Clarissa's Blog

I deeply dislike the expression “peak woke.” It suggests that the heights of wokestry are behind us. We can now look at them as a quaint memory from the past and share a chuckle over them.

None of that is true. Not only have we not reached a peak, we haven’t even gotten anything but the smallest taste. People are complacent, although there is zero evidence that the organizers and the participants of the ideological wave that hit us in the year 2020 have changed their minds or even mellowed out a bit.

I made vegetable soup today:

– Carrots
– Potatoes
– Cabbage
– Purple asparagus
– Bok choy
– Garlic scapes
– Fresh corn
– Spinach and parsley.

It’s lovely, which is precisely the problem. A large pot is already two-thirds gone.

This is the curse of people who cook well.

As many other writers, Chirbes always felt that the art he created hadn’t really been authored by him:

I have the impression that someone other than myself has written things that are beyond my reach—things I would be incapable of writing. It is the work of someone smarter than I am, someone who writes the way I can only ever hope to; these texts seem to hang there in the literary chain, appearing distant and elusive to me: they are not mine, and that is precisely why they interest me.

I also believe that humans are conduits for beauty. The source doesn’t lie within us. It can go through us. It can reflect itself in us, but it doesn’t originate in us.

Why some people get chosen to be conduits is not for us to understand. It doesn’t mean it’s easy for them, though. It’s an enormous responsibility to receive the message correctly and transmit it well. The 2,200 pages of Chirbes’s diaries make it very clear that this work is anything but easy.

If you don’t want to do it, if you don’t gain an intense amount of energy from social interactions, then you’re simply not an extrovert. Extroverts gain energy from social interactions. Introverts lose energy through social interactions. This doesn’t mean that extroverts are necessarily good at socializing or that introverts are bad at it. Neither way of being is morally superior to the other one.

People increasingly try to turn things that are physiological into a morality play. It’s bizarre. In the meantime, things that actually do lie in the moral sphere are extracted from it by appeals to individual choice. Many people sincerely believe that something that just happens to you and you cannot choose speaks to your moral character when things that you choose freely do not.

Exhibit number five trillion to demonstrate that analogies are almost invariably dumb:

To dig under all the verbiage, in the depths of the formless or deformed mass of clichés, to find true words, words that name rather than merely envelop. That is the writer’s job: to clean the grime that clings to language.

-Rafael Chirbes, Diarios.

I don’t hate AI. What I hate is when AI is used for purposes for which it should not be used. Knives are great, but not for sticking into people. That kind of thing.

This is the kind of thing I’m talking about, and mind you, this is very recent, from yesterday :

People sincerely believe this, and that is a disaster, both for the education system and for society.

By the way, this was the foundational belief of Soviet pedagogy. My mother was told by the Soviet authorities that the only reason why her students, almost all of whom were children of convicts and multi-generational alcoholics, were not proficient in algebra is that she was a bad teacher. That this kind of errant lunacy is still so widely believed in America is simply sad.

Theoretically, Chu knows that a successful neoliberal subject should be a quirky original thinker. Yet she repeats the hoary platitudes about the importance of being a nimble citizen of nowhere in particular.

This is the problem with nimbleness. It requires constant exertion. Chu is aware that the expression “global citizen” is démodé and shows reluctance to use it. But coming up with a truly original approach is too hard. Throughout the book, Chu rubbishes Chinese teachers for being opposed to originality and individuality. The teachers are, at least, consistent, however. They don’t prattle excitedly about the importance of freedom while living in a cage of a restrictive ideology.

Lenora Chu, a child of Chinese immigrants to the US, moved back to China with her American husband. They wanted to raise their 3-year-old son to be “a nimble global citizen with no attachment to a specific place.” Seriously, that’s how Chu puts it. In those words.

To achieve the goal of massaging the toddler into nimble  global citizenship, Chu and her husband put the child into a Chinese daycare. China is an authoritarian society stuck in the industrial era mentality. In their school system, children are terrorized into robot-like obedience from the youngest age. Chu was so shocked by what she observed at the Chinese daycare that she wrote a book about it titled Little Soldiers.

The book is built on the contrast between the disciplinarian structure of the Chinese school system and Chu’s mentality of a reflexive hatred towards boundaries. The curious thing is that neither of these ways of being in the world is well suited to the neoliberal reality in which both have to exist. Chu is a standard Western neurotic who is incapable of any form of self-containment. The products of the authoritarian Chinese education system are also incapable of self-containment, but for a different reason. They get used to being disciplined and controlled from the outside from their earliest childhood. Establishing and strictly maintaining internal boundaries is alien both to Chu and the people she criticizes.