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The Agrestic | |
August 24th, 2018 | |
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== Introduction == | |
I wrote an opinion piece in my college newspaper about the state | |
of our campus due to excessive construction during my two years | |
attending. There was no grass over the vast majority of the | |
campus, only churned earth or piled dirt next to broken cement | |
walkways. I don't remember much of the article except that I used | |
the word "agrestic" in a way that suggested rural beauty. The | |
editor of the paper had enormous issue with the word, claiming it | |
wasn't a real word at all (her three degrees in English literature | |
as proof). This outrage and logical fallacy cemented "agrestic" in | |
my mind forever. Funny how brains work [0]. | |
[0] cat - Miscolored memory of Washington | |
This phost isn't about that article though. This phost is about | |
the future, post-modernism, the death of the internet, and the | |
rise of the agrarian renaissance. Hold on to your butts, we're | |
going for a ride. | |
== Time Travel == | |
In 1985 Back to the Future was released. Apart from it being | |
a nearly flawless film giving us endless quotability and | |
establishing a benchmark for all future time travel films, it also | |
cemented into my budding consciousness the idea of temporal | |
relativity. By this I don't mean anything to do with Einstein's | |
terminology, but rather the sense of future and past being | |
relative to your own present. What seems obvious from your point | |
of view today gets very complex when you take into consideration | |
time travel. | |
Lets say you traveled back to 1955. When you say "in the future | |
I want to be a rock star" do you mean back in 1985 where you're | |
from, or in your personal future? Perhaps you'll return to your | |
original timeline, or perhaps like Doc Brown you'll cut ties to it | |
completely and move independently like a Time Lord. The further | |
you get away from linear existence the harder relative temporal | |
terms become. Or maybe they just become less useful since they | |
lack a common vantage point. If you were the Doctor traveling with | |
Rose Tyler, you could say, "let's get chips tomorrow" and it might | |
still make sense, even if tomorrow happened to be in Victorian | |
London. | |
Time travel complicates everything [1], even basic language. But | |
it doesn't take a T.A.R.D.I.S. to weaken a word into | |
meaninglessness. It just takes aging. | |
[1] tomasino - time travel | |
As a kid, the future represented sleek, pointy cars with sharp | |
angles and neon colors. Badass dudes with giant shoulder pads | |
would wear opaque shades while LA and NYC were either on fire or | |
underwater. These days the future is global economic collapse as | |
the balance of power shifts to China and a waffling United States | |
falls back on military action to try and maintain a control it | |
gave away through isolationism. The future, in essence, is nothing | |
at all. It is a fantasy in constant flux with no anchor in reality | |
or common experience. It is neither hope nor fear. It is | |
intangible and ineffable, and utterly useless. | |
In 1955, Marty McFly went back to the future. He returned to his | |
nineteen eighty-five where sexy mom and successful dad were ruling | |
the day. He had his truck, he had the girl, and everything was | |
going to be okay. That moment of psychological juxtaposition where | |
he physically entered into a new timeline that was not his own | |
projections of anticipation or a cultural meme of anxiety but | |
a physical reality that had been shaped by actions he would never | |
personally witness--that was like the moment of birth all over | |
again. He was in a new world, a "future" world, bearing no | |
similarity to the other meaningless definitions of the term. His | |
fictional actions made fictionally-real a concept which cannot | |
ever be real. Rather than a tautology, this is something inverted: | |
where the repetition of a meaningless idea becomes meaningful. | |
If you're following my logic I commend you or apologize or both. | |
Ultimately what I'm getting at is that the idea of a future is | |
meaningless, except in context of its own manipulation. That | |
manipulation is irrelevant without time travel or some other means | |
of temporal scrying. You cannot change the future if you don't | |
know what the future holds. The future is nothing becoming nothing | |
otherwise. Simple, right? | |
So, it with all of this in mind that I proclaim with all the | |
seriousness of IHOP rebranding as IHOb that "The Future" must | |
definitively refer to 1985 and nothing else or it will become | |
meaningless once again. | |
Being that the definition of definition is (yes, tautology again), | |
"a statement of the meaning of a word or word group or a sign or | |
symbol," then only a statement that gives meaning to the word | |
"future" can rightly be called a definition. If only such | |
a situation as car-washer Biff can justify a true "future", there | |
you have it. Let all other uses be damned. Change thy lexicon! | |
== The Agrestic == | |
While sitting at a Denny's in Greenwood, Indiana, staring down at | |
a paper place-mat featuring "Guess Who?", I had this conversation | |
with my friend Josh. There was much coffee involved, and probably | |
a burger in there somewhere, and we were more certainly awake far | |
too late in the night. My argument stated, I continued for him as | |
I will for you now. | |
The future is over. It's been done, you see. 1985! We're well | |
passed that, even if it was a fictional version of it. If this | |
time is no longer the future, or even "A" future, what is it? We | |
have generational terms, decade terms, and occasionally history | |
grants a time with an overall label in retrospect. These are all | |
scientific, calculated, or reactive. They don't attempt to | |
describe us while we are still in the act of being. They describe | |
the past, or they describe the calendar of the present. | |
Uncertainty clouds the present and the days ahead and puts us back | |
into nonsense-words again, right? | |
What if we chose a nonsense word for the times we're in and the | |
times to come that wasn't bland or neutral, but instead one that | |
evoked in us a primal sense of experience. Imagine that a word | |
could convey in existential, individual, human terms a sense of | |
the entire days to come. It wouldn't need to be packed with | |
context from other sources but contain them within its full | |
understanding. | |
Agrestic. | |
That is the "future" I envision and put forth in my own mind and | |
in my interactions with the world. It can be summed up as the | |
logical conclusion to the phrase: | |
"Then they all decided the internet was a pretty bad idea." | |
What happens next. What do we find. Rustic. Beauty. The Earth. | |
Human animals in the dirt, in the trees, in the seas. Unpack as | |
much as you can from the word and from its idea and from all that | |
came before it and let it saturate you. | |
Is it silly, is it absurd, is it infinitely unlikely to happen? | |
Who cares? Flying cars are EXACTLY as absurd. | |
Here's the key to the whole thing: whatever you aim at you're not | |
going to hit, but you're going to end up close. If you aim at | |
flying cars and nuclear war... I don't want to go there with you. | |
If you aim at a world where we found peace with our planet and | |
didn't let our creations define us then everyone deserves some | |
god-damned high fives in my book. | |
Agrestic. Say it with me. It may not be a word (it really, really | |
is a word), but that doesn't matter. It's in your head and it's in | |
my head and it's more fucking real than a flux capacitor. |