Theme Week: Responsibility

This is an experimental theme week, which is to say it is slightly more experimental than usual. For a single week only, we are going to try to post on a set schedule, each of us falling into place behind the last like the gears on a jewel-encrusted cog.

If, somehow, we find ourselves taking a liking to this alien conceit of scheduling, we may continue it in the future. That is not a promise.

What does it mean to be responsible, and why are a bunch of young internet hooligans like ourselves trying it on for size?

Well, we aren't, really. I mean, our last theme week was Hedonism Week, and it stretched on for a decade, during which we frequently forgot to write anything at all for years at a time.

So maybe this is responsibility week because it's time for a bit of a change. Maybe this is responsibility week because we've tried nearly everything else. And maybe, just maybe, this is responsibility week because we're out of better ideas, or because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

That is more or less our motto.

But I would hold that we are no more irresponsible than the average citizen of this benighted world. We may take up amusing affectations, don curious clothing and spend far too much time reading, listening to music and thinking, but I find nothing inherently irresponsible in these acts. We are not betraying our country or the world by devoting ourselves to intellectual and aesthetic pursuits. One must appreciate beauty in order to create it.

The day before yesterday I was interviewing protesters in Pittsburgh, when I suddenly found myself the target of interview myself, by a freelancing journalist. Asked to comment, I found myself spewing forth an incredibly optimistic rant about internet communities becoming involved in real-world politics, and how I felt this was a positive sign of the times. The bemused journalist found herself struggling to keep up, and after a moment or two I found myself feeling foolish as I recited back a few of the more sensical sentences to her.

The urge to run my mouth has apparently not subsided. I'll probably be speaking to you again tomorrow about the protest itself. There are pictures to be shown and tales to be told, and I get to look somewhat dashing, or at least silly, in my Goggles of Truth.

Secret Cartography: Simile, you just Metaphor. OR The Author is Still Feverish Hooray!

Tragedy tonight, gentle readers. A man with serious problems has enacted a most terrible scenario; we extend our sympathies.


Onward.

Hi! I am just recovering from four or so days of bed rest and fever dreams. There was one where I was a pokemon trainer, and more than a few where I was the Aragorn-like savior of the world, gearing up for some conflict that I envisioned only as a conflict between bright orange and a sort of sea blue shade, surging against each other. A vision that I realized shortly after looked more and more like a map. I'm no prophet, and I realized that this was because I was hunched over (like a sick kitten!) during lunch the day before, figuring out a 50 States puzzle from my youth.

So I've at least had cartography on the mind, and if not of the secret kind, then the insane dream-logic kind. And that's just as good! I mean, cartography itself is mostly a function of metaphor, as we base our understanding of the world upon relating two things that are not very similar. The whole idea of Red and Blue states is entirely fictive, a sickening reduction of thousands of human lives into a single simplified concept, but still an effective way of communicating the idea of difference. The strange part with the dream of Blue vs. Orange, then, was that they didn't really relate to anything - they were just some damn colors. But I still sensed conflict, so it's entirely possible they were just a metaphor for their own action. Does that make sense? It doesn't have to! Hooray for being sick!

Similar to dreams, language and thought processes are extensions of metaphor. On this Valentine's day, consider the choruses of people claiming that two people in love are travelers, or, Lockhorn like, one is a Ball and Chain on the other. They also say (Who says this? God, what's going on? Who are you people?) the limit of a man's world is his vocabulary, with obvious reason; as a person learns more ways to express themselves, they see that few things are cut and dry. Their map of the world suddenly grows new colors that they didn't even know existed. For example, they can recognize Schadenfreude in Amy Winehouse or Britney Spears or even whenever anti-war activists vote for John McCain. Previously, these sensations were just kinda funny! There's a whole new high-falutin' world out there of words (many of them German) to express guilty enjoyment. Red and Blue and Orange are allowed to expand in our understanding into Purple and Burnt Sienna and Off-White and Blue Green - there are now a million ways to reduce individuals to blank representations. Again, the symbols that we use to understand things soon become more and more accurate, akin to creating a map so large and accurate that it's a faithful physical reconstruction of that which it depicts.

Speaking of that. It can be argued that maps are artificial impositions, but doesn't the world, after all, only really exist as long as we agree upon it? The foundation of knowledge is the communication of facts, and understanding these facts relies upon metaphor, the application of what we already know to what we don't. Minnesota is not an absolute truth, after all. So it is with the internet philistines - their world is shrunken, and I come off sounding like I'm speaking a justifiably foreign language when I say something like "I thought their representation was unique" instead of "lol" and then nothing for five minutes (presumably because I was rolling around on the floor). Therein lies the dark side of this understanding - the above mentioned Red vs. Blue struggle, where one side opposes it's opposite so completely they cannot tolerate each other due to an inability to even talk to each other, as each side ends up sounding like an alien to the other. Each side of an argument may know objectively what the words Gun and Control mean in relation to each other, but the term together carries so much baggage with it depending upon your red or blue experience that good communication is impossible. The meaningless quibbles of our time (Obama vs. Hilary, Evil White Guy 1 vs. Evil White Guy 2, Creationism vs. Science as a whole... wait, maybe not so pointless, that last one) are more a function of our enthusiasm towards understanding things in simplistic terms - a sort of Go Fight Win Ra Ra Ra for whatever cause is closest to our hearts, setting it up in a simple adversarial opposition with, well, whatever it is not. Who cares that we can't talk, let's fight about it!

Finally, there's no way to approach the issue with right or wrong, true or false, because these, too, are just metaphors. You can't escape an issue by relying upon it (like what I'm doing now!) to provide it's own end, even though you can eventually hope that a representation of Object A slowly becomes so accurate that is almost becomes Object A in itself. So it is with maps - the physicality of places is secondary to the thoughts that we have about them in our understanding, and the only things that can really be mapped out are enthusiasm and fandom and the strange motivation that lies in the logic of dreams and language, because these, ultimately, are the only things that we can hope to give a flying fuck about. Seriously, fuck that hill, let's get into a fight about it.

(OMG RAMBLING D-)

Edit: Am I encouraging XKCD-ish happy nihilism? You make the call!

Antony and Cleopatra, and the brain.

My dear friends of the internet,

If I may introduce myself, my name is Jack Grey. I'm ever so slightly overeducated, a fishmonger, a drinker of fine teas, and a magician. I'm tattooed and hermaphroditic.

Favourite authors include Virginia Woolf, John Ruskin, and Emily Post. (I thought it best that you were forewarned.) I think that trying to choose one's favourite Shakespearean play is a bit like trying to select one's most useful internal organ.

I'm between world travels at the moment. I'm drawn to antiques, to decadent cultures, to historical moments at which savage civilisations met strange natives.

But I suppose it's best to be on with it. I've heard that we're summoning ghosts.

I can, I think, safely state that we modern Americans are quite madly in love with the Victorians. We adore their fading photographs, their marvellously purple phrases, their stockings, the devastatingly straight lines of their suits, their conflicting romantic notions: prudish and prurient, secretive and enduring. We emulate their wallpapers, and, if I may be allowed to speak for all of us, we miss their manners. Desperately.

I would argue that this love affair with an epoch is well timed. Our empire is crumbling. It is no surprise that we'd look longingly to the culture of the fallen empire that we remember best. Perhaps we want to feel ourselves surrounded by their ghosts. We want to believe that we, too, will be remembered fondly by absurdly dressed Japanese teenagers in some glowing future. Or we want to learn to die gracefully. Or we really do just love the wallpaper.

Besides sharing in the collective obsession with the Victorians, I also like taxidermy a great deal. They were fond of the art, in fact.

They, I think, were doing it in conquest. When they were gaining their empire, they were sailing to strange lands, finding beautiful, naked creatures they didn't understand in the least, and animals of which they'd never dreamed, even in the mythologies of the empires that they themselves remembered fondly. The Pre-Raphealites, for example, were quite fond of the wombat, and there is the famous story of the first taxidermic platypus sent back to Britain: the receiver responded that it was a terrible joke and a hideous fake, that, clearly, no such beast could exist.

Taxidermy is enjoying a small revival, if only in my own mind. We, however, are not trying to catalogue dark continents, or to prove our masculinity or our skill with an elephant gun. We're clutching, once more, at ghosts. As our supremacy fades, we're forced to confront the fact that we've taken more than we ought. We've created quite the ecological mess, and, as a few monumentally populous nations in the East begin their own Industrial Revolutions that, we're a bit shocked to discover, we cannot stop, we note that we aren't dying alone.

I don't know about you, but I want an elegantly mounted gazelle head. I want gorgeous stuffed peacocks, taxidermic piranhas, gorilla skulls, and a stuffed crocodile, which I'll display in my study, so that my friends will understand instantly that I'm a magician of great skill. And I want them because, I'm afraid, their living counterparts may not be long for this world. The Victorians stole these creatures away from their native lands in order to prove that they were real. I'm afraid that we may need to begin preserving them for the same reason.

Yours always,

Jack

Of Sailing Ships and Ceiling Wax, of Cabbages and Kings

Blogger informs me that this post is, internally at least, the one hundredth post to exist on this site. This includes any number of drafts that were never posted, sad forgotten creatures unlikely to ever see the light of day or to serve any purpose except to make me feel like we might have accomplished something here.

To wit: in the seven months (really?) and two days (really really?) this website has existed, we have written on it. Not as much as we should have (I am exceptionally guilty) or, perhaps, as well as we might have (there is ever room for improvement), but we have written.

And we will continue to do so as we pass this largely nonexistent milestone. We are living, as the chinese curse goes, in interesting times. In order that we might survive, I think it is best that we practice being interesting people.

I didn't really have a vision when I came up with the idea for this website, beyond perhaps getting my friends and I to write things that we enjoyed and maybe, one day, being able to buy a pitcher of beer at the Penny Bar with strange coins plucked from the aether. I still feel much the same day: we are here to write and have fun, and perhaps even to better ourselves or create some content worth consuming, if we are capable of such.

In any case, not-quite-nonexistent audience: thank you very much for joining us. Next time I update, I'll try to bring some actual content with me. Would you prefer the update about One Piece I promised you a millenia ago, or would you like to hear about how I want a t-shirt declaring my allegiance to Mike Gravel in the 2012 election?

I figure it will be the last election, coming at the very end of the world. We might as well get it right for once.

Alternately, we could elect him the second Emperor of America. Emperor Norton I has gone far too long without a successor.

I suppose I answered my own question there a little. Still, if you're out there, in the dark, with a keyboard and a working internet connection, consider dropping a comment here and telling me what you would like to hear more about: politics or nerdery.