For the Love of the Anti-meme
What I've been up to, and a listicle on behalf of the blog …
The last several months had me scattered and distracted. Pieces, ideas for pieces, a few things in flight. The vehicle, the plane, the blimp, the airship, still being assembled even after takeoff … And then there was no poetry — none at all — for months. Something finally changed recently, but so long an abandonment by the Muse, the hand that writes the poem, is painful.
I almost went anonymous again but decided against it, which I’m pretty sure is a good thing, but I can’t quite tell … I was away for a bit on an airborne cruise ship and saw the topography from the upper deck. Something about the air up there made me think of the beach, though there is no ground. Peeking out from behind the mask of my new screen name, I would have been a real Internet writer now, but never mind …
The name I was going to use — Dalboz — is from an old computer game called Zork: Grand Inquisitor, a point ‘n’ click adventure from 1997, with puzzles and live action cutscenes. It’s kind of a spoof of Myst, if you know that one.
Dalboz is a wizard who has been trapped by a magic spell in an old lantern. You, the adventurer, fish him out of a crate that was dumped in a harbor —
— and together you work to stop the Grand Inquisitor’s plot to outlaw all magic and take over the world. Straightforward enough. Dalboz calls you AFGNCAAP, which is short for “Ageless Faceless Gender Neutral Culturally Ambiguous Adventure Person”. It’s a funny game. Dalboz is the reason I use a lantern logo for this blog.
I won’t say why I wanted to be anonymous or why I changed my mind about it, but silence has always been a part of this thing anyway. If Final Canticle has vibes, they’re something like "circumspect autodidact”, who traces the circumference of his subjects and finds a silence at their center. We give a non-clue or two before letting off, and the reader is left to review on their own darkened hill.
These pieces are restless and don’t like to sit still, take oblique shots, make weird shapes. I want this blog to keep changing shape. I like that the things I’ve written here are of so many different formats — this for me is a point of pride. Each one has their own form, and their own silence.
I’m happy with all the formal morphings and the music of the poems, the music of unexpected styles, but it’s also true that I want to gather knowledge — to give you something you could use. This feels more urgent than it did when I started. In my last review, I tried hard to fortify my judgments with background reading, to give an invisible footnote for every surmise. This imaginary magazine I’m writing suddenly had very high editorial standards! It took some work, but I thought the review came out alright. Was it convincing? Did I play the part of the critic well … ?
But anyway back to vibes. How to make something so restless more legible to the memeplex? If Final Canticle were a magazine, what sort of art would be on its cover? Is it sensual, is it ascetic? Is it futuristic, anachronistic … ? And how to make the vibes durable enough to withstand this thing’s appetite for change? Maybe you can help me.
To get us started, I brainstormed some riffy bullet points for the whiteboard to use at my next personal branding seminar. Here’s what I came up with. Some poetical mood nodes of our project might include:
Post-contrarian take synthesis
Neo-1920s Platonic-erotic speculatory book reviews
Metempyschotic anti-meme poem posting
Ralph Waldo Emersonian Zen abruptitude
Daemonized rant machine attack blogging
Dad zine self-haunting silence reveries
Imaginal psychoanalytic cultural commentary via angelic doom-channeling
Stubborn obliquity shelters for when the next eon burns down
Hmm. Ok, so how do I to generalize these into “takes”? We need tweetable pieces for when people come asking about what sort of publication this is. Maybe this is only possible now that I’ve worked on this thing for a couple years. Three easy steps …
Start with particular, detailed impressions of concrete examples.
Embody those impressions in intuitive, poetic responses.
With enough specific experiences absorbed, we can begin to generalize …
With this we can finally attempt some Powerpoint-slide-style communicating — incredible! Use these the next time you’re elevator-pitching the blog. I’ve put a lot of poetry on here, but people will be really impressed with these “takes”!
If you’re newer here, welcome, and thanks everyone for reading. I have some new things in the works, so hopefully I’ll have more for you soon.
In the meantime, here’s a listicle on behalf of our blog —
Top 8 Must-Have Final Canticle Blogging Principles
1. You’re both wrong
When I write about a book, I like to go through the exercise of reading through all the reviews and pieces I can find about it online. Reading through fifteen reviews of the same novel can be tedious, but I recommend trying it some time as an experiment. You’ll find that the reviewers’ voices begin to merge into each other after the first five or so. Maybe you’ll need some theory of the collective unconscious or of a universal mind to explain how the oneness seems to keep thinking the same thought, only a little revised each time … That is, you’d be surprised by how much the reviews will resemble each other. They’ll note similar passages, make similar cultural references, hit the same beats, come to similar conclusions. This is consensus forming, I guess, and the consensus could be, for example, “This book rules”. The first take.
Then often another consensus emerges — the counter-take — maybe saying, “Actually, this book sucks”. Two choruses, one of yeasayers, one of naysayers — you can pick your side. When I get here, I feel the urge to resist, to turn away. Surely it couldn’t be this way … How did each one arrive at what they saw? What’s behind it?
Is it a question of judgment? One kind of critic says we shouldn’t judge too harshly, that a book is a piece of entertainment made for a certain audience — let it be what it is. Another kind says we aren’t judgmental enough, that we should have more negative reviews — judge now, judge quickly! The gentle critic says, “Writers are putting themselves out there, making themselves vulnerable — let’s support them”; while the hater critic says, “Writers are like figure skaters — score and assess, embarrass any weakness that comes through!”.
Here then is my tweetable take, my secret third way. Both the gentle critic and the hater critic fail at being receptive enough to let the book judge them, and so too often they mistake the book’s real nature. They do not absorb the book enough into themselves, and they do not let it absorb them.
Absorbed into the book, they would become one of its characters, and they would have a new and unique dramatic irony forced upon them. At Final Canticle we write to give some account of this experience of absorption — what happens to our worldview, our habits of thinking, our sense experiences, our desires, our morals, our sense of ourselves, our sense of others, when we fully enter into the world of the book? Are we enriched, or do we contract? Is this a fertile despair, an expansive irony, a subtle and elusive dream, a trap? Or are we in a badly staged play, a bad TV show, a bad political fantasy?
You can do it — ENTER THE BOOK !!! Then tell me how you hacked your way out of its tangle of vines back to yourself, and how you found yourself changed.
2. Poetry and its principles are central
We all know that after high school we don’t read books like little babies anymore, and so like all non-babies we’ve joined the big kids’ dialogue alongside Socrates and his interlocutors in Plato’s Republic, discussing our vision of the ideal society with exceedingly rational propositions and argumentations. Being rational is paramount, and being rational about discussing your rational vision for the ideal society is definitely the smartest thing you can do. All you have to do to achieve a vision of the ideal society is to have a rational idea about how to organize it, and every result you want will follow from that. But it’s important to have the right ideas.
Other people will have other rational ideas about how to organize the ideal society, and, oh, ok, here we go, it’s time to debate! Generally it’s a good idea at this time to bring up pragmatic reasons why the other one’s rational ideas about how to organize the ideal society aren’t as good as yours, and it’s ok at this time to mention actual people and things they’ve done that might help make your point about this being not such a good rational idea for organizing the ideal society. An example from recorded history to illustrate your point is alright, but what we really like are statistics, which eminently reasonable and well-informed people use to argue against bad rational ideas about how to organize the ideal society on behalf of good rational ideas about how to organize the ideal society.
Littered amidst these rational ideas are a couple other kinds of thinking you may want to brush up on in your ongoing quest to be a non-baby — namely chiding moral abstractions, mystical media theory mouthings, carping cultural criticism, and, ah, this one is kind of interesting — “art”.
“Art” is an activity that occurs “downstream” of the guiding force of various overlords of our culture, who are really, really important and under which we are wholly passive, it’s true. There are a bunch of these — Language, Capital, History, “social forces”, uh, like, “materiality”, y’know, stuff like that.
Words are organized by people into books because books are efficient information containers — that is, they’re really good for storing arguments on behalf of rational ideas about how to organize the ideal society. “Drama” is pretty cool because you can use it to demonstrate the rational ideas in real time, and “poetry” is great because it makes the arguments for rational ideas sound prettier and so makes them more memorable and convincing. We like pretty stuff because Darwin — a perfectly rational explanation.
We live in an “era” of “history” inside of a “society” that is rationally organized. The smartest people not only have really good rational arguments about how to organize the ideal society, but they also are really good at seeing through our current “era” in “history”, which is kinda tricky because sometimes it seems like we understand the “era” we’re in but then sometimes we don’t. Helpful in this regard are “poets”, “artists”, and “writers”, who are like particularly sensitive zoo animals whose unconscious gruntings and turnings-in-place in their little zoo habitats are useful signals for seeing through “the media” and our “politics”. They’re pretty interesting on their own, but they really need either a thinker of rational thoughts about how to organize the ideal society or a chiding abstract moralizer — always great to have both! — to help them make any sense of what they’re up to with all the noises they keep making.
Anyway, it’s helpful to have these zoo animals called “poets” help us through this whole not being little babies thing. We publish poems here at Final Canticle out of the belief that such unconscious gruntings might be useful to our betters, whose absolute authority we recognize, especially if they went to grad school.
3. Reviews can be artful too
This one is simple. Sometimes we write book reviews here. You can have a good take on a book, you can write about it in a nice style, you can do your homework — but you can also bend and break that thing called “review” into whatever you want.
It should be possible! It should be possible to do all four things in the meme above. You aren’t just wandering off — you’re forging your own unique response to the book. It can be unique and still be durable. It can have real knowledge in it even as you experiment.
What is the most adequate way to respond to a book, to record knowledge about it, to record what it meant to you — a review???? Or, well, ok, you can still write reviews, but write one all in verse, or write it backwards, or write it in another voice … don’t be afraid — BREAK IT !!!!
4. Passive thinking is dead thinking
Here at Final Canticle we abide by the constant motion of the never-resting mind. It will not stop moving, that’s obvious, will not stop moving until we’re no longer here. Before that time comes, we deal not with being but with becoming. Being is only for after you’re gone, and even then we’re not quite sure. All things flow.
To us this is simply the stance of the poet, which we learned mostly from Wallace Stevens. Here’s the last part of his poem “The Poems of Our Climate”:
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
We hope to abide by this apprehension of the necessity of change by attempting to realize a paradise of the imperfect in everything we publish here. The flawed words and stubborn sounds besmirch the burnished clichés of dead thinking and make them new again. An unsettled language will stir a hidden presence in the house of thought, a just-awakening possibility of new associations, new meanings … WE FIGHT HARD AGAINST SITTING STILL !!!!
5. Weird takes are encouraged
I used to love this old website called metaphilm.com, which is no longer maintained. You can still find it on the Internet Archive. Their motto was “see through cinema”, and they were home to endless unusual takes. It was pop criticism mixed with philosophy and New Age spirituality and film bro argumentation. The blog was snarky, irreverent, and careless. It liked to carry ideas through to their absurd ends. Favorite topics were subliminal messaging and (of course) conspiracy theories, the high art of popular blockbusters, obscure philosophies and esoteric knowledge, and the occult power of corporate advertising and film. The Matrix series was a favorite for interpretation and re-interpretation, as well as Donnie Darko and, weirdly, Pirates of the Caribbean.
When I think of metaphilm I often think next of Maddox’s The Best Page in the Universe blog, which amazingly is still getting new posts after 20 years. I remember reading this sort of thing around the same time I really liked Family Guy — that is, when I was in high school. Maddox has an online jerk persona that seems tame in comparison to today’s trolls, perhaps tame even in comparison to the way ordinary people behave online today. He’s kind of like a living Simpsons character — a benign, opinionated, and absurdly arrogant jerk. We need more of this kind of benign trolling online, and if I had a better sense of internet history I might assert more confidently that the spirit of the early 2000s lives on in this kind of irreverence, but anyway my own sense of nostalgia will suffice.
The point is, you should write dumb or strange opinions about things you care about because it’s funny — or maybe you mean it, maybe you don’t. Here’s Maddox, for example, calling Bob Dylan a better “podcaster” than singer. You get the sense that despite the pointless rant that he’s probably a fan of Dylan underneath. (Or maybe not!).
Is it possible to accommodate this sort of thing to the rest of what we do — straightforwardly thoughtful reviews, contemplative poems, earnest arguments? Yes! Or, well, at least I hope so. The closest I’ve gotten to it was my T. S. Eliot rant, where I went full sicko mode. Sorry again for that one.
6. Ordinary things are mystical
Dads are grillpilled losers; they write about their job and their kids and streaming TV. But that’s me, that’s my actual life — ordinary at home. I have a routine, I am a conventional person. I love my wife and kids. Despite what mean and nasty Twitter users say, it should be possible to write about this.
I’m a private person and so would never go into detail, but even an anonymized account of the ordinary might confess itself to you in a poetic way, if you allow yourself to observe.
Meaning, omen, the world-spirit are present in the deadline, the alarm clock, in washing the dishes at night … This is the deepest of “dad zine” writing, the poetry of suburban street autumn leaves and the chore of raking them up. We’ve tried it here — I’ve liked what we’ve done!
7. The answers to the deepest problems in contemporary art and literature will not be “contemporary”
What I mean here is this odd feeling I’ve had — we’re all “postmodern”, I guess, and one thing that comes with this in art is the much-discussed flattening of the sense of history, which you can see exhibited by some fiction authors’ tendency to write pastiches that mix freely from any era, any aesthetic, as if time were a flat field. Thomas Pynchon, for example, writes historical novels that draw up a “period” and then weirdly mix that period with genre fiction parodies, injections of modern culture, and endless obscure collages of out-of-context ideas, aesthetics, and esoterica. Or Salman Rushdie, who writes novels of the modern age invaded by the supernatural fables of the past, as if history were all one big Arabian Nights story.
To account for the unique nature of our moment in human civilization and the history of art, our strange self-consciousness about our place in history, we point to things like our omnipresent systems of mass communication, the development and elaboration of the academic discipline of history, the unprecedented volume of humanities scholarship produced by the academic industrial complex, the world-transforming power of our visual media, our freedom to manufacture and distribute works of art — objects, products, ideas, moods — at extraordinary speed and scale … All these produce the conditions that give us that feeling of the flatness of time.
This supposedly makes us very “historicist” — highly conscious of what sort of time we’re inhabiting right now, and highly conscious of how we relate to the past. We’ve never known more history, never had a better sense of history, never been more conscious of history’s distortions, than now.
But put this next to another thing I’ve noticed — a sort of addiction to the contemporary. At times, doesn’t it feel like we are in fact profoundly anxious about history, and uncertain of our place in respect to the past? Unsure of ourselves, passive, ambivalent, disconnected? The flat field of time induces a sort of paralysis… The veil of our time draws itself down over our eyes.
These thoughts are not very original, maybe, but in general I would like this blog to resist anything called “contemporary”, anything called “discourse”, any monstrosity produced by the overwhelming flooding waves of conforming thought that wash over us every day.
To the memeplex we offer an obtuse greeting, a stubborn glancing backward or sideways or down inside, probing at the deeper causes of things. To be oblique, at least — but hopefully more penetrating than that — would be an adequate shelter against the incessant weather systems of “the contemporary” that pass over us all the time, unaware of themselves. I hope you know what I mean!
8. The post must resist the intelligence almost successfully
We stole this one from Wallace Stevens too, and his poem “Man Carrying Thing” , where he says: “The poem must resist the intelligence/ Almost successfully”.
What would it mean to resist the intelligence “almost successfully” in this way? To wait until after the snowstorm for when the “bright obvious stands motionless in cold”? Is the “bright obvious” a riddle, or the answer to a riddle? Is it speaking, or silence?
I’m brought back to that word “anti-meme” from one of our bullet points that we started with. I found it recently in a book called There is No Antimemetics Division, from Amazon suggested reading, a book rec from the machine. It’s a bit of sci-fi written by an author with a proper internet name — qntm.
I actually still have to read the rest of the book, but I was struck by the opening, which introduces a secret research facility that houses, among other things, a mysterious entity known only as “SCP-055”. Here’s how qntm describes SCP-055:
SCP-055’s physical appearance is unknown. It is not indescribable, or invisible; individuals are perfectly capable of entering SCP-055’s container and observing it, taking mental or written notes, making sketches, taking photographs, and even making audio/video recordings. An extensive log of such observations is on file. However, information about SCP-055’s physical appearance “leaks” out of a human mind soon after such an observation. Individuals tasked with describing SCP-055 afterwards find their minds wandering and lose interest in the task …
The reviews say this goes on to sci-fi horror and suspense, where SCP-055 is murderous bad news, but anyway aren’t you arrested by this evocative description of this forbidding non-entity? This enigma, this “self-keeping secret”? We could invest this with infinite senses, auras, airs of suggestion …
I also found out that anti-memes are a real thing online. I should have known. They’re something like meme jokes that refuse the form, like the one from Star Wars above. You read the text at the top, are set up for a joke, and then the text on the bottom delivers only a brief muted bafflement, a quick puzzle before you move on. The reflex did not fulfill itself, almost.
Amidst the onrushing river of memes, the stream of many voices, your reflexes are trained — read setup, read punchline, read setup, read punchline … The anti-meme refuses this conditioning, stops you for a moment. Your puzzled face.
You come upon an anti-take amidst the worldwide vast impulse of takes. You keep scrolling, but … later on it starts to bother you. There was something about it … you try to speak, but … you can’t remember now …
Very clever how you use memes throughout to make the case for being anti-meme! And thank you for the Wallace Stevens quotes!
I missed this blog!!