literally 2

Zoom link for this Sunday, Aug 4, 6pm UK.

Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes call "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve. It's not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as "a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.

— David Foster Wallace, Laughing With Kafka

Larkin

There’s this thing that happens to me sometimes in Stemless…  it’s like you get to the place where you’re like, “Okay, we've been playing a fun game, but this is real now. I need to take a timeout because I'm not playing now.” 

And this is where you lose the ability to look at your dream logic and to share it. When you go “No, I need to retreat, actually, to the litigated commons.” 

Arrow

It doesn’t feel like the litigated commons, though, does it? It just feels like, “Oh, wait, now this thing that’s happening is real, right? Real, for all of us! I'm not alone in here, right? I don’t want to be alone.” Something like that?

What happens in that moment for you? I don’t think there is much of a hug from a “litigated commons”– that’s just the bureaucracy of establishing shared reality. You're not like, “Oh, I need some bureaucracy to help me with my crisis right now.” So what is it? 

Larkin

It’s like: “I have to be serious about this” - that becomes larger. Oh, and “this is real,” “this is dangerous.”

Arrow

In the same way people say, “It got real at the bar.” Oh, it got real. People start throwing punches, rather than just talking loudly or shouting at each other. 

Larkin

And I think … Remember Kafka’s frozen seas? This is that. The place where you go “No, no, no, this is real, and I have to be careful, and something bad can happen to me here.” And you can't be in humor anymore. You can't be in play. That's where–

Arrow

Frozenness is the rigid bureaucracy that makes you believe “this is frozen for me.” Which is another way to say, “this is real for me, this is not negotiable. There's nothing that can be moved here. It's not fluid.”

This thing that freezes… is actually the thing that could be met by Stemless!... Your dream-logic of separation becomes too “real” and takes away from the actual reality, of intimacy.

Larkin

The thing that's frozen… that could meet…?

Arrow

The frozen should be met by the reality of playfulness and fluidity. That's what's actually real. That's what's really going on: everything is fluid, nothing is frozen. If you actually manage to Stemless in that moment, you'll get to connect with us. But what you want to do in that moment is impose. You fail to own. You go, “No, no, no, hold on! This is real. You’re all playing games, I’m not.”

Larkin

There's a certain place in experience, more than one, where it feels like: this is no man's land for openness. I cannot open here with you. It's just very persuasive and very frozen and “Hold on! I am not a participant in this contact dance of reality with you. You are making contact with me. You're seeking contact with me about the way that I just impacted you or whatever. And you want to be in the reality of that with me. And I know I cannot.” There is something about closeness and there is something about also…

Arrow

“I need to be alone here?”

Larkin

Openness. There's an openness I can’t bear, I think.

Arrow

But why does it make you reach for "normal” words? That's the question.

Larkin

That's a closing.

Arrow

That's a closing! Hmm…

Larkin

I don't know. Maybe it's too quick of an answer.

Arrow

But is it maybe about… mediatedness? There is something very subtle here.

I can picture someone when they're in that freezing experience. They really fall for the dream in that moment. And it is a dream, because in truth there cannot be frozenness. The only way that you can have frozenness is by falling for that dream. 

So actually I think it might be the other way around. It’s not that you are closing because of a real peril. It’s that you are stuck in the false narrative that you are or can be closed, and this narrative manifests as “freezing”.

If you fall for that dream, if you believe you're somehow closed, then it manifests that way.

It's much more that if you've tumbled into fusion with your dream, into some trap of bureaucracy, some logistics of survival, then all the fear shows up. You’re in a kind of frozenness of your own experience which causes, indeed,  freezing, where you’re in a state of “I don't know what to say.” And that causes the loneliness and fear. Rather than the other way around.

Larkin

You recorded this part too, right?

Arrow 

I hope so. I hope I didn't mumble all of my words. How does anybody understand what I'm saying?