by
Elvia Wilk
6
One ambitious attempt to undo the individual-moral-adventure story was the postmodern systems novel, which intended to depict entire political, social, and technological systems by zooming in and out on figure and ground. The concept was introduced in the late eighties by the critic Tom LeClair, who chose the fiction of Don DeLillo as the quintessential example. LeClair claimed that DeLillo and others, such as Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis, were using fiction to analyze the complex systems of society, technology, and politics from a structural level. DeLillo’s early novels sketch vast political and corporate conspiracies just beyond the fingertips of the central character, whose individual moral adventure is his paranoid pursuit to comprehend the whole system from shards of evidence. The “system” of the systems novel is never fully revealed, but the reader is given to believe that, behind the scenes, something or someone is pulling the strings.
The term systems novel was maligned by many readers as well as authors themselves, who saw their works as diverse and exploratory rather than reducible to a set of general principles. Yet there are qualities typical of the project: the character of the classic systems novel is a white Western man, as are the majority of the authors themselves. Despite the focus on macrolevel occurrences and interconnectedness, there remains a protagonist: the mystified guy (or guys) at the center. He may feel personally small or powerless, but his experience is the lens through which human experience is meant to be extrapolated. Most of the time, the systems in which he is embroiled are social, technical, and political, rather than ecological, suggesting a separation between the human realm (system) and the natural world (ecosystem). In books about systems, men tend to emerge from the background rather than merge into it.
funny cus this is kind of what pano is trying to be
One ambitious attempt to undo the individual-moral-adventure story was the postmodern systems novel, which intended to depict entire political, social, and technological systems by zooming in and out on figure and ground. The concept was introduced in the late eighties by the critic Tom LeClair, who chose the fiction of Don DeLillo as the quintessential example. LeClair claimed that DeLillo and others, such as Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis, were using fiction to analyze the complex systems of society, technology, and politics from a structural level. DeLillo’s early novels sketch vast political and corporate conspiracies just beyond the fingertips of the central character, whose individual moral adventure is his paranoid pursuit to comprehend the whole system from shards of evidence. The “system” of the systems novel is never fully revealed, but the reader is given to believe that, behind the scenes, something or someone is pulling the strings.
The term systems novel was maligned by many readers as well as authors themselves, who saw their works as diverse and exploratory rather than reducible to a set of general principles. Yet there are qualities typical of the project: the character of the classic systems novel is a white Western man, as are the majority of the authors themselves. Despite the focus on macrolevel occurrences and interconnectedness, there remains a protagonist: the mystified guy (or guys) at the center. He may feel personally small or powerless, but his experience is the lens through which human experience is meant to be extrapolated. Most of the time, the systems in which he is embroiled are social, technical, and political, rather than ecological, suggesting a separation between the human realm (system) and the natural world (ecosystem). In books about systems, men tend to emerge from the background rather than merge into it.
funny cus this is kind of what pano is trying to be
21
The story of person-becoming-plant is not about reversal or reversion to some imagined natural state. Instead it provides a counterpoint to any quick-fix, back-to-the-land fantasy, which sees nature as distinct, permanent, unchanging, passive, authentic, and fundamentally good. The idea is not that nature will heal what ails these characters, that they will become natural “again.” On the contrary, it’s about seeing people as always already plant, plant as always already human, and those distinctions as always already weird. Weirdness resists the idea that everything can be explained by humans, but doesn’t give up on the importance of human experience and ability to access and affect the world. This requires some kind of surrender to the unknown, which makes humanity itself an unknown category—whose outlines get messy and whose central importance in the universe is not self-evident.
this is good but also makes me think of the miranda popkey 'always already' joke lol
The story of person-becoming-plant is not about reversal or reversion to some imagined natural state. Instead it provides a counterpoint to any quick-fix, back-to-the-land fantasy, which sees nature as distinct, permanent, unchanging, passive, authentic, and fundamentally good. The idea is not that nature will heal what ails these characters, that they will become natural “again.” On the contrary, it’s about seeing people as always already plant, plant as always already human, and those distinctions as always already weird. Weirdness resists the idea that everything can be explained by humans, but doesn’t give up on the importance of human experience and ability to access and affect the world. This requires some kind of surrender to the unknown, which makes humanity itself an unknown category—whose outlines get messy and whose central importance in the universe is not self-evident.
this is good but also makes me think of the miranda popkey 'always already' joke lol
31
Love can be both intoxicating and toxic. One desires to be taken over: enveloped, dissolved, decomposed, and one desires just as strongly to retain an individual shape. For this reason, Anne Carson describes erotic love as fundamentally ambivalent in her 1986 book, Eros the Bittersweet. As she puts it, the “incursion” of Eros invades the self, disturbing its homeostasis, and the self finds this both painful and pleasurable. It is only due to incursion, after all, that the self can even recognize itself as such. When the self recognizes its boundaries, it has to reckon with them. The lover has to ask, “ ‘Once I have been mixed up in this way, who am I?’ Desire changes the lover.” Carson describes this change as both bitter and sweet, borrowing these terms from a fragment of poetry by the ancient Greek writer Sappho:
Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me
sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up
Love can be both intoxicating and toxic. One desires to be taken over: enveloped, dissolved, decomposed, and one desires just as strongly to retain an individual shape. For this reason, Anne Carson describes erotic love as fundamentally ambivalent in her 1986 book, Eros the Bittersweet. As she puts it, the “incursion” of Eros invades the self, disturbing its homeostasis, and the self finds this both painful and pleasurable. It is only due to incursion, after all, that the self can even recognize itself as such. When the self recognizes its boundaries, it has to reckon with them. The lover has to ask, “ ‘Once I have been mixed up in this way, who am I?’ Desire changes the lover.” Carson describes this change as both bitter and sweet, borrowing these terms from a fragment of poetry by the ancient Greek writer Sappho:
Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me
sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up
40
The Gift’s thesis is that artistic creation is fundamentally an act of generosity, which may be accounted for by commodity systems such as the market economy but which forever evades total capture by those systems. Hyde makes (some occasionally universalizing and exoticizing) sojourns into gift theory and anthropological surveys of cultures with gift-giving economies, and analyzes the way gifts have today been commodified and funneled through philanthropic systems. Yet Hyde maintains that, despite the function of the gift in a given time and place, the gift is fundamentally unique, in that its value always increases as it circulates. The gift contains within it “the mystery of things that increase as they perish”—like compost. The gift may degrade, but it holds potential for eternal growth.
<3
The Gift’s thesis is that artistic creation is fundamentally an act of generosity, which may be accounted for by commodity systems such as the market economy but which forever evades total capture by those systems. Hyde makes (some occasionally universalizing and exoticizing) sojourns into gift theory and anthropological surveys of cultures with gift-giving economies, and analyzes the way gifts have today been commodified and funneled through philanthropic systems. Yet Hyde maintains that, despite the function of the gift in a given time and place, the gift is fundamentally unique, in that its value always increases as it circulates. The gift contains within it “the mystery of things that increase as they perish”—like compost. The gift may degrade, but it holds potential for eternal growth.
<3
145
I imagined, while watching Melancholia the second time, how the people in the village outside the family’s private property might have been dealing with the news of apocalypse. Maybe they were generating wild conspiracy theories and attacking one another—or maybe they had stopped worrying, stopped working, and were having a great time! Maybe they were inventing new rituals, taking psychedelics, or having ecstatic sex. Maybe, like Michelle, they had all gotten sober and opened themselves to falling in love. Maybe they had all become anarchists and were freely sharing resources. As science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson wrote in an essay about the pandemic: “Amid the tragedy and death” it is possible that “at the very least, we are all freaking out together.” Or, as author and critic Olivia Laing wrote in a review of Black Wave: “The end of human existence is an opportunity, just like anything else. Maybe it’s even an occasion for enlightenment, the shaky, tender kind that robs the newly sober of their defences.”
When the wave crashes on the shore of the end-times, Michelle is sober and sur-thriving, but this is not to say she’s healthy or that “the planet is healing,” as that pandemic meme proclaimed. The planet is not healing. There are, however, methods for living in the protracted present, riding the crest of the wave, that do not require invoking the crash or drinking yourself to oblivion until it does. The first time I watched Melancholia, I was struggling to draw outlines around myself, to distinguish my psychic state from the external reality of the world. The second time I saw it, after reading Black Wave, the dichotomy I had been trying to uphold between myself and the collective had begun to collapse. And all those hypothetical possibilities for what I imagined could be happening in the village outside the private compound were happening all around me, at the same time.
man i need to watch this
I imagined, while watching Melancholia the second time, how the people in the village outside the family’s private property might have been dealing with the news of apocalypse. Maybe they were generating wild conspiracy theories and attacking one another—or maybe they had stopped worrying, stopped working, and were having a great time! Maybe they were inventing new rituals, taking psychedelics, or having ecstatic sex. Maybe, like Michelle, they had all gotten sober and opened themselves to falling in love. Maybe they had all become anarchists and were freely sharing resources. As science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson wrote in an essay about the pandemic: “Amid the tragedy and death” it is possible that “at the very least, we are all freaking out together.” Or, as author and critic Olivia Laing wrote in a review of Black Wave: “The end of human existence is an opportunity, just like anything else. Maybe it’s even an occasion for enlightenment, the shaky, tender kind that robs the newly sober of their defences.”
When the wave crashes on the shore of the end-times, Michelle is sober and sur-thriving, but this is not to say she’s healthy or that “the planet is healing,” as that pandemic meme proclaimed. The planet is not healing. There are, however, methods for living in the protracted present, riding the crest of the wave, that do not require invoking the crash or drinking yourself to oblivion until it does. The first time I watched Melancholia, I was struggling to draw outlines around myself, to distinguish my psychic state from the external reality of the world. The second time I saw it, after reading Black Wave, the dichotomy I had been trying to uphold between myself and the collective had begun to collapse. And all those hypothetical possibilities for what I imagined could be happening in the village outside the private compound were happening all around me, at the same time.
man i need to watch this
236
Anyway. The more I tried to get the characters in the story to enact the behavior that would lead to their relationship’s demise, the more I found myself spiraling outward to describe their entire world. How else could I show how death had infiltrated their lives and ruined their capacity to connect with each other? How else could I dissect the woman’s overempathizing and intense projection of her own fears onto the man’s grief? How else could I find out how to distribute fault? To get there I surely needed to first describe a whole society where, for instance, there are no grief rituals to handle death; everyone is in their twenties and thirties and has no intergenerational ties; awareness of climate change forecloses the future imaginary; gentrification is destroying the capacity for creative freedom (which extends to the creativity required for love); everyone feels like they are subversive while role-playing the gender dynamics and social hierarchies they’ve inherited; charity is the only clear expression of empathy; and so on.
I got carried away by the world-building. I told myself that the relationship was still the nexus of the story, its reason for being, but each time I got close to the lovers I found myself zooming out and inventing some new corporate scheme or technological development or subplot. Eventually a friend suggested that, the validity of world-building aside, I was maybe trying to distract myself from the thing I still didn’t want to look at: that wound at the center of it all. I had started writing the story to make myself deal with the inexplicable sadness of death and heartbreak, and still hadn’t dealt with it. Worse, two years into writing a full-length novel, I hadn’t allowed myself any closure for those old feelings, because I was still picking at the wound.
i like the way she writes/thinks
Anyway. The more I tried to get the characters in the story to enact the behavior that would lead to their relationship’s demise, the more I found myself spiraling outward to describe their entire world. How else could I show how death had infiltrated their lives and ruined their capacity to connect with each other? How else could I dissect the woman’s overempathizing and intense projection of her own fears onto the man’s grief? How else could I find out how to distribute fault? To get there I surely needed to first describe a whole society where, for instance, there are no grief rituals to handle death; everyone is in their twenties and thirties and has no intergenerational ties; awareness of climate change forecloses the future imaginary; gentrification is destroying the capacity for creative freedom (which extends to the creativity required for love); everyone feels like they are subversive while role-playing the gender dynamics and social hierarchies they’ve inherited; charity is the only clear expression of empathy; and so on.
I got carried away by the world-building. I told myself that the relationship was still the nexus of the story, its reason for being, but each time I got close to the lovers I found myself zooming out and inventing some new corporate scheme or technological development or subplot. Eventually a friend suggested that, the validity of world-building aside, I was maybe trying to distract myself from the thing I still didn’t want to look at: that wound at the center of it all. I had started writing the story to make myself deal with the inexplicable sadness of death and heartbreak, and still hadn’t dealt with it. Worse, two years into writing a full-length novel, I hadn’t allowed myself any closure for those old feelings, because I was still picking at the wound.
i like the way she writes/thinks
238
The main character of the novel, unlike me, is a scientist. She is employed by a biotech think tank, where she studies self-replicating cells that are programmed to multiply in particular patterns on command. But she does not work with the real, organic cells; she examines how they behave in a computer simulation. She runs the simulation again and again to predict how the cells will behave. She has no reason to believe the simulation will not accurately predict the real behavior of the cells—but there is always that infinitesimal chance that they will not follow their preprogrammed course, that the simulation will turn out to have been faulty. She can’t help but suspect that there is a mysterious element that cannot be accounted for in advance.
This might be a decent metaphor for writing a novel. Even for those writers who have every paragraph outlined before they begin (not me), there remains a tiny element of the unknown when you set the simulation in motion. You can only create the conditions for something to happen, and plan for that thing to happen, but you can’t ever be completely sure—unless you write the whole fucking book. You have to carry out the experiment.
lol
The main character of the novel, unlike me, is a scientist. She is employed by a biotech think tank, where she studies self-replicating cells that are programmed to multiply in particular patterns on command. But she does not work with the real, organic cells; she examines how they behave in a computer simulation. She runs the simulation again and again to predict how the cells will behave. She has no reason to believe the simulation will not accurately predict the real behavior of the cells—but there is always that infinitesimal chance that they will not follow their preprogrammed course, that the simulation will turn out to have been faulty. She can’t help but suspect that there is a mysterious element that cannot be accounted for in advance.
This might be a decent metaphor for writing a novel. Even for those writers who have every paragraph outlined before they begin (not me), there remains a tiny element of the unknown when you set the simulation in motion. You can only create the conditions for something to happen, and plan for that thing to happen, but you can’t ever be completely sure—unless you write the whole fucking book. You have to carry out the experiment.
lol
257
I have no muscles that have developed through play or the immediate need to survive—just countable reps. I write a certain number of words today; I answer a certain number of emails today; I do a certain number of lunges. I lunge—“a sudden thrust forward of the body,” as if to seize prey—and then I retract without grasping anything in my jaws. Just the lunge and the act of lunging. A certain number of lunges. A certain number of calories. A certain number of recreation hours. And then the day is over.
A is very productive, too. He gets work done. Only he doesn’t seem to exalt it as his ordering principle for being alive. Taking a day off can be nice for him; the meaning of life does not disintegrate as soon as the disciplinary structure is removed. He doesn’t panic as I do when interrupted at the desk, because you can’t interrupt something that isn’t sacred. Free time does not provoke an existential spiral. For me, anything that isn’t quantifiable productivity can only be construed as procrastination. There’s no “life” that is not a means to an end of —?
relatable lol
I have no muscles that have developed through play or the immediate need to survive—just countable reps. I write a certain number of words today; I answer a certain number of emails today; I do a certain number of lunges. I lunge—“a sudden thrust forward of the body,” as if to seize prey—and then I retract without grasping anything in my jaws. Just the lunge and the act of lunging. A certain number of lunges. A certain number of calories. A certain number of recreation hours. And then the day is over.
A is very productive, too. He gets work done. Only he doesn’t seem to exalt it as his ordering principle for being alive. Taking a day off can be nice for him; the meaning of life does not disintegrate as soon as the disciplinary structure is removed. He doesn’t panic as I do when interrupted at the desk, because you can’t interrupt something that isn’t sacred. Free time does not provoke an existential spiral. For me, anything that isn’t quantifiable productivity can only be construed as procrastination. There’s no “life” that is not a means to an end of —?
relatable lol
259
One way to make sure I’ve done my reps for the day is to keep lists of all my tasks. Everything goes on the same list because everything has to get done. Shower, eat, write a friend, write a colleague, talk about my feelings, call my dad, write an email, write an essay, write a diary, write a new list of tasks.
Something on my list that is not work, but that is on the same list and so has become ontologically flattened into work, is to record a video message for my friend’s birthday. Given the quarantine situation, her kind husband has invited almost a hundred people to upload pictures and videos to an app where she’ll be able to watch them on her birthday. It’s possible to see what other people have uploaded so far. Before recording a video, I watch some of the other video messages. One of our mutual friends has made a lovely one: she’s sitting in a bathtub and extolling the virtues of the birthday girl, whom she dubs the Queen of Pleasure. I smile. It’s true! This friend is wonderfully adept at enjoying life. She knows how to live in a body in time, how to maximize joy as its own end, and I dearly love this about her. I get emotional thinking about friends I haven’t seen in so long, who are all Queens of something. The Queen of Finding the Hilarious. The Queen of Even Keel. The Queen of Gathering Us Together. The Queen of Optimism and Ambition. I must be a Queen of some kind, too, I think. What Queen am I? The Queen of Time Management. The Queen of Third Draft of an Essay. It is I, the Queen of Reps.
One way to make sure I’ve done my reps for the day is to keep lists of all my tasks. Everything goes on the same list because everything has to get done. Shower, eat, write a friend, write a colleague, talk about my feelings, call my dad, write an email, write an essay, write a diary, write a new list of tasks.
Something on my list that is not work, but that is on the same list and so has become ontologically flattened into work, is to record a video message for my friend’s birthday. Given the quarantine situation, her kind husband has invited almost a hundred people to upload pictures and videos to an app where she’ll be able to watch them on her birthday. It’s possible to see what other people have uploaded so far. Before recording a video, I watch some of the other video messages. One of our mutual friends has made a lovely one: she’s sitting in a bathtub and extolling the virtues of the birthday girl, whom she dubs the Queen of Pleasure. I smile. It’s true! This friend is wonderfully adept at enjoying life. She knows how to live in a body in time, how to maximize joy as its own end, and I dearly love this about her. I get emotional thinking about friends I haven’t seen in so long, who are all Queens of something. The Queen of Finding the Hilarious. The Queen of Even Keel. The Queen of Gathering Us Together. The Queen of Optimism and Ambition. I must be a Queen of some kind, too, I think. What Queen am I? The Queen of Time Management. The Queen of Third Draft of an Essay. It is I, the Queen of Reps.
264
Some of my classmates were probably geniuses. Others managed to parlay the genius myth to their advantage. Others were just rich or from famous families, so it didn’t matter. Others were ahead of me in a different way: they understood that creative work also happens when your ass is not in the chair and they saw no purpose in self-punishment. And others were probably working as hard as I was and just not making such a big deal out of it. They realized that artists are not supposed to look like we’re toiling this hard. Our labor is supposed to be mysterious exceptional labor, in service of making exceptional timeless objects, etc.
Some of my classmates were probably geniuses. Others managed to parlay the genius myth to their advantage. Others were just rich or from famous families, so it didn’t matter. Others were ahead of me in a different way: they understood that creative work also happens when your ass is not in the chair and they saw no purpose in self-punishment. And others were probably working as hard as I was and just not making such a big deal out of it. They realized that artists are not supposed to look like we’re toiling this hard. Our labor is supposed to be mysterious exceptional labor, in service of making exceptional timeless objects, etc.