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A Shipping Container Full of Hammers in Upper Orbit

A disquieting little segment on RadioLab last year detailed the practical dangers of satellites and other objects in earth’s orbit colliding — the gist being that there’s around 20,000 objects large enough to track flying around constantly at incredible speeds, and teams of international monitors are constantly sending alerts to help avoid collisions. Day-to-day, they get the job done, but the scary thing is that there may be up to half a million other, smaller objects in orbit that are not large enough to track, and these objects can still wreak havoc (a fleck of paint colliding with a space station can crack multiple layers of windows at the speeds at which these things orbit, they say). So this all gives rise to a fear of cascading impacts denominated as the Kessler syndrome — wherein one collision causes an explosion that creates millions of tiny pieces of debris that causes ever more dangerous collisions until certain layers of orbit become practically overwhelmed with speeding debris, making it impossible to pilot a rocket out of orbit, or, for that matter, potentially take down the world’s satellite communications systems.

Which means, if you’re an enterprising writer looking for a new kind of villain for your next thriller, may I suggest the billionaire with access to rockets intent on sending a shipping container full of hammers into orbit and then opening the doors.

How fun!

Shakespeare

Shakespeare died unknown, apparently. His plays weren’t being performed. There wasn’t a publisher holding his rights. His works wouldn’t get put in print until a while after.

I do believe that once a thing is written, it exists independently of the author. It has a life in the mind of each reader who gives it attention. That attention is where the book finally lives. A precious little bit of a widely read work really belongs to the author.

Which makes the true authors of Shakespeare’s legacy the ones who came after, who gave the plays their attention, who loved them, who offered them a world to live in. They are in a real sense the true heroes of the story, because they had no horse in the race. They came for the love of the work, and until they came, the works were nothing, almost dead.

Just to make explicitly clear that this is all a cry of spurned vanity, waiting for a publisher feels like this.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

I looked at Lettie in the moonlight. “Is that how it is for you?” I asked.
“Is what how it is for me?”
“Do you still know everything, all the time?”
She shook her head. She didn’t smile. She said, “Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you’re going to muck about here.”
“So you used to know everything?”
She winkled her nose. “Everybody did. I told you. It’s nothing special, knowing how things work. And you really do have to give it all up if you want to play.”
-Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

***
There’s a version of this thought around consciousness and recursion, because of course the universe can only be infinitely varied and wonderful if it is not a simple, recursive system. But if we take Douglas Hofstadter’s thesis seriously, all consciousness derives from recursive properties — the system knows itself only when it is limited, retraces its steps. Ergo, the lovely possible mysterious universe is ultimately constrained by our sheer ability to apprehend it.

Wishful Drinking

“Losing your mind is a frightening thing – especially if you have a lot to lose – but once it’s lost, it’s fine! No big deal! There could be a light shining out of your own head. It’s sort of like glowing in your own dark.” Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

If there’s a little coherence lacking from the metaphor, I think it makes it all the more sublime here.

Coherence

“Everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office,” the president of the United States announced today. “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea …. President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer – sleep well tonight!”

Perhaps especially at his most incoherent, you can hear little bits of the man’s character crying out. The desperation to believe something so unfounded, he doesn’t even attempt a theory for it. The need for that fiction to be so unquestionable, immediate, automatic as to defy any justification. And always posing his predecessor in the role of dupe because he’s recently experienced an unfortunate attack on one of his core beliefs — that everyone but him is and has always been incompetent, and that the world’s problems fall away naturally in his omnicompetent hands, if he just does whatever comes to mind, his radically gifted mind. One of the lesser appreciated things about the Trump era is the window we’re getting into the mind of a man that is mightily trying (and mostly succeeding, by the looks of it) to transcend cognitive dissonance. A man who believes that if he is just insistent enough, the facts will come to him.

It helps that when you say something, an entire national media ecosystem will spontaneously start to craft the supporting narrative structure to justify it. If you wrestle briefly with doubt, you just have to read your favorite news source or watch your favorite show the next morning to see the pieces fall into place, see the facts and arguments now bolster you where before you were vulnerable, where you cried out the thing that you needed to be true at some stupid hour of the night, unsure.

***
Coherence has lost the war in the United States, I’m starting to think, and that makes it a very dangerous country going forward. There is, if not a consensus, at least a winning coalition across both parties that there is no mutually agreeable independent arbiter of the facts anymore. And because the mass media environment has become both increasingly consuming and pointedly unrestrained by any kind of gatekeeper, everyone can and typically does find the reality that suits them. The quality of that reality represents its own quality of life. It is not just how we interpret the world around us. It is very much becoming its own world worth fighting for.

It’s not hard to imagine the next (previously) laughable thing that can come out of that environment, nor how quickly people will habituate to it. Invade Canada, goes the old line, a trope of a trope. But how easily would we accept it with just a little spit shine on it. Canadian steel is now designated a national security threat, an assertion to which the Foreign Affairs Minister can only muster “Seriously?” (increasingly the last imaginable response between any two parties from opposing medias). Of course, Canada also shares the world’s longest unprotected border with the United States, and while an order of magnitude increase in refugees from America’s immigration reforms are flowing North, it’s not hard to imagine (if, indeed, the fact would matter at all) how an immigrant crossing a border in either direction becomes a live threat in a sense, seeing as how if these animals can escape US jurisdiction long enough to avoid capture abroad, they might easily reenter the country unobserved to carry out their mayhem — and suddenly you have pretty reasonable grounds to mandate that Canada actually police its own damn border, or the US will do it for them (just like troops are being sent to do now in Texas), and if lining up troops through the fields of North Dakota doesn’t work, it becomes existentially necessary to send US troops in to police the border cities (as they’re threatening sanctuary cities in California now) — and at every step in this process, if some logical leap beggars the rational mind, just spend five minutes trying to imagine the argument you would give for it if someone was paying you to. These guys aren’t geniuses. They’re just committed, and brave enough.

This morning, the North Korean nuclear threat was neutralized. Praise be. If I had to bet, the only thing keeping that assertion from being accepted fact for half the country is whether the president continues to want to believe it or not. If he repeats it every day until he leaves office, there will be media universes where that truth is reinforced, and the facts will come to him. Trump did not create that environment. An entire country of people creating and choosing their own information universes and disintegrating the idea of gatekeepers or independent arbiters of fact did. And whether that country happens to be trending blue or red at any given moment, that is a dangerous society for the rest of the world to reckon with.

Living in the End Times

So, full disclaimer, I don’t have a license to be practicing philosophy. But I’ve been working my way through Zizek’s “Living in the End Times,” in which he levies a lot of condemnations of liberal politics or PC culture.

There is some good framing early on in how to think about classical liberalism: “For liberalism, at least in its radical form, the wish to submit people to an ethical ideal held to be universal is ‘the crime which contains all crimes,’ the mother of all crimes — it amounts to the brutal imposition of one’s own view onto others, the cause of civil disorder. Which is why, if one wants to establish civil peace and tolerance, the first condition is to get rid of ‘moral temptation’: politics should be thoroughly purged of moral ideals and rendered ‘realistic,’ taking people as they are, counting on their true nature, not on moral exhortations.” I like this framing, casting liberalism as an essentially negative doctrine — the doctrine that all moral doctrines are injurious, which he rightly concludes is an unsustainable fiction. That is, it’s impossible to enforce this prohibition against oppressive moralizing because every time you try to supplant someone’s oppressive moralizing you’re just putting some other subjectivity in its place. There is no neutral moral framework, or, as he says later, “every universality is exclusive, it imposes a particular standard as universal.”

If there’s anything Zizek is infamous for on the left, though, it’s using this intellectual foundation to attack identity politics and PC culture in particular, levying that “liberal multiculturalism is hegemonic,” that “liberal-tolerant racism … [offers] ‘respect’ for the Other [as] the very form of the appearance of its opposite, of patronizing disrespect,” and that “the injunction is one of cultural apartheid,” and etc., among a series of arguments that in fairness to his work I ought to summarize more fully, but if I did, you’d still be hard-pressed to intellectually distinguish them from the Op-Ed page on Fox News, so let’s all save some time here.

Synthesizing some of his arguments, I think his point is that “prohibiting discrimination” as such is an essentially insupportable moral position, taking an ostensibly negative ethos and pretending that, in practice, it’s not just hiding someone’s positivist ethos inside the horse. I.e., you want to tell me not to insult the Muslims like that’s a neutral position, but it really just hides your endorsement of certain norms, while giving you a nominally value-neutral cudgel to impose them. And I get that in the abstract.

But personally, I’m inclined to understand liberalism in a categorically different way, in more of a procedural sense than as a fixed doctrine or lack of same. That is, directional — supplanting the adoption of any specific moral doctrine with consensus processes. Just looking at the PC debates, in 2018, we discourage specific types of speech, in the full knowledge that the moral framework we’re working under is subjective, temporary, and incomplete. In 2028, we will expand or contract that prohibition — the Irish will be fair game for mockery again, the furries will suddenly not be. It’s not a positivist, static vision on offer here (which is why conservatism habitually finds itself so neatly opposed to liberalism, stuck as it is on a fixed point in time when Ward Cleaver had the world figured out and the idea of post-modern subjectivist value systems are themselves threatening). It’s a commitment to gathering up the polyphony and seeking its consensus on what is offensive to its changing demographics. In that sense, its appreciates that no one of us is going to have an adequate handle on what is offensive to every different interest group, neither today nor especially over time. Our children will write us down for barbarians no matter what, and that’s fine — liberalism’s norms are built to be eradicated within a generation.

Zizek’s claims that the end results of that process look hegemonic, perversely racist, apartheid-esque, but if so, I don’t think it has to do with any hegemon (hegemen? hegewomen? hegefolk?) imposing it. In that sense, liberalism is queerly collectivist, and the question comes down to whether you trust the hive to reach legitimate consensuses.

Thirty-Six Questions

The first part of writing anything long-form for me is always some exhaustive outlining, working through all the macro-structural elements so I can comfortably dive into the micro-structural elements. It saves time, gives me something to write towards. Saves me from going down a lot of wells and getting married to all the well-toads that live down there, not being able to divorce myself from them later on when I realize I was supposed to be somewhere else.

But even antecedent to that deep outlining phase, while we’re still trying to figure out who our characters are, I’ve taken to an exercise with a little piece of pop psychology that most of you have probably heard of at some point: thirty-six questions developed by psychologist Arthur Aron, which, when answered earnestly together by any two people, are designed to make them “fall in love” (whatever that means clinically). You read the questions, you see what they’re talking about. They range from relatively benign ice breakers to pretty emotionally deep stuff. It’s easy to read them, feel yourself beginning to answer them out loud, feel yourself beginning to project a kind of trust and gratitude onto the hypothetical listener even as you just think about expressing those aspects of yourself to someone. Feel like you could know yourself better just by working these out for yourself, and imagine the debt of care you would feel for anyone who would bare those parts of themselves to you. It’s obvious how people end up in bed together.

So: generally speaking, I think the world is full of too many people taking their narrow experience and trying to tell other people How to Write (you may as well be asking How to Think), but I’ll make my gentle offering here: if you’re writing characters that you want your reader to love, you’d do well to fall in love with them first. So I’ve found these to be a useful tool, a good outset exercise, going through 36 questions for each of your major characters, writing their responses.

I mean, it’s not a straight-line process. You start with Who would you most like to have dinner with in the world, and after a few hours of picking apart the subconscious implications of that question just to slap a celebrity on their propensity to look in the mirror and wonder who they really want to be, you realize you don’t even know who this character’s mother is, and then you’re off to the rabbit-hole-races, rabbit-holes that interconnect with other rabbit-holes, making a map by trial-and-error of the entire underground rabbit infrastructure system. And then you finally get to question #2, feel like it’s all child’s play for you now, until question #3 makes you question why they don’t have even a religion in your notes. Rinse, repeat. By the time you get to question 8, Name three things you have in common with your partner, you can articulate things that they’re borrowing from you, or what they’ve borrowed from other people in your life, so you not only have a sense of who they are, but what is it in your life that has informed their creation.

I think it’s useful to have some kind of exercise like this, even if it’s not the 36 questions specifically, because one is inclined to approach questions of character development with some personal bias, with some lazy muscle memory. What you think you need to know about your character becomes your cage. But if you let go of the process just enough to let someone else dictate what you need to know about the character, and if you start approaching them from angles you wouldn’t be inclined to otherwise, you may end up finding out a lot more about these people than you anticipated.

Beau Travail

I don’t think I have ever seen a piece of surrealist film-making as effective as the one-man dance party at the conclusion of Claire Denis’ Beau Travail.

It is optimized on every dimension: the surrealism comes out of nowhere; it sharply inverts the tone of the film; expresses the character in a way the character is constitutionally incapable of expressing himself; and both plays off of and releases a tension that we have been painfully watching build for 90 minutes. Mwah.

Pop Sausage

There’s something wildly depressing about the NYT’s Diary of a Pop Song, although no one involved seems to be aware. How many amusical handlers need to fly how many miles to shepherd a modest clip of a girl’s idea for a chorus hook through a thousand impersonal interpolators before assigning the track to a random aspiring celebrity who doesn’t even recognize the writer when she meets her, nor seem to think she’s anything of mention when told. Holy shit, this is dystopic. This is peak soulless.

Self-Immolation

There’s something about self-immolation that strikes one as holy, as negating one’s presence on the earth, retracting the sin of living.

RIP David Buckel, gay rights attorney found dead in New York City, leaving behind a note decrying the “pollution ravag[ing] our planet,” and noting “my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves.”

There’s been a good amount of study recently on the effects of climate change on mental health, finding symptoms akin to PTSD in some cases. If the science is to be believed, it is the appropriate scale of reaction, if not the type. Would that there were more people living with the kind of purpose that Buckel is trying to die with.

There’s the threat that as we live increasingly in a world of media, we will lose our grip on what remains decent in reality. There’s the inverse threat that as we live increasingly in a world of media, we become blind to what we are rendering indecent in reality. A perverse conflict cycle. As changes in climate are necessarily planetary-scale, we have no choice but to absorb the preponderance of these impacts through media, and that can be a passive, debilitating experience. It can become unhealthy in the mind to the same degree as society’s blindnesses become unhealthy to the planet.

The world seems too vast and hostile to determine, one can only determine oneself. A man goes up in smoke in a major metropolis and asks to be remembered as a warning. He negates himself, he retracts. He leaves a negative space where he would like something better to emerge. And the world goes on, will retract everything for us eventually. Every time something dies, something different gets born where it was.