Clouds of Unknowing is a weekly newsletter by @original_chills, mining the present for unserious sermons, other worlds, and little rituals.
_-_right_hand_screen.jpg)
The world that we interact in is mostly imaginary, constructed by all of us out of fantasies and guesses. As we get more intelligent, we will get more imaginary.
The Lesson
I think it’s been long enough between newsletters that I can talk about ‘writer’s block’. Where have I been? Why didn’t I write anything? Did you miss me? In truth, this newsletter went the way of many things. Before I started, it seemed like a wonderful idea in abstract. The newsletter I had in my head was erudite, illuminating, a bit cheeky, a new species of high-class shitpost winning awards and the praise of friend and foe alike. I exaggerate. But still, the gap between the dreamed-of project and its execution is real, and can be enough to shut the whole thing down when reality kicks in. Now I’m ready to dive back in, with a better idea of what I’m doing here: this newsletter is a pleasant diversion, a way to build a writing habit, a link to old friends and a bridge to new ones, and it requires time and effort to produce concomitant with the rewards it brings me (and hopefully you).
I think that part of my rationale for starting was a feeling that the covid-rupture, and lockdown’s temporal and spatial twists, were beginning to recede. It felt like some novel space opened up in spring of this year, and that there was some Promethean gold to snatch from the jaws of a horribly mixed metaphor. I think there was some truth in this, but perhaps I tried too hard to reify something nebulous, closing down on a space, a vibe. So that’s what I want from this newsletter. More space, more vibes.
This week I made a decision that closed an open loop, an alternate path left over from the before times. I’d been given a three month opportunity to live as a monk of sorts, to fill myself up with knowledge in solitude and community, before returning to the real world. The opportunity had changed, and I needed to decide if its new form was compatible with life as it stood now. While I deliberated I went back to the notes from my first ever tarot reading back in April with the wonderful Ben Joffe, and was struck by something I wrote down during the session: ‘open the front door and the back door of your heart’. I took this to mean that it was time not to fill myself up with external knowledge and wisdom, but to open and soften in the here and now, and share the fruits of what I can already offer. Maybe it sounds trite, or even nonsensical, but it grounded me in something that I think I knew after that Tarot reading; it is possible that we can learn much more through giving than receiving, or perhaps through forgetting the difference and simply interacting. There is no reified kernel of knowledge to take from an experience, be it lockdown or anything else. There is only the endless play of embodied knowledge and forgetting.
The Logbook
I’ve been enjoying some neat melty music by Teleplasmiste, which I discovered through Erik Davis’ wonderful monthly musings on California and assorted weirdities, The Burning Shore. I particularly like ‘A Goodly Company’, which puts me in mind of some friendly little green men gently drifting down to earth.
I hope to nudge this newsletter in the direction of weekly. Thank you for reading, and please feel free to reply, comment or share.
Surround yourself with people who are free in ways you’re not.