Why Trains?

There’s some reasoning behind this seemingly fanciful name, beyond the fact that I myself love trains! Allow me to explain:

1.    The Little God—kept always to a timetable!

For as long as I can remember I’ve been obsessed with trains: playing with them, arranging them, cataloguing them, reading about them, riding them, imagining them as the center of my world.
So there’s a childlike passion when I speak about trains bound up with a very mature, adult experience of logistical mastery that comes in playing with them. But indeed, the two can scarcely be decoupled—nor should they!
To play with trains is but one of many children’s pursuits that embody the constructive, generative metaphysical genius of a child. Transform everything around into a game!

Just as playing with dolls or action figures teaches development of personality and behavior, playing with trains teaches us to think in puzzles and to develop synchrony. 
It’s a constant ordering and reordering, mixing up cars, weaving together threads, to express an infinitude of possible combinations which are equally inspiring. As long as they run somewhere! 
Because the track is our litmus test. Does it run, or not?

While a doll doesn’t need a dollhouse, trains need tracks. Their tasks are necessarily expansive; they must run somewhere. Each one is purpose-built, not just to its own purpose but always to join with others. Just so, the tracks that serve them are always strung between not objects in space but points in time.

So while learning to play with trains is about learning to master and arrange particular points within a universe—learn to pick apart the pieces, then put them together again and again— this is no flight of fancy into arbitrary control and destructive fervor. Rather, such a task admirably encourages constant dissection alongside ready recombination.

Child’s play here—scarcely limited simply to children! –helps to develop aptitudes for working in concert, organizing various functional parts, and developing a world of difference based on a single set of shared features. This, a heart of any age might hear and appreciate.
Ultimately, such a task is firstly individual but always communal, in time. It helps to develop a sense of appropriate freedom within constraint, that comes through coordination and control negotiation and understanding. It is as such that we begin the long march to reconcile desire and will, adult and child, in the imperfect language of expression that constitutes our being.

And the lesson of the trainset is fundamentally an exercise in solidarity, in cooperation— in the balance between discipline and delight!

Recall Jodi Dean: any revolutionary praxis must proceed
from discipline to joy
from joy to enthusiasm
from enthusiasm to courage—
together! In our trains of thought: these are our revolutions.

2.    Coupling and Uncoupling Trains of Thought

My intellectual project here consists in building up systems of thought. At their most minute these systems follow moments, attempting a description in the most precise detail. At a glance, these smallest of units are everyday perceptions of the cultural and the historical, the virtual and the real, sensory and logical perception joined together as train-cars—if you will!

It is thus that I generate theory through these sense perceptions, through cultural objects, through libidinal eruptions, through intellectual inquiries: NOT on them.

We must understand the circuitous nexus of track through the qualities of each car, not in simply exercising analytical powers ‘on’ them. That’s also how we ourselves build up our own trains of thought, action, and organization. 
A lot of this blog is thus about expressive forms related to one another by some sort of theory. These two systems are necessarily intertwined—call them cars (pieces of culture), trains (cultures), and tracks (the larger world culture inhabits; the railroad world of switchmen, conductors, mechanics, but so too the world of industries, consumers, travelers, soldiers, and intellectuals that they serve).

In that sense, our train metaphor is an important one for understanding global modernity. As the links that bind the world of material transit (even today, as they have arguably lost the primacy of their dominance to trucks and planes), the railroad remains the invisible network of interwoven steel rails through which we might trace the flows of people, goods, ideas, strategy, responses, confusions, and coincidences, where the path becomes the product.

Tracing a desublimation between product and practice is central to my project here. My work is, for lack of a better word, expansive and assimilative—a humanities task that integrates several different perspectives to pick apart and evaluate necessarily convoluted material bereft of origin or explanation, or too heavily burdened by one. Its nature is out of time, out of place. The intellectual work of this blog links together historical and religious analysis, philosophical systems and perspectivism, styles of literary and aesthetic critique, and sociological and communicative outlooks to comment on politics: functions of people engaging with other people and trying to reconcile their various needs, desires, and overlapping demands on one another.

In that sense we’re always following trains. The speed of the world obligates us to do nothing less; it’s no longer the fort that denotes the frontier as a foreboding outpost guarding subliminal danger—but the gas station, the ascetic minimalist dromedary where we briefly rest our mounts before departing again. But the frontier is gone now, moved elsewhere.
Our journey has ended before it began—would we really have expected anything less?

We follow, as did the curious and wary cavalry of old, the great Iron Horse streaking across the horizon—burning endless sky into pristine, empty lines. But the days of boarding the train to rob or divert it are over. It’s impossible to even see them anymore, abstract and formless as they are. We have simply to follow in this liberated path, building our own tracks as we see fit—a task which begins always with a train!

Always building and rebuilding we are. Our great hero in this endeavor?
Jonathan Letham’s Lionel Essog: the sleepless voice of Tourette’s and OCD,
forever pulling on threads and trying to recombine them so they sound right.

3.    Along for the Ride? Might we share in it?

There are many ways to ride a train; you don’t have to pay for a ticket. 
That’s always stood out to me as important. The most visible figure, in my world of railroading, was often the clandestine one—the hobo sat quietly in the corner of the boxcar hoping to evade the brakeman’s gaze. 
And that’s what this blog is, in tracing the visible and the invisible: an opportunity more than one and double. Both a train rushing by and a chance to climb aboard anyway you please.

This blog project is not simply about the facts of trains, their composition, their systems, their power, or rearranging them—it’s about those who ride them. 
It’s about where that train is taking us.
It’s about what we find in them.
And it’s about the stories we tell along the way, as they get switched down the stems and mains until the motionless, the inert, the ineffable, takes on a life of its own.

This blog is a very personal project for me. It’s an organic expression of the ways my thought grows: my version of Essog’s ceaseless energy and reckless attack on the intricate lacing of his world and his existence therein. 
Like a train ride, as the steel rails grown and the engine sings, solitude is less than silent for me. The greatest peace comes in companionship with my fellow travelers, which is ultimately the point of this blog for me—and the point of writing at large.

Have you ever read Fatima Mernissi’s Women’s Rebellion? Writing, she tells us, is one of the oldest forms of prayer. It is a reflexive admission of impotence; dare we assume we might change the course of the train, redirect where it takes us? Perhaps, but such an act is always somewhat beyond us. Writing is a hopeful act, but always an uncertain one: a desire for contact, an anxiety about being heard:
but ultimately a great wager, a dangerous trust, in the goodness and the wisdom of our fellow travelers.

Come with me.

Let’s ride these trains up and down and across this beautiful land of ours.
That which is ours, which we have made, which was made for us.

Once again, I’m obliged to share another personal element in the name. I prefer speaking to writing, so this blog format—and writing at large—is a bit challenging for me. Speaking has so many comforting functions. It helps me to be more articulate, to utilize tone, intonation, and cadence, to my benefit. Speaking for me is the stepping-stone to telling a story, to weaving a narrative. Oral narratives aren’t like written ones; even if you read out the same words every time, you’re always telling a different story—or at least a distinct one. This title is certainly a joke insofar as my stories tend to run on sometimes, just like my own trains of thought. Most of all, it’s where my charisma and the reassurance of others I seek can take the pressure off the anxiety of thinking. It’s calming for me, to speak and just do it, while writing is often tempestuous in the oppressive maw of its roaring silence.

You’ll find many different sorts of trains here. Some are purely grammatological, others are written and recorded. In the spirit of all my close, dyslexic friends, I hope I can share my thoughts through more than just writing—that’s how I generate them, after all! Thought, having found firstly its voice, seeks next an ear—by any means, I hope!
In finding your ear, I hope against all hope we might share in this journey together.

“If there’s hell below, I'll see you when you get there.
Are you enjoyin’ yourselves?
If we may, we would just like to close off with somethin’ a bit inspirational.
Hopefully something a bit relevant as to us all are having the same fears, shedding similar tears, and of course dying in so many years.
It don’t mean that we can’t have a good life.
So we’d like to just maybe close out with something, some food for thought, for all of us.”

—Curtis Mayfield, live in Montreux 1987
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zGOeH4LWp-U#t=3453

There’s an absolute morality? May be. And then what?
I’ll see you when you get there.