Sunday, August 13, 2023

I revisit this thought:

the ironies of a bunch of hyperliterates using a giant text machine to bootstrap text into a thing that exceeds the bounds of comprehension and then totally overwhelms all the tools of literacy itself

I’ve spent most of my life enmeshed in language, with words as my main power, and also a lot of time dwelling on the insufficiency of language to what life is really like. These days the latter sometimes feels like the main thing about words. Or at least the main thing about the dominant culture of words, the technology and system of them.

The tools of literacy — I don’t exactly mean to run them down. We just live in a time when, for whole classes of human, a kind of hypertrophied literacy has enmeshed and eclipsed the experience of reality. This isn’t so much new as it’s just newly vast, encompassing, interconnected. The language machine is so big, so ramified, that the sheer mathematical accumulation of its products now feeds deafening oceans of noise back into the workings. Whether by this I mean the outputs of machine learning or the behavior of a few billion minds over-saturated with internet bullshit: I’m not sure it even matters.

We’ve all had our part in building this, and you can get endlessly meta about the endless meta of it, which is part of how it exceeds the bounds of comprehension. All of that is… Not really how I want to spend my time. I don’t have any grand thesis here, or at least I don’t have any grand prescription.

There was a time when I was a big word fish in a small word pond, I guess. Somewhere along the way the contemporary internet happened and also I got a job where being a big word fish was a basic prerequisite. Circa now: Sweet Christ am I ever weary of paragraphs. There’s something useful in knowing that, if I don’t chase my own tail about it too much.

p1k3 / 2023 / 8 / 13

tuesday, august 1, 2023

one for jack

here we are in one of those times of dying
and i'm fucked if i know what to do
i've never known, i likely never will

it was so dark at 5 o'clock that the streetlight came on
in the alley out back, and i started flicking switches
on the lamps

water poured through the kitchen window when it rained
and i got one of those fancy new reverse 911 calls
about the flash flood warning
and now in the aftermath
the mice in the walls are more agitated than usual
i suppose they may have gotten wet

now the storm has shuffled off east, and
there's a thin mist rising off the streets
and i'm on the couch, drinking iced whiskey and orange soda
out of an aluminum camp mug

i should kill the mice in the walls
(god damn them, i don't want to kill anything at all)
i should fix the windows
i should muck the rainwater out of the crawlspace
i should be stone sober, waiting for what comes next

but it's true enough:
the times you should be most in your right mind
are often the times you least want to be in that
mind at all.

p1k3 / 2023 / 8 / 1