growing up

Progress

While I lay here still

I understand that time will slowly take me.

But before it can take me back, it must shatter what I have become.

Progress.

It is a strange idea.

I am perpetually attached to it, as if there is some necessity for my life to mimic the arrow of time.

Forward. Forward.

Endlessly pursuing some incremental alteration toward a predefined but often unknown idea of “better.”

But who decides what better is?

The government? Instagram? Goldman Sachs?

Better is a brand. We wear it like a jacket.

We are at the mercy of entropy.

Held in its mouth like prey.

Alone at some level.

The disorder we experience only increases.

Unless we consume the right mix of chemicals

to balance out our internal chaos.

Sertraline. Nicotine. Microdoses of psilocybin.

We regulate like machines pretending to feel.

Like single cells on the surface of a petri dish,

we eat away at our land,

hoping there is some meal

that teaches us how to eat less.

Invested.

Researched.

Consumed.

All shrink-wrapped and timestamped.

Our world is already in rupture.

But must it break before we dare to fix it?

It is a rare human who changes their habits

without an incentive

or a threat.

Incentive.

Threat.

Then change.

We are lazy.

Nursed by the dead.

Dragged forward by the unborn.

Civilisation is a costume.

Underneath, we are just well-trained animals

that respond to designed sti

muli.

Flash. Sound. Touch.

Push notification.

Think you are above it?

Give your partner chocolate before a hard conversation.

Turn the music up in the car during an argument.

Send a meme instead of saying sorry.

Even our intimacy is coded.

We are sensitive and fragile.

But the rate at which we build solutions

appears to outpace the rate of our collapse.

Or so we believe, as the wreckage gets prettier.

The king cannot see that the bricks are running out

because his tower keeps rising.

Built on borrowed stone.

So what then?

If we are all kings and queens of our own worlds,

how do we know if we are improving,

or simply burning the last of the rocket fuel

before gravity reclaims us?

Where do we look for the cracks?

Where do we allow ourselves to fall apart?

Italy

I worked in Italy last month on a project.

It has taken me weeks to recover.

As I stood on the shore on the penultimate day,

trying to reconstruct how I even got there,

I searched for that sharp vein of gratitude

that takes you to tears

so I could carve it into the memory of the sunset in front of me.

I saw a crab.

Overturned.

Empty.

An abandoned home.

Only a lattice of chitin and calcium remained.

Discarded, yes.

But essential.

To leave its shell,

the crab first reabsorbs the calcium.

It collects itself.

Elemental cargo packed for departure.

Luggage in the bloodstream.

Relics of the past, liquified.

Once softened,

the crab expands.

It grows.

Forcefully pushing against the limits of its old form.

A new membrane has already been crafted.

A wet armor.

It fits.

But it is not yet strong.

As the crab inflates, it shatters the shell.

Breaks the mould.

Destroys safety.

Then it hides.

Waits.

Preserves.

It will be stronger.

But right now, it is weak.

I sat there, looking at the carcass.

And then at the many crabs who do this daily.

Nature does not romanticise change.

It enforces it.

Violently.

Regularly.

Maybe that is what we forgot.

How to break.

Everything got too nice.

Manicured hands.

Decorative dissent.

Feelings curated into digestible slides,

visible only to those who agree.

I hear it often.

Art can change the world.

If that is true,

then it must learn to speak to those

who do not want to change.

Over the last hundred years,

as the art world ballooned,

it became easier to find agreement.

To gather consensus.

To share feelings already shared.

To perform rebellion to an audience who bought tickets to agree.

Few voices stepped out of the stream.

Even fewer stepped against it.

But those perpendicular insights,

those frictional perspectives,

that is what we are missing.

An incentive for change must offer something novel.

If art is a manufactured mirror,

then the artist must hold it at an angle

that reveals what we would rather not see.

And yet present it in a way that helps us navigate it.

Even if it wounds us.

Or is that too much to ask?

Is it just another selfish loop?

The human compulsion

to chase a thing called progress

when there may be no such thing at all.

Anyway.

Change.

Don’t change.

Nobody will notice.

I love you loads.

Poet’s Corner

shush

shushed, and

Told it doesn’t matter,

shushed, and

Madder than the hatter,

shushed, amongst

All of the chatter,

Holding down a shout,

That silence seems to shatter.

- Thomas May

It’s not that serious

I love you loads.

Russ

x

If you’re curious about how I wrote this week’s newsletter, here’s my process

Set Topic (Shatter - 9 weeks ago)
Research/thinking (Wednesday)
Writing on plane (Saturday AM EST)
Memes (Sunday AM EST)
Finish on phone
Panic
This section (7pm UK)
Insert Poets corner

I don’t think everyone gets this far, so if you have, this is our little secret.

I’ll put something cool here every week as long as you click here

You’re awesome

x