editing

Since 2019… language traps, accidental ethics and being a good doggy

Counting the Days
Dog at Rest
Gerrit Dou (Dutch, 1613–1675)
1650
Oil on panel
* Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection
* Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

I haven’t written on here since 2019 so, I prompted myself to get started again by editing an old draft for a post (well, just a little thought-note really) and scheduling it to go out next week, which quickly become tomorrow, and while I was writing this, tomorrow became today.

The logic being, if I know suddenly, out of the blue, I’m posting a weird little note about metaphysics (that’s what the other piece is almost about), then it’s not going to make sense. I’m going to have to write something now, tonight, today, as a prelude to overshadow it: the real ‘return to the stage’. Not because anyone’s watching but I mean… I dunno, it takes a lot of integrity and self-confidence to stand up on stage in an empty room, rant for a full ten minutes and then disappear. What if someone saw? Every minute ticking by up there makes it more likely that you’ll have a witness, right, and if you have a witness, you have an audience. And if you’re on stage and you have an audience, well then you goddamn better entertain them.

Apparently – I can’t let a sleeping dog lie. Like the empty theatre. I struggle, sometimes, to embrace the emptiness and just roll with it. For example, I hate using phrases like “let sleeping dogs lie”, uh, just let me check on a search engine… idioms! I think that’s what they’re called.

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about how a lot of the Nazis were boring in their evil. Well, not boring, but banal. The point being, you don’t need to be Space Hitler, you can just be an unsatisfied painter and ex-solider with PTSD, personality issues and a hardcore painkiller addiction. Evil happens in that kind of environment – a real world environment. You don’t need literal Satan or a Sith Emperor. Sometimes that grandiose image of evil even distracts from the real evil going on around you, maybe to the point where you aren’t ready for it or just don’t see it.

Eichmann is the banal Nazi I’m reminded of currently. I remember Arendt writing that – in his trial – Eichmann seemed to only speak in idioms and justified all his actions through a kind of dumb reliance on orders and supposed ‘common sense’. This wasn’t a shitty attempt at hiding mastermind villainy – which is what my mind immediately wanted it to be. Eichmann was an average man, using his boring mind to commit a bunch of heinous acts on numerous people, regardless of whether they were interesting or boring. He just liked that he’d become important, I guess. No grand agenda, as such. I imagine him as a local council official given way too much power, probably specifically because he wouldn’t think out of the box. [dammit, another idiom]

So now, when I hear myself using a string of idioms (or, it seems, just one idiom) I compulsively retch in my mind over how I’m drifting into the Eichmann zone of thought. Just keep repeating the common phrases, do what you’re told, and be exceedingly evil when you’re pretty confident you can get away with it, ‘and you’ll be fine’.

I don’t like it. Ick.

And this little aside proves, maybe, that I can’t let a sleeping dog lie, because I retched at the idiom and then I really wanted to explain myself to you rather than just trotting past it like nothing happened.

Imagine I’m doing this (or resisting doing this) in regular conversation, and not in a – possibly – conceited bit of online self-reflection. Because that’s what it’s like for me a lot of the time. My mind is cuddling or poking or panicking at sleeping dogs all the time. Maybe yours does the same thing. I don’t literally poke sleeping dogs though. I do tend to very gently pat them if I think it’s not going to disturb them too much, but probably not if they’re really far asleep. It’s not often that dogs do seem to be in a deep sleep, so I wanna let them have that moment to themselves.

I just read a snippet of a summary of the banality of evil and Eichmann stuff (I searched it up to make doubly sure I’m not going insane and had remembered enough of the details correctly) and the AI search assist that had made the summary concluded, “This idea suggests that evil can arise from thoughtlessness and conformity rather than from a monstrous nature.”

I kinda think thoughtless conformity is a monstrous nature. I mean isn’t that what predators are supposed to be doing all the time? Thoughtlessly killing to conform to their nature, because they don’t know any better? Or, is the point here that it’s not about a monstrous nature at all?

A leopard scavenges a corpse to feed itself and maybe its folks – is that a monstrous nature? Another week, the same leopard ambushes and kills a gazelle, still to feed. A dead tree rotting is home and food to hundreds of plants and creatures, but if humans cut down a forest to build a town, there won’t be any dead trees rotting for them to live in. No forest, no plants and creatures, that’s less food, less medicine, less pretty things. Suddenly the town that was built doesn’t look so homely anymore.

We’re getting into what could be a hardcore ethics chat here, but to my mind there is no monstrous nature, there’s just nature (forget whether it’s human or not, ethical inclinations or biology, I’m talking about it all) which can be a real fucker sometimes, for sure. There’s a black hole out there that can eat a sun. And, I dunno, that just feels rude. But I’d be hard pressed to say that black hole has a monstrous nature. Pretty sure it’s as much a reason why we’re here as a bunch of other stuff, including our sun – which would also be a bit of a fucker if it wasn’t for our unique atmosphere. If you wanted to get fanciful you could say it’s trying to burn us alive, but then again you could say it provides us with food, power, and we’re made out of bits and pieces of its aunts and uncles.

I guess, the fact that we can get emotionally scarred, to me, doesn’t mean that the things which scar us are intrinsically evil. It just means they feel that way a lot of the time.

Making every search engine use involve an “AI” programme that may be draining a town’s water supply, putting thousands of people out of work (maybe including me), and it still doesn’t do a better job of summarising a thing or answering my enquiry than any of the standard, somewhat less damaging listings just below it… isn’t that quite mundanely evil? I mean it seems almost machiavellian in one way – you can hardly notice the swap from ‘Wild Wild West internet’ to ‘tool of greedhead oppression internet’, just like with America itself perhaps. But DuckDuckGo are (probably) just using AI because everyone else does it. Boring, dumb, lemminging ourselves off the cliff of eternity because we forgot the option to live a life was there all along.

At some point in this piece, I’m going to explain that I’ve been working voluntarily as an editor or equivalent in local small town newspapers (two) for the last seven or eight years. I don’t have any other go-to on my “CV” to prove I can edit a body of writing. Reading this, you might think, “no wonder it’s a small town paper”. I’ve always had a tendency, okay, to link things in my mind. First I see something new, it’s strange, it’s terrifying. I see other things around it that give it a context. And if the new thing doesn’t kill me, I start to learn about it and its relations to the things around it. Suddenly I find that the strange new thing has become completely familiar and I’m flitting about it with reckless abandon, jumping from one part to the other as if it was all the same ultimately coherent whole.

And that is me writing an article. Or reading one, I think. That’s how I first found out that this might be a weird way of interacting with text – I read a poem at school when I was about 15, just as part of a normal English class, and it created a completely different world in me than it did in anyone else, apparently. Certainly my English teacher didn’t like my interpretation. I could back it up with the text, but then she threw the book at me [fuck!]. I mean, she just told me all this other stuff that wasn’t covered in class which proved that I was wrong. Or, at least, proved that I was not presenting the most usual interpretation of this text. Since I’ve unlocked internet search powers, people normally don’t get to do that anymore. I have infinite possible contexts to call upon mwahahahaha! Also I’ve relaxed a lot these days. Also people don’t really care half the time.

From an editorial perspective it’s interesting, because I’m very cautious on the first read, and then the text keeps expanding (whether I’m reading it, or writing it, actually) perhaps to infinity. I tend to cut it off – more or less arbitrarily – after a while. Sometimes it’s a good, coherent text by then. And sometimes I’m just too familiar with it to see its flaws. Where possible I leave it and sit on it for a few days, to refresh my perspective. With this right now, I stopped writing most of it at 1am this morning, and I’m editing it now at 2pm, as I’m writing this paragraph about editing.

A lot of the people (not all of them, far from it, but a lot of the people) I work with do not like the “let’s wait a bit” part of the process. Back at the last paper, I even got into the habit of skim-reading a quick proof rather than actually editing (or rather than taking the proof reading seriously), because everyone wanted it done quickly… until it went wrong, and then they wanted to have done it slower. I was listening to something recently that said the unfulfilled wishes of the past haunt the people of the future. I can probably get on board with that.

I struggle not to explain myself and overjustify everything. I also struggle, when I know something well, to remember that I need to explain it at all. I sometimes struggle in either or both of these ways to the point it causes chaos and (emotional) destruction around me. Usually that only happens when I’ve stopped being aware that I’m doing it, but not always. And believe me, it is horrifying to realise that you’re the dickhead but then carry on anyway. Almost scarring, really, because after that moment where it seemed so essential to keep being a shit, you have a bunch of emotional baggage to carry for… who knows how long. I still remember winning an argument by knowingly lying when I was 11 or 12. It still scares me, because it wasn’t an important argument – I just wanted to be right, even though I knew I was wrong.

The pain of understanding that what you’re doing to reach something has actually pushed you so far away from it, you won’t be getting it back.

From time to time I think of these interruptions, these justifications and observations as me narrating or fourth-wall-breaking my own life. Or maybe I just also narrate some things to myself or have this part of my self that sits on my shoulder looking at what I’m doing. I haven’t completely worked out what role this narration or segment of self plays in my overall being. Am I practising for something, like talking to people or explaining myself? Am I reviewing things that have happened, but now in more detail or with a different lens? Probably some yes to each of those. And am I scared that I’m the only other person who can really see and understand me… well, that sounds like something that might be the case.

I’m missing out a lot of background here, and I don’t know if I want to keep digging this hole. I’m on the “hate myself” side of the arrogance spectrum, and in life I have a tendency to put others first to the point where I’m utterly devoid of all vitality and lash out mindlessly at my surroundings to try and recapture some rumour of whatever essence I seem to have given away. You can’t go it alone, either as a ruler or as a slave. Both extremes are unhappy in their extremity, lack of balance, and probably their lack of community.

The buddhists are probably onto something, with all that balance stuff. And I’m fairly sure it’s not just the buddhists either. I mean, I’m an anarchist hedge wizard of sorts, and I seem to be onto something myself. Or possibly just on something. But the other anarchists and pagans seem to get it, and they don’t all draw it from buddhist texts passed around in the 60s; the ideas of balance, peace and community have somehow survived many attempts at their destruction in ‘Western’ thought. We don’t like to admit it, but we are capable of not being ignorant, intolerant, greedy pig-fuckers. Someone should pat themselves on the back. Maybe you.


Pernod in the Interwar Years

Communication as Magic

On my way here today I got an ad for Wix, I wondered: who’s paid off Google to translate “Wordpress” to “Wix” first, or is it all just some damned mistake…that some ad agent somewhere, paid more than the freak curating our children’s futures, just happened to confuse one ‘w’ word with another, relevant, ‘w’ word. I feel like these kinds of mistakes cannot reasonably be made with nouns.

I’ve been away from the blogging world – and from writing – for a little while now, and I’ve hated it. Nightmares from childhood crawl through my skull even in broad daylight, a substantial marker in my mental landscape of sustained failure. A warning that arises unbidden when I’ve spent too long writing cheques that won’t be honoured. Metaphorically of course. Show me a 20-something of today that ever wrote a recogniseable cheque from their own account. Even when I had my Mary Poppins Kiddie Account at the Halifax (I think I was 13) I didn’t write cheques and I’m pretty sure that was the only way you could use the account. Perhaps I dislike banks and even money altogther. Perhaps we all do, secretly, even while we profit from them. But more of that kind of rant later.

Editing other people’s writing for content rather than style is a disgusting activity that should only be conducted at times of definite intoxication. I have been undertaking this kind of task, sober, for extended periods of time. This had been part of the source of my break from writing. There are other things: transitory things that don’t make the cut here. What you need to know is that I shouldn’t be editing anyone for content, I should be exposing their own lies to them or singing out their truth. Editing doesn’t come into it. But style – if they want a different style to their own, if they want a unified publication style, well, that’s something I can disagree with but also something I can enforce while employed to do so. That’s something I can edit, but that’s also something that’s not part of my employment description. Time will tell however. Manoeuvrings and strategems, possibly even ruses, will enable me to gamble at the kind of position I desire. Inklings already here, staining my fingers.

Enough of gambling, however. Writing has to return to my life, and this is the allocated medium. Content production must occur, ideally with some extravegance or flair or other expressive quality. I adore neutrality but language isn’t neutral. It’s like some disgusting fizzing pot of chemistry full of PH papers and overshadowed by distillation tubes and pipettes and other extreme scaffolds with distinctly menacing connotations. The right amounts of love and bile must be associated to produce something approaching a middle ground, or at the very least a highly entertaining segment of nothing at all.

People don’t respect a writer who’s not writing. They don’t understand the alcoholism, the binge-watching, the binge-eating, the long walks, the hibrow cultural gatherings – they’re not pretence, they’re all an effort to convince the psyche and soul to reinvest their myriad energies in the act of verbal description. Coaxing a mouse into a bottle, except this is no ordinary bottle. The acoustics are fantastic, and there’s a thin crusting of rum salts at the bottom and up the sides. It’s been a struggle bringing myself back to this point, I can’t pretend to you it hasn’t been. But the nightmares have led me here safe and sound. I don’t want to be dealing with them anymore. I’ve had enough of childhood recollections taunting, without reason, without logic, except the undeniable fact of my own failure to pursue my own designated purpose. Got to get back on the horse, got to carry on up the path, or down it, at least until the next town.

But these distractions! For someone such as myself, who takes pride in low self-esteem, who hails it as a philosophical attitude, it can become painfully easy to get sidetracked. I mean why should I do any better, the question comes. My answer has to be tight. I have to navigate my own internal highways with great care, understanding, and above all, integrity. I can’t be intimidated by myself or else the plot will be lost for at least another day. And that’s another day of nighttimes and youtube advertisements and trips to the shops. If only the shops would go away. I don’t know if I can take the consumeristic bent of it all any longer. I can, but I’d rather not. And it’s that preference that scares me. More stable types than I have probably been lost to insane delusion. Firebombings and riots and even ideologies…all seductive to the head, all very sinister. I myself nearly became an ad man, once. It took the death of my father to stop it – Fate speaking a clear message with a completely unexpected heart attack. Or was it co-incidence? And is this ignorant arrogance?

Too soon to tell. Too soon. The memories will well up and consume eventually, and then the truth of it all will be reality, for better or worse. Or perhaps this is already the present, the great procession of Septimus Hodge marching and shedding in perpetuity, despite both fires and equations.

These times for the individual are like the interwar years were for Europe – a time of both certainty and uncertainty. A time when the controlling forces change more or less and begin to understand things, while the masses ignorantly celebrate every last moment they’re allowed, safe in the knowledge that they can do so without being randomly exploded. Now, once again, they will only be exploded for transgressions against more powerful parties within their own society. Elsewhere in the world will largely leave them be, for now. The individual is both – the thinking master and the wishing-they’d-rather-not-have-to victim. We’re each an ouroboros, infinitely changing, infinitely the same. At least, we are if you interpret it like me. And this is where the self-hatred or at least deprecation comes in as a natural response to an uncertain new world for humanity. We don’t want master-slave anymore and yet our biological hard-wiring struggles to make the change, on the personal level and on the social level. It can’t provide the internal stability our ideals prefer. So we work at it: we want democracy, we get representative oligarchy, we say that’s good enough for now. Maybe that’s all there is for us. The next generation will do better if they can.

We must destroy these kinds of assumptions. We must carefully and knowingly unselve, in select ways. Unravel our own stiching to do a better job than the Great Seamstress in the Sky. This is willful evolution, a new process often ignored or rejected by right-thinking scientists and pseudo-Darwinians. More on that another time.

Jean Rhys wrote some good books in the interwar years, and in one of those books her detached character liked Pernod. I have to say it’s an excellent discovery. I’m not drunk on it now, but I will be shortly. Then to the pub? No, no. Not enough pay for that. More importantly – not enough certainty of positive social contact. Who’s there? It could be somebody, it could be nobody. It could be some demented bat with a perfect tan and bleached hair, his eyes guarded by overly keen cheekbones. A heavy ordeal to encounter as the light fades on such a seasonal evening.

No, I’ll stay back and edit that last poem. Drink some more Pernod. Drive it forward with minimalist synthwave drumbeats etc.

The time could be near.

Is there any more to be said?

Perhaps not yet…the prey must be led with breadcrumbs, not brought to escape with a labyrinthine thread. That’s what they say at ad school. That is…unless you want to make them escape from their own heads, their own realities…but no ad man is genius enough to come up with that kind of manipulative scheme. The unreality on us now is sheer accident brought about by centuries of corruption crushing layers one upon the other. The sort to make a conspiracy aren’t advanced enough for it. More stuff, more, more for the fire. Break all the chairs, break all the pots, the food, break everything you made the fire for, just to keep it going. The burning must go on.

I have to escape now, before the anti-capitalism takes me away for hours…….and so the Pernod comes, an aniseed twist up the nose, dreams of green oblivion……it must be allowed to take effect…poetry must be drafted, writing must unfurl and snarl and beak at the uncertain consistencies all up the walls, the procession must go on…