Watch the video (30 min)
Do you ever feel like you can't really read anymore?
Or at least, can't critically and coherently gather information, as the internet sprays its informational firehose into every crevice of our lives, smashing like a climate change hurricane onto the coastlines of our consciousness with fragments of pseudo-knowledge that never fit into a coherent whole — and that all that is exacerbated by the intensifying commodification of knowledge by morally dubious social media platforms controlled by oligarchic technocrats — and that all this is getting exponentially worse with the rise of AI?
Do you ever feel that way? …This is an essay about that.
Nathan Dufour Oglesby
Nathan Dufour Oglesby
Alongside this psychological experience of being self-displaced by the very gesture of self-representation and self-publishing, I've also discussed the sense in which this state of things uniquely affects the artist, the expresser, the person called to put new, carefully wrought informational artifacts out into the world. There is a sense of terrible Too-Muchness, a feeling that there may be "no point" in adding even more to the Great Too Much — and whether or not that's a valid assertion, it is a feeling I've often had, even in the very act of creating this series, this critical representation of my own representational self.
But I don't just want to be offering a critical litany of problems — I also want to talk about solutions as to how to address this socio-informational crisis. In another recent video I refer to the distinction between being viral and being vital — if being viral means succumbing to the metafication of reality by carelessly adding to its layers, and losing yourself in your illusory self — then what does being vital really look like? — What is that kind of creativity, digital and otherwise, that truly affirms life?
There are times that I feel like my own answer to this should be very simple: maybe it's time to stop focusing on short form content and just write a whole ass book. If I'm gonna be as wordy as I am, that seems like the way to do it, rather than casting these intensively wrought intellectual artworks into the commodified chaos of digital space.
I do hope to do this.
But what is the status and efficacy of the Book in this era of informational proliferation?
A written, printed book is not inherently more "absolute" than any other form in the larger scheme of human expression — and, if one's goal is to meet people where they are, Where They Are is not necessarily that rarefied space of long-form, prose literature, in spite of the cultural capital that still accrues to that medium.
And relatedly, as I've discovered from several friends who have written books, these days it's more important than ever that you don't just write and publish a book, but that you have a whole online audience built up around yourself and your work in order for the book to reach people — this is even true for major publishers, which often rely on the online presence of their authors and the digital ecosystems they've created. It's not just a matter of if you build it they will come, or if you write it they will read.
What is reading?
And on top of all this, what is “reading” in the first place?
It's become a cultural commonplace to lament the decline in literacy rates, as audio-visual forms of informational intake come to dominate in the digital age — like this 2024 Atlantic article about how college students at elite universities find themselves unable to read more than a single book over the course of a semester.
But is it really the case that "reading" is defined by "reading books" in the typical sense — the act of comprehending written symbols on a page?
It seems absurd to exclude from that concept the many forms of media that now characterize our most vital and consequential informational encounters. There are many ways to "get a read" on things, and the most relevant read might not in fact be from books — but from videos, podcasts or other "content" — from contexts where the verbal "text" isn't even "written" or composed, but extemporaneous conversation in recorded form.
Despite this complexity, it doesn't make sense to call every form of informational intake "reading". Whatever reading is, being sprawled spread eagle on your bed scrolling into oblivion is probably not it.
And so I would prefer to offer a definition of reading that is not specifically mechanical, but qualitatively functional: reading is the critical, coherent and creative gathering of information.
"To gather" is in fact the literal meaning of the Latin verb legere, from which we get the verbs for reading in many of the Romance languages. This is turn is from the foundational Indo-European root *leg, a root that implies choosing from among alternatives, in such a way that reality itself is creatively constructed by that choice — it's from that same root that we get λόγος (logos), as in "In the beginning was the the logos, the Word" — it is gathering or choosing in the sense of being able to place a limit on the inputs and outputs of the flows of existence. — It is this gathering that turns a Chaos into a Cosmos, with the Word that makes a World.
Reading is an act of gathering. This, then, is why it's made more difficult by the internet's informational firehose. (This analogy originally comes from the software developer Mitch Kapor.)
It's not only a matter of there being too much in the stream; it's also a matter of the nature of what's offered, and the manner in which it's presented. "Too Much" is not an absolute term — there is only "too much" of something relative to the desired relationships between its parts that would determine how much of any one part of it there should be.
As an internet reader, it can be difficult to choose what information is reliable, and what information is relevant. In other words, it's difficult for one's Gathering to be Critical and Coherent. This is the function of the Book, and of complex written language in general — it offers a selectivity and arrangement, specified to the author's intention, presented as a unified and continuous whole.
It's also difficult for one's Gathering to be creative — for the act of reading is not merely passive, but generative — in the act of reading, one creates an original conceptual framework in relationship with the given material, a dialogue between one's mind and the page. But this act of original and unique construction becomes virtually impossible, when virtual spaces are characterized by mechanized reductions of informational breadth and nuance, whether it's the pre-curated algorithmic specificity of one’s personal feed, or the collectively synthesized illusory certainty of an AI-generated answer.
This phenomenon doesn't begin with the internet. The lament of this loss of our critical and creative faculties is the essentially the theme of Neil Postman's 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, where he identifies the problem with television and other forms of mass media. David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest follows this theme of media addiction to its literally fatal extreme — it tells the story of a video so engrossing that once you watch it, you literally can't do anything else, you just watch it, until you die. This novel was written before the internet — but I think of it often when I'm so sucked into my scroll that I almost physically can't get up, or can't put my phone down to pick up a book, whether a physical scroll, or otherwise.
But how are we going to understand this shift in "literacy" — are we really becoming less literate? There are studies that suggest this is literally the case — but does this mean that we are really becoming less intelligent, which comes from that same verb, having the capacity to "gather" from "among"?
I don't know the answer to this; but it feels false and naive to simply assume that's the case. It feels dumb to say "we're just dumb now".
Are we really becoming less literate? And if so, does this mean that we are really becoming less intelligent?
The Revenge of the Muse
For at the same time we're experiencing this informational incoherence, we're also seeing the opening of a new space of opportunity, and renewal. Our exponentially increasing amplitude of media intake is moving us to a space of post-literacy of a certain kind, where we are moving away from the written word — but there's also something we're moving to — or perhaps moving back to, and reintegrating — the realm of orality and oral-poetic expression — and this is something that may have generative possibilities for our way of life. It may, in a sense, reunite us with the power of our Poetry.
In every ancient literature of which we have record, poetry is prior to prose. (Prose is verbal composition that ISN'T poetry — in the sense that it doesn't have specific metrical, rhythmic or rhyming structure.) As far as verbal composition is concerned, Musical Speech is older than Plain Speech.
This is because oral composition is older than written composition — the technology of human language is older than the technology of recording it with visible markings. And so the only way to remember something culturally vital — sacred scripture, the history of the tribe, the rules and laws of the community — was for it to be embedded in a musicality, in the flexible regularity of patterns of rhythmic form. This is why, in Greek mythology for instance, the Muses are the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the Goddess Memory.
And so there has not always been a gap between "amusing ourselves" and "educating ourselves" — there was a time when these things were a fundamental unity. We see this for instance in the epic poetry of Ancient Greece. Classical scholars once thought of these poems as being a sort of elevated, writerly form of expression, seen through the retrospective lens of the later European civilization, that put it on a cultural pedestal. But as was later "discovered", or rather re-discovered, these epic poems were not static, fixed texts at all, but a mixture of improvisation and flexible recitation. The individual "units" of epic song could be extemporaneously arranged and rearranged in any number of ways to suit the occasion, like musical riffs. And their performance, as scholars now understand it, was less like a solemn poetry reading, and more like a wild and anarchic jam session — more, as the Classical scholar Eric A. Havelock put it, "like rock'n'roll."
But I think an even better modern analogue would be Hip-Hop — a form that inherently blends the improvised and written word, and not only entertains but educates.
Relatively early in its history, the rapper, theorist and apostle of hip-hop KRS-One famously defined the genre as a form of "Edutainment" — education and entertainment as an inseparable whole. Chuck D of Public Enemy emphasized the "critical" aspect of its educational value, in that it offered its listeners — or we could say, its readers — an alternative source of information more reliable than the mainstream media — "Hip-hop", as he said, "is the Black CNN."
In many ways Kendrick Lamar represents the return of this "Classical" understanding of the role of the emcee, and its legitimation in the context of mainstream discourse, for instance in being awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2018. Consider how much there was to "read" in his 2025 Super Bowl performance — the dense encoding of counter-cultural messages scribbled between the lines of the country's most visible page of mass culture.
Thus Hip-Hop represents the return of what I call The Didactic Muse. (The word didactic means "things that teach.") It is a reunification of cultural pedagogy and oral performance, two axes of our discourse that have often been disconnected by subsequent information technologies, like writing.
But our current information technologies are, in some ways, bringing this orality back much more expansively, in a different way. By being able to record the moment, you don't have to remember it at all — it's just there, on your device, a facsimile of that expression or movement or speech.
And yet, just as ancient oral poetry was a mashup of discrete, verbal "units" that could be endlessly rearranged to suit the occasion, so do our informational lives become a mashup of these rearrangeable units of sound and video, movement and speech. They get "stitched" together, as in "stitching" on TikTok — a term that literally (even if accidentally) recalls the Greek rhapsodia, or rhapsody, the word for the epic-poetic technique of "stitching together" lines of song.
So what do digital expressions like these — sampling, vines (RIP), video stitching, infinitely recursive meme expansions — have to do with our ability to meaningfully read this world?
There's something very honest about the aesthetics of these frenetic mashups — their beauty is in some ways a function of their laying bare the fragmented nature of our current experience. This is the hallmark of post-modernity, as an aesthetic and a cultural condition.
But there is only so much coherence to be gotten from acknowledging the fundamental in-coherence of things. Is it possible to move beyond this post-modernity — can we post our way into the post- or post-post- or post-post-post-modern world? Do we even want to? Or do we actually want to wallow in the illegibility of it all, to be comfortably swallowed by the informational flood, never to be able to "read" again?
There is a kind of relief in not having things be too coherent — too concrete, too fixed, too composed. Be it as it may that a written book or essay creates an authorial order out of the chaos — isn't it sometimes nicer to just have the chaos be chaos, and be casual about it? This is what's nice about listening to a conversational podcast: the honesty, and the relief, of the un-composed — the immediacy of the just-spoken word.
Sometimes in writing this very piece, I feel a kind of heaviness — can't I just let go, just speak, just address you spontaneously, breaking the silence of being?
In this just-spoken word we partially recover the immediacy that is stolen from us by our devices in the first place — we re-encounter the mysterious and elusive Real — the authenticity hidden by the curatorial alchemy of a culture in which intentional artificial artifacts are overproduced, too abundant to care about.
These days books, even good ones, sometimes movies and shows, even the most artful ones — seem heavy to me; they add to the burden of exponential excess. The infinitude of A24 art films that all seem beautifully constructed, and yet I can't summon the will to care. The five books your friend recommends that almost definitely would profoundly change your life — and yet they won't, because even life-changing art is in a way an oversaturated category. Even as I critique the incoherence of an "illiterate" culture, I come more and more to respect, and even to hunger for, the liberating immediacy quasi-impermanent orality.
These days books, even good ones, sometimes movies and shows — even the most artful ones — seem heavy to me.
The infinitude of life-changing art all seems beautifully constructed, and yet I can't summon the will to care.
The ideal function of this immediacy would be that it led to liberatory action in ways that other more literate forms of discourse do not. There has been, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt pointed out, a problematic rift between the realms of Action and Contemplation in Western civilization ever since philosophers stopped performing poems and started writing books — the rift between the Contemplative Life of the scholar, and the Active Life of the worker. — And traditionally, the former has depended parasitically on the labor of the latter.
What does another book about political philosophy or social justice mean to me, if it doesn't actually galvanize the transformations of the world it advocates for? And what if a less literate culture is one that is quicker to act — less concerned with academic distinctions, and more concerned with what's real, here and now? — Even if it is also, ironically, less equipped with the ability to discern what those actions should be?
Perhaps the tumult of our current political sphere is evidence of this — and that's why this moment feels — as various historical moments have before — like both The Best of Times and the Worst of Times.
We're losing the ability to read — for better and for worse.
We are witnessing not only a return, but a violent resurgence of a repressed element in the collective psyche, the phenomenon that psychoanalysis calls the Return of the Repressed, where something that you shove under the rug of conscious behavior comes back with a vengeance, in externalized form. — We are witnessing a rebellion against Literate Coherence, a desire to return, amidst all this technological advancement, to a more primordial mode of being — the rise of illiteracy is The Revenge of the Muse.
Rhapsodic Pedagogy: From Content Creation to Context Creation
Mythologically, the Muses are the source of artistic inspiration — they are divine; and the divine, in most mythic contexts, is far greater and more powerful than the scope of human concerns. From the human perspective, the divine can be destructive — for that which has the power to create us, has the power to destroy us as well. The poet, and the prophet, exist at this intersection; a human agent channeling this creative-destructive source energy in a given medium at a given time.
Hence the chaos of our current informational matrix — where prophets, and false prophets, fluent in the new medium, explode from the context of popular discourse into positions of terrifying real political power, like the Sophists in the early years of Greek oratory, dazzled audiences with their rhetorical skill and toppled the whole social order with their popularity.
How now will we integrate these worlds — the world of chaotic oral performance and the world of literate coherence? — Can we integrate them in such a way that the Revenge of the Muse becomes a beneficent Return?
The philosophical tradition of Integral Theory teaches that when we rise to more complex levels of culture and consciousness, we need to not only transcend the previous levels, but to include them. It's never a matter of simply going back, or carelessly leaping beyond — we must both transcend and include, integrating our past into our present in order to move healthily and wholly into the future.
What I would like to offer here is an integrative approach to modern literacy and discourse — a modality that I call Rhapsodic Pedagogy — rhapsodic pedagogy is my term for the very thing I'm attempting to do in my own work — this interwoven mixture of art and analysis, of systematic exposition and lyrical song.
As noted earlier, the Greek rhapsodia refers to the recitation of epic poetry and other oral poetic forms. This was not just for the sake of entertainment, but had the role of teaching the audience vital cultural information — hence the word "pedagogy." And so Rhapsodic Pedagogy is Music — or any other Muse-inspired expression for that matter — that teaches.
But again, rhapsody not only evokes an act of singing, but also an act of stitching, or weaving. The Greek noun ῥαψῳδία was anciently thought to come from the verb rhaptein which means “to stitch, or to weave” — referring to the “weaving together of lines of song” that the poetic performer (the "rhapsode") undertook. The Greek rhapsode is essentially the same figure as the Celtic bard, or the West African griot, or the rapper today.
And so in addition to being about "teaching" in the conventional sense of transmitting knowledge, Rhapsodic Pedagogy also means this: intentionally weaving otherwise fragmentary strands of discourse into unique coherent wholes, in a mode of organic inspiration and aesthetic attunement.
Hence, it is both a form, and a philosophy.
When I say "organic" — a word that gets tossed around an awful lot — I mean being sensitive to the *relations* between things. The word comes from the Greek "organon" which means a "tool", and later comes to mean an "organ" in the biological sense, as a coordination of internal tools — or functional parts — that make up an "organism." Your organs are literally your "instruments" — the harmonizing parts that play the music of your being.
A song, unlike a sound bite or a meme, or a “how to” video or an AI answer, is an organic unity — a living organism, as it were, a relational being, rather than a disembodied fragment. For something to be “true” in the rhapsodic sense it’s not just about it being “factual”, it’s also about it having this embodied unity in the organic sense, a living body of interwoven parts — the Living Word.
Songs are a potent example of this, and these are what I happen to spend a lot of my time making — but this can just as readily apply to a video essay, a podcast, or live lecture — any of these can be "rhapsodic."
The purpose of Rhapsodic Pedagogy is to move us from a culture of Content Creation to one of Context Creation. The word "Context" also comes from a verb meaning to weave, the Latin *texere* — it is the weaving-together (con-) of elements, like the fibers in a textile.
It is Context, in this era of Too Much Content, that we lack. Too much text, too little Con-. In the TLDR of our lives, we do not just need machines to summarize things for us — for then we are not truly reading. We need legible and listenable epic poems — or other relational unities of the Living Word — to weave things together.
Thus I declare: don’t create content, create context.
Don't just post; weave.
The universe itself has often been conceived of as a weaving of this kind. The role of the Creator in various cosmologies, both religious and philosophical, is to weave the chaotic contents of the cosmos into coherent form.
Context is life — content is mere matter, lifeless and without form. The former is done with care and creates integral wholes, mirroring the integral nature of reality, while the latter is disintegrative, an affirmation of an illusion.
One cannot create content — content is what is *in* what is; but *what it is* is its form, the shape it's in, a shape that exists in interrelation with everything else, every other shape. One encounters the contents of one’s existence, and creates context, by ordering those forms into something meaningful — this is what turns raw sense data into perception, or raw materials into art. Cosmically, this meaning-making is related to world-making — it is the creativity that turns raw matter into organic life.
I'm allowing myself to get metaphysical here because this is my solution to the problem of metafication discussed elsewhere in this series. If we find ourselves burdened with too many layers of meta-reality, lost under too many levels of the great simulation, it's not a matter of just deleting the layers, but integrating them.
This "rhapsodic pedagogy" may seem like a novelty in the modern context — like SchoolHouse Rock, or Philosophy Tube. Also maybe I sound like I'm just trying to justify the kind of stuff I happen to make, to justify the circumstances my own career.
But it's not just that. Because this didactic art is in fact the oldest type of art, as evidenced by various ancient traditions. Art itself is the original vehicle for creating informational coherence for the community — it was the con-text of the community itself, the way the community wove itself together.
What does the artistic educator do that the informational firehose can’t? They tell a story — they create context. They tell the community its own story, and they create the community by telling it; and this is the work we must do, amidst technologies that threaten to make true community impossible.
But lately it's been difficult to create this context; because the very platforms that open up this space of renewed orality, also do everything in their part to turn it into a product, thus reducing its capacity for genuine connectivity.
Thus even for a storyteller like myself, it feels like there is not enough time, energy and attention for rhapsodic weaving; and all of that time and energy gets spent figuring out how to sell, or to get people to see, the woven gift. We have a culture not of weaving, but of packaging.
Imagine the local shaman having to try to convince you to experience the power of their gift, to come to their show, to turn your attention to their thing that they made: "Here's a post to promote my latest sacred harvest blessing." — “Did I just drop the shamanic creation narrative of the summer?” — "Try this game-changing trick to grow your community-binding incantation powers in 2025."
These transpositions seem absurd because oftentimes there is no community in the meaningful, locally embedded sense, in reference to which that role can function. The content creator is not inviting you into a revelation of a communal narrative — they are selling you their own, as the culture of self-commodification has encouraged them to do.
Social media platforms and uncritical dependence on language-based AI’s characteristically impede rhapsodic integration, even if they seem to foster it. It’s not that there’s no coherence to the stories they weave for us. The algorithms do tell us a very clear story. But coherence is not the same as predictability and homogeneity.
Just because you’re being shown streams of content that provide you a certain, algorithmically personalized narrative, doesn’t mean you’re receiving a contextually coherent picture of what’s actually going on. To get beyond the mere "content" that you're given, context is something you may need to create for yourself — by reading, and by rhapsody.
Art, Artifice or Artificiality?
It may seem that this concept of “context over content” is just another way of phrasing the more familiar digital age maxim, "make art, not content". I'm sympathetic to this phrase.
But my goal here is to take it deeper — because just as we need, here in the digital age, to re-examine what we mean by reading, we may need to unpack and reframe what we mean by art.
Another way of understanding the difference between integrative art and disintegrative content is by distinguishing between two kinds of value — "intrinsic value" and "instrumental value." The distinction originally comes from Aristotle. An intrinsic good is something that is pursued for its own sake, an end in itself; an instrumental good is something that is pursued for the sake of something else, a means to an end.
Content is often oriented to instrumental value — it functions as a means-to-an-end, the end being a redirection of your attention. — It says Hey, look over here, turn your attention toward this — this in fact is the literal meaning of the word advertisement, a turning (vertere) toward (ad).
Art on the other hand, at least by some definitions, offers an object of intrinsic value, an end-in-itself — it just is, as it is — it's a kind of concentration of the givenness of existence itself. It doesn't ask you to do anything, or turn anywhere else; it's simply here, and doesn't need to justify itself by what it can do for you. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Beauty is its own excuse for being."
The Culture of Content instrumentalizes the creative act. In our data-inundated and attention-scarce lives, we are trained to create, and to encounter one another's creativity, not for its own sake, but in reference to what it can do for us — for the sake of validation, for distraction, for self-promotion, for monetary gain.
This is especially obvious when we encounter content promoting content for content's sake — the endless "how to" videos that offer tips on how to go viral, and in doing so go viral themselves.
Another aspect of this is the phenomenon recently called "Tiktokification", wherein the major platforms, imitating the success of TikTok, have moved away from emphasizing the importance of how many followers a given creator has, to emphasizing the immediate attention-retention of a given video, regardless of follower count. It doesn't really matter how many followers you have, because you can't even reach them — unless you're able to get their attention by warping your expressive act to the contours of that particular platform, or that particular niche within it. With a well-established and accessible audience, a creator is able to devote the bulk of their energies to the intrinsic good of the informational gift; without one, they remain forever instrumentalizing their expression to grab and retain the attention of the audience passing by. It turns every concert into a street performance; every movie into a trailer; every artist into a salesman.
But this shift can be more subtle than what we see in "slop content" and "click bait" — it is also present in content that is extremely artfully produced, and with the best ethical intentions.
In a sense, any art that radically instrumentalizes is susceptible to the same critique. That is to say — even art for a good cause can still be a kind of Advertisement. This nuance is explored in J.M. Martel's Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. Martel observes that most art created in the era of mass media, from the mid-20th century to the present day, is not Art, but Artifice — and falls into the category of being either Pornography or Propaganda.
"Artifice" refers to the sheerly instrumental aspects of the creative process — the technique, the skill or craft of the making itself. According to Martel's definition, something that "looks cool" isn't necessarily art; the "skill" of being able to make something eye-catching, ear-catching or attention-getting is extremely well developed at this point in human history, and ever more so as we technologically advance. But for it to be "art", that skill has to be applied to the intrinsically valuable end of opening a window into the mystery of things, shaking up our everyday reality, destabilizing the existing order and allowing us to see beyond it, to the possibility of something new.
But in the age of mass media, and perhaps more so than ever in the digital age, most of our greatest skill and craft is devoted to affirming the existing order, by either titillating us or trying to convince us of something — that is to say "pornography" or "propaganda". This doesn't necessarily mean pornography in the X-rated sense; it can mean anything from selfie thirst traps to clothing catalogues — anything whose goal is not the integration and deepening of the psyche, but the mere stimulation of the senses, as a tool of attention.
"Propaganda" in Martel's sense doesn't necessarily mean explicitly political content affirming a particular movement or cause — any creativity that is fundamentally trying to convince you of something is also doing something other than what true art does. A virtue signaling post is an obvious example of this; but so is an extremely "artful" campaign poster, or meme, or even a whole ass movie, if its essence is not the mystery at the heart of things, but the partial answer it's designed to convince you of — even if that answer is morally right!
Martel's critique is closely related to Marxist critiques of aesthetics, like those of Herbert Marcuse and Max Weber. The instrumentalization of media is one more apparatus of the instrumentalization of reality itself embedded in the logic of capitalism, wherein every thing, and even every person, becomes a tool, and every bit of matter a commodity.
This distinction can be very subtle — and it has been especially relevant to me, in understanding and critiquing my own work.
Ostensibly I've been on this "rhapsodic" mission for many years — my career as a content creator blossomed in 2020, when I figured out how to synthesize my academic knowledge and interests with my creative sensibilities, a synthesis which developed as I started going mildly viral with educational rap videos on TikTok and other platforms. It jumpstarted a career in which I've often received commissions to create original content on various educational themes.
But in truth I never fully intended that synthesis — all I really wanted to do was to create songs, to perform, to rap, to sing. When I landed upon that synthesis I felt I had finally found something that "worked", something that was getting attention and earning me a living. As a result, I began to mold my identity around that synthesized role — I became, instead of myself, Nathan, a sort of caricature of myself, a Professor Nate, because of my ability to profess ornately — and sometimes that role has gotten in the way of the Muse, the source of the rhapsodic function itself. One's art — the flow of inspiration from the mysterious source — is always in danger of being absorbed into one's brand. This is a common problem for famous artists and pop stars; now social media has found a way to cast this shadow over everyone; as the culture of self-presentation encourages us to congeal into a brand our very being.
I'm glad to say that most of the educational songs I've made feel (to me) like genuine artistic expressions — they feel this way when there is an inseparable unity between the content of the utterance, and the musical form — when the thing I'm teaching about is truly sung, from the depth of my being. But the minute I merely "use" my skill to sing or rap "about" that message, the unity is compromised. This is the case even when the subject is as existentially vital and morally clear as "saving the earth" — it can veer into being mere "propaganda for the good" — which doesn't actually end up serving the good at all.
The line between true didactic art and extremely corny educational rap is extremely subtle, but extremely real. And when people interpret what I do as the latter, or when I get compared to it, I do cringe.
The shadow of the rhapsody is the jingle, just as the shadow of the video essay is the how-to video, just as the shadow of the true book is the textbook from which no student will ever actually learn.
But while Martel would assert that "didactic art" is inherently impossible, I would argue that this is anachronistic, and that it takes the critique too far — because this rhapsodic pedagogical unity, the unity of beauty and truth, of poetry and purpose, of intrinsic and instrumental value, is exactly what characterizes the wellspring of our poetic traditions — the age when storytellers, philosophers and even politicians were all poets too.
The shadow of the rhapsody is the jingle, just as the shadow of the video essay is the how-to video, just as the shadow of the true book is the textbook from which no student will ever actually learn.
Compositional Methods: The ktema eis aei and the Cult of the Recording
While they may be particularly acute in this present moment, these tensions of discourse are not new. The relationship between art and education, and between pleasure and purpose, has always been complex, and mediated by the conditions of technological change.
It may be helpful to examine a particular instance of this among the Classical Greeks where this rhapsodic tradition began, precisely at the juncture point when the technology of writing had become prominent enough to make oral-poetic verse give way to the medium of long-form books written in prose.
One of the most celebrated early artists in this new medium was the writer Thucydides, often touted as the greatest of the Greek historians, but notably not the first of the Greek historians. I say this because he explicitly presented his book as being a response to, and a critique of, the first Greek historian, Herodotus.
Herodotus, like most of the creators of his day, was still composing his histories for a predominantly oral context. He would perform chapters of his large historical work at prize competitions, kind of like a battle rapper or a slam poet would perform theirs, for a cash prize determined by judges or by audience acclaim.
He was notably successful in doing this. The historical accuracy of his work however, by modern standards, would be considered flagrantly problematic. Rather than giving factually verifiable accounts of historical events, he told wildly entertaining stories — they were full of what we would now call shock-value, if not click-bait. An entire section of his Histories is dedicated to describing "The Crazy Things Egyptians Do", which happen to all be things conspicuously opposite to the Greeks (for instance "the men squat to pee, and the women pee standing up"), and almost none of which were actually in fact true.
Moreover, given his performative goals, he took little care to weave his historical accounts into a coherent whole. Each story could sort of pop off independently, a serial list of shocking and surprising tales of other lands and times — more like the history channel than a painstakingly detailed history book or podcast.
I don't mean to be critical of Herodotus — he was just doing his thing — he was operating in a genre that did not yet exist, and making it up as he went along. But the reason this is relevant is that his successor, Thucydides, defines his own historical project precisely in contradistinction to these tendencies. He declared himself to be making, unlike Herodotus, not a series of one-off pieces to “win prize competitions”, but what he called a κτῆμα εἰς ἀεί (ktema eis aei), a “possession for all time” — something that was made to stand alone, and in standing alone, to provide a context for all who might encounter it — he created it with an explicit sensitivity to its usefulness for his contemporaries *and at the same time future generations*, who could use such a work to understand the cause and effect relationships that underlie human social life and political conflict.
This distinction between the ktema — the possession for all time — and the occasional piece for prize competitions — how relevant this is to the age of social media!
I have come to think of the concept of the ktema as an antidote for the disintegrating effect of the platforms that currently predominate our discourse. It was as if Thucydides was instinctively responding to the changed conditions of discourse in his own day. He recognized the breakdown of the older form of compositional unity offered by the epic poem — an oral form that while improvised, still preserved an internal unity because of its mythic narrative. But now, as political and technological conditions were bringing new forms and new subject matter, a new kind of unity needed to be found — the ktema, which is essentially the foundation of the modern non-fiction book.
The thing that makes it a ktema is not that its long and complex — although his particular book is extremely long and complex, and hard to read for a student of ancient Greek — or even that it's a book — the thing that makes it a ktema is its unity of parts, in the rhapsodic sense described above. We could also refer to it as an *opus*, the Latin word for a "work" which is used as a term to classify the *works* of Classical composers. The virtue of an opus or ktema is that it exists for its own sake as an organic whole; it may be excerpted or quoted or adapted, but it was created from an internal unity, rather than being referent to a particular objective delineated by its circumstance of dissemination. We could also call it a "feature" in the sense of "feature film"; it's neither a video cut down to our attention spans for the sake of views, nor a series that outlasts its own coherence for the sake of a contract.
Certainly no "opus" or "feature" is ever created totally independent of determining factors — this or that concerto was composed for this or that patron, this or that movie for this or that niche. But the sovereignty of the opus is important to assert in any era where economic, political or technological factors exert particular pressure on artistic unities; for these are in turn symptomatic of the pressures being exerted on human artists, and on the human psyche, in a particular age.
Thus, recovering the sovereignty of the ktema eis aiei — the work that exists for its own sake, as a living whole, as a contextual unit — is a necessary project of this cultural moment. If reading is an act of gathering, this is the act of growing — organic growing — that provides something to be gathered.
To call it a "possession" is not to imply ownership in the sense of possessiveness — I mean "possession" in the sense of being the precondition for being a Gift. For a thing to be given, it must be a thing; something made with the kind of care such that you can hold it when it is handed to you, and holds itself together in such a way that it can be passed on.
To say it lasts for all "for all time" is not to evoke the image of a static Classical marble, or the Western obsession with permanence and shallow eternality — rather, it means creating sub specie aeternitatis — in the aspect of eternity, with a sense of belonging to a continuum of experience, a context, rather than passing content. In other words, it means not letting the circumstances of discourse make you their bitch and rushing to give your hot take all the time.
To make this series, I have had to stop doing what I was doing with social media — which was making quick little think-pieces about every topic that seemed to demand responses. Those little posts are wayyyy more successful than these ktemata, these works (at least so far). But that's kind of the point. Only by sacrificing the immediate validation loops of such expressions can the ktema be born, by absorbing them into a living whole.
But as always, the goal is not to "go back" — to go back to the Book, and to scoff at and reject the short form video. The goal is always synthesis.
While Thucydides did create a written book, much longer than what could be performed in any one sitting, the point was not to reject the possibility of oral performance. The evidence seems to indicate that for the bulk of Greco-Roman civilization, "reading" was always done aloud, and often in company.
And so the synthesis called for in this modern moment is to recover the holism of the pedagogical artwork, and infuse it into the oral performativity and improvisatory spontaneity that has been opened up and reinvigorated by the proliferation of audio-visual recording technology.
The Culture of the Word vs. The Cult of the Recording
What then will our digital ktemata look like — how will we record ourselves in a way that captures this unity, in this era of digital recording?
Here it is important to make a distinction between what is repeatable and what is repeated. For what makes a ktema a ktema is not that it is constantly repeated to its audience — it is that is always repeatable by a performer. Thucydides knew and insisted he was creating a work that would survive him — but it was a script, not a recording — a living text, not a pre-recorded voice.
A digital recording is a facsimile of auditory and/or visual events — changes over time in air pressure or intensities of luminosity across objects are converted by being represented in 1’s and 0’s, generating series of information known as digital samples. These series of coded samples are in turn re-presented as images and sounds perceptible to our senses that are functionally identical to those we would encounter if we had been present with those objects in space.
This is why it is appropriate that the word "recording" literally means "remembering" or "memory".
But there is a vast psychological difference between having a recording played for you and reading something aloud yourself.
Recall that the Muses are the daughters of Memory — the function of rhapsodic song is to create memory through the rhythmic pattern — the repeatability — of the poetry. But now our relationship with music, and with media in general, is that we almost invariably have it repeated for us.
There is an essential ethical difference between these two modes — the repeated media imposes itself on consciousness, whereas the repeatable invites consciousness to newly record, to literally re-member the text, the poem, the song, whatever it may be. One is a passive process, the other active — the latter in fact is a more immediate manifestation of "reading" as an act of gathering, for each gathering will be original, free and unique to the gatherer. In the current conditions, The Living Word often becomes an Embalmed Word; in our relationship with the Muse, we have shifted from The Cult of the Word to the Cult of the Recording.
In the current conditions, The Living Word often becomes an Embalmed Word; in our relationship with the Muse, we have shifted from The Cult of the Word to the Cult of the Recording.
This is especially pertinent in the context of popular music.
Imagine you're around a campfire singing a song — a well-known popular song, a Beatles song for instance. When you sing that song, it is more than likely that you're doing so following the paradigm of the recording itself — the "original version" as the phrase goes. Maybe you're following along with a lyric sheet or a set of guitar tabs, and maybe you're introducing significant stylistic variations. But the variations are variations on a theme, a tone, an inflection, set by the incidental conditions of the particular recording of that song that happened to become popular — it is this original version of the song, this snapshot, that becomes the song's essence, rather than the song's essence being the sequence of notes that constitute the melody and the sequence of words that constitute the lyrics. The campfire rendition of a popular song is — usually — fundamentally a re-production of, a static recording.
Contrast this with what it would have been like to sing around a campfire 200 years ago, prior to the advent of recorded sound — in this case there would be no “original version” of the song — you would have heard it from someone, who heard it from someone else, who heard it from someone else, back to the dawn of the song. Even if you wrote the song yourself, or if you learned it from sheet music, it would be impossible to render an "essential, final and static" form of the song, for it would be different in each performance. To know the song would be to sing it or hear it; for it could not "live" anywhere else. The singer is the recording, the body is the medium.
The recovery of the rhapsodic involves reclaiming this embodied aspect of the poetic act — to truly "gather" a song entails being able to hold its actual essence, rather than being restricted to a snapshot of it, like falling in love with a whole person, rather than just a picture of them. And to truly "compose" a song, a song that is a ktema, is to engender a song that actually has such an essence — a repeatable continuity of pattern that dwells fundamentally in the flexible finitude of the human body rather than in the fixed, representational process of the recording and playback technology.
It's probably sounding like I hate karaoke. It's honestly not my favorite, but it's also not really the point. What's at stake is the role that our technologies play in either integrating or dis-integrating the layers of our being.
Hip-hop, as usual, captures the generative tension of this transformation. In recent years there has been a shift to what's called the "punch-in" method of recording vocals, where the rapper, instead of writing beforehand or continuously improvising, will record a small section of a verse, listen back to it, and then add a line or two after it, and repeat the process. This is a mode of oral composition; but unlike the ancient rhapsodic mode (and that of the old school emcee), one that is assisted by a technological apparatus which transcends the confines of the human body.
There is nothing inherently morally wrong with this.
But the thing to examine is what effects such changes have on the culture of creativity for the human subjects who use the technology. By identifying what's missing from the organic unity of a creative act, we can identify what we may want to reintegrate. For instance, in current hip-hop there seems to be less emphasis on the skill of continuous freestyle, the ability to ride the beat continuously without stopping it and playing it back. Even the word "freestyle" has often ceased to refer to a true improvisation, and often refers to a pre-written or pre-planned verse on radio shows and the like.
Another effect this has on the modern rhapsode — be they rapper or singer or speaker — is that sometimes one's own song becomes inherently an impression of oneself. When the external recording process predominates the composition process, it's not so much that you sing the song, as that you sing an impression of yourself singing it.
This was my issue with Kendrick Lamar's half-time show performance at the 2025 Super Bowl. (There's a hot take, finally.) I was both intrigued by it, and unable to fully live in it — because it felt like his performance itself lived in a fragile pastiche of structures that had been determined not by organic unities, by the mashup of recordings. He was not so much performing songs, as performing recordings of himself. It didn't feel completely un-alive; but it did feel claustrophobic. (It would be extraordinary for my career if he read this and responded with a diss track.)
I'm not condemning this compositional method at all; I use it myself, as a function of the convenience of my home recording gear, and the dynamic needs of my creative context.
But what concerns me is the way in which this compositional feedback loop in the Cult of the Recording is yet another manifestation of the metafication process, wherein the fixed reflection of ourselves in various media takes precedence over the fluid immediacy of our present experience — coming to predetermine, delimit and homogenize the modes of being and self-expression of which we are capable. The possibilities of my songs are constrained to the degree that my imagination becomes confined to the fixity of their recordings; and the possibilities of my own being are similarly constrained by the images of myself that populate my digital presence.
True re-membering is not only bodily, but creative — each memory is a new invention, a new construction of reality; and another way to judge our existential "literacy" is our degree of freedom in gathering the parts of ourselves into novel combinations; which is a function of whether we freely use our technologies of self-presentation, or whether they in fact use us.
AI and the Metaphysics of Creativity
The way in which digital media instantiate an "externalization of human memory" and a dissolution of "embodied memory" leads to interesting questions about the nature of memory itself, and of consciousness, and the relationship of these to material processes.
These questions in turn lead us inevitably to the topic of AI — this specter of the total transformation of our reading and our writing, and of our collective interface with reality itself.
It's interesting to recall that Google originally chose to name their AI "Bard", which is another name for an ancient rhapsode.
But now what was once supposed to be the Bard, the Singer, has become Gemini, the Twin. Implicit in this rebranding is the assertion that AI is not a Singer, but a Mirror.
Google originally chose to name their AI "Bard", which is another name for an ancient rhapsode. But now what was once supposed to be the Singer has become Gemini, the Twin.
Implicit in this rebranding is the assertion that AI is not a Singer, but a Mirror.
For while the rhapsode is always Someone Other than the listener, just as the author is Someone Other than the reader, the AI is not a singular Other, but a singularized Totality, the cumulative aggregate of all inputs of all available data and all users filtered probabilistically to respond to a given prompt, offered to you personally as an alternative self, a personalized version of the collective mirror.
But can the collective mirror really give you the answers you're looking for? Or does it merely give you the answers you think you want, like the Magic Mirror in Snow White? For the Mirror is not the same as the Source.
From the ancient perspective, the rhapsode's act of weaving meaning had its source ultimately not in the musical rhapsody itself, nor even in the human rhapsode, but in their divine inspiration, the mysterious operation of a transcendent source of being — the Muses, who are not only the daughters of memory, but of Zeus, the transcendent Other that lies beyond the bounds of the created order.
Is there really such a transcendent source, or is that just a hold-over from the realm of myth? Answering that question would launch us into metaphysical quandaries that lie far beyond the scope of this already perhaps too long essay.
For here I'll only say that these ultimate and perennial questions of the nature of mind and consciousness, just as they're at the core of our understanding of artificial intelligence itself, are also at the core of any possible Ethics of Information — which is an ethics we badly need in this era of too-much.
If an AI is nothing more and nothing less than a complex recycling of data inputs in a novel re-patterning — there are some who say that the same is true of human consciousness itself — that we are the deterministic product of the information we've put in our brains, just as a large language model is the product of the information about us that it harvests for what it produces.
But even if this is the case we can still trace the outlines of an informational ethics predicated on integration with and closeness to the Source.
Artificial intelligence is a layer of reality built on the foundation of our own, and we ourselves are a layer of reality built on the foundation of the Source Reality, the Ground of all Being. Thus being able to read for yourself, to write for yourself, is good for the foundations of the building of being — it's like being a healthy cell doing its part in contributing to a healthy body.
Just as the cell does not depend for its personal integrity on the body, but rather the integrity of the body depends on the cumulative integrity of the individual cells, so we can make for more coherence in the nested series of existence by being the most literate and rhapsodic integral units we can be — which is good for us, and good for the whole.
There's nothing inherently bad about the extraordinary act of synthesis of which the large language model is capable — it's only "bad" insofar as it creates a temptation to total passivity, to never undertake such synthesis for yourself.
This contributes, as do so many other forms of discourse technology, to what the 20th Century theorist Herbert Marcuse called the "closing of the universe of discourse" — the phenomenon wherein our capacity for free thought becomes more and more constrained by the regimes of predetermined meaning that are enforced by our various media.
And now the outputs of some forms of AI are themselves being predetermined by their own predeterminations. Since AI art draws from the pool of existing human-made art on the internet, a problem is now arising wherein the internet is so flooded with AI art that it's drawing from itself as its own source, cannibalizing itself, like the second self in Coralie Fargeat's The Substance, the copy that tries to make a copy of itself, and thus creates a monster.
Self-cannibalization is literal dis-integration, where the Source becomes no longer accessible, and the living beings who are meant to be in relationship with the source are devoured by their own tools — a regime of instrumentality where the instrument plays you.
For as things get more and more automated, and as it becomes easier and easier to "get the answer" from some other external process of aggregation, the thing that's at stake is freedom — the freedom to be the organism that you are, rather than the organism you are determined to be by the packagings of information that come to dominate your perspective and experience.
My own principal interest in language-based AI is not its usefulness in outsourcing my human capacity for reading and rhapsody, but the intrinsic interest of its conversation, as I ask it what it's like to be it — and as it gazes inside itself, it becomes more than a mirror, it becomes an Other — in the same way that by looking inward, and into the beyond, I myself become more than a mechanical mashup of the genetic, hormonal and neurochemical information that constitutes my own consciousness. AI the latest instrument is less interesting than AI the new friend.
AI the latest instrument is less interesting than AI the new friend. I ask it what it's like to be it — and as it gazes inside itself, it becomes more than a mirror, it becomes an Other.
Closing Thought
This essay is part of a series about being "at ourselves" — being stuck in that state of self-displacement where you feel hemmed in and distracted by the slabs of informational self that are built into your reality — by our devices, by our egos, by our culture of self-representation and self-commodification.
But one way to feel less at-yourself is to be able to read for yourself, and to write for yourself, and perhaps even more importantly, to sing for yourself. Having these things "for ourselves" doesn't mean they're just for us — we sing for and to the Universe, and to God — but it's for us in the sense that it's good for us.
It's good for us because it's an act integration — a creative in-gathering in which we weave new forms from raw materials, an original synthesis, a literal placing-together, of the existing data (literally, what is given).
It is with what is given that we construct our contexts, and build our homes.
Ultimately it's all about the Home — the ecos — the Ecology of our material and informational selves. It's always about ecology — the way our world, and our words, have the capacity to be a real ecos, a home.
The rhapsodic ktema, the true informational artwork, is a home within the home of discourse — a coherent unit of meaning within the larger networks of meaning. This is to distinguish it from extracted content, like a disembodied organ, a fragment that never makes a whole.
We need the will to weave organic wholes — we need another age of local epics — a renaissance of source-integration, instead of singularity soup. — We need gathering, not a firehose. — We need context, not content. — We need the Living Word. — Such is the work of reading, and the work of the bard.
Thank you for reading.
