Tuesday 131: Entering Tenochtitlan

Entering Tenochtitlan



It’s estimated that there are 6.8 g of microplastics in the Average American’s brain.

I couldn’t tell you whether that’s too much, though.

I count the number of unoccupied rooms walking through the parties I attend on any given weekend.

I see something like four or five perfect bodies in the average year.

A city is no better than its curbs, of which even the granite variety erode like social skills and teeth.

This is all just stuff we’ll have to deal with.

We’re like scientists bringing the forest back to life, full of wolves like it was before Hernán Cortés.

I have a general preoccupation with towns and cities, their societies and institutions and customs. I think for a lot of writers, this preoccupation exists in one form or another and begins with an interest in the observation of everyday life, which inevitably leads to questions like, well what the hell is everyday life? What is modernity? Why are we the way we are?

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Maybe a year ago, I was reading some ancient and medieval history—David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything and a few books about the 30 Years War—and one of the most captivating and challenging perspectives I found myself forced to maintain to even begin to understand this stuff was that of a human subject I really literally couldn’t relate to. Everything about the way people lived was alien. An abstraction like hope or desire, or a social form as simple as a “gift” could take on wildly different meanings than those I understood.

Everything we experience today is mediated through a capitalist process. You take a lot of things for granted. I think Albert Camus addresses this best in The Plague, articulating how modernity, and maybe more directly, consumer capitalism, develop as a psychic and social wall against death. To be connected organically and biologically to life is to face its end, so we de-naturalize ourselves with material desire, value, technology—all the trappings of modernity, as a defense against death.

It’s fascinating to think of how different things could have been with a simple shift at some particular historical juncture.