is even better than listening to John Kiriakou talk about catching Abu Zebayda for the fiftieth time, or reading all those Phillip Larkin poems I memorized to impress Alex O’Connor, or being absolutely sick to my stomach watching the finale of Fleabag
partly because your Trump impression sounds like an even better Shane Gillis
partly because time moves so quickly when we’re on the phone I hardly notice time at all
partly because of how you mispronounce Wittgenstein
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for formal logic which always seems to baffle me

and it’s hard to believe when we’re on the phone together laughing
that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as philosophy at all
and all the sentences seem to have no meaning, just ink
and suddenly I wonder why in the world anyone ever wrote them

I listen
to you
and I would rather listen to you than any podcast in the world
Except possibly for Norm Macdonald’s
but anyway it’s only on Internet Archive now
and thank God for that because that means you haven’t seen it yet
so I can be the one to show it to you

When you’re talking to me
I never think about the passages from the books I’ve memorized
just as at work I never think of Descartes’ Evil Demon or
a single line from Studies in Pessimism that really used to wow me
and what good does all the wisdom of the philosophers do them
when they never got the right person to talk to about their day when the sun sank?

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it.

¹³ He had also seven sons and three daughters.

¹⁴ And he called the name of the first, Jemima; and the name of the second, Kezia; and the name of the third, Kerenhappuch.

^1…

Read more

Ladies and gentleman of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied.

Look at this tangle of thorns !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You should not grow accustomed to this kind of slop & drivel. Great essays await you! Posting your diary on Substack is the equivalent of a sitcom clip show episode. It’s lazy filler, a writer’s not-so-clever attempt to trick you. But yesterday, when I was looking through old journal entries, it made me think about how when I was little, I liked to go on walks at night and look into people’s homes — which kind of makes me sound like a pervert, which I guess I am, but I’ve always found it comforting, watching the lives of other people illuminated and framed into little vignettes.

For your voyeuristic pleasure:

07.22.23 Bettie Page was a dominatrix. The past always feels wholesome and benign. “Gone are the days of women like that sweet, innocent Bettie Page!” My grandmother can tell you stories of the war that will make you yearn for bunker rations. The past is perfect because you can’t grab at it with your sticky little fingers. Maybe that’s why I like you more dead.

07.13.24 You told me once, “An artist needs a drug.” It breaks the monotony, splits the mind — that is the nature of art, you told me, duality. Duality is essential to the conception of genius. It’s been ten years since you told me that. You died of lung cancer. I haven’t written anything good.

04.06.24 I wanna keep Buster Keaton in the pocket of my overalls and feed him sunflower seeds. Today, someone told me my haircut made me look like Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird. I should have told him he smelled like Burris Ewell, but I didn’t think of it until the drive home. When you’re tired, it’s easy to get out Dennis Miller’d. I never feel special or superior when I know things people don’t. It makes me angry. If your mom didn’t make you watch Mr. Smith Goes to Washington when you were seven, you had a bad mom. Call CPS. My “obscure references”?? You don’t know who Al Pacino is. You’re the weird one. You should be locked up.

09.06.22 I saw a dead dove today. It was laying in the middle of the sidewalk on its back. Its feathers looked pristine. The mortician did an exceptional job, although perhaps a little heavy on the rouge! It looked so perfect it was hard for me to understand it was dead. I must have stared at it for five minutes expecting it to pop back into action and apologize for blocking my way, but it didn’t. It just laid there, staring blankly into the sky, seeing nothing.

02.14.24 I love you and I’m sorry. I’m waiting for you to die so I can make the documentary. I’m taking pictures of the corpse so I can get the colours right. What did the sky look like? How many cars were on the road? I think I love you, but only in the way a stamp collector loves his stamps.

05.10.23 I can tell I’m getting worse. I can tell I’m getting worse because every time I get worse everything becomes really funny to me. And I can’t stop laughing. And you become clearer, and everyone else becomes dull and inconsequential. Everyone else turns to caricature, the people I’d once be nervous to meet, become innocuous, malleable fodder, to my mind no longer greedy for love, but raw material, no matter the cost.

06.12.26 When I’m sitting across from men I’ve read biographies about, I can only think about what you would think of them. Every joke demands your approval, every idea your criticism. I don’t know where to look when I’m not looking at you. When I’m “somewhere else”, you’re where I am. It’s still your ghost I’m trying to impress.

06.24.24 I never want to meet you. I prefer you less human. I understand people much better than I used to. Every time I shake a man’s hands, I can feel blood and time and regret. I see things I’m not supposed to. I never know what to say.

07.29.24 I’m always forgiving myself for promises I’ve broken, like a parent promising their child a toy only to find themselves unemployed by Christmas. Try telling a hungry child they don’t live by bread alone. I don’t bring the ducks bread crumbs. I bring them Dostoevsky. They quack at me confused.

10.06.22 I don’t know how to live. I’m trying. I promise.

Your continued support of the Brinley McCully Project for Illiterate Brinleys has been overwhelming. If you feel so inclined, please click the button below to champion the very noble cause of increasing literacy rates among Brinleys across Canada.

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I have nothing to say & one day left to post this newsletter. I have no big plans, no exciting news to share. I have one good essay in the tank for May — look forward to that one. Here’s a list of ten things I like with zero explanation:

1. Bob Mortimer asking David Mitchell to think of him as a friend.

@primevideouksewage industry, but make it ✨fashion✨ #lastonelaughing season 2 episodes 4-5 are out NOW on #primevideo #lastonelaughinguk #davidmitchell #bobmortimer

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2. Don’t Let Me Down by The Beatles

3. Shakespeare’s 57 Sonnet

“Being your slave, what should I do but tend

Upon the hours and times of your desire?

I have no precious time at all to spend,

Nor services to do, till you require.

Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour

Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you.

Nor think the bitterness of absence sour

When you have bid your servant once adieu;

Nor dare I question with my jealous thought

Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,

But like a sad slave, stay and think of nought,

Save, where you are how happy you make those.

So true a fool is love that in your will

Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.”

4. Sam Kinison on The Tonight Show

5. This classic example:

@strid3_💀#memes #real #relatable #viral #funny

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6. Andrew Scott’s Hamlet

@fascistbabyyou would pluck out the heart of my mystery. #fyp #andrewscott #nationaltheatre #acting #corecore

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7. Marilyn Monroe’s journals.

“Why isn’t anything plain & commonplace, ordinary & easy — I guess I’m emotional in the wrong spots — but if things weren’t like that I would probably bore myself — although if I were different I would hardly know the difference.

(I’ve been smoking and it is a filthy habit (it’s not one of mine yet)) I have the most unpleasant taste in my mouth as if I had chewed raw tobacco over a sustained amount of time.

I think my love if must call it that was mostly that wonderful titillating feeling of being wanted & loved & cared for & any sexual attraction. I was so badly sunburnt that I wore only a sweater & no bra — it gave me a sensual feeling I thought he might share. He didn’t.

I know that at 12 o clock I will feel another surge of resentment.”

8. Lana Del Rey’s poem, L.A. Who I Am To Love You?

Especially the part where she says, “I’m pathetic. I know. Can I come home now?”

9. Peter Hitchens angrily throwing a pillow on Alex O’Connor’s podcast. (46:25)

10. 1 mg Hydromorphone taken by IV every hour.

If you feel so inclined , please support my project, The Brinley McCully Foundation for Illiterate Brinleys. Every dollar you give to the foundation goes toward the purchase of books, increasing literacy rates among Brinleys across Canada.

Buy Brinley a Book

For the last six years, I’d write over and over again in my diary, somewhat sarcastically, “I hope God is going to cash in my sacrifices, all at once, like a thick stack of arcade game tickets.” In December of 2024, I wrote, “A year of deprivation without reward. Is this what we deserved? Is this my punishment for sins I don’t remember?” (A bit dramatic, but that’s my nature.) ‘24 was a rough year for me. I spent thousands of dollars on therapy without insurance, only to feel worse than when I started. I lost forty pounds to heal my liver, which caused me to develop gallstones. I ate so little my hair fell out and my nails flaked off like drywall. Work wasn’t much better, the NDA I didn’t sign, but try to uphold nonetheless, precludes me from talking about the details of the schizophrenic patients I looked after, but my reputation for rehabilitating difficult clients resulted in having the cops saved as a favourite in my phone. I also developed an allergy to dust, which was so dorky I couldn’t stand it.

Even though I entered 2025 with low expectations, I had a feeling it was going to be an important year. I spent most of March high on morphine. I was in the hospital recovering from gallstone pancreatitis. A few weeks after they chopped out my gallbladder, everything started working out for me. I got everything I ever wanted. God cashed in all my sacrifices, all at once, like a thick stack of arcade game tickets. I healed successfully from my surgery. I’ve had so many health issues over the last couple years, the word “healed” felt synonymous with “fantasy” or “delusion”. When I decided to quit my job and move back home with my parents, (you can only have so many conversations with social workers about how your roommate refuses to shower because the devil lives in the water) we were able to sell the house I rented from my step-dad and make a profit. By the time my grandmother got sick, we were all home, unemployed, and able to look after her. We lived five minutes from the hospice she was sent to. The days I spent with her there were some of the happiest of my life. We ate breakfast together every day for two months. One day, she leaned over to me, looked out the window, and said, “June is a lovely month. I’ll be happy to die in June.” She died June 29th.

A few months later, I got a job as a housekeeper at the hospice where she died. And there hasn’t been a single day I haven’t been excited to go to work. I spend my days cleaning toilets — which I love doing, I also love taking the stainless steel trash cans off the wall (they’re attached to the wall for some reason) and cleaning all the dust that gets trapped inside — and I spend my nights writing about cool things and talking to smart people who use big words I have to Google. I have a truck with a full tank of gas & a fridge filled with ice cold Pepsi. I’m happy. And I never really thought that was in the cards for me.

I’ve never cottoned much to the spiritual & I’ve never been an “everything happens for a reason” kind of girl. And I’m still not — but if you were to ask me about 2025, I’d talk to you about miracles and blessings, plans so perfect and suffering so exquisite, I’d be forced to quote scripture. If I told my mom, “God cashed in all my sacrifices, all at once, like a thick stack of arcade game tickets,” she’d say, “Says the atheist?”

Yeah. Says the atheist.

On Brooke

A lot of my essays are filled with little inside jokes that only I understand. I remove most of them by the end, so you, dear reader, are not confused. In Snoopy, I say, “[Snoopy adorns] children’s clothing and merchandise all the way from his hometown of Santa Rosa, California, across the sea to Guangzhou, China.” I chose Guangzhou because my friend, Brooke lives in Guangzhou. She’d send me pictures of their Snoopy boats, bats dressed as Snoopy, Snoopy vaccines, etc. When I told her Snoopy was doing well, she made a Substack account just to subscribe to me. (@) When she was back in Guangzhou, she sent me a Snoopy from across the sea:

Before Substack, my essays had an audience of three: my mommy (my most brilliant & beloved editor), my step-dad (my biggest fan), and Brooke. (Occasionally my brother would endure them.) Before I published Snoopy, I printed out a copy and read it to her in an empty Dairy Queen. Brooke is the only reason I graduated high school. We took English class together, and Spanish (muy dificil!), and maybe Social Studies? I don’t remember. Brooke was enlisted with the very difficult task of explaining each assignment I was given so I wouldn’t write on the wrong topic. She also edited all my work.

When we were nineteen (many, many years ago now) she told me, drunkenly at a party, with uncharacteristic sentimentality, “You’re my Oscar Wilde.” I wasn’t gay. Or British. And I never went to jail for sucking dick. So I was confused. I said, “What?” And she said, “Everything you say is beautiful.”

On Myrlene

Myrlene is one of my coworkers at the hospice. Myrlene is three apples tall, with large hands that give her the appearance of a puppy who has not yet grown into her paws. On our breaks, she feeds me fruit and makes me watch Facebook Reels, which she translates from their original Tagalog.

When we put away new shipments of cleaning supplies, I leisurely slice open the cardboard boxes with my housekeeping key, and remove each item separately. Myrlene punches the boxes open, flips the supply bin over and dumps the product inside. Yesterday, she accidentally punched my hand trying to open one of the boxes. She apologized, caressed my hand, and said, “Soft. Baby skin.” Which, unfortunately, might be my new nickname.

A few weeks ago, when she saw a picture of a bunny I drew, she took it around the entire hospice to show everyone. “Brinley did this. Can you believe it?” (Everyone believed it. It was a pretty basic drawing of a bunny.) On our break, I drew her a picture of some flowers, while she cleaned the blinds in the kids room. I said, “I should probably get back to work. I’ll finish this later.” And she said to me, “No. I will clean while you draw. Your art is important.”

On Hana

The first day I worked with Hana, she asked to look at pictures of my family. When I showed her a picture of my father, she said, “Ah. He is emotionally unavailable.” That’s when I knew she was psychic. Hana is the only person at work who knows I write. Hana is the only person, other than my immediate family, who knows anything about me.

On the rare occasion my writing comes up in conversation, I’ve learned to just say, “Oh. I write about boring philosophy stuff.” It spares us both from having a conversation neither of us really wanted to have. When I tried that one with Hana she asked me, “What is philosophy? Like Buddhism? Is Buddhism a philosophy or a religion?” I smiled when I realized I didn’t know how to answer. Hana knows about Plato, Diogenes, rhetoric and sophistry. Hana is one of the smartest people I have ever met. And she’s much better at understanding philosophical concepts than I am at learning Czech. I only know “strom” — one of the many Czech words for tree. When she and Myrlene were talking about going on vacation to the Philippines together — renting motorcycles and swimming in the ocean, etc. Myrlene said, “Let’s bring Brinley with us!” And Hana replied, “Brinley does not like having fun. She likes thinking about things.” Which is true. I don’t like having fun. I like thinking about things.

At Christmas I wrote her a card and after she read it, she said, “You will write a book and it will be New York Times bestseller. Tell me in the future, when I’m right.”

The Future Where Hana is Right

This is my schedule: I wake up at 5:30 am, work for eight hours, come home, write for six hours, sleep. (I’m editing this on my lunch break. Fun! Forth-wall break!) I’ve read my Plato-Hitch-Dot essay so many times I have it committed to memory. Lately, I’ve been dreaming of sentences and Google Docs. I wake up in a cold sweat to jot down something brilliant, only to find pure gibberish in my phone notes in the morning.

Since JID’s album, God Does Like Ugly dropped, I’ve been listening to For Keeps on repeat. On every album, JID has a song about his come-up — about his success. The song starts with him saying, “And every time I think the mojo gone, here come the feeling I’ve been tryna find for oh so long.” During an excruciating period of writer’s block, I repeated that bar to myself like a mantra, hoping to reignite what I felt had been lost. It worked. It came back.

On For Keeps, JID says that, “[He was] headstrong, fueled by the fact that [he] was slept on. Wanted to prove they was dead wrong.” Like JID, me and my pen got a bond so tight that I’ll be back next week even if I bombed last night; but, unlike him, I never wanted to prove anyone they were dead wrong. I wanted to prove to them they were right.

Outside my bedroom door, I can hear my brother say to my mom, “Yo let’s talk quieter. Brin’s writing.” (Immediately followed by, “Damn. Does Brinley even aim for the sink when she spits out her toothpaste. She’s disgusting.”) Everyone in my life treats my writing with a seriousness I’m not sure it deserves. But I do know, to paraphrase JID (once more) that, “No matter how many heartbreaks, headaches, affliction and the pain, my pen is itchin’ in my veins. No right or wrong prescription. I’m addicted to the game.”

If you feel so inclined , please support my project, The Brinley McCully Foundation for Illiterate Brinleys. Every dollar you give to the foundation goes toward the purchase of books, increasing literacy rates among Brinleys across Canada.

Buy Brinley A Book

I didn’t post a newsletter for March because I thought it would be dorky to post two newsletters in a row without posting an essay. But now that the Dot-Hitch Paper has hit the stands, spring has sprung! Your March Newsletter is here!

In a similar vein as my last newsletter — because I’m lazy and don’t know what a newsletter is — I just typed out a transcript of my latest interview with Teen Vogue:

Does analytic philosophy’s commitment to logical clarity amount to an epistemic exclusion of hermeneutic and phenomenological truth?

Next question please.

Which nationality has the sexiest accent?

Thank you for asking. I’ve been thinking about this for some time now. The worst accent, and I say this with pure objectivity, is Israeli. And this isn’t a political statement, the Palestinian accent isn’t much better. The British Psyop of 2013 indoctrinated us to believe British accents were sexy. The only reason I was immune to this propaganda was because the only British person I knew was my grandmother, who was a very beautiful woman, but I wasn’t particularly sexually attracted to her. However, I did like the way she said the word “strawberry” with all the syllables smushed together.

When I tell people the sexiest accent is a rural Albertan accent, it begs the question, “Well, ya know! It depends on what you mean by the word ‘accent’ and ‘rural’ and ‘is’?” The third most famous Albertan (behind myself and Ted Cruz) is Jordan Peterson. And God bless him, but his voice is about as pleasant as the sound of a cat in heat getting beat to death with hammers. The Rural Albertan Accent™ is not to be confused with The Hockey Accent™ (which was invented during NAFTA trade negotiations by the Mulroney Administration in the 80s) The accent I’m talking about is — picture this: You’re in Medicine Hat. Your furnace broke. Your friend’s cousin’s uncle comes over to fix it. He tells you, “If I can’t find the solenoid we’re hooped, pal.” You stand in the corner, like a pervert, staring at him while he looks inside a vent holding a flashlight between his teeth. He says, “You don’t have to watch me.” You say, “Yeah. I know.”

Are women as funny as men?

No. And maybe this is my conservatism speaking, but I don’t think women should speak unless spoken to. I think women should be stored in silos and fed a nutrient dense slop through a tube.

Even though you write non-fiction, your essays are very poetic in style. You’re clearly very influenced by W.B. Yeats, Philip Larkin, W.H. Auden, and Sylvia Plath. Is there anyone else I’m missing?

That’s so kind of you to say unprompted. I read a lot of poetry. I really like Bukowski. He has a line where he says the women he sleeps with remind him of buttered toast with the butter melted in. I really like that line. Bukowski gets a bad rap for being a misogynist, but I don’t think the people who say that about him know what misogyny is. Bukowski doesn’t hate women. He just hates. He’s hateful. I think the way Larkin writes about women is far more misogynistic because he never really writes about them. They’re mentioned on occasion, but only as projections of his desire, his loneliness, his insecurities. When Bukowski writes about women, he writes about them specifically. When he talks about his dead girlfriend, Jane, he speaks about her like she was a person — which a lot of women are. He says she wore black shoes and cursed when she drank. She owned a green dress and was the only person he knew who truly understood the futility of the arrangement of life. When he tells us that “what she was will not happen again,” it’s sad because she sounded really cool. He loved her. And through him, we love her. In Bukowski’s world, women are nasty, slutty, benevolent, saintly & wicked. They’re human.

Did you have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky?

No. Well, she came onto me. Wait. I worded that weird. I mean, she tried to pursue me romantically. But I was all like, “Listen, toots. Not interested. I have Hillary at home, and as you can probably tell by her general vibe and demeanour, she’s fire in the sack.” And that was that. End of story.

What did you mean when you said, “Tell Sam Harris he can come over here and wage jihad on this pussy?”

Next question.

What’s the best episode of Star Trek Next Generation?

Data’s Day. Or the one where Dr. Crusher makes love to a ghost.

What’s your favourite Lana Del Rey song?

My favourite Lana song is Tulsa Jesus Freak — a song I don’t understand, at all. It’s about God. And sex. And drinking gin. She pronounces Arkansas, like Ar-kansas — the way it’s spelt, which is not the way it’s pronounced. I like it when she says, “If you never pray, you’ll never learn,” then tells someone she’ll trade her body for a can of gin. I don’t know why I like all those things. I just like them. I even like how the title looks, Tulsa. Jesus. Freak.

How are doing? What have you been up to lately?

I’m happy. I’ve been writing a lot.

buy me a coffee

When Meet The Grahams dropped, I sped to my brother’s house like I was late to the colosseum to watch a public execution. The summer of ‘24 — the summer of the Kendrick/Drake beef — was the summer I spent every day at my brother’s house. We studied every diss track for hours, annotating and authenticating each verse like theologians desperate to unravel all the mysteries contained within this decade-long feud. Meet The Grahams promised apocalypse; a confirmation of everything vicious and triumphant in the national character. It was a beautiful, violent salute to the fantastic possibilities of rap music in this country. Meet The Grahams sent a chill up my spine that has never gone away.

When the song ended, my brother asked me what I thought:

“Is any of that true?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, “but I don’t think it matters.”

We both concluded Kendrick had won.

After Meet the Grahams, and its successor Not Like Us, nothing came of the rumours surrounding Drake — no victims spoke out, and no charges were filed. When I watched Kendrick perform Not Like Us at the Super Bowl Halftime Show last September, and heard thousands of his fans chant the lyrics, “He’s tryna strike a chord, and it’s probably A-minor,” It made me think about C.S. Lewis and “all the victories he seemed to score from his cleverness, at which, while angels wept, the audience laughed.” And it made me think about Christopher Hitchens, the angels he didn’t believe in, and the audiences so mesmerized by his wit that they failed to notice his outright refusal to engage with the subjects he was supposed to be discussing.

This essay will be, in part, a critique of men whose mastery of their craft far surpasses my own. And I’m painfully aware that if they were to take offence at anything I had written, they could insult me so beautifully, and with such cruel precision, I’d regret ever picking up a pen. (Luckily for me, the likelihood of either of them reading this is pretty low — extremely low for Christopher Hitchens.) The reason I decided to write about them is precisely because I admire them so much. My envy of their rhetorical genius, and the devastating force with which they wield it, has always represented, to me, a warning. A warning about the temptations of cleverness — the influence of applause — and the vigilance it requires to orient ourselves toward the truth, even when the audience demands the opposite.

What’s Plato Got to Do With It?

I know you’re all chomping at the bit to hear me talk about Plato, so I will. Plato’s Gorgias is a dialogue about rhetoric: the art (or knack) of persuasive speech — all the little tricks and techniques we use to convince an audience. Gorgias begins with Socrates arriving at the house of — none other than, you guessed it — Gorgias, a teacher of rhetoric and the most famous rhetorician in all of Athens. Like housewives hocking Tupperware or Avon products, teachers of rhetoric would throw parties at their homes, showing off their goods in the form of long speeches to lure prospective students.

Socrates shows up late, blames his friend Chaerephon, and then tells everyone — after missing Gorgias’ speech — that he’ll leave if they don’t answer his weird-ass questions in a manner “satisfactory to him.” Socrates may have been the most influential figure in Western philosophy, but he was an violently rude houseguest.

Callicles (one of the guests at this very dorky house party) asks Gorgias and Socrates to formally discuss the nature of rhetoric. And because that’s the only reason he showed up at all, Socrates agrees. Gorgias, however, only consents after hearing the cheers of the crowd, remarking to himself, “I should be disgraced if I refuse.”

Chapter 1: “If He Hatin’, Disrespect, You Better Follow Up With Hands.”

The Rhetoric of Kendrick Lamar

The beginning of every rap beef starts with the phrase, “I should be disgraced if I refuse.” Gorgias isn’t just a dialogue about the nature of rhetoric, or its harmful consequences when used improperly. It’s about what motivates us to use it in the first place.

Back in 2014, when Kendrick was asked about his beef with Drake, he said, “I can’t see myself going bar for bar with [him]. We’re two different types of artists.” It wasn’t until he heard J. Cole’s verse on Drake’s First Person Shooter, where Cole refers to himself, Drake, and Kendrick as “the big three,” or the three greatest rappers of all time, that Kendrick decided to reignite this decade-old feud.

Kendrick’s response on Like That was an assertion of dominance: “There ain’t no big three. It’s just big me.” The argument was simple: There is no argument. I’m the best rapper. This changed on May 3, 2024. Twenty minutes after Drake released Family Matters, where he accused Kendrick of beating his wife, Kendrick dropped Meet the Grahams — a blood-curdling track where he accuses Drake of hiding a second child, and speaks directly, and ominously, to Drake’s son, Adonis. After Meet the Grahams, there were no rules; no code to abide by. And once Not Like Us dropped, Kendrick wasn’t proving he was a better rapper than Drake. He was proving he could kill him.

It’s always felt strange to me that Kendrick felt the need to prove himself at all, especially to Drake. Kendrick’s status as a rapper was already settled. He wrote masterpieces. He annihilated on his features. Eminem called him a top-tier lyricist, and Kanye said, “If you rap against Kendrick, you will lose.” Whereas, if someone told you they were a Drake fan, you’d just assume they weren’t really into rap. Drake was tolerated by other rappers. Kendrick was revered.

I don’t know what was going on behind the scenes, but I’ve always wondered whether Mr. Morale was to blame. Mr. Morale and The Big Steppers was Kendrick’s return to music after five years of silence. It was his most personal and intellectually complex album. He talked about his infidelity, the childhood abuse he endured, his desire to overcome his addictions to become a better father to his children. Mr. Morale was Kendrick’s soul. And no one liked it. F.D. Signifier said, “[His] fans were put-off by the sheer humanity of the record.” Morale won him a Grammy, but it had zero bangers — and you sure as hell couldn’t put it on the aux”. During the summer of 2022, while I was crying in my bedroom listening to Mother, I Sober, the cool kids were at the club listening to Nice For What.

I don’t think Kendrick’s verse on Like That was a response to Cole, or to Drake, at all — I think it was a response to the culture. The culture that ignored him at his most vulnerable; that dismissed his genius in favour of Drake’s quick, sloppy, club bangers. Cole’s verse on First Person Shooter presented Kendrick with an opportunity; an opportunity to reassert himself in the culture; to regain His blissful seat.

When Kendrick tells us, on Euphoria, “It’s not just me, I’m what the culture feeling,” he’s admitting to Socrates’ criticism of Callicles — that he is a lover of the demos: a lover of the people, of the culture itself. He warns Callicles that despite his intelligence, he dares not contradict the opinions of his lover. He tells him, “As [the culture] changes, you change, backwards and forwards.” As long as he seeks the praise of the public, his opinions will never fully be his own.

It was the love of the demos, the desire to be perceived as best — which was questioned explicitly by Cole on First Person Shooter and implicitly by the poor reception of Mr. Morale, and by Drake’s popularity and commercial success — that, I believe, motivated Kendrick to write Meet the Grahams and Not Like Us.

I’m less worried about whether the accusations he made against Drake on these tracks are false — in time, we might discover Kendrick was right all along — I’m worried that when I listened to him making them, I didn’t care if they were true.

The reason Socrates believed that rhetoric was an ignoble craft was because its success benefited only the rhetorician, not the audience he spoke to. The rhetorician’s ability to persuade grew in proportion to the ignorance of his citizenry. It was not only that the rhetorician’s speech didn’t edify the public, his speech was made more powerful by their ignorance.

For those of us who already didn’t like Drake before the beef, we had no reason to doubt what Kendrick was saying. Every accusation made against Drake confirmed a belief we already held. Kendrick knew Meet the Grahams and Not Like Us would be rhetorically effective because our bias against Drake primed us to believe them. He knew he could say anything. And he knew we would love it.

Chapter 2: “F*ck Being Rational, Give ‘Em What They Asked For.”

The Rhetoric of Christopher Hitchens

Even during the New Atheist phase of my youth, I was always a little too squeamish to fully enjoy Christopher Hitchens. I’d pause his debates halfway through, and think to myself, “Oh God. He’d say the meanest shit about me. This guy would fucking hate me, man.” My insecurities aside, Hitchens was, undeniably, the victor of these debates. He could make the Christian apologists he debated look like country bumpkins who stumbled into the lecture hall by accident. The speeches of scholars turned into the ramblings of rubes and yokels, who never cottoned much to public speakin’, but gee, they’d love to give it a try!

Like Kanye said of Kendrick, “If you rap against him, you’ll lose.” Richard Dawkins said of Hitchens, “If you’re invited to debate Christopher Hitchens, decline.”

In a debate about God’s existence in 2008, Frank Turek asks Hitchens to justify his belief in an objective morality without a belief in God.

Hitch responds to this question by bringing up our boy, Socrates. He says, “Socrates answered it like this, when he was on trial for his life — accused of blasphemy, by the way. He said, he had an inner daemon, a spirit, an inner critic, a conscience.” He says Adam Smith believed in a similar, internal guiding voice, and so did C.S. Lewis, who attributed it to the Divine, but didn’t improve upon what Adam Smith said, or what Socrates said when standing trial for his own life. Hitchens tells the audience that anyone with the right moral equipment knows the difference between right and wrong — and if you don’t, he feels very sorry for you. We all have a moral instinct. (We don’t need some celestial dictator telling us what to do!) Anyone with the right moral equipment knows the difference between right and wrong. Well, except for sociopaths and psychopaths who are deaf to this moral instinct. They don’t have the right moral equipment.

If Turek had said to Hitchens, “Hey! List a bunch of people who said we had a conscience!” This would have been a fantastic response, with a fun twist ending. But he didn’t. He wanted to know, “Of Hitchen’s moral intuitions, how does he know if they are objectively correct?”

When Hitchens attempts to answer this question, he appeals to the existence of a shared moral instinct that exists within all of us, but when he brings up the existence of sociopaths and psychopaths (who do not share this shared moral instinct) he introduces an exception he refuses to address. If morality is grounded in our instincts, and instincts vary, then instincts cannot be the basis for an objectivity morality. We have returned to the realm of the subjective. Whose moral instincts do we trust?

If the people who are moral are the people who agree with Christopher Hitchens, and the people who are immoral are the people who disagree with him, morality is grounded in the judgement of Christopher Hitchens himself. Which, I don’t know, kind of makes him sound like a celestial dictator.

The reason Hitchens got away with not answering Turek’s question was because he was too busy answering ours. He was not participating in an honest dialectic because the audience didn’t show up for an honest dialectic. They wanted smart by proxy, superiority by association. And Hitchens, like he always did, delivered. And this is how he did it:

Starting his response by saying, “Socrates answered it like this,” does a few things. First, it subtly denigrates the question, but more importantly, invoking Socrates borrows clout. Socrates, who we all agree is very smart, already agrees with me. So now, in order to refute me, you have to refute Socrates. (Note to the reader: I would never invoke Socrates to help carry the weight of an argument. It’s a cheap trick, performed by charlatans. I’d never stoop so low. My consciousness wouldn’t allow it — I have the right moral equipment.)

The really interesting thing Hitchens does — something I didn’t have the balls to do in this essay — is compare himself archetypically to Socrates, which is a bold move. He says, “Socrates was accused of blasphemy.” And we think, as if it’s our own idea, “Oh my god… so is Christopher Hitchens.” So when he finally lands the, “when standing trial for his own life” bar, it’s not a fact about Socrates, it’s a statement about his own moral courage. These little Socrates interjections are 1000% irrelevant to the question Turek asked, but they are not at all irrelevant to what the audience is asking of Hitchens. When he’s able to position the dogmatic beliefs of the Athenians, who executed Socrates, alongside the dogmatic beliefs of the Christian apologists foolish enough to debate him, we’re at the colosseum. (Well, Athens, technically. Socrates was executed in Athens. I won’t lie to you just to maintain the metaphor.)

When faced with a question he couldn’t answer (or didn’t want to) Hitchens, like a comic would, played the room. His response to Turek’s question was so dumb because he’s so smart — he was clever enough to get away without answering. He knew he didn’t have to answer the question. And he knew we would love it.

{Please considering supporting me and my work. I’ve gone bankrupt buying books to make myself smarter to please you, except for this essay — I found a PDF copy of Gorgias.}

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Chapter 3:

The Counterfeit Art

The reason Socrates referred to rhetoric as the counterfeit art of politics, is because rhetoric has no knowledge of the good. Its aim is singular: the pleasure of its listener. Its benefit: the rhetorician’s power.

The debate and the diss track are both demonstrations of persuasion without knowledge of the good. They seek above all to win. They are both theatrical performances designed for our entertainment, in which participants are pitted against each other in a battle of rhetorical skill. They diverge from their true art when their structure leaves no room for self-accusation — when the cost of looking stupid or weak becomes higher than the reward of truth. Both the debate and diss track are framed incorrectly; they produce winners or losers. And the humility that is necessary for self-accusation, is mistaken for weakness. When you aim to win, or more precisely, when you aim toward being perceived as the winner, you are not aimed toward truth.

Like cookery, rhetoric seeks to please at the cost of our health. And Politics (which in Socrates’ day meant the art of caring for, and governing over, one’s people), like medicine, seeks to heal at the cost of our displeasure. Socrates uses the cookery/medicine distinction often in Gorgias. In fact, he takes a very anti-pastry stance in the dialogue I find disturbing. I love pastries. I’m eating a danish right now. It’s lemon. And it’s exceptionally good. We shouldn’t avoid that which is pleasurable, but we should understand its nature. We should know the harm caused by its excess. And we should not mistake the pleasurable for the good.

As the audience, we should treat the debate and the diss track for what they are: exhibitions of rhetorical skill. And as the rhetorician, we should be asking ourselves the question Socrates asks Gorgias, “What good will this produce?” When we don’t ask that question, when our power is aimed improperly, we usually end up regretting it.

It might seem strange to you that I’ve treated Kendrick’s diss tracks with such moral seriousness. And I wouldn’t have, if Kendrick had not done so first. On Reincarnated, a song released after the beef, Kendrick accuses himself of manipulating the masses through his music. He says his only aim was power: “The only factor [he] respected was raisin’ the bar.” He didn’t follow his conscience, he only followed the “instincts [that] sent material straight to the charts” On the track, God questions Kendrick, much like how Socrates questions Gorgias, in a joint search for truth. After their conversation, Kendrick admits to using his gifts to sow division, and promises God that from now on, he’ll use them to bring understanding.

I don’t have a perfect ending for Hitchens’ story. Although he was a man who seldom criticized himself, at least publicly, he knew he often used cleverness as a replacement for argument. He said once in an interview, “[If] I skip a stage in the argument to make an inexpensive point, especially if it works, and I get the laugh, I feel a pang.” That pang, I think, is what C.S. Lewis talked about when he heard the angels weeping.

The vices of Kendrick Lamar and Christopher Hitchens were encouraged by the very artforms they dominated. Their sophistry was an occupational hazard, encouraged by us: the people whose desires they were fulfilling.

The real villain of this essay isn’t Kendrick Lamar or Christopher Hitchens, it’s you: the audience. And your lust for entertainment, which is, of course, my lust for entertainment. It’s the giddiness I felt at the prospect of watching a rapper I mildly dislike be accused of crimes he likely didn’t commit. The thrill of watching Christopher Hitchens insult and embarrass anyone I felt was an idiot — replaced by the thrill of watching Jordan Peterson insult the New Atheists, once I had decided they were idiots — replaced by the thrill of me insulting Peterson, after deciding he was one.

It is the audience the rhetorician supplicates. It is the audience who favours cleverness over truth, cruelty over compassion, spectacle over substance. The audience oftentimes awards the worst within us. This is why the rhetorician is endowed with the responsibility to know the good, and to teach the good.

Chapter 4: “I’m showin’ up as your friend.”

The Rhetoric of Jermaine Lamar Cole

I wonder whether people will remember to mention Cole when they tell the story of what is now called the Kendrick/Drake beef. His story might be too messy to include. Throughout his career, he followed the advice Kendrick gave (but failed to follow himself) on Man at the Garden: “I’m showin’ up as your friend. I see you as a human first. Telling truths better than your next of kin.” So when he released his response to the beef, 7 Minute Drill, on his album Might Delete Later, everyone was confused. 7 Minute Drill wasn’t just mean-spirited, it was bad — lyrically, conceptually, sonically. The only good thing about 7 Minute Drill was that he Might Delete It Later. He did. After releasing it, he bowed out of the beef.

I wanted to frame this essay around the idea of counterfeit arts. Debate, at least the kind Hitchens participated in, was the counterfeit art of dialectic. Which meant the diss track had to be a counterfeit art as well. But then I thought about Snow On Tha Bluff and realized it wasn’t that simple.

Snow On Tha Bluff is, for all intents and purposes, a diss track. It’s a response to rapper, Noname, who criticized Cole and other rappers, including Kendrick, for failing to publicly support protest movements. On Snow On Tha Bluff, Cole’s aim isn’t victory, it’s truth.

When Polus asks Socrates if there are any beneficial uses of rhetoric, he says: “Let [the rhetorician] accuse himself and his own relations, and using rhetoric to this end, that his and their unjust actions may be made manifest, and that they themselves may be delivered from injustice, which is the greatest evil. If [the rhetorician] did this, Polus, rhetoric would indeed be useful.”

This is exactly what Cole does. He starts the track by addressing his own audience, introducing Noname as someone worth listening to, “People be thinkin’ I’m deep, intelligent, fooled by my college degree. My IQ is average, there’s a young lady out there, she way smarter than me.”

Before criticizing Noname, he recapitulates her position. And when he does criticize her, he doesn’t attack her, he attacks her ideas. He tells Noname she’s condescending to the very same people who would benefit from hearing her message. He says, “If I could make one more suggestion respectfully, I would say it’s more effective to treat people like children. Understandin’ the time and love and patience that’s needed to grow,” because “what the fuck is the point of preaching your message to those that already believe what you believe?”

He ends the song by accusing himself: “[Sometimes I] feel like a slave that somehow done saved enough coins to buy his way up outta slavery. Thinkin’ just maybe, in my pursuit to make life so much better for me and my babies. I done betrayed the very same people that look at me like I’m some kind of a hero.” Cole admits to himself, “Maybe deep down I know I ain’t doing enough.”

When my brother first showed me Snow On Tha Bluff, I cried. My brother nodded at me in agreement, “Yeah, man. It’s tough.”

In Gorgias, when Socrates asks about the nature of rhetoric, everyone keeps talking about how much influence the rhetorician has; how powerful rhetoric can be. Socrates keeps saying, “Sure. But toward what end?”

Snow On Tha Bluff is Cole’s answer to that question. He rejects a structure that demands blood. By using his rhetorical skill to help his friend instead of destroy his enemy, he removes the ego that makes self-accusation impossible. The counterfeit art of the diss track can return to its true form: hip-hop — an art form that seeks, above all, to tell the truth.

When Cole wrote 7 Minute Drill, he was aiming to kill and missed. But if he had succeeded, he may have never rediscovered his purpose as a rapper. On Port Antonio, a song he wrote after dropping out of the beef, a friend tells him, “If you refuse to shoot the gun, don’t mean the gun ain’t deadly.” Cole says, “Guess a gun ain’t what I’m tryna be.”

For the last two months, I’ve been trying to write an essay about rhetoric. Naturally, that means I need to have an uncompromising and erudite understanding of Plato, Aristotle, and every other philosopher who has ever written on the topic. John Mulaney said once that before he goes on stage he always whispers to himself, “I wish I were funny. I wish I were funny. I wish I were funny.” Every time I stare at an empty Google Doc, which is most days, I think to myself, “I wish I were smart. I wish I were smart. I wish I were smart.” I never cottoned much to school learning; in fact, I barely graduated high school. And sometimes, when I write, I can feel my lack of education leak out onto the page. I’m never sure what to do about that. I think I’ll always feel like I’m tricking people into reading my work; tricking them into liking me.

That being said, I’m very grateful to have tricked so many of you.

Here’s some mini-essays I’ve written, on topics which may, or may not, interest you:

In Defence of the Parasocial

During the pandemic, I used to walk around my neighbourhood for hours talking to myself. At the time, I lived with three schizophrenic men (I ran an Approved Home, which is sort of like foster care for schizophrenics), so my eccentric behaviours were never questioned by my roommates. It wasn’t until I moved back home with my parents that I started to realize how strange my habits were. I would sit outside for hours loudly laughing and gesturing to empty lawn chairs. If questioned, I’d say, “Oh. Sorry. I was just talking to myself.” I wasn’t talking to myself. I was talking to my friends.

I don’t know how most people experienced the pandemic. If, to them, it was just an inconvenience; a hiatus from normal life. But the only words I’ve ever found to describe my experience of the pandemic come from Bukowski: “Very few people know the terror of one person. Aching in one place. Alone. Untouched. Unspoken to. Watering a plant.” Loneliness, true loneliness, feels like terror.

To compensate, my mind created a second world alongside my own. I would spend hours every day talking to Norm Macdonald, writing jokes together, reading Alice Munro, and arguing about Dostoevsky. I was an accomplished writer, a beloved stand-up, a well-travelled journalist. In this second world, I had everything I ever wanted. It kept me alive, until things got better, which they eventually did.

I’m sure this would be an embarrassing admission for most people. But I’ve always been impressed by it — that what I didn’t have, the experiences I was starved of, my mind was able to invent. It’s a good thing, I think, to fall in love with dead comedians. I wouldn’t have finished Anna Karenina if I didn’t have Norm Macdonald asking me to.

I’ll never quit my day job.

I work as a housekeeper at the hospice where my Grandmother died last June. Naturally, people find this strange — stranger, when I tell them how much I love my job.

Last April, my brother called me from The Rockyview Hospital saying Gram had high blood pressure. She might have had a stroke. When I got to the ER she begged me to take her back home, “I’m fine, Brin. I just didn’t sleep well last night.”

She had stage 4 pancreatic cancer. She was sent to a hospice five minutes away from our house. When my brother and I got to the hospice he whispered to me, “It’s nice here. It has a good vibe.” It did. The nurses doted on her. The cooks made her bacon exactly how she liked it: “extra, extra crispy.” The volunteers brought her anything she needed. The months I spent with her there were some of the happiest of my life.

I started working at the hospice four months after she died. And there hasn’t been a single day I haven’t been excited to go to work. When my job comes up in conversation people tell me, “Ugh. That must be heartbreaking.” Last week, a patient asked me if I could bring her a warm blanket from the tub room. After I gave her the blanket, she held my hand, and said, “Thank you, love.” in the exact tone my Grandmother did when she was alive.

Working at a hospice does something to your heart — but I don’t think it breaks it. I think it softens it. Or cracks it open. It lets the light in.

A few weeks before she died, my Grandmother said to me, “Oh, Brin. Wouldn’t this be a lovely place to work?” She was right. It is.

I <3 John Kiriakou

After watching six hours a day of John Kiriakou interviews, I feel like I’m the one who caught Abu Zubaydah. It wouldn’t surprise me if I were fluent in Arabic and Greek. And God, do I ever hate that John Brennan.

Biologically, I’m a woman, but spiritually I’m an incel. And because of this, my TikTok algorithm has been neatly divided into John Kiriakou edits and Clavicular memes, with a little Nick Fuentes thrown in for good measure. The rise of John Kiriakou’s popularity, especially with young men, made me think about the place Jordan Peterson used to hold in our culture. For the lonely and resentful, (like me) Jordan used to be a surrogate father, reminding us to carry our cross and make our beds, but his obsession with the culture war has turned him into a strange caricature of what he once used to be. People no longer care about what he has to say — they know what he’s going to say — he’s on Twitter right now calling Elmo a Marxist slut.

buy me a copy of Das Kapital

Under the strange edits of John, meme-ified into incoherence, I read a lot of comments saying things like, “I lowkey really respect this guy. He’s really brave.” They’re right. John Kiriakou is someone worthy of our respect and admiration. He went to prison for refusing to be a part of the CIA’s inhumane and illegal torture program. That’s lowkey goated. It’s so strange to me that the young men who admire John are the same young men who think Nick Fuentes should run for president. They’re the same young men who think it’s cool that Clavicular smashed his jaw with a hammer to give him a better looksmaxxing ratio.

I’m not sure how men choose their role models. I see no similarities between the inarticulate, slow-brained Andrew Tate, who can barely formulate a sentence, and Jordan Peterson, who can recite the entirety of The Brothers Karamazov from memory, but I know their audiences overlap. When Jordan compared (pre-sex trafficking conviction) Andrew Tate to the Beast from Beauty and The Beast, and said he could be redeemed, I knew we were cooked. When good men like Jordan make excuses for reprehensible men like Andrew Tate because they believe they’re on the same side in the culture war, it damages young men’s perception of what is acceptable and what isn’t. It’s acceptable to say women find being a mother fulfilling. It’s unacceptable to sex traffic them.

I don’t know a lot about John Kiriakou, and maybe he’s a rapist, child murderer, who knows! Time will say nothing but I told you so. But as a connoisseur of internet misogyny, I can tell by how he speaks about the women in his life that he loves and respects them. He talks about how intelligent and capable his female bosses at the CIA were. He refers to both of his ex-wives as his wife, which makes for confusing storytelling, but shows how much he cared about both of them. He talks about his male and female colleagues, his friends, and his opponents with the same amount of respect or disrespect he feels they deserve.

That’s why waves of relief washed over me when I heard him disavow Nick Fuentes.

If John Kiriakou is the internet’s next male role model, I’m more than relieved. In fact, I think it’s highkey goated.

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Tell me where you were when Clav was mogged by the ASU Frat Leader! (I was at home eating tortilla chips in bed. Sad!)

Like David Lynch, for Lana, the dream logic prevails. Our culture largely ignores dreams because their interpretation defies modern analysis. And our modern music critics, mutilate the qualitative experience in order to present a quantitative diagnosis. Everything must be organized, evaluated, and dissected. Ratings must be assigned. Subjected to the analysis of our times, Marilyn Monroe is dethroned by her negative canthal tilt. Her position as the American Aphrodite has been undermined by a cabal of sexless technocrats. Art is no longer needed. The mysteries of eros have been illuminated to us by rats with cocaine buttons and sildenafil prescriptions. (How dismayed Botticelli would be to discover his Venus has a recessed maxilla!) Her errors counted and points subtracted, the womb can no longer be a place we long to return. Woman, reduced to utility, is stripped of her magic. Our culture, starved of love, rots in numbers.

This world, ruled by empty materialism, is not equipped to interpret Lana Del Rey. She belongs to the chthonian; the subconscious; the uninterpretable underworld. She is beyond interpretation. She is beyond good and evil. And like Nietzsche, whose questions for the culture, when removed from their context, lead only to confusion, she never quite means what you think she means. The men that praise Norman Fucking Rockwell, and condemn Born to Die, enter her world irreverently, with hiking boots on. They approach her work like cartographers, searching for incisive arguments and a well-maintained thesis. As long as we approach Lana’s work in this way — mapping her terrain instead of experiencing her atmosphere — we will be doomed to misunderstand her work.

If you were to ask me what White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter was about, I would ask you what colour time was. A student of philosophy herself, Lana knows better than anyone that the analysis of her work has been burdened with category errors: “Is the ocean a Republican or a Democrat?” “Is the moon a feminist or a trad wife?” Her critics look up at the night sky, puzzled, mumbling to themselves, “Ah, yes, but what is it trying to say about the culture?”

Lana often responds to her critics, but she always sings to me. To Lana, our ears will always be the most absolutely remarkable things; worlds in which she makes images grand and classical appear. I can’t fall asleep without her. No one, except my mother, has ever really loved me the way she does.

That being said, I’d give it a 6/10.

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I want to leave the big-hitters unpaid because I’d like for people to read them, but I thought it would be cool to share ideas for upcoming essays, notes about my writing process, and things I find interesting but may be too controversial or personal for the public.

THE BIRTH OF THE SNOOPY ESSAY: HOW I WRITE

I’ve always been fascinated by people’s writing process — their little quirks and rituals. Jerry Seinfeld writes all his jokes on a yellow legal pad. He writes them in small, half-formed bursts and sometimes doesn’t complete them until years later. Truman Capote wrote lying down, smoking cigarettes. Victor Hugo wrote in the nude, which is odd, but whatever gets you there, I guess.

I begin all my essays title first. Snoopy was originally “The Idolatry of Snoopy: The Rightful Heir to Diogenes.” (I changed idolatry to philosophy because it made more practical sense, even though the phrase “The Idolatry of Snoopy” is much funnier.)

I split my research into two sections: (1) practical research and (2) tonal research.

The practical research for Snoopy was relatively boring. I reread the Stoics: Epictetus, Seneca, a little Zeno, and of course Marcus Aurelius (of whom I happen to be a direct descendant — for more information on this, contact my mother, who insists it’s true). I studied Diogenes, to whom, as far as I know, I am not related. (Bummer.) And, of course, I read as many Peanuts comics as I could get my hands on, along with all the specials.

I wanted the essay to be written in a very specific tone. I attempted this with the help of the great orator and polemicist Christopher Hitchens and the World’s First Incel, my favourite philosopher, the one and only, Arthur Schopenhauer. You are what you eat! And by devouring as much Hitch and Schopenhauer as I could stomach, I was able to give the essay the annoyingly clever, self-serious tone it required.

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The essay you’re about to read is very different from “Snoopy”. It isn’t as tightly structured, clever, or measured. It is however, to me, at least, very funny and very meaningful. And hopefully, and most importantly, helpful to those who choose to read it.

I’ll return to writing clearer, more expressly philosophical pieces in the future. (I haven’t forgotten about Woodstock.)

Without further ado,

HOW TO SURVIVE IN THE UPSIDE DOWN:

The Metaphysics of Play

TRIGGER WARNING: Jordan B. Peterson, Arthur Schopenhauer, Matt Rife.

STRANGER THINGS SPOILERS (Seasons 1–4) (There are no spoilers from Season 5, so you’re safe if you’re not caught up. Also, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings spoilers — but you’ve had plenty of time.)

“Play HUMBLE. by Kendrick Lamar.”

“What?”

“Play HUMBLE. by Kendrick Lamar.”

“Like… right now?”

“No. Austin. If I ever get stuck in the Upside Down, play HUMBLE. by Kendrick Lamar.”

On my eighteenth birthday, I had one request: for my brother to perform HUMBLE. as a spoken-word poem. He had performed it many times before, usually on the train ride to school. It originated as a punishment for all the spoken-word poems I had forced him to watch. It backfired, terribly. I loved it. It put me into absolute hysterics. It still does.

Earlier this spring, in the parking lot of the Rockyview Hospital, after we found out our grandmother had been diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, neither of us knew what to say. It was four in the morning, and a thick layer of black fog stretched across 14th Street. 14th Street led to every place a kid would want to be: the waterpark, the reservoir, our grandma’s house. I asked him if he remembered going to Heritage Park with Gram when we were kids.

He said, “I remember syrup sandwiches and crime allowances, finesse him with some counterfeits, in fact, I’m downing this.”

(For those uninitiated into Kendrick’s discography, those are the first lines of HUMBLE.)

We both laughed. Then cried. He reached for my hand, “Yeah, Brin. I remember going to Heritage Park. It was fun.”

This essay will not be the most intellectually ambitious I’ve written. It isn’t going to wow you with its elegance or philosophical complexity. I have nothing to prove; no grand thesis to defend. Instead, I’m going to spend the next eight pages telling you something you already know:

Love can defeat evil.

Love is our greatest defence against the tragedies of life.

And our most inexhaustible source of love, and maybe the most powerful, is play.

Our greatest evidence for this comes through story. The more you look for this pattern, the more you will find it:

A hero (who is always you) is surrounded by insurmountable darkness.

His vision is clouded.

His path is obscured.

There is no way forward.

The darkness preys upon him and feeds on his worst memories.

He is reminded of his failures, his humiliations.

Every betrayal. Every regret. Every sin.

He is convinced that the journey he has embarked upon is a fool’s errand.

His love is naïve. His bravery, futile.

There is no point in trying:

He has already lost.

He starts to believe this — until he is reminded of something: (And this is the part that fascinates me.) Our hero is not saved by recalling the purpose of his mission, his moral duty, or his ethical obligations. He is redeemed through memories of gardening, Material Girl by Madonna, by the smell of crayons.

In The Lord of the Rings, Samwise does not tell Frodo, “If we do not destroy the ring, The Shire will burn.” He asks him if he remembers the taste of strawberries.

In Harry Potter, the most difficult spell to produce, the one that Harry uses to save two innocent lives, is the Patronus Charm. A charm produced through memories of joy, and most reliably through laughter.

In Stranger Things, Max is saved through memories of going to the mall with Eleven; trying on silly hats, eating ice cream, and playing pranks. These are the memories that raise her from the dead.

When we watch these scenes, we see nothing trivial in them. We understand them intuitively and without question. I’d like to spend this essay questioning these intuitions. And in doing so, uncover their philosophical groundings and their significance as recurrent literary themes.

These are the mysteries that stand before us:

How did Will survive in the Upside Down?

Why was a mere Hobbit chosen to carry the Ring to Mordor?

How does a Patronus charm work?

And what the hell does any of this have to do with Arthur Schopenhauer? (Very little, it turns out. But he’s briefly mentioned in the section about music.)

Most importantly, I’m writing this essay to give you, dear reader, the ability to survive when the darkness comes, which it will.

PLAY AS THE ANTITHESIS OF EVIL

The red-pilled among us, may notice the title of this section is borrowed from Jordan Peterson. “Play is the antithesis of evil” or “play is the antithesis of tyranny” is something Jordan says all the time — sometimes randomly — confusing the hell out of his guests. Matt Rife will be talking about getting cancelled and Jordan will go, “Yeah, ya know, play is the antithesis of evil.” And Matt is forced to nod along, as if that has anything to do with what he just said.

I’m going to explain to you, and to Matt Rife, what he means by that. (Or at least, what I think he means.)

THE METAPHYSICS OF PLAY

Metaphysics is a confusing and controversial word (so I’ve recently learned from ), and it may be a word unfamiliar to you, so let’s clarify our terms:

Without getting into its history and etymology, metaphysics is a word philosophers use to describe claims about the nature of reality: What does it mean to exist? How do we determine what is real? Does anything exist beyond the physical world?

So for example, nihilist metaphysics claims that life has no inherent meaning or value, whereas Christian metaphysics claims that meaning is found through our relationship with God. Utilitarian metaphysics argues that value lies in measurable outcomes, whereas deontological metaphysics argues that value lies in moral duty, not in measurable outcomes.

If none of that made sense to you, that’s alright. All you need to know is, when I talk about the metaphysics of play, what I mean is: How does play function as an aspect of our reality?

THE FUNCTION OF PLAY

Play is an ancient and unbelievably complex phenomenon. Our attempts to explain its function arrived long after its practise. For this reason, I believe our best explanations for the importance of play are presented through story. When we read about play, we learn nothing we do not already know. The role of play is understood through practise and reflected back to us through story. However, the purpose of understanding the function of play gives us the necessary framework to fully draw upon its power.

PLAY AS PERFORMING AN IDEAL

Play is not simply fun. Play is a structure bound by rules from which spontaneity emerges. This is true of all forms of play. Referees, conductors, dungeon masters, and the audience, in the case of stand-up, all serve to enforce the agreed upon structure. When the structure is broken, play dissolves. The whistle is blown. The game has ended.

These play structures are based in reciprocity and agreed upon voluntarily. This is perhaps best exemplified in the relationship between the stand-up comedian and his audience. The relationship between the stand-up and his audience is one of reciprocity, in which his play invites our attention and our attention invites his play. If the audience refuses to give their attention or the comic refuses to perform, it is no longer stand-up. It is a lunatic in front of a crowd. (But I don’t want to take potshots at Joe Rogan. He’s a good guy.)

Paradoxically, from this bound structure, freedom emerges. When we play, we are practising freedom in the highest regard. Play is not freedom in the sense that one can do whatever one pleases, for play cannot exist at all if one does whatever one pleases. Play is freedom because play is a world we enter into voluntarily and with the express purpose of benefiting all those who choose to participate.

Play reminds us of, and allows us to practise, our most sacred values: fairness, reciprocity, justice, and joy. It exalts the talents of the individual while protecting the rights of the group.

Simone Weil said, “You can only experience goodness by doing it.” And when we play, we are acting out the good. In Stranger Things, the hours the boys spend practising these values by playing Dungeons and Dragons are carried with them when the real monsters emerge. They understand the horrors of their reality through the lens of the game. Will survives because he remembers that he is not just Will Byers, he is Will the Wise.

EVIL AS THE SEDUCTION OF UTILITY

In order to position play as the antithesis of evil, I should clarify my definition of evil. Or at least, a definition of evil as understood through these stories.

The villains of Stranger Things, Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, share a primary motivation: a desire for power; a desire to dominate creation rather than participate in it. This desire for power strips the human spirit of its inherent value. A man is measured by his function. He is reduced to his utility.

Dr. Brenner, seduced by scientific pride, values Eleven only so far as she is useful to him. She becomes a means to achieving scientific progress. She is reduced to a number.

Voldemort, driven by the promise of immortality, mutilates his own soul to preserve his survival. Life is treated instrumentally to the degree that his desire for immortality becomes more important than the integrity of the soul itself.

Saruman, convinced of the inevitability of evil, aligns himself with Sauron; the ultimate manifestation of power for power’s sake.

In the worldview of these villains, all relationships are reduced to utility. Humans are objects from which resources can be extracted. They are a means to an end.

PLAY AS RESISTANCE

Play resists evil because play speaks a language evil does not understand. Evil seeks to dominate, extract, reduce, and simplify. Play is creation for creation’s sake. It is self-sustaining. It exists for itself. Play is powerful for the same reason it is trivialized: play is useless. And because of this, utility cannot be extracted from play.

Which brings us to Hobbits; a people of seemingly little importance, with mouths apt to laughter and a fondness for simple jests. The Ring’s power lessens in the possession of a Hobbit because Hobbits are a people practised in play. What the Hobbits value: harmony, peace, community, cannot be provided to them by the Ring’s power.

With the exception of Smeagol, Hobbits have a strange resistance toward the Ring, which perhaps isn’t very strange at all: When you seek play, power cannot corrupt you; for play is deaf to its seductions.

PLAY AS A PROTECTED SPACE

When we play, we create a second world alongside our own. These hallowed worlds of play, in which a higher order reigns, are exempt from the rules of ordinary life. These playgrounds, so to speak, are partitioned off and given special distinction. The hockey rink, the stage, the screen, Mike Wheeler’s basement, are all, to quote Johan Huizinga, “temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.”

The truly remarkable thing about play, to quote Huizinga for a second time, is that the light of play is not snuffed-out when the game ends, “it endures as a new-found creation of the mind; a treasure to be retained by the memory, which can be repeated at any time.”

There is no better explanation of the Patronus charm.

The generative capacity of play — the light play produces — is not only available to us while the game is played. It becomes a treasure retained by memory. It can be called upon any time we wish.

It is the capacity to feed on this light, that protects Harry, saves Will, and gives Frodo the courage to continue on.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MUSIC

For those of you unfamiliar with the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, he was not a particularly cheerful man. In fact, one of his most famous (and infamous) works is a collection of essays entitled, Studies in Pessimism. There was one thing, however, Schopenhauer spoke highly of: music.

He believed the effect of music was much more “powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts.” Where the other arts spoke only of shadow, music spoke directly to the will itself. He said, “We must attribute to music a far more serious and deep significance.”

There is perhaps no one who agrees with this sentiment more than Max Mayfield, an equally curmudgeonly figure who could never be found without her Walkman: a girl whose ability to defeat death rested upon a song I’m sure Arthur Schopenhauer would have detested. (His loss. Running Up That Hill is a fantastic song. We’ll keep some Mozart in the tape deck for when Schopenhauer has a run in with Vecna.)

Despite their differing tastes, both Max and Arthur understood the same thing: Music makes life bearable.

And it’s unsurprising that the grumpiest of us, for those of us whom optimism is not easily possessed, have the greatest fondness for music. Only those familiar with darkness, could understand the significance of something which produces so much light.

Buy me crack cocaine!

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HOW TO SURVIVE IN THE UPSIDE DOWN

I’m not one to make empty promises. This is how I think you survive the Upside Down:

YOUR UPSIDE DOWN SURVIVAL KIT:

1. A TOKEN

A token is something that reminds you who you are. It reminds you of who you are if you could be the best you possibly could be. It reminds you of who you were when you were your most beloved.

Will survives the Upside Down because he remembers he is not just Will Byers, he is Will the Wise. He survives because he remembers how Mike sees him, how his Mom sees him, how his brother sees him. It isn’t just The Clash that protects Will; it is the memory the music carries. He is protected by his brother’s love.

This is my token:

A gross piece of dirty tape with my brother’s name on it, he stuck to my boot one day.

2. A LIST OF JOKES

Play is an act of spontaneity, but mastering it requires practise. You should bring 3-4 bits with you into The Upside Down. Until you compile your own list, you can borrow some of mine:

Bit #1: The Misattributed Quote

The misattributed quote is a bit best illustrated through a passage from The Brothers Karamazov, in Book V: Pro and Contra, Dostoevsky writes, “Ayo! Ariana Grande! Come down to Coney Island! Take a spin on the Cyclone, baby!” You know what? That might not be Dostoevsky. Either way, it’s very profound.

Bit #2: The Pretend Sponsorship.

The pretend sponsorship is a bit inspired from the latest season of Stranger Things. It can be performed at anytime, in almost any context. All you need is my all-time favourite product: a bottle of refreshing, reasonably-priced Gatorade. Now available for purchase in-stores or online.

Bit 3#: The Canadian Custom

The Canadian Custom is a bit that works best amongst foreigners, in which you very earnestly educate them about a Canadian custom that does not exist. It could be an alternate name for a household product or an imagined Canadian delicacy. This bit works best as a contest. The person who convinces the foreigner of the most fake customs gets a fifty dollar bill, or as we call it in Canada, a moose tongue.

3. A HAPPY MEMORY

The final and most important thing you should bring with you is a happy memory. When you’re in the Upside Down, a happy memory is hard to summon. That’s why it’s important to pick one now.

This is mine: (You can’t borrow this one. You, unfortunately, need your own.)

It’s the second week of twelfth grade, thirteenth grade, if you’re counting the fact that I had to take an extra semester. They finally let me take English 30-1 again after failing it twice. I’m in all remedial classes. (Remedial isn’t the word the kids used, however. It was another word that started with the letter “R.”) My teacher, Mr. Bonner, pulls me outside and asks if he can speak with me. He’s holding my essay. I thought to myself, “Damn. I wrote an essay so bad I’m getting kicked out of the class. Now. In front of everyone.” My eyes start to well. He asks for my permission to read my essay to the class. I’m very confused, but give my consent.

He slaps the essay on the projector, points to it, and says, “I want you all to pay attention. This. This is good writing. This is the kind of writing we strive toward.”

When he’s finished reading, a kid in the back of the class, takes a long hit from a mango Juul pod, and says, “Broooo. I wish I could write like that. Damn.” His friend replies, “Bro. Same.”

I quickly wipe the tears from my eyes before anyone notices, “Thanks, guys.”

IN CONCLUSION

You probably didn’t need to read eight pages of poorly paraphrased Johan Huizinga to know any of this. But all art — all good art — is a reminder of something we already know:

Play isn’t silly. It isn’t trivial.

It is sacred. And it’s one of the most important things we do.

I’ll end this essay with something that happened a couple weeks ago,

My mom and I are driving to Costco during a snow storm to buy a turkey for our first Christmas without my Grandma, her first Christmas without her mom. We spend twenty minutes circling the parking lot until a spot about a mile from the entrance opens up.

We buy our turkey and trudge back through the snow toward our parking spot.

She stops pushing the cart and starts crying.

“What’s wrong, mama?”

“I just miss her so much.”

We stand in the middle of the snowy parking lot and cry together for a few minutes before finally making our way back to the car.

“Do you know what I miss the most about when Gram was still alive?” she whispers in my ear, “Getting to park in the handicap spot.”

The question that needs to be answered is, of course, an icon of what exactly? What does Snoopy represent to the broader culture? How do we explain the eternality of this mischievous purebred?

My primary goal in writing this essay is to dispel the outlandish speculations and, frankly, groundless rumours that plague Snoopy’s legacy, which in our internet age circulate now more quickly than ever before.

This essay will be, in essence, an attempt to answer: To which school of philosophical thought does Snoopy subscribe? And in doing so, hopefully uncover the answer to why he holds such a significant place in the cultural imagination.

In my corner of the internet, it is not uncommon to hear the claim that Snoopy is a Stoic. Any true devotee of Snoopy knows this to be false. But before I debunk this claim, and assert my contention that Snoopy is an acolyte of Cynicism and the true heir to Diogenes, let us first undergo a brief study of Snoopy as an individual, so the reader may come to his natural conclusion:

In a strictly legalistic sense, Snoopy is Charlie Brown’s pet dog — although Snoopy himself would reject this description. Snoopy views himself purely as an individual. He disdains and renounces his position as a subordinate. He delights in mocking his owner and refuses to obey his commands.

Snoopy often sets himself apart from Charlie and his cohort, refusing to participate in what he sees as the banal and insignificant troubles of his owner. He instead spends his time embarking upon excursions to distant lands. He is tortured by an obsession with the Red Baron, the infamous German fighter pilot, on whom he launches reckless and unprovoked attacks. The civilian casualties of these frequent onslaughts remain uncounted.

Snoopy is the archetypal trickster. He revels in mockery. He lives a solitary life, enjoying the companionship of others without viewing it as a necessity. He neither seeks the advice of others nor offers any in return. His loyalty and helpfulness to the group remain incidental. He takes the path of a vagabond. All obligations by virtue of his position are, to him, meaningless.

DEBUNKING THE STOIC CLAIM

Assuming you agree with this characterization, let us now lay out the basic tenets of Stoicism.

Stoicism is a varied philosophical school, which has spanned centuries, and as a result, has developed and differed over time. While some Stoic philosophers emphasized certain aspects of the philosophy over others, they all focused on cultivating virtue as a means to achieve eudaimonia, meaning well-being or flourishing.

Stoics strive to live by the following virtues:

Wisdom: The ability to make rational choices.

Courage: The ability to endure hardship.

Justice: The ability to treat others fairly and fulfill social duties.

Temperance: The ability to exercise self-control and live in moderation.

To live by these values, says The Stoic, we can achieve inner peace and social harmony.

You may be asking yourself, what does any of this have to do with Snoopy?

It doesn’t. And that is exactly my point: Snoopy is not a Stoic.

While Snoopy’s cool demeanour, his placid indifference, his urbane nonchalance might be interpreted in the lowercase, colloquial sense as stoic, it is inconceivable to me that Snoopy — Snoopy the iconoclast, the social critic, the alleged war criminal, values above all else inner peace and social harmony. To put it another way: Snoopy’s copy of Meditations remains unopened. The pages of Discourses? Used as kindling, to keep him warm on some cold and desolate beach, while he waits for reinforcements on the Western Front and delights in the fact the Geneva Convention has not yet taken place. Snoopy tosses each page into the flames, grinning, the reflection of fire flashing in his eyes. Where Marcus had the bees to remind him to work hard and happily, Snoopy has spite.

So then what does Snoopy value above all else? Well, this is where Diogenes comes into play!

Diogenes was an ancient Greek philosopher and contemporary of Plato, who believed himself to be the rightful heir to Socrates. Like Socrates, Diogenes did not merely espouse his philosophical doctrine. He lived it.

Diogenes is the founder of a philosophical school called Cynicism, the much coarser and confronting precursor to Stoicism. While Stoicism receives its moniker from the stoas, or porches, under which its philosophers taught, Cynicism gets its name from the Greek word kynikos, meaning “dog-like”. Diogenes happily adopted this disparaging nickname, given to him by the Athenian people, as he believed we had a lot to learn from dogs and their way of life, as we will discuss later on.

Cynic philosophy is based on the idea that human beings have lost their way, that we have focused too much on accruing social status, that the price we pay to advance politically and financially is often the price of our own morality. Or in the words of my favourite carpenter from Nazareth, “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

Diogenes criticized those who spoke of virtue but lived in vice. He was critical of philosophers who talked about courage from the comfort of lecture halls, and of politicians who preached about piety in the marketplace, only to return to the opulence of their mansions. To say Diogenes played the role of a cultural critic is a wild understatement. Once, having heard Plato define a human being as a featherless biped, Diogenes plucked the feathers of a chicken, stormed into the lecture hall, held the dead bird by its feet, and declared, “Behold! Plato’s man!” Unlike Socrates, who ignored his detractors, Diogenes could not stop himself from responding. For Diogenes, there was no room for politeness. He intended to shock. Offense was intended. To pull a direct line from Jean-Manuel Roubineau’s book The Dangerous Life and Ideas of Diogenes the Cynic, “[Diogenes] delighted in bluntly pointing out the contradictions of the small-mindedness, and in some cases the sheer absurdity, of prevailing social conventions.”

This just so happens to be the exact function Snoopy plays in Charlie Brown’s life.

Despite spending my time writing about and researching Snoopy, Charlie Brown might just be my favourite character in all of literary history. I think this is because Charlie is the character most like us. (Or at least, most like myself.) To be Charlie Brown is to be in trouble, ethically and existentially. He represents us at our most philosophically conflicted. For it is Charlie, not Snoopy, not Linus, not Lucy, who is forced to answer the questions we will be plagued with throughout our entire lives: How do we maintain faith in a world that constantly disappoints us? Can we still find meaning in traditions co-opted by commercialism? Which ethical responsibilities are we obligated to uphold? What do we owe our friends? What do we owe ourselves?

Snoopy’s rebellion, mockery of convention, and refusal to obey provide Charlie what Diogenes provided for his students: a distorted mirror that revealed the corruption and superficiality of society. It is often Snoopy who confronts Charlie with the very ethical questions he spends the comics navigating.

Lucy, captured by the same vice as the Athenians of Diogenes’ day, loves nothing more than to hear that sound: “That beautiful, beautiful sound! Nickels, nickels, nickels! That beautiful sound of clanking nickels! Cold. Hard. Cash.” During the Christmas play, when we watch Snoopy pantomime Lucy’s idiotic and dogmatic commands, we are watching with the same glee as the ancients, as they watched Diogenes burst into the lecture hall, holding a plucked chicken, declaring, “Behold! Plato’s man!”

When Diogenes was being auctioned off as a slave, he looked into a crowd of bidders, pointed to a man and said, “Sell me to him; he needs a master.” This quip concealed the same philosophical question Snoopy asks to Charlie throughout the comics, “Am I your dog, if I do not obey you? Are you Lucy’s dog, when you obey her?”

It is true that Snoopy’s mockery often trespasses into cruelty, but I believe Snoopy would share the same response as Diogenes once did, when pressed about his methods, “I bite my friends in order to save them.”

Snoopy’s mockery is not without purpose. His rebellion not without cause.

We need to be awoken, shocked out of submission to the conventions that stifle us, to the rules designed, not for the flourishing of our souls, but so the powerful may maintain their power, so that the Lucys of the world can continue to hear that beautiful clanking sound of nickels, nickels, nickels. When we look around us and see the corrupt rise to power, the ignorant chastise the wise, and the idle lavish in their wealth, we can hear Snoopy and Diogenes whisper to us, “They are the true slaves, working for masters they cannot even name.”

What wise tramps! What heavenly mutts! By this point in the essay, I believe I’ve proven the comparison sufficiently. I could go on for pages listing their similarities: Diogenes sleeping outdoors in a ceramic jar, behaving as a dog. Snoopy sleeping on top of his dog-house, refusing to behave like one. The two of them, both adventurous travellers, charming beggars, witty satirists! And of course, I would be remiss to not remind the reader once again that the word for Cynicism itself, kynikos, means dog-like. (How Diogenes would love for his successor to be an actual dog!)

Like Diogenes, I live on your alms…

Click here to buy me a ceramic jar!

With the rumours of Stoicism dispelled and Snoopy’s Cynic legacy confirmed, we are left with one final question that needs to be answered: Why is any of this important?

Why am I, a relatively healthy, normal 25 year-old girl spending hours researching a silly cartoon dog? Unemployment? Sure. Too much time on my hands? Oh, definitely.

But I believe there is something much deeper, and much more universal, that underpins my obsession with Snoopy and his antics, and with the Peanuts Comic Universe more broadly.

It is this:

We are, as a species, addicted to stories. We spend our waking hours consuming them and our hours spent sleeping dissecting and unravelling them. Stories announce our place in the nature of things — and the deeper we can connect with them, the deeper we can connect with those around us, and ultimately ourselves.

Like Charlie Brown, we are daunted by our obligations, humiliated by our failures. We desire to know where we stand in the social order — how our decisions, seemingly trivial and insignificant in the moment, extend to and infect the greater world. We are faced with the ever-constant process of deciding which worldviews we should subscribe to, and which should remain untried.

As with all philosophers, their greatest utility can often be found in our disagreement with them. Snoopy may, or may not, be a figure we should emulate, but that is not the purpose of Snoopy, in Charlie Brown’s life, or in ours.

Figures like Snoopy, and by extension Diogenes, serve as distorted mirrors, reflecting the absurdity of the social conventions we have enslaved ourselves to. The Snoopys and Diogenes of the world offer us, in their quips and ridicule, refuge from the corruption, hypocrisy, and superficiality of the world. Through them, we can identify which aspects of our culture form the necessary bonds that hold our societies together, and which ones only serve to stifle our freedom and harm us as individuals. Their disobedience forces us to answer the question, “Who is your master?”

A world filled with only Snoopys would be one of chaos, indeed. Yet we must remember that Stoicism, it has been said, was written on the tail of the dog, and the encompassing framework of Stoic ethics owes its existence to Diogenes. If we are to follow any path, let it be this: May Snoopy’s radical disobedience empower us to reject the societal conventions that harm us as individuals, and may the profound sensitivity and moral courage of Charlie guide us back to our obligations to those we love.

And as for the role Woodstock plays? You’ll have to wait for my next essay.

The first time I watched Beyoncé’s 2019 concert film: Homecoming — a concert that turned me from a casual fan into a full-fledged, card-carrying Beehive member — having never listened to, or fully paid attention to, the lyrics of her 2014 song Flawless, I was struck to hear the sentence, “Don’t think I’m just his little wife.” I paused it, and said out loud, Is she talking about Jay-Z? And don’t get me wrong, I love Blueprint, but I have never once thought, not once in my life, even as a casual fan of Beyoncé, that Beyoncé was just Jay-Z’s little wife. I thought of her as many do, as an absolute powerhouse of talent, whose career and cultural relevance has spanned decades and whose success is rivalled by very, very few. Definitely not Jay-Z’s little wife. But this is what makes Beyoncé’s work so interesting, and this is the deeper root from which she writes, and maybe an explanation for her connection to her star sign Virgo, Beyoncé’s motivating force isn’t empowerment or confidence, it’s a much deeper, much more complex emotion: insecurity.

Empowerment doesn’t beg for external reward, power does. Empowerment is an internal feeling of self-determination and agency, unswayed by the material. Beyoncé’s music is aware of this. In moments of true empowerment, on songs like Bigger where she talks about our existential debts to the universe and on Pretty Hurts where she reflects on, and tries to release her need for, perfectionism, Beyoncé, in an almost Kanye-like whiplash, flashes between this spiritual assurance and an exaggerated, superficial need to be desired. These latter moments come most prominently when she’s reflecting on the insecurity she feels in her marriage. She goes from these deep, passionate declarations of love into the most vile insults you’ve ever heard, the kind that almost hurt your own feelings, “It must be the cash, ‘cause it ain’t your face.” Or the funnier, but not less degrading, “If he fuck me good, I’ll take his ass to Red Lobster. If he hit it right, I’ll take him on a flight on my chopper. You might just be a black Bill Gates in the making. Oh wait, I might just be a black Bill Gates in the making.”

When tested, Beyoncé’s confidence comes not from spiritual integrity, her legacy, or her existential debts, but instead from the forms of external power she has been praised her whole life for harnessing. It almost reminds me of Kanye’s EP Ye where goes from vulnerable admissions of his mental illness, into rants, like on Yikes, where he says, “That’s why all the bitches fuck with Ye. On meds, off meds. Ask your homegirl right now, if you had a shot at Ye. You’d drop everything.” Despite God, despite enlightenment, despite Miss Lauren Hill. If you’re rich and fuckable, you’re safe, maybe. Like Kanye, when Beyoncé is faced with rejection or humiliation, she relies on the ever-flimsy, ever-temperamental resources of wealth, desirability and fame.

Which brings us to her star sign, Virgo. Virgo, has its Latin roots in the word Virgin. She is usually depicted as a maiden holding a sheaf of wheat, representing her as the nurturer of the earth. This depiction of Virgo represents all the bountiful and abundant aspects of female sexuality. The second, almost contradictory element to Virgo lies in her sheaf of wheat. For wheat to be of any value, it must go through a intensive process of discernment, the grain must be cleaned and removed of any impurity, then chaff must be separated from grain. This process is what gives Virgo the reputation for detail, cleanliness and practicality. For the wheat to be of any worth, it must be ruthlessly striped of all that is imperfect. A metaphor perfectionists understand too viscerally, too well. Now! The grain must be ground, which brings us to Beyoncé’s favourite pun! Grind. In America Has a Problem Beyoncé sings, “Boy, I grind. You know I grind. When I pull up to change your mind” The word being in reference to the movement of her hips and also to her grind, her work, her hustle, which is ultimately to convince Jay-Z to love her. Beyoncé’s music is full of these double entendres. She uses the word stack in reference to money and the word stacked in reference to her figure. But it’s the idea that love is conditional, something to be earned that defines the tragedy of her work. In All Up In Your Mind she sings, “Why don’t you take the time to notice me?” And in Partition she sings, “I just wanna be the girl you want.” If everyone wasn’t too busy shaking their ass to her music, they’d be crying.

I think Beyoncé is trapped. It seems strange that someone as thoughtful and complex as Beyoncé would be so wrapped up in her own vanity, her own wealth and her own ultimately fleeting sexual beauty. And I don’t think her statements about love or spirituality or responsibility are merely decoration. I think she, like all humans when scared or threatened or unsure rely on what they know. And maybe she doesn’t even value these things herself, but she knows the world does. She knows her parents did when they entered her into beauty pageants at the age of seven. She knows her managers did when Destiny’s Child became one of the biggest girl groups in the world. And she knows Jay-Z did the day he met her, when she was then the most beautiful, sought after 18 year-old superstar in the world.

And maybe that’s the thinking error that defines insecurity. Power can’t protect you over the things that really matter. Power can’t save your marriage. Power can’t change the past. Power can’t love you.

Which makes it all the more devastating that the song she decides to dedicate to her fans is Love on Top. A love song about finally being made a priority, a song about waiting to be loved “Baby, you’re all I need. You’re all I see. You’re the one that always calls. When I need you, everything stops, because you finally put my love on top.” A love that, as a child performer, must feel to her as familiar as time itself, a love she only knows how to get from the stage.

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