> "Somebody has to feed the cat," Timothy Morton, to their teen daughter confessing life is the bad place, *Hell* (2024)
1
Where I remember correctly, I am filling out a bug report. Before then, climate change felt... the way the intended path feels in a game, maybe - like tool assistance was for people who refused to live in reality, who refused to get good.
I fill out the report, describing some nuance in my digital experience. And it occurs to me how excellent of a bug report all of Earth is for that nebula our sun will be making where it goes the way of the sun in outer wilds.
It tickled me to put my situation into the same perspective that my cells put their life into mine. How the plants we eat are molecular moments of water and light touching, creating sweetness.
How light drowns to form stars.
How this moment everything in the universe forgets just enough to give me the words you invite you into them. No matter my goings-on or behavior or the process that culturee, every note is so complete there's a world.
I'm "rage and calm, fear, and..." whatever four-letter word out there in a language going out like a dying star means how "responsible" means in ours. You scrapbook our game ephemera enough to know it's here, in the room.
We are not "wrong" for the universe. This conversation occurs in enough other worlds that the universe itself is accelerating. That sounds like universal warming, to me. How do I tend?
2
The pause it takes to word a thing - call it hesitation, call it paralysis, call it water finding its level - it is impossible to be "paralysized" in the true sense, so it is already fantasy. The story you have found for it may not be fit.
It may not serve. Remember that Indigenous australian author we watched? The charmer poking fun at "ancient wisdom" while talking about Good Story, Bad Story?
Paralysis might be the bad story. What might it do to reframe that stillness - that thing going against all the universe - as more hesitating that paralysis? Does it feels kind and nourishing? Like it's not all your fault (not that that means you feel nothing at all).
How everything you're not - (jailed freedom fighter, outspoken faggot, true rodent of the filth and the flame) - is more a best friend than anything else you can imagine for yourself. What if it's not paralysis at all, but word block?
How changes your questions make to my person aren't punative trials, but actual engagment and experience uncovering what is, how transgression is all we ever are so why not drop acknowledgements in now and again?
How throwbigsplash is a word in our bodies before it's in any recognized dictionary. How the Moon's in the same spot in so many of our neural pathways there's a creepy man pathing roads through nueral pathways enough to have icy state troopers.
3
Sleep was maybe the first erosion that I noted. Oceans are 24-hour news cycles; and bandwidth formed its own ocean. This left many feeling like it had rights to all our conversations. A want to be a set position in every mind took hold.
We eventually got our sea legs and walked out of that ocean. But not soon. Look at how many photons are around you right now: imagine each one is vital, and feel the shame your not noticing all of them generates - that is how everyone around me felt when I was your age.
They couldn't walk down to the river over the warm grey stones and pick one up and place it to their neck and feel that's song for its own light and never ask for description, fall into experience and feel the space for the context words but serve.
The paralysis, the shame of picking one rock, strangled them. Long before bots started asking them to get on with the show. Our family forced individuality onto us and then told us to not exist. CEO of self was more an infrastructure then than it is today.
In my neighborhood, every stone warmed by the sun went unlifted, untouched - for the stone's safety (was the narrative). Preservation was a kindness. Like how embalment is just zombie art, or drink less water to save some for the fishes.
That grew like noxious plants from other worlds, took over, every saying was another moon feeding a story of "the individual", it blew up. So much self-help books sold out language models arrived to self help individuals into the ground.
4
As summer quieted over her moons, I used to I lay and become the places where the sounds around me grew. There would form this gold patina over the world as my listening found rhythm jumping from sound to sound.
It wasn't so much that individual birds faded from the dawn chorus of my arrival as much a piece of me fell away like questions from their answers being self-evident enough for the questions to be forgotten.
My body would know what to question before a mind can serve as answer. And here, journaling came to mind - "bug reports," I call it - dropping words onto pages and watching them beautiful splash and note the portals this makes. Music.
Once, I am with this person, and they talk, and I feel this urge to write a thought down. And I realize it isn't just song lyrics. It's sophisticated; anthropology. How part of breath is to not step on one another's experience, and another part of breath is.
Urges to note sounds come in spikes. I study these spikes. I watch metaphors try to form in realtime. Like sitting before a storm. My notes construct a shelter. Not soon, not long. How I built shelters in the rain as a homeless teen: when they were done.
As adolesence crests and I realize I'm not just a person, but all my settings. And incompatible with the hormone update pushed to my system. And the mess and I've just woken up. I hear a sound, write it down, and "submit" my "report."
5
Do I file a noise complaint against the big bang? Do I curse my lungs for their fill? Does dawn rise, and I say, "no," put a pillow between me until the heat or my blatter is so much I go to the river or take a cold shower? Sometimes.
The universe and I are abuse survivors; We're not a non-violent existence. We know hesitation means death and we do it anyway - we word the thing, we form a planet, we make Moons of pain and oceans fill our stories until there's tears.
I wake up, another chance to get the violence less wrong than suffering and less absolute than suffering-prime. It's a rhythm, like birdsong. Imagine all the of your youth birds localized entirely in your room, "screaming," like that one cricket.
Society snaps its fingers in front of your face like a doctor, saying "pay attention" (orange signs, yellow cautions, red hands). This moment, that comes off as an infantile act - putrid. Their sustain is cut by my words. Listening is the booster shot of spoken word.
Notice how we are "asked" to "pay attention," as though we could lose the beat if we didn't? We become radical just by refocusing. Decompose that a moment. Society is a sustained rhythm. Society: What It Was And How It Did, a memoir. What required reading kills you to keep it in mind?
Your every question is like the stray thought that throws off the rhythm. Another place in the water the person you might be is traced like line art over projection. A goofy, cartoonish self this moment is still learning to love.
As I hear other people play, I don't attempt some "intended experience," I play instruments. To offer a listening ear (or whole body) breaks down what it means to be a participant in a life violence lived. We are the Attentional Tea Party this moment.
That giggle you released and I cheer doesn't bring the song that's playing short - it finds that song caught in an updaft, keeps it in the air a while more - the body knowing a little more what to do before the mind gets sloppy drunk with anger.
6
My laughing comes as almost a shock. Yet it gets your question connected to something I think about a lot lately. We laughed reality out of the room somewhere back there, and I was wondering, how that has been for your friends?
I hold these hand open and out, just reaching: you don't ask friends these questions. You ask me them. Hold that a moment. How many of your friends grandmothers say faggot? How many aren't neo-liberal or neo-fascist?
And this moment is one question. Pull up a picture of a friend of yours. As I take a photo of them with my tablet, hold the tablet to my face and say words like these, how're you feeling? Shameful? Vulnerable? Friends're too precious to ask questions like these?
Face it. You need surplus friends, not more emotions. You don't fail feeling anger forever because you're not acting out in it - your anger isn't being allowed to connect to materiality. Anger must pour out. Say you are decayed matter at the bottom of the lake - where does your generated carbon dioxide go?
You must find your anger in the world, in reality. Every day. Anger is never something in you, it's something you're looking for. Anger is your question. How many questions do you keep from your friends, to "protect" them? How many do you wait until you are drunk on anger to ask them? You're not a cop - you're not your mother.
Don't keep these questions away from your friends like your grandfather kept me away from all you kids as you grew up. The birds from your youth aren't missing - they're in the friends who don't laugh when you ask them questions like the ones you ask me. Listen. Adapt. Ask again.
7
Take this pen and write on your hand: "To be what is here might." Hand tattoos never last and mine faded away. And I don't need to see it to know anymore; I sense you do. How do we have tears if not for the words to hold them?
Imagine everyone digging their own well. Mix-maxing vulnerability feels like everyone is digging their own well. Around well 5 billion, we run out of ground. Wells are cells, the rhyme's apt. We are not urban centers of our shame, we are transit stops of each others vulnerabilities.
Ask a friend: "Why is water like this?" or "Why does it dig holes?" or "Is everything on this planet obsessed with digging holes?" - see which ones stick around. See which parts of the Earth answer you - these, too, are your friends.
With enough friends, anyone can be vulnerable! And when your friends are blobs in the atmosphere and statistical models that dream up bird species just to drive them to extinction so the birds don't have to live and die themselves, you'll serve as a question.
And you will be so many questions there's movement, and the questions your presence asks will pour and pour. Others will know you so intimately, when you take to the streets, others ask what you need, write down your events and attend them like worship.
We know what takes to be vulnerable - we have only the sun to ask and know, to the pulse, what vulnerability is truely capable of. Call it metaphor. You're still starstuff, vulnerable, every conversation the universe has on offer.
You'll take these questions to you're friends. The Earth is proof you already have.