I’ve never read HP Lovecraft. I understand him only as an early twentieth-century landmark that casts a long shadow over cosmic horror and as a man who held some noxious views, perhaps even for the early twentieth century. I am, however, reading Eugene Thacker’s extravagant meditation on cosmic horror, and he includes a paragraph that Lovecraft wrote in 1928 as the opening paragraph of The Call of Cthulhu. A century later, it sounds like my relationship with the internet.

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but someday, the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

I understand less and less these days, yet I know too much: a blast on the other side of the world, shootings across the nation delivered like the weather forecast, something awful that somebody said thirty years ago, the sexual lives of politicians, the opinions of a distant acquaintance on Israel, the fact that a body found in an Ohio nature preserve turned out to be a discarded sex doll, and so on.

Are we standing on the precipice of a new dark age? Probably. I often catch myself thinking, yes, this is what a society circling the drain feels like, and in America, these nineteen days before the election feel genuinely existential. But there’s a phrase from Don DeLillo that refines Lovecraft’s prophecy: “Too much of everything from too narrow a source code.” Which means it’s time to step away from the screen.

The heat is finally ending tonight. The rain came an hour ago, and C. says it feels like a fever’s breaking. News about the climate crisis tends to focus on high temperatures, not the lows. But since the 1990s, the average nightly temperature has been rising faster than the daytime highs. And these nights have felt so heavy, like the way an old man steps out of a bodega with a tallboy of beer in a damp paper bag and says, “Oh Lord.”

Sometimes C. and I debate whether we’d rather live in ferocious heat or subzero cold. She always chooses the cold. “You can put on a jacket,” she says, “but you can’t take off your skin.”

They buried John Lewis today. The New York Times published an essay he wrote just before he died. I can’t imagine the sensation of writing beyond my death, hoping its timing might capture the attention of a nation busily tearing itself apart. “While my time here has now come to an end,” he begins. And: “Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble.” His essay appeared alongside news about the collapsing American economy and how it might not bounce back. A former presidential candidate who dismissed the pandemic died of the virus this morning. A hurricane named Isaias formed in the Caribbean this afternoon, and it threatens to roll up the eastern seaboard. Meanwhile, our current president suggested delaying the election. Although this is unlikely, the table is set for chaos in November.

I flipped to where I’d left off in Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. The synchronicity knocked me sideways as the narrator prepared her friend to get ready for inevitable upheaval: “We can get ready. That’s what we’ve got to do now. Get ready for what’s going to happen, get ready to survive it, get ready to make a life afterward. Get focused on arranging to survive so that we can do more than just get batted around by crazy people, desperate people, thugs, and leaders who don’t know what they’re doing!”

Lately there’s been a great deal of handwringing about “cancel culture” as evidence of increasing intolerance, even a rejection of liberalism. Instead of addressing these ideas, however, every essay on the topic seems to be about things that happened on Twitter. Maybe I’m being dense, but doesn’t this suggest the fault is the design of our spaces for conversation with their binary logic of like and mute, or follow and block? Stare at these buttons long enough and of course their language will infect how we think.

Meanwhile, I scroll past headlines that say things like “you won’t believe the fifty most incoherent things from the president’s rambling speech.”

I had big plans for today, but they went unfulfilled. I make demanding schedules then punish myself for breaking them. Thumbing through an old notebook tonight, I came across this quote from Ingmar Bergman: “I make all my decisions on intuition. But then, I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.”

And what is my intuition telling me? To turn down the volume on the world so I can hear.

Autechre – Glitch

Amber | Warp, 1994 | More

Lately my nights have been filled with patchy dreams and idiot head chatter. Garbled headlines and pandemic waves. American hallucinations and the Sturm und Drang of digital living. Last night I forgot how to fall asleep, and I faced the solitude of the three o’clock in the morning mind, those thin hours when the soul races like a lunatic puppy, fetching unpleasant memories and scraps of regret for inspection.

More people die during the black and blue hours just before dawn than any other time, disappearing in car crashes, heart attacks, overdoses, and suicides. They call it the hour of the wolf, and I think it’s reassuring there’s a name for this time, that others feel it too. In his 1968 film of the same name, Bergman describes these in-between hours as the time “when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most real. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fears, when ghosts and demons are most powerful. But the hour of the wolf is also the hour when most children are born.”

A piece of gut-punch wisdom from Deadwood comes to mind: “We’re all of us haunted by our own fucking thoughts. So make friends with the ghost—it ain’t goin’ fucking anywhere.”

In 1928, the poet Paul Valéry had a vision of the future: “Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.”

I copied this quote into my notebook five years ago, and it still knocks me over whenever I come across it. Today we can let the entire world—and everyone’s opinions about it—into our heads with a swipe or a click. Of course we’re going to feel a little crazy. Perhaps screens have become our reality, and the physical world only exists to serve their needs. This is a loopy sensation rather than a coherent idea, and I clearly need to step up my information hygiene.

But back to Paul Valéry, who might be the patron saint of blogging. Each morning for fifty years, he would record his thoughts, theories, and questions in his notebooks, which became a sprawling collection of meditations on psychology, metaphysics, history, poetry, and the mundane. “Having dedicated those hours to the life of the mind,” he wrote, “I thereby earn the right to be stupid for the rest of the day.

Tonight I came across Tolstoy’s three questions, and they feel especially pressing in these overloaded and disorienting days:

1. What is the best time to do each thing?
2. Who should receive my attention?
3. What is the most important thing to do at all times?

Tolstoy examines these questions through a parable about a curious emperor who believes finding the answers will solve all his problems. His advisors develop elaborate schedules and routines. They debate the merits of science, art, and faith. After a bit of deception, gardening, and bloodshed, the emperor eventually discovers the answer is whatever is happening at the moment.

I’m thinking a lot about presence lately—whether maintaining some degree of control over my attention will ever arrive naturally, or if it must always be hunted, tended, and guarded.

Basic Channel – Presence

Inversion | Basic Channel, 1994 | More

Twenty minutes of grainy low-light concentration. A durable writing soundtrack for twenty-odd years.