Introduction to a Liminal Space

The inaugural episode of Null by Design - a short consideration of why making space for own thoughts is important, the possibility of a book club with the first work to come in later episodes being There Is No Antimemetics Division.  I hope you enjoy and that I find you here next time in this space between the platforms.

Transcript

Null 0:01

Hello internet people. Welcome to Null by Design. And this the inaugural episode of Null by Design. To start off with, let's talk through a little bit about why I'm here and hopefully why you're here. I'm here because I am, in many ways, a verbal processor. My thoughts and feelings work out best when I'm able to just talk through them with myself. And if I'm stuck with me talking to myself, why shouldn't you be as well? So here we are, talking to myself, I suppose. But hopefully to you, you out there who's looking for something to dig your ears into. Not something full of hot takes, not something hopefully full of cold takes, but something in between, terribly lukewarm takes. But takes on what? In large part what I'm looking to do isn't to talk on any really specific set of topics, but instead to be able to use this as kind of a palette to think through what I think about on a day to day basis. I'm doing that because I think I believe that we have been told and shown not to think too much about what we think. I think a great deal of empathy has been stripped away from our own thoughts, both our thoughts about ourselves as well as our thoughts about our thoughts. I think we don't think very much about what we think or think very much of that. And I think that that's a real shame. So what I hope to do is give a space where we can think our thoughts. Where no matter if those thoughts have a whole lot of value, even if they are devoid of value, even if they are null by design, we give ourselves the space to think them. We give ourselves the space to think our thoughts, think about our thoughts, and think about ourselves. I think that that's something that's in this attention economy, more important every single day that we give ourselves that space and grace. In some way, maybe, at least for myself, this represents the revolution in my heart for my mind, or for my mind and my heart. It's a bi-directional relationship. It's allowing myself to have the thoughts and feelings that I have, to lay them out bare, to not give them too much judgment as they come across and come through here. This is a liminal space. It's like a hallway between two subway concourses. Thoughts are entering and leaving from someplace out of sight, and they meet here in a space in many ways devoid of any other context. I like that, the thought of a liminal space for our thoughts. Not everything has to have a well ordered place, and I'm someone who likes to put things in very good order. Maybe that's not entirely true. I live a fairly orderly life, but it is perhaps a certain kind of ordered chaos. Something that has the semblance of order, but should you dig too deep, it begins to fall apart one layer at a time. Not in any terrible or frightening or disturbing way, I don't think. But in those natural everyday ways. Things put in order so that that order would suffice for a moment, but not with any other grand strategy in mind. And that's okay. It's an order that lasts as long as is necessary as long as is needed. It's a sufficient order. The kind of order that keeps the soul quiet one more day, even if not more than that. Maybe a week, maybe a month, but maybe just that day. And then we get back up and we try it all over again, putting all of the things in our head and in our heart back into the order that we can find. And if that doesn't sound like enough, there is some amount of structure that I'm thinking of for this space. Largely one of the things that has always kept a good order and place in my life is reading. I love reading. I especially love sci-fi fantasy, speculative fiction. And I think that literature gives us an excellent way of thinking through and focusing our own thoughts. All art of any kind, really, is not just a reflection of the artist, but also of the person witnessing that art, be it visual art, be it a movie, be it a video game. All art is in every sense interactive between that creator and the person who is witnessing that creation. We let our own thoughts and lives play out over that work of art. And through that, the meaning of that work is derived. Certainly the creator has precedence in what they wanted to create, what they hope people would feel, what they hope people would see when they look upon it, read through it, interact with it. But nothing lives entirely on its own. It's all in context. We give art context, art gives our thoughts context, and I really look forward to going back through any number of works, sharing my thoughts, in not really a review format. I may do something that looks kind of like a book review, but much more than that it's in my own mind a kind of book club. It's about going through the chapters, looking at whatever thoughts and feelings come across through those pages, and giving an interpretation. Obviously anything that I do and any of that will be terribly full of spoilers. So I'll try up front to give as much information about what portions of what works I plan to cover. That way, if someone wants to follow along, they can work to get ahead of me before they finish listening to whatever spills out of this mind. For the most part, they'll likely be things that I'm reading not for the first time. I think the first thing I'm going to go through will be a first reading, and the plan is to go through There Is No Anti-Mimetics Division. It's a title that's been highly recommended to me by many different people. It's one that I've been planning to read for a little bit, and it comes from a world largely influenced and involved with the world of fan fiction. And I think as a starting point for this, a podcast about giving a space for our thoughts and giving it kindness, anything that comes out of that wonderful, messy world of fan fiction is an interesting spot to kind of give a start to it. After that we'll likely go to some things that I've read before, but that I haven't read for quite some time. That way it's a fresh reading, but still carries that familiarity. Like a good chair that you sit in to read. Something that carries the weight of memory every time we come back to it. And so that's the plan for the first bit. But by and large, this is likely just to be reflections on my thoughts, things that are going on. Again, I think we need to give ourselves more of that space on a regular basis. We have so many different things competing for our time and attention. We have so many things recklessly careening through our lives. When we look around all of what's going on in this hour, manic society, the politics brewing around us, everything wants us to disengage. Everything wants to take us out of that moment because the moment isn't something that I think most of us really want to dwell on. I know I don't. I look around at the world around me and quite honestly, oftentimes I'm confused by how we got here. It's not what I ever expected to see in all of the years that I've lived. I've never expected to see my country teetering on what feels like the edge of some kind of collapse. Not a collapse into nothingness, not even really a collapse into chaos. But a collapse into something raw, something that we've hoped to in so many different ways and in so many different times, desperately tried to avoid. We're staring down the barrel of a very, very strange time, a time in which a nation set upon a hill, shining brightly doesn't shine so much any more as an example to others, but as a warning, a big red blinking light, a beacon signaling trouble, a beacon that we don't want to look at, that we don't want to stare at and see in our own hearts. We don't want to think that we or anyone that we know could have been part of how we got here. Or maybe you agree with it. That obviously, given that last bit of statement, probably a bummer to me. But there's room here for a lot of different thoughts. We're here to explore and to give ourselves space and grace. So I don't want to close the door just because there's a disagreement with where I'm starting and likely finishing on that kind of thought about where we're at. But while that big red blinking light on the hill is there, signaling danger, everything else around us is seeking to distract us. Everything else is a much more demanding dopamine loop. Our endless feeds call to us, they offer us distraction, short form content that presupposes to give us some kind of insight, anything to substitute our own thoughts with something else coming from a screen. And of course here I am coming at you through a microphone. I don't have any illusion that I'm necessarily better than any of those other things, except that all I'm here for is myself in a certain way. I hope that I'm here for all of you, wonderful internet people. But I'm not certain of that. The only thing I'm certain of is that I'm here. Resting comfortably in my familiar chair, hoping that the thoughts that scrape through my head, by the time I'm done with them, arrive at some kind of at least comfort in my own heart, although that rarely does happen. No one has ever particularly accused me of being a hopeful person. Instead I'm certainly some kind of pessimist. I look out again at right now this terrible blinking light on the horizon that signals some kind of danger and devolution of all of the things that I thought would come to be. And it does frighten me. I worry terribly about the environment and what we're doing to it. I wonder if there's some way for us to step back from it, and I worry that perhaps we've made it far over the skis and cycles that we can turn away from. I see our political system, as I said before, teetering on the edge of something that certainly genuinely gives me pause and fright. And for that I actually do have quite a bit more hope overall. I think despite the steady blinking red light, there are a number of different off ramps from which we can get off this journey and arrive at a different destination. And I hope we do. I really do. I think we have chances for that coming up in the not too distant future. But we're really going to have to grab what's in front of us and decide upon a different, better path, a path that recognizes the human rights of everyone around us. A path that looks at the promises that have been made, and really better attempts to embrace those, and embrace those for a very wide set of people who deserve who deserve anything, who deserve everything, perhaps. Not necessarily wealth, although perhaps in the older conception of wealth not being comfort and commodity, but in our well being, in our community. And that is something that I feel and that I hope we can keep building more and more community, both again, I think within ourselves, I think community between our heart and our mind just for ourselves is something that's incredibly important. Again, with so many different things competing for our attention, there's a discomfort with sitting with our own thoughts, with sitting with our mind and allowing it to unspool, to, in some uncontrolled way, lead us to the conclusion of those thoughts. That feels every day more and more dangerous the further we get away from allowing ourselves to do it. After all, when we think for ourselves, and I'm not talking about doing your own research, I think that there is actually a common reality that we can all orient ourselves toward, which is full of actual facts derived from actual science. But we have to allow ourselves to think our thoughts. Even if those thoughts don't agree with everything else or with everyone else, if we don't allow ourselves to really sit with our own thinking, then we'll never get comfortable with the ideas of others either, because we won't be able to sit in discomfort of our own thoughts and accept what other people are saying as true or false. We'll just keep seeking to isolate ourselves behind layer upon layer of the dopamine chase. And I do that every day myself. I don't want to somehow put myself aside or above in some purity of escaping the dopamine cycle. I am trapped in it as deeply as anybody else is. Which is perhaps why the first book, as I mentioned before, that I'd like to read through and cover is There is No Antimetics Division. A book whose whole concept is around ideas that in their ingestion destroy the evidence that they were ever there, that destroy other ideas, that take thought and feeling away from us. Because that is what all of these different sources of amusement and distraction are trying to do. Take us away from ourself, colonize and commercialize our attention, and ensure that we stay as uncomfortable with our own thoughts as we possibly can be. Because the more desperate we are to escape our own minds, the more easily we can be manipulated into anything, be that a commercial purchase, or be that the acquiescence to the reality around us, which is being constructed for us by an increasingly small fraction of people. As all of the media around us seems like it's congealing into one titanic truth making monster, we are isolated ever more from ourselves by that effort, and the more uncomfortable we allow ourselves to be, the more it will continue to win. So again, instead, what I hope, to use my own voice against myself, to fight against my own desire to not hear my own thoughts, because again, as a pessimist, most of those thoughts not super fun to dwell on. But instead here I am thinking through them one terrible syllable at a time, letting it all hang out verbally, something that I'll have to listen to time and time again. Because I have to edit it all together into some little coherent thing that becomes in and of itself a media product. That's a that's a dilemma, isn't it? To fight against a system of media products by commodifying oneself. But it's what we have. It's the only way I have to reach out past myself. So let's see if this is going to be an interesting journey together. Let's see what books we can read along the way, what thoughts we can find, and what acceptance for our own selves and our hearts we can establish. I think that's all for this time. I think we've described a liminal space, and now it's time to escape deeper into it. Deeper into the null. So, thank you for coming along on this little introduction, internet people. I hope to find you next time.