So I do feel the need to apologize again. I had much more planned to get out in writing after this weekend, but it was just not happening. There is a lot going on in my social world that I have to attend to, and then my work world is constantly beckoning with a force of its own, and then the wacky weather up here has been sort of nice, but also playing complete havoc with my Long Covid.
There is a lot of change happening up here that is difficult enough to keep up with in person, and I'm constantly trying to get a hold of this Long Covid problem. I spent a good part of the day just sitting in a chair with my eyes closed and doing breathing exercises. Plenty of times I tried to write, and plenty of times I had to stop, my head spinning, my heart pounding. 4 years in, 4 years more or less sick much of the time, and in moments my heart burns with hatred, while grieving for what I lost to the fucking hedge fund managers and private equity funds who are running everything around watching numbers go up, content to shove Covid down our throats while they convene under germicidal UV lights in well-ventilated rooms. Fuck You. And then I have to let it all go. They win if you die choking on your own bile.
There may be some things to report down the line, but for now let's say that it is "an overly dynamic situation." Also there are some downright mystical things happening in the forest, which involve deer, owls, a cougar, and a bear cub. All very tantalizing but too much to get into at the moment.
I am aware that some of the writing as of late has come across as unhinged. I see it, I acknowledge it, and nevertheless I still must continue to write when I can. So why even read me at this point? Well, some of the unhinged-ness may accord with the zeitgeist, for one thing, and it may be quite entertaining to read besides, I don't know. Not to make a direct comparison, but I had a ball reading H.S. Thompson, a lot of which was pretty nuts.
But in keeping with a continuing theme here, I do like to see the human in the work, and I'll try to live up to that here, messy results and all, as long as the product is not so diffuse as to lack discernable value.
I'm a mess, the writing is a mess, and so it goes. But then the messes tell us a little something about organization, and vice versa.
For example, let's contrast all this to Marx's three volumes of Capital, which I am very slowly making my way through. These volumes make up a tome, a monumental and singular work. But there's a problem with the tome. Its gigantic size and deep consistent complexity requires dedication and talent and sensitivity in the individual to extract meaning from the tome, meaning which takes on a certain correctness and usefulness depending on how much is gleaned out of the material, which is not only a product of the author's intentions, but also the underlying intellectual traditions that refract that author's work as well.
The results can be gatekept, to be sure. The utility of the work can diminish as the tradition dies and the emanating signal wanes, and/or the gatekept material is siphoned off and strangled.
At the same time there is a strength to this approach, if the tradition can survive and the gatekeeping can be maintained and done well, much wisdom can be produced and preserved.
Whether the utility of the work diminishes or not is related to the overall social maintenance of the work, which reflects the socially produced nature of the work. The tome is a particular form of cultural work that reflects a certain form of cultural development: a singular work is instantiated and refined to the point at which it can be introduced into the public as a finished product, where the actual process of development is hidden from view, and the finished work emerges ready for public consumption.
But take a glance at the multiple forewords in Capital Volume 2 for example, and you see something else going on. You see Engels writing about Marx's cycles of productive writing and then his down times when he was just too sick to produce and would retreat and read, and then Engels would have to go through all of his messy notes - even after he died - and try to piece everything together and make sense of it all.
You could just about see Engels rolling his eyes, putting up with Marx's fits, and then editing everything down and welding it all together to produce a comprehensible work. He was quite self-deprecating and constantly wrote himself out of the process, but in essence we wouldn't have Capital as a tome if it wasn't for his incredible editing work, an achievement in its own right. And then we know the hours and hours Marx spent in the library synthesizing all of the many other authors that went into the thought of Capital. This was part of the cultural context in which Capital was produced and then eventually maintained socially as a source of knowledge, translated and distributed and processed globally, its message constantly altering and transforming through its many gatekeepers.
These were many human beings laboring over so much accumulated materials over great periods of time and distances, all working to reproduce the continuity of the tome and the consistent body of work.
There are problems here with the blogosphere and the podcast ecosystem too, as well as a whole set of advantages. Which is how things typically work. The Internet is a terribly tragic entity at this point in time at our particular stage of development (can't get into it now), but it does do some really wonderful things as well.
What I really like about the current structure and functioning of the blogosphere and the podcast worlds is due in part to the structure and functioning of the Internet that makes them possible. There is a constant feedback between writers and storytellers, as well as between them and their readers and listeners and then between the readers and listeners themselves, producing and reproducing a constantly evolving web of meaning, and so the work departs again from a tome and back to an ever-changing, almost oral tradition, which is at the same time constantly documented and etched in as writing or recording, becoming something else entirely.
It is much easier to make out a human being in the work. It is a much more intimate process in some ways, if you find the right eddies and flows of course. There is plenty of corporate manipulation being done on the Internet, and there are other problems to address with Internet ecosystems. But I do really like finding the "real ones" out there, taking in the various details of their personal lives, in addition to their works themselves, perpetually co-creating this shared meaning.
