Remodel

Generally speaking, I find it much more interesting and fun to build new, as opposed to remodeling. But the thing about remodeling - especially when the previous jackass whose work you're remodeling was you - is that it changes the nature of the building process itself entirely, considering that you are face to face not with raw earth, but with something that is already built. It changes your conception of what you build, how you build it, and why. Because sooner or later you might come face to face with it again, especially if you don't have the time and resources to scrap it and start new, and when that happens, it is better to be kind to your future self, lest you become trapped in a downward spiral. 

Uncertainty in the Built Environment Pt. 5

This Uncertainty in the Built Environment series also was a bit of an albatross: the subject matter of these posts required covering a lot of ground, and then I became very sick with Covid and the whole thing lost momentum, until finally stalling out and then just sitting there for some time. This is a huge pain in the ass: you lose your many trains of thought and coherence, and then go back to the thing to try to pick up where you left off, torn between finishing it out less strong, or tossing the thing entirely. 

I was tempted to scrap this shit, but reading it over, I'm seeing that there is still some meat here, and some important themes buried within that I'll be returning to anyway. If you bear with me through this undercooked post, I'll start a little more fresh on the next one and salvage some useful concepts for working through later. 

For the completionist, here is 1, 2, and 3, with 4 following just below. Not everyone has time for that though. I'll try to get the salient points across from here on out. 

Previously in part 4 I painted a bit of an intense picture of what uncertainty in the wilderness looks like. More importantly, we can use that picture to analyze the current state of the built environment, and of course assess the implications of that state. This is an exercise that feels all the more pressing, considering the state of current affairs in the United States especially. 

Here for many, the built environment is beginning to take on the subjective experience of a wilderness, a process that has been well underway for decades, and which is experienced at varying levels of intensity depending on the individual's social, political, geographic, and economic locations. The concept of the wilderness itself needs to be further addressed for clarification, but I'd like to save that for the next post, as I believe we have enough to directly address the subject matter alluded to by the title of this series of posts. 

Now, as we touched on before, the built environment is most immediately represented by the material supports of the urban environment - used in this case in a more general sense - but the phenomena itself is more an expression of a deep need to persist and even flourish at greater timescales, and so from the built environment flows an entire evolving world of ancillary processes such as the medical system, water and energy and waste systems, food distribution, transportation, research, administration, legal regulation, and so on. 

Many of these patterns seek to stabilize and maintain the many life processes on multiple levels, say on the molecular, individual, local, and collective levels, and to establish certain acceptable levels of predictability and certainty for the perpetuation of human life. 

Part of the problem here is that for numerous and deeply complex historical, evolutionary, and even thermodynamic reasons, the process to achieve stability and certainty tips well over into not only flourishing and then a bid at perpetual ecstasy, but also to absolute power and domination, which is necessarily a localized process, no matter how intently its universal conceits are declared. 

With such uneven patterns of development then, the historical regions of certainty and organization are always moving and shifting, and with them - and inextricably bound up with them - the regions of uncertainty and so-called chaos. 

We've been meditating on this process and its nature and consequences here for quite some time, and indeed it is incredibly complex and as a result, difficult to describe as a totality, but then that is what the wilderness metaphor is for: we can provisionally collapse these processes down into the simple matters of access to food and energy and basic survival, and then the subjective experience of such things. One way to illustrate the movements of organization and stability, and their contrasting regions of uncertainty, is to illustrate the basic contrasting consequences and experiences of these phenomena. 

This is getting easier to do now, because the contrast between flourishing and struggling is proceeding to such a stark and sharp disparity between classes of individuals, and then there is the growing polarization of the shrinking wealthy classes and the growing impoverished classes.

One is of a certain class, ticking off the right identity boxes in certain regions of affluence, and everywhere one walks, there is somewhere to instantly procure food, energy, transportation, what have you. You get lost, and you merely need to speak, and soon you'll be on your way. 

Move over to another class, another set of identity markers, and one is regarded with puzzlement and suspicion. One loses the ability to speak, or to be seen and understood, regarded instead as a threat, and one better mind one's step. There is less certainty in the daily furnishing of food, water, shelter, and heat, which at present is increasingly being rationed in accordance with the money system, a rationing that will increasingly become more territorial as the money system is increasingly abused and broken down, as is apparent in the behavior of the rich and powerful increasingly buying up material security in the form of land and natural resources, and of national boundaries sharpening and clarifying under the increasing strain of global trade. 

This uncertainty manifests all sorts of compensatory behaviors which complicate the public sphere and introduce a chaotic, shifting mass of activity that is more difficult for central powers to manipulate and anticipate. Lying, stealing, murder, social threat and domination, addiction, suicide, and so on are examples of the many alternatives available to individuals and then states abandoned to a social and geopolitical wilderness where food and protection are no longer guaranteed, all of which have profound social and political consequences that must be dealt with in turn. 

The many micro-events influence the development of a macro, or structural set of ongoing forces, which produce their own micro-events in turn. At the risk of entering a particular sequence of events mid-stream in the narrative, you had a socially, politically, and economically weakening global capitalist system - which was built for the rapid movement and suffusion of material globally - take up the coronavirus that causes Covid, which rapidly moved through the global population, reproducing and evolving and reinfecting rapidly in waves, doing damage as it went. 

This pandemic was able to bloom into fruition through a growing political economic wilderness in which a populace was increasingly set against itself, and the virus, doing its damage, contributed to a seizing up of global supply chains, and an acceleration of the concentration of capital, among other knock on effects, accelerating the mistrust of collective institutions and even guiding ideologies. We've been covering this growing chaos and uncertainty in the context of the decline of the West, but there are similar issues springing up globally - if in different forms - due in part to the universality of an increasingly unstable global climate. 

Uncertainty and certainty are connected conceptually, yes, but they are also closely connected in practice. Where chaos and uncertainty grows, there grows with them an insatiable hunger for certainty and stability, which pursued in a concentrated and forceful matter, produces more of its opposite in well-proportioned amounts. 

To make better sense of these tangled concepts in tension with each other, I'd like to address the shifting nature of the wilderness and its lessons. Uncertainty is in our present narrative closely associated with the wilderness, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. Though the identity of the concepts of "uncertainty" and "wilderness" have been useful to establish a narrative thus far, the concepts themselves will be more useful to us on a practical level when they are disentangled. Next time we can untangle those things and see what is there.  

On Yule

Here we're on the eve of the Western Christmas, that Christian and then commercial graft onto the body of pagan traditions, stories, and symbols called Yule, which circulating and crosspollinating among the Roman, Germanic, Nordic, and Celtic worlds, gelled into the coherent winter holiday we enjoy today. 

Yule myth actually contains some really interesting ideas and phenomena: communication with the dead continues on from Samhain, and as the cold and dark really start to set in, vibrant colors and symbols of vitality are bandied about to buttress the community against the bleak chill pressing in from all sides. Strange and sometimes dangerous spirits wander the frozen landscape out there in the dark, which are best sheltered in from, avoided, and ignored.  Me? I do choose to ignore the unrecognized Timeshare Exit calls that have recently invaded my phone.  

We get some of the residue of those sentiments as winter passes over us in the Western Hemisphere, though the nature of winter itself is changing within my lifetime. One wonders where the myth goes from here. 

I'll have to get more into that later, as family will soon be here, and I'll be quite busy. For a lot of folks, the light and color and food and company creates a welcome warm pocket to push back what cold is left. If that's you, enjoy, and if not, enjoy the quiet nevertheless.     

Damages

One ongoing concern at this here blog is the course and nature of what we could call "damage" sustained on human societies contemporaneously. Though the damage takes place along a spectrum, with more kinetic forms continuing to exist in current war zones, there are also slower, multifaceted, and quiet forms which continue on with a heightened insidiousness, which produce the more kinetic and concentrated forms, which despite their geographically remote and concentrated nature, nevertheless feed back into the less kinetic forms, advancing them all the same. Understanding this damage is crucial to understanding and anticipating the arc of decline in industrial age societies, and we'll continue to get deeper into that subject as per usual. 

In this case, I'm grateful that Ian Welsh has stayed on the subject of Covid damage since the very beginning, as this is a tricky and complex process that is made even more complicated by heavy propagandizing in the press and in our political economy. 

As Ian describes - and the chart he links to is astounding - wave after wave of Covid infection has steadily ground down the population's immune response, among many other things, which results in a grinding merry-go-round of secondary infections, all of which produce additional heavy damage throughout society on multiple levels.  I'd suggest reading this post as well, which taken together with the Covid piece, carries the implication that damage and leadership are related and influence each other, as Ian mentions.

This is personal for me. As I sit here writing, I'm slightly out of breath and quite achey. My Long Covid has largely healed. I've gotten away from the fire, and it no longer actively burns, but the scars are still there, and occasionally they still hurt. I haven't been the same. And like the archetypal burn victim, I'm quite wary of the fire: even distant and suggestive glimpses of it are enough to activate my early defenses and put me on alert. 

Now, roughly 5 years after the start of the Covid pandemic, Covid is everywhere, and anecdotally (with regular observations of national policy and messaging) very few people care to track it or even mitigate or take the slightest precaution that actually works. I still hear people going on with, "Don't worry we've wiped down all the surfaces with bleach and are being really careful." Huh? Not even a year into the pandemic, we knew it was in the air and that you had to clean the fucking air. And that is one thing we refuse to do. 

Even further, here in Southern California, the air quality is worse than I've ever seen it. There is a perpetual build-out and population growth - more cars and wider freeways - and geography and climate conditions have led to a capping effect in which the Los Angeles basin traps all of the smog and holds it in, with the result of lingering garbage air and constant smog alerts and burn bans. Are we doing anything on a large scale about ventilation and sick buildings at the very least? Might not be able to contain those local growth engines, and we might not be able to muster the coordination, trust, and purpose it takes to build out mass transit. Folks have forgotten the lessons of the 60's and 70's and the smog alerts, and all of the heart disease and cancers and cognitive dysfunction and other maladies that come from that. And of course, all of this is also hard on immune systems, bringing on more Covid, which brings on more secondary infections, and we get more and more tired and brittle and hand-wavey about the bare minimum mitigation. 

I get it, bleach is cheap and air purification, ventilation, and HVAC are expensive, and the virus is everywhere and they just aren't trying anymore, so what is the average person to do? But even low-cost mitigation and effort can't be bothered with. We are collectively sleep-walking into the miasma and then steadily ground-down. 

All of the messaging has overwhelmingly downplayed aerosol dynamics and structural environmental mitigation, and emphasized surface cleaning, distancing, and personal responsibility. Here, Fela Kuti's Zombie comes to mind, with anti-police and anti-military messaging that could be readily transferred to a more generalized population group, following orders, or mass propaganda, and marching on, rotting away all the while. 

Setting aside the personalized venting here, I don't necessarily mean for this to be a finger-wagging moral condemnation either. People are exhausted. Large-scale problem solving measures, or even basic mitigation, simply can't be done as a matter of failed capacity and functionality. This is what the damage looks like and feels like on a social and subjective level.  

Visual Arm

So that writing project that I was working on? Yep, I got me a Substack. 

The nature of that project is in the name. I was explaining to a friend of mine that this was going to be the "visible arm" of my writing endeavors, and being of a poetic mind, he promptly replied, "How about Visual Arm? That could be a good name." Yeah, that was the one. I have an affinity for those abstract yet suggestive names that are head-scratchers. 

So, maybe a couple more words on that. 

I've been writing on this here blog - The Faster the Slower - for twenty years now, which is kind of wild to me. Before starting this blog, I was writing on that old blog engine Xanga as a teenager, when that general blogging business as a cultural phenomenon was young. At that time I was pretty inexperienced - obviously enough, being a teenager - and just wrote whatever, reaching out to whomever on there as I went. That blog started to gain traction - in a very small-scale niche Internet community way - as I was pretty friendly and making online buddies and such. 

It was a good outlet for a while, but my inexperience started to catch up with me. The density of my interactions and the reciprocal writing and commenting began to overwhelm me, and I started finding that it was getting harder and harder to write naturally and expressively while experimenting with new forms, as I was writing for others and thinking too much about what those others were thinking about my own writing. And this is an insecurity that was related to a lack of life experience too. So eventually I said my goodbyes and closed the thing down, and then quietly opened this Blogger account, not telling anyone save for a couple of close friends, and left it at that. 

Writing here, I began to realize that I liked the quiet and the obscurity, and could just write for the love of the writing, and develop my own idiosyncratic craft in isolation, which suited me just fine. I knew I only had a handful of readers, and I wasn't too worried about getting my writing out there. Of course everyone does want to be read and understood to a certain extent. Eventually I figured I would get the writing out to a wider audience when it was more developed and refined, but I wasn't in any hurry. 

Well, time passed, and I came to further appreciate the obscurity. My life arc ceased to be about becoming a writer per se, and more just about surviving that space between the cracks that I had fallen into, in search of autonomy and grounded confidence and satisfaction in daily living. The writing was a form of personal meditation, of putting together everything that I had learned in the intellectual sphere with everything I was learning in the practical/material sphere, and that was enough. 

Further, the cultural weather was really starting to turn, more so than before, with a mounting and widespread meanness and cynicism that was making that process of going out into the public ever more unappealing. Earnestness was cringe, and despite my own growing cynicism, I was also quite earnest, and consider myself that way still. Granted, that was only part of the calculus, and there are plenty of wonderful writers out there doing good work and providing online refuge for those seeking it out, offering up a model of how it could still work. 

But alas, I figured I could be OK with toiling in obscurity in perpetuity, as my living conditions became satisfying and rewarding enough in their own right. And I have grown to savor those dark, quiet, candlelit caves and alcoves where I can hide and be in peace, with just enough light to see what I was doing immediately in front of me, babbling to myself in the process. 

Nevertheless, there was always that smoldering ember of wanting to be read, which still glowed under the ashes. And also a little problem was starting to develop: that minor matter of increasing precarity that we are all collectively experiencing more or less. I've been living on the financial knife edge for quite some time, and was able to get a little grace from some remaining institutional resources, and some leg-ups from loved ones from time to time. But that edge gets a little sharper the more things are cut to the bone in the country as a whole. Of course, living the way that I do is also a matter of increasing personal resilience and lowering financial overhead, which does help the precarity factor. But there is also strength in diversifying one's strategies too, to be sure. 

See, there are a number of countervailing forces present in the relative states of obscurity and visibility, with each separate sphere offering its own advantages and disadvantages. Of course, these forces hinge on the nature of the individual too, as there are plenty of folks that thrive in different conditions for different reasons. For me, obscurity and silence offers an intense spiritual place to plow all of my personal resources and concentration into a given craft or practice, where I can develop without distraction or interference. Personally I thrive in such conditions. 

Being less visible and having less public awareness can also be good if you have a certain notoriety and personal noxiousness, so you're less apt to arouse suspicion and/or be attacked in some way. I might not be noxious per se, but I can be stubborn in my...idiosyncrasy. But it also means less social support and social opportunity, and it's not as immediately apparent to others when the invisible are being stepped on and/or are going under. 

On the flip side of this, being more visible means making a lot more connections and having all sorts of opportunities open up that weren't there before. It means putting out the equivalent of a little solar or water collector, attempting to capture a little stream of social resources, so to speak. For me it also means possible overstimulation and distraction and overbooking. And in general, it means opening up oneself to more passing social forces, good and bad. There are always trade-offs. For each additional energy-collecting leaf the tree puts out, that leaf can also be a vector for water loss in the respiration process. 

The interesting thing about this particular juncture is that framing things in this contrasting light provides a way to separate the approaches and possibly develop them independently, experimenting with their various effects. 

What I mean is that splitting off this writing project offers an opportunity to explore those contrasting approaches and develop via different modalities, among many other things. I'm planning on keeping this blog as it is, and then continuing to do in obscurity the more weird and esoteric stuff here, which will of course inform and buttress the more visible and accessible (and somewhat theatric in a way, in the sense of developing a persona) stuff that I'm doing over there. 

And you, dear reader who found this space, can watch both spaces develop and inform each other in their own ways, if that sort of thing is interesting to you anyway. The normal thing to do would be to keep private notes on the one hand, and then a public body of work on the other - and I do have my share of private notes - but I find that having a semi-public experimental sphere and then a separate public experimental sphere could be quite interesting.  

Now, it could be that my Substack never gets off the ground. Perhaps it fails to gain traction and fizzles out as a place of interest, and then it is back to the drawing board. Or eh, something happens. I attempted an early foray into the Instagram world to showcase my photography a couple of years ago, and within a day or two of setting up my account, the account was promptly hijacked, flooding my unsuspecting friends with pornographic images, and so I gave up that venture on the spot. 

That's of course a comical example - I did not have a very strong commitment to the Instagram project - and I don't plan giving up that easily this time, I promise. And it could be that the Substack does gain traction, and through that traction, this place is found, and the nature of both projects change too. Anything can happen. But for now, it'll be an interesting exercise to try to straddle the worlds and develop in different ways in the different spheres, and see how it all pans out. 

The other thing about splitting off this other writing project is to combine its public purpose with a very different set of intentions from the get-go. With Visual Arm - and as with everything else I do it'll change and evolve over time - I intend to more intentionally ground the material in a specific place (or places) and within a certain community striving towards certain ends, as part of a broader project to develop a positive vision of action which is connected to - and results from - the ongoing critique which will continue to take place here. What does one do with one's life, considering that one takes to be true the state of affairs continuously rendered here? Well, I've flipped the switch, and I'm going to get to it. 

I'm also working on a shit-ton of posts on here too; more to come.