Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

Édouard Glissant’s “The Thinking of the Opacity of the World” got me wondering about the way I might write my final project. Glissant talked about Opacity as a way of making art, and of creating new meaning without being limited by definitions and the need for clarity. Now, it’s got me thinking about getting more loose with my piece, as it’s being drafted. The little radio show I’m writing doesn’t need to make perfect sense, and it doesn’t need to be as familiar as my initial draft. Instead, I could lean into the nonsense, like Glissant suggests in his own work.

Maybe I could come up with random world building facts. None of which need to be explained, but I could pepper them in and leave it as an unknown. Just these little strange features about a place beyond mortality, where souls/spirits roam and just exist. I thought of a celestial event for the piece called the Realignment. Everything goes dark, time stops existing, and there’s never quite a guarantee that things will go back to normal afterward, but it just is.

To add to the confusion, I’ll add in some mystery about the radio host herself. She’s dead, of course, but she was a radio show host in her life, and she died within the recording studio itself. I don’t know if I want to explain how, or why, but it would be interesting to talk about it vaguely, and tease it out. Half of Glissant’s sentences were difficult to parse, and seemed to be totally unconcerned with his readers, so I think I’ll try to do the same. I may make a little note sheet with a bunch of little facts about the world so I can pick one and just mention it casually as I write. I’m really trying to have fun with this piece, and this is a strange way to do it, but it feels right.