It occurs to me that one of the most annoying or useless mechanics someone who prides themselves (or overly invests their self-worth) in thinking a lot employs is 'meta-making.' Seeing one's own anxiety, for example, which is probably a good and helpful and insightful thing, but then immediately puzzling out whether or not this realization, when looked at 'from the outside,' should be adding to or taking away from the initial anxiety. Being worried about being worried, being scared about the breadth or lameness of one's own fears, being modest about one's ability to ingratiate oneself. And then spewing this out on bloggish platforms.

I am tired of this neat little trick, which is afforded to almost everyone and only made marketable by the same late-empire opulence I sort of half mentioned in the previous post. It has been supplied an audience because it is pleasurable to back away and curl up into one's own ideas as long as one can be sure that the dirty idea used napkin of their lingo will be picked apart by willing fingers sometime soon. And people can rest assured it will be! Or at least those people of the late-empire writing in this sort of way, because this supersession or meta-making requires some necessary overhead to interpret, a necessary complexity in its undoing that, and I know this sounds bad, makes one feel good in doing it; the same satisfaction one gets in untangling a knot on a spare piece of string.

People answer that there's no real purpose or prescription for art making, but I want to stress that this meta-making, this mode of production and attempt at drilling the living bejeezus out of something in search of profundity (or the profundity of profundity's mystery etc.; you get the point), is italicized lazy and actually sick-making and boring. This is the real reason for this message: I am, like the doctors of fairest heart, afflicted with the sickness. It is deep inside of me. Like the common therapist I am maybe just a little clinically fucked up in a way that could help me empathize, in theory, but actually just lets my complex baggage smother the therapist-ed's own. The big issue is of course that without meta-making it is awful hard to imply that you have thought about paragraphs (1) and (2) see above. Which is why I don't think the answer is abolishing the practice: at all. It is a question of saying something you mean while discussing also how things you feel make you feel—probably pretty usually this can be hidden in plots and their red-herrings and McGuffins, or in morals, or on dust-jackets. The thing that slices through the meta-fictional phyllo dough that would otherwise make the whole thing low-calorie and un-sustaining or burpy (either by a trick or sentiment or 'the zeitgeist' or whatever). I want to try to be more sustaining without imposing the wholesome solemnity of early veganism. Don't tell anyone I've said this.

Meanwhile I have rediscovered this and am both on an uncreative Lin binge but also thinking way more about my language. Will roll out the lingo someday. I will also update sometime soon on my modern opinions on the netflix of today.