I Can't Write and This Is Some Writing Writing About How I Can't Write
I can’t write.
I mean, I’m writing right now. But I can’t write in the way I once could. I think there are a lot of reasons why. When there is shifting sand, I don’t think writing is contained within the bottom rung of Maslow’s hierachy of needs. And writing now has somehow become in my congealed mind a public expression first and foremost. Not something you do for yourself. How on earth did I let that happen? Is there no end to the ways we’ll strip ourselves?
I did once have a romantic notion about writing. I liked to think of it as a vocation, in the oldey timey way vocation was seen as – as something that goes beyond and higher than everyday existence. I still think this is the only way I can write. As an offering to the Whatever. Not focussed on who I’m writing for, not because I wouldn’t want to but because when I do I can’t write. Because you, my darling, have become a giant baleful eye of the internet. Not humans on the other end reading whatever I write but contemptuous, judgmental, time-short but timeworn, pieces of digitalia.
Look what the internet has done to us.
I love the idea of vocation. Divorce it from religious underpinnings that diminish. Think of it as freedom to commune with the highest of whatever this existence is, on the level where we are one. But vocation has not belonged in the world, and so it left my mind.
There is no longer any common aspect we share that goes beyond and higher than everyday existence. Fuck, we don’t even share a common everyday existence. We don’t have an existence now, we are one. We are the products of the environment that’s droned on in the background our entire lives, which for westerners meant a false peace, while the machine found it most beneficial to focus its destruction out onto the brown bodies of countries we can’t spot on maps. Now things have come home, in this next version of a small group of people maintaining their power, and now a portion of western populations understand that they are the enemy while another portion does not (yet) have any need to discover this fact for themselves. And the portion that cannot seem to understand that is not only the people whose function is to do this (the liberal) but also the socialist. So what do you do with that? I don’t fucking know either, but it’s one of the reasons why I think I’m not writing.
It is wild to me that there are people out there in one of our glorious western nations who do not yet understand that they are the product. Human capital, they call us. We are a spreadsheet column.
On a higher level, I am convinced that there is something else going on underneath the machinations of the despotic few of the earth’s topmost animal. I am convinced that everything is undergoing some kind of upgrade. Maybe a quantum leap. Well, I’m as convinced of that as anything I am in these days of being brain-minced. Really, it’s amazing to be convinced of anything at this time. Who could possibly dare to put their eggs into any basket at all, and be convinced of something? Well, except for the copious continual tsunami of people online all day, every single fucking nonstop 24/7 fluorescent day, a swirl of delusion, propaganda, disinfo, misinfo, boring info, info unpegged to anything at all, good info hidden underneath all the other info. Info, info, info. Bits of bytes. Bites. Defences. Everything ultimately coming out of the fact that humans are really very much fucked and maybe it’s not nearly as much our fault as we think it is because we didn’t create the system we’re forced to be in (not even the part where we suddenly started getting copious amounts of cheap shit from China).
But whatever.
I can’t write, and I want to, but I’m in the process of … I was going to say dismantling or dismembering, but those are cold words to talk about the most ill-formed parts of myself, and I refuse to do so. That is to think of myself as info bytes too, as disparate things that mean something but which are generally dead. And what I have discovered in recent years, to my delight, is that these parts of trauma, these embedded energies locked into tissues, is that they respond. You can interact with them as if they are actual people, and they will respond to me, and I can feel it all shifting inside me, these energies flowing from one state to another. I can’t talk about them as bits of information. I’m not sure we can talk about anything at all as bits of information.
The world, this existence, is far more alive than we’ve been taught to believe. And this is one of the things I’m convinced we are growing into.
But that all sounds whack. This is the thing about our modern world. It’s a deathcult through and through. It was before the world’s richest actually convinced everyone they needed to vaccinate five year old children. Way before that. Way, way before that. Who knows how long it all goes back, these puppeteers, pulling our strings, using our poor frailties against us, treating us like shit but creating the very kinds of people who will, for example, talk earnestly on SBS shows about the problems with domestic violence while having zero understanding that the way they are approaching domestic violence is a product of the societal violence that’s been inflicted upon them, so that they can have a spreadsheet column of Very Bad Things That Must Be Stopped without thinking for one second that there are people at the other end of their big fat humanitarian thoughts, actual people. It is absolutely fucking wild how a species has been taught to devalue its own kind. It’s not men who are struggling to subsist that’s the problems, and the world that’s doing that. The fine watchers and audience participators of SBS do not need to worry about these things anymore. They are the new left. The new authoriarian left, as cast adrift from everything that matters as the people they’ve been trained to be so quick to condemn.
But anyway, I said I wasn’t going to focus so much on the dying anymore. I keep getting caught up in it. This is partially why I’m not writing. It’s the focus. Watching it all burn, and getting caught up in it, in my needing to be on the right side of watching it burn. But it’s dying. All of this is dying, right in front of our eyes, spinning like flies at the end of their existence, smashing into windows, zipping, going in 16 directions and ending up as dead on the floor as if they’d just sat there and done nothing, like the people I’ve spent so much time railing against over the past two years.
What a hypocrite. Like everyone else, I’m a hypocrite. I rail against people who, for all I know, have done nothing in the face of absurd public health measures because they are as frozen as I. And I, because I like these days to contrast my frozenness with bouts of rage, in my quest to be born, do exactly as they do, but in different ways.
Anyway, I said I wasn’t going to talk about all of that.
Sometimes I think this is exactly why there’s an “all of that” to begin with: distraction. To distract us. To distract us from being able to properly prepare for what is coming. But those are paranoid thoughts. Those are right wing thoughts. Everyone is a Nazi, except for puppet governments in Ukraine and Dan Andrews.
Everything is a Nazi to the people who have in some ways been more brain-sliced than me. The people who are unable to think now in terms of what they see in front of them, of linked-up things, or beings, of the power inherent in them all, of principles, of ideas. The most dead amongst us can now only think in categories, in the group they appear to have subscribed to with the payment being only everything.
But anyway, I said I wasn’t going to focus on that, didn’t I. Because I need to break away. I have stupendous amounts of time on my hands, and people who don’t would look at me in horror at the amount of time I spend completely misusing it. Masturbating its essence to a frenzy of idleness. Refusing to rest when I need to and calling it idleness. Pushing. Always fucking pushing. Trying to force things which have resisted my fiery ministrations for years. Not knowing how to rest, not knowing how to move forward. This is the modern western subject.
I wonder what will be written about us.
I wish I was there, writing about us, rather than here, being us.
I want to be away, I want to be anywhere than I am, which is stuck. Stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck, stuck. A plethora of time but utterly claustrophobic. Time, but nothing to peg it to. I don’t like time anyway. This stupid version of it, anyway. Far too much chronos, and way, way too little kairos.
There is far too much of one thing and far too little of another. But what can you expect. We are the end of capitalism.
I keep getting caught up in it because it’s caught up in me, right up in my fucking face. The constant digital spreadsheet bureaucrat motherfucker machine cunt left-brain rationalistic deathcult motherfucker dirge. The fury and rage that my one beautiful life is so easy to control, that so many others can do what I apparently can’t, and contempt at them for doing it because it’s their deathparts that allow them to do it and my lifeparts that stop me, but it doesn’t matter if I can’t acclimate myself to the sickness, it doesn’t matter, the sickness crept up on me anyway and mangled and twisted my soul so that I can’t write.
I have written 1200 words as I type about why I can’t write, 1210 now, 1212, 1213, 1214, 1215. They mean absolutely nothing. They are tied to nothing. I don’t want them to have to be tied to anything because this is the whole problem, this pegging of everything to money, and then pegging the money to the digital world, and then there we are, an amazing accomplishment, the biggest lassoing of cattle you ever did see on this planet.
So I can’t write because this burgeoning pusfilled machine is in my fucking face, and it’s in yours, and there’s billions of us and only thousands or hundreds of thousands of them, and that’s why there’s no space, even though there’s so much fucking time I’m drowning in it. There’s no space, because the jury is out yet that we are going to stand up against this monstrous machine, and I don’t want to keep focussing on this but where else do the children of hypervigilance stand, moaning and bemoaning, invisible, pointless, useless, cooked?
But the astrologer woman on YouTube can do it, the one I really like. She can look after herself in the world. She can find her people, her tribe. She can but I can’t. Why can she and why can’t I? Well, I know the answers to those questions. She sits up on her witness perch, watching what’s burning itself up, not getting too caught up in it, secure in her tiny portion of her platform, her audience, her patrons, built upon whatever it is she did previously in her life that I would not be able to do, her previous life that garnered her plaudits and trinkets and baubles and cash. Cash. It’s funny now how meaningless money is, now we know it gets manufactured out of thin air onto spreadsheets, now crypto exists. Maybe we’re actually getting to the point where we realise, on the downward slope, that it never actually meant anything at all until it did. Until they made it solid while they made it more abstract. So many interesting paradoxes about life. Money, the system it set up here, was always all smoke and mirrors, shit that pits us one against the other so the ill-formed can vaunt their shit instead of treating it, value themselves against the devaluation of others. Money, as Charles Eisenstein said, and what countless cultures previous to ours knew, is meant to be a greasing of the wheels, not the wheel itself. Money is meant to be a more convenient method to bartering, a way of being able to not have to actually bring our chicken in order to barter for your newly made pair of handmade shoes.
But now we’ve lost the chicken and now we’ve lost the shoes, and now we’ve lost as a focus the humanity of the people the money was meant to be in service to.
But that’s how it rolls. Heights to depths. Everything wears out. Old wineskins and all that. This whole system is an old wineskin. And as it dessicates, it throws a tanty. But it will die. Like everything should.
The dilemma remains this in the meantime: how do you get the fucking thing out of your face in order to focus on what’s coming in the new wineskins, when the wineskin is dessicating but at the same time it’s made of steel and its tentacles reach into everywhere and pull you up, time and again, and try and tell you that you are far less than you are and that its way is the only way?
Sometimes I think humanity is beginning to come out of its winter sleep and will start knowing again, in its bones, what we actually are beyond what sociopaths tell us we are, and what we can be again. Not abdicating, not freezing, not fighting, not flighting, because now we know all we took as authority over the last 30 years was just the talking heads of a system that’s just really not all that into us.