation.”

“You’re overthinking it. When I met my husband I was drinking at the river and we made eye contact and the only dilemma was who was going to fly over to whom. And look at us now: every day he wakes me up by dropping whatever remains from his morning meal into my beak. Compatibility is the result of commitment, not a precondition. I think you believe that you have a philosophical dilemma but you’re really just heartbroken.”

“I’m not denying that. Also, the two aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“I’d offer to let you follow me home, but you’d cause quite an inconvenient stir and I’m afraid you’d be tempted to eat the little ones. But we can walk south together for a while.”

It was an uncommonly clear night and the moon was out above them. The fox observed the heron’s elongated orange beak and s-shaped neck with an appreciative eye. He would have been tempted to attack her if she was weakened, but fortunately she was in the prime of her life and he knew his odds based on size and speed weren’t great. He had been too busy sponging in his regret to properly focus on hunting as of late. The familiar hunger pulled at him.

“Stop looking at me like that,” the heron snapped.

“I’m sorry. I’m a carnivore. You smell really good.”

“You act like you’re just a slave to your instincts. But personality isn’t primitive—we arrive at it—and you have a well-developed personality. You have moral resources.”

“I’ve read too much Spinoza. Deus sive natura, natura naturans. Oh wait—“ he paused “—I smell rabbit. Give me a moment, will you?”

There was rustling, a rapidfire chase, and the sound of jaws sinking into velvety flesh. The fox emerged from the bushes with a gleam in his eyes and small flecks of blood on his muzzle.

“Excuse you.”

The fox sighed. “There are moments when I can feel my whole existence reduced to the joy of consumption. No more worrying about who’s licking Amritha’s muzzle, no more about whether the kits will grow up okay, just warm flesh and the placid limpness of a freshly dead body.”

“So you’d rather be an unthinking animal.”

“I wouldn’t say that sentience increases happiness as compared to a pure instinctual life.”

“And yet you didn’t eat me when you pulled me from the river two years ago.”

“Yeah, well, I pitied you. You know what Spinoza says about pity?”

“It’s an expensive emotion for a predator with a relatively short lifespan?”

“Sure, we can go with that. And now I get to have a bird interrupt my solitude. That’s my reward.”

The heron shrugged. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Your solitude will be punctured sooner or later by a heartbreakingly beautiful female fox in heat next year during breeding season. You’re young and virile.”

“Another hypothesis: life is just disputing over carcasses with wolves, good-naturedly dealing with the consequences of a hierarchy that is set from the time you are a cub, and trying to write a novel even though you know you have no ear for narrative.”

“Stop it. Here, I’ll tell you some good news: I just laid my first batch of eggs. Five of them, pale blue. Their dad is incubating them right now. In approximately 14 days they’ll hatch and then I’ll have chicks that I’ll feed by regurgitating food into their mouths. And then two months later they’ll take their first flight. Because you didn’t eat me, I’ve spawned a new generation. I know that may seem arbitrary in the grand scheme of things, but the great truth of life is that the arbitrary is made miraculous by sheer improbability. I’ve been given, and therefore had the chance to give the gift of existence. I would encourage you to recognize all pain that seems specific is in fact generalized, by which I mean unoriginal, and you’re more likely have a perfectly fulfilling life by satisfying all your biological needs without taking any of them too seriously. To put it another way: in practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable. It’s only in speculative thought that we’re compelled to follow truth.”

“You have read Spinoza. Congratulations on motherhood.”

The heron winked. “I’ll try not to raise illiterate children. Good night.”

They had reached the edge of the water, which streamed by in a white rush to the sea. The fox watched as the heron spread her great dappled wings and flapped until she was just a distant dot in the sky. It was spring in Southern California, which meant the aromatic smell of sage pervaded the air and blazing yellow wildflowers dotted the dry ground. He could very faintly sense rodent life moving through tunnels underground. The sky was a predawn indigo.

He yawned again. It was late. The world was heartbreakingly beautiful in its aliveness. The world was very boring. He felt like reading another book.  

[avahuang]

Shock Velocity

I. ANESTHETIC IDEOLOGY

Because in certain pockets of the world we’ve become divorced from the idea that achievement is heavily impacted by factors outside our control, the modern secular analogy to religion is the industry that’s been created from Maslow’s idea of self-actualization as a supreme expression of human life. The anesthetization of inner turmoil has been married to outward success–not only will you feel better, but your performance will also be optimized. You have the power to live a rational life in service of others.

Much of it seems like a rehashing of the 60s’ human potential movement as a counter-cultural rebellion against mainstream psychology and organized religion. It’s not so much a religion as much as it is a psychological philosophy and framework that focuses on a particular set of values, but it’s meant to be followed obsessively and provide meaning in the same vein.

Some basic tenets: you should take responsibility for everything that happens to you. Deal with whatever crisis comes up and move on from it as cleanly as possible. You aren’t like those postmodern softies who need to obsessively control their outer environment and suppress free speech. Everything is based on merit. You square fully with the harshness of the world and you are going to triumph by making a lot of money (while working on something appropriately meaningful that addresses the human condition).

There are remarkable similarities between the principles currently in vogue and things taught by human potential-focused movements like est, Landmark Forum, neuro-linguistic programming, Tony Robbins seminars, Impact Training, Lifespring, Complete Centering, Scientology, etc. A lot of the parallels revolve around personal responsibility as freedom:

Jordan Peterson: “Every experience that you have had contains information. If you have fully processed the information in that experience, (1) its recollection will no longer produce negative emotion and (2) you have learned everything you need to know from it.”

Landmark: there’s a concept in the Landmark Forum called getting complete. To get complete means that you need to address what is “incomplete” with the other person, which is a fancy way of saying getting emotional closure. To complete, you take responsibility for what is incomplete and relinquish reside emotions, resentment, etc. and extending forgiveness the other person. If you do that, you are completely being responsible for your own life.

Scientology: to become clear is one of the major states practitioners strive to reach on their way up the Bridge to Total Freedom. The state of Clear is reached when a person becomes free of unwanted emotions or painful traumas not readily available to the conscious mind. By applying Dianetics, every single person can reach the state of Clear.

Stoicism: “When you are offended at any man’s fault, immediately turn to yourself and reflect in what matter you yourself have erred.”

Since we can no longer trust in a higher power to guide our lives and imbue it with meaning, we’ve turned to believing that the only way to control the external world is through mastery of the internal world. There’s a lashing out against the postmodernist renunciation of structure and meaning, a rampant nostalgia for the idea of meritocracy, excellence, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. The anecdote to emotional pain is inner calm and material success. It’s discipline, it’s not worrying about the things you have no control over, it’s letting go of the things that move you if they’re destructive to your life.

Believing that you are in control of all of your reactions and that controlling your reactions can radically affect the outer world is a good psychological trick on several levels: 1. It removes anguish over the “other” because everything is about you and your actions 2. It legitimately can catalyze action in people who might otherwise be paralyzed by a lack of meaning 3. It puts a focus on performance and hierarchy as a way to easily gauge success.

People are looking for an alternative to the confusion of being alive and not knowing why and what to do about it. Successfully selling a life philosophy gives you just about more influence and capital than anything else. But successful adoption of a life philosophy has little bearing on whether it’s true or not. From Simone de Beauvoir: 

  The serious man gets rid of his freedom by claiming to subordinate it to values which would be unconditioned. He imagines that the accession to these values likewise permanently confers value upon himself. Shielded with “rights,” he fulfills himself as a being who is escaping from the stress of existence. . . . [The serious man] chooses to live in an infantile world, but to the child the values are really given.  The serious man must mask the movement by which he gives them to himself, like the mythomaniac who while reading a love-letter pretends to forget that she has sent it to herself. 

We’re trying to be serious men. So much remains thematically the same between different belief systems: the hope of eternal life, a belief in (AGI-assisted) miracles, a sense of purpose and value. The problem is often not in the particularities what we believe, but how blindly we believe it: when we start thinking about a framework not as guidance for how to look for answers but rather what to answer, it devolves to ideology.  Even ideologies that claim to promote curiosity and an environment for learning can end up enabling what James Carse calls “willful ignorance”: an intentional avoidance of knowledge and ways of thinking that contradict your religion. Believers like authority. Even people on the margins of modern political thought are drawn to ideological purity. 

The problem with every ideology is that it’s ultimately reductionist: it reduces the world to one thing, and then explains the world in terms of just that one thing. It’s extremely useful because the world becomes simplified and you have something to tie yourself to emotionally, in this case internal and external performance. From the inside, a closed and consistent framework of truth looks more or less like joy.

II. HYPEROBJECTS

In Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects, he introduces the concept of objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity. The examples he gives are as global warming, styrofoam, and radioactive plutonium. I think the concept can also apply to technology that is disruptive on such a large scale as to fundamentally alter our experience of living. 

Growing up, my political beliefs were more or less shaped by neoliberalism and third wave feminism.  In recent years those frameworks seemed in many ways inadequate to diagnose and deal with what is happening around us: human beings have more or less become neurolivestock for corporations like Google, Facebook, etc--your personal information is taken from you, and you are rewarded with short-term conveniences like targeted ads but your long-term prospects are gradually reduced because you have less privacy, less freedom. We live in an operating system set up by “the accelerating triad of war, capitalism and emergent AI,” distracted by “libidinal- and reality-engineering, advertising, branding, media, the happiness industry.”

In the 1970 Albert Toffler wrote Future Shock. He defines the term as the social paralysis induced by rapid technological change. According to Charles Stross, his “working hypothesis to explain the 21st century is that the Tofflers underestimated how pervasive future shock would be. I think somewhere in the range from 15-30% of our fellow hairless primates are currently in the grip of future shock, to some degree. Symptoms include despair, anxiety, depression, disorientation, paranoia, and a desperate search for certainty in lives that are experiencing unpleasant and uninvited change. It's no surprise that anyone who can offer dogmatic absolute answers is popular, or that the paranoid style is again ascendant in American politics, or that religious certainty is more attractive to many than the nuanced complexities of scientific debate.”

I’ve been thinking lately about accelerationism, which is influenced by Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, and in its modern incarnation came from texts that Nick Land began producing in the 1980s when he was involved with Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. The CCRU argued that the institutions like government, academia and the established sciences more or less slow progress down, and to break out we need to encourage “an accelerated culture” where new ideas could flourish. In a lot of ways, the accelerationism of that period (before Land had an amphetamine-induced breakdown and started spouting alt-right ideas) connects with a belief in Silicon Valley that markets need to be fast-moving and tech must be disruptive. Accelerationism “goes against conservatism, traditional socialism, social democracy, environmentalism, protectionism, populism, nationalism, localism and all the other ideologies that have sought to moderate or reverse the already hugely disruptive, seemingly runaway pace of change in the modern world.” I don’t necessarily espouse accelerationism as desirable, but it seems in many ways a prescient diagnosis of where we’re heading.  

We are moving towards a post-industrial society: even skilled workers will lose value with the advent of robots that are sophisticated enough to provide medical procedures, sophisticated enough to program. There are technologies that are coming that will drastically alter what it means to be human: gene editing, brain computer interfaces, AGI. I don’t think anyone disputes that, but we’re all collectively unprepared to deal with it politically and philosophically. We are moving towards a world dominated by high-tech capitalism,  post-liberal humanism. For better or worse, it is moving towards us.

We need cliches to help us to adjust to a world transformed by future shock. I think individualism--being tough, being rational, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps--seems to people like a way to regain control over the present moment, which is defined by radical change and a loss of control over information. But to me it kind of feels like saying that being a good surfer is going to help you in a tsunami. A sense of agency might be pleasant in an individual life, but we live among networks that require a large number of people who participate in them to generate value but have the effect of centralizing wealth and power. We live on a dying planet, in a society that’s been transformed--and will be transformed--by hyperobjects that are difficult to predict and difficult to control.

Being on the cusp of a seminal moment is exciting in a lot of ways. Questions that seem interesting to me:

1. How do you expect a society to orient itself politically and philosophically when there is not anymore a stable baseline for what to expect in our lifetimes economically, technologically and otherwise?

2. It’s good and comforting to believe that we function autonomously and take responsibility for ourselves, but how do we reconcile that with knowing (I’m cribbing Foucault) that the individual is the product of power and that language, in the form that we interface with it in the media, is not made to believe but to be obeyed? I.e. as Chomsky says, “mass media amuses, entertains, and informs, and inculcates individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society.” Is it possible to avoid conflating the comfort of feeling like rational actors with actually pursuing independent thought? Which leads naturally into 

3. Is there any way to bridge that gap between what we know to be true and our relative inability to generalize it? As Jared Leoner describes, the hacker attitude is often approximately this: “Open up your life to the ’net, all you ordinary people. The world is about to become transparent and that transparency will be the beginning of a golden age. Sharing is good. However, encrypt your life like crazy. Use VPN, etc. Only the smartest people can make no sound in the digital forest.” What are the most effective ways to go from “I believe something to be true (i.e. privacy matters) and will live my life in accordance with it” to “I will also convince other people that this belief is true?” If you believe, which I somewhat do, that people are motivated mostly what what they find emotionally appealing and choose values using that as the primary criterion, the answer might very literally be to design and sell an ideology whose tenets consist of the things that you believe to be true. Which is, of course, a separate thing from successfully convincing people that they should care about what is actually true, separate from ideology.

III.

“The individual is no longer rooted in society as a tree in a forest, rather he is comparable to the passenger in a rapidly moving vehicle whose name may be Titanic, but also Leviathan. As long as the weather holds and the outlook is pleasant, he will scarcely notice the curtailment of his freedom. He may even be filled with optimism and with the consciousness of power produced by the sense of speed. But all this changes when the fiery volcanic islands and icebergs emerge on the horizon. Then not only will technology claim a right to dominate fields other than the procurement of comfort, but at the same time the lack of freedom will become apparent–be it in the victory of elemental forces or in the fact that individuals who have remained strong acquire the means to exercise absolute power.”

- Ernest Junger, Forest Passage

[avahuang]

thoughts on a personal mythos

In order to maintain control over your narrative, you need to be surrounded by people who support it.

It is difficult to maintain close relationships with people who consistently undermine your narrative, because interfacing with them essentially derails you from realizing your desires.

It is good to be self-aware and consistently keep track of your faults, but maintaining a good narrative takes strength of will and consistent storytelling that results in the need to pick and choose what advice you listen to.

It’s easier to objectively react to feedback and criticism from someone you like but are not close to than from someone you are very intimately connected to. Think carefully about how the people close to you give feedback, because their feedback will have disproportionate sway over your thoughts and actions.

Are their desires for you aligned with your desires for you? If yes, and they give good feedback, you can trust them to guide you in the right direction. If not, there’s a problem.

It’s good to consistently seek out new ideas and opinions and stay open-minded. However, the continued survival of the narrative depends on you being willing to change your mind about nearly everything, but remain inflexible about three opinions.

What is a narrative? A narrative is a story you construct about who you are and where you want to be. It’s a combination of your core beliefs and greatest desires. It should be summarizable in roughly three beliefs.

Much of this is self-fulfilling, because like attracts like and if you have a strong narrative people who share similar values will be drawn to it. However, there are people who will be drawn to you for aspects of yourself outside of your narrative, and they may have opinions that clash or contradict with your core beliefs about yourself. Note: two people having different opinions about the world can be and often is different from them having different opinions about each other. This is a critical distinction.

People who care about your narrative will criticize you because thoughtful criticism is a form of love, but they will also structure the criticism in a way that supports it. An example: “Acting this way is unkind” versus “you are an unkind person.” How you let people who are close to you talk to you is always reflective of your beliefs about yourself. You may fall into the trap of thinking, “I let this person treat/talk to me a certain way because I care about them.” In reality, you would actually be showing more care for them and for the people who will interact with them in the future if you took the necessary steps to correct their behavior. It is, of course, possible depending on the case that their behavior is not incorrect, but simply incompatible with you. In that case, just remove them from your life.

Refrain from giving people who undermine your narrative your time, attention or love. Protect it.

This is only relevant if your life is structured around goals that your narrative will help you accomplish.

It is very important to get your narrative right. Having the wrong narrative can lead to many problems. However, if you are surrounded by people who care about helping you accomplishing your goals, any attempt to make changes to your narrative on their part will generally be in your best interest.

[avahuang]

little whirlpool

What if the rivers don’t freeze anymore & the winters keep getting warmer & warmer & Kim Jong-Un’s stubby fingers launch a nuclear weapon & the Yellowstone volcano explodes & the Arecibo message is intercepted by unfriendly aliens & the killer drone breaks the window at night & you wake up in the morning & don’t love me anymore? No matter: as my old loves have been reincarnated in you, as I see the moon shining out from the window of your body, I recognize the universal brilliant in the particular. My life an eddy in the current, everything coming back again & yet again, the old sublated into the new.

[avahuang]

Life on the page

I. MARCH READS

I read a book of essays by a rock critic. I read three short story collections--Ben Greenfield, Otessa Moshfegh, Jhumpa Lahiri. I read a memoir on learning to write in a new language. I read a manifesto about translation. I read a manifesto about women and power. I read a book of essays about women and art. I let Noam Chomsky explain syntax to me. I revisited Philip Roth and Goodbye, Columbus. I read about future sex. I read a book that traced the paths of three marriages in Mumbai over the course of decades. I bought History of the Russian Revolution by Leon Trotsky after I watched The Death of Stalin but I haven’t finished it. I read two books by David Deutsch. I read Geek Love and Blood and Guts in High School and Fear of Flying which I think are vaguely in the same genre of messy bloody odd. I read Anais Nin’s letters with Henry Miller and then I read the portion of her unexpurgated diary that covered 1944-1947. I read about how she met her second husband in an elevator when he was 28 and she was 44 and she was still married to her first husband. She would go on to be secretly married to both at the same time for 11 years. I read Fun House by Alison Bechdel and was touched by the part where she reads Ulysses because it reminded me of the first time I read Ulysses. I read a short story by Han Kang in which a woman turns into a plant and bears fruit which her husband then plants, wondering if his wife will be reborn in them. I read Foucault on madness in the back of a car on my way home from Tahoe. I read a collection of essays by Marilynne Robinson but the way she wrote about God didn’t quite resonate. I can only understand the divine through absence: I reread Tractatus and highlighted the part when he says that God doesn’t reveal himself in the world. It makes sense to me that things are in the world have no connection with what is higher.

Language is innate within us. Chomsky’s Minimalist Program “appeals to the idea that the language ability in humans shows signs of being incorporated under an optimal design with exquisite organization.” We are born with everything we need and the rest is the process of realization. The rest is just a process of realization that the world is just words.

II. METAPHOR

An explanation for why every once in a while I try to write about what I read and it never turns out very well: good books and good ideas are always expansive and it’s hard to capture that sense of space on the page. When you write about a specific and personal feeling you are of course also writing about the universal feeling, which so many people before you have felt before. Echoes of echoes, concentric circles rippling outwards into the space of all possible actions. There’s implicit history in everything you have ever thought and felt. Broad patterns can be extrapolated from the slightest movement. The universal lies always in the particular. It’s so hard to do even justice to the smallest thing. It is impossible to be literal in any way: all of language is dead metaphor, which starts with analogies in the physical world (people chew over ideas, swallow information, gobble up books, etc) and then becomes more abstract over time. This applies not only to phrases but also to words themselves (transpire originally means to breathe through, discover means to un-cover, sarcastic means flesh-tearing). We look at the world and try to describe it the best we can and our descriptions gradually become fossilized bridges that compose the building blocks of how we speak.

IIi. NOTES

“What separates a language from a dialect is who has the army.”

The Latin noun homo (“man”)  is masculine, luna (“moon”) is feminine, Mare (“sea”) is neuter. Man, moon, sea. What a recipe.

Also Latin: agricola = farmer, nauta = seafarer.

In atmosphere, is the /s/ part of the second syllable or the third? It is not clear.

The most important thing to learn is that all categorizations leak.

Language is a system that makes infinite use of finite means.

Lisa Halliday: “Casals, who also played the piano, by the way, once told a reporter when he was in his nineties that he had played the same Bach piano piece every day for the past eight-five years. When the reporter asked whether this didn’t get boring, Casals said, No, on the contrary, each playing was a new experience, a new act of discovery.”

Camus: ‘“Because,” Cormery went on, “when I was very young, very foolish, and very much alone . . . you paid attention to me and, without seeming to, you opened for me the door to everything I love in the world.”

Li-Young Lee: “in his mother's garden, magnolia, hibiscus, azalea, peony, pear, tulip, iris;

reading in another book their names he knows, and then the names from their secret lives;

lives alchemical, nautical, genital”

IV. ATTENTION

If you read a book per day you can read 25,550 books over the course of your life. Open on my laptop right now: Language and Mind. A Dictionary of Modern Usage. selected unpublished blogposts of a mexican panda express employee. A Timeless Way of Building. I don’t think I’ll read all of these books thoroughly because I’ll get distracted midway through and my mind will wander so in the end even if I finish the entire text I won’t have properly absorbed it. But who can absorb everything? Everything that I’ve ever forgotten comes back to haunt me. Ditto with everything I’ve ever decided to not pay attention to. If you want to learn, if you want to have good relationships, you have to pay attention. Attention without object is the supreme form of prayer. I’m trying to figure out the best way to learn. I read a book on that, too: Making Learning Whole. My friend said she learns best when presented with extreme granular detail. Personally I prefer abstraction. There are entire systems of rules that we’ve all internalized without ever consciously examining them. Like how to put together a sentence. Learning new systems as an adult is difficult but not impossible. The fact that everything is interrelated makes it easier. The fact that I can speak English makes it possible for me to learn Russian. Everything building upon everything else.

Loneliness comes from being unable to communicate things that seem important. I am overwhelmed by the impossibility of articulating the truth, knowing that the truth is subject to change, just as sounds in language shift gradually over time, eroded by usage itself, so that what was once correct is no longer correct. Fallibilism seems like the only tenable philosophical position. I still want to believe that anything that can be thought can be thought clearly. I want to think things through the best I can and write my observations down. I try to ask for help when I need it: the world makes more sense when parsed by multiple people. When everything seems unbearably precarious, structurally unstable, I remind myself not to panic the same way I remind myself not to panic when my backpack gapes open and everything spills out and I get on my knees to shove it back in. The antidote is slowing way down. The antidote is, quite simply, to pay more attention.

V. OVERCOMING

What does the Hegelian term aufheben mean? Varied (and seemingly contradictory) things: to lift, to abolish, to cancel, suspend, sublate. Walter Kaufmann: “It is what you do when something has fallen to the floor. Something may be picked up in order that it will no longer be there; on the other hand, I may also pick it up to keep it."

Hegel believed in the interaction of the thesis and the antithesis. To sublate is to transform something, to overcome, and then at the same time preserve. Nothing is lost but rather incorporated into a larger whole, like the spiral of a fern opening into infinity.

Living is a process of sublation: if you allow yourself to constantly be undone by the beauty of sentences, if you do not allow the topology of life to at any point of become familiar, if you resist predictability, value both movement and stillness, you will realize that the struggle of becoming is the becoming, that concepts that seem to negate each other are interdependent, that you have already arrived; the vast and implacable universe is within you, blooming impossibly tender, the constant presence of loss coexisting with the miracle that there are people who will stay to bear witness to the ways time will ravage your body and mind. You are the synthesis of what is there and what is necessarily absent, every iteration ambered in every new iteration. You are the overcoming.

VI. UBER TRIP

_______, blue-eyed, slight pulling on socks in the morning. We’ve only held hands in the car on the way from _____ to _____ the silent explosion of happiness in my chest like the air during Holi, bright colors smeared over all my organs, irrepressible. In the middle of the act he puts my hand over his throat the warm tender length of it I can’t contain my joy, feel like-- forget simile there’s just panic wonder panic silence great swaths of sound cliff and crest speech disintegrating because the emotion is simple and today simplicity undoes me.

VII. ? There was a door.  I entered without the least bit of reluctance.  Better forward than back.

[avahuang]

i.

In early spring, he reached into the woman’s throat and pulled out a bouquet of camellias. The bud was within her and so was the bloom:

beneath the skin of the fruit lay the sugar. They stayed up late discussing how orthography was not a reliable source for pronunciation. Spoken languages

mutate over time, flowers taking on a new phyllotaxy. The man said he could not guess what lay beneath her flesh,

which seeds pressed into the soil sprang into the words that she delivered behind his ear

and into the curve of his neck like letters from a carrier pigeon. The mind of God remained alien

though he knew He loved connectedness and continuity, shapes emerging from water and mutating continuously, bright colors and little shards of sound.

She found him in the new season after losing every belonging to winter. Her house leveled by an avalanche. Her lover

ambered in ice. When everything thawed she looked for his body but there were only sprouts

wriggling through the soil into being like love poems uttered tentatively in morning air.

Her new lover told her that being afraid of loss was like screaming into a canyon and fearing the echo. An abandoned tree is just a tree. 

So she aimed to have nothing, like the bird  whose ecstatic flight outstrips any terror. She took his hand  and planted silence in her garden as an offering. 

In early spring, they were two bodies learning a common alphabet: iris and hummingbird, loam and root.

[avahuang]

green is gold

In the beginning I imagine that there were nebulae and um, planets being formed and the one who dreamed us standing in the middle of all that negative space, thinking, O I guess this is how it will be.

He dreamed us. Or She did--I don’t think there was much fussiness about pronouns in the beginning. And there were agate blue rivers and valleys and buffalo streaming through fields before we paved them over and built large apartment complexes and gas stations. Those came later. We ruined almost everything that was given to us in the beginning but that very act of destruction, which was kind of one continuous act over many centuries, one fluid stroke, or the aggregated Frankenstein of many separate actions depending on your perspective was of course also an act of creation. We were the smartest creatures on Earth and we used our collective intelligence to invent strip malls and Eggslut. We were dreamers. At least part-time. The rest we spent fucking our lives up mercilessly and being trapped in loveless marriages and reading Madame Bovary.

Sorry, I’m just trying to reconstruct it all for myself as a child of modernity. Sometimes I think about what would happen if all of civilization was destroyed and we were living in a post-apocalyptic world that somehow managed to resemble a pre-human world, all the forests somehow lush again, polar bears meandering over restored ice caps, no power lines or cell phones. Nobody to call just to hear them ask you why you called. I think I would feel an indescribable sense of awe at being plunged into the wildness of the world, the savagery of its beauty. And then I would die very quickly, or want to die. I read an article about the Piraha, a tribe in the Amazon who have almost no abstraction. No numbers, no time, no colors. Daniel Everett, a linguist who spent almost 30 years living among them, originally came as a missionary trying to convert them to Christianity. They promptly lost interest in Jesus once they realized Everett had never met him. Adults in the Piraha tribe cannot be taught to count past three, and are completely interested in coercion or outside influences or anything at all that falls outside of direct personal experience. Which is to say that they would not do very well in modern-day America. But you could drop them off in any random jungle and they would emerge two days later fully dressed, with food and a source of warmth. I’m just the opposite--everything I really find interesting requires a wifi connection or a book. I wouldn’t survive very long without those things, and I wouldn’t want to. The most interesting thing about human life is where we’re heading. I don’t mind becoming ever more specialized, removed from rhythms of biology as much as possible. If you inhabit a body you kind of need certain things to feel okay--food and movement and people to touch you and maybe children. And you can’t reason your way out of those drives so you have to make room for them. But the only things that can give meaning to any kind of existence is continued mutation, experimentation, evolution on an ever-larger scale.

So the question is: what kind of mutations are worth dreaming of? What I want to do is make things real. The act of making the imagined real must be enough on its own. The result is often unpredictable. I am trying to figure out what I need to know to build the things I want to build, or at least find people who can help me do it. I feel limited by my knowledge and my taste, which is probably more deceptive of a feeling than I think it is. It’s kind of how whenever I write anything I feel like I need to have a deeper knowledge of Greek mythology because without it I’ll never write The Autobiography of Red. Which doesn’t really make sense. I’m torn between my active life and my reflective life. My active life is execution--doing the next thing that needs to be done, making it sure that fits into the scope of my goals. My reflective life is all imagination, all nostalgia. I know that everything worth doing would make a good creation myth. I think the people I like most ask questions that have no good answers: once we’re all uploaded, are we going to make clones of our virtual selves and force them to become our slaves? I love the impossible and the uncanny. Life is fun because there’s no narrative predictability. Once in a while I get in a rut and start thinking about my life the way I would think about a novel and start wondering where’s the conflict, where’s the resolution? And then I remember that there’s only our own minds, only the struggle to impose desire upon reality and reshape matter. Oh, okay.

I think when He made us He must have hoped that we would spread life everywhere. Because life is active--life is the antidote to emptiness and we have more than enough of emptiness. The Buddhists got it right--existence is suffering. Existence is temporary. But I don’t think it has to necessarily be that way and the desire for it to not be that way moves me. I want to understand pain as much as I can because pain is what sets the upper bound in all the ways that matter. Depression, exhaustion, loss of belief, fear--I want to operate unencumbered by those things. If you are completely okay with the presence of pain, if you do not fear it, you have access to a kind of freedom most people never will.

The last thing He said before He turned away from us: You will live. But it will hurt very much.

The three most beautiful words in the world are I’m an optimist.