alright, let's do it. let's talk about the book of webs by Jesse Kohn (yes it's not capitalized, yes that's important).
i read this book over the summer, having randomly spotted it in the fantasy/sci-fi section of a bookstore and deciding to take my chances with it. the premise, as best i can put it, is that two revolutionaries are trapped in a cave, recounting to each other the story of how they got there. their purpose in this retelling is to try and remember the contents of the book of webs: a book so powerful it can change (and thereby, in their hands, liberate) the world.
the best way to describe the book of webs is that it's Complex with a capital C. if you try to take it as a standard narrative with a solid throughline and a True version of events beneath all the tangents, perspective shifts, hypotheticals and obfuscations, then you'll find it hard to follow and potentially unsatisfying.
rather, it's a maze that you're dropped somewhere in the midst of, a labyrinth with impossible geometry that will, after a long stretch of seeming progress towards an exit, loop back in on itself — just as often as it will defy your expectation that it will loop and instead take you to an entirely new ecosystem. it's meandering. it's heavy and dense. it's absurd.
it's also, when it wants to be, genuinely funny.
the thing is, to try and describe what this book is about, to sum it up in a post, is going against its very nature. because it's a book about the tyranny of meaning.
but, of course, that's oversimplifying it.
it's a book about books, what they mean to people, and how they can change the world.
(ragad fans, this book is for you)
it's about books as doctrines and as active shapers of truth. it's about the intentions they're written with and the ways they expect you to engage with them. really, it's about narratives in the all-encompassing sense of the word, and the myriad people and entities that shape and follow them.
in particular, this book is in large part about the narratives that the state writes (or co-opts) and propagates to sustain itself and its systems, writing reality for all who exist within and beneath it. (the 'state' later being substituted by God, psychologists, an amusement park, a mall, etc.) it's about how a person's expression of even their most personal, creative thoughts is hampered and twisted by the dominant structures of communication and meaning. a book about the inherent political nature of all stories, all ideas.
it's a book about authority and alienation. about how collectives are made up of individuals and individuals are made up of collectives.
it's a book that interrogates the idea of the individual. it interrogates the idealization of completeness and cohesion. it's a book where its revolutionary heroes must seek out imperfections — including their own, the rebellions of their bodies ("excretions, tics, bad hair days, and, most importantly, their dreams") — and must tear themselves into pieces in order to triumph over empire.
it's a book about the power and limits of speech, of words, and the impossibility of knowing other people.
and yes, this book is about the tyranny of meaning and truth, but it's also about the desire for meaning and truth. about the longing for understanding. for connection.
it's about how our definitions of those concepts, of our desires, and our understanding of what things we are supposed to desire, are informed and enforced by society; how it contains our very imaginations...
...and what it might take, what it might look like, to exist outside those definitions. to imagine something genuinely new, genuinely liberating, and make it real.
it's about the good that can come from letting yourself be confused. from taking a leap of faith: pulling up the anchor you've set down in safe harbors — or full-on abandoning ship.
from taking yourself apart and reconstructing those parts into something different; something nonhierarchical, noncohesive, unco-optable, ungovernable.
it's a book that interrogates all the things you've taken for granted (in stories), all the structures you've been mentally subsumed by, and posits, instead, actively losing oneself, letting oneself become lost, as a way to freedom.
it's a book that's full of and celebrates such seeming contradictions, because that's how the world is: Complex with a capital C. incomprehensible in scope; ever-changing yet so resistant to change (or so it feels), so difficult to actually fight against.
it's a book about getting caught up in things.
(ragad fans, this book is for you)
or, to put it another way: it's a book. about webs.
i'm going to cut off my rambling there, but i will still include a couple of bonus passages where, upon reading them, i couldn't help but be reminded of some other works that i love:
beginner's guide moment:
and we know the devil moment:
with all that having been said. i figure you, reader, can determine for yourself whether or not you'd be interested in this book. if it does sound like your thing: you know what to do. :)
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It kills me to write this. A precious clove of garlic saved from the two heads I’d purchased from Stanley Crawford at the Santa Fe Farmer’s Market in September went uneaten, slowly shriveling, stranded atop a tin of red chile powder in my kitchen in New York. I had planned to plant this clove in autumn, put it in a pot on the fire escape, let winter, spring, summer do their thing, and see what I’d dig up come next fall. But we didn’t have any soil. Later we had soil but no pot. Then it was November. If it wasn’t already too late, it soon would be. And a million other things happened. And then it was late winter. When at last I’d worked up the nerve to touch the clove, life had left it. Mold had sprouted under its sloughing sheaths.
“Things are seeds,” says Bill Starr, the slowly expiring narrator of Seed. “I wish to plant mine into the future, deliberately, though I am not yet clear as to the eventual intended result, if there can be one, intended, within the vast fields of contingency that lie out there, ahead.”
Jesse Kohn reviews Seed and The Canyon by Stanley Crawford.
TWELVE VARIATIONS ON A CLASSIC HIT by Jesse Kohn
1.
I stop to gawk at a couple posed to kiss for pictures in a park. They kiss. They stop. They say, “This park is usually pretty, but now it is deeply dead under stacked strata of melting ice, slush pools, and thawed dog shit.” I gawk as again they kiss. And again, they kiss for pictures.
2.
Kissing for pictures in parks that are usually pretty attracts gawking, gawkers being naturally attracted to any impending disaster. Kissing for pictures is an impeding disaster in that, with each picture taken, the kissers become increasingly involved in the fabrication of a fiction. Because the pictures are meant as future verification that kissing has occurred, the kissing required becomes increasingly unmeant. It is openly known, but not openly acknowledged that the pictures thus form a fiction meant for future verification that the kissers pictured have chosen to mislead and be misled, proof that they are both silently singing into the mouth of the other, “This falling in love is mine, mine, mine.”
Losing your mine is a way to avoid kissing for picture in the event that you are posed in a park that is usually pretty, which is an impending disaster bound to befall anyone engaged in kissing. Kissing is like a park that is pretty, and prettiness naturally attracts the taking of pictures. The taking of pictures turns kissing into a park that is only usually pretty precisely because it calls for reiteration, and reiteration is almost always some reiteration of the fiction that you are essentially unloved, which is a standard tuning wherefrom every tune produced is some variation of the classic hit “Mine, Mine, Mine,” a tune that is, no matter how well played, covered in slush and thawed dog shit.
The first two of twelve parts of Jesse Kohn's fucking awesome piece on the Keep Away website today
