BLURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM (5)

By: Miranda Mellis
July 14, 2022

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, delivering brief remarks on mottos, mantras, speeches, slogans, and other words to live by. Series edited by Adam McGovern.

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THE FUTURE IS PASSÉ

When I was a kid, the future is passé used to be spray-painted on the wall of a liquor store at the 24 Divisadero bus stop at the corner of Divisadero and Haight. Combining lost futures and dead pasts was one answer. Because everything new happened in the past. Even the ‘new’ was of the past – think of it; doesn’t the word lose value as soon as it escapes the mouth, like a car the moment it is off the lot? For us, who are being sucked down the drain of the future, the Gyre Hypothesis sounds right. It also did to Lovelock, as it happens, though for a different reason. The abstraction ‘Gaia’ was a misnomer. The specificity of ‘gyre’ was the better conceptual affordance…

Anyway, you were right Roy: stopping time is the more practical solution. We saw it with ‘the shutdown’ in March 2020. How ‘stopping time’ set in motion the auto-poietic (self-organizing, self-repairing) processes of ecosystems; the atmosphere; waterways. For a month the skies began to clear, etc. It almost seemed as if there was a direct correlation between non-productivism and ecological remediation!

The Green New Deal needs a metaphysical addendum: time itself. To ask: what shall it have been for, after all? What will all this counting have amounted to?

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BLURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Adam McGovern | Ran Xia on BLACK CROW BELIEFS | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on LEFT-CORNER BRICK | Andrea Diaz on JOY IS RESISTANCE | Lynn Peril on TO THINE OWN SELF | Miranda Mellis on THE FUTURE IS PASSÉ | Bishakh Som on LET THE WEIRDNESS IN | Lucy Sante on FLAUBERT’S PERFECT WORD | Stefene Russell on CRYSTAL SETS | Crystal Durant on LIFE IS A BANQUET | Adam McGovern on EVERY MINUTE AN OCEAN | Josh Glenn on LUPUS LUPUM NON MORDET | Heather Quinlan on SHUT UP, HE EXPLAINED | Adrienne Crew on WATCH YOUR PENNIES | Art Wallace on COME ON AND GIVE A CHEER | Julia Lee Barclay-Morton on WILLIAM JAMES, UNADAPTED | Christopher-Rashee Stevenson on TO EACH HIS OWN | Nikhil Singh on ILLUMINATE OR DISSIPATE? | Mimi Lipson on CHEAP FOOD TASTES BETTER | Kahle Alford on NOT GONNA CRACK | Michele Carlo on YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT | Marguerite Dabaie on WALKING ON WATER | Raymond Nat Turner on TRYIN’ AND TRANEIN’ | Bob Laine on WHEN YOU GROW UP | Fran Pado on THE SMILEY EMOJI | Deborah Wassertzug on PLACING YOUR BETS. PLUS: BLURB SERIES CODA by Lisa Levy.

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