One of my minor affectations is periodizing my writing into sardonically named 6-year eras. The first six years of this blog were the Rust Age (2007-12). The next six years were the Snowflake Age (2013-18). We’re about to enter the last year of the third age of Ribbonfarm, (2019-24), and I finally have a name for it: this is the Charnel Age.
Over the last few years, I flirted with other candidate names (Plastic Age and Cryptic Age were in the running for a while) but never quite felt any of them in my bones. But when I thought of Charnel Age, it instantly struck me as exactly right. Everything I’ve done in the last few years has been colored by what one might call charnel vision: a tendency to see things from the perspective of natural processes of transience, death, and decay. Paradoxically, it is a disposition that provides solace rather than causing distress once you get comfortable with it. Charnel vision feels healthy. Resisting it seems unhealthy.
Charnel vision is somewhat alien to a modern Western sensibility; it creates dissonance if you’re accustomed to occupying a headspace that is an eternal struggle between historicist narratives of fiat optimism and fiat pessimism. Charnel vision is neither optimistic, nor pessimistic. It is a way of seeing — one that calls for a certain sort of philosophical literacy — within which optimism and pessimism are not well-posed categories.
I expect 2024 to be the year we hit a worldwide extremum of charnel vibes, before fragile new life strengthens enough to capture our imaginations once again, and organic sanguine currents in the zeitgeist once again overwhelm organic melancholy ones (I find the frame of the four humors to be much more psychologically sound than the optimism/pessimism frame favored by modern discourses).
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