I guess I’m living up to my invented title. I’m back, but late.
A year of fraught thoughts has not helped me build momentum. Or new habits. The tragic horror-comedy insanity of COVID-19 and the similarly flavored political warfare and societal upheaval that hitched a ride on that train of madness smeared my perception of time and space. Limbo or Purgatory seem like the closest analogies: a featureless prison stretched over a timeless horizon that relentlessly gnaws at the meaning and purpose of the self.
I hear of people’s creativity that thrived within it. I don’t know what’s worse, my jealousy and shame, or the privilege of those who still had the peace of mind that comes without the looming threat of homelessness during the chaos that was the year Twenty Fucking Twenty. Maybe I’m just looking for a villain. Sometimes they tie a thief to the tree / Sometimes I stare, sometimes it's me, at least that’s what the songwriter Sting says.
I want to believe that there was meaning to my unmoored senses and direction—a value, some gleaned wisdom, a beneficial rewiring of my synapses—but all I got is a tee shirt with a picture of a middle-aged man shrugging his shoulders. What’s the purpose of persistence within a persistent fog? Is navigation possible without references? Can there be a story without plot?
Now our collective experience has settled down somewhat. Relatively. We can see better weather ahead. But what is “better”? And to where from here?
Author Barbara Kingsolver gave a college commencement speech in 2008 that in part sums up what comes next:
As we track the unfolding disruption of natural and global stabilities, you will be told to buy into business as usual: You need a job. Trade away your future for an entry-level position. Do what we did, preserve a profitable climate for manufacture and consumption, at any cost — even the cost of that other climate, the one that was hospitable to life as we knew it. Is anybody thinking this through? In the awful moment when someone demands at gunpoint, “Your money or your life,” that’s not supposed to be a hard question.
In this way, we are compelled to continue down the same path that led us, in all its grandeur and horror, to this moment. I start a new job soon, one that again sacrifices self at the altar of practicality. Yay. I’ll have the security of a roof and food, but I’m older now. I see the trap and shortsightedness of the solution. Time runs faster now. I am tired.
And Now Some Prosetry
We can’t see the cage because it’s familiar.
I do not want to be another White Guy explaining through the lens of exceptional American privilege, swinging for the marketing bleachers of attention and influence. I am the authority of nothing, reporting from a single point in the wild wild sea. Dog paddling. I’m trying to decipher myself and Us during this age of unprecedented turbulence and distortion and naked inanity.
Maybe confusion and frustration is the point.
Our collective navigation and interpretation and definition is razor-narrow. I desire a fuller account in this life, of this life. I reject the deference of the elsewhere mystical and tomorrow technical. Faith and Hope all too often abandon today for a tomorrow that frees us from accountability. Possibility is not finite. Destiny is a choice. I want to travel beyond our thin veil.
Everything is relational.
Our communication has become increasingly adversarial. “Knowing” has turned into an armchair weapon we regurgitate recklessly. Every phallic instance feverishly wags in attempt to shape reality. Add a cultural anabolic steroid such as an exploitative algorithmic-based global network that operates at the speed of light and you’ve got an existential anthropologic hot mess.
Our enmeshment is multidimensional.
Manipulation and deception and paranoia are in full bloom. Suitors of all stripes hustle and grift within our fog of doubt, seeking yields in every thought-catching crease. Our institutions lack imagination and will beyond the cultivation and retention of power. Truth and fact are up for grabs on the battlefield of belief while the shadows of our reality are warping into epic absurdity.
This is what happens as grand illusions fall.
The Culture of Civilization has always been weird. Brutally weird. Its pervasive, recursive pattern has echoed through time—an inexorable swallowing of humanity within its contagious meta-mythic structure until it defined all human identity, our meaning and intention and imagination flattened and bound to its dominating arc. It became our divine right, our destiny.
Our vision has been eclipsed by an unsustainable system.
The sphere of our feedback weirdness has accelerated exponentially to the scale of the entire planet. While masses pledge to various incarnations, they exist within a shared unity. Will we double down on our God-given, inalienable, militant, market-driven constructs? So far, all signs point to escalation on all fronts. This is our birthright. This is our 10,000 years old response.
This is the story we are trapped within.
But if we are not the center, the pinnacle, the master, the main character of some divine plan, what then? Pondering this question is heresy. The implications, terrifying. Fear makes the mind simplify. Better to be chosen. Better to be right. Better to be superior. Better to build a kingdom of reason to rule than be a participant, a member, a partner of the vast Tapestry of Everything.
Ego cowers in the face of the Ineffable.
In battle, disillusion and dissolution come as catastrophe. In surrender they arrive as awe and humility. Our perception is just a speck of a fleck of a sliver of a shard of an endless, emergent complexity from which we are inseparable. To engage life as a foe is to war against ourselves. To treat it as plunder and fodder is to betray our bond. To deem life a way station defiles the sacred.
There is an interesting question in the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas and also in an old science fiction story, the name of which I forget, concerning the paradox of free will and predestined fate. It asks whether a man in making a great decision that will forever set the seal on his future does not also set the seal on his past. A man alters his future, and does he not also alter his past in conformity with it? Does he not settle not only what manner of man he will be, but also what manner of man he has been?
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading. If any of it rang a bell in your chest, please share it with a friend.