Single crows fly straight ahead in a clear blue sky. Candlemas: the tree and the wreath come down. Some branches for the shelves: how much green can you have indoors. The car park cat sat on the fence for hours and even though the birds came and went, nothing but territoriality.
Friends visit with their four-month old baby. How infrequently she blinks, blue eyes, translucent skin. She lies on her back wriggling in proprioception. I ask her what everything is made of: water, fire. She smiles at the four elements so we say ok, she’s clearly an Empedoclean! Well we don’t get to love and strife, but these are unavoidable in any case. She is placid, “content,” her mother says. Strange to be born with character: determined so completely and yet a mystery at the same time.
N. said she had a dream at eight of walking on a carpet of pigeons inside her house. She has since felt that she will hurt birds (and butterflies). Pigeons are very battered city angels, or ancestors. Babies do not have wings.
Church was beautiful; light streaming in beams through the stained glass windows, a patch of red on my coat. It is cold, but optimistic cold, not the kind without hope.
Paranoia event yesterday. All these brilliant minds seeing patterns, making prophecies, stepping back, researching, playing. Paranoia for me is the fear that someone has a kind of knowledge that you don’t have; at the same time it is the quest to fill in all the holes. One becomes an infinite detective, oscillating between narcissism and cosmic indifference. After a bout of extreme paranoia a long time ago now, where sentences appeared not like passing clouds but more like lapidary statements, ringing with alarm, and words split their homonyms into all meanings at once (“the language crystal shattered”), I felt like a match. Burnt like a used match. The burned part and the match and the smoke, for months. Extinguished (and all words beginning “ex” had this weird force). Paranoia is exhausting.
The kind of paranoia you can induce by smoking weed is wearisome too. This inability to get away from the inner voice that splits off from the outer and can’t hold on to its own stream. Too linear. Too inward. It’s a boring drug: self-satisfied. Paranoia can be a tool, but a recursive one if not contrasted with ekstasis.
One excellent talk yesterday reflected upon gnosticism as a hermeneutics of suspicion, pointing out the lack of distinction between text and life. I said, it all depends on whether you think that being is good, and older gnostic forms at the very least thought there really was an outside. Gnosticism without hope is just the black iron prison. If there are merely mirrors, and no qualitative difference between over here and over there, or this level or that, then knowledge will just result in despair, if that. Gnosticism without the good, or the true God, or unity, however distant, is just darkslop, indeterminate signs, semiosis, with no elevation and no codex.
I speak to J and T. I tell them that sometimes—quite often in fact—men send me their theory of everything. T says during lockdown she had the same dream every night for a week: walking over to a cabinet in her room she pulled out an A4 white pad with a black circle in the middle. She later realised that that this was the beginning of her theory of everything. The same scene later turned up in a film she watched. We prompt her to finish her theory of everything.
J says her new job involves in part determining who might be a bot in the chat on a live stream. Someone kept asking similar questions to different people in a suggestive manner: well, was it a bot? She doesn’t know, but excludes the programme/person anyway. H. tells me that marking at university has become impossible. He can tell that essays are AI generated, but there’s nothing you can do about it.
Well, I say, the only work that won’t be is work that is completely useless, not for anything. The only thing left of the human will be our errors, our mistakes, our flaws and miscommunications. Well okay, perhaps AI will also train on itself until it implodes, and without any principle of discrimination there will be just walls of inaccuracy: so either we give up on accuracy altogether and drown in a sea of stories, or we determine that some stories are better than others.
Some stories are better than others.