/lit/ - Literature

4/6
>>11102269
>What is it specifically that attracts you to this style of work? It feels very loose, building narratives around intuited ideas by applying them metaphorically across domains: so maybe a lot of nonsense

i mean it’s a good question. it’s not like i want to be a kind of problem-solving guru or anything. i’m not qualified for that job, for one thing, and most gurus go off the deep end anyways. truly awakened and wise people are rare and precious. i’m more like a cub reporter of anxiety. i write a perpetually running column for the Oh My God We’re All Going To Die Times.

anxiety has always been a kind of preoccupation for me but something changed when i started to read some of the theorists and realize that *it wasn’t all just in my head.* i mean, some of it is. a lot of it is. but continental theorists were really good at helping me to explain the phenomenon of anxiety - why i felt it, what it was, where it came from, how it was wrapped up with language and a lot of other things and so on. i never intended to devote this much time to reading philosophy and thinking about it, i really didn’t. i always just kind of naively trusted that everything was good and well and all right in the world and that things would sort of naturally sort themselves out. i don’t know if i really believe that anymore. but i kind of believe in something about the mimetic nature of all things in this way, that it’s good to try and practice sanity, be sane, try and foster a little peace and friendliness in the world however you can. i don’t know where this impulse comes from. self-preservation is no doubt a part of it. but it’s not all of it. so, it’s a kind of a mystery, i guess.

so you’re right, it is intuitive. it absolutely is. it’s why i’ve been reluctant to try and make a living on it and i prefer to just shitpost here on /lit/ for now and kind of echolocate, even though it feels like wheel-spinning and has really frustrated some anons here on this board in the past. my own brand of shitposting really rubs some people the wrong way and when that happens i do feel kind of shitty about it. i don’t do this to grandstand for (you’s) or to feed my ego. i do it because i am just kind of obsessed with these questions and for the time being there’s not much else i can do with them. for what it’s worth.

empathy kind of sucks though. imagine if a lot of this is the transition to a kind of necessarily empathic civilization. where we are all in the mcluhanesque global village. mcluhan said it would be uncomfortable. i think he was right about that.