UNFINISHED READING - Dispatches From A Time Between Worlds - Various Authors.

I have found myself unwilling to finish this book, I've got two thirds of the way through, and abandoned all hope of it being as cutting edge and thought provoking as it likes to thinks it is. I gave up, because I think I have much better things to devote my precious reading time to.

Simple Comprehensible Illuminating Language is often replaced with Complex Hermeneutic Opaque Linguistics. Sentences compacted with closely argued sequences of specialist jargon, one compound term followed by yet another. If this is the densely tortuous language we are going to use regarding the meta crisis, then I do not hold out much hope for Pespectiva's work on - systems, souls and society - let alone humanity. 

This is the sort of thing the meta crisis really does not need, but unfortunately appears to be getting. Lots of serious over thinking, preoccupation with the minutiae and implications of words and grammer. Its full of ubiquitous special language for special people. Who is it meant for? Who will find this remotely helpful? Its the sort of thing only wealthy intelligentsia will say they fully understand, but probably are bluffing. 

Though we may well baulk at the slippery nature of truth, in the hands of right wing authoritarian proponents. They do however, speak plainly, eschewing alienating words or concepts to enhance the clarity of their speaking, and to connect. The left, or any other alternate viewpoint, if it is ever to revive it's fortunes, must first rediscover how to convey its ideas without the need of a specialist translator in socio-economic theory.

Its true, that any compendium of essays will inevitably be uneven in style and tone. Each author tackling their issue in a structurally different manner. And that is certainly present here. Some writers try to be so open you struggle to locate what their precise point is. Others become so tightly obscure you struggle to grasp if there is a precise point at all. Either of these, all of these, and everything in-between, can be found in Dispatches From A Time Between Worlds. It's a brilliant depiction of the contemporary zeitgeist. We are fucked, but can't find any helpful ideas or words to unfuck us.

As an assessment of the meta crisis and what the issues are, Jonathan Rowson's essay Tasting The Pickle is hard to beat. But there is also a sense things should really have been moving beyond overall assessments onto specific propositions or actions by now. Dispatches From A Time Between Worlds was published in 2021, four years ago and it already feels terribly dated. The title itself is an adaption from Zach Stein's book Education In A Time Between Worlds from 2019, so prompted by six year old ideas. Time and the meta crisis wait for no one, and its moving on at a pace we are not keeping up with, let alone getting ahead of. Unedifyingly this book tells us we don't know what to do, even as we are not doing it. 

CARROT REVIEW - 2/8