Unutterable Whispers
2026-08-13
Remember when discourse used to be called rhetoric? Even though those French deconstructionists aptly foresaw its collapse, I still find myself itching for some kind of good argument. No, I don't mean in that "discourse" sense either. There's a clear lack of intelligible thought these days; people want, more than anything, to have the right aesthetic or vibe instead of actually advancing rhetoric in any meaningful way. In a sense, we might think that there's no further it can go—that Wittgenstein put the pin in it, so to speak. Have we really tapped all the walls of language, if there are any? Well, if Merriam-Webster is still in business and new terms keep coming up every year, I'd dare to say Probably Not. Man, I hate microblogging. I don't really care if Xitter is full of "fascists" or if Bluesky and Mastodon are full of "libtards." I just want there to be substantive thought to engage with, and while those platforms democratize it in a sense, I find that the main ingredient missing is the incentive. Sure, platforms like Medium and Substack try to assuage that by letting writers monetize, but even those "newsletters" don't really offer anything meaningful, and they most certainly don't portray anything honest.
Though I want to avoid the trap of pinning myself as some kind of ulterior underdog fighting for the "truth" in the vein of a personal website and RSS-friendly infrastructure, if I'm being honest with myself, I'm just a picky asshole. Certain good prose is hard to find, but I'm always delighted when I do. Good ideas are harder to find, but when I find them, I feel motivated to keep pursuing my own work with an earnest and sincere motivation. Really, I just want to capture a certain zeitgeist—a certain type of person who finds themselves in a specific time and place—to try and codify it and be a reliable source for those in the future who wish to find the patterns that led us to whatever future we find ourselves in. Anxiety is a hallmark symptomatic condition of those in my milieu, and I want to do my best not only to figure it out, but to provide a sense of support for those in a similar position, no matter how small or large that contingent may be.
I'm pretty well-off, all things considered. The fact that I have the luxury to tell my truth is alone one of the highest of privileges. It makes me not want for more, and more than anything, just not to lose this faint yet constantly beating pulse I've cultivated somehow. That fear is what keeps me going and is perhaps why I try to carry that anxiety with as much dignity as I can—not to fight for any kind of marginalized voice, but to fight for the voice. I am ashamed of my sins, but I am not ashamed of being human. As much as I look at my literary heroes and feel immense love for them, I fear their lack of closeness with Christ—how their aesthetics often outshone their convictions. It's as if I want to amend the "record," so to speak. In the same way I fight every day for my own salvation, I want to fight for theirs, too. On that Day of Judgment, I want to stand as a witness for them: that even in their bouts of sin and shameless, haughty arrogance, they inspired me to feel what they felt, to become even more human than I already am. Even in those fits of denial and despondency at the unutterable whispers of nothingness, there was still something they were fighting for.
They were fighting for me, and I can't thank them enough for that.
Even if this generation might be pawned off as the failsons of history, I want God to know that their efforts weren't in vain, that all of this mattered. Without their efforts, I wouldn't have the voice and the medium I do; my greatest conviction is to show that even in the midst of shifting global polarity, in a situation that feels as pacifying as it does precarious, there was still something to live for. Day in and day out, I will make that so undeniably and abundantly clear that even if the sun were to fall from the sky tomorrow, it would've all culminated in something. Will that be some grand thing? I sure hope not. The spirits can whisper about me in their hushed tones, and I wouldn't mind that at all. That next life will show me what to do next, but as for today, I pray that I can keep on living until the job is finished.
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