The fifth sssatire session is happening on
Jan 20th, 10:30-11:10 PM, UK time.
Check what this is in your local time zone here. Even though the title says today, most of you might’ve gotten this email while it’s still Friday for you.
Meeting link
The theme will be “Hope after Despair”. Usual secret prompt + reading included; again, they’ll be forwarded in two weeks. Week 4’s summary is below the poster, just in case you forgot.
A summary of week 4
I read an excerpt from Susie Zhu's "Amphitheater" this week. This book is a highly experimental prose poem - it builds a stage and adds to it with words.
Prompt:
a character (fictional or real; could be yourself for that matter) is introduced to a completely foreign setting. This could be a plane crash, waking up on a deserted island, a backpacking journey, or isekai teleportation to a fantasy world. They are hiding something, from someone.
Take this prompt as anything you want. You could focus on visuals, worldbuilding of the place (language, people, culture, even sociopolitical issues and economics), or your character's reactions, psyche, interactions between characters; go wild!
Products from the session
As much as I was tempted to just write as/about myself and my trip, I challenged myself to get out of that comfort zone - so I wrote a funky 3rd person fiction piece that was very waffly.
my piece:
He woke up, from the void-like depths of his subconscious, filled faintly with hyperventilation and struggles. He stands as the tenseness from his limbs fades away. He forgot where he came from, or what his name was; only that he has to keep going.
Never stop.
He looks forward, to the only path in front. Something inside of him drives him to walk in that direction, to the only path he could possibly take. Left, right, this planet is foreign, a place distinct from the one he grew up in; somehow, despite having lost his treasured memories and forgotten everything about himself, this thought is kept afloat in the back of his mind.
From the muddy, diluted atmosphere heavy with a mist reminiscent of blood, to the hint of a metallic smell in the air, every aspect, every minuscule element of the soil he steps on silently screams of its idiosyncrasy.
But he doesn't know, or rather remember, what metal is. Or blood. So he perseveres despite the familiar unfamiliarity, of something being off - the very fact that he, an amateur (indeed he is beyond just amature; his knowledge of the world is as pure as an infant's) was entrusted with space travel and left alone intergalactically, is the most "off" thing present. The unknown doesn't intimidate him; it excites him. He knows no fear or joy.
Maybe he'll lose mobility soon. Maybe his orifices will fuse together as the temperature rises, and soon he'll lose his voice. Then it'll gradually expand to the ability to breathe. He'll truly be one with the soil.
You think that's what he thinks? Then you'd be mistaken. Think again; and you'll find that it is what I think. In fact, he doesn't think much at all.
What good does thinking do to us? It's the source of human miseries, after all. Fortunately for him, he might as well be the only human capable of suspending thoughts, putting them to a pause. Just keep going. That will is strong enough for him to ignore mortal needs - our survival instincts. He ignores the need for thoughts, food, drink, excretion, blinking, breathing, then sleep.
(the most important of all is sleep; for without rest we cannot keep up this suit of flesh.)
Until he inevitably collapses. Morphs into the red (赤い、红,) soil as he abandons the humanity of his physicality.
That's when he tries to revive the humanity of his mind. To recall his purpose beyond the bizarre sourceless (but, he is the source?) determination that has kept him going.
(Is he coming or going?)
He tries to recall the source of him, or him as a source of everything, to the last hint of humanity left in the universe.
An astronaut once told him, the purpose of humanity lies in exploration. It doesn't matter who the astronaut was, just like how it doesn't matter who he is, only that it stuck with him as the true anti-fallacy, a non-empirical non-theory. The truth of the essence of humanity that one must upkeep.
Maybe his flesh is no longer made of biological (i.e.: human) components, maybe neither are his thoughts, but I don't think it still matters here. What matters is the significance of his insignificance on this new, unexplored celestial body. Despite the two of them both being red-hot inside. He has walked around in a circle, back to the point where he started. That's when he realised it's time again. Time to become 0. He walks towards (re-)becoming 0.
Reset, Repeat daily, until Infinity. That's the cruellest truth to being human he had hidden from him.
He continues on the journey reaching forward until he reaches the edge of what's beyond -
The session ended up being delayed by a day, so it actually happened on the 7th. It was just me and Nina, so we extended the meeting after the initial 40 minutes. 80 minutes of talking to Nina!!! Woohoo!!!
I probably wrote the most this week out of every session - purely because I was waffling head-on. Amazing.
Nina’s comments: she gets why I said it’s waffly. Also, I should mess around with pronouns more (she liked the parenthesis-ses).
Nina is on her memoir arc - she wrote an amazingly vivid memoir that was quite relatable (lol cram school). I haven’t got permission to share, so you’ll have to imagine what it was about.
P.S. if you do end up exploring any of the past prompts and want to share anything, send it to me and I'll include it in the next week's newsletter.