August 15th, 2013 / 4:38 pm
Snippets
Snippets
Mike Young—
“Besides: to learn to use her mind’s energy against itself, she would have to add new content. Even if it was content that might eventually ease the burden of having content, at this point, she is so overwhelmed with the content she already has, she thinks she cannot take on any new content even if it’s promised that the new content will help her.” — from Evelyn Hampton’s “The End of Content” over at The Collagist; no one does clever and sad at the same time like Evelyn Hampton
Yeah,
It’s like technology is fucking it up for artists all over the place.
It’s like technology ignores the fact we use words.
It’s like technology doesn’t know who Ray Kurzweil is.
It’s like technology has no idea what effect contemporary nutritional standards have on the brain’s capacity for self-awareness.
A logical solution to the problem of having too much content might be to ask in a different way after the feeling itself of “too much” — the determination towards discontent.
Is politically non-specific discontent a kind of spoiling of oneself? a luxuriation?
Maybe those are the questions of a small serious man.
But ‘small serious man’ sounds like viciously circular self-satisfying grievance.
I don’t think reason ends. I think reasonable people end.
Wanting reality regardless of its indifference to personal smallness–to ‘person’–: maybe that’s not… feasible.
I think, rather than a factory, content can be a garden. A garden is an imposition on wilderness, but I think it can also be a discovery of the wild, a participation with the wild.
Maybe gardens are steps ineluctably on the path to factories, and supposing that gardens are more natural than factories would be a destructively sentimental fantasy. And surely the gardener is not separable from content.
But I think that content can be tended as a garden by a gardener who’s not a destroyer.