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This is the second post of the highschool discursives set. There’s repetition of certain phrases/examples as they are shared across individual pieces - but that’s just as per the nature of exam practice.
“Plunging into the void” – On the modern Hero’s Journey
If you’ve even so much as dipped your toes into the great sea that is the internet, you’ll be familiar with the “travel the world” narrative. If you aren’t, let me give you a refresher, courtesy of a recent Instagram reel I found myself watching just a couple days ago:
I’ve gotten too comfortable sprawled on my couch day after day. I have nothing to do except mindlessly switch between adjacent apps on my phone, doomscrolling and watching others live the life I dream of living, rotting away et cetera et cetera. So I’m leaving my home, and embarking on a journey to discover myself. This is episode one of “Excuse to go on a holiday and write it up as a tax-deductible work expense”.
I might have paraphrased here and there, but you probably get the gist.
Perhaps a better trope name would be the “pilgrimage to self-actualisation”: to brace the thousand savage dangers of the void beyond – a supposed journey into the unknown to rediscover the self. No doubt this ripoff modern Odyssey can be rightfully construed as an overused cliche; another echoing of whatever narratological ‘Hero’s Journey’ boilerplate we learnt back in the godforsaken Narratives That Shape Our World unit.
But still, I can’t help but admit that the idea has merit. After all, if absolutely nobody related to this ‘healing power of the unknown’, how could it have ever emerged as a stock-standard, almost quotidian literary bromide?
And I think, at least in part, the answer lies with our favourite 1928 cosmic horror short story. For when H.P. Lovecraft wrote about an octopus marginally larger than the ones you’d otherwise find in your local seafood market, the masses were enthralled – not because the last lines were “and they cut it up and made calamari rings and order was restored for the next millennia”, but because the ending did the exact opposite. It resisted conclusion.
The Call of Cthulhu brought to the surface something that perhaps we already knew – that humans love the thrill of the unknown. The thrill of danger. Perhaps you’ve heard it as the “l’appel du vide”; perhaps as the “Thanatos complex”. Maybe it manifests in the celebrations of the archetypical tormented artist – Penderecki’s screeching Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima, or the arterial throbbing of Van Gogh’s left ear, lying on the wooden floorboards.
At least I believe that it’s precisely because of this unnerving pull towards the unknown that, in these environments, we are perhaps able to make the greatest discoveries. For instance, it’s a pretty self-evident observation that the invention of the domestic flame necessarily had to be done in darkness. The invention of the lightbulb subsequently had to be done under, well, less effective lightbulbs. Throughout history we’ve seen the path to light lit by darkness. Failure is the mother of success. Diamonds are made under pressure. The maxims we’ve heard a thousand times.
But at the same time, maybe we should ask ourselves – how true really is this grand serendipitous narrative? That to properly discover something, we need to plunge into the dark depths of the unknown?
Maybe we should start by considering another platitude: necessity is the mother of invention. Would the lightbulb have been invented if not for the day-to-day fire risks, intermingled with the constant need to source fuel and the overarchingly frustrating requirement to relight an inconsistent, unpredictable flame? We don’t come up with ideas in the vacuum of empty space. Even subconsciously, we draw from quotidian, relatable experiences. Take our psychologists – they’ve talked about semantic satiation, jamais vu, Gestaltzerfall, et cetera; these weren’t ideas begotten from Mother Darkness herself. They came from simple observation of white noise; of our everyday world.
I mean, it’s certainly true that for the most part, our discoveries tend to draw us into convenience – out of the darkness and into the light. A reason to lie on our couch every day, a job which ‘suits you better’, a faster means of transport. But that doesn’t mean that they must be made in void, and void alone.
Like the baby who learns from the overstimulating lights and sounds of the Antichrist manifest, Cocomelon, perhaps we all need some noise to discover. Because sure, we can all retreat into the peaks of Tibet and conquer the unknown and meditate in our own spiritual cesspools; but, at the end of the day, don’t we all live in a society?
And besides, it’s time for my doomscroll break. Maybe I’ll embark on a journey of self-discovery later.
Can’t even bother giving this a title
Stimulus: “For all the benefits gained by time-saving inventions, there’s much to be said for going back to basics… So, could there be benefits to leading a life less convenient?” — JESSICA POWELL
“Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click? Pic? Look, eye, now, flick, here, there, swift, pace, up, down, in, out, why, how, who, what, where, eh? Uh! Bang!”
I’m not going to lie, if there’s one thing I remember from Ray Bradbury’s rather famous Fahrenheit 451, it’s probably this quote. Not even the “it was a pleasure to commit arson” one, or however it went – for some reason that last part evades me.
From memory, I think the context of that moment was Beatty talking about the intellectual pattern which had overtaken Fahrenheit 451’s world – standard dystopian stuff: mindless citizens, garbled and censored news outlets, et cetera. History, philosophy, languages, all dropped for the pleasure of convenient, immediate life. I mean, we only need to press a couple buttons, flick some switches, burn some books. Why bother with the past or the future?
People often say that literature mirrors reality. And I mean, I’m not one to draw parallels, but I think in this case, the parallels are practically drawing themselves.
Whether it’s infants gorging themselves on the flashing lights and viscerally unnerving songs from the Antichrist manifest, Cocomelon; or the teenager doomscrolling hours and hours on end; or even the college student, pulling their hairs out at three in the morning while playing back a video lecture at twice original speed; we’ve all in a sense become more ‘present’, living life faster in a world with increasing technological dependence. Even as a child, if I wanted to read, I’d leech off the local bookstore for an afternoon until they suspected me of doing a little more than simply “browsing one book for the past three hours”. Now, I can’t even remember the last time I’ve actually picked up a paperback – we have PDFs on Project Gutenberg after all.
That is, if our “Gen Alpha” even decides to read. Let’s be honest – when was the last time you saw a library being frequented by schoolchildren for its books (no, free internet isn’t a book)? And who even cares about literature anyway, given that AI is the new up-and-coming? We need people who can build faster and more helpful machines, who can implement layer-norms and multi-head attention and Royce’s left kidney algorithm quickly; not people who care about conveying things like “emotions” and “feelings”. Our modern day almost seems to obsessively fetishise the things which get results, the things which make our world more comfortable – more convenient.
And I guess, sure, who doesn’t want people to work on developing cheaper inventions, quicker tools? Do I want to go back to a world where we had to send out letters to stay connected? A world where I had to flip through a physical dictionary to figure out the meaning of “quiddity”? A world where to get from point A to point B I’d have to haul around a thick booklet of maps with no little dot to mark my location?
Nope. I’d be lying through my teeth if I claimed that I wasn’t a massive fan of this convenience stuff. But I wonder: maybe we’re losing sight a bit here. Wasn’t the whole point of social media to stay connected – not to put up facades and post politically-charged deepfakes to propagate hate-speech? Wasn’t the point of AI to automate time-consuming tasks so that we might have more time to spend writing and painting – not to fill the internet with its own, heterogenous, sloppy writing and soulless painting?
Humanity must progress. I’m sure it should. But with the layering of more and more modern-day stimuli, of things happening left, right and center, I hesitate to declare that we’re going upwards. Maybe if we relinquished all these advancements, we’d be able to progress humanity, not just our technology.
Perhaps it’s too reductive to claim that everything is going to hell either. We’re probably going sideways, to be honest. I guess that the buzzing monotony of modernity has almost sort of made us even more appreciative of our humanity. The pile of haphazardly constructed, robotic, probably ChatGPT generated emails makes the occasional letter ever the more special. The mountains upon mountains of online sloppy generated art make the beginner artist’s attempts ever the more appreciated.
I recently went back to the bookshop that I had frequented as a child. Nothing had really changed, save for the fact that there were expectedly a couple less people around. I think the store manager must have changed as well, because nobody really came to tell me off when I picked up a copy of Catch-22 off the shelves and seated myself on the dusty carpet.
I had indeed forgotten the feeling of reading from a paperback.
“SLEEP”
Stimulus: “People think dreams aren’t real because they aren’t made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.” — NEIL GAIMAN
Not a day goes by where my friends don’t make fun of where I live. They get pretty creative with it. Sometimes it’s the fact that there are no scrumptious banh mi places within walking distance of my house. Sometimes it’s the fact that I’m half-surrounded by forest. But most of the time, they point out how I have to get up at five in the morning to be on time for a class at seven-thirty.
And I mean, it’s really a shame – not because of the constant “why do you live so far north”, but because as much as I don’t really get to sleep, I love sleeping.
I guess it’s because of one of the key things that happen during sleep: dreaming. It’s always fascinated me as a child – most prominently I remember myself still in primary school, tossing and turning; I was trying to enter that “lucid dream” state I had learnt about on YouTube: a state, that among other things (one of which being lucidity, surprise surprise) allowed for total dream-control.
And even though I’ve moved past such obsessions for absolute ontological power, I still find myself stopping on those Instagram reels which feel just a bit too dreamlike. Whispery voiceovers. Pale, minimalistic subtitles. Oneiric, empty spaces. Watching them almost feels like I’m somehow dreaming while awake. Sure, the guy actually doing the talking is probably explaining how to commit tax fraud, but I promise it’s the aesthetic that draws me in.
There’s a name for that kind of modern internet fad. Nowadays we call it “liminality”, which really makes sense when you think about it, because scientifically dreams occur in that liminal space between consciousness and unconsciousness – that transient state of REM sleep. More concretely though, it reflects a sort of familiar unfamiliarity. Usually these sorts of ‘liminal’ spaces are nostalgic snapshots of a childhood that you kind of remember, but not really – like one of those empty party-rooms in a Strike perhaps: faded gaudy wallpapers, dimmed neon lights, a sole, half-floating balloon. That sort of lingering sadness after all the guests have left. Images, memories, all jumbled up, both comprehensible and incomprehensible.
In trying to understand this sort of “living dream”, I turned to a less-modern not-really-internet fad. More so a fine arts movement – Surrealism. You’ve likely seen one of its works, whether you work for the Museum of Modern Art or not. Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. You know, the painting with the melting clocks and the ants crawling over the stopwatches? That one. Obviously dreamlike.
And as Dali was quoted to say, one of the core principles of Surrealism was its heterogeneity. The patchwork way that quotidian objects were stitched together in a composition whose elements alone made sense, but did not in combination. The irrational “paranoiac-critical” method which was used to imbue the one subject with several different perspectives.
This particular observation has made me realise that throughout history, we’ve viewed dreams as a fundamentally pluralist thing – an amalgamation of all sorts of feelings, a mix-and-match of all sorts of perspectives. Which makes me ask myself: what’s the actual modern dream, given that all our memories and photos and stories are as present as ever?
Maybe I’m blind, but I’m inclined to say “nothing”. As far as I can tell, we’re caring more and more about the practical, and not really about, well, imagining. “Let’s find new forms of matter; give us more funding; just one more particle collider, I promise it’ll solve all our problems”, the annoying experimental physicists at CERN say, knowing the only problem it’ll probably actually solve is securing their lunch money for the next few years. Babies don’t sleep – they dive headfirst into the viscerally disturbing world of Cocomelon: caffeine for infants. College students don’t sleep – they can’t afford to, because they have an engineering exam in three hours and if they fail they won’t be able to graduate and find a job and make six figures and then die. I, for one, don’t remember the last time I’ve actually slept properly pondered the age-old question: “What do you want to do when you grow up?”
I’ll probably just… start doing. When I grow up.
But dreams are probably as real as anything we’ll encounter. Perhaps it’s not the stock market, and sleeping won’t put us in crippling debt, but there’s a common story that in the moments before our death, we rewatch all the memories of our life. All the people we’ve met, all the places we’ve seen. All the hopes we once had. And I realise now: it’s kind of like a dream, isn’t it – that same heterogeneity?
“He woke up, and it was all a dream.”
How poetic that the worst way to end a story is the only way to end this story?
Maybe we fear dreams too much. I mean, if Nolan’s Inception has impressed anything upon me, it’s probably the crippling fear of oneirataxia. But at some point, we should probably realise that we’re “living the dream”, as much as we don’t want to admit it. After all, our world is a heteroglossic patchwork of experiences, stories, perspectives. And maybe, in such an oneiric landscape, we ought to let ourselves dream a little.
I guess it’s probably a good thing. Given that we’re basically eternally in slumber anyway, surely it doesn’t matter if I sleep a couple hours less compared to my geographically advantaged friends.
Sitting and sleeping and breaking the record for most overdue essay
Stimulus: “We are shaking and waking and breaking indifference We are quaking and taking and making a difference We are working observing recording researching Wherein we’re conferring subverting referring We’re counting the minutes the moments the loss Redressing the balance addressing the cost We are citing and fighting it’s all in the writing The spark is igniting in dark we are lightening” — LEMN SISSAY, “Making a Difference”
I am sleeping and bludging and doomscrolling for probably the sixth time today. And all of a sudden, I am stumbling upon and watching and staring at this one video clip of some man, half-cast in shadow, soft, ambient music playing in the background in somewhat stark contrast to the rapid pale-yellow subtitles being plastered over the screen.
I am sitting up, listening as he goes on and on about this idea of “getting off your bed” and “going to see the world” – about his own life journey from a “kid who always got bad grades” to a supposed “better person”: how he unlocked his potential to change.
And now I am shaking and waking and probably vomiting in disgust because what does this guy think he’s talking about? Actually crawling out of my bed and starting the essay that was due two weeks ago? Keep dreaming and wishing and hoping. And what’s this about a grand journey towards self-discovery, towards a beautiful self-actualising transformation from a purposeless caterpillar into some kind of what?
A budget Shakespearean therapist living off Instagram’s ad-revenue? Sounds like a downgrade to me.
On a more serious note though, I’m sure it’s perhaps not a totally infrequent occurrence for any of us to stumble upon these wannabe philosophers, desperately attempting to convince viewers that somehow their inspirational stories of change are worth contemplating about. Those masterfully corny posters asking people to “believe in themselves”, or to “see their full potential”, or to “subscribe for $30 a month to view more quotes like these”. In fact, I dare say the amount of people in this pseudo-literary field has only increased over the past few years.
And I guess we owe it to our modern ethos, which so fervently tries to “quake, take and make a difference”. I mean, everyone’s working nowadays. Not just our resident experimental physicists, constantly “observing, recording, researching”, hoping to gather enough government attention with their newly discovered ‘Gullible boson’ for a research grant that might just support their lunch endeavours for the next couple years. Our college students are working, trying so hard to catch up to a field moving faster than they’re able to run – as a prospective computer science student myself, I look forward to finishing my five-year university course and then subsequently realising that AI has again rendered all developments in the last couple decades absolutely obsolete.
“Redressing the balance, addressing the cost.”
In a sense, as a society, we’ve already unlocked that potential to change. Maybe even surpassed it – because nevermind caterpillars to butterflies, we’re now in this constant state of butterfly 3.0 to butterfly 3.1 to butterfly 3.2, as we keep building ourselves larger and larger cocoons; ChatGPT 6.0, now with the scintillating new ability to do our research for us!
But is this even a good thing? I once heard somebody say that “everything is zero-sum”. There’s no such thing as infinity in a finite world like ours. And I mean, we can see it if we look a bit closer. Check the internet. Where have the souls of our paintings gone? Replaced by a mashed, heterogenous slop spewing out of a machine in somebody’s basement. What about our email exchanges? They all (spiritually) end with “Let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to add”. And it’s no surprise that to fully embrace our ‘potential for change’, we’re advocating for STEM much more than we’re supporting the arts. I’m glad that our youth are going to be better at calculating how many years left until we’re going to get Haldous Auxley’s Courageous Future Society predicting our death via technological anodyne, rather than realising some guy called Aldous Huxley already wrote one of those.
Perhaps our addiction towards changing our societies has left no ability to change ourselves. No place to cite, to write, to light our own darkness. Maybe that’s the true problem of this “potential for change”. Because sure, our world is transforming. But are we?
Maybe we should take advice from the self-proclaimed Socrateses. Change ourselves.
But I know I’m just going to keep scrolling and procrastinating and engaging in a multitude of other present continuous actions.