Piano-forte, Pathos of Writing, Seeing Colors, Didion, Pondering
Advent Dispatch
Greetings, Travellers!
Let’s start what might be the last Signal of the year with a bit of foreboding:
Not about to crash. Not literally. It’s a metaphor! Maybe.
Reef
Speaking of wrecks, and the Tempest, maybe, and Bermuda discovered through shipwreck, which I’ve written about elsewhere. Stunning, but hard to photograph without slipping into cliche. The idea here was to discipline with geometry. As always, best viewed on Substack on a big screen, not on email or on a phone. Turn up the light. Screens luminesce, which is sometimes just fantastic. The fish were beautiful. I did not try to photograph them.
Communication in our digitized cultural spaces, certainly including journalism, social media, and Substack, tends to be assertive. Hence the plethora of hot takes: “Here is how I – a very smart person – understand this event, and how you should think about it, too.” To be charitable, humans are meaning-making, meaning-speaking, meaning-sharing, creatures. Few people are so religious, indeed evangelical, as the committed atheist, as has been oft-noted. Assertive. Nonetheless, apart from harsh words over wine, I’m not going to avail myself of the opportunity to talk about U.S. health care or even the freedom of the deed, despite the fact that I too frequent midtown Hiltons, veritable shooting galleries, and have thoughts you really should know. J
With so many people asserting so much, our social environment is very loud, and worse, monotonic. The great advance of the piano forte, literally “soft loud,” what we now call simply a “piano,” was that volume could be modulated, notes could be phrased. What I’m trying to do here, especially with the pictures, is piano. Somebody close to me suggested I do a Signal with only pictures. That would be cool, but I’m a writer, and not ready yet. And pictures raise some of the same problems text does. That said, the last few weeks have been visually rich, so this Signal has a lot of images.
Lizard on a pale yellow wall, darkening with the setting sun. Color.
Staying charitable, through the din, I’ve learned a lot. “Learned” is not quite the right word. It’s odd to realize now, but in my young strength I unconsciously presumed I would write everything, that is, set the world or at least my imagination to rights. Not only would I understand, I would fix, on the page at least. By the time I died it would all make sense? Sounds ridiculous in the abstract, but there you are. Wisława Szymborska has a wonderful, deeply pathetic, poem about such minds in the world: The Joy of Writing. It’s short, and excerpting seemed wrong, so I won’t quote. Click, and thank me later.
Later I read a book, Douglas Holmes’s Integral Europe. Here was something that I needed said, but not by me, because Doug had said it already. (Doug has since become a friend and interlocutor.) It was liberating, this freedom from the compulsion to write. And I often have this feeling on Substack, if less intensely: many people are writing very well about things that concern me, especially the cultural consequences of technology. Perhaps I could improve a bit, here and there, but much of it meets my need to see the world steadier, at least for a while.
Contemporary church parking lot. Some very Joan Didion vibe here, perhaps due to the wet asphalt?
Our need for a world, to stop the nauseating and fearsome rocking of our little ships, informs not just writing, expressing, but also reading, and receiving more generally. This is the great power and temptation of the “choices” offered by digital media: the chance to fashion our worlds as reflections upon our own images of ourselves. (We call it “curating”!) Capitalism as ideology can articulate no other way, even though capitalism as practiced does other things entirely, generally coercive.
To that point, I spent a few days with computer scientists talking about neurosymbolic AI (think ChatGPT plus logic). I learned a lot. Maybe I have something to say, but what, how, and for whom, is unclear today. I’ll sit with it.
Tropical spookiness. Speaking of Didion. The Last Thing He Wanted, fantastic title, also Salvador and Miami. No doubt inoccuous, it always is. But every now and then global force projection manifests itself in an odd place, and a security thinker . . . ponders.
The U.S. election still reverberates, and I’ve mused about how hard it is to think, much less write, when everyone knows the truth already. This by way of excuse, maybe, for my own efforts, which were not as successful as I foolishly had hoped. Bad readers! As always. That too can wait, maybe for the inauguration, round about my 60th birthday.
Something similar happens with photography. Everything beautiful or otherwise significant has already been photographed, you’ve seen the photographs, and so is hard to see live, and images pass unnoticed, unless they are really loud, visually assertive, like coffee table books or travel posters of [the Caribbean] or, luridly, websites. Or maybe done in black and white, so you know to pay attention. Walter Benjamin famously worried that “mechanical reproduction” would degrade works of real art. Maybe, although we still privilege originals, sometimes with good reason, especially in painting. A hundred years on, the greater problem with digital media seems to be that the plethora of images dulls the eye, as familiar arguments blunt thought, make it seem superfluous. Easier to rehearse what we already expect, to see the familiar again, and only superficially. Not exactly the disenchantment said to characterize the modern, more the clouding of the water in which we swim, the blurring and softening of our sight.
Connected neighborhood. Still sort of Didion, but something else is at work.
Chris Arnade The Meaning of, and In, McDonalds. Arnade has been walking all over the world, and writing about it. But this may be the strongest piece I’ve read from him, or maybe just the one a certain cut of intellectual needs to hear most. And, fwiw, I think he’s quite right. We do make meaning, even in unpromising places.
Aaron Lake Smith, Wine Dark America: Orlando Is Coming for Us All, a former punk vagabond and very fine writer muses on late Kerouac and the nature of U.S. patriotism. And suburbia. Brilliant.
Realizing this, what is worth me writing, now, apart from the open letters and odd distributions that comprise Intermittent Signal? Worth photographing? So, while no Virgin, I am “pondering in my heart,” that is, I’m waiting for something to emerge from amongst dreams, thoughts, and happenstance.
In the northern hemisphere, the farther north the more so, this is a season of dwindling light. Friends and families draw in, and some await the mystery of the incarnation, Christmas. This is a time of waiting, and of looking and listening, appreciating, and if it arrives, thought. Spring, with its labors, will be upon most of us in due course.
The platform reports that Intermittent Signal has subscribers in some 79 countries. I’m proud of that, hope it is true. Regardless, gentle reader, in whatever land you may find yourself, and however you may celebrate, may your holidays be bright.
-- David A. Westbrook
Water of Life, as John has it. Merry Christmas.