Writings from the Furnace

I’m sorry! I haven’t managed to stick to my schedule at all… but I haven’t given up. The fact this site is online at all is kind of a miracle, I suppose, but the best I can do is stick with it and try to iron some kinks out. I’ve been struggling with processing the immense deluge of news into a coherent whole (if I’ll even be capable of that), which has proved to be somewhat time-consuming—it’s fundamentally a matter of separating the wheat from the chaff, but when you aren’t sure what is wheat and what is chaff, it becomes a bit overwhelming. That being said I feel like I made some strides today, and I’ll try to write a little something until the end of Sunday in order to at the very least have a start. (I don’t really count the half-baked attempt already up).

Besides that, I’ve been somewhat “possessed by the demon of drawing”, so to speak. To tell a long story short, I’ve been experimenting in the last few months with ways of learning and what actually means to learn something. This led me to attempt to learn a new language through some, shall we say, unorthodox means, as well as solidifying my understanding of guitar (which I have quite decently learned by myself, if I may leave modesty aside for a moment). Thus I set upon learning how to draw, something I’ve wanted to do for many, many years. After getting myself a copy of The Keys to Drawing, by Bert Dodson, I set upon this task. And unexpectedly, I found myself unable to stop drawing.

Not literally, I mean, like in a sort of Twilight Zone setup, but drawing started to take over so much of my thinking that it drastically overshadowed everything else, including this site. I can’t really explain what happened. Maybe the (many years old) repressed desire to draw resurfacing so explosively ended up having some powerful effects upon myself. But leaving aside my personality and failed ambitions from my younger years, I’ve come to realize that starting to learn something that you have forever believed you were incapable of learning, maybe from someone else’s criticism, or maybe from internal self-critique, is one of the most powerful experiences one can have. It proves, beyond any questioning, that “yes, you too are capable of this.” Which is heartening, because it means that if you can learn that thing which you so firmly believed yourself incapable of doing, then the same probably goes for everything else as well. Too dumb for math? Maybe you’ve just been hit over the head with some such nonsense during schoolyears (as is well known, very formative years for the human being…) and thus decided to give up. I’m fairly convinced that (though it may vary in degree of effort, given some people do seem to have particular affinities for certain subjects) anyone can learn anything. And why not? All things that have ever been done were done by human hands; and if you’re human as well, why wouldn’t you be (in theory) able to do the same? It may take a long time, sure, but taking a long time and being impossible are very different things.

I’ve become quite passionate about this. Not just for myself—though I have indeed been loving to learn new things—but for other people as well. I’ve become quite annoyed when I hear people say “ah, I can’t do that, I’m not smart enough” without even really trying. I mean, it’s perfectly understandable given their life circumstances, but it just makes me wanna scream “yes! yes you are! you’re just as smart as anyone else! don’t trick yourself into thinking otherwise!” Of course, this leaves aside material circumstances: namely, time in which to study something, which in neoliberal capitalist hell is indeed very scarce, and even when available we find ourselves, quite sensibly, incapable of mustering the energy to engage in learning anything new. But I feel like making clear to as many people as possible: yes, you are capable of learning anything you want. If you’ve always dreamed of learning something, there is nothing in your constitution which impedes you (barring obviously certain disabilities, which even then one would be surprised with the ways disabled people find to circumvent their own limitations). You too are smart.

I understand this message kinda skirts close to TEDx hell “just believe and you’ll be capable” and this bothers me immensely. But it bothers me even more to see good people beaten over by life to the point of thinking that what they are is simply all there is to be. That they are fundamentally, essentially, incapable of anything else. Material circumstances limit a whole lot; they make or break so, so much. But they do not decide your capabilities. That was decided when you were born a human being—by doing so, you were born capable of doing anything a human can. Don’t let neoliberal ghouls and eugenicist scum tell you otherwise. Proletarians aren’t dumber than the bourgeois; manual workers aren’t dumber than intellectual workers. (And obviously, to the point of not needing to be mentioned, women aren’t dumber than men nor are people of any race any dumber than any other race.) To believe that is already to capitulate to the basic pretense of capitalism: that some are fit to rule, and others merely fit to serve. Who decides that? The ones on top, of course. Always. Don’t let others decide what you’re capable of. And if you need proof? Find something you always wanted to know and decide to learn it. It can be as small as some random factoids about dinosaurs, or maybe even a new language or new skill. All you need is a decent book (sometimes even bad books work as well), which is to say, somewhere where the knowledge is stored, some time to dedicate, and the belief that sooner or later you’ll get there. Maybe it’ll take a day, maybe a year. That is of little consequence. The point is merely to know that yes, you too are capable of learning, for you too are an animal capable of learning. No more, and no less.

Hey. As the title implies, I’ve failed! I didn’t manage to write the news breakdown for today, but I’ll try my hardest to have it done tomorrow. Still finagling with setting up news sources that I want to regularly read, so as not to get bogged down in countless pointless articles. It’s a bit harder than I expected, but to be frank I should have expected that it would be quite a bit of work. Still, I won’t renege my promise to deliver at the very least a blog entry every Friday. That much is for sure doable.

2022 is at its end. Today is the 30th of December. What a year this has been! Good? I’m not so sure, at the very least talking strictly about myself. A few successes, but also mounting failures and difficulties. I find myself ever wondering, “what’s gonna happen next?” To take an example: I believe most people didn’t expect, a year ago, Twitter’s current situation (what looks like its death knell). Now, I don’t like Twitter in the slightest, but it is quite stunning that such a central fixture of online life can just be dying like this. This, of course, is nothing new; we live on top of the cadavers of Myspace and the like. The internet is lightning-fast, but its structures and inhabitants cannot outrun the inevitable decay that the mere fact of existence produces.

In a sense this all feels a little bit liberating, in a perverse sense: a few years ago I used to talk with friends about the way events seemed to be accelerating, the catastrophe of climate change fast approaching, and often I was stared as if I were a madman (not entirely inaccurate). The world, even after Trump’s election and the like, still felt somewhat stable? Like it was the world we always knew, but a bit worse for wear. So we could be comfortable in our expectation that yes, times are bad, but they’ve been worse, and we’re here after all. But the years kept on piling on, and our certainties revealed themselves to be what they actually are: assumptions. Nothing more than the things we believe must be like this, which is nothing but a certain sense of temporal and geographical parochialism. There is nothing timeless about the world in which we live; therefore, there is nothing that guarantees that it’ll stay the same—in fact, if there is one singular certainty is that it will change, inevitably. The fact that things are as they are is nothing more than the direct effect of each person’s (and institution’s, corporation’s, etc.) actions, the causality of all choices. I by no means intend to say that this world is “our responsibility”, as if the phrase had any significant meaning. But I intend to say that, perhaps in a microscopic sense, our choices add up, be it strictly within the domain of our personal lives, or perhaps on a greater sense, depending on how much power a person has.

The future, in this sense, is the result of both inevitabilities (the phenomena which already are in motion and which cannot be stopped, merely dealt with) and uncertainties (how will each person act?) How will I act? I don’t know, of course, since I don’t know what will happen and in which circumstances. But overall one can look at this present moment and perhaps think about their decisions in this exact instant. I have decided to make this website, and to write in it (though not so much to keep the schedule I proposed myself…) What will be the consequences of this decision? Probably small. I can’t see myself having a particularly large readership, or my words having meaningful influence. But maybe by writing I can make a small impact on someone? Perhaps tiny, but still, something is better than nothing. This is enough. Success is knowing that one decided to do something and did it. No more, no less. What comes of it remains unknown, until the moment it reveals itself in glorious, terrible, spectacular, disappointing, or whatever other adjective, fashion.

Hey. It’s been a while. It’s been more or less a year since I deleted my previous iteration of this website, and more or less two years since I started that iteration. It has been quite the pandemic. I suppose I owe some explanations to the folks who knew me back then, and an introduction to those who didn’t. Let’s start with the introduction then, since I might as well.

Hey. I go by the name of furnacewriter, but people usually just call me Furnace. I’m just a fellow who likes writing, like many others around this website (this kinda-sorta-but-not-really social media). I like to write essays (which go by the name of Articles on the bar up there), on a variety of subjects. I like to be freeform, but to adhere to some level of accuracy (though not that much) through research. This means that sometimes my writing tends to be dense, though I strive for it to be as pleasant as possible to read (form is just as important as content!) Right now, at the moment of this website’s launch, you’ll find a couple of texts, one of them a significant revision of a work present on the previous version of this website, and a new one (and maybe even some more? Who knows!) Reviews and stuff like that will also go there.

In addition to the essays, I also offer a news digest with the most important bits of each week’s news. This serves a double purpose: to get myself to train my skill of sifting though the bullshit on the daily news, and finding what really matters (a rather useful skill); but also because too often I see people wanting to know what’s happening and kinda getting lost on what is important and what isn’t? Especially since news agencies make little effort to distinguish what is crucial from what is just fluff or outright propaganda. Maybe this can be an useful service?

Besides that, I also write this blog here, under the category of “Thoughts”, as a way to write whenever I feel like it without holding myself to any particular standard. There are pretty much no rules, though I’ll avoid including extratextual content (images, sounds, etc.) The point is to focus on the writing, after all.

I guess that’s it. I might create some new sections with different kinds of content (maybe fiction?) in the future, but for now that’s all.

It should be noted, so as to leave no doubt: I write unabashedly from a left perspective, especially through a marxist lens. I find it to be the most powerful philosophical toolset available. Dialectics is one hell of a drug. If this bothers you, read anyway since you’ll develop your own ideas and arguments through the effort of demolishing my own (I guarantee it, it’s great practice).

The introduction aside, now I’ll leave some explanations for the folks who used to be on the discord (if you know, you know). So… yeah, sorry. I was in a shit place and I had no mental capacity to try and make it a good place to be in, and I felt responsible for it kinda floundering since I was admin, (especially since I kinda hate discord anyway? It’s pretty terrible software), and I just got sick and tired of the stuff I wrote (artists will understand), so I obliterated all of it and disappeared. You can still find it archived, if you so desire, etched in digital stone (archive.org). This does not mean I abandoned the texts and themes I had started working with; I still intend to write about the strange phenomenon of death for internet celebrities, the nature of addictions, and a whole bunch more stuff I only hinted at during the earliest of iterations of the website (damn it was shit, I kinda miss it tbh). That being said, please do share your opinions about the redesign! I’m not too sure about the colors (being colorblind kinda hampers that), so any suggestions are welcome.

And yes, I intend to stay for good this time. Especially since maintaining a website made with Hugo is so much easier than handcoding shit, fuck that was awful (but also a lot of fun).

See ya,

- F.

P.S.: If you kinda just detest the way this website looks, or just love reading things in a very convenient manner, I offer RSS feeds, linked on the footer of every page, where you can subscribe to the whole of the website or just you preferred part of it, so as to read in whatever device you want in whichever way you find best. Thanks to Hugo for autogenerating these feeds!