By Shai-Hulud, an Update! (17/11/21)

“We are myth-killers, you and I, Moneo. That’s the dream we share. I assure you from a God’s Olympian perch that government is a shared myth. When the myth dies, the government dies.”

- God-Emperor of Dune, Frank Herbert

Hey folks!

Apologies once again that this update comes so late. Every time I seem to find myself 'out of the woods' with this latest project, on the verge of having some actual Content to provide you, something comes along to lead me astray -- all in all it has been a fairly productive couple of months, albeit not in the sense of finalizing scripts, filming, editing... etcetera

After pounding my head against a few existential walls in my writing, I made the call to go back and read more of the work I'd put into the "consider for future expansion of topic" pile. In this case I went back and finished up my reading of Robert Pirsig with Lila (his follow-up to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which will factor heavily into my next work), closing the book on Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years,  Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces, getting like 30 pages deeper into Deleuze's work (god that guy is hard to read), re-opening some Kant and Nietzsche I'd put down a while ago, and reading through the entire Dune series up to Heretics -- which I'm currently on now. All in all there's been something quite exciting about it, as at every turn I feel like I'm seeing things linked directly to where my writing was leading, either bolstering arguments I was already formulating or righting my course when I seem to be getting on the wrong track. It's been exhilarating in a lot of ways, but I can't deny a certain anxiety that I seem to be falling into deeper and deeper rabbit-holes when I'd otherwise hoped to be wrapped up on this months ago. It's getting harder to distinguish the kind of material that's tangential to what I'm doing and what's so fundamental it would render everything I'd done up to this point invalid -- all I can say is that this project today looks quite different to this project a week ago, which looks very different to this project a month ago, etc.

If you keep up with these posts you'll know a while back that the focus of the project was once around the process of alienation, with a lot of focus on youth sub-cultures and various political movements. That is still a fair chunk of what I'm talking about, but over time the question of what leads us to alienation (and what we envision in the 'un-alienated world') has cracked open a door into a very large world of theory. It started to dawn on me that getting into all of this without addressing religion/religious theory beyond shallow asides just left this massive hole in what I was doing, so that in turn has been incorporated into the process. I wish more than anything I could quickly and easily summarize all the things I have to say to you all; at the same time, were I able to do that, I'd probably have no need to keep going with this whole process.

On a more practical note, there's a good chance that once this thing is finally done with I'll be spending a fair chunk of post-production in the UK -- with various USCIS woes and also that one global pandemic, it's now been 2+ years since I've last seen many of my friends and family, and I'm relieved to have the opportunity to head across the pond and spend the holiday over there with them. This will likely involve me transitioning some of my hardware over when I travel and setting up a new office space, which will come with its own delays, but I'll appreciate the opportunity to make some necessary updates and also be able to work away from this apparently haunted apartment that has so far delivered me endless technical problems. This may also end up being something I can factor into the project itself -- on that, we'll have to see how the writing finally shakes out.

Thank you all so much again for your incredible patience and generosity --I know I've said this before, but it bears constant reminding that no part of this process would be feasible without the support you've all provided over 2021. I don't come from money and 100% of my income goes towards supporting myself and my partner, and under normal circumstances taking a year out to develop a theory simply would not be an option. I hope that at the end of this, the theory I do have will be something worthwhile to you all.

I hope to update again soon.

Stay safe,

Love you all,

Jack