Naming the thing
That which has not been recorded cannot be reckoned with
This project has gotten off to many false-starts. This may well be another one.
Why should anyone have the hubris to write, let alone in long-form, at this the quarter mark of the twenty-first century of our common era? Is the world not already over saturated with the detritus of attempts at sense-making?
These are sensitive questions. I was born in nineteen-ninety and experienced first-wave woke first-hand. In my early twenties I was acutely aware of the cringe-worthiness of being another apparently superfluous man from the middle of the Anglo-American sphere aspiring to be a writer because he could think of nothing better to aspire to. That came with a certain ambivalence about the ethical sequela of scarce opportunities that ultimately led to me becoming a lawyer. But now, some fifteen years later, that ambivalence itself has solved itself—for there are apparently no opportunities left for anyone.
But ‘why not’ is an insufficient answer. After all, absence of inhibition is not motivation.
There is a contemporary understanding of psychoanalysis which suggests the mechanism of change (I do not presume ‘treatment’) is simply the fact of external signification. That is, by transposing the thought into a phenomenological experience you necessitate a shift in the reality of you neurobiological state (at all its scalar levels of complexity). This carries with it at least the potential for change in the way the thought is related to. The consequence of this is that, even if you are fundamentally disillusioned, the mere act of expression can never be truly absurd. It may also be why the human ability to express is properly considered sublime and inalienable.
If that is the case, the act of writing—of naming the thing—can never be truly absurd.