Da-da-dasein
— Heidegger’s stammering brother Fritz
The pandemic is over (though it has been over probably since last May as a real, tangle, experience-able public health emergency), but the damage — specifically the cognitive damage caused by the pandemic — lingers, digs in, entrenches. I feel it. I feel how hard it is to close my laptop, turn off my iPad, my phone and just go out; I have become a creature of the QuarLife even as I resisted it, wrote about it, complained about, actively tried to live a non-QuarLife. My brain is a QuarBrain, a function of the…
I feel, at times, a new self pushing up through the old, dead one, like a fingernail after the original has been damaged. With this newish self comes a kind of urgency, an awareness that even with ‘re-opening’ — a return to ‘normal’ — things will not be put right (that maybe they were never right to begin with).
Counter-intuitively, the past year of relative isolation has meant a great divestiture of privacy, a surrender of inner-life to the hive-mind. …
- Something happens to us: we start to crave the game version and not the real thing — the artificial to the natural, the advertisement to the product. Kitsch creeps in, displaces the sacred. Habit creeps in, replaces the unstructured, the free. And it becomes frightening to live, to be otherwise. It becomes impossible.
- Noted: safety rituals performed by depressed Zoomers who talk about being on SSRI’s and wishing they were dead.
- The commons seem to have partially recovered in the past few months, only something seems to be missing. The Covid commons is a Zombie commons. …
Eros and imagination are a single motion of
the same general action — where the whole question of
behavior is swept in and out of view. I cannot
characterize this…
So much in the certain irregularity of the daily
unbecoming that you cultivate
prepare
launch into the near-term future. You are monotone;
I am imperfect. Along the circles of the…
It takes confidence to philosophize, partly because in the process you start to realize whatever liberation narratives — freedom narratives — you’ve shored around yourself like potshards are basically crap…
it all depends on the condition of taste
so you must weigh the violence with your hands
the Gothic inventor does not leave a sign of his interpreation
and makes…
The pathological tendency of the American spirit is to believe anything that makes it feel good.
The American left and the American right are illusions, ephemera, brands that hide a basic sameness in our political and social thought — a basic addiction to shallow, ahistorical reasoning consumed straight out of the corporate media can.
The symptom of a dying soul is its unquenchable desire for stimulation. …
A sense of an ending. The sense that it is ending. A shift in people that yields, if not hope, then the hope for hope. The vaccine, for better or worse, is just the kind of magic talisman people need to go return to the outside world, a little bit. Suddenly, the vaccinated are starting to find all their old behaviors ridiculous, though they won’t admit it — only point it out in others. They’re on the other side of the looking glass. They believe they have made the right sacrifices, performed the right spells; they feel the god Science…
