orb (n.)

I originally published this essay on my Patreon page in 2021, a Patreon which I have since unpublished (at least as of August 2023), so now it lives here on ill-defined, for your reading (cf. pondering) pleasure. I think it still holds up! Enjoy.

i

On October 15, 2021, @thatsgoodweb tweeted an illustration of a robed, bearded, wizardly man staring into the middle distance through the cloudy depths of a blue sphere sitting upon a be-runed table with the caption: “pondering my orb.”

The meme spread hence, taking on new forms, as memes do, migrating to a host of manipulatable meme formats. You can even 3D print the ponderer and his orb.

As Know Your Meme has reported, the image itself is an illustration by Angus McBride which featured on the cover of a 1988 adventure book, A Spy in Isengard, written for the Middle-Earth Role Playing game.

Thus, by implication, the man in the meme—the “ponderer” in question—is none other than the evil wizard Saruman of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels. And the ponderee: a palantir, one of an unknown number of magical stones created by the elves in ages past which enable long-distance communication through the transmission of images and, one would assume, speech, between the wielders of said stones, say, Saruman and the Dark Lord of Mordor himself.

A kind of magical webcam, if you will.

Or a smartphone.

In the broader text of the meme—the macro-text? the mega-text?—the orb is not strictly speaking a palantir, crafted by Feanor in the First Age; and the man on the throne pondering said orb is not strictly speaking Saruman the White, corrupted leader of the Istari.

But formally, a similar structure remains in play. Glowing crystal balls, for instance, are after all recognizable as devices (like palantiri) that purport to enable communication with, if not persons, then futures. Others.

ii

There is something immediately relatable about this image. The ponderer seems weary. It is as if he is binging the orb, if that were possible, the dull blueish-white glow reminiscent of a screen. No wonder, then, that the orb has replaced a smartphone in numerous of its cross-format migrations.

Popular criticisms of mind-numbed Millennials and Gen-Zers  glued to their phones are a dime a dozen (or whatever the going rate is, when adjusted for inflation). By replacing the phone with this orb—a mythical artifact lifted from a generic fantasy sign system—the meme seems to offer an interpretation of mediated existence that goes beyond the mere technological, handily avoiding this facile handwringing while reaching toward an expression of something deeper, something beneath or beyond the surface behavior. Boredom? Ennui? Despair? Existential dread?

He is waiting. For what?

A stimulus. A message.

The ponderer’s eyelids are half closed, puffy; his frown is the frown of boredom or perhaps depression.

“Talk to me,” he seems to say to the indifferent sphere.

The ponderer is awake when he should be asleep. Pondering his orb into the wee hours. Anything to avoid succumbing to sleep, to awaken the next moment at 6:00 a.m., to get up and shower and drive to his job.

Again and again. Forever.

iii

To ponder, etymologically speaking, is “to weigh” (hence, when some piece of writing is beleaguered with big words and heavy-handed prose—such as, perhaps, this very essay—we say it is ponderous). But the ponderer in question is definitely not weighing his orb on some ornate scale decorated with runes (unless of course he is).

I'm more inclined to think that in pondering the orb, the ponderer is weighing as one “weighs between options,” seeking an answer to a question, a solution to a dilemma. The orb, like a crystal ball, like a Magic 8-Ball, like indeed a palantir, is a tool for decision-making. One seeks knowledge of the unseen from a crystal ball (“Tell me the future so I can know what to do in the present.”). One asks a Magic 8-Ball whether they’re right about their intuitions (“Should I do X?” “Is it true that Y?”). In Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), Saruman ponders his orb by asking, “What does the eye command?” We ponder orbs in general—whatever their form—to receive confirmation that what we think, what we do, is sound, and barring that, to learn what we ought best to do, given the circumstances of the present [and future] in which we find ourselves.

As such, the orb is the seat of a kind of authority. However, in this new, blueish light, the ponderer’s face is revealed as that of one who has looked too deeply and too long into the orb and has found, rather than a future, only an abyssal present; he has glimpsed the artifice but is unsure how to proceed. Ironically, as he is used to do, he waits (perhaps without realizing it) for the orb to tell him precisely that.

The orb, spherical, offers the facsimile of a horizon, a unified future, The Truth; but really, its offering is reflection and hence repetition. The future it offers is merely the present, over and over again: the future capitalism ultimately preaches, despite its promises.

Now the phrase “pondering my orb” takes on an ambiguous quality. I imagine it as a kind of response.

He gets a text: “watcha doin”. 

He texts back: “pondering my orb”.

Is he pondering whether the orb is trustworthy, whether it is in fact worth continuing to ponder? Does he continue to go through the motions, to continue ascribing authority to his orb, or does he follow the sense of disappointment to its troubling, iconoclastic conclusion? Either way, he’s not quite admitting to anything. Either way, the promise of knowledge, of purpose, of meaning that the orb embodied before is compromised. But then again, what's the alternative?

iv

In his "enquiry into the origins of cultural change", The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey analyzes the "time-space compression" that seems to occur across the history of capitalism, characterized as it is by a "speed-up in the pace of life" and an overcoming of spatial barriers such that "the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us.

"As space appears to shrink to a 'global village' of telecommunications... and as time horizons shorten to the point where the present is all there is (the world of the schizophrenic), so we have to learn how to cope with an overwhelming sense of compression of our spatial and temporal worlds," Harvey writes.

The experience of this compression, he says, can be "challenging, exciting, stressful, and sometimes deeply troubling."

In Europe, as time and space were reconceptualized and reorganized by the mercantile development of money exchange and long-distance trade, maps and cartography became increasingly important to the powers that be. By the Renaissance, Harvey writes, the voyages of "discovery" challenged what one could call the literal world-view of European consciousness. These colonial ventures "indicated a globe that was finite and potentially knowable."

Harvey points to how postmodern media represent this globe to itself: a shrinking globe, which, by degrees, compresses exponentially until, perhaps, the physical world, the scope of time, the world of possibility, is small enough to set on our desktops, then to hold in our hands, to slip into our pockets.

Globe becomes orb.

Thank you for reading ill-defined. This post is public so feel free to share it.

v

In one popular iteration of the meme, the orb has been overlaid onto the “Boy and Girl Texting” template. In the top panel, the girl texts to her boy, “I’m COMING OVER U Better NOT Be Pondering your ORB!” Of course, in the bottom panel, we see our boy, labeled, predictably: “me pondering my orb”.

The “Boy and Girl” template adds a layer of morality, of pleasure and transgression, to the orb’s meaning. In fact, implicit in a lot of the iterations of “pondering my orb” is a sort of moral disapproval.

There’s something not good about pondering your orb. 

What the girl says suggests that pondering the orb amounts to a kind of unfaithfulness to some greater commitment. Pondering one’s orb becomes a kind of cheating. (This sense comes through in other iterations (see, for example, “he just literally nutted in me and then started pondering his orb”), often veering into explicit pornographic forms, as a Twitter search of the word “orb” will quickly attest, at least at time of writing.)

To ponder the orb is to stand (rather, I suppose, to sit) at the point of knowing something is deeply wrong with the way things are. And, as we know, to know—or to feel as if one knows—is pleasurable. To look away from the orb would be to break the spell of knowing. To dip back into the choppy waters of anxiety.

The girl in the meme is the future, “coming over,” not yet arrived. The orb is an endless present. And to “know” only the present as it happens is merely to endlessly perceive. Knowledge without memory, without hope, without meaning.

The orb is a trap—not like a bear trap; more like a water trap, or that thing people put in their drains to catch hairs, or maybe a minimum wage job—and we know it’s a trap. That’s where the pondering comes in.

But if we were merely absorbing the emissions of our orb in a one-way relationship, we would not be pondering our orb. We are not coppertops trapped in the Matrix, awaiting our Neo to descend into the Real World and unplug us (unless, of course, we are); we are aware of what’s happening, if only in the back of our minds. Why else post the meme? (Yes, I am suggesting that posting the “pondering my orb” meme is a form of pondering one’s orb.)

vi

On December 6, 2021, @simonharris tweeted an illustration of a robed, bearded, wizardly man sitting on a rock, smoking his pipe beside a brook in a verdant wilderness with the caption: “remembering what life used to be like. no orbs. just wizards pondering the moment.”

The image was quickly identified as an illustration by Roger Garland for the 1984 Tolkien Calendar, published by Ballantine Books. The wizard in question is Gandalf the Gray, evil Saruman’s righteous counterpart.

An antidote to orb pondering. A return, literally, to nature. (All things considered, a very Tolkienesque take.)

This seems too easy. The orb is not just a technology. It is an order of things, a node in the structure of society, more analogous to an abstract category like “the media” than to the comparatively concrete concept of “smartphones”. To adapt Jacques Derrida’s famous saying, “there is no outside-orb.”

In The Lord of the Rings, no one destroys the palantiri. No one casts a seeing-stone into the fires of Mount Doom or shatters one with a mighty blade or throws one in the bushes, leaving it behind. Instead, Gandalf, when he discovers that Pippin "fool of a" Took has taken Saruman’s palantir, exposing himself to the Evil Eye of the Lord of Darkness, seizes it and covers it over with a cloth. Gandalf does not destroy, remove or escape the palantir. He takes control of it.

There is one word in the meme we have not yet discussed: “my”. The ponderer is not pondering “an” orb, “the” orb, “bae’s” orb, or “Sauron’s” orb. It is “my orb.”

The orb has separated the ponderer from his world, from a future, instead reflecting the appearance of a world-present, a globe, a “universe” (that which is “rolled up into one”). But there’s no denying the fissures in this picture. The world is burning. Pandemic is raging. Authorities defy the pleas of the people for their most basic needs. Laying claim on the orb is the first step toward something else. Something other-than-what-is.

Perhaps, pondering us in return, the orb is quietly seeking in us a future that it has no way of imagining on its own.

Thank you for reading ill-defined. This post is public so feel free to share it.