Skip to main content

tail call

Saying a lot to say nothing really gets a bad rap.  Talking in circles for a while is great even when, ultimately, it's only to prove that there's not much to say in the first place.  Because, really, there's not all that much to say, anyway.  And, the most interesting thing about all this nothing is the only way to come to terms with it is the futile act of attempting to symbolize it.  If we don't do that.  If we fail to go through the motions of attempting and failing to symbolize the something that is actually nothing, we might mistake it for something.  We risk pooling meaning behind shaky, fragile signifiers that we never explore, never peel back the lid to see the emptiness inside.  The idea that we always have to convey some datum, some rational and utilitarian fact with our speech seems noble on the surface, but that's the only place it can ever exist.  It perpetuates shared delusion.  It allows us to put too much faith into the fantasy that we have all this under control.  What if the only real way to cast light on this lack is to dance around it?  From this standpoint, saying a lot to say nothing is one of the most important things we can do.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Automatic Nonsesnsors

Imagine if you and each of your friends wrote random things on index cards all day.  You then made copies of them and whenever you saw your friend or passed by your friend's desk, locker, mailbox, etc. you gave him a copy of the index cards you wrote on that day.  Each friend also gave you a copy of her cards.  After a few exchanges with a few friends, you had a stack of cards to go through, reading each individual card (and they wrote a lot of them).  And, since you wanted people to see your cards, and since trading cards became a social task in itself, you often started trading with just about anybody. Most of the messages were dumb and boring.  In fact, your friends knew that many other people would see these cards, so most were stripped of any kind of controversy or antagonism.  A number of the cards simply said "Here's something I like that I know many other people also like," and then other cards repeated the same thing and had things like, "Yeah!" ...
1 comment
Read more

Nietzsche was a baller

Hansen Writing Ball This morning I switched on my monitor, noticed the LCD screens of my newly built mechanical keyboard--the Ergodox Infinity--go from "breathe" to a greeting with the qmk logo from its freshly flashed firmware, and then my monitor greeted me with its Emacs session from yesterday. Even though it was not my original intent when switching on and plugging in, I found that I couldn't resist continuing to type up the next logical part of a keymap I started working on for a different mechanical keying device: My long-finished but never customized RAMA m10. Ergodox Infinity (center) RAMA m10 (top right) As I finished joyfully typing the rest of LAYER1, on to LAYER2, it made me think of a story I once read about Nietzsche and his typewriter. I remember the striking thing about it, and probably the reason it occurred to me again in this moment, was how much Nietzsche wrote about using the typewriter and how he thought about how our tools and techni...
1 comment
Read more

The End of Story.

This is it.  The end of the movie.  The hero will have to use all of the cliched pithy wisdom that’s been spelled out for him by the older, wiser, less head-strong character who was surprisingly like him in his youth.  Older audience members can relate to both characters, and younger audience members are taxed to consider the wisdom of their elders more often.  All pretty much male-centric; the girl lead who seemed to completely be put off by the male lead has just about completely come around now, after the lull in the middle of the story where the hero’s sensitive side was exposed and he was vulnerable to change.  Finally embracing that change, in the apex of his final challenge, the young hero is compelled to apply the advice that was clearly and consistently broken down for him by the wise old male character and combine it with the sensitivity he’s learned from the female lead.  None of the base-line collateral characters believe in him.  The clear...
2 comments
Read more