Sometimes you just need to slow up, slow down, close read. For example, this interview with Vaclav Smil in New York Magazine needs this ‘treatment’. The message is one of unrelenting and bleak pragmatism. I don’t like it, but I need to feel it, to experience it. My bias is to ignore it. I want to be blind to it, blinded by positivity. Brightside me to a different, unspoiled planet, please.
But I can’t. I have got to see his point of view by living inside his point of view. That is what these ‘translations’ are about.
I have been doing these for quite awhile. I usually keep them to myself. Turns out I have some good company in this particular kind of mental gymnastics. In Rob Walker’s happily practical book, The Art of Noticing, he calls this “Poetizing the Irritating”.
What I do is to read the article. Next, I highlight it for enticing sounds and ideas and phrasings using Diigo. I also lightly annotate. I use Diigo because it is easier to copy all the highlights and annotations. I paste all my highlights and annotations into a tool like Etherpad. (If you want to pal around with these words go here and have at it.)
Last, I just start pruning and adapting and translating like I would an overgrown cider apple tree until I get what I get. See ‘annoying poem’ below. I think of these as a form of digital feldgangs, woolgathering walks through the map of another’s mind. Or as Walker quotes Kenneth Goldsmith above as “walking a few steps behind two people engaged in conversation for several blocks.”
The result is below. It is annoying, but it is a revelation for me. I step into Vaclav Smil’s mind being interviewed. I ghost into his being and channel his voice. I plagiarize his spirit. Then, after I have written, I step back and review and revise until I have regained my own self, refilled with empathy and appreciation. It is a whole body translation. That’s the way it feels to me.
How Fucked Are We? What Mean We?
The message?
We live in plenitude?
No.
we live in finitude
finite planet
finite energy
finite efficiency
This is real,
really attached
to reality–
fer real
we wanna the whole cake
we don’t wanna share
we wanna raspberries when we wanna them.
Airdropped
In January
an aspirational dream
dead on arrival,
but tasty.
We have to do something else?
Draw down on consumption?
Remove the slack in the system?
No.
People don’t wanna.
I don’t wanna.
That’s the problem:
the simplest course changes
are the toughest…
but we could,
right?
nothing new is wanted
to make it happen,
right?
for example,
just stop wasting
the 40 percent of everything we grow?
This hope is crazy,
so
just
crazy.
Look at your cell phone.
We are gossips,
we wanna dumb selfies,
we wanna tear people down
to build ourselves up.
See, smartphones eat us.
4 billion of them,
7 and a half billion of us,
with tools
for self-aggrandizement.
Nolo contendere.
That’s the message.
And the net gain?
in the red,
a blooming red as blood,
a net loss instead.
And with remorse
an even redder cherry
on top
Here’s the thing —
the gap between
what coulda been done
and what we did
yawns like a sad realization–
we coulda been a contendere.
I’m old .
Still spending
the legacy of finitude.
mashing the pedal
to the floorboard.
glancing over my shoulder
at the true cost.
paid,
not by me,
but by those
who are eating my dust,
for real
for sure
forever.
(Poem translated from an interview with Vaclav Smil in New Yorker Magazine(http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/vaclav-smil-on-the-need-to-abandon-growth.html)