Grief and substitution
Reading paths · 7 stations · 14,549 words · 63 min contemplative traversal
- 01Sacrifice, substitution, and the remainder of grief · Folk horror from The Lottery to Midsommar and Pluribus
- 02About the Inadequacy of Attempting to Communicate Grief through Art
- 03the shape of what cannot be said
- 042026-10-11
- 05Declarations_Of linguistic cartographies
- 06To Speak, To Listen
- 07Apropos of Nothing
Hop 01 Sacrifice, substitution, and the remainder of grief · Folk horror from The Lottery to Midsommar and Pluribus
This began as a simple question about a kind of horror I kept watching without being able to say why. Widow's Bay, Midsommar, Hereditary, Azrael, Best Wishes to All: an isolated place, or a line of generations, where a sacrifice is necessary for the order of the status quo. What is the metaphysics of it, and what are its sociological implications? I expected an answer about cults. What I found, over many months and…
Tangent this note links to Technology and its Discontents, a station on Technology, simulation, and the machine.
Hop 02 About the Inadequacy of Attempting to Communicate Grief through Art
Of course, I will always come back to you but only insofar as you wear the clothes of the transcendental signified. You are only you when you are stripped of everything that is you, who becomes everything and everyone at the moment of meaning’s abnegation. We only exist in language and linguistics is the only relationship that connects us. But what about its grammar? What are the disguises that we inhabit to make…
Tangent this note links to A Return to Form, a station on Language and the unsayable.
Hop 03 the shape of what cannot be said
If we say that identity formation is wholly based on the understanding of how language works, then it is also a matter of forming one's own relationship with language, of how words are defined by a meaning-making consistent with one's own worldview. Change a definition, reframe the world within a new system of language, and the world appears different than it was before. A person changes with it. Immensely.
Tangent this note links to 2025-01-29, a station on Language and the unsayable.
Hop 04 2026-10-11
Perhaps this is me trying to take back what is lost. But as Weil's void put it, this void is irrecoverable and should only exist as a vessel for grace. That is still something I am learning. That is still something that I am heavily trying to resolve to experience.
Hop 05 Declarations_Of linguistic cartographies
The body keeps its own history. Not in straight lines, but in fragments, in whispers, in the language between breaths.
Tangent this note links to Declarations_Of the body, a station on Language and the unsayable.
Tangent this note links to Notes on Inhabiting, a station on Language and the unsayable.
Hop 06 To Speak, To Listen
I am on this streak of reclaiming myself, if not my sense of self. I guess the latter carries more truth than the former because to reinvent my sensibilities is more important and meaningful than trying to capture an old self that was lost. I cannot always drag a corpse to my body for sentimentality and a sense of familiar comfort. There is no kind of reinvention that occurs without self-examination. I am able to…
Hop 07 Apropos of Nothing
For some reason, I have come to ensure that nothing that I have produced will persist beyond what I can control. There can be nothing that will exist that will be under my name. Everything that I have written must be erased. All that I am seeks a type of death that cannot be confirmed, that is beyond disappearance, that is what comes after the state of absence itself — perpetually unverifiable. I am only here to…