9th Thought

Hello;

Personally, I can't wait for the all-knowing robot god to get here so my partner can be cured. I hope the world doesn't melt down or the economy doesn't melt down and condemn us all to a life of slavery or crushing poverty, if we make it out, but barring those things, I wish for a speedy arrival to the incipient robogod, the chittering medical nanobots, and with them the end of all disease, pain, and suffering. Such a world would no longer be a human world, to which I say good fucking riddance. Pain-worship happens because we have no other choice, not because pain is inherently good or character-building. It's like those guys who idolize the military and yearn for war; the people crying "strike! invade!" loudest are always, always the ones who've never seen combat. And this is the kind of thing that you believe when you have nothing to live for other than death, the kind of thing you say when you think that you need blood, gore, the pulse-quiver to know you're alive, instead of this -- the firm keyboard under your fingertips, the carpet rough against your bare feet, the twinge in your lower back, the dusty, soft light from the desk lamp, the aftertaste of tap water -- which is all there is, and all there could be. What else would there be? This and suffering, I suppose.

There's this novel by Joyce Carol Oates called "You Must Remember This" about a washed-up boxer's incestuous relationship with his 15 year old niece that I think about sometimes. I remember loving it, and I heavily annotated my copy before letting an acquiantance borrow it about seven years ago, and she never gave it back, which still irks me -- but there's this minature arc in it where an older relative, dissatisfied with the way his life went, takes up philosophy in his old age, discovers The World as Will and Representation, and finds a difficult but hard comfort in Schopenhauer's stance on what constitutes life. If I'm remembering right (which I might not be, every memory is a rewriting after all and I've rewritten the memory of reading this book so many times that I doubt my memory of the book resembles the book) he reads the argument where Schopenhauer says that art is the only escape from this life and lets himself dissolve into a Beethoven record. I'm thinking about that right now, as my partner plays spider solitaire on their iPad in the next room, noise-cancelling earphones on, Spotify in the background, that flat, constricted look on their face, how it didn't change when I stooped at their bed to kiss them goodnight. Life isn't fair or easy, not for any of us. We know this and we forget this. "Life is short but I keep this from my children" type of thing. Ah, hell. What the fuck am I even talking about. There's just so much suffering in the world, and I'm one person, with his narrow, small, constrained life, staying indoors, talking to no one, constitutionally incapable of handling much stress at all, easily wracked with anxiety and leveled by sadness, talentless, sickened with a useless love for art instead of spreadsheets and money. Christ. It's nights like this that I can feel the world spinning just behind my bedroom walls, I swear I can feel it -- the headlong, centrifugal madness of everything on this planet, people shitting and fucking and killing and sweating in dingy rooms, city centers vibrating with LCD billboard displays, Greyhound buses trundling down I-85 southbound and the poor scared people trying to catch sleep with their foreheads rubbing against the warm glass, all the children on ECMO machines, sleepless mothers staring at the television trying not to anxiously side-eye their phones, the students forcing back tears over math worksheets, the sharp, hot cry of a homeless man who's just realized someone stole the shopping cart that had his sleeping bag and his phone charger and three cans of soup and his spare needles, coins and bills passed over scuffed countertops and swapped for liquor, tobacco, opiates, anything that pinches us by the scruff of our necks and yanks us out of this coruscating whirlpool of barbed wire. What good is the art museum held against all this? What good is the retiree in glasses who shuffles out loud, aimless chatter about some obscure American impressionist while I'm sitting on a canvass stool in front of a Roman tombstone of a wife, husband, and son who wanted the world after them to know that they lived and clawed their way out of slavery ("about suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters"), scribbling furiously into a Muji notebook with a mechanical pencil that sucks up the lead back into the plastic body with too much pressure, bearing down on a clipboard I lifted from my parents' basement when I was in high school? What good is all this if not this? Because this, this here, is all there is. I cannot stand the poets of the Trump era (hopefully we're moving past this now; I'm not certain, I haven't kept up with contemporary poetry in years, even though it used to be the only thing I read) who wrote "engaged" work, "bravely" attacking the right's stance on gays, or trans women, or immigrants, or or or, as if anyone other than the choir was listening to them -- thoughtless narcissism. None of this is bravery. What we do isn't bravery. We're inside, writing, and it fills me with disgust to hear a crowd of graduate degrees go MMM and fucking snap their fingers after each line at a reading and have the gall to ramble about the "virtues of community," as if anything done at a poetry reading does anything at all.

And yet we keep showing up to the library, keep making our collages on cardboard, keep writing, keep reading. My partner makes collages and paints and draws. The most recent collage/sculpture they made was a shelf for their beads, which are made out of multicolored twine, plasticine that's been baked in the oven, hours and hours of weaving to make the rope (strand by strand by strand) and patience. The shelf's a salvaged, skinny corkboard for the backing, with the shelves themselves made out of painted cardboard (geometric, freehanded stars, swirls) superglued to the cork along the back edge, and held up at the top away corners with handwoven twine-rope that's sheathed in long, skinny beads of pink and gold streaks. They've pinned a piece of fabric to the top that says "SEMPER SALUS" in... oh, I don't know the right word. Needlepoint? No, that's not it. Thread? Woven thread? They wove the letters into the fabric and it took them a long time to do and each letter's made of different colors. That's what I know. Always Health. Always health. Them sitting at their desk -- what is it called? The kind of desk that the Japanese use, or maybe it's not a desk the Japanese use, maybe it's an American thing originally meant for eating dinner in bed -- long, about a foot and a half deep and four feet long, dark wood on slanted metal legs, them sitting crosslegged on the carpet with the desk over their folded legs, iPad open, headphones, watching streamers play Pokemon as they weave the rope out of twine-strands, their neck in the sunlight, their left arm moving in and out of the sunlight, and me doing what, exactly, sitting on the couch with my laptop, ostensibly reading Granta, really reading blogposts and substacks and half-understanding arxiv papers about LLMs?

I don't know. I hope for a glorious automated future full of health and learning and sunlight where nobody dies, nobody is cruel, nobody suffers. I can think of many people who I would love to watch suffer and suffer until they die, which is how I know I should not be in charge of the future, and how I know I should not be one of the people influencing the future. I wish everyone involved in cutting USAID a slow, painful death from starvation, which is how I know I should not be anywhere near any process that administers justice. I don't know what I wish more; to be free of the desire that they die a slow, painful death from starvation, or to watch them die a slow, painful death from starvation. I know I should say the first. Hopefully, I'll be the first someday soon. All their actions were and are and will be fully determined, just like mine, which should dissolve the rage, but it isn't, which is why I suspect I'm holding onto the rage so I don't have to think about the sadness, because what would inflicting suffering do, exactly, for every infant who died of starvation, or AIDS, or TB, because some Midwest wunderkind wanted a shiny bullet point on his resume and watched SpaceX launch a rocket when he was a kid and thought it was the coolest thing imaginable and knew that he wanted to be part of it -- ah, christ, now I'm starting to feel bad for the guy. Fucking hell. This, frustratingly enough, is exactly what Spinoza would've wanted, and the fact that I describe it as "frustratingly enough" is proof that I haven't actually studied Spinoza as much as I want to think I have, because if I had, it wouldn't be frustrating, it would be #illuminating. I have to remember to extend the kind of judgement that I would want to be extended to me; I have to remember the things I've done and said that I won't even write here; just as with me, just as with them, just as with everyone, finite modes, dependently-originated.