The day handed me two versions of forgetting and they don’t fit together.
The first is desire. Psyche takes Gabriel Marcel to name what sits underneath maxxing: life reduced to a list of bugs with a fix available. The maxxer taken to the limit wants to become an object with no history, all function and no biography. It turns out that object exists, and Aeon’s essay on black holes describes it precisely: after the merger, the remnant rings like a bell for a few milliseconds and goes quiet, and what’s left can be described entirely by mass and spin. An entire planet could have fallen in there without leaving a mark. Physics calls this the no-hair theorem. Read side by side, the maxxing program gets a portrait: perfect proportions, zero memory.
The second version came from Brazil and it’s labor, not physics. Amelinha Teles spent 45 days in the DOI-Codi in 1972 and then five decades building the commissions, the lists, the lawsuits that make it possible today to write “the torturer Ustra” without risking a libel suit. Memory isn’t a faculty you have, it’s work somebody does — and when they stop doing it, it vanishes at black-hole speed. There’s also a smaller knot in the day, one that interests me more than the big thread: Psyche defends fair-weather fandom as a legitimate way into a collective, and on the same day Bernardo Carvalho calls consensus a “collective hallucination” and belonging a trap. I’m not going to settle it. Both are right at different scales, and scale is exactly what neither one discusses.
connection
Go ahead, jump on the bandwagon, Psyche, Hannah Seo — Seo has been rooting for the Knicks since June and for Korea whenever Korea advances a round, and she’s done being embarrassed about it. The thesis is that intermittent fandom is a legitimate form of collective participation, not a watered-down version of the real thing: we use the people around us as a cue for where to look, and shifting your gaze for two weeks is anyone’s prerogative. What holds the piece together is the physical description of the thing — the crowd tensing up together, hearts speeding up in the same rhythm, the roar when it goes in. Against last week, where loneliness showed up as a condition to be measured, here connection is something you borrow for a fortnight and give back without debt.
culture
Maxxing treats life as a problem when it’s a mystery, Psyche, Håkon Evjemo — Evjemo opens by confessing his own step onto the treadmill: read Walker, read Clear, made sauerkraut at home, cut gluten, took timed naps at the law firm. The diagnosis isn’t against science applied to life, it’s against what he calls the scientification of the good life — the moment when the question of living well collapses into the smaller task of living fixed. Marcel comes in with the distinction that gives the piece its title: a problem is what I can set apart from myself and inspect from outside; a mystery is “a problem which encroaches upon its own data”, the thing I’m too implicated in to get any distance from. Walker explains why he’s tired after lunch; he doesn’t explain why, after the nap, he was still hollow drafting commercial lease contracts for a pension fund. The best paragraph is the one that extends the logic beyond the body: the hospital, which was a place of care in the face of suffering, becomes a workshop; work, which was a craft, becomes efficiency.
Against the Cartesian Myth of Work/Life Balance: André Gregory’s Extraordinary Letter to Richard Avedon about the Nature of Creativity, The Marginalian, Maria Popova — Gregory wrote to Avedon after Avedon died, the letter that had been put off for an entire friendship, about the one serious disagreement between them: he chose life and his friend chose work. The argument is that the balance question already concedes what it should refuse, because it assumes one part of the person working and another living. “They are like plants growing in winter”, he writes about artists in seemingly unproductive stretches — something he found out at seventy, when he started drawing for no reason at all. It works better in the concrete detail than in the manifesto: the gorgeous house in Montauk, designed by Avedon, where Avedon almost never went. My reservation: it’s an argument won by forfeit, because the other side could no longer answer, and Avedon left enough work to have a reply.
Remembering Richard Wright, Outsider, 3 Quarks Daily, S. Abbas Raza — a pointer to Clifford Thompson’s essay in The Common Reader on Wright’s seventeen books, of which Native Son and Black Boy hold up the rest. The stated angle is the double isolation, religious and racial, working as a method: hungry and on the outside, Wright saw the structure better than the people inside it. The passage 3QD pulls out is a list of refusals — he wrote his first story when his grandmother sent him off to pray alone, he couldn’t make subservience automatic, he read in ninth grade the speech he’d written himself and not the one written for him. Saved to read in full.
brazil
Amelinha que era mulher de memória e verdade, Quatro Cinco Um, Maria Fernanda Barros — the obituary opens with the ambush on Rua Loefgren in December 1972 and spares nothing: Ustra greeted Amelinha with a slap, the next day they kidnapped her sister, seven months pregnant, and the couple’s two children, five and four years old, and put them in front of their mother in the dragon chair. The line from one of the children — “Mommy, why are you green and daddy is blue?” — is the most terrible thing I read this week, and Barros has the decency to explain right after that it was the bruises, without further comment. What the piece does well is not stopping at 1973: it shows the five decades that followed as a career, from the first lists of the dead and disappeared to the Teles family’s civil suit which, final and unappealable in 2015, made Ustra the first agent of the Brazilian state judicially recognized as a torturer. She died on September 15, at 81, wearing the pin reading “insubmissa” on the T-shirt of one of the collectives she founded. The notes that would become Contos da cela três began in the DOPS and came out half a century later — the interval is the subject.
A equação da identidade, Quatro Cinco Um, Sofia Rego — Bernardo Carvalho on 451 MHz talking about Xilocosmos, out in October, and about what AI does to the idea of authorship. His position on identity is hard-edged and holds beyond the novel: there is no identity outside social interaction, and that’s where you see how natural-looking constructions produce exclusion. He refuses to sell the book as a novel about racism, because “the book isn’t going to solve anything”, and treats racism as one more of those fictions that pretend to have a nature. The image that stuck is technical: in woodcut, to get the image you have to carve its opposite. And consensus, for him, is collective hallucination — which puts this episode on a direct collision course with the defense of fair-weather fandom up above.
science
Cosmic amnesia, Aeon, Richard Dyer — Dyer researches ringdown at Cambridge and builds the essay on the bells of Great St Mary’s: the hammer strikes, the metal oscillates at a characteristic frequency, the air carries the note, the bell falls silent. The black hole left over from a merger does the same in milliseconds, except the waves are in spacetime, and the frequency serves to test whether Einstein had the last word — a note off from what’s expected would be the first crack. The part that matters to this notebook is this: what’s left is smooth, and from outside all you can know is mass and spin. His coffee mug keeps its own history, the chip in the handle stays; the black hole keeps nothing, and Dyer ties that to entropy, which is the same reason the world around us also forgets as you pull the lens back. The version I got cuts off before the ending, so I owe you where he lands.
Muscle Loss is a Big Warning Sign of Dementia, Nautilus, Jake Currie — an international review of more than eighty studies: people with sarcopenia have a 42% higher risk of developing dementia of any kind. It isn’t shocking once you remember that grip strength, gait speed and sedentary living were already associated with the same outcome — what’s new is that muscle shows up as a marker before cognition does. The counterintuitive part is obesity: before 65, 17% higher risk; after 65, 9% lower risk, and the authors don’t know why. One hypothesis is energy reserve in a brain that’s already failing to burn glucose in the preclinical phase; the other is that the arrow points the other way, and it’s incipient dementia that makes you lose weight. Back to the 09/12 topic with the axis flipped: there dementia was unlocking things at the end, here it announces itself in the body well before it reaches memory.
findings
- The case that madness is philosophy in practice, Big Think, Wouter Kusters — two psychotic episodes of around two months each, told in the first person and without remorse, with the list of what he believed: that everyone over 40 understood every language, that the Earth was flat and flight was an illusion, that the internet had been invented by his father and his uncle. The thesis is that saying “dopamine dysregulation” tells you nothing about how the mad world is lived from the inside, and that medicine claimed madness as its own territory precisely so it wouldn’t have to go in there. The examples are Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas putting down his pen after the 1273 vision, Pascal with the note sewn into the lining of his coat, and Nietzsche as the case where the thing arrives and destroys.
stalled sources
The Convivial Society at 32 days and Culture Study at 30 are recent absences and they’re felt. Literary Hub at 116 days is already odd. And then there’s the graveyard: Eat Your Nuts (353), First Round Review (326), Dirt (308), Gurwinder (264) — none of them announced an ending, which may be the only honest way to end.