I buried my grandfather a few hours ago. Cracks will spiderweb across the surface of the altar while I’m asleep, I’m sure. There’s gonna be a party when the wolf comes home. For now, though, this is context (not eulogy). I’m totally in the full heat of this one, so I haven’t bothered to tune. I’ll leave the eulogising for another time, when a self-that-is-reflective is less clearly absent from the Parliament. In quella parte dove sta memoria, I have, today, only fragments and borrowed text.

You write of the millenarian — of the void and the vertigo; the crying out the end is nigh — and I’m afraid that any discussion of a fire-and-brimstone sense of being “cosmically significant” is beyond me. While it is, perhaps, today, of all days, especially beyond me, it is in general not a feeling I feel. I tend not to feel any sense of extraordinary power w/r/t AI problems, nor any overwhelming sense that “we’re all gonna die”. I don’t feel as if I’m staring down the barrel of an accelerationist gun. I don’t fear the black ball in the urn in my viscera and I never (as a result) find myself mustering or suppressing a go-down-fighting grim resolve. I also feel no sense of setting keel to breakers. No sense of a numb nightmare, or a light in Troy,either.

What I do feel, quite often, is a profound confusion at the (expressed & enacted) endorsement of a ‘do bad to do good’ moral attitude. There’s a tonne of people who seem to think that there’s an existentially-catastrophic shoggoth visible on the horizon. They broadly seem to agree that “demon summoning is easy, and angel summoning is much harder”. And then they seem to think — as if it’s obvious and natural to think this — “well, you know, shit, I guess we’ve gotta do as much practical summoning research as possible”. They keep putting their foot down, hard, on the pedal.

They just don’t seem okay.

Nobody seems okay.

They seem somehow dissociated. Alienated from a basic, commonsense, innocent, naïve version of sensibleness. The thing that says “just don’t do the harmful thing” or “you’re even overthinking overthinking”.

In Fanged Noumena, Nick Land writes of a time in his life in which he chose, and saw, and descended into, his own insanity:

I stole Vauung’s name because it was unused, on the basis of an exact qabbalistic entitlement.

Yet, at least ‘up’ here, Vauung still confuses itself with me, with ruins and tatters.

This might change. Names have powers and destinies.

I have decided to let Vauung inherit the entire misfortune of my past (a perverse generosity at best). Its story might never emerge otherwise. There are rotten threads which even I can follow backwards for decades, but they soon cease to be interesting. Better to begin more recently (‘better’ in Vauung’s sense, and so no different from ‘worse’).

It had pledged itself unreservedly to evil and insanity. Its tool of choice, at that time, the sacred substance amphetamine, of which much can be said, but mostly elsewhere.

After perhaps a year of fanatical abuse it was, by any reasonable standard, profoundly insane.

A few examples may suffice, in no particular order.

On one occasion - indicative even to itself - it was in a car being driven by the sister of its thing (the ruin). It was night, on a motorway. The journey took several hours. During the previous night, Christmas Eve, it had followed its usual course into fanatically prolonged artificial insomnia. It had spent the time devoted to futile ‘writing’ practices - it still pretended to be ‘getting somewhere’ and was buoyant with ardent purpose, but that is another story (an intolerably intricate and pointless one). It was accompanied to the early hours by a repetitive refrain ‘from next door’ - a mediocre but plausible rock song whose insistent lyric circled around the words: “Going to hell.”

It knew these words were for it, and laughed idiotically.

“They must really love the new CD they got for Christmas,” it thought, equally idiotically.

In the car it listened to the radio for the whole journey. Each song was different, the genres varied, the quality seemingly above average, the themes tending to the morbid.

“This is a cool radio station,” it said to its sister.

“The radio isn’t on,” its sister replied, concerned.

Vauung learnt that the ruin’s unconscious contained an entire pop industry.

The ruin learnt that it had arrived, somewhere on the motorway. (629–30)

That parenthetical phrase — “indicative even to itself” — bounces around in my skull, sometimes, when I worry about the anti-safety ‘safety’ crowd. The fact that you can see your own irrationality without the self-awareness being enough to save you.

I don’t know how else to express my opposition to the ‘obliged to do bad to do good’ lifeworld, except, I guess, by way of a gesture towards a reflection that I share with John Darnielle, about the experience of being fourteen years old: things get be pretty bad — really bad — but they’re never gonna feel insurmountably bad if you’re having a lot of sex. There’s a limit to how much anyone, or anything, or any idea, can hurt you when you’re getting laid on the reg.

Friends who don’t have a clue

Well-meaning teachers

But down in your arms, in your arms

I am a wild creature.

I’m past those years; I didn’t really talk about them when I was in them. I think you are, too, (and didn’t, either). The ghosts only come back into view when I’m ‘home’, driving too-familiar roads at night, facing a ‘dramatic’ parent.

Maybe some folks just need a hug or something, y’know?

(And maybe the fact that you thought a scientology personality test would be a funny first date was itself a sign of good health, in spite of your results?)

For all his faults, Ryan Holiday seems to understand a little of the thing I’m pointing towards when he writes that

It’s as if we don’t want to admit that we can’t do this alone, or that success may require dealing with the soft parts of ourselves, the uncomfortable, sticky parts we’d rather pretend weren’t there. We have trouble seeing the ramifications of our personal lives on our professional lives and that the best way to navigate the public world is to master and find contentment in the private one.

The myth is of the lone creative entrepreneur battling the world without an ally in sight. A defiant combination of Atlas and Sisyphus and David, wrestling a Goliath-sized mass of doubters and demons. In reality, I’ve found that nearly every person I admire—every person I’ve met who strikes me as being someone who I would like to one day be like—lives a quiet life at home with a person who they’ve teamed up with…for life. The reason this one person strikes us as special, I find, is because they’re really two people.