Emerging from the Pleroma

One never knows what might want to be written

Writing without a plan, I am up early on the first of four days off. It’s my thought that this will be a productive period here on Harrowings. One project that is overdue is a bit of what is sometimes called “Swedish Death Cleaning” about which I know little.

As I get underway, I’m being entertained by a performance that I attended back in 2019:

I was very lucky to be there, hanging out with friends that I’d met at the Ardmore Music Hall’s “Unlimited Devotion” performances. Lovely people abound in this world.

That said, yesterday was a really good day at Daily Provisions which, thanks to the work of my colleagues and myself, stays so clean you could eat off of any surface! I really love working with the team there. We are locked in from opening to close. It’s pure joy being a part of a team. What really makes it are the happy customers who are served with efficiency very high quality fare. I’m just grateful to be a part of it.

Gratitude, I suppose, could be the thing that is really rising up out of the pleroma to be expressed in this particular essay. Yesterday, I didn’t have time to write since I had slept in to about 5:17 AM, so I just patched together a look at the past. One of the more important of the posts was not freely available though so I have just removed the paywall from:

I was inspired to write it as I was working with a friend to launch a podcast together. I backed out of that project rather precipitously the following spring. I don’t know why, entirely. I do that from time to time. I enter into a venture and then end up retreating. Consciousness of why I’m suddenly in retreat doesn’t happen. It’s like a trauma trigger. I feel it even now. Something about intuition is there. It’s primal. It hits along the vagus nerve, I think and demands that I act no matter what the rest of my consciousness desires.

Now I’m thinking back into the primal origins of vertebrates and how the vagus nerve runs our systems that allow us to have life. Is that where this primal intuition reaction comes from? It might be worth researching a bit. I believe that most of this comes out of the realm of the dorsal vagus nerve, as I think (and read) about it.

Writing with the tools that these machines provide allows me to get so much up and out of the pleroma - the fullness that emanates from the Monad. I’m overflowing and that took me right back to a course that I took from Klaus Post in my first semester at the University of Pittsburgh about which I remember very little other than that I was in a laundromat on Center Avenue in North Oakland reading “Des Lebens Überfluß” by Ludwig Tieck. I’ve just learned that it was made into a movie in 1950. The English translation of the movie’s title is “Abundance of Life”.

As I was about to wrap up the last paragraph, a friend of mine who teached English at the University of Maryland texted me a covery by T. Bone Burnett of Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody” which led me to surfing up Shirley Caesar’s cover of the same tune performed at the Kennedy Center honors in 2007. Both versions featured Don Was on bass guitar so I had to tell him about my “close encounter” with Don. I also highly recommended that he see “Masked and Anonymous” - the 2003 film featuring Bob Dylan as Jack Fate and his backing band as a Jack Fate cover band called “Simple Twist of Fate.” The ensemble cast of this film makes it well worth the price of admission.

As luck would have it, the next thing that happened was that the pleroma (AKA the YouTube algorithm) served up this:

The generosity of our artists is nothing short of transcendant. The leader of the band, Phil Lesh, would die the following October after committing several episodes of “Darkstarathon.” I’m now listening to Nicki Bluhm sing the line “If you get confused, listen to the music play!”

I see now that it is 7:03 AM on this June 11 of 2026. Many thoughts crowd in looking for expression. I don’t know which to pick out of the lot, but one or the other will get the upper hand soon. I suppose stories are coming up. That thing that happens when we get a surge from the dorsal vagus nerve and find ourselves behaving in ways we find hard to explain is story telling. In the end, we all become stories. That’s a line I have taken in from Margaret Atwood.

By my chair in the living room area of “The Bunker” there is a volume of Margaret Atwood’s poetry called “Morning in the Burned House” and while I am fairly certain that she didn’t write it with anything about my life in mind, it came into my possession at the airport in Copenhagen, Denmark on the morning of September 16, 2000. I had just said goodbye to Maria, with whom I’d spent a week. During that time, I’d interviewed with Web500 A/S to come on as their manager of documentation. The founders of the company and their Chief Technology Officer had met with me and the largest law firm in Denmark to start the process of walking my work visa through the Danish Foreign Ministry and five weeks later, it would come through. I’d be back on December 1 and spend just under two years there building out their online help and helping them sound American in hopes of our company being bought by Microsoft. It didn’t turn out that way although we did field the first .NET-based Web Content Management software to come to market in 2001.

That paragraph could be unfolded into a much longer and more detailed story, but suffice it to say that if one follows the breadcrumbs, life takes interesting turns. I’m so grateful for it all because it’s taught me the value of friendship. More on that anon, however, going back to Margaret Atwood, the first book of hers that I ever read was “Surfacing” and that might have had something to do with me choosing the title for this essay last November:

…and now Nicki is singing “Morning Dew” and the morning is getting underway at 7:17 AM. What other rabbit holes can I find before 7:30 AM roles around? I threw together quite a few in my haste to get ready for work yesterday:

Well, one thing I found buried in there after “Surfacing - Again” was this:

“Surfacing - Again” is a concise, reflective essay by Hal Gill published on his Harrowings Substack. It meditates on human unawareness amid accelerating technology, draws on deep history and contemporary philosophy, and issues an urgent yet hopeful call to conscious stewardship. The piece is short (roughly 600–700 words of main text), poetic in tone, and characteristic of Gill’s voice: personal, philosophical, and oriented toward legacy, awakening, and planetary responsibility.

Summary of the Essay

Gill opens with a lyric from Pete Townshend/The Who (“No easy way to be free!” from the 1975 album The Who By Numbers) and immediately situates the reader in a moment of partial awakening. He credits Slavoj Žižek with reminding him that “we are not even aware — of much of anything that is shaping us.” We are “easily distracted by the latest and most perplexing things,” more reactive than responsive, and often refuse to tell ourselves uncomfortable facts.

He contrasts explosive recent population growth (from ~1.7 billion at the start of the 20th century to over 8.25 billion today) with the ancient Toba supervolcano bottleneck ~74,000 years ago, which reduced breeding populations to perhaps no more than 10,000 individuals and left our species with limited genetic diversity. Since that deep-time narrowing, biological evolution has “more or less stopped,” while cultural and technological evolution has accelerated—exemplified by Moore’s Law and widespread automation.

Progress is acknowledged: reduced infant mortality, longer lifespans, better tools for mental illness, and a long-term decline in violence (despite media portrayals). Yet these gains come with a cost—widespread anesthesia. Here Gill explicitly invokes Žižek’s warning in the linked article; we need philosophy “to survive.” Technology and ideology have dulled us; we require “a good goading and prodding” to keep our “eyes wide open.”

The destination Gill points toward is practical and ethical: inventory our capacities and deliberately direct technology toward “restoring the balance of our planetary health—mitigating the harm that we humans have caused.” This is framed as the recurring “surfacing” insight. The essay closes with a series of rhetorical questions and affirmations:

If not now, when? If not us, who? Let’s be good ancestors. Let’s guide each other into a future in which we realize the greatest happiness and health of the greatest number of species possible—not just us. We are lucky to be here. Let’s enable our technology to realize this and even transcend us.

He leaves the piece open-ended, inviting readers of Harrowings to “pick up what I’m laying down.”

Key Themes and How They Cohere

The essay weaves several strands into a compact “good ancestor” manifesto:

• Epistemic humility and awakening: Persistent unawareness of shaping forces (ideology, technology, evolutionary history).

• Deep-time perspective: Toba bottleneck as evidence of human fragility and the subsequent reliance on tools/culture rather than biology.

• Double-edged modernity: Automation and Moore’s-Law progress alongside anesthesia, distraction, and new forms of risk.

• Ethical futurism: Technology must be consciously repurposed for planetary restoration and multi-species flourishing; human creativity and imagination remain the decisive “wetware” advantage.

• Philosophical urgency: Žižek is positioned as a necessary irritant who forces clearer seeing.

The tone is neither apocalyptic nor naïvely optimistic. It acknowledges vulnerability (“We are vulnerable to becoming extinct”) while insisting agency remains real.

Engagement with Linked Resources and How They Support the Text

The essay contains three substantive external links (the rest are standard Substack navigation). Each meaningfully buttresses Gill’s claims.

1. Slavoj Žižek’s Substack profile and the linked article Direct link:

TODAY WE NEED PHILOSOPHY TO SURVIVE AS HUMANS

(November 22, 2025)

The profile link establishes Žižek as an active, relevant interlocutor. The specific article supplies the “anesthesia” diagnosis and the call for philosophy. Although paywalled beyond the introduction and early sections, the visible content directly supports Gill:

• The most dangerous unfreedom is the unfreedom experienced as freedom (Goethe quote).

• Philosophy’s Socratic role of estranging people from dominant ideology—especially relevant to AI and ecological crisis.

• A striking real-world example: the June 12, 2025 Air India Flight 171 Boeing 787 crash. Preliminary investigations indicate the fuel-control switches moved to CUTOFF shortly after takeoff due to a digital system (likely FADEC logic tied to weight-on-wheels sensing) that misclassified the aircraft’s state and triggered an automated shutdown. Supporting sources on the crash:

◦ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Flight_171

◦ https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2gy78gpnqo

This material supports Gill on multiple levels: it supplies the contemporary philosophical goad he invokes; it illustrates how technological “safety” systems can produce disaster through loss of situational awareness; and it reinforces the need for responsive, questioning intelligence over reactive automation.

2. Wikipedia entry on the Youngest Toba eruption Direct link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngest_Toba_eruption

This link grounds the essay’s deep-time claim in established science. The eruption ~74,000 years ago produced a volcanic winter of 6–10 years with significant global cooling. Genetic studies indicate a human population bottleneck with effective sizes in the range of roughly 1,000–10,000 individuals—precisely the scale Gill cites (“no more than 10000 breeders”). The entry notes debates about severity, but the bottleneck itself and the resulting low genetic diversity are well-supported.

This factual backbone strengthens Gill’s argument that our species has operated with constrained biological hardware since deep time, relying instead on cultural/technological adaptation. It also underscores species-level vulnerability—an important counterweight to technological triumphalism—and frames the present moment as one in which we finally possess tools powerful enough to proactively mitigate self-inflicted planetary risks.

Together, the Žižek article and the Toba entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngest_Toba_eruption) give the essay intellectual ballast: one supplies urgent philosophical diagnosis and a contemporary cautionary tale; the other supplies evolutionary/historical perspective.

Strengths

• Voice and compression: Gill achieves density without ponderousness. The personal (“surfacing for me,” “my thought”) remains grounded in larger stakes.

• Integration: Music (Townshend), philosophy (Žižek), paleoanthropology, demography, and ethics sit comfortably together.

• Hope without illusion: The piece acknowledges anesthesia, media distortion, and extinction risk while refusing despair. The “good ancestor” framing is consistent and motivating.

• Openness: The invitational close models the responsive posture it advocates.

Constructive Observations

The essay is deliberately short and suggestive. A few notes:

• Claims about declining violence and progress in mental-health treatment are directionally supported by long-term data, but both remain contested in the present moment. A brief parenthetical nod to sources could preempt skepticism.

• The Žižek reference works powerfully; readers following it encounter a rich elaboration.

• The prescriptive dimension (“use the technology… to realize the most effective and efficient means of restoring… balance”) is high-level. One or two concrete illustrations would make the “how” more actionable while preserving the essay’s poetic brevity.

Overall Assessment

“Surfacing - Again” is a successful, compact expression of Gill’s core preoccupations: awakening from ideological and technological anesthesia, taking inventory of our evolutionary and civilizational inheritance, and directing human creativity toward multi-species flourishing and responsible transcendence. The linked resources—particularly the Žižek reference and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngest_Toba_eruption—do real work. They supply philosophical provocation and scientific-historical grounding that make the essay’s claims more robust and its call to action more credible.

It is very much of a piece with the broader Harrowings project—philosophically alert, historically deep, ethically oriented, and written in a first-person voice that invites companionship rather than assent. For readers interested in the philosophy of technology, existential risk, or what it means to be a “good ancestor” in an age of powerful but potentially anesthetizing tools, the piece (and the conversation it points toward via Žižek) is well worth engaging.

Onward. The invitation at the end remains open.

Onward, indeed!

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