On our DETERMINATION to interpret

Entry 96 in the Triarchy Press Idioticon

96. (Over) Determination and the need for mist

Yes, but what does it mean?

It’s a common enough occurrence. Something happens that feels significant. You know the sort of thing: an owl hoots at the moment you read the last words of an old friend; a scarab beetle taps at the window at a crucial moment in a therapy session. If you are a child of the European Enlightenment, you are trained to dismiss the idea that this occurrence can have any meaning. If you lean towards the magical, you may persuade yourself that the universe has taken time to send you a tailor-made message. If you study Indigenous wisdom or the wilder ends of systems thinking, you may allow that the occurrence lets you create your own meaning in a less than random way. Whatever. These occurrences continue to occur.

There is such an occurrence in The Ancient Device — a book that plays around with ideas of time, unpicks relations of cause and effect and repeatedly finds its characters deep in the mist. Throughout the book, the idea of a landscape that is both external and internal—or ‘real’ and dreamlike—is crucial to the journeys our characters are on, as is the sense of a collective that may inhabit the writer… or the reader.  Also at stake is an anamorphic ‘ancient device’ that foregrounds other realities:

Walking along the edge of an old field, Hare spots it in the grass just by the hedge. A long thin pole, made of wood, shaped and smoothed. He stops and stoops down to get a closer look. It’s a little longer than his height, about the height of Ribbonhead he thinks, and there’s something affixed to the top. Or, looking closer, perhaps not affixed but a larger knoll of wood that has been worked on. Hare reaches down, grasps the dark wood and lifts it up. It’s definitely a head of some kind that has been fashioned at the top. …The whole head is slightly larger than his fist. The mouth—if that’s what it is—is open. The eyes staring out blankly… Holding it upright now the polished top catches the sun and Hare can see further markings—lighter cuts, diagonals and chevrons—have been incised onto some of the surface. In the sunlight it no longer looks like a face, but like some other kind of device.

‘That’s an interesting find’, says Fox-Owl. ‘Strange that it was there for you to pick up Hare.’

Hare looks up slightly puzzled. ‘Any of us would have seen it’, he says.

‘Perhaps’, says Fox-Owl. ‘But the truth is you saw it and now there it is in your hand. It certainly seems as if it is for you. An indication of something perhaps.’

Just as we look to attribute or determine meaning consciously, we are also always at it, unbeknownst to ourselves. In How to be feral, Claire Loussouarn draws our attention to multiple assumptions we make about ourselves and our place in the world - unmasking them through movement.

She debunks, for example, the idea that we choose the movements we make. Leaving aside spasms, tics and habitual (autopilot) movements, she shows how often we are the puppet not the puppeteer. And, as our sense of agency becomes blurred, “it becomes more relaxed about lacking a clear sense of self and control”.

Talking of softening boundaries and fuzziness, she offers practices to unmask our determination that we are set apart from our surroundings:

Softening boundaries starts with recognising that we have separated ourselves from non-humans, and that we can choose to change this storyline. We can let ourselves be permeated by non-humans, and even recognise that we are already permeated by them, and everything around us, as much as we permeate them. We can choose to become more aware of our fuzziness. Allowing ourselves to be feral is allowing this story we have of ourselves as humans to relax.

Fog and mist and fuzziness are old tricksters, undermining our wish for clear focus and definite meaning. Author Phil Smith has long valued the indeterminacy of mythos over the hard edges of logos. In Goblin Queens and Qualia Knights he urges us to:

..pay attention to both the ancient and the modern patterning of the planetary surface… with particular attention to where the patterns’ intersections interact with our immediate human circumstances, for it is at such points of intensity (sometimes referred to as ‘privileged points’) that humans describe having their most direct experiences of the connected world; these ‘points’ are where “the capacity of the world to influence man [is most] concentrated”.

It is there that we can expect to experience mutation moments of unexpected change, intuitions and what we might call “coincidences”, “synchronicities” or “good luck”; for such ‘points’ are where the lips of the basins of attraction touch the edges of the organs of desire; and where the random complexity of life is as thick as thieves with feeling and meaning.

And I’m certain that, however closely you look - as in a dream - you will never quite catch the moment when the lips of the basins of attraction actually touch the edges of the organs of desire - as if a mist descends briefly. You may not even be at all sure what he means. But you will have at least a suspicion that he means something important.

The Ancient Device: Simon O’Sullivan

How to be feral: Claire Loussouarn

Goblin Queens and Qualia Knights – Phil Smith

[If you’re growing weary of all this mistiness, we return to the definitive with a new book that imagines the varieties of post-capitalism.]

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