Charlene Doland (@inspirepassion) and I have been playing about with an idiosyncratic essay by Venkatesh Rao entitled “Logics of Caring”. It is a part of his Substack, “Ribbonfarm”. I copied over his essay as a Page in my WordPress blog and we have been going back and forth like a loom using the social annotation tool, Hypothes.is. If you want to join us, we welcome your comments, replies, images, videos, and more Here is the link to the page where we are annotating. Join in.
I wanted to do more with Rao’s essay so I took my own annotations and aggregated them here. Also included in that link is my first draft at translating what he is saying into something poetic. Just below in this post is a second draft ‘translation’.
Making it “poetic” means I slow the eye down by putting it into verse form, I find better words, I put good turns of phrase in better context, and more. Every translation effort here is to make the original more open and understandable. I realize that I don’t always succeed, but for my own purposes I think I have a better handle on what this deep thinker is trying to share. I hope Charlene reads this and lets me know what I could have made more felicitous, a happier translation.
I think of this kind of work, social annotation and translation, to be a form of slow, close reading. It is a way of honoring the work and is a condition for having conversations that honor the work. The more sharply we attend to shared text the less likely we are to eschew the logics of caring.
A Poem Summary of Logics of Caring
Don’t cold-start the year
with your paint-by-numbers
signifying nothing.
Instead
let us begin with
a low-ambiguity keynote,
a click of orientation
of emotional rightness
with the world outside.
It’s about
how we belong in the world
and what we see in it.
It’s not about who we are.
It’s about how to care
in the world.
It’s a caring that has to be seized.
In other words
in resolution times we need
an emotional posture
a direction-setting mood
a vibe vector
a default disposition
And any old mood will do,
even grimmest doom.
This low emotional entropy
Creates time for you.
If you are not careful
All of a sudden
All your paint-by-numbers resolve
Melts,
Lifelessly unravels and
As January turns into August
And the heat death phase of the year
Is born.
You are undone.
In resolution time we need
the right starter culture
the small currents of conviviality
the moodstdrapping
the power flowing down at the shitposter altitudes
where we, the mood dowsers, work
in an undercurrent of emotional sense making
& a lively contest of
little trends & good-natured memes
& genuine, animating moods and postures.
These are the core of what
I understand are ‘logics of caring’.
A cohering way
To feel about the world,
Robust and anti-fragile
With the power to breathe life into
The colorless paint-by-numbers
We tend to make in January
Instead we make derangement syndromes
That are too narrow to serve as ways
Of caring about the larger world.
In resolution times there are
no obvious animating moods to surrender to,
none to fiercely resist
nothing to imaginatively break from
no worldwinds to sail with or against
no natural sap to tap.
In resolution times it seems obvious that
the endless hustle is ridiculous
larger narratives of trauma & caring
are unraveling.
Yet all the rearguard efforts like goblin mode
or quiet quitting
or laying flat
Are a gathering storm,
Gaining strength
And undermining logics of care
reborn as zombie logics,
Walking dead
But in resolution times it doesn’t have to be this way.
We can be:
rewilders of enchantment
wishful utopians
against the demons and mind viruses of the center or the margin
We don’t have to be
for nor against cartoonish narratives of the hustle
or a menu of derangements
So we wait for the right vibe to sallie forth
We can pay happy attention to the world where we are
We can ignore derelict stories
(They are nice to have but better to have no story than a bad one.)
We are off the fucking clock.
Pay your bills if you can.
Stay alive.
Abandon your urgent calendars and to-do’s.
We have survived for years
By disengaging from the grandest hubristic narratives
We have planted the seeds of real agency
By quiet quitting the world
In order to begin living within it now.
That’s where the logic of caring
Can be found.
Anon.
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Thanks for drawing my attention to the Logics of Caring article and annotation. I’ve done a deep read of the article and your poem and offered comments in the margins.
I admire the time and effort you put into turning this into a poem.