Welcome, I’ll say. Hello.

Picture me saying these words to you from a crumpled heap on my living room floor (grey/green couch and beige carpet), limbs tangled awkwardly around me, eyes bloodshot and tears leaking downwards along my cheeks. I’ll remain here for the duration—defeated, broken, done.

You can stand where you are, in the doorway leading out into the cold night, or sit. The couch creaks, but it’s comfortable.

I got here—I simply cannot tell you why I got here. And neither can you. I remember falling. I remember 1997 and coming out of the bathroom, tripping on my shoelaces, and falling. Falling through the floor, through the years, through the sky and through your arms so warm and tight around my heaving body until I opened my eyes and found myself laying here. My leg hurts.

We—you and me and everyone—are teetering on the brink of crisis, a crisis that none of us can imagine, impossible to imagine even as it happens in the world around us, even as authoritarians rise to power, whole entire towns burn to the ground in devastating forest fires, racist disciplinary agents of the state crack down violently on difference and dissent, whole entire cities wash away in deadly storms, diseases overwhelm our shoddy public health infrastructure. And we ask ourselves what will it be like when disaster comes.

What is failing us in this moment?

There are options in reply. It could be cosmic. It could be god’s punishment for persistent sin. It could be anthropocentric hubris blinding us to the possibility that maybe we can’t just expect everything to go our way all the time. It could be living under a global system which has convinced us all to live hellbent on extracting maximum value from everything: maximum profit from every commodity, maximum love from every relationship, maximum happiness from every moment. It could be Richard Nixon. In my most desperate moments, I choose to blame it all on Richard Nixon.

There’s also the possibility, often-unexplored, that we are just plain wrong about everything. I mean as wrong as wrong can be about all that there is, was and shall be. Not only about higher-order postulates like “there is significant meaning and purpose to human life” but also fundamental assumptions like “the progress of time can be understood through the linear relation between cause and effect” and “the human mind should be believed to have the capacity to rationally understand and explain the reality of our universe.”

Now, though, as the collapse fated centuries ago befalls us, we have come to celebrate that which keeps us imprisoned. Wearing empirical positivism as a crown when in reality it is that which keeps us chained to thinking in terms of hierarchy, extraction, commodity, progress, linearity. We think we can think our way out of the problem, analyzing causes and tracing the lines that lead to their effects, when in reality thought, itself, should be understood to be the root cause of the problems we think we face.

This supposes something that seems quite impossible, which is that we have been—up until now, now that we stand on the threshold of our collective demise—pretty much just plain fucking lucky. But, of course, our collective luck is undeniable. Lucky that the asteroid came to wipe out the giant lizards. Lucky that those ice ages didn’t last a few decades longer or get a few degrees colder. Lucky that, through a series of inexplicable processes, organic matter developed the ability to be conscious of itself and its condition.

But then lucky that—once we developed that consciousness—the succession of stories we created to prop up, care for, nurture our feeble selves—stories that blinded us to the abyss right beneath our feet, stories that ushered us into a millennia-long era of collective self-preservation in spite of ourselves (the true long durée of modernity!)—just by happenstance overlap significantly enough with an inscrutable reality, overlap enough that we are able, quite convincingly, to hold them up as truth. Which is to say that just because this linear causality allows for the construction of quite convincing—but, more importantly, pleasant—narratives of existence, does not mean that we should be convinced that those narratives perfectly reflect the reality of being.

But maybe we can find—but not think of—a different way of thinking. Aren’t there other ways of thinking, of solving problems?

We try, but we quickly see how any attempt to disrupt this linearity of thought does nothing more than reiterate the linearity of thought. We can place multiple linear processes in parallel with one another, or—worse—we can obscure that linearity across networks of being—networks that are constructed through the assemblage of linear relationships. We think and speak in lines. Thought, like text, flows unilaterally—away from what preceded it. I cannot, trapped as we all are, suggest an alternative to thought other than “Sit on the floor of an old, musty forest. Then feel the vibrations until you cry.” But I can suggest what the results of that alternative might be.

A world in which incident, defined causally, is revealed to be mere accident. A historiography leading not towards any ideal telos but instead just a mass of messy social happenings that appear—rather than distinguishable along a timeline of existence and judged positively or otherwise based on their apparent adherence to certain ideals of liberal philosophy—instead are simply united in their propagation of systems in which the few are able to exploit the many, and each happening only different in the scale and kind of suffering the various members of that happening then experience.

There are many consequences of this shift in paradigm. One—the most important, I would suggest—is that it reduces moral considerations to the present moment and constrains their terms to the experience of suffering. We are not building towards or away from anything, whether it be a totalitarian regime, a great pyramid, a sense of freedom, a child, a great innovation. Nothing is better or worse but only a different form of suffering brought about by the instantiation of a worldview reliant upon a sense of scarcity and abundance, power and powerless, extraction, hierarchy, development, loss, an insistent demand to value and evaluate. But remove the lines that link those poles together and what are we left with? In reality, it’s probably the same as what we always had, which is the capacity to share, commune, relax, fuck, die. And then repeat. Endless repetition.

And then, we can ask, what happens to story in the midst of this alternative system? Is not language—again, determined by the apparent limit of our mind to consider reality in any way other than piece-by-piece, and placing each piece somehow in relation to the piece before and following and so on—but is not language a necessarily linear process, one word following another in a great chain of meaning?

This, some might say, is proof of the triumph of linear-causality. But, because of this, I instead assert that it is proof of its alluring lie.

But what happens to story? What about culmination? Or triumph and defeat? What about growth and change? What happens to these believed-to-be foundational elements of the human experience?

Are we resigned to communicate by sitting on the floor of an old, musty forest, staring into each other’s faces and watching carefully as microexpressions tic across cheeks and brows and lips until we are all—overwhelmed by the beauty of this truth—reduced to heaving wet, snotty sobs of grief and despair?

I wish. I certainly hope so.

But instead, I will tell you from my crumpled position on the floor, I have this to offer: a proposition.

A story that lives as we live. Typed up by me but influenced (potentially) collectively. Incorporating as many various elements of genre, conventions of form, spasmodic hiccups and retches as we are able to cram into it. And attending to, instead of the strictures of narrative cause and effect, nothing more than the anarchic, throbbing tangle of human emotion, suffering, joy, life, death.

It will be, what I’m saying is, a gigantic fucking mess. It will be, as I said before, an investigation into our capacity to share, commune, relax, fuck, die. And then repeat. A portrait of life. Endless repetition.

So, get off the couch. Yes, I know it creaks. We will speak soon, I’m sure. Goodbye, I’ll say.