Vertigo/Solastalgia
not much in answer to anything else, or is it?
Anyone who reflects about pop culture will have observed that the rapid turnover of styles in the 20c has given way to what feels much like stasis by the early 21c. Turbo-consolidation of media ownership & its turn from being run by people who at least originally cared, to people who took it over in order to run it into the ground for a moment of shareholder fingersnap, okay. That accounts for a lot (besides the utter triumph of the unsmiling gatekeeper). Critics & reviewers becoming as trophy-huntable as rhinos, that too.
Maybe not a little of it is due to the evaporation of affordable housing from, like, anywhere you might want to live in. How many more causes do you need?
Does feel like the walls are closing in. Maybe that’s what’s driven the stampede online. It looked like (was painted on the wall as) a way out.
It wasn’t a way out. It was a smileyface framed above the entrance to the gas chamber. AI is the Zyklon-B that’s going to finish the job.
In their eyes these are rational, even praiseworthy, choices. Projected on the wall slides of futures, slides of plenty, slides of never-have-to-do-what-I-don’t-want-to-do-ever-again.
(All that, just to keep from having to pay a pittance of royalties?)
I used to have Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas (being the sort of contrarian who reads This Side of Paradise instead of Gatsby), back when this seemed a joke. Like Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream, the trope of alter-Nazis invariably ends up not being about Nazis. It was pleasant enough, but I didn’t think it was a good enough idea for a whole book. Writers that prosper under fascism are the same as writers that prosper under other styles of misgovernance, for lack of integrity, when it comes to hierarchies, is a superpower. Lots of people for tinsel reasons can convince themselves to do something they shouldn’t; in this particular kind of dishonesty, they convince the people around them that not only is this the thing they should be doing, it is the only thing they can do.
Sometimes when I’m in a condemnatory mood, I want to blame even more than the sociopaths & the dumbfucks they deceive, the intelligentsia of excusers & explainers who betray their basic purpose knowingly & for the sake of fleeting or nonexistent rewards. How I understand them is that they think they are playing a game, it’s not that different from the game they weren’t doing so well at, but all of a sudden they’re being praised & fed tidbits for doing this new game that happens to entail some real punishment & destruction for others whose experience of the game they fail to imagine. All they have to do is pretend they don’t know about it.
The vertigo comes when you have to go out in the world with this question: do you know what’s going on? Are you pretending not to know? Are you telling yourself there’s nothing to be done? Are you saying knowing it is equivalent to doing somnething about it? And if someone were to come to me in turn with these questions, there’s days I can answer, but many more days when I can’t. This poem says it better for me than anything else:
“Variations on a Theme by Joyce
The war is in words and the wood is the world
That turns beneath our rootless feet;
The vines that reach, alive and snarled,
Across the path where the sand is swirled,
Twist in the night. The light lies flat.
The war is in words and the wood is the world.
The rain is ruin and our ruin rides
The swiftest winds; the wood is whorled
And turned and smoothed by the turning tides.
—There is rain in the woods, slow rain that breeds
The war in the words. The wood is the world.
This rain is ruin and our ruin rides.
The war is in words and the wood is the world,
Sourceless and seized and forever filled
With green vines twisting on wood more gnarled
Than dead men’s hands. The vines are curled
Around these branches, crushed and killed.
The war is in words and the wood is the world.”
—Weldon Kees