If you cannot be someone to another — if you cannot maintain a reliable self — if you cannot exchange promises and obligations with others — if you only know how to live in parallel spectatorship with others, each an audience of the others — you will passively seek containing circumstances that prevent dissipation.

You will drift along, blown from haunt to haunt, until you drift into a windless space that no longer transports you, where you will settle into the life of a bottled ghost.

Perhaps you will settle in a monastery. Perhaps in a cubicle. Perhaps in some domestic limbo. Perhaps in an identity.

You’ll live a life of awaiting, vaguely anticipating a life to come that never comes, but which provides a semblance of stability to a wisp of being with no integrity or structure of its own.

Psychologists are priests of the universal faith. If you have fallen out of communion with conventional wisdom, a psychologist can help you repair the breach and rejoin society as a participating member.

A few things I love to do that make me feel connected with the world beyond my skullspace.

• Discussion salons
• Blind contour drawings
• Co-marveling at
  • Music
  • Paintings / graphic designs
  • Oolong tea
  • Scotch
  • Crafts (like gundam building)

I’ve also gotten this from cycling, especially mountain biking.

Alienation is a loss of intuitive contact and participation in some aspect of reality. Total alienation is rare, but partial alienation is nearly universal. Wherever alienation occurs, things begin to feel unreal and we, ourselves, feel less real. It requires effort to overcome alienation, especially in conditions of mass societal alienation.

I am designing a half-day disalienation event. I would want a mix of generations and worldviews in the room.

A rough agenda.

• 20 minute meditation or prayer session to quiet ourselves down and prime ourselves to pay attention.

• 30-45 minutes of gongfu tea. We will focus on noticing the sights, sounds, smell and taste of the tea, speaking only to point out subtler features of the experience so others can notice them with us.

• 90 minutes of salon, on some experience-resonant topic. “Acquired tastes” might be a good one.

• 60 minutes of blind contour drawing. We’ll refrain from commenting on or even looking at one another’s drawings. The purpose of the activity is the activity itself, not the output.

• 90 minutes of salon, over some simple lunch, on some topic connected with awareness shifts. “Noticing” or “absorption” or “craft” are possibilities.

• 30 minutes of scotch tasting. We’ll each slow sip one dram of scotch. We will share what we smell, taste and see, and try to notice what others are noticing.

That would be an amazing day.

I might want to experiment with doing gatherings in multiple cities. A friend in Chicago expressed interest in hosting one. We were thinking we could do in-person gatherings on Saturday, then have a Zoom call the next day for participants in different cities to connect and reflect.

New coinage: Lalalalightenment. Honestly, I don’t even think it needs a definition. That’s how good it is.

After I finish Lee Braver’s A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism, I think I am going to tackle The Colonization of Monographs: Unwieldy Entitlements, Performative Punctuation and Presentation of the Intellectual Self in Scholarly Spaces.

Three words reliably deflate my heart when I hear and read them: 1) narrative, 2) practice, 3) performative. I’ve caught myself groaning.

I am removing these words entirely from casual speech, but keeping some of them for very specific technical uses.

Where there were “narratives” there will be stories or ideologies. There is no reason to use that word ever again. It is irretrievably ruined by association with this idiotic moment in history.

“Practice” will be replaced by methods, tools, or other less fancy-pants terms. I’m ashamed of my own overuse of this word. I will make it up to you, somehow. The only place I plan to use it now is when I discuss “praxis”, which I still consider an excellent word, provided you use it when you aren’t being an asshole, a qualification that will reduce use of the word to almost, but not quite, zero.

“Performative” will be strictly limited to two technical senses, the only permissible uses for this rotten-ass word. First, when a speech act demonstrates or implies a belief which potentially contradicts the content of the speech. (For example, the famous paradox “This sentence is a lie.” The act of assertion implies conveyance of truth, while the content of the assertion denies that what is conveyed is true. Or saying “You do not exist.” The act of addressing you presupposes your existence, while the content claims your nonexistence.)

The other technical meaning of “performative” is where the essence of some thing is its performance. The most famous use of this word comes from Judith Butler who argued that gender is performative — that is, that the essence of womanhood or manhood is the performing of these gender roles, as opposed to the expression of some biological condition.

But the use of “performative” to mean merely-acted is entirely pointless when we have simpler and more beautiful words like “phony”, “ostentatious”, “insincere” or “bullshitty”. Ironically, saying “performative” seems performative, in the sense I claimed I was retiring. See, in that last statement I just performatively contradicted my resolution to stop using performative, but in this present sentence I am not. Shut up, self. You’re boring everyone, including yourself.

*

I’m listening to Brett Easton Ellis’s latest novel The Shards.

It is an absorbing story but Ellis’s writing is annoying.

Now I will gripe. I will limit my gripes to three, because this angry blog post was brought to you by the number three.

Gripe 1: The constant music references are cheap and carry too much weight. In some random places he attempts to convey fresh novelty of certain bands who now seem banally ancient (“a band called the Stray Cats”). But most of the time he drops the names of bands and songs as spray-on atmosphere.

Gripe 2: Ellis is a hamfisted abuser of adverbs. One memorably dumb example (so dumb I actually, physically slapped my own forehead in the parking lot of Kroger) was when he had hippie cult members “eagerly” ringing doorbells while casing neighborhoods. Huh? What does an eager doorbell ring look like? C’mon, Brett. Don’t write when you’re stoned. It shows. I’m not motivated enough to dig up more examples of misguided adverbs. I have no work ethic. You go do it. It’ll only take two or three pages, and you’ll have dozens. Had Ellis’s editor removed every adverb, even the rare well-chosen ones, it would have been an improvement. Maybe his editor was stoned, too. This book could be an exhibit in a case against the legalization of marijuana.

Gripe 3: Ellis’s frequent and thoughtless use of “performative” and “narrative” irritates the everloving fuck out of me. It is plain bad and brainless, but it is even worse than that. It stands out like a conspicuously contemporary hair-do in a period piece. Hair is where a director ingratiates characters to us by making them relatable and desirable, and these worn-out now-words are how Ellis gives us the secret handshake that signals to us that he is actually morally up-to-date and not really amoral, after all. I think it is the cowardice of it that’s getting under my skin.

If you’re going to be amoral, commit and do it for real. I’m doing a citizen’s arrest and revoking Ellis’s Gen-X credentials. He can go shop himself around and see if some ethical generation will have him.

I hate this book, but it is fun. I do intend to finish it, but I also intend to supplement the fun and avenge my annoyance with more griping.