Coincidental Connections
In the spirit of things non-linear, an interesting coincidence just occurred. Attempting to re-enable comments, in light of the previous post, I visited my site from the computer of a friend already logged-in to WP. Given how comments were not readily working from that account, I offhandedly searched for “future release temporality” from their reader. The top result was:
HAUNTINGS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
An Initial Exploration
by Jeff VanderMeer
1.
Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects, which sets out a series of thoughts about “dark ecologies,” has become central to thinking about storytelling in the modern era, in my opinion. Morton’s central idea of a hyperobject is in a sense a way of using a word as an anchor for something that would be otherwise hard to picture in its entirety–it is an all-encompassing metaphor that also has its own reality, both literal and figurative, here and there[…]
What is a hyperobject? Something viscous (they stick–to your mind, to the environment) and nonlocal (local versions are manifestations from afar). Their unique temporality renders them invisible to human beings for stretches of time and they exhibit effects in the interrelationship of objects.
At first the image struck me as uncannily familiar, then it became apparent there were probably other connections as well. Turns-out the unexpected detour traverses non-linear correlations more efficiently than what I otherwise had in mind. I admit that I still find this pleasantly surprising.
As Maria de Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren write in “Possessions: Spectral Places” in The Spectralities Reader (Bloomsbury), “Repetition of events, images, and localities is one of the recurrent motifs of the uncanny.”