Warm Recollections #50
More from the Bitz Files
As introduced here, these Warm Recollections are random cullings from thirty years of notes files…
The young will not “save us”. They will carry on being young and seeing the world as young people do, and this is their duty and right. We need to weaponize the wisdom and concerns of older people. Because there’s a lot of us now, and we’re not out there trying to fuck everything in sight or to kill the biggest bison for clicks and likes.
Instead we’re wondering how to look after the children that came from all the fucking, and how to make sure there are still bison a hundred years from now.
One should never think in negatives, because the mind does not understand them. Negatives are a linguistic construction: not-x is a listing device, and understood wholly in terms of x. Not-x has no meaning except through x, and so the brain will obligingly provide x. If you tell someone not to think of a red cross, they will immediately think of a red cross: there’s nothing else for them to think of.
Related to the observation by (I think?) Aristotle that only another nail will drive out a nail. You replace a habit not by attempting to negate it through white-knuckled denial, but by choosing a different and better habit.
In the future reality television has reached stage where, to fill all the shows, everyone has to have a turn on television — like jury service.
If, as Baudrillard suggests, language is there to stop things meaning the same thing, English is structured around giving this a subjective standing. The combination of these two factors gives: ‘The world exists, in such and such a way, and you are the most important thing in it’.
Other languages don’t elevate us this way. Even a relatively close one like French frames us as “having” hunger, rather than “being” hungry.
Why is it that an elderly man sitting by himself looks so much more lost than an elderly woman? Is it just because I’m a man, and fear that position? Or is there some deep memory that makes him seem so much more lost and culturally adrift? It feels like women are more a part of the community, through structuring and maintaining it. Men do their jobs out in the world, and once they can’t, they’re done.
As always, if you can think of anyone who might enjoy this Substack, please spread the word.
Elderly women are better at sitting alone because they have had more practice. Even, when a man was around, they were often, still alone.
About a thousand years ago, or maybe ten, I was listening to a radio show and the narrator was talking about the subjunctive case (?) the "what if?", and that the Asian language his family spoke didn't have that. The whole "it could have been so much worse if X" was just NOT THERE, the very idea of looking for a worst case scenario wasn't in their thought process. Language shapes thought , and my linguistics brain absolutely exploded.