Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

on actually writing a draft

The week has finally come: my workshop week. As per usual, I’ve done nothing but procrastinate brainstorm this piece, toying around endlessly with concepts without actualizing anything. It’s always how it happens–unfortunately, I just write best under pressure.

I do, however, have to thank my VIS partner (shoutout Noah) for giving me a starting point to inspire my piece. Before taking this course, I’ve never really thought about writing outside of any other format besides textual. Yes, I watch movies and listen to music and podcasts, but my own writing has never taken those forms. With a vehicle for my writing as audio, however, I found it a lot easier to funnel my ideas through the character that we decided our radio transmitter would take on. It was really fun to blend some of the concepts we’ve discussed like transparency vs. opacity and codeswitching across genre with my own personal style. I have a pretty obvious affinity for writing about relationships between people, not just romantic but platonic, familial, etc. How people interact with each other fascinates me: I’m always wondering why people do what they do, act how they act, say what they say. From the perspective of a lone, possibly abandoned, dying robot, what do these interactions look like? I chose the main repeating motif of a “half-life” because of how quantifiable it is; juxtaposed against such unmeasurable things like love, disaster, wonder, I tried to capture units of experience that encompassed these feelings. It’s purposefully a little vague, because I think emotions usually are. We often don’t even understand our own feelings until they pass. This draft definitely ended up having a bit more of a somber tone than I initially anticipated, but looking at it now, I’m not that mad at it. I think the imagery of the poem merits a bit of reserved contemplation–the robot is dying, for crying out loud. To me, it’s recounting the beautiful and the tragic that it’s observed in its lifetime, embodying the emotions of its creators/interpreting them in its own, mechanical way. Maybe we are the robot too. Maybe all we leave behind are impressions on other beings.

-sydney