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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.
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