Reading Thoughts and Notes
Annihilation, Jeff Vandermeer

• Parasitism doesn’t really exist when the strength of interconnectedness becomes apparent
• Observation, above and below, lighthouse vs tower. That there lies observation below that we know is there, but have never bothered, or cannot, explore
• Merging of mind, centralized control, and nature – the “other” absorbing us, infecting us, becoming us, mimicking us until “us” is gone
• Hypnosis
• Deception and truth
• “Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives”
• Perhaps you can’t kill nature because it feeds on the dead; fungi. Instead we strangle it with its own fecundity. Rich forests are choked out by the ironclad biceps of wheat field upon wheat field, corn row upon corn row, soy bean after soy bean. Species after species devoured by unprecedented pace of change – voracious cane toads an example.
• Language is limited?? Is this really what the idea of the Crawler is trying to represent? Or that the journals represent?

Summary
Surveyor, anthropologist, psychologist, and biologist go to mysterious bordered, secluded wildlands called Area X from which many explorers never return. Or return, changed. The expedition is organized by a mysterious group called Southern Reach which we come to learn has pathologically manipulated and crafted the knowledge which the group was give about Area X. Our group of explorers begins by discovering a structure buried in the ground, not previously recorded on their maps of the area. While exploring the entrenched tower the biologist is exposed to spores of a supernatural fungi she dubs the Crawler, which writes itself in scriptures among the breathing tower walls. The biologist becomes inexorably enamored with the tower. Just as love parasitizes the mind, attraction colonizes her. They return, explore further, and discover the anthropologist, evidently killed by too closely approaching the Crawler under hypnosis. When they emerge, the psychologist has disappeared. The biologist searches for her while continuing to experience effects of colonizing Crawler spores. When she reaches the lighthouse, we learn many more than the previously posited 12 expeditions have trekked through Area X. This is revealed by a midden of thousands of journals decaying in the lighthouse. Departing the lighthouse, the biologist brushes against the moaning mud-beast; seemingly a haunting amalgamation of prior dead. “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe… ‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!’”
At the climax, we travel back to the thudding depths. The tower invades – one might describe it as rape, as the tower reproduced in its hosts – the biologist’s mind. It is an excruciating trial of fire, a literal blinding revelation. It took from her sight and momentarily replaced it with another form of being. It supplanted everything known for other knowing. Though it may have killed the anthropologist, our enduring protagonist survives. We are left with idea that the biologist has accepted her new becoming; she will travel through Area X as her own colonization inevitably proceeds.

Compelling Points

• Partial observability is inevitable
• Immanence can be more powerful than attempts to ‘objectively’ observe
  • Decaying journals
  • Immanence is observation
• Partial observability is a blessing, when the Crawler reveals its true self it destroys, it blinds, it

Implications
If we are doomed to partial observability, how does our ethical basis change? If we must accept that we cannot know Truth, this cannot be the foundation of our basis, yet nevertheless even the act of writing subverts to our hopelessly romantic relationship with Truth. Why are we seduced by her? Power is transcendent – it is more knowledge than your counterpart. You cannot manipulate or control from a position of less knowledge. Science, our conqueror of Truth, embodies our will to power and clothes her in gilded robes shimmering like water on the desolate horizon.

Although it warps our eager hopes of power, partial observability is not a curse. It is our gift. It is our models. We are the embodiments of partial observability and our culture embodies our palms against the cold crushing wall of dusk. We strain against it like Sisyphus, and the great stone border begrudges us a centimeter more of indigo light.

On the relationship between rap and the presymbolic

No one knows the dance of words like than the rapper. Syllables chop. Electric, eclectic. Soaring off jagged cliffs. They thrash wildly and erratically against the will of the beat. Suddenly, their light twists and curves, caresses the contours of meaning. Words are the clouds, words are the concrete pillars of projects, words outline a corpse on the ground, words are dark pooling blood of a brother on the sidewalk, words are her pain, words are our glory, words are our triumph, words are our warmth and water and food and truth and lies.

But the words hold no meaning without their depth. Their depth is the smooth sad VI chord shattered by the guttural enunciation. The rapper’s dance with presymbolic purity, stepping in and out of the other’s body.
You cannot quote rap. It is massacred as your wrist flicks gory syllabic ink to paper. But its bloody body feeds a fungi through which it is borne again in the spores as you speak it.