a gorgeous fever
10 things to think about this week
Welcome back to another edition of Why Are You Like This? — a newsletter about stories, storytelling, and storytellers. As always, shares are appreciated and I’ve even got a new referral scheme running which is a bit of a surprise.
This week, I’d been feeling some overwhelm with all of the dark shit happening in the world right now and went out into my research with that in mind. It took me to some unexpected places — whales, tarot, Andrew Tate, clouds, Leo Messi, and beyond. Hopefully it’s not too woo-woo but I do feel like I finished in a place that helped things start making sense to me at least, or else gave me a little more strength to move through this to that. There’s a nice poem at the end of this email (love a poem; it’s easy money) that got me good.
Anyway, let me know what you think: what you liked, what you hated, and what resonated.
All the best,
Sam
(ICYMI: Last Thursday, I dropped part two of my interview with Ted Philipakos and people seemed to really enjoy it. If you’d like me to do more of those with creators and creatives you appreciate, let me know [and I’m always open to suggestions].)
“Below us somewhere in the gelatinous phantasmagoria of churning blue, the whales wouldn't be much aware of the storm.” — from The Moon By Whale Light by Diane Ackerman
I’m always thinking about the ways we distract ourselves from overwhelming forces that rage around us. I do it all the time, losing myself in reading and research, or Married At First Sight: Australia or the minutiae of work, or better in personal connections that seem to offer a connection more tangible or at least comprehensible than The Big Bad Things that loom, like a towering thunderhead, on the horizon.
We were not built to hold things that large in our heads. We should, in the well-trodden words of Michael Brooks, “be kind to people, be ruthless to systems” but you cannot punch a cloud, no matter how huge or ominous. You cannot fight the horizon. You can only go towards it, or away from it, or, as it feels like I so often do, as many of us do, run consistently alongside, keeping it in our periphery, for fear that it might advance on us, consume us, destroy us, if we stop paying attention entirely, until we’re finally read to challenge it.In the most recent edition of the Journal of Visual Culture, I came across a brilliant (free) academic paper titled: ‘Tarot as affective cartography in the uneven Anthropocene’ by Australian lecturer of art history and theory Anastasia Murney.
(Some quick, we’re-all-mates-here definitions before we begin: tarot — those illustrated cards used to tells fortunes and futures; affective — relating to moods, feelings, and attitudes and not necessarily e-ffective; cartography — the art of making maps; and anthropocene — the loosely defined unit of time where humanity began to negatively affect the earth with its profane fuckery.)
Now, I have little-to-no interest in tarot. My experience in the main is limited to drunken sojourns into light occultic territory around a dinner table with housemates during Lockdown. But the premise of Murney’s paper — which is, as it happens, quite helpfully, a light read on a dark topic — grabbed me.
Here’s Murney’s intro to tarot reading:
“In a traditional Tarot reading, the querent (or questioner) comes to the reader with a problem for which they are seeking guidance. The reader lays out a spread and decodes the cards, tailoring the reading to the querent’s mindset, charting a path through the problem. A skilful reader is adept at recognising patterns and attuning their intuition to animate the cards. In this sense, a Tarot reading can be described as a practice of storytelling.”
The effect — abstract interpretations of disembodied shards of narrative represented by painterly depictions of jaunty skeletons and the like — allows, she writes, for an opening. It is an alleyway down which potential resolutions for the unexplainable can shuffle. They are not symbols that tell us something we didn’t already know, but that jog our brains into understanding that which we didn’t realise was already in there.
“Each Tarot card offers something: an image, a provocation, a warning, an idea, which, in combination, opens a space for interpretation and negotiation. It is this creative and collective potential to which I am drawn. The symbolic language of the Tarot offers a way to recast the problem, to step back from conventional methods of problem-solving or well-worn vocabularies that produce familiar ruts and dead ends.”
For Murney, she sees the opacity of tarot practise as a way of making sense of the climate crisis with empathy and vulnerability, at odds with the often-shaming binaries at the heart of reporting on the subject:
“As global warming intensifies and the world staggers closer to the critical threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius, there [is]... the assumption that a lack of knowledge about climate change is the central reason for inaction is a persistent belief in the sciences. At worst, the deficit model assumes facts are self-supporting and adequate for emotional and intellectual transformation, constructing viewers as the passive recipients of knowledge. But what if this logic is cultivating an over-reliance on certain representations of crisis that limit rather than expand our understanding of climate change? Rather than providing the groundwork for lasting, meaningful transformation, what if these forms of information overwhelm and paralyse us?”“Capitalism harms human beings through neglect rather than through terror. Compared to the personal will of a dictator, the structural violence of market ‘forces’ appears benign. Those individuals (or groups) excluded from capitalism's dreamworlds appear themselves to be to blame.” — from Dreamworld and Catastrophe by Susan Buck-Morss
Thanks, Reacher. Last week I wrote about the recent proliferation of henchness in modern pop culture’s masculine icons. Murney had a line in her paper which calls to mind its conclusions.
She argues that “Tarot is a valuable cartographic method for ‘making sense’ of the cognitive and affective messiness of the climate crisis, distributed across multiple different scales.”
Towards the very end of my feature, Michael Cornelius — co-editor of Of Muscles and Men, a collection of essays about the sword-and-sandal epics of early Hollywood — articulated similarly his feelings on the trend of beefed-up actors (and the attendant upswing in muscle dysmorphia that has followed in young, male non-actors). I could only fit a small section of the quote into my final piece, but here’s the full quote:
“[The muscle men] fetishize the male form,” he wrote to me, via email. “They create incredibly homosocial and homoerotic scenarios; and they often reflect more complex ideologies regarding the patriarchy that may first seem apparent. But even TikTok trends of overly muscular males showing off their bodies or creating videos on bulking and cutting are less informative or erotic than they are patriarchal, designed to demonstrate an overt sense of masculinity that feels like an assertion of control in a world where control is rarely constant or even possible. These broader popular culture trends often reflect that same desire for patriarchal control—physical might making ideological right—designed to simplify a complex world into basic patterns based on a glorified past that was usually never that glorious to begin with.”
It’s clear that as market forces expand, so too do biceps. As we are alienated, we clump together for warmth. When signs and signifiers arise — illustrated skeletons, Will Poulter suddenly having massive arms — we assign meaning without hesitation. Sometimes these knee-jerk reactions work — as with tarot — but often these meanings get twisted. Predatory forces — algorithms, Andrew Tate, the icy hand of fear — muddy and mislead. Algorithms promote fear and loathing. Fear becomes muscles for muscles’ sake. Muscles become the antidote to misogynistic, opportunistic male victimhood. Whether decisions made are right or wrong, we long to impose sense on a senseless time with whatever tools we have at our disposal.“If masculinity is a homosocial enactment, its overriding emotion is fear [since] what we call masculinity is often a hedge against being revealed as a fraud, an exaggerated set of activities that keep others from seeing through us, and a frenzied effort to keep at bay those fears within ourselves.” — from ‘Masculinity and affect: new possibilities, new agendas’ by T W Reeser & Lucas Gottzén
Affect has a word I’ve come across often over the past year, since I lost my full-time job and was allowed to fit — in between bouts of brand strategy and spelunking for books in neighbourhood charity shops — copious amounts of academic papers into my free time. Most of that time, I admit, was spent Googling what words meant, but it’s paying dividends now. In psychology, affect refers to the experience of feeling or emotion, particularly in the context of how it's expressed outwardly. It is a feeling as it is observed by others.
Another term it brings to mind is poetic truth: an experience of reality as observed by internal self. It is a concept whose modern exponents are typified by lyrical nonfiction writers like Diane Ackerman, quoted in [1].
In an interview with Inquiring Mind, a “semiannual print journal dedicated to the creative transmission of Buddhadharma to the West” or something, Ackerman — whose work focuses around nature, human senses, and the chewy little spaces between the two — is asked about the way that she communicates “the power of sense experiences” in her writing.
Internal Mind: You often talk about being “transported” by the senses. In Buddhism, many sages warn of the dangers in being swept up by or drunk on the senses. What counterbalances the risks?
Diane Ackerman: I think a greater danger lies in living too narrowly, in depriving oneself of life’s textures and processes. Does this mean occasionally overdoing it? Sure. But it’s possible to balance enthusiasm and caution. Life without passion would be safer, but it would be drained of its vital juices, and not any truer.
Get that up you, sages.
Ackerman describes consciousness as “a gorgeous fever” and, later in the interview, encourages all of us to think, and write, in a more feverish way on our journey through life.
Her tips: “Pay close, loving attention to nature. Be willing to abandon your sense of self. Imagine being inside a hawk looking out, or the feel of being reptilian. Allow your senses to record the feel, tastes, sounds, sights and flavours of being alive on this particular planet. Don’t fight the lovely part of our animal nature, the part that relishes curling up in a pool of sunlight on a cold winter day.”
I first came across Ackerman’s work in the book Deep Play, her ruminative, sometimes-repetitive, mostly-beautiful meditation on flow. I was at MUNDIAL and bored by the increasing creep of reality on football and the adherence of those around me to this new, flattened reality. Football no longer felt like a sensual game, a game for weirdos and fuck-ups and unfit playmakers with a left-foot that could play you Ride of the Valkyries. It was a game played by robots, umpired by robots. But I found a footing in flow, at least, in knowing that there was still this mystical, undeniably otherworldly part of the game where people would enter another realm of consciousness and slalom through frantic compositions in a gorgeous, unthinking fever. You couldn’t watch Messi and not see it: the way time slowwwwwwwwwwwed and his movements atomised as he weaved through onrushing defenders. I sought to find flow in my writing the best I could, and to search out flow to write about whenever I had the chance.
I found Ackerman the best in the biz about writing on the subject: “Deep play,” as she terms it, “arises in such moments of intense enjoyment, focus, control, creativity, timelessness, confidence, volition, lack of self-awareness (hence transcendence) while doing things intrinsically worthwhile, rewarding for their own sake…It feels cleansing because when acting and thinking becomes one, there is no room left for other thoughts.”
For me, Deep play and poetic truth go hand in hand. I will forgive any pathetic fallacy — the attribution of human thought and feeling onto inanimate objects or animals — with a sense of fucking style. I will impose my feelings onto Messi’s dribbling and play them out as one and the same, happening as parts of the same orchestra in a stirring movement,
Flow, deep play, whatever you want to call it, is as real as anger or sadness or boredom but suffers from a lack of affect. You cannot see it, but it’s there. You can feel it. And if it feels real, then it is real.“What we see in the mind is as real to us as what we see by the eye.” — Wallace Stevens
Right at the very end of Anastasia Murney’s ‘Tarot’ paper, she writes:
“Fighting climate crisis does not always look like fighting climate crisis… It is impossible to think neatly, succinctly, about the epoch we are in and the diseases afflicting it. In this context, Tarot reading is a promising tactic because it thrives on a constellation of ideas and knowledge that require active participation. The fact that it does not cohere into a single image or answer is, I argue, more honest to the confounding, multi-scalar nature of the uneven Anthropocene.”
It is science as poetic truth. Opposing forces that make sense in total subjectivity. (I’m sorry we’re back to tarot, but we’re back to tarot.) A key strength of the medium, she argues, is its composition of “absorbing, mixing, and translating different knowledge”. There is the real and the assumed, the fact and the fiction, and in that gumbo, people find what they need in uncertain times.
Knowledge, Murney writes, “should be promiscuous and incomplete. We should be willing to unpick the knots that separate and constrain categories of thought and action: to work out how to sit with the slow and the urgent, the spiritual and material, knowing and not knowing, to plot new movements and possibilities. There are no ‘big’ solutions without these small, iterative processes, riddled with fraught questions and unexpected tangents.”
But let’s take that conclusion in tandem with the performative masculinity of big ol’ muscles. Both are driven by fear and overwhelm. But on one side, abstract narratives help Murney transcend the terrifying. It makes fear abstract, too; more somehow more manageable, more swift and changeable, less monolithic.
On the other, abstract narratives help young men believe that the problem is them and theirs, that they are at fault for market forces and are too weak to control it. They find immanence — the idea that the divine is manifested in the material world. It makes fear not abstract, but concrete.
There is so much pervasive evil in the world that blaming yourself, fighting yourself and not systems, is futile. Like throwing a haymaker into the thunderhead, it will get you nowhere.may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that
’blessing the boats’ by Lucille Clifton
Sam, again, thank you