Why, his characters keep asking, are we like this?
Why do I feel like this? I don’t feel how I’m supposed to.
Chalice and the blade journey into the lost world how to#
This book explores where that story comes from, taking a materialist approach to tracking the sources of emotions, feelings and pain, and understanding how to change them. A cosmic pill a way to glimpse the truth in fragments, and catch sight of other worlds.Īutofiction (“autobiographical fiction”) tells the story of an inner life. If Taipei was a novel of pills dropped, dissolved, mixed, crushed up into lines, Leave Society is a novel of pilling. Everything flows together into a personal cosmology of Tao Lin. These slow, gentle, comic scenes of everyday life in Taipei are blended into summaries of some of the outsider thought Lin’s been researching, and a smattering of his own theories about life’s mysteries. One of the major threads of Lin’s novel, however, is his process of learning how to better communicate with and understand his Mom and Dad, and to help them with their own problems. Many books, essays, posts and e-girl song-and-dances have been written blaming Boomers for ruining society and dooming our lives. Millennials often have fraught relationship with their parents, the Boomers. Most of the story takes place in Taipei, where Li goes to visit his parents for ten weeks in 2015, eleven weeks in 2016, twelve weeks in 2017 and ten and a half weeks in 2018. In different stages of life, a person can assume different names. The new book, Leave Society, is a tale of recovery and departure. “Four days before the book tour,” he recalls in his new book, “he’d eaten psilocybin mushrooms alone in 4K and deleted much of his internet presence in a trip whose main message seemed to be ‘leave society.’” Toward the end of one of his polydrug binges, after he’d finished writing Taipei and was about to go out and promote it, Lin received a message in a trip. That felt like a perfect distillation of Millennial life at the time, and now feels like decades ago. Paul spends the book strung out on downers and uppers at the same time, unable to understand or even feel much of his dulled emotions, wandering aimlessly around Manhattan with nowhere much to be, accompanied by an indistinct, shapeless feeling of melancholy. He told me he was probably taking a lot more.
When I interviewed him about his last novel Taipei, around 2013, I asked Tao Lin if he was taking as many drugs as his character Paul, a version of himself, who documents his drug intake in daunting and vertiginous lists, while writing it. Do you believe you have a soul? Do you believe you can change? What do you see when you close your eyes? Have you heard of the mystery? The mystery, have you heard of it? Take this, in my hand, so you’ll keep living in the oasis, keep having your cultural experiences. Pour your mouthwash down the drain, forget everything you know. Have you heard about the ancient city of Çatalhöyük? The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis? Ever think your dog is trying to tell you something important? How often do you trip? Did your friend who brought the DMT work for the CIA? Is the CIA messing with artists and writers again? Isn’t life just a novel, just a dream under the sun? Edgar Allan Poe came up with the Big Bang, did you know that? Why did the FBI confiscate Tesla’s papers when he died? Turn your phone off. Do you really trust these vaccines? You think 5G is good for you? Have you read An Electronic Silent Spring? The Chalice and the Blade? And listen, do you believe in the Big Bang? Are you aware of Electric Universe Theory? Do you listen, really listen, to Chopin? Is your face like a muggy, low sky? Do you ever feel so alone? We’re bathing in the forest, we’re flapping in the park. Eat vegetables, get Tao Lin-pilled, and revel in the beauty of the universe: the modern-day equivalent of "turn on, tune in, drop out"? Dean Kissick returns from his summer hiatus (ascetic, solitary research, perhaps?), restored and brimming with renewed hope.
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