Buckle up kiddos, because this one is a rabbit hole and a half, and god forbid you play your part of Alice somewhat well, eh?
Today we’re talking about both efficiency AND symbolism, insofar as they relate to both individual meaning within the Zeitgeist around us, and an increasingly rapid existence. Simply put, our rate of life is both accelerated and stagnant, simultaneous. This sounds pretty crazy at first glance, but with a little magic, and maybe even some Foucault-esque discussions of power and language, we’ll get there.
Did I forget to mention that I got an “A” in my university metaphors class? (Hah!)
Now, let’s talk about efficiency first. It seems that in the past few centuries since the industrial revolution, humanity has had a habit of reducing the half-life of technological and scientific progress. While this is largely why the core tenet of my religiosity is the twin concepts of empirical method and science, out of respect for due process – it also speaks to an enormous shift in both Zeitgeist and society. The heteronormative WASP nuclear family is as strange and unrealistic today as cavemen were to the nuclear families of the 1950s. The advent of the digital age only accelerated that process tenfold. Culture moves so rapidly that you can be TikTok famous in fifteen minutes, only to be completely forgotten a decade later a la the memes of old.
My own relation to efficiency comes from neurodiversity, despite not realizing early on that neurodiversity was the drive behind said efficiency. It is one thing to think growing up that you are stupid and broken and different. It is another to realize twenty years later that you and your family are a strange nexus of serendipity that has created superhuman savants in a sense. Remember, the average percentage of the entire human population of eight billion is about 15-20% neurodivergence. Then there are a plethora of other bell curves laid on top of that one via intersectionalities.
Hyper-attention to detail via my Anxiety Disorder and ADHD is a trait that not everyone has.
In gaming, there’s the concept of “min-maxing” which means gamified perfectionism. The black and white thinking of autistic and ADHD brained-folks works incredibly well in systems with this style of perfectionism, which is likely why so many neurodivergent folks flock to things like high level gaming. Back when I was a hardcore World of Warcraft guild and raid leader, min maxing was fun! Seeing bigger numbers scratched some quantitative itch in my brain.
Being the best could be measured by healing and DPS charts!
A decade later, I realize this hyperfocus and hyper interest in certain topics, games, media, or the like for my own self comes from said neurodivergence. I’ve simply always been good at perfecting any system or problem placed before me. When you are shunned by the majority of society as different or weird, you fail to see these savant syndrome outputs as good things. Instead, you believe your strange obsessions to be symptoms of being fucked up in various ways. Obsessions or addictions to neurotypicals, most often.
Traumas be damned, eh?
My father was very good at min-maxing his chosen hyperfocus – work in the trades and logging in general. When I was learning to run various excavators and heavy machinery as both a teenager and young adult, he meticulously taught us how not to waste a single movement, to touch things once and not twice – tied as it was directly to efficiency of work and the burning of diesel fuel, an ever-increasing cost. We learned to move twenty five tonne machines as perfect extensions of our body, slow and powerful as they were. Being careful and deliberate was important. He’s one of the best Logger Gurus I know, despite how badly his industry has treated him over the decades.
Carrying that forward, we see this obsession with efficiency in most modern capitalism, due to the historical context of the “bottom line” and improving profits, especially in public stockholder companies that have an impetus to improve share prices for shareholders and maximize profit at the cost of anything they can cut or shave. The increasing fragility and fraughtness of the capitalist markets, both the job markets and the financial markets, echoes this century-old proliferation of greed. Never forget that capitalism is an inherently entropic system. It utilizes capital to take a service or product and then resell that value for excess profit. Capitalism will always take something and never give it back, via squeezing wages, destroying the environment for materials, or bloating in a top-heavy fashion. (If this were a university thesis paper, I’d cite shit, but that’s what Google is for these days – you can just look up all these big words and terms I use!)
Think of how a landlord makes an investment, and then rents it out to use the labour capital of their renters to pay for their investment and garner equity. The entirety of capitalism is based on skimming profit off somebody else, somewhere.
In the digital 21st century, we see efficiency emphasis due to the increasing value we place on our free time – obsessed as younger generations with using our extra time out of work to hopefully financially capitalize our hobbies and passions. (Hello other indie writers! I see you!) Beginning with my generation – the millennials, and continuing even further with Gen Z and their successors, language itself was codified and became reductionist – with the advent of 1337 speak and OG smileys speeding up our communication in primarily text-based formats.
I learned English and slang at a crazy-fast pace as a kid simply due to how much free unsupervised internet access I had, in battle.net chat rooms aptly named “sex” and the like. I masqueraded as a twenty-something from as early as 5-7 years old, gorging on knowledge and experience like a sponge and growing up way too fast. Now, we have emojis which contain multitudes of expressions or implied expressions, and gifs to react without ever speaking a word. Insert an eggplant emoji here as a good example. Communication, the pace of media and interest curves, it’s all sped up faster and faster. Efficiency is the new god of this digital age. At least for those like me who live perennially online. The “six second attention span” of the TikTok and video swiping worlds speak volumes.
Which brings us to metaphor. As with the dozens of literary terms, moduses, similes, metaphors, and allusions, it all simply speeds up the transition of knowledge and expression. Faster and faster and faster! This is unfortunately at times a deficit, due to lack of deeper knowledge for the benefit of efficiency in basic communication. An increasingly difficult amount of critical thinking is required beyond a certain point, of course – as the common man can hardly understand my random allusions to Gilgamesh or The Ramayana or any of Moliere’s work. To be truly literate in this digital age, it requires one to be increasingly well-read and also capable of making connections between increasingly ambiguous and obtuse mechanisms in ADDITION to all the modern nuances of gifs, emojis, and shorthand, no cap. As a writer, one often becomes obsessed with hiding as many things in a piece of poetry or prose as we can. Obscure references, distant allusions, and massive hyperbole to make important points. I’m guilty of leaning so heavily into metaphor as to be only decipherable at times by fucking academics. I love to hide constant easter eggs in every short story or novel I write, referencing my other pieces or works. Which speaks volumes to why I likely will never be popular as a modern writer. My old-ass allusions and deeper cuts simply don’t resonate with the common bell curve of humanity, both from interest and intellect angles.
It’s not fast enough in regards to the dopamine hit.
Symbolism comes as an extension of this. Anybody who knows my work knows that I have stolen and twisted the old myths and religions of pagan denominations. I’ve stolen the name and guise of Jormundgandr for myself specifically, in order to paint the pictures that play out in the Eddas and parallel the mythical apocalypse of Ragnarok to the current climate apocalypse we face. (As many parts of Canada burn to the ground even as I write this.). A demigod, villainous-styled creature that begins an apocalypse and kills gods is rather on the nose, really, for said looming climate apocalypse and the current literary climate – wretched as it has been made by capitalism’s corruptions of art in regards to only promoting what will sell along recurring themes and plotlines.
Myself? I simply want to exist and make art, both in hopes of becoming the most prolific poet of all time, as well as a successful one from a purely academic or artistic standpoint. The metaphors I weave into my work are extensions of my beliefs and philosophical discussions I have with myself. I am infinitely self-reflecting, perplexing as that is to most. But I’m constantly using and abusing metaphor and simile to compact enormous themes and artistic contemplations into much smaller pieces of work, in the hopes that my audience will understand and be able to pick them apart.
Or at least build their critical thinking skills in trying!
Ironically, just a few minutes ago, an old man came over and asked me what my tattoo on my left shoulder stood for. I only have one right now, the same tribal-esque Black Sun I’ve had since I was nineteen or so. Designed it myself! And my frequent readers have all seen the next tattoo art piece I plan to get, that of my own design of Jormundgandr in my own simplistic style to match the sun. It’s plastered all over my website and poetry after all! But even the Black Sun reflects a stupid era in which I had only half-formed an identity. Symbolism tells the story of my life here, to some extent!
I told the old man who asked:
“It’s my own art. My rule is that anything I get tattooed on my body has to be my own concept or artwork, and preferably my own artwork. But a decade ago, I believed in the idea of Maxims, which are a Deontologist belief of the christian monk – Emmanuel Kant.”
What I didn’t tell him was the lived experience of that struggle.
He misunderstood, saying something to the effect of how it was silly that an old christian monk was so bored that he made up a sun symbol. He had no idea I was writing an article on Efficiency and Symbolism, of course. But he did serve as a perfect foil for the everyday citizen and their ability to comprehend deeper concepts, eh?
But we don’t give people our full selves, do we? Because of how easy it is to misunderstand, misinterpret, or obfuscate meaning. As much as I like symbolism to shortcut metaphor and meaning and make my writing and expression more efficient, how can I tell some old man that I used to have maxims – rules that I had to follow? That one of my maxims was to always ingest whatever food or drink you take, to avoid waste. That my grandiose philosophies and maxims as a 19 year old then lead me down a path of drugging and drinking and eating too much?
Nah, too much effort for one old man in the cafe. I’m more worried about the constant co-opting of both Nordic paganism and other symbols I’ve always used, by Nazis. The same fuckheads my grandfather murdered for a very good reason in World War 2. I’m still working to reclaim such symbolisms as a self-proclaimed witch and cryptid! (Metaphors abound! Art fighting Fascism, as it always should!)
Still, when it comes to art, we must go as big and as deep as we can. There’s that old expression: “Go big or go home.” As much as I see it as childish and somewhat foolish, there’s a kernel of truth in most colloquialisms and idioms. If you’re not going to shoot for efficiency in your communication, or expansiveness in your art, what the fuck are we even doing it for? I firmly believe in pushing the boundaries of art no matter what, striving for big emotions, big reactions, big audience impact, etc.
So where do these two notions collide?
Well, my father knows jack shit about poetry, for the most part, but he does know about efficiency and min-maxing, as any good neurodivergent does. Undiagnosed ADHD old bastard that he is! So I can stop, and respect the simple wisdoms of my Logger Gurus. After all, my father tried to help, to employ, to educate, or to evolve others, and many of these Logger Gurus still died at their own hand despite the attempts. It’s a somber story of greater social ills for differently abled people like us.
I can never write a metaphor large enough to express my grief at their loss. I can never wrap enough metaphors in other metaphors to truly express the complexities of their experiences and traumas, despite such a similar story to our own ancestry. The lived human experience deserves more than a simple efficiency tweaking, but I’ll be damned if I don’t try to condense the stories of their lives into teachable moments. To try and honor their legacy and help the younger generations by witnessing both their mistakes, as well as their great abilities and powerful skill sets.
Part of me will always be a dumb disabled logging family kid. Simple expressions. Simple problems. Ignorant as to the truths and realities of hereditary mental disabilities and illnesses. But as I explore my art further and further, I can’t help but keep the simple wisdoms with me. Efficiency. Do it once. Do it right the first time. Avoid waste. Ensure maximum productivity and profit (begrudgingly!). If we are doomed to reach for the stars as a species, isn’t it important to claw our way from rock to floating rock, insofar as it teaches us something in our pursuit of progress?
One of the places all this talk of efficiency and symbolism comes up in, again and again, is the greater Zeitgeist and greater control of human society via the collective consciousness. Billionaire right-wing interests have been working for literal decades to buy up as much of the media and entertainment sphere as possible, consolidating an ever tightening grip on what gets deemed worthy as art, as news, as entertainment, or the like. Look at guys like Rupert Murdoch and his family, who own staggering amounts of media across the globe, or the fact that ninety percent of U.S. media is owned by something like six companies.
Now, I firmly believe that outside of raw military and geopolitical power, the most power one can have over the entirety of humanity comes from this control of the Zeitgeist, and the ability to exercise overarching classism-based opinions, norms, and dialogue without much in the way of alternative or counterculture based voices. Outside of government funded programs to support the arts, for example, one can see the erosion of the corporate industrial media complex via the ongoing writing and acting strikes. This is in addition to the fears around machine learning (disguised as true A.I.).
This is a reflection on how precarious the overall industry is due to the larger players controlling monopolies for the most part over what entertainment and art we see in the public eye. Advertising comes attached to this, and the power of advertisers shouldn’t be discounted. Big corporations are very finicky on where they spend their dollars to carve out the Zeitgeist for themselves, and can sway public opinion too, but mostly only from a self-serving corporate interest position. Their efficiencies are based around profit – pleasing and attracting advertisers with hefty enough userbases. As ever, writers, actors, artists, and creators get shafted for profit at every point possible, to funnel money and wealth upwards along the pyramid scheme of class.
Now, symbolism and efficiency plays into all this by portraying certain cultural norms as monolithic and rote. Back when I was a teacher a decade ago, I had a little symbolism project in which I had students design their own symbols with hidden meanings. But symbolism infects our daily life in a multitude of ways. Think of complex religions and belief systems boiled down to simple symbols like a cross. Our entire society knows what these particular signs or symbols mean. They have a place and impact on the Zeitgeist that then ripples outwards. For example, just over 50% of the Canadian population identifies as Christian, so those specific deontologist based beliefs will creep into our media and our societal ideas on what is appropriate, inappropriate, etc.
This is just one example – there are hundreds more, from the peace sign to the WHMIS symbols!
So what can I, or you, do as individuals and artists to push back against these powerful forces? Well, counterculture and alternative culture should always be promoted and emphasized over other mainstream platforms – the inner punk in me has big problems with corporate news media, for instance, seeing how even the delivery of facts is often distorted to please largely upper class and homeowner class citizens over renters and frontline workers. If you look into the ongoing criminality and corruptions surrounding big hedge funds and Gamestop over the last two to three years, one begins to see the blatant lies, truth-twisting, and manipulation of facts by big news players like CNBC, which often have “Citadel Securities” logos or ads on their screens behind the various talking heads. It might make me sound a little conspiracy theorist crazy, but these old as dirt stereotypes of bankers, Wall St. financiers, lawyers, and politicians mostly being sleazy come from somewhere, don’t they? I think the greater class consciousness is becoming more aware of how they’re being manipulated by the interests of the 1%, even if the facade is still intact, holes and tears in the societal contract and fabric notwithstanding.
I’m a simple logger turned teacher turned writer, myself. So personally? I’m going to try and be as efficient as possible with my use of symbolism and my twistings of the symbols I choose. If I want to fix humanity in all the ways I want to, I’m going to need some level of control over the entirety of the Zeitgeist, wrestling as much as I can away from the grubby hands of guys like Murdoch. But all indie artists and creators are doing the same thing simultaneously, grabbing at pieces of the Zeitgeist. Which means there’s an inherent monetary value to clout, or visibility, or reach. Meaning those with capital can fast track themselves to the top, and those at the bottom can barely hope for scraps or family and friend circles to support their work for more organic growth.
Wealth inherently can buy efficiency, in a sense. While I could always follow the path of L. Ron Hubbard and create a cult or religion or the like, as faith based organizations tend to be better at controlling their denominations through carefully crafted meta-fictions… There are also moral and virtue-based implications for that. Even if my religion was based on the purest truths and pushed purest kindness as a value, what’s to be said that it won’t be corrupted and distorted like the Church of Scientology? Or even the modern eschewing of OG Jesus-based christian values in favor of bigoted Christian Nationalism as we see with Trumpism and the like in right-wing, traditionalist, and conservative circles?
So for now, I can only stick to my own personal use of symbolism, as I lack the wealth to impact, influence, or buy the Zeitgeist. (At least until my stock bets pay off!) So as artists, we can make choices on a more personal basis. Personally, I select symbols and old concepts that mirror what I want to speak to. As with Jormundgandr and Ragnarok earlier, concepts like being a warlord, monk, skald, or any other title will help define what my core beliefs and values are as an artist, and hopefully they’ll speak to those clever enough to comprehend my true meaning. Even a word like “monk” denotes mastery and discipline in equal parts.
But whether I’m efficient with my symbolism or not, perhaps at least I can be happy with the fact that choosing to go deeper with my artistic symbolisms, allusions, and metaphors will allow critical thinking skills to prosper in those that do read my work… Be it in my poems, my prose like this, or any of my other projects or pieces. For yourself, what symbols help define who you are as an individual? There are plenty of symbols co-opted by minority groups, such as the Death’s Head Moth or the infinity symbol. Even the simple semicolon hides hidden meaning when tattooed on the inside of the wrist! The symbolisms you choose help define and explain your own art, self, and expression to the rest of the world. Even the smallest facets… In my poetry, I use ampersands, while in longer form writing I eschew them. An entire discussion on efficiency and symbolism hiding in plain sight!
We can only hope that others resonate with what we put out, and share that same energy back with us to create deeper and more meaningful communication, art, or experience. At least until one of us many freethinkers gets a hold of any significant portion of the Zeitgeist, after all! Maybe we can all hope that big names like Taylor Swift or the like will begin fighting against capitalism and the monopoly on media, perhaps.
Regardless – I can only hope to be as efficient with my symbolisms and expressions as possible, after all! And the same goes for you.
Now, let’s get the fuck out of here!
-McRae
