I finished the Elegies last night and opened my e-mail this morning to find that my goals are too complex and that I need to lighten up. Apparently, immersing myself in the question of what I'm doing and how I'm doing it only leads to confusing blog posts and grim e-mails.
Fair enough. I kept reading lines out loud to see if they sounded as overwrought as they felt while reading. It was easy to lose perspective because the essays tended toward a depressing vision of a future in which we are plugged into the hive and unable to separate ourselves from the group, when the impulses propagate through entire societies like a craving for sugar runs through my own limbs right about this time of day. Where will the organization come from in the hive? Where will the thoughts and impulse control come from?
As I send this out, into the spreading void of the hive, it seems more or less as if I'm talking to myself; I'm thinking via keyboard, mediating my own thoughts into grammatical structures and then into typeface and then into the blankness of the untraveled interwebs. Have I lost a sense of interiority then? Have I divided my thinking into public and private just as I've accustomed myself to the idea that cameras are everywhere and the public sphere begins just outside the front door and even in the house, depending on the images released in various social networks.
It seems odd to me that stories would vanish as the constructed self vanishes--who are these people who used to expect that they would be able to escape, what was the panopticon like when it was an invisible diety rather than a humming machine?
How much longer can they last, these stories?
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