When we cross through portals, we often lose memory of the things which came before. We pass through a doorway and immediately forget why we walked into the room. That is because we are context-jumping. We have left behind all the things that help us remember, and that keep us grounded in a state of self, a state of mind, a state of doing and desiring.
Probably still the best thing I've ever written, so I'm gonna post.
Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday,
Who could hang a name on you,
When you change with every new day?
The Final Frontier
Sybok stands in front of a great wooden piloting wheel, against a great window of stars, and invokes Columbus, the history of navigation, the expansion of human experience—all the barriers that turned out to be purely mental, all the limitations men put on themselves, and how much greater they might be, if they set aside fear.
When I originally set out to write this review, I was going to open with something like “obviously we all know that medieval and early modern Europeans put rushes on their floors, but what you may not know…” before it occurred to me that I should probably check whether that was actually true. So, like you do, I asked my friends, and since I got answers ranging from “yes of course, everyone knows that” to “what’s a rush?” I suppose I should first inform you that 1) a rush is an aquatic plant of the genus Juncus, sort of like a reed or a sedge, and 2) medieval and early modern Europeans put rushes on their floors. The Anglo-Norman word junchiere²is first attested in 1170 and means “rush-strewn floor,” and there are records of rush purchases, payment for rush-strewers, and regulations on rush-selling (you have to bundle them before you bring them to the London wharfside for sale) throughout the period. They even appear in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, where Petruchio’s servant checks on the preparations for his master’s wedding by asking, “Is supper ready, the house trimm'd, rushes strew'd, cobwebs swept…?” But imagine trying to walk across a floor covered in vegetable matter in the sorts of long gowns that all Tudor-era women (and many men!)³ wore; it would get caught up in the trailing fabric, wouldn’t it? And indeed, this is what happened with Goodman’s first experiment with strewing loose rushes, but she soon found that they performed very well when laid in bundles. At two inches thick, they form a consolidated layer and do not move around underfoot; at six inches thick, the floor is “genuinely comfortable to sleep on” (and the floor was of course where many people slept in the days before coal reshaped English life).
—Mr. & Mrs. Smith, "How to be a Tudor"
we talk about stephen maturin self surgery all the time but the specific bit of that that always fucked me up the most is where jack apparently could literally see his heart beating there while he did it
no but LITERALLY. the way that surgery & intimacy are overlayed here is so much. like the fact that he's been shot in the chest in a duel over a woman who's broken his heart & he's so intensely private that he does his own surgery to dig the bullet out rather than have anyone else touch him like that -- Literally down to the heart, and the fact that jack is there & sees all this. and sees his actual physical (metaphorical) heart exposed like that... and then the way he personally sits with him through the whole fever that results so no one else will hear when he says secrets in his sleep. it's so.
also like
…siphoning the colored language off the farms and the streets…
On conflict theory
Basically, the first serious attempt at creating a scientific field of archaeology was done by 19th century Germans, and they looked around and dug some stuff up and concluded that the prehistoric world looked like the world of Conan the Barbarian: lots of “population replacement,” which is a euphemism for genocide and/or systematic slavery and mass rape. This 19th century German theory then became popular with some 20th century Germans who... uh... made the whole thing fall out of fashion by trying to put it into practice. After those 20th century Germans were squashed, any ideas they were even tangentially associated with them became very unfashionable, and so there was a scientific revolution in archaeology! I'm sure this was just crazy timing, and actually everybody rationally sat down and reexamined the evidence and came to the conclusion that the disgraced theory was wrong (lol, lmao). Whatever the case, the new view was that the prehistoric world was incredibly peaceful, and everybody was peacefully trading with one another, and this thing where sometimes in a geological stratum one kind of house totally disappears and is replaced by a different kind of house is just that everybody decided at once that the other kind of house was cooler. The high-water mark of this revisionist paradigm even had people saying that the Vikings were mostly peaceful traders who sailed around respecting the non-aggression principle. And then people started sequencing ancient DNA and...it turns out the bad old 19th century Germans were correct about pretty much everything. The genetic record is one of whole peoples frequently disappearing or, even more commonly, all of the men disappearing and other men carrying off the dead men's female relatives. There are some exceptions to this, but by and large the old theory wins.
from Mr & Mrs Smith, cf Margulis vs Dawkins, Graeber vs Hobbes, and critiques of Randall Collins's (via Weber) conflict theory
ctd:
I used to have a Bulgarian coworker, and I asked him one day how things were going in Bulgaria. He replied in that morose Slavic way with a long, sad disquisition about how the Bulgarian race was in its twilight, their land was being colonized by others, their sons and daughters flying off to strange lands and mixing their blood with that of alien peoples. I felt awkward at this point, and stammered something about that being very sad, at which point he came alive and declared: “it is not sad, it is not special, it is the Way Of The World.” He then launched into a lecture about how the Bulgarians weren't even native to their land, but had been bribed into moving there by the Byzantines who used them as a blunt instrument to exterminate some other unruly tribes that were causing them trouble. “History is all the same,” he concluded, “we invaded and took their land, and now others invade us and take our land, it is the Way Of The World.”
On conflict theory
Basically, the first serious attempt at creating a scientific field of archaeology was done by 19th century Germans, and they looked around and dug some stuff up and concluded that the prehistoric world looked like the world of Conan the Barbarian: lots of “population replacement,” which is a euphemism for genocide and/or systematic slavery and mass rape. This 19th century German theory then became popular with some 20th century Germans who... uh... made the whole thing fall out of fashion by trying to put it into practice. After those 20th century Germans were squashed, any ideas they were even tangentially associated with them became very unfashionable, and so there was a scientific revolution in archaeology! I'm sure this was just crazy timing, and actually everybody rationally sat down and reexamined the evidence and came to the conclusion that the disgraced theory was wrong (lol, lmao). Whatever the case, the new view was that the prehistoric world was incredibly peaceful, and everybody was peacefully trading with one another, and this thing where sometimes in a geological stratum one kind of house totally disappears and is replaced by a different kind of house is just that everybody decided at once that the other kind of house was cooler. The high-water mark of this revisionist paradigm even had people saying that the Vikings were mostly peaceful traders who sailed around respecting the non-aggression principle. And then people started sequencing ancient DNA and...it turns out the bad old 19th century Germans were correct about pretty much everything. The genetic record is one of whole peoples frequently disappearing or, even more commonly, all of the men disappearing and other men carrying off the dead men's female relatives. There are some exceptions to this, but by and large the old theory wins.
from Mr & Mrs Smith, cf Margulis vs Dawkins, Graeber vs Hobbes, and critiques of Randall Collins's (via Weber) conflict theory
The power of precedent is enormous: claiming unique knowledge as to an action's normality or abnormality is a super power.
You swore you’d never fall. You swore you’d do it different. You wanted nothing less than what you believed was possible: to rise to every occasion; to be your best self all the time. What you didn’t count on was just how all-the-time it was, the way the occasions bled into each other and layered, so that failures and shortfalls spilled into the future. You wanted to sustain enchanted vision, the meaning-laden view that confers wisdom, but what you didn’t reckon on was how constant the interruptions, disruptions, and crises of faith would be. How constant the impositions of alternate worldviews; how powerful the accumulation of inertia, of habit, of nature and nurture. The debts just keep racking, the regrets never really fade, and the law of compound interest slowly crushes you. One last gig, one last show, one last fight—a way to set things right. The search for deus ex machina, the world’s final account-balancer.
a. molotkow on late-spring crushes & songs of summer
In a way, the song of summer holds a longing that holds a longing. The desire for something to look forward to—for life, for renewal—tends to coalesce in a person. It often ignites a longing for romance, or vice versa (though not always romantic longing; the prospect of a new friend can hold the same anticipatory charge). For me, late spring is crush season. I become particularly susceptible. When I was younger, to crush on someone was to want them. If we got together, I thought, the longing would be satisfied; the future would arrive. We all know the longing is never satisfied. It’s seasonal. I thought this restlessness would diminish with age, or find a new main repository, but it hasn’t exactly. Sometimes that makes me anxious, in predictable ways. But if desire is here to stay, I have to keep negotiating my relationship to desire—to hold it lightly, to let it be. Crushes, like summer hits, are both specific and not. There’s something about this person; they just do it for you. But something has also attached to them—a general lust for connection, which is what the “song of summer” is really about, beyond the hype cycle, beyond the content opportunity. You might hate the Billboard number one this year, but there is going to be a song you’ll want to sing with strangers at the bar, or dance to on the lawn of a public park, one that promises nothing but holds every possibility, and the restless need for others.
"It's called drifting. The cars are lighter, the tires are slick. When you drift, if you ain't outta control, you ain't in control."
Desire is a hearth that warms us with meaning, and attaches us to the world, and guides our development. There is a relativism to desiring—whatever gets you going, whatever gets you off—but within creative constraints. A desire, presumably, should not cause its host to crash & burn, if only because a certain persistence or stability or survival of the host is required for the production of further desire.
The most important aspect of a desire would appear to be not intrinsic but relational, its fitness within a system of desiring—yours, others'. A social group where each member's desires, and their pursuit, only stymied each other, would ultimately add up to nothing. And the same is true with the individual. Presumably, one wishes to cultivate compatible—complementary, even—repertoires of desires, and across long and short tie horizons, so as to become a coherent person, site of great emergences, rather than to be constantly undercutting Mr. Tomorrow, while handicapped by Mr. Yesterday.
It is the same with coordination practices—norms, language, etiquette—because it is in all behavior, in a system of behaving organisms, and therefore characteristic of ecology generally. It is arbitrary whether you drive on the left or right side of the road, and imperative that everyone chooses complementary sides. It is the same with desiring. Desires, being "genetic" templates for actions, are always implicated by proxy, by contribution in the causal flow of which we all partake. All or most of culture services this coordinating function, which is why it is important we use words similarly, and share systems of legal codes.
These days it is fashionable to remark, as with surprise or insight, that desire might contradict our moral aspirations, or the political abstractions we pay lip service to. Frequently the analysis of is sexual desire, and queer sexual desire specifically. (Heterosexual desire is assumed problematic from the get-go.) The initial shock is that one's own revolutionary body might in fact be complicit in society's power structures, a shock exacerbated by its contrast with the implicit cultural belief that the pursuit of one's desires is in itself the highest moral imperative, an intrinsically revolutionary act.
Yet neither this specific contradiction, nor the general case, would come as a surprise to our ancestors, who recognized that the problem of desire and the problem of morality are the same problem: the problem of coordinating action, so as to add up to something—as individual or society.