THIRTY-FIVE SUMMERS IN THE MINESHAFT

THIS IS AN ESSAY/BLOG POST/WORDS ON A SCREEN

THIRTY-FIVE SUMMERS

Last night I watched the movie Rumble Fish with my dad.  It’s good, worth checking out if you’re interested, but that’s not what this essay/blog post/words on a screen is about.  At one point in the film, a minor character played by Tom Waits muses on time (one of the topics in the movie is the folly of youth) and he uses the phrase “thirty-five Summers.”  I jolted up to write that down (my dad was unphased).  There was something to the phrase, it’s said in the same section the word “years” is used to refer to time and perhaps this juxtaposition is what jolted me.  Thirty-five Summers versus thirty-five years.  The phrases technically mean the same thing but they absolutely do not.  One of these phrases lives, you can feel its weight; Summers are real.  What the fuck is a year?¹

This is the note I wrote

Fuck you

I’m kinda retarded.  I’m big into big-picture type thinking–paradigms, frameworks–the details are almost irrelevant and besides they’re an emergent property of the framework, the underlying structure, so if you figure that out then you can predict how the details will manifest (I studied physics in university and now I’m much more interested in myth & religion.  lol.  Like I said, I’m kinda retarded.)  Consider the industrial age, or, more fundamentally, consider men as living through ages.  (Hesiod & Ovid are so stoked to be eternally recurring, they are absolutely loving their fates being referenced by a retard.)  That’s the initial frame.  There are ages.  For the most part I accept this frame (would be happy to smash it to pieces) and here in the West that’s how we’re taught in public schools.  The Information Age supplanted the Industrial Age supplanted the Agricultural Age supplanted the Pastoral Age. (Whig history much? Don’t worry, when you zoom out enough the line of “progress” is actually a section of an ouroboros.) And within this frame, in public schools at least (it’s the experience I got), the Industrial Age began in England around the year 1760. For years I carried this understanding with me; the Industrial Age was a few hundred years old and we were transitioning (coping, seething and dilating all the way) to some kind of a different Age right now as we lived and breathed. Then (a couple Summers ago) I read Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford. My frame got a new prescription.

Actual picture of Lewis Mumford communicating with me (and now you)

Mumford says ACKCHYUALLY the Industrial Age began with the invention of the clock. (I am HEAVILY paraphrasing and simplifying. Mumford defines three phases in the development of technology and he’s more talking about Modernity itself (his phases are certainly more alive and Real than the totally denatured and disembodied Industrial and Agricultural Ages etc., to dissect something you’ve gotta kill it (don’t get me started on words themselves)) but I’m the retard writing this shit, go cry somewhere else.) Something inside me stirred, the frame shifted to a lower energy state, the world became clearer.

I told you.

But what about second breakfast?

Thirty-five Summers. I’ll be honest with you guys, just hearing those words almost made me cry. How far we’ve fallen was momentarily crystallized in Tom Wait’s gravelly voice; Eternity is gone and we fucking killed her. And if you’re here online, then you are not going to escape. It’s over. (Or is it endless?) (An aside—I have the idea for a short story (I already wrote the outline) about a guy who streams 24/7 and he just tells people to go outside the whole time.) Industrial modernity was, to me, even in my previous 1760’s-steam-engine-as-first-mover paradigm, obviously fucked up, and then, it turns out, it’s even more fucked up. The clock has infected our blood, it’s inside everything, even you. (Moments when I am least aware of time are during focused artistic work, playing, laughing, and fucking, these are legitimately Holy moments. I seriously think play is the highest virtue (war is a type of playing, not the point of this essay/blog post/words on a screen but I am not fucking around, bro)). Secular Modernity, the Industrial Age, the Iron Age, Kali Yuga, State-Enforced Homosexuality, whatever you want to call it, is beholden to the clock. Even more fundamentally, I think it’s abstraction, in general—the clock is abstraction manifest.² Thirty-five Summers versus thirty-five years.

this is a drawing I made called SALUS POPULI SUPREMA LEX ESTO, feels related

IN THE MINESHAFT

Mumford calls the mine “the first completely inorganic environment to be created and lived in by men.”

I fucking told you.

Do you see where I’m going with this? You’re in the mineshaft right now.³ Just try to escape! Maybe you will—in which case I guess we’ll never know cuz we’re here in the fucking mineshaft. We killed Eternity with the clock and we killed the World with the computer. (But maybe you can just go down in the virtual mine sometimes and find jewels, maybe the only way out is through, maybe your lineage will evolve new ways to navigate the darkness of the mine as it adapts to its environment.)

MAN AND ANT

Perhaps this is the nature of man? To build a virtual environment based on his abstractions of the world? Maybe that’s what god⁴ did to create our world? In which case we have truly been made in his image, no? I guess my point with that sort of question (I think about it all the time tbh) is that I can’t help but wonder if what seems the most inorganic and unnatural, the most deracinated and disembodied and, dare I say, demonic (holy?⁵)—the computer and the clock, perhaps they are as natural to (Faustian) Man as the anthill to the ant? (Does (Faustian) Man himself not seem unnatural compared to everything else? Another point for the Demiurge.) Part of what spawns this thinking is abstract thinking itself—if that’s the problem then I don’t think I can abstract my way into some proper relationship with technology.⁶ And you can’t design a religion. Put another way: what is the difference between a loincloth and a computer?⁷ In Michael Lindsey’s essay in the previous link he says “technical modernity itself is the bloody problem” and when I read that I agreed completely (I said “based” out loud.) A problem, however, is that if technical modernity (the clock begetting the computer) is the emergent result of abstract thinking itself and abstract thinking is natural to (Faustian) Man in the same way building an anthill is natural to an ant, then there is no way out of the mineshaft.⁸

CHICKEN WONDERS ABOUT THE EGG IN THE FRACTAL MINESHAFT

I don’t have answers. And answers have this funny way of making more questions. As I’ve been writing this essay/blog post/words on your screen I had the revelation that the mineshaft of the computer might be inside the mineshaft of the world. An unnatural environment made in an unnatural environment where children play in an unnatural environment to make an unnatural environment. Is abstraction a positive feedback loop? A fractal building complexity through basic self-similarity that we observe in many complex systems in nature? In which case, what could be more natural? I dunno, man. Here’s a song I’ve been listening to lately.

1. Oh it’s the amount of time it takes the Earth to make one revolution around the sun? Yeah I totally feel that. Fuck you.

2. I’m pretty sure I’m (in my tard style way) reiterating the thesis of The Master and His Emissary (I haven’t read it but I’ve got an idea from some of my favorite Substack chuds). Too much left-brain thinking and systematizing, too much Reddit Man. Not enough right-brain vibing, not enough Colonel Kurtz. Too much Apollo, not enough Dionysus. Maybe Aristotle was onto something.

3. I just came

4. Not the big G

5.

6

Or can I?

7. I told you I’m retarded

8. Or is there?