Projections

content/trigger warnings: discussions of political violence, imperialism, and colonialism; references to police/state violence and delusional thinking; brief depictions of political assassinations; use of ableist language

This week is what I call Parable of the Sower week: the seven days leading up to July 20, 2024. This is the day that inaugurates the narrative in Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower, as well as the 15th birthday of its protagonist.

I'm what you might call superstitious about things like this, though I don't know if superstitious is the right word, since I consider myself and claim to be something of a clairvoyant.

I have feared for a very long time that something of great import would occur on the 20th, though I try to approach phenomena like clairvoyance, superstition, and serendipity soberly: things of great import occur every day, at every hour, at every moment. At the same time, things of great import don't really "occur" at all; they unfold, over much longer periods of time than a day, and in tandem with all other things, of import or no, in ways that are inextricable from each other.

Nevertheless, because of my particular vantage, I feel and understand the world in moments, hours, days. It's hard for me to not assign importance to the day at the end of this week, or even to the week itself (despite neither "day" nor "week" being particularly coherent temporal groupings anyways).

I often describe my writing as an attempt to intervene in the thorny political economy of art production, but you could just as well describe it as an attempt to democratize clairvoyance. If pressed, I would admit that I consider these projects to be one and the same. In my essay titled "Inca(r)n(t)ation," I write:

The truth is that everyone is clairvoyant. Those who already know this know also that its source is trauma; trauma is the catalyst for clairvoyance. This is because clairvoyance is the same as hyperempathy; a better word for it may be hypersensitivity. Clairvoyants are sensitive to everything: the tiniest twitches, the most invisible winds. If you allow yourself to feel enough, you will have visions too.

My visions come to me mostly in my dreams, but also in my writing. Earlier this year, I dreamt a long dream—had a long vision—in which I shot a politician. I transcribed what I remembered of the dream after waking, and then turned it into a short story originally titled "Letters," and later retitled "Los Anaranjados." The short story follows three economically precarious siblings as they navigate the chaos initiated by a series of disturbing letters, sent out to seemingly random groups of residents of their unnamed metropolis. Each letter urges its recipient to commit a specific act of murder.

The original title was a nod to the power of language, that a city could be thrust into turmoil by a few handwritten words on paper. The change in title came from the speculative conceit that helped me give narrative coherence to my strange and violent vision.

From the story:

The mayor is holding a press conference, where he announces that he’s the one who’s been writing the letters. I push my way to the front of the crowd because I need to hear him speak. I want to understand.

The mayor says his office commissioned a novel law enforcement program, an artificial intelligence that can determine a person’s propensity for murder. It sorted residents into groups coded by color: fresa red, piña yellow, limón green. Of our populace of millions, eleven percent comprised the first group: extremely likely to kill or fatally injure another person. He says the program was defunded but his conscience remained ablaze. He says he illegally obtained the addresses of those flagged as killers—mailed letters to their residences, to goad them into doing what he thought they’d do anyways, what he’d be powerless to stop unless he got them to do it sooner, got them all off the streets and behind bars in one elegant swoop.

He corrects himself. Six elegant swoops.

Doing it all at once would have overwhelmed the postal service, he explains dispassionately. He says he’s sorry for the trouble and the trauma he’s caused. He says he sees now the error of his ways, and he says nothing else because I shoot him in the chest.

I buy a gun after the third letter because I know it will come in handy. I kill him as a matter of self-defense. As the city protecting itself, acting through me.

"Los Anaranjados" is Spanish for "the orange ones." It's an oblique reference to the idea that, if there are groups of people "extremely likely to kill or fatally injure another person" (the red ones), and groups of people less likely to do so (the yellow and the green ones), there must also be the orange ones: those only extremely likely to kill or fatally injure another person under very specific circumstances.

For example, as a matter of self-defense.

And in a world riven by colonialism, the vast majority of us are in the business of defending ourselves.

As I wrote this part of the story, I left out a small detail: while the mayor talks about the artificial intelligence and its color-coded groupings, he gestures to a screen behind him. On it, a slide from a presentation depicts the three colors the narrator describes: "...fresa red, piña yellow, limón green." In my mind, it was a pie chart with big, brightly colored slices, but I couldn't think of a good way to write this into the story, for two reasons. The first was that, earlier in the story, I referenced a "colorful infographic" that ran in the city paper, and I simply didn't think it artful to repeat such a detail. The second, more substantive reason was that I felt it took away from the explanation for the letters, which—at this point in the story—is essentially the story's climax. The city and the characters have been shaken up over the course of six rounds of letters, and the mayor's press conference is the big reveal that purportedly explains what they were all about. (Shortly thereafter, this is revealed to be a charade; the press conference was all lies, for reasons not relevant enough to this essay to explain here.)

I worried that cramming too much detail about the presentation into this moment would take away from the climax: the politician's speech, and the narrator's violent reaction.

*

I've followed the national news this week at something of a distance; I always do. I like to know the broad strokes, not because I think that it can tell me much about reality directly, but because what small fraction of information it has chosen to become the quote-unquote "broad strokes"—and how that fraction of information is depicted—can. Sometimes on social media I'll read a post that says people who watch reality TV are preternaturally intelligent because they are avid scholars of human behavior, but the problem with this thesis is that you are never really seeing human behavior on television, reality or otherwise. Reality TV provides insight into the psyches of reality TV producers, whom I definitely consider an interesting bunch to psychoanalyze, but are certainly not a representative slice of humanity writ large.

In the same way, keeping abreast of what most people refer to as quote-unquote "the news" does not provide any insight into what is actually unfolding in the world, but rather gives one insight into the psyches of news producers. And since news producers are beholden to all kinds of mechanisms of colonial power, watching the news is an excellent way to keep tabs on how empire is seeing itself. How it is understanding itself. How intensely it is rationalizing its contradictions. How close it is to its inevitable implosion.

*

A presidential assassination attempt inaugurated Parable of the Sower week. The assassination target in question wasn't the president at the time of the shooting, though he will likely soon be again, and he wasn't badly injured, nor is there much evidence that the whole affair wasn't staged, which—as is the case with all violence—is more or less irrelevant.

I don't bother to watch the footage save for the highlights that appear on my TikTok feed against my will—I try to engage with quote-unquote "political content" as little as possible—and then the short clip posted on the front page of every major U.S. news website. In only one of those clips—one which I see days after the shooting, and the one which catalyzes the bulk of this essay—can you clearly see what was behind the assassination target at the moment of impact.

I am a bit taken aback by this, but only insomuch as any clairvoyant can be surprised by the accuracy of their visions. I quickly process the mechanism by which I came to see this before it happened: it is not uncommon for politicians to be framed during political rallies by a screen, or for that screen to display informational graphics like charts. It is not implausible for politicians to be shot during political rallies; in fact, it is more likely for them to be shot there than anywhere else. If you asked a million people to describe in detail what they saw if they carefully imagined a future presidential assassination attempt, the majority would likely include somewhere in their description a screen like the one in the photo and a chart like the one in my dream.

None of this contradicts my understanding of clairvoyance. It only reinforces it.

The thing I am actually taken aback by is how superstitious the assassination target turns out to be. Multiple times after the shooting, he publicly credits the chart for "saving his life," most recently just yesterday, in a 90-minute speech on the closing night of the Republican National Convention. In the story he tells of his supposed near-death experience—a story he will tell and retell until the day on which death fails to elude him—the chart is the climax.

From his speech:

Behind me, and to the right, was a large screen that was displaying a chart of border crossings under my leadership. The numbers were absolutely amazing. In order to see the chart, I started to, like this, turn to my right, and was ready to begin a little bit further turn, which I’m very lucky I didn’t do, when I heard a loud whizzing sound and felt something hit me really, really hard. On my right ear. I said to myself, “Wow, what was that? It can only be a bullet.”

And again, later in the speech:

But you can see [the] chart that saved my life. That was the chart that saved my life. I said, “Look at, I’m so proud of it.” I think it’s one of the greatest — it was done by the Border Patrol — one of the greatest charts I’ve ever seen. It showed everything, just like that. You know the chart.

Oh, there it is. That’s pretty good. Wow.

*

In April, I receive an $75 scholarship to attend a short seminar on writing. The scholarship is randomly assigned via a lottery, so it is completely by chance that I receive it and attend (though I hope you have come to understand by now that there is no such thing as quote-unquote "chance").

During the seminar, we undertake a far more practical writing exercise than most: putting together an artist's statement that argues why we deserve this or that share of a pool of funding. For many artists, these statements are what receiving meaningful funding hinges upon. We are constantly asked to explain and justify ourselves. I am no exception, in this regard and every other.

The seminar leader frames the exercise uniquely, and for this, I feel grateful. We are asked to take the strangest and most unpackageable part of our work and to package it up into a tidy, compelling artist's statement, strangeness be damned. At first, I resist my instinct to write about the topics in this essay—most of my time is spent worrying about whether or not I am using my clairvoyance appropriately—until finally I determine an interesting way into the exercise. How do you write about clairvoyance without sounding mad? How do you pitch delusional thinking as an asset?

In the few minutes we are given to produce a draft, I write the following:

As a prophetic writer, I conjure predictive fiction and nonfiction that traces the trajectory of the near-present and far future. The value of this work is its prescience; my readers can learn about the future the way they might learn about history from a textbook. Prophetic work is not uncommon or particularly esoteric in the age of big data: corporations, institutions, and governments regularly use data analysis, a tool of prophetic writing, to make weighty decisions about resource allocation.

Projection and prophecy, after all, are one and the same—equally flawed and equally potent.

*

Time, as it is commonly perceived, is hardly stable. I begin writing this essay on July 14, 2024, at 6:50 PM PST. I write this sentence on July 19, 2024, at 3:30 PM PST. If you read this essay, you will likely experience it in a single sitting, which will of course not correlate at all with the rhythm of the temporal arc over which the essay was written. And if you read it in pieces—or revisit it over and again as weeks, months, or years pass—that experience will not correlate with mine either. Time, as it is commonly conceived of, is inherently disjointed.

In most of the rest of the world, it is already July 20, 2024.

And it will be over 37 hours before July 20, 2024, has officially come to a close.

Looking outwards from so-called "American politics," the news reports this morning are of a global tech outage across airlines, hospitals, emergency hotlines, retail stores, and more. One outlet refers to it as the most widespread information technology failure in history. I have been preparing for a cyberattack of these proportions—or larger—for some time, forgetting perhaps that the cyberattack already took place, over the course of many decades, carried out by countless attackers: the construction of a way of life in which critical biosocial functions are so reliant on fragile, interconnected digital networks that a bug in an otherwise banal software update can rewrite the trajectories of millions. It rerouted mine. I wouldn't have spent the last five minutes writing this paragraph if the outage had not made its way into the broad strokes of today's English-language news reports. There is no way to know what this paragraph—or the rest of this essay—would have said if it had not occurred.

There is also no way to know what this part of the essay would have said if I knew more about the countless processes that have proceeded, piecemeal, around the world since the start of July 20. Since the start of this week.

The present, as it is commonly perceived, is hardly complete. Reality, as it is commonly conceived of, is inherently disjointed. There is no way to know what today or tomorrow will hold.

I mean, of course, I have some ideas. I am certain you do too.