#16 Mirror flower, water moon, no fun, my babe
Mindy Meng Wang 王萌 & I have released our first new song in two years. In the face of existential paralysis, I recommend a book called "Emergent Strategy" by adrienne maree brown.
You know the drill - we start with the music, then get to the existential rambling. And this time, it’s a doozy.
NEW MUSIC: MIRROR FLOWER 镜花水月
Mindy Meng Wang 王萌 & I have just released our first new music in two years, a song called Mirror Flower 镜花水月:
It’s out now on your favourite fiendish music platform, including Bandcamp, where you can also get official Mindy x Tim t-shirts & our two previous EPs on vinyl. The video is also quite excellent, thanks to Tony Yap and Nick Mckk.
Mindy decided on the title 镜花水月 - jing hua shui yue - a Chinese idiom referring to the illusory and fleeting beauty of "flowers in the mirror, moon reflected on the water."
There’s more to say - and for that, Mindy and I have actually set up a separate email newsletter. We’ll share news, new music, tour announcements. Maybe I can convince Mindy to share wine recommendations (she’s the most ridiculous wine person I’ve ever met).
Sign up here and you get an unreleased song which I can’t say too much about, except that it will never be officially released, and a member of *NSYNC is involved.
Onto today’s totally necessary rumination ..
NO FUN, MY BABE, NO FUN
I’ve never been the funnest guy at the party, but I’ve generally been an ok chat. A reliable, reasonably generous conversation partner.
But in recent years, I fear I have become increasingly “a bummer” in social situations.
I’ve never loved small talk - talking about things that don’t seem important - but I at least used to find some joy in playing in the cracks of it. Small talk was a pause in the proceedings, at times even a happy distraction. A necessary part of how we stitch each other into a shared human experience, using the mundane to reinforce the glue that binds us.
Now I feel allergic to small talk. I feel incapable of it. I tire of it instantly, bored in a way that I would describe as bone-chillingly entitled, or in a word, “dickish".
Imagine how much of an asshole you need to be bored by a polite, well-intentioned conversation initiated by a friend. I appear to have become that asshole, for now.
When I sense I can’t escape, I will firmly grab hold of a well-mannered surface-level conversation and dive dive dive. I plunge us all deep under the surface of the water, down to the dark, the existential and the highly conceptual.
Want to tell me how your day was? In a snap, I can turn that into a rumination about ennui - mine, yours, and everyone’s. Want to talk about that film you saw? For me that’s an opening to pontificate on the role of culture in society and how it is currently deeply contested.
To me, every small thing is now a doorway to the biggest possible thing. My impulsive galaxy-braining is well-intentioned (is it? don’t answer that) - but it feels toxic in the moment, and I feel terrible afterward, every time.
It’s like I take us deep underwater intent on some fun undersea adventure - an existential James Cameron leading an expedition to plumb the depths of our human experience. But oops, something goes wrong and oh no, I’ve drowned us all. Or at the very least, forced us to all feel lonely and sad. I have successfully made it weird. I quietly resolve to talk less next time, or to possibly never leave the house again.
I think, quite possibly, I have zero chill.
In 1969, Iggy Pop used a different pair of words:
No fun, my babe
No fun
No fun, my babe
No fun
Why can’t I chill the fuck out and just have a normal / polite / boring time with you?
Well, it’s the usual. The same things you fret about, in the cracks in your day, maybe.
The world is sick, trying to spit us off its surface like a toxin, and we aren’t as a species proving ourselves especially capable of responding to its needs (which are our own). The rich get unfathomably richer each minute, fondling levers of power that the rest of us will spend a lifetime trying to imagine let alone locate. The things we think are meaningful to us probably aren’t, and we increasingly have to live inside the knowledge of that. Tech is gleefully evolving at a pace that we can’t control, but it’s convenient and one hell of a distraction. Truth is suddenly malleable, which is cool fun, humans are increasingly atomised, which is very sad, and reality is becoming multitudinally fractured.
Every small thing is a resonance of every giant thing. The world’s ills reverberate in every tiny innocuous moment. So I zoom out habitually, at every opportunity, perhaps to put myself at a safe distance from the ick. When I reenter the discourse, no matter how tiny, I am overridden by the urge to drive it back to “the very important knowings” that we must all look at, constantly, and immediately process + do something about.
Why would we talk about the football? You know the world is ending, right?
I wonder if zooming out so far, constantly putting things in some giant societal context, has the side-effect of bloating me to the same scale as the epic impossible-to-comprehend problem. I, one tiny human, become the size of climate change. I, one tiny ant, become the size of all social inequality and injustice in the world.
This is, obviously, ridiculous. Inflating myself to the scale of the problem gives me the delusion that I should be able to make a civilisation-sized impact single-handedly. I feel constant frustration and resentment that this does not just miraculously occur. On top of the usual guilt and shame that comes from being inevitably complicit in ‘badness’ with seemingly every choice, every behaviour, every thought.
Thinking at the biggest possible scale at all times disconnects me from the people near me, and nudges me further into that dark place where hope is fleeting and fickle.
But someone needs to think about the big picture. Right?
And it absolutely has to me? Right now, and all the time, right?
Is anyone actually flying this plane? Is anyone actually imagining the future?
No fun to hang around
Feelin' that same old way
No fun to hang around
Freaked out
For another day
We learn as children that if we look at the sun for too long, it will do our sight irreparable damage and we will never see things the same way again. So we squint at it, trying to experience it or understand its immensity, and we look away with a faint ache in our eyes and that weird negative image that lingers like an aftershock.
I looked at the burning knowledge of reality too long and now my vision is distorted.
I wanted to know how the world works. Now I know too much, and I’m no fun.
My babe. No fun.
WHO TEACHES US TO RECONSTRUCT?
Well c'mon
Well c'mon
Well c'mon
Well c'mon
Well c’mon, Tim. Get it together man.
If it isn’t bleedingly obvious, I have been quite depressed for a little bit.
I know the drill, because this is far from the first time I’ve been here: eat better. Drink less. Go on walks. Practice sensory awareness, deep breathing, be in your body. Monitor your sleep and stress levels. Go back to therapy. Be kind to yourself.
And I’m doing all of that, and it’s working. Yay.
I’m also reading a lot. No more tweets, just the verbose stuff. “Books,” they call them.
But it occurs to me that I have probably read enough books that deep dive into the guts of civilisational collapse, at least for now. Don’t get me wrong, you totally should read these books, if you think you have the stomach for it: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New Dark Age. Culture As Weapon. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate. Can Music Make You Sick. Decomposed.
That all sounds super cheery, right? Even right now, I’m reading a book called Chokepoint Capitalism. So fun. It’s actually great. But maybe my balance is off.
There’s no point understanding what’s wrong if you have not built the resilience to actually live inside that dark information, to process it, to find your relationship to it, and then to work towards the light. To do that, I need some help. I need models for how to build hope, joy and optimism - how to construct these things inside myself when they don’t exist, and then learn to tend to them, maintain them.
In search for that, I have found some lighthouses in the dark. Keen to share them too.
This is one of them:
The book is “Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds” by adrienne maree brown.
I had to buy a highlighter, for the first time since Uni, so I could mark the critical phrases, koans I can try to internalise. I’ll share some of them below.
adrienne is an incredibly inspiring, empathetic, and sharp critical thinker. Through her work as a community organiser, activist & doula, and her lived experience as a queer person of colour, she has both recognised and lived the injustice in the world. She has also spent a lot of time thinking about how to respond to it meaningfully, as an individual and together. The book provides a lot of useful and practical advice on how to adopt a healthy hopeful and intentional mindset in the face of deep challenges, and how to build shared resilience by connecting more deeply to each other.
A lot of adrienne’s thinking is inspired by legendary sci-fi author Octavia Butler, so I’m currently getting myself ready for a long overdue deep-dive into her work. She is also very articulate speaking on biomimicry, and what we can learn about community & organising from natural systems like biology & physics.
I want to dip your toes in the wisdom of this book.
So what I’ve decided to do is drop some of adrienne’s quotes in pairs. I will clumsily add some thoughts here and there. Hopefully it gives you a sense of how this book is helping me, and might help you too.
However, before we go any further, there are two things I recommend doing if you are intrigued at all by what I share below:
Buy adrienne’s book - I mean, duh
Listen to this episode of On Being with Krista Tippett (which has become both one of my favourite podcasts and also one of the most meaningful things in my life), which is where I first heard adrienne speak
Ok - here we go —
The crisis is everywhere, massive massive massive.
And we are small.
Transform yourself to transform the world.
This second quote “transform yourself to transform the world” actually comes from one of adrienne’s wisest mentors, Grace Lee Boggs, and refers to the practice of seeing “our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet.”
Maybe I can’t change the world, but I can work on myself. I can embody my values, as I develop and evolve them, in my actions big and small. I can learn, learn, learn, but also I need to be honest with myself about my vulnerabilities and needs. So the first step is to recognise that I’m not much help unless I am looking after myself. My learning has to include learning how to care for myself, and for other people.
We are in an imagination battle. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.
We have all of the information we need to create a change; it isn’t a matter of facts. It’s a matter of longing, having the will to imagine and implement something else. We are living in the ancestral imagination of others, with their longing for safety and abundance, a longing that didn’t include us, or included us as enemy, fright, other.
I’m somewhat professionally and personally invested in the idea that “imagining” is, of itself, a vital pursuit and not some indulgent flight of fancy. So this idea that imagination is actually fundamental to making positive change in the world happen is deeply compelling to me. I also simply don’t hear people talking about it much. I want it said more. I want and need to believe that art/culture - “imagining” - can play a critical role in driving positive change.
Reality is nothing without imagination - we build reality via shared narratives, storytelling, values, beliefs, ethics, ideas. We all live inside our imaginations, and to reckon with that is to admit that reality is vulnerable, easily malleable, transformable, susceptible to manipulation, both good and bad. Understanding that your desires, your wants, the way you frame your life, that these things might actually be informed partially or entirely from some place outside of you... that shit is frightening & empowering in equal measure. It scared the shit out of me in my early twenties, and I’ve been reeling ever since. Now it feels like we all are.
That phrase of being “trapped inside someone else’s imagination” was haunting to me on first read and will now sit with me for a long time. I am someone who in skin and gender embodies the “someone else” that adrienne is likely describing. To live your life trapped inside the imagination of the oppressors, the colonisers, to slowly wake up and realise that your dreams are their dreams, your language is their language, your vision of the future is imported from theirs... it’s the stuff of nightmares.
Can we cultivate a shared “imagining” of what it means to be alive, that is inclusive of everyone and honours everyone’s unique realities? Do we need a shared reality, or do we just continue to silo each of our selves off into our own personal worldviews? This I will not have an answer for, likely ever, but the more of us thinking about it and kicking it around, the more empathetic the world will be as a byproduct.
We must make just and liberated futures irresistible… facts, guilt and shame are limited motivations for creating change. I suspect that to really transform our society, we will need to make justice one of the most pleasurable experiences we can have.
What amazes me is that, in the space of such constant Black trauma, we get together and celebrate and love on each other, we laugh, we find the pleasure of community, of interdependence. It feels good together.
One thing I love about adrienne’s writing - and her voice when I’ve heard her speak - is that she embraces joy and pleasure as necessary for activism and change.
In a book that feels like a warm bath of good vibes, this simple idea perhaps gives me the most hope - that joy is required. That pleasure is a prerequisite for change.
Do you understand that your quality of life and your survival are tied to how authentic and generous the connections are between you and the people and place you live with and in? Are you actively practising generosity and vulnerability in order to make the connections between you and others clear, open, available, durable?
Many of us have been socialized to understand that constant growth, violent competition, and critical mass are the ways to create change. But … adaptation and evolution depend more upon critical, deep and authentic connections, a thread that can be tugged for support and resilience. The quality of connection between the nodes in the patterns. Dare I say love.
Just. Oof.
Read it again.
Just double back and read those two quotes again.
Then go buy adrienne’s book.
She comes back often to the idea that we should be striving for deep connection with each other - the deepest of deep - rather than skimming the surface. In terms of activism, she talks about shifting from “mile wide inch deep” movements to “inch wide mile deep” movements, and how “the depth of relationship between the individuals in a system determines the strength of the system.”
I feel it. I want deeper connections. I want to find my inch and go a mile deep with the ones who are with me. I suspect that settling for no less than that, would help a lot of people feel much happier in their lives to be honest.
While many of us articulate a yearning for a more simple life.. I have begun to wonder how it looks to practice complexity as a sacred path.
My default position is wonder.
What a thing. To be enraptured by the world, by default. To embrace the complexity of existence, and instead of being frightened of that complexity, be in love with it.
To stay healthy, and move forward, I know that I need to embrace complexity. I need to learn what I can, understand what I can, and move from there with purpose, but with the knowledge that I am often wrong, that imaginations are multitudinal, that existence is impossibly complex.
I need to learn to love the grey in things that were never black-and-white; to approach our dark ambivalent world not with fear but with a light curiosity; to resolve to go inch-wide mile-deep with my people in order to ward against nihilism and paralysis. And to be comfortable knowing that though my tiny existence is but a speck buffeted by winds beyond my control, there is still joy and purpose in setting up my tiny sail and pointing it in what I hope is the right direction. Just play it cool when it’s not.
To embrace complexity, be in love with it, and to try to live with wonder as my default position - it’s going to take time, but I’m putting those goals further up the to-do list. I need to re-embrace joy, and wonder, and curiosity, and play. Those deep connections I crave, that you crave, are forged strongest with love and not fear.
Til next time
Tim
ps. buy the book
I don't have the faintest idea why, but whenever I start to feel disconnected from the world and look at the bigger picture a bit too much, listening to the Swedish House Mafia remix of Coldplay's "Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall" brings me back down to contentment. It's nice to have a reminder of the completely unimportant things that are still critically important to you.
I wish I got more emails like this honestly. Thanks for giving me something to think about, mirroring some of my own existing ruminations. Hope you’re well.