It’s the beginning of the bankruptcy filing chapter, at least the type of filing that always comes up in the news and in movie references. Time for some restructuring, as long as the judge approves. It’s the same book, but better, with lower costs and a more attractive product. Just keep reading and you’ll see. We’ll be paying dividends to shareholders again in no time.
I’ve become a little bit cynical about the legal fictions that feed on the plankton from human minds (I’m looking at you, Google). I’m hoping that my cynicism remains niche and difficult to explore in either this unbelievably annoying to navigate blog or a real life book that is read by very few people. Otherwise, how will I get jobs working for the monsters of the deep? I suppose if the book is read by many, many people, and I negotiate well with a publisher who prints and markets the book (and gets me on popular talk shows for at least a few weeks), then I may not ever need to work for these legal fictions again. What would I do with my time if not work for a few dozen more companies before I start collecting the social security checks from a very confused government agency (Did you work for all these companies? How did you keep getting jobs? Were you fired from all these jobs? Are these hiring managers stupid?)? But the social security bureaucracy doesn’t understand value creation in the corporate world today: in a single meeting, I could earn my whole years’ salary, if I say the right thing to the right person and they then take at least one millions-of-dollars-action. Decisions are the metric, not production, I will remind the person hesitating to sign my retirement checks. So please do sign that check, I’ve contributed at least a few decision-changes during my winding road inside the legal fictions. And yes, I did take a few breaks to write fictions and non-fictions of my own, some of which gained some measure of consciousness and seem to still be going around hiring people to get their decisions improved. I’ve reproduced.
When an asexual organism splits in two, it’s a similar moment as to when a writer writes a sentence. The sentence separates from the brain and enters the world as a new organism, a reflection that immediately starts having its own experience that makes it an individual. You’re reading the reproduced organisms from my fingers and brain right now. They might still be very young by the time you see them, so please forgive their impertinence. As a young child, I bet you said some things on which you wouldn’t want a legal fiction to determine an employment decision. Have you read Sartre’s Nausea? I started to believe in the ability of a moment, of a couple of sentence-organisms appearing late in a story, to change the nature of the entire preceding narrative. Never have I been quite so moved and surprised by the end of a book (nor more convinced that philosophers who write a little bit of fiction are onto something). The youngest children of Nausea changed everything about the older children and the original amoeba (the sentences toward the end of the book being younger than the earlier sentences, and the author being the original amoeba, if the analogy from the beginning of the paragraph wasn’t coming through for you). I think this is often true of internally reproduced “children” as well as of the traditionally reproduced ones. When you read a biography, Leonardo da Vinci’s father’s life is defined by the impact it had on his child (as is Vincent van Gogh’s father’s). In these cases, the progenitor’s life has been consumed, digested, and released as waste (not very nice-smelling waste, in van Gogh’s case) by their progeny’s ripples across time and human civilization. It’s hard to ride the waves of the reproductive relationship and avoid crashing against the rocks: children of self-made millionaires, authors who write a successful book while still alive, and the cousins of lottery winners (not to mention all lottery winners) each struggle to avoid being dashed to pieces by the fifty foot waves of their “children” or “parents” (or children or parents). The obsession with genealogy and the cause-and-effect relationship cripples many who are nearby when a big, famous, important thing happens (each word in that list deserves scare quotes, but putting them around each word felt a little excessive and potentially punctuatorily confusing). Rock and movie stars know what this is like. Tech billionaires get it. And these people know how to pay for therapists (and date/marry other people with similar problems), and still suffer the consequences of their reproductive “success”. What if there wasn’t such a tight, unbreakable relationship between parents and children, metaphorical or real? What if one’s family (or creations, or the creations of one’s family) were just things that happened nearby and might be related to one’s own experience, but couldn’t be leaned on as a singular cause of everything? Certainly my childhood has had an impact on my life. Certainly some things I’ve written and read have changed me. Certainly my father’s life ripples through my life, even after it ended. But an accurate biography would describe all these things as related, interesting, and not at all Newtonian: equal and opposite reactions are for early 20th century psycho-analysts, not for 21st century people who understand that very little is understood about human brains in general, and that one cannot understand very much about one’s own brain in particular (at least not yet).
So even if you get to the end of the story and one of the sentences changes everything you thought you knew about the preceding sentences, consider re-visiting the earlier sentences and taking them as they are. Because their siblings didn’t “make” them, and neither did their parent.
Roman Ryan 