Living up to a name

i thought the name was really clever.

it wasn't long after Nazis started typing parentheses around the names of Jews and Jewish-related things to denote their Jewishness. It was meant to denote an sarcastic audio echoing effect—cartoonish villainy. And then newsletters started being a Thing, and i thought it was clever to call my own vanity project (((Echo Chamber))) for self-explanatory reasons. Never had a concrete plan for the newsletter—it's fluctuated between a place for rejected freelance stories, 'content' curation, self-righteous confessional e-journal, etc.

Always wanted to get it to at least a weekly post schedule, but that's never materialized for another set of pretty self-explanatory reasons--lack of free time, day job obligations, finances, a general creative disorganization. It's gone on intermittently for so long that the parentheses in (((Echo Chamber))) are an even more obscure reference than they were at the beginning. A play on yet another antisemitic meme.

And now here we are. And the echo chamber in my head is deafening, full of atrocities and barbarism and the wailing of lost desperate peoples. i already had enough trouble articulating a semblance of identity before these newest and profound sadnesses,

and i am so tired.

The digital landscape mirrors the real—corrupted and polluted and crumbling. Each day's input entered into an online ether and soundtracked by the howling din of sorrow and fury we are not biologically equipped to comprehend. We float in the chamber of echoes

and grow furious within the deluge.

*

An English teacher quoted you 'All the world is a stage' at some point, probably. But what's the point of a stage when neither its actors nor its audience can hear the lines? No, All the world's an echo chamber. All the world's an echo chamber so loud sometimes the rockets descend on already deafened ears.

*

If i understand them correctly — and maybe i don't — echoes are reverberatory ripples amid audio. They are repetitions, and they weaken with each return until they completely and finally recede. And so All the world is an echo chamber, not a stage.

and the needlessly dead bounce back and forth this chamber, amplifying in magnitude, defying the physics of sound until even you — you with deafened ears and the day job and the vanity projects — can't endure the noise. But that's the chamber we find ourselves in.

You want to help the dead, but you are only in a position to witness them. And you know it's pointless to yell into the echo chamber yet again, yet again, and again and again.

But you keep doing it and try to believe one day the echoes could bounce back, amended. Something better and more wonderful. Maybe not even echoes anymore — defying physics yet again in this already impossible chamber. Return to the real and the whole. And then maybe you will have finally helped to construct something of worth and love and humanity in this furious echo chamber.

(((EC)))