Apocalyptic Wonder
An otherwise simple walk to catch a train into the city had a dimension that I guess I’ll describe as “apocalyptic wonder.” I don’t mean that in the “end of the world” sense, but in the “unraveling” sense of the word. It was like every phenomenon—a passerby’s limp, a tasteless building, Broadway advertisements—came with a decision: I could see it with my usual categories, almost like through a foggy glass of analysis, or, I can imagine and wholeheartedly believe the most generous and profound interpretation possible. And when you inherit that 2nd option as a lens, it’s like one thing builds off another until there’s a cascade and you just have chills over extremely ordinary things. A grumpy commuter is not someone to judge, but someone deserving of parental love, and you imagine you and them as if you’ve been very close for a lifetime, and just for a second you infer some emotional dimension you would’ve never otherwise known. It very much feels Scroogish, like you’re a deadman with just one evening to remember life from its most charitable angle. I don’t know why I’m feeling this lucidity: could be a new surge of dad hormones, or the frigid weather, or the tie around my neck is too tight, or maybe this new frenzy of spawning new software to wrap around my problems is priming me to believe that I can just spin up my own mental frames to see anything anew, as I please, whenever.
My friend Andrew, I imagine, would read this and joke that it’s a low-grade form of Claude psychosis. Maybe, but maybe the good kind? I’ve always thought there was something slightly off about seeing normal life with ecstatic wholeness, and that the line between psychosis and mysticism is thin. When LSD was first invented, it took them a decade or so to shift the framing from psychosis—they called it “psycho-mimetic,” a madness simulator—to psychedelic (“mind-manifesting), and eventually mystical, transcendental, entheogenic, etc.
I don’t know what it was, but now that I write this on the train, I’m right back in my regular head. And obviously I love writing, but it makes me think I really need to make sure I have chunks of boredom each day, non-linguistic moments in between things. Infant care sort of produces this feeling too, but it’s different because that is about fusing attention with another being; what I just experienced before was something like full immersion in a chaotic environment. Pure Horus. I guess I’ve found it hard to make time for this because, since time is so limited, there’s a pressure to prioritize and converge in the little time you have: I have a book to launch! (I will be announcing the essay prize winners in early March.)
Anyway I think I’ll post this to Notes. Usually I’d just post a riff like this to a secret corner of my website, but in January I stopped logging, and said I’d try to just use Notes as my public note-taker. So if I want to really remember anything, I have to share it. I think the idea of sabotaging the thing I love—capturing fleeting thoughts in prose—and forcing it through a habit of the thing I’m scared of—public judgment of my every idea through metrics—is a good principle to do more often. It’s weird to take something that really is more like a journal entry and open it up to strangers. I’d basically be okay sharing this with anyone I know, but it make me anxious to think a stranger could find this, and this would be 100% of what they know about me, and they’d have no idea about Essay Architecture or whatever, but I think that kind of disregard is exactly what I’m trying to go for on Notes. If my email essays are on topic and polished and narrative building, then each Note should be its own thing, out of context, unrelated to the last one. And so I’m glad to share something like this after a shipost about snakepit.