This is overdue for being moved to draft-blog-post status (working title: Urban Narrativium) but I'm feeling lazy so will work out a couple more bunnytrails here on twitter.
Conversation
In the US, there is a weird geographic correlate of narrative destiny: roughly NE to SW. Manifest destiny is part of dustbin of history now, but this tendency still exists. Your story is moving forward to the extent it's moving NE-SW. NW and SE are sideways. SW-NE is regression.
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The simplest nominal hero's journey, in geographic terms, is moving from Boston to LA and coming back a movie star or something. If you lack the ambition for it, you go NW to PNW for the Blue-White variant, or SE for the Red-White variant.
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Vast oversimplification of course, but you could get a zeroth-order linear story of your life as progress/regress by projecting your geographic movement on a NE-SW diagonal line.
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For example, my story is: [India-->], Ann Arbor, Austin, Ann Arbor, Ithaca, Rochester, DC, Vegas, Seattle, LA. Or PSSRSRPPP.
P= progress
S=sideways
R=regress
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If I make it a bit more complex and weight a leg in inverse proportion to distance from Boston-LA turnpike, I could code my Rochester-DC move as "progress" (projection moved backwards, but I got closer to the turnpike). It's a bit like doubling back to ramp onto a highway.
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In general, the topology is more complex of course. SF to Midland, TX is severe regression, but SF to Austin is more of a mild regression, with a lot of sideways. The network of major cities has its own topology, which distorts the base R^2 plane topology.
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The biggest political conflict in the US is probably between those who are invested in the current topology of the Narrative Highway System (NHS) of the US and those who think it is decay and decline.
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The American Dream, unlike Old World life scripts, has always had a very high-legibility geographic component. Indian dream scripts for example, do NOT have such a strong geographic component. There's at best a very weak "going to Bombay to join Bollywood" narrative.
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At best there is a weak, generic provinces --> big city narrative without strong bindings for particular big cities.
I think this is because America only has a brief peasant history, and no old cities, so entire narrative imagination gets projected onto network of young cities.
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"imaginations which have no peasant traditions to give them character but flutter and flaunt — sheer rags-succumbing without emotion save numbed terror” -- To Elsie, by William Carlos Williams ht for this key point.
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If I had to get all mathematical and imagine a topology for US narrative space, I'd make it a planar graph of charismatic cities, with an extra node in the middle titled "heartland" to which all of flyover country is mapped. Sounds callous, but that's really it.
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The American heartland is a trope more than a place. Specific interstices within the city graphs do not have strong identities. At best, you can decompose "heartland" into "Midwest", "Texas", "Prairies" and "Old South", and those are not intrinsic, but artifacts of global history
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By contrast, agrarian heartland of India for instance, is strongly differentiated. Starting with entire mutually unintelligible languages. If you did a narrative-space graph of India, ratio would be reversed. There would be few charismatic cities, many charismatic heartlands.
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This means, as narrative spaces go, the US is peculiarly tractable. Stories that play out on the charismatic-city narrative graph are unusually legible in way old world stories are not. That's why, for instance, a road trip is a better narrative template in the US than elsewhere.
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this is also why attempts to predict the future of the US in response to the Great Weirding by looking at countries that got hit earlier (USSR, Japan, Greece, Britain) are misguided. American exceptionalism in classical terms may be dead, but this is still a weird country.
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Hmm... I'm now thinking of the Great Weirding as a shock wave that unfolded in at least 4 parts: USSR (1989-2000), Islamic sphere (1992-2007), West (starting with Greece, 2009), and finally Asia (China and India, both around 2017-19: Xi elevation and Modi 2nd term)
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Hmm. The Great Weirding in this 4-wave form kinda follows the logic of clash of civilizations huntington model. It didn't go from localized weirding to great weirding until it hit America though. That's when the whole thing came together as a global shitshow.
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A lot of my thinking/ideas now are of the sort that would best suit a sort of sprawling podcast format rather than essay... mainly because I'm getting increasingly lazy about writing up all but the tightest, hardest ideas in longform
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