A didacticism haunts the world. It wants to tell a story about the world getting caught, the careless having consequences, the seas rising and the iniquity and pain and death and squalor being real but unevenly distributed. The climate change novel carrying forth the new Weirding, in which climate and weather are hyperobjects, and trying to capture Capital, in its monolithic but felicitous chrysalis, undergoing its venerable face-sucking frenzy. Propaganda makes for paranoia and potentially the enlightening moment in the lives of a few consumers of that propaganda. Some of it is stunning. Some of it is bad. Of the latter, is it just bad art, or art the badness of which is somehow redeeming?

Or: under the impulse of the affect, can the whirling language mobilize more than the shoe gazing, muttering masses?

But what of our humanity, haunting the husks we inhabit from hours that somehow stack into days? Humanity becomes a password, a skeleton key to keep turning the crank of progress, inching us and the rock we push upward closer to the apex it reaches before tumbling down. Keeping going isn’t going to stop It from happening.

We gaze upward at the steepled glass ceilings and then back at the fire, worrying over the shadows it casts onto the walls. Is that ontological puppet show any more consequential than the shadows we see on the underbellies of passing clouds?

Shantih, shantih, shantih. Who was it I was reading back when I was young and would have had a corpse bearing a passing resemblance to the beautiful, who suggested that a beautiful corpse is in and of itself like a terrifying angel? Is this round revolving sphere more than beautiful corpse, a host, an anchor for the field and the ground on which inhabited bodies are themselves hosts? Humans are what technology thinks through, period. How it lives and propagates, full stop. Maybe you don't have to live in a cabin without water to have that concept gain some executive function on the otherwise empty fumblings of your captive mind.

Uncle toms cabin, a polished chestnut, but At this point how many will cite the lesson without having read the book? That is what being the exception to the rule. An exceptional chestnut but perhaps no more polished and no less precious (no less dear to us) than a clockwork orange as ultraviolent art that at one point led to ultraviolence. What is the message of the fourth movement of the fifth symphony that comes before the deafness sets in, or the riots descending in the wake of firebird? If we the concerned bloc about a boiling planet all pass along books about what a boiling planet looks like, rather than starting a Baader Meinhof faction, is that a triumph of literacy? Something inside us is trying to measure how it can keep competently inhabiting the host without taking responsibility for its degradations, how it can keep telling us fulminating stories so compelling that we can’t help but go on living them.