Recent publications: a couple of short stories—“Mulch” in See The Elephant #4 from Metaphysical Circus Press and “The Dreaded Name: Thirty-Nine Crowdsourced Annotations on an Anonymous Manifesto Promoting Tactical Human Extinction” (my longest story title ever, by some margin) in the anthology The Internet is Where the Robots Live Now from Paper Dog Books—and a poem, “Vajrakantakasalmali”, in Syntax & Salt.

Since we are in a Janus-faced moment (see also: resolutions and irresolutions, the takings and leavings of stock) there is a round-up of everything I published in 2018 listed here in my bibliography, or alternatively and perhaps more intriguingly in full tweet-thread form here, where I even did little blurb-type things for each of them.

I used to find that sort of thing harder to do than writing the stories—social media self-promotion in general, or worse, writing blurby bits about my own work and trying to say what a thing is about, when obviously everything is about a lot of things. But sometimes you can just say some words and move on with your life? It seems the salve for many of life’s thorns is to try to relax and do the thing and not worry about it too much. And this is perhaps good advice not just for the minor but also the major arcana. See also: the leavings and takings of leave, the piya vippayoga dukkha, which is the name of the thing that flutters in the extremely occupied cage and makes it hard work for the other organs to organ. A lung must lung without having to worry about stray claws and beaks and feathers. A heart must heart.

Max Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers is fortunately not about Ted Hughes as such despite the overwhelming stench of Crow, but rather about a Ted Hughes scholar. It’s a small lovely book about grief as the madness with sanction, the permitted abandon. There are the things we see and the voices we hear, the half-world we inhabit, sometimes for too long, eating and drinking of it, until we can’t quite come all the way back. That’s me, you see. It took me about seven years to breathe out and say, okay, maybe I’m never going to come all the way back. But then there was an eighth year (and we are in it still—calendrical regimes are complicated) in which I am like, well, fuck it, I can make this work too. It may seem like I’m talking about several things at once. I am, because everything is about a lot of things. Griefs—what an awkward-ass plural that is; it should at least be grieves for the echo, for we be reft when we be reaved—braid. And the pain of being separated from those you love, the diamond-edged precision of this term, the piya vippayoga dukkha, does not speak of death at all, except to encompass it by implication. Death is not the mystery: sundering is.

Once the classless society had been defined as an infinite task, the empty and homogeneous time was trans­formed into an anteroom, so to speak, in which one could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity. In reality, there is not a moment that would not carry with it its revolutionary chance—provided only that it is defined in a specific way, namely as the chance for a completely new resolution of a completely new problem.

From Benjamin’s Paralipomena

This anteroom is a hazard for the handling of infinite tasks. This is, for example, how orthodox Sri Lankan Theravada handles the problem of nirvana: defined as an impossible problem of many lifetimes, it’s easy to put it aside altogether and do other things of more worldly import. H.L. Seneviratne’s The Work of Kings records a particular argument about the heritage of a Theravada Buddhist monk in the late 1940s, overlapping with the struggle for nation-making. Walpola Rahula argues for the politicization of the monk, and a social role in keeping with the Christian model; his critic Henpitagedara Gnanavasa argues for a vibhavagami path that precludes this kind of usefulness. Of course, Gnanavasa lost this argument so thoroughly that (as I noted when I tweeted about this book a while back) now, seventy years later, it is bizarre to expect that Buddhist monks should practice Buddhism. Organized Sri Lankan Theravada entered history’s anteroom then, and has since made itself very comfortable there: to yr average frothing-at-the-mouth monk, that anteroom is the world.

The classless society and nirvana are not the only kind of infinite tasks, though. These are not truly infinite tasks: they could be any task of sufficient scope and ambition that it can easily be (mis)construed as infinite. This is, as are many things, a problem of definition. Healing can become an infinite task, if you’re not careful. So can Great Works, if one is so incautious as to attempt them. It’s a pattern that occurs in the large and the small, like nautilus shells and spiral galaxies. But this kind of connection between the large and the small is itself the beginning of an answer, if sundering were a question. Listen, that is Earth under your feet, the same as mine.