paranoid fantasy and reality

a mini essay and three links

This post is discussing: Some Personal Thoughts About Art and Finding a Career, How it Can Protect Your Brain, etc. ☆ Paranoiac Power ☆ Well well well if it isn’t The Supreme Court ☆ It’s raining cats and dogs in terms of OCD diagnoses

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fighting off paranoia with a stick, by which I mean a pencil (from my personal journal)

I’m trying to discover what this is. What this is right here, right now. Words don’t do much better than a photograph at capturing the ~essence~ but i know you feel it too in your own special way because who’s alive that doesn’t feel that it’s somewhere in the vicinity, just waiting for you to notice? Writing is my preferred vehicle to try and catch this specter that looms to my side, this shadow of a feeling hanging over my best moments when I am really genuinely having a good time, and receded into the landscape of my life during my worst. But words lack. The best music gets close to shaking this entities hand, this happiness genie or whatever you want to call it, this djin of spirit, while the worst music tries but fails to win its favor. I like a light snowfall. I like thunderstorms. I like mornings alone and I like houseparties. I like the feeling of being in my element. Who doesn't? Literally the only reason I’m writing any this right now — it’s not like I’m making any more than pocket change writing on this blog — is because sometimes, while writing it, I’ll feel that beautiful glow inside of myself. And that’s what brings me back to it. I find myself writing like a madman this time of year. I’m not sure why it’s always the summer. Blogging on Substack presents an interesting drawback, though, in that sending out one of these posts means sending it to over seven thousand e-mail inboxes, — this is not just my little page on the internet no matter how many times I try and convince myself it is — and I forget that sometimes. But for me at least, the magic of “Serious”, sit-down writing every day has its merits: every once in a blue moon, it procures a moment of clarity: the magic moment of charting out how something in the universe works and is and interacts with the rest of everything. When I was a kid I loved to draw maps. This is similar. It’s what makes this so addicting. I feel like I’m playing Tetris, sometimes, when I’m writing.

Anyways, I discovered the art of writing around 2019 when I was typing away in the basement of a family member’s house in Altoona, Wisconsin — unfortunately trying to emulate David Foster Wallace — but who’s to say 19 year old me wasn’t simply inspired by plowing through the fields of text inside infinite jest? and who’s to say that wasn’t a good thing? You?

Outside the basement windows, the snow was up at least a foot from the ground, and the basement felt like my little cavern, my little mouse hole. I felt something magical. There was a spark. There was excitement. I felt like I discovered something. I read a Shakespeare play for the first time for fun. Then I wrote another 3,000 words in a sitting. Then I read another Shakespeare play. But then the feeling dies down eventually, or, rather, it becomes a rarer feeling like dust settling on a bookcase of writing having become what I do.

I think it’s true generally that in life, to escape yourself and to find income, you must find something to do with yourself, to do with your time. I haven’t seen any arguments for the alternative. Even the Dude in the Big Lebowski was a bowler. The give and take of artistic practice, of finding something to do, starts up an on-and-off series of highs and withdrawals that leads to a pretty solid work mindset, for myself anyways, because without the high of artistic practice and without something like a career to my name, a certain paranoia sets in, a suspicion of other people, something that’s of course not entirely healthy. And I would like to make this into a full time profession, these little breathless writings I have here, — is that selfish? — and I don’t mind such a task taking five or more years of regular work. But even more than that, the work gives me a reason to exist. It gives me a reason to breathe easier. That’s all to say: sorry for filling your inbox with so many emails every week. Is it selfish of me if that, of all things, makes me feel less crazy?

Some people on this app think I live in New York, and I don’t. I live in Chicago. The How to get to new york series’ title is facetious in a way that I’ll write about at some point — but no, I’m in Chicago right now, and I like this city. Generally, I like being in close proximity to other people. There’s less small talk in urban settings and people are generally more direct and upfront, and to walk around outside around dozens of people who couldn’t take less of a notice of me makes me feel less lonely, oddly enough.

I’ve noticed, on the other hand, in the rural places I’ve lived, that certain pesky paranoia begins to set in for me and, well, it seems, for everyone else too — gradually and then all at once. Who doesn’t have family members in rural parts of the country who’ve gone off the deep end? And who can blame them? After all, paranoia has become a sort of currency since it began to bubble up in the Post-9/11 surveillance state. Everyone I meet has a favorite conspiracy theory locked and loaded because some of them are probably true, if we’re being honest here, (looking at the Epstein “suicide”, looking at some of the circumstances around 9/11, looking at the assassination of JFK, etc. etc.) and even the ones that aren’t true have an eerie way of lurking in the back of the head. There’s a strange sort of buzzing in the air now. And paranoia — what’s that noise? — creeps in gradually. Pynchon, for instance, excels at paranoia writing — it’s probably what he’s known best for — but the biggest reason he’s so good at paranoia writing is because he makes expectations of a world in which paranoia is truely manageable, comfortable, even somewhat silly like a tom and jerry cartoon from the ‘80s. The Simpsons also excelled at this, making a paranoid life into something that can be lived. I’d say Ari Aster — feel free to debate me on this point in the comments — is the great paranoia writer of our time and what is so remarkable about Beau is Afraid is that Aster was given the creative freedom to reach for a new artistic perspective on paranoia and its inhibitions, its expectations, and its outcomes. Here’s hoping the film didn’t bomb so bad that he’s not given free license to try it again. Ari Aster is the only person alive who could write/direct a gravity’s rainbow film. I have yet to see it, but Eddington is looking promising.

What I mean to say in this little rant is that finding some artistic outlet through which you can make sense of the world is worthwhile in that it can protect your mind from being washed away into some paranoid fantasy become political reality, as we’ll see below.

(And I know I’m trying to write less about politics and more about other stuff because, let’s be honest, politics are exhausting, but this first linked article below was too interesting for me not to write something up about it)

Through an examination of the world we live in as it feels, and by sharing with others, you can, by virtue of the effort, feel more comfortable in such hackneyed times. Art feels like a way of keeping your head above water in any situation. And there’s a lot of cloudy water now, especially. And what’s more, artistic practice is good for brain health. There’s nothing wrong with holding onto a personal practice and self-applying some title that gives you a sense of meaning in the world — even if the title feels tacky — especially if it helps you feel disciplined and fully yourself. Besides, life’s too short to spend it deliberating.

paranoiac power (žižek goads and prods)

the first link today is by Slovenian writer Alenka Zupančič. It’s a wonderful writeup of “paranoiac power” as it’s being currently wielded by the far-right worldwide . She argues that today’s paranoia is different from the paranoia of the 90s, for instance, because, instead of the “end of history” paranoia that began with the fall of the soviet union and grew into a monster of its own in the post 9/11 cultural landscape, in the United States, at least, here we have arrived at a paranoia made real, in a way, cultivated into firm voter bases.

“In other words, what is at stake is a narrative rendering of hurt—of the status of our “wounds”—which then opens up a whole new playground or “platform” on which our hurt exists socially (even if we do not experience it directly), in relation to others, as a force of both binding and division, and as a basis for possible “explanations” and recipes for recovery.”

This means that the platform internet as it stands, has been reopened for the renegotiating the narrative of hurt. The modern far-right populism has done wonders, needless to say, in terms of capturing this moment to renegotiate who the perpetrators of the hurt are exactly, which for a good many of the dissatisfied people out there in the world wide web could be anyone. But when a stagnant, unchanging political party has a captive audience, the leaders of the rhetoric, such as Trump, Carlson, or Bannon, can fill the zone (the feed, in this case) with the seeds of new paranoias and new mental illnesses which can only exist when the extensions between the internet and our daily lives are as paper thin as they are. Essentially, with this top-down approach to political messaging, as long as it looms over the abysses of social media, reality can be created for many. And what could more radicalizing than to see personal paranoias, those which stem from insecurity and a culture of precarity, become fully realized and verified as true by every post up and down the endless scroll through which modern people understand the world?

Ever since the post-Fordist restructuring of work began in the 70s, an enforced precarity became the model across the country — by this I mean having medical insurance tied to a workplace that would just as easily fire you as it would delete your job title from a database, for example — and now, fifty-plus years into this new model of work, things are not very good for anyone outside of the 1% with the most accumulated wealth, but to many, the symbolic degradation of the quality of life is not entirely apparent in their day-to-day lives despite how heavy it looms in the background. We certainly live in an eerie world. I don’t know if anyone could deny that. But what do we do about this? Solidarity has been bulldozed to make way for consumerism. This happened decades ago. Now there’re more consumer goods and more content to consume than we know what to do with, yet something unbearably hideous is lurking just outside our vision, a world being dismantled, climate change ravaging the cities and the countryside; thus paranoid fantasy, with one foot in the true nature of our time here on earth — and this true nature could be a number of things, from climate change to the increasing impoverishment of ourselves and everyone we know — and one foot in the insecurities about oneself can bloom into something like what Zupančič describes here as mass “paranoiac power”, driving the sudden rush of political power to people like Trump, Thiel, Farage, etc., who claim to have an explanation for why you feel so terrible and scared all the time, an explanation for what has been done to you — “by them!” they cry, pointing at someone with dyed blue hair, projected onto the wall. Keep in mind, the masses who handed them power handed them their power while themselves chronically checking their phones for notifications that might confirm their paranoid fantasies. For many, it wasn’t a conscious decision. People are scared. Something feels like it’s coming. The far-right lunatics are the only ones who speak to that fear, except they use it for their own ends. They themselves are the anti-christ they talk about. But that doesn’t matter to their supporters who’ve discovered, over these last ten years, that they can manufacture their own paranoid fantasies into reality.