Patterns in the Static

Most of my adult life I’ve felt like a man trying to hold up a circus tent full of water. Please, no advice; I bring this on myself as a way of maintaining the sense of constant crisis that motivates me best. In exchange for your forbearance I’ll withhold apologies for all the things half done or creeping toward an unknown horizon at an infinitesimal pace. I suspect I’ll live to an age that will invite appearances on whatever future version of The Today Show is popular in 2115, in which some jolly fellow the shape of a gumball machine congratulates me on being 146 years young; asking my secret, which of course will hinge on a daily shot of whiskey and a bucket of fried chicken. I believe this because it will take me at least that long to get through my current to do list.

Sometimes something’s got to give. This week it’s my planned first post-vacation Bestiary entry, which might seem a particularly lazy turn of events, but that the behemoth I’m working on is the mental equivalent of the Ross Ice Shelf abruptly calving its vast mass into the sea like an elephant defecating a right whale, which in its turn is voiding a Saturn V rocket. For me anyway. I’ve done my research, I’ve started a draft. I reckon if someone handed me a thousand bucks I’d just sit up all night and finish the goddamn thing but for zero bucks I’m going to make it good instead. Capitalism is a strange master. 

In the interim, I thought I’d just shoot the shit a little bit. I’ve had some practice: I’ve been writing a little blob of daily text in German in Reddit’s WriteStreakGerman subreddit. Every day I write something and every day or so some native speaker comes along and corrects what I wrote, making me feel like an imbecile in passing. I think it’s helping. I hope it’s helping; I’ve been doing this for 150 days now.

Most of what I write there is just pure shit. Every now and again I’ll tackle a decent subject and write maybe three paragraphs, all carefully constructed and with a violently labored spoonful what probably comes off as ignorant attempts at style. But most of the time it’s just, well… what totally not boring thing happened today and can I scrawl three sentences of elementary school German about it? The need for subject matter is absolutely voracious. Things that happened recently; things that happened not so recently; albums; books, TV shows; ideas about language learning; a detailed description of every baseball game I’ve gone to this season, which must be absolute poison to German readers steeped in Fußball.

I see people writing there with streaks running upwards of a thousand posts and I’m just absolutely enthralled. Are they writing novels in Tweet-length chunks?

Ok, well, the thing is, it’s actually not hard to write. It’s just thinking out loud. You just start talking and write down the words that come out of your mouth.  Pick anything; you can say something about it, even if it’s just, “I don’t know much about mitochondria but The Organelles sounds like a 60s-era all-female vocal trio.”

What’s hard is giving words a shape. A beginning and an end and some kind of structure in between. Making stories instead of just vomiting on the page. I think what makes it hard is that it’s unnatural — in contrast, the world just sort of blunders on senselessly and without pause, each beginning rooted in what happened immediately before and each ending instantly birthing another beginning. Turning this into stories is like chopping up a river.

Apophenia is the propensity to see patterns where they don’t exist, also called pareidolia in reference to visual information specifically. The disorder is in a sense a kind of psychological cancer, in that the ability to detect patterns is key to intelligence, but that capability, removed from any kind of conscious filtering, grows out of control and crowds out rational thinking. I wonder if perhaps that’s what we as a society are suffering from right now: the overwhelming tidal wave of rootless and disconnected information flung at us daily is a kind of hazard to our collective brain, threatening to unroot and disconnect us and dump us all like flotsam into a wild river of chaotic, random-access discourse. And so we do what we tend to do: find patterns. Or make them.

Disinformation, conspiracy theories, fake news — all debris from the collapse of reason. Probably not the best time to be advocating for the automation of information creation, but money and power have their own agenda. 

So a global psychological breakdown, basically. There’s reason for hope, though. I can’t say why because it’s one of the threads running through the next RCB and I don’t want to spoil anything. Instead I’ll engage in that one contrivance every sitcom writer keeps in his or her back pocket for those moments when the relentless demand for harmony and order become too great:

To be continued…