> [!info]- meta > **Author**: [[Brandon Taylor]] > **Full Title**: Be So Serious Right Now Homie > **Category**: #articles > > **Summary**: The author reflects on feeling overwhelmed by metaphors and symbols in a confusing world. They express fatigue with figurative language, feeling it no longer captures the reality of their experiences. To cope, they turn to playing tennis, seeking a more grounded and straightforward escape. > **Note**: This piece from Brandon really spoke to me. The idea that our experiential language, metaphor specifically, is disassembling around us is a kind of fatigue I feel deeply. I don't want to talk about "fascists" in a metaphorical sense, but in the very literal sense. Be so serious right now homie. > **Source**: [Original URL](https://blgtylr.substack.com/p/be-so-serious-right-now-homie?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=14343&post_id=157551814&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=i1m8e&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email) ## 📄 Full Document → [[Be So Serious Right Now Homie]] ## 🔦 Highlights & Commentary - figurative language and about the *lyric* is that it constitutes a phase change ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jmj1ssrrcg1nxc5hdfmg3kz5)) - when language is put under the pressure or extremity of experience or emotion, it shifts register from reality as it appears into reality as it is *experienced*. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jmj1t09nxjfaphj30wea45hd)) - For a long time, I thought of figurative language as an attempt to make *sense* of something larger and stranger than all of us. But what I’ve come to believe (I think, I hope) is that figurative language is an attempt to *convey* something larger and stranger than all of us. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jmj1sf98rh6jx123zzg0tdfc)) - Then, this morning I read that the president and his tiny-headed Rasputin have gone to the Fort Knox to inspect the gold. They have gone to Fort Knox to inspect the gold. I repeat it because it has the ring of something a child might think or do. “We are trying to get the economy back on track, so let’s go to where all the gold is kept.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jmj1t8j8c4n2d6611jba004g)) - in the case of this new *regime* (what other word is there for it?), I find myself tired of metaphors. They are insufficient. And increasingly, it feels like what they want is for us to think in abstraction and metaphor, to immediately turn what they do into a comparison with some other thing so that we might not notice the extremity of what it is they are actually doing. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jmj1wt8748f3ng572es6qyy5)) - I think so many of us got burned out in the Trump is a Fascist wars of the last decade—so many metaphors and allusions to fascism—that now the fascism, the actual, factual, here, boots on the ground, one step from declaring that he is the State (he might have actually said that he is the State), seems a little…I don’t know. Not anticlimactic, because in truth, it is very scary. I think to me it feels as if we’ve already expended the charge contained within that word, within the idea of the fascist president, that now we need another word, another phrase, something else to capture the extremity of what is actually happening. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jmj1y4005jtaqdq30ww45jja)) - And this need for a more extreme word is because, I think, many people failed to appreciate the extremity of what the word actually meant then, how serious a charge was being levelled. They assumed, when people called the Alt-Right Neo Nazis, that people were using the word *Nazi* ironically rather than, you know, definitionally. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jmj1za248mqag97vd7jbfn6p)) - Note: Thinking about the precision of language here, connecting back to MacFarlane's work in "Landmarks" even. - there are times when I feel like the whole affective and experiential world order that I came of age with is rapidly disassembling around me. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jmj2bzghaj5fyh8mz1bqvn1a)) - Like, in five years, I won’t even know how to write anymore because the language I have for experience and existence is so radically unsuited for a world this potent with metaphor and symbol, and yet, all of the symbols and metaphors are so dead the minute they arise? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jmj2m6jmj8dt78y9p0n63amk))