Disclaimer: It was getting a bit thick and stuffy in the other post, ideas were curdling into nightmares and logic was warping into lunacy, and also the word limit was approaching. We continue here.
September 9, 2024:
One of the absolute worse things that can happen in a conflict is the verminization of the enemy – to quote Mark Fisher. It means that the enemy is seen as vermin which cannot be understood or reasoned with, only eradicated. The enemy is not a fellow human being and cannot be respected in any way – leaving total annihilation as the only answer to the ‘subhuman swarm’. The war in Gaza has become a textbook example of this phenomenon for the West. While Israeli hostages or any Western victims of violence have families, lives, memories etc. (presented abundantly on the news) dead Palestinians have nothing, no families, feelings, homes, futures or anything – almost as if they were never alive in the first place, never ‘human’ to begin with. But this terrifying logic seems so far away for most people – in some corner of the world that they couldn’t point out on a borderless world map – that there is no need for them to worry about how disturbing it is. Who cares when a bomb explodes in northern Nigeria or if another 20 die in Gaza? But god forbid there be some form of violence in a Western city – you couldn’t peel it off the forked tongues of the Karens and Kevins if you tried. It would be talking and grieving material for weeks. Little school-children might cry after catching a glimpse of the evening news on their family television set. Tragic indeed. But is this verminization really so far away? Only until total dehumanization crosses ethnic and political boundaries and finally worms into the social sphere. When the Rich completely and totally win the class war that the non-Rich are not even aware is happening, the average person will cease to be a person and become vermin. We already see this with ‘homeless’ people in the West; they do not exist, nor does their suffering. They are vermin. When technological advances reach the breaking point and dispel the need for human labor, when AI obliterates much of the lower industries, well, then most of us will also become vermin. The circle will be complete. But don’t succumb to rat poison before basking in the Sulphuric sunset.
September 12, 2024:
Somewhere far, far away, beyond howling Atlantic winds, an underpaid production assistant is being barked ill-informed orders to wire the studio for the most recent presidential debate, scheduled between an idiotic clown and a corpo-broomstick. Her head aches from partying beyond the confines of her age. Something is trying to hammer its way out of her skull. A lot of stuff is trapped up there. She knows her job is pointless but grinds on in order accrue an adequate retirement fund so that one day, in some receding timeline, she may rest. But something keeps tugging her down into a sinkhole of gloom carved out of self-destructive spirals and mental misery. That something is currently sitting in her skull, weightless and free. It generates silent vectors of hysteria, dulled only by a grotesque cocktail of chemicals. You and I likely have this entity too, it’s called a brain. And its screams concern the volatility of the future. She is aware that her pitiful retirement fund, much like the average person’s, will not matter one bit when the demographic crisis inverts the core of capitalism and shatters the growth-model that props it up. The cost of labor will skyrocket, the price of things will exponentialize, and any sort of rest or retirement prospect will evaporate. She cries, often, and not because her advances towards a co-worker were mistaken for kind-heartedness. She barely ever sees the sky; it hides behind the elongated faces of tall buildings reflecting the glow of corporate slavery back at her. Neon advertisements glitter off glass façades and merge into distant office lights like constellations. In that beautiful mess she can trace the stars from Orion’s belt to the wings of Cygnus. It’s all in her mind, all artificial, yet still it has some sort of beauty to it, like moonlight glancing off a broken machine at just the right angle. No, she cries because she will never stop working. She will work to death. Certain things can momentarily suppress this feeling: the humdrum of daily chaos, putting things inside of her, or even just a smog-filled gust of wind caressing her face. Or it may not; sometimes nothing lifts the weight. Work or die: a nebulous choice that eventually converges. The presidential candidates filter in, two jars of fat with lids that open and close as idiotic chords located in meat-tubes pipe out sonorous waste. She sits in a darkened backroom, executing her work. Meanwhile, somewhere this side of the Atlantic, beyond the pollution of countless factories, a small kid is cuddling a teddy bear and quietly wetting his bed, unaware that his future will be to work and then die, pointless and undignified. His parents are doing their best to raise him properly, working and trying. He cries in the middle of the night because of a scary nightmare involving a dinosaur chasing him and his best friend. He cries, and eventually, he will die. But something happens in between, something lecherous and debased – a magnificent catastrophe.
October 20, 2024:
“Neoliberalism is not freedom from work, but freedom through work” – is what Fisher wrote in his unfinished introduction to Acid Communism. A salient reminder of how dire things have become in today’s sinkhole, perhaps most glaringly noticeable in what is often referred to as the ‘mental health epidemic’. When one someone commits suicide, for instance, it is often connected to individual reasons – there was something ‘wrong’ with them – rather than recognizing or addressing the collective factors that drove it, such as social alienation, health expenses, lack of housing, lack of psychological support, work/life balance, etc. As David Smail argued, “society is usually responsible for personal distress.” But the tendency to individualize everything is the hallmark of today’s sinkhole. We are all alone. It has got to the point that any form of collective action or even thought is unthinkable, it falls outside of the Overton window. Fixing mental health requires action on the systemic level; reforms and a review of how we organize society. Not action on the individual, ‘damage-control’ level. It is so problematic and wrong to ‘blame’ the individual, or to find in them the cause of a voluntary exit from this world. A worker going to work and producing happily is good. One who is miserable and prematurely leaves, is bad; he isn’t producing enough. “Let’s add a suicide hotline, so that he may call when things seem unendurable and be urged not to die and get through another day.”
November 6, 2024:
I’m mildly annoyed by the supermarket till-belts in Jumbo not being exactly rectangular in shape – would be a funny thing to say. Then again, what isn’t funny? One precisely hilarious thing has been the recent elections in the US. I’m happy to see Trump elected. Why? I hear you say. Is it purely out of spite? Well, I’d be lying if I said spite didn’t play any part in this. The entirety must burn down in order to build something better, and only one of the two candidates can lead us to the witching hour. The other will merely perpetuate the current rotten order. The world needs a bulldozer, and Mr. Trump may just be it. Even if half the world dies in the process, we may finally get a step closer to the next level of human civilization where super space communism or some other decent thing happens. Seeing the election results trickle in as billions of faces across the world elongated into reflections of a contorted nothingness has been satisfying. The tears of liberals and centrists and all those void entities, devoid of ideology or coherence, indeed taste quite good as they tumble down a self-proclaimed, baseless moral high-ground. I mean, there was no campaign. How could this have gone any other way? Telling an entire electorate that the main reason to vote for Harris was to “save democracy” very clearly shows that there was no idea or campaign promise or anything at all behind the veil. It implies that you must vote for whatever slop the Democrat Party throws in front of you at the ballot box, simply because otherwise Trump. “You have no other choice” really does not cut it as a campaign strategy, apparently. I’m happy to see Trump elected, because it nails home how this spineless, idealess form of guilt-governance perpetuated by the neoliberal world order is useless against even the most primitive of ideas. People deserve better than this nuclear waste. Now I’m eager to watch MAGA plague-bearers launch their gangrenous saliva out of the White House and into the living room of the average Joe. Froth forth my dears. As a post-scriptum, I must say: God dammit is Rogue Trader an absolutely amazing CRPG. Glad I experienced it before perishing in nuclear war or whatever is lurking around the corner. A well-spent-150-hour-glob-of-time tastes so good as you swallow it down in a month-long salute to the grimdark 41st millennium. Thus, I pledge myself to Cassia the Navigator.
November 8, 2024:
Okay imagine this hypothetical scenario: The 90s last more than a decade. Wow! Right? But that would actually lead to a situation which was the norm throughout most of human history: technological and societal changes were much, much slower. If the 90s lasted a century, say, then we’d have a mountain of music cassettes, Punk boybands, Gameboy cartridges, Fox Kids cartoons, and other things associated with the 90s in particular. This is how our ancestors experienced life. Or, what if the 80s lasted a century? Would be interesting. Perhaps our cultural artefacts would actually mature into something decent rather than be transient fads that die faster than a butterfly. This is how most of history was before the modern age. Life in the year 1100 was not very different from 1200. There was a lot of time for the products of scientific and technological innovations to mature and harmonize with society. Same for thoughts. Same for art movements. People had time to stop and think before life completely and irreversibly changed, which now happens about every ten years or so. Entire generations used to live in roughly the same milieu. Now every generation is alien to one another. A father, a son, and a grandfather in the Middle Ages would all have comparable, relatable and conversable life experiences. Imagine if the 90s lasted a century. You’d be able to discuss and sift through so much of it both horizontally and vertically. But now everything is so rapid, it’s upsetting. Some really poignant times have passed and died so quickly. The 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 00s and whatnot are now all lost in time, like tears in rain, as a blade-runner might say. This makes today so, so different from the entire rest of history. We are beyond history.
Πάντα ῥεῖ – all is flux.
November 21, 2024:
Today we travel from my keyboard’s space bar to actual space. A truly fascinating concept in astrobiology is the exchange of organic material between Mars and Earth via asteroids. Microscopic organisms can survive in the vacuum of space when embedded deep within asteroids or comets, which Mars and Earth exchange every so often. While this may seem extremely rare on the human scale of time, on the galactic scale it is quite frequent, summing up to several tons of potential organic matter over the course of the last few billion years. Earth was formed circa 4.5 billion years ago, while life on earth began a few hundred millions years after that, so around 4.2-4.3 billion years ago. This is a very short time span that has baffled astrobiologists and physicist for some time (e.g., see the discussion of Paul Davies or Francis Drake). If the formation of life is so easy, then one of the central pillars of the Fermi Paradox is voided. We may expect life to bloom rather quickly wherever in the universe conditions become right (many thousands of such exoplanets have been identified). Or alternatively, as some suggest, maybe Earth lucked out. Did our planet somehow begin forming life much before it is statistically expected once conditions are suitable? Maybe the speed of life-development on Earth is a mathematical anomaly of such biblical proportions that we are indeed alone in the universe. If the formation of life is similar to the odds of a Boltzmann brain forming, for instance, we are indeed alone in the void… But this seems very unlikely.
One resolution to this conundrum concerns Mars. Mars had already formed much before Earth, and it is looking likely that we will soon discover a form of – perhaps long gone – biologics. A central question would then be whether or not the genesis of life on earth was actually an insemination event from Martian organisms embedded in asteroids that bombarded Earth and took a hold. This opens the possibility that Earth did not necessarily develop life from scratch in just a few hundred million years after its formation, with far reaching consequences for SETI calculations (making Earth’s case less miraculous on a galactic time scale). Also, consider this: If indications of life are found on Mars (e.g., embedded in the rock crust) it would be astonishing if it did not turn out to be from the same genesis as life on Earth. For if two adjacent planets in a star system that is by all means quite ordinary in the galaxy developed life independently from each other, well then life is indeed very common. Another thing which would indicate that life is common would be if we ever found proof of multiple genesis events for life on Earth. So far, we have no such proof, and all life that we know of looks to be from a single common ancestor. A separate pylon of life on Earth would not necessarily have to be alive now, nor inhabiting the same places as current biologics. The search thus continues. The amazing thing is, if a second genesis event in our solar system is ever proven, this would obliterate the ‘development of life’ as a factor from the Drake equation. It would stop becoming a filter for the development of extra-terrestrial intelligence. Because if life has developed multiple times from scratch on Earth (or Earth and Mars), then we can safely assume that it is statistically likely to develop in many other star systems.
If, on the other hand, we ever definitely prove that all life on Earth (and on Mars if discovered) is indeed from a single genesis event, this would imply the opposite: That the formation of life may indeed be the ‘Great Filter’ for the development of intelligence. This ‘filter’ is what scientists define as being the answer to the Fermi Paradox which asks: Where is everyone? Or in a wordier version, Why have we not detected any signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence? Clearly, Enrico Fermi’s logic goes, there is some sort of hurdle or filter that prevents intelligence from being widespread. Some scientists place the filter further in the timeline, suggesting that perhaps the development of intelligent life from simple biologics is the main hurdle. After all, dinosaurs ruled the earth for hundreds of millions of years but failed to develop anything resembling intelligence. The idea thus goes that perhaps the humanoid development of advanced intelligence in the incredibly rapid span of a few hundred-thousand years is the real anomaly.
Some scientists place the hurdle further away still, suggesting that the Great Filter lies at some point in our future, at a time after the development of intelligence but before space-faring – a frightening concept if true, for it implies we are staring down the barrel. For instance, the idea that biological intelligence is an expected but temporary stepping-stone on the journey of life which eventually transitions to machine or non-organic intelligence. What if this is the galactic norm? – goes one such hypothesis. Although this does not in itself resolve the Fermi Paradox, since we have so far detected nothing like von Neumann probes auto-colonizing star systems or anything. I myself choose to believe that the strongest explanation for the Fermi Paradox is the difficulty in the genesis of life in the first place. Therefore, should a second genesis on Earth ever be confirmed, I believe we can surmise that the universe is (or will eventually be) teeming with intelligence. I say that, but the transcendence hypothesis (i.e., retreat into cyberspace) as a solution to the Fermi Paradox is also looking more and more possible given the direction humanity is going. An eerie reality. In any case, recent interests in Martian chemistry and biologics in extreme places on Earth (e.g., deep-crust convection fluids) are exciting avenues of inquiry that may soon change our entire reality should they ever find a second genesis event. In closing, I’d like to note that I think the most depressing solution to the Fermi Paradox is that maybe we are the first (or one of the first); the idea that humanity is an early bird to the galactic intelligence club, a club that may be so fun in a few billion years…
November 26, 2024:
I never quite understood the obsession with life extension and LEV (Longevity Escape Velocity). What are you planning on doing with your pathetic life if it extends into another decade or five? Anyone thinking they’d do something different is delusional. Say you live until 110 instead of 75, then what? An amazing 35 years was it? Unlikely. I hate to parrot the whole quality over quantity argument, but it really is that. Consider this thought experiment: Ask a child what animal they’d like to be, and they’ll likely reply based on a variety of juvenile considerations including perceived coolness, size or ferocity. Length of lifespan is never considered. This is hardly surprising. But what if we direct this question to adults, such as yourself? Even in non-juvenile, semi-serious consideration (as far as one can stretch this incredulous inquiry), hardly anyone produces a mental spreadsheet of lifespan lengths and selects the animal that lives the longest. No, in fact, adults often choose a type of bird or something that flies and which has a rather short lifespan. Now this may not be the best, or even a very good analogy for saying the obsession with life extension is unnecessary, but it’s the best I came up with in five minutes. Also, the prospect of living forever (i.e., LEV) sounds greedy and pointless. It’s the transient nature of life that drives almost all beauty and creativity in the world. Without it, we are machines of hedonism doomed to perish in the pit of Gomorrah. This life is enough.
December 8, 2024:
I’ve always been fascinated by equality. And I mean equality. Not the type of drivel espoused by liberals. Not the type of non-equality of a market-driven system. Not the latest ‘hot shit’ pushed by the mouth-to-ass spirals in human form, regurgitating self-serving agendas like a quivering Ouroboros. True equality is not possible like that. Think of this: let’s suppose life enjoyment, happiness, wealth, or some other measurable metric (doesn’t matter what it is; pick one) can be quantified by an integer from 1 to 10. Then ask yourself this: Is a world where everyone is a 5 better than one where there are some 9’s but also some 3’s and even some 1’s? The liberal economist aka Capitalist will argue that the latter is clearly better since (the argument goes) the average rises. Leaving aside this questionable claim (has the average risen?), let’s assume for sake of argument that it indeed does rise. Then the hypothetical question becomes: Is it better if everyone is a 5, or is it better if there’s lots of 8’s and 9’s and some 1’s too (with an overall average higher than 5)? I’m a firm defender of the former. I’ve always been. I’d rather we all live as a 5 than there be a single person living as a 1 or a 2. Raising ‘the average’ is meaningless, this is not a statistical experiment; it’s life. I’m one of the most ardent, inflexible defenders of equality that I know of, which is why I’m writing this. Any sort of ‘unfairness’ (re: inequality) irritates me to the point where everything else morphs into velveteen blackness. And this goes beyond the more common things such as defending a wealth ceiling or UBI etc. For instance, I’d rather we all only live to the age of 50 if it meant no child or teenager died ever again. Fuck living till 80 or 90 while others die at 10 or 20. The lowest common denominator should always determine every policy.
One death is a tragedy, but if everyone dies then that’s not a tragedy, it might be a calamity, a catastrophe, but global extinction definitely isn’t unequal, that’s for sure. If one single child has to live without a toy, no child on earth should have a toy. Back in the day when we were primitive mammals slithering across magma-crusted riverbeds, if the proverbial child could burn down the village, it could and would. Now, we’ve lost this equalizing mechanism, this reflexive calibration needle. There’s no village to burn down anymore, but a vast bottom-heavy lattice unfolding skyward at escape velocity: the untouchables. Disgruntled masses wallow in shallow graves while their children aspire to enter the upper-side of the median line, crossing the aforementioned ‘average’. Quite sad really. It reveals a profound lack of human progress. “Not only in peasant homes, but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside the twentieth century the thirteenth.” (Trotsky, 1933). Equality is simply impossible in this world. Aeons later, star-spawns will laugh at us. They’ll laugh that in twenty-first century English, “he’s a successful man” was understood financially; that ‘success’ was measured by positions and salaries and bootlicking; that introspection of life rested on artificial shit. We’re probably the entertainment – the zoo – of advanced, galactic civilizations, all peering down at our auto-gimped, primate-lite existence.
December 14, 2024:
Millions of droids walk the streets of Europe like specters, all depressed, all supremely unsatisfied. They crowd the alleys, staff the offices and man the machine. They’re your neighbor, colleague and friend. Millions upon millions of Americans live lives that are so pathetic and so full of struggles that we – as humanity – have already solved; struggles that are re-introduced and perpetuated by the machine (e.g., food, shelter, medicine). But to realize you’re eating shit you have to have tasted non-shit at least once. This is the great irony of conservatism; of anything wishing to conserve and perpetuate what currently is, be it ‘centrism’ or ‘moralism’ or any other shade of gray. It must take a supreme lack of imagination to think that what we currently have is the best.
It is supremely ironic that the common clod’s idea of what should be the default organization of mankind has somehow landed on ‘Democratic Capitalism’. This is supremely ironic because it is a paradox: the words are opposites. Democracy or ‘majority rule’ inevitably implies the rule of the poor over the rich, since the poor are more in numbers, and the natural conclusion of democracy is therefore a governance by a permanent majority dedicated to economic and social redistribution, or the antithesis of market accumulation. The capitalists are therefore inclined to align themselves with reactive forces to abolish democracy – it simply does not serve them. The problem is this dynamic operates only one way in this day and age, while rich capitalists are hellbent on destroying democracy, the ordinary person has no interest in destroying or even debating capitalism. As Wolfgang Streeck put it: “The Left has more reason to fear the Right overthrowing democracy, in order to save capitalism, than the Right has to fear the Left abolishing capitalism for the sake of democracy.” It is very funny in a sort of manic, existential way.
The very people that have the most to gain from a society organized around communes and community (to avoid the dreaded word) are instead continuing to either buttress or just plainly accept a society organized around capital and its accumulation because the alternative is unfathomable or ‘doesn’t work’. It is critical to remember that the ultimate goal of any ideology is invisibility – something achieved perfectly by capitalism. It has reached the ultimate goal: The idea that there is no viable alternative and that it’s not an ideology but just ‘human nature’. No one is a ‘capitalist’, no, of course not, they are just ‘normal people’, contrasting with the abnormal ones, who suggest strange, abnormal ways of organizing things. What is likely (definitely) not the best social system for mankind has thus been normalized into complete and absolute invisibility: It’s not an ideology anymore but the ‘way of life’. It’s all even more ironic when we consider that industrial capitalism did not develop until the eighteenth century in a small geographic area confined to Western Europe, and its development was neither continuous nor inevitable. That much is not even a ‘socialist’ understanding, e.g., see Kenneth Pomeranz’ magnus opus, The Great Divergence (2000).
But I now see that any sort of drive for real societal change is continuously crushed in a diamond vice, creating a sort of ‘virgin oil’ that occasionally drips into media or oozes into people’s peripheral vision and needs to be quickly wiped away and then preferably followed up with a nice warm shower where the middling niceties of the current order are used to wash away the dirty and outrageous feeling of considering actual change. Imagine if we gave up on scientific endeavors after a handful of failed experiments – we’d never be flying aeroplanes, developing vaccines, or inventing semiconductors. We’d be stuck in the stone age. So, the finger-pointing at the handful of cases that attempted to carve a world order beyond the current one and failed (e.g., USSR) is nothing more than hot air as far as argumentation is concerned. It means nothing. People often say: “The failure of communism is not a theoretical problem but a practical one” or “It’s incompatible with human nature” etc. But these are merely engineering problems. Anything practical can be dealt with; a solution can be engineered. As long as the theory is solid, a solution can be created. This is how all scientific progress works. I wonder why the question of “How to organize a society?” is not considered with the same scientific rigor as “How can we develop a vaccine for X”? The answer is depressingly simple: While we leave science to scientists (experts in their fields), for some reason “how to organize a society” is something that everyone is meant to weigh in on. What might be the most important question is thus cast into the void of averageness. Funny stuff indeed!
December 22, 2024:
The mind seems to erase shit in hindsight, I think this is called ‘positive memory bias’, producing some wildly rosy takes of the past. Here’s a definition from a recent neuro-journal: “Mainly in autobiographical memory and particularly for self-relevant information, positive memory biases emerge from the operation of powerful mechanisms aimed at maintaining the individual’s well-being.” So, this crap seems to have some sort of an evolutionary explanation. But despite knowing its fakeness, I cannot seem to wriggle free from its grasp. I write this now because it’s the fucking crack of dawn and I decided to listen to a playlist titled “Very British Christmas” just to liven the mood a bit. The weather is so bad, I haven’t even seen the sun in a month; no warm hues at all. Anyway, I put this stupid-ass playlist on and went to make coffee, and a few tracks later I was stunned by a piece of music that came on. It was a rendition of “Walking in the Air” from The Snowman, a childhood classic for me. It’s impossible to describe exactly what happened, but a deluge of emotions seemed to froth out of each molecular orifice in my nervous system. It’s been years since I heard this, and it just overwhelmed me with nostalgia, in that sort of sad-that-those-times-are-gone type of way, as if ‘those days’ were beyond incredible. It’s funny really, because I know that those days were full of shit and stress, likely even more so than now. But the empirical part of my brain loses the battle to this evolutionary memory bias or whatever it’s called. Knowing that it is untrue doesn’t seem to diminish its strength. A collective joke that the mad flute player pipes up from the seventh layer of hell to pacify and subdue humanity. I’m almost certain this is what Howard was also struck by. E.g., see this passage from one of his letters: “I am perfectly confident that I could never adequately convey to any other human being the precise reasons why I continue to refrain from suicide – the reasons, that is, why I still find existence enough of a compensation to atone for its dominantly burthensome quality. These are reasons are strongly linked with architecture, scenery, and lighting and atmospheric effects, and take the form of vague impressions of adventurous expectancy coupled with elusive memory – impressions that certain vistas, particularly those associated with sunsets, are avenues of approach to spheres or conditions of wholly undefined delights and freedoms which I have known in the past and have a slender possibility of knowing again in the future.”
While considering this curse of ‘positive memory bias’ and how it seems to operate despite us knowing it’s not an accurate representation, I have become certain that if full life simulations ever become reality (which they will) people will have no problem in plugging in and effectively ‘plugging out’ of physical life. Since it is obvious that knowing something isn’t technically ‘true’ doesn’t bother us. In thought experiments on this subject (or in films such as The Matrix) one of the prime drivers against the simulation is that we would know it ‘isn’t real’. Like there’s some granular yearning for truth and reality embedded within mankind’s cellular composition. Well, that sounds like horseshit to me. Such grand statements rarely make sense anyway. But in light of everything I’ve seen in the past 35 or so years, I can safely say that should the simulation arrive and offer an absolute one-way ticket, the majority of humanity would take it without hesitation, including myself. You have to really be in love with yourself to desperately cling onto what you have here. Only the most ego-filled obnoxious morons would do that. Deluded idiots who want to channel concentrated pain and suffering from the outer cosmos upon us all. Or, worse still, pathetic slime patches who think that ‘humanity’ is something super grand and important might not plug in. Hyper-deluded idiots. Speaking of slime patches, in recent news, millions of people in the West are in (mostly silent) admiration and support of Luigi Mangione. This tells us that it wasn’t he who broke the social contract, but that the social contract was already broken, because only then can vigilante justice be seen as legitimate by large parts of society. This, then, shows that there’s an even bigger disconnect between mouth and asshole than otherwise thought. It turns out, he who eats a seventeen-course menu under a starlight banquet and he who sucks shit out of a rectal corridor have different priorities. After all, it’s possible to dump nuclear waste right into people’s open mouths with the right legal processes: It’s happened many times in places where unimportant people tried to live.
December 31, 2025:
Wintering in Istanbul, first time in six years. It turns out I’ve missed this stupid-ass place; it truly is the best city. What a joke. Stockholm Syndrome at its finest. I walked 21.000 steps today and something similar yesterday too. Each step I take in this sun-struck metropolis makes me love and hate it more. Both increase at the same time. Winter really is something else here: god-rays beam through ever-present breaks in the cloud cover, glinting along the crest of waves rising periodically against the rocks along the shore in Moda. Some nice photographs were captured near the defunct port (now a library and tea house). Also got some amazing deals on a couple of massive old codices from the sahafs in Kadıköy, which I then had to lug around the entire evening as we walked around forever. Anyway, aside from all the chores and appointments and social stuff and miscellanea throughout the city proper, back in the house I’ve been using my old laptop to experience Ken Follet’s The Pillars of the Earth. Its music and atmosphere are quite good, likely helped by being from a well-written book set in twelfth century England. It struck that goddamn Medieval-life chord in me again. Reeled back in by ze historia. I’ve found myself re-reading Robert Fossier’s stuff and looking into Byzantine monastic itineraries to envision myself as a farmer-monk type life-form. Such is the allure of these fantastical dream slices. Ian Mortimer put it best when he wrote: “As soon as we start to think of the past *happening* (as opposed to it having happened), a new way of conceiving history becomes possible… it allows us to see the past not as a series of graphs showing fluctuations in grain yields or household income, but as an investigation into the sensations of being alive at a different time… to gain an inkling as to why people did this or that, and even why they believed things which we find simply incredible.”
Sometimes people ask me about the best or most interesting Byzantine writing I’ve come across. And while there are many truly inspiring contenders, I always find myself coming back to a cluster of early-eleventh century manuscripts (ca. 1020s), all composed in the same scriptorium in Constantinople, discussing ‘asymmetric warfare’ or skirmishing (codex Vaticanus graecus 1164, codex Scorialensis graecus 281, and codex Barberinianus graecus II 97). Two or possibly three copies were originally produced of the two texts in question which are today referred to as the Peri Paradromis (“On Skirmishing”) and the Biblion Taktikon (“Book on Tactics”) – both of whose authorship remains anonymous, although likely composed by a Byzantine general (possibly the same one; one contender is Nikephoros Ouranos). The reasons these texts are so interesting is because they utilize a non-flowery, rather direct and ‘no nonsense’ language and style to illuminate the thinking behind all sorts of warfare related matters, particularly from a defense and logistics angle. There are lengthy sections on night raiding, ambushes, and spying – for instance – all packed full of local knowledge and wisdom that is all but lost and that when read nowadays seems so clever and interesting. Truly must-reads for anyone even mildly interested in the distant past.
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Cover Image: Rime of the Ancient Mariner illustration by Gustave Dore
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