Cryptid History 2 – From Press to Edition (1)

June, 2018– whither employment? Josh Glasman, graduate of the York University’s Master’s of English Literature program, searches the depths of the internet for any position which he might suit himself to. Adaptable, with a penchant for pseudo-insightful comments and unthreatening charisma, Glasman is convinced that he will soon find a role in publishing or marketing. To his brother, in July of the same year: “It is not a matter of if, but when. Time itself senses my urgency and hurries obediently onward”. By October, Glasman’s reservoir of self-assurance is depleted. He ceases corresponding with his brother entirely, leaving a handful of increasingly laconic e-mails unanswered.

It is at this time that he joins the (now defunct) “Autacoid” subreddit, which concentrates on a number of loosely related theories of “intercellular communication”. Common to all these is the idea that the localized modulatory action of autacoids such as adenosine, alongside the distributed effects of hormones, suggests the existence of a “paracellular brain”, a “brain” that is “directly in touch with all psychophysical phenomena generated by both material physics and metaphysics” (Letter to Peyton Clasp, 2018). The dissemination of these theories relies on a tight-knit group of pseudo-intelligentsia, deprived in social circumstance and thus dependant on an extended arrangement of razors and mirrors.

I started writing something ungenerous in this second section. It was a sarcastic remark directed against a feature of experience which is often lampooned. There is a margin of truth in the frame that is applied to this feature by the caustic interpretation provided by so many hopeless and eager bores; like so many landscapes in the gallery of a middle-aged corporatiste cum aesthete, these reproductions are all clumsy, but to different degrees, the same way that all op-eds are. But now I’ve become polemical once again, despite the last few torturous sentences I’ve spent condemning myself and others for similar lapses in complexity*. I suppose the most familiar way to limit both the character of my words and the words of my character is by saying that Josh Glasman was lonely. While closing an infinite number of positions to stone, it opens a secondary infinite to movement.

Josh passed under so many arrangements of title and so became a servant beyond number. Many of us are required by circumstance or the unchecked boldness of our vessel to match ourselves to an equally diverse selection of servilities. What proved fatal, for Josh, was his lack of a single quality which the remainder of this cohort takes for granted. Through all his supplication, he never believed in anything— when he knelt, his body disappeared. I know that in these same moments of dedication I often find myself subtly embellishing the shape of my master until, whether by way of image or emotion, I have extended them into a more bearable object.

The question which this entry was meant to extend had to do with why Josh chose to steal the Vingt Regards of Megan Wick. There is an assumption, buried in this question, of justification. To what end? One can remain unjustified in their actions and retain the same depth of humanity as their more intelligible sibling.