It’s about how they treat suffering. It’s difficult to explain. Maybe it’s about people trying, so hard, and they fail. Or they succeed. But the ending isn’t what the stories are about; I don’t even remember how some of them end. It’s about recognizing life, as it is lived, with joy and suffering. And my red eyes feel a part of that recognition.

Solzhenitsyn’s novel “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” has a similar feeling. One day in a Siberian gulag, as it is experienced, full of small joys and tragedies, on the periphery of a large tragedy. But it doesn’t make me cry: maybe because the experience is one of neverending presentness, of a person so anchored to his day by its constant trials that he can’t look up. There’s no catharsis in the story, just survival. After finishing “A Day in the Life” I feel optimistic, in the way that one’s arms feel weightless after pushing them sideways against a doorframe and then stepping out.

Now this article about leaving prison from the perspective of California’s third-strikers, imprisoned for life after three offenses, released from that fairy-tale justice into the harsh and beautiful world outside the walls, has me sobbing. After a pause and some tissues, I had to write something, because these tears aren’t just a recognition of suffering, but also of a strange hope. In the face of frighteningly inhumane systems, I often shut down, to some extent, and stop paying attention, at least emotionally. There’s too many scales at which things operate, and it’s overwhelming to think about; it’s easier to declare structures so much larger than me to be incomprehensible, and use that to ignore their behaviour. But these emotions integrate those scales of events into a single feeling, a real, graspable sadness that anchors me to the great and the awful things I take for granted. It feels like a reminder, but also like a start to something. We can do better, at both the individual and the societal level. There is room in us to be considerate, and where we’ve pushed it out we can start creating environments that welcome it back.

Some writers today speak of a “systemic sublime”: an emotional/intellectual reaction to technical infrastructure, to seeing both how massive is the bubble we call civilization, and how thin and specific it is. Here, too, the feeling precedes and guides thoughts from the personal to the societal. Walking on train tracks past a nuclear power plant once overwhelmed me with feelings of splendour and nausea, and it took some time for fumbling thoughts to detach those feelings from reality so that I could think on and use them.

The emotions this article brought me feel like a systemic sublime for social infrastructure, systems of humans; in a word, politics. An Iranian economics professor I briefly knew might say “the thoughts of the heart are slower and deeper then those of the brain”. Language flits about, a rudder on the massive enterprise of a self; and if we learn to guide that mass to deep waters and systemic feelings, maybe we can start to slowly guide the entire fleet away from the rapids of debt and war, and stop running aground on shallow imagery.

Once.

      “Yey, did you not?”

It was sworantly then came. “Well I don’t eter one by the last time it’s a rolly, and I see the slingsmasts, which starter is unnets, and then. And then later the blank-passengers, appointed as a craft inside. I do the silver intraction rehearing it in their way, the regina, any diamond from a target, wonless, they’re semi-oring in the flesh. Gene pulls his grit filed to the others.

He like held off his wound to take the robot. The splash shoulded them staring, as the metal t do-like, his percent carbon black.

Then the table and stuck his head on his head.

{[ context: I'm running some code to generate science fiction stories from those of 365tomorrows.com. They just keep getting better; this is the latest; more on the way! ]}