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C. says it’s better to make tacos at home because we know what’s in them. But I think it’s the not-knowing that makes Taco Bell the spiritual choice.
The sociologist Eva Illouz describes the imagination of our ancestors as “information-thin,” which is why they could conjure such intense visions of gods and ghosts. To fill in the gaps.
Today we have “internet imagination.” Our brains cook in a vat of liquid crystal fragments, leaving no room to ponder the whole, let alone the void. Desire no longer flows from the unknown parts of ourselves, says Byung-Chul Han. Now it’s like shopping. We crave images and information.
But not-knowing is fun. Like when you’re bullshitting with friends, trying to remember the name of the actor who was in that thing with the airplane or whether it’s true your intestines can reach the moon. Then some jackass pulls out his phone to look it up.
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In 1985, Italo Calvino wrote a memo for the new millennium:
What will the future of the individual imagination be in what is often called the ’image civilization’? Will humanity’s power to develop images in absentia continue to develop as it is increasingly swamped by the flood of ready-made images? The visual memory of individuals used to be restricted to the legacy of their direct experience and to a limited repertoire of culturally reflected images; the opportunity to give shape to a personal myth arose from the way in which fragments of that memory could come together in surprising and suggestive ways. Nowadays, we are bombarded by so many images that we can no longer distinguish direct experience from what we’ve seen for a few seconds on television. Bits of images cover our memory like a layer of trash, and among so many shapes it becomes ever difficult for any one to stand out.
When we discuss technology in my class, my students berate themselves to an unsettling degree. They mourn their lack of control, their weakness when it comes to the mad urge to doomscroll. Their self-loathing vexes me because I know it well. I do my best to remind them that we were not built to see the suffering of the entire world at once, that our attention-hijacking devices have mutilated the decent human impulse to bear witness. And they should not punish themselves for this.
3
But back to everything-at-once, here’s Byung-Chul Han quoting Roland Barthes quoting Kafka: “We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.”
The anonymous 14th-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing summons the spirit of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite from a thousand years before:
Thought cannot comprehend God. And so, I prefer to abandon all I can now, choosing rather to love him whom I cannot know. Though we cannot know him we can love him.
Or more succinctly from Meister Eckhart:
Therefore we beg God to rid us of God so that we may grasp and eternally enjoy the truth.
And this gets to the heart of all this eye-shutting and not-knowing. I should put the question of god aside. Focus instead on the strange desire to love something that can never be known. The hardwired craving for glimpses and shadows. That's the information.
4
Last month at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, I encountered an 18th-century study with an enormous scholar’s rock, the bloopy stones chosen for their mysteriously compelling forms. "If the rock does not seem like a painting by the powers of nature," writes Liang Jiutu in his 19th-century Chats on Rocks, "then you should not choose it." Inside the study, an unknown Qing dynasty scholar had carved "The Studio of Gratifying Discourse" into a ceiling beam, and I can’t stop thinking about this delightful phrase.
What is gratifying discourse? Beyond the baseline requirement of speaking in good faith, I think it means being quick with a compliment, laughter, and a question. More importantly, a willingness to look foolish. A lack of certainty. Which means not knowing.
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Tonight's selections gratify me because they aim straight for the pleasure centers and risk looking foolish (especially the Orbital track, even though I slowed it down 220%). Yet they also retain some mystery, perhaps even to themselves, chanting and humming until language becomes a garbled holy tone—from the climactic minute of the xx's "Intro" to a loopy Enya edit to a Byzantine hymn from Father Dionysios Tabakis, a 52-year-old priest who dropped one of my favorite albums of the year via the crucial Heat Crimes imprint.
Thank you for listening. (And thank you to Martin Essig for encouraging me to read Simon Critchley and Byung-Chul Han.)
- The xx - Intro
xx • XL Recordings, 2005 • Bandcamp - Walls - Sunporch (Holy Other Mix)
Coracle Remixes • Kompakt, 2012 • Bandcamp - Seraphim - A3
London Is Tired of Me • Lost Domain, 2026 • Boomkat - Death in Vegas - Girls
Scorpio Rising • Sanctuary Records, 2002 - Frederic D Oberland & Radwan Ghazi - Squeal of Swine
Eternal Life No End ليلة ظلماء ملعونة، كحياة طالبيها • Constellation, 2026 • Bandcamp - Enya - Afer Ventus (DNTEL Remix)
Enya Mixes • 2010 • Boomkat - Tears for Fears - Mad World (Midnight Radio Mix)
The Hurting • 1982 - Walls - Burnt Sienna
Walls • Kompakt, 2010 • Bandcamp - Father Dionysios Tabakis - ΑΝΑΡΧΟΣ ΘΕΟΣ Βυζαντινά Κάλαντα των Χριστουγέννων σε α΄ήχο
Paradise Metal • Heat Crimes, 2026 • Boomkat - Placid Angles - Saint Anne
Canada • Oathcreations, 2026 • Bandcamp - Orbital - Halcyon and On and On (Midnight Radio Mix)
Radiccio • 1993 • Bandcamp
