Do you hate God?
Are you afraid to die?, Shit Talk: The Meaning of Life, Vast Conspiracies, Shamanism, Coronavirus, and Inevitable Societal/Ecological Collapse.
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Lately, I’ve been thinking about consequences. About how the choices we make ripple out into the future, and how they quiver there. Longer than we could ever imagine. In a way, the past hasn’t ended. We are dealing with the consequences of the choices that were made by people and non-human beings and entities 200, 2000 years ago. Longer? Yes.
What am I talking about here? Cause and effect? Why am I typing this sentence into the computer, and why are you reading it? Because of the consequences of our choices, and the choices made by the people that came before us. We are always interacting with the past. This is all obvious but when I think about it for a while it blows my mind. We are living in a swirl of consequences in every moment all interconnected, and in a way, present in every moment. Everything vibrates with the energy of the recent and distant past. Timothy Morton in her book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, writes a paragraph that beautifully describes this.
I start the engine of my car. Liquified dinosaur bones burst into flame. I walk up a chalky hill. Billions of ancient pulverized undersea creatures grip my shoes. I breathe. Bacterial pollution from some archean cataclysm fills my alveoli - we call it oxygen. I type this sentence. Mitochondria, anaerobic bacteria hiding in my cells from the Oxygen Catastrophe, spur me with energy. They have their own DNA. I hammer a nail. In consistent layers of ore, bacteria deposited the iron in Earth’s crust. I turn on the TV and see snow. A sliver of the snow is a trace of the Cosmic Microwave Background left over from the Big Bang. I walk on top of life-forms. The oxygen in our lungs is bacterial outgassing. Oil is the result of some dark, secret collusion between rocks and algae and plankton millions and millions of years in the past. When you look at oil you’re looking at the past. Hyperobjects are time-stretched to such a vast extent that they become almost impossible to hold in mind.
If we could live our lives through this lens in a less abstract way, slowing down and paying attention to the minute and vast beauty and complexity that surrounds us in every moment, I wonder how we would live differently. Might it be too overwhelming?
Thinking about the past in this way has been brought on by Stephen Jenkinson and his book Die Wise that he opens with a thought about the people who practically invade the place he lives during the holidays with their motorboats and gas guzzlers.
What if those people could stand on the shore watching their wake wash a bit of the shore away? And what if each of us could stay put long enough to see the rippling trail of everything we did rolling out behind us? What if we stopped long enough to see the long train of unintended consequences fan out from every innocently intended thing we did?
Here is where I expose my hypocrisy. One of the few things that have consistently brought me joy, and helped me to release some stress over the past few years is going for a drive on this circle route I take. It usually takes about an hour, and I listen to music nice and loud the whole way through. Singing, sometimes crying, sometimes yelling. It’s… really something. I wonder how much ecological damage I’ve caused by doing this? Maybe I could do a little more reflection when I step out the door to go for another drive.
A good example of the complexity that flows from the choices we’ve made and their consequences comes from How Everything Can Collapse by authors Pablo Servigne and Raphael Stevens.
Several hundred thousand bolts, nuts and rivets of different sizes, tens of thousands of metal parts for engines and bodywork, rubber, plastic and carbon fibre parts, thermosetting polymers, fabrics, glass, microprocessors. . . . In total, six million parts are needed to build a Boeing 747. To assemble its aircraft, Boeing uses nearly 6,500 suppliers, based in more than a hundred countries, and performs approximately 360,000 business transactions every month. Such is the amazing complexity of our modern world.
We are living in a world that is deeply interconnected, where everything affects everything. The authors continue
All the sectors and all the regions of our globalized civilization have become interdependent to the point where one of them cannot suffer from a collapse without making the whole meta-organization vulnerable. In other words, our living conditions at this precise time and in this precise place depend on what happened a short time ago in many places on earth.
My tendency is to try and remove myself from the wonder that this is. To make facetious remarks like “whoa man, trippy stuff.” *jerk-off motion* I try to have some kind of cynicism around it to prove that I am not in awe of these things, that they are adolescent, marijuana-cigarette-puffing thoughts, and that I am an informed and rational and mature person who doesn’t get caught up in such things. That’s bullshit though. And what if that attitude is actually perpetuating the predicaments of inequity, the climate change that’s leading to total ecological destruction, and the myriad other maladies that afflict us today?
In Hyperobjects Timothy Morton talks about “the gradual realization by humans that they are not running the show, at the very moment of their most powerful technical mastery on a planetary scale. Humans are not the conductors of meaning, not the pianists of the real.” Our cynicism and lack of wonder, being above it all, could be a cause of the predicament we find ourselves in. “Cynicism becomes the default mode of philosophy and of ideology. Unlike the poor fool, I am undeluded - either I truly believe that I have exited from delusion, or I know that no one can, including myself, and I take pride in disillusionment. This attitude is directly responsible for the ecological emergency, not the corporation or the individual per se, but the attitude that inheres both in the corporation and in the individual, and in the critique of the corporation and of the individual.”
When I try to remove myself from all this, I am trying to pretend that I am not heartbroken.
Stephen Jenkinson has noticed that most audiences he has been with “believe without saying or being aware of it that being upset is a kind of noble labor and that it should be rewarded… a public expression of pain or confusion is a problem for the listeners or the experts to solve, as if the hurt has an automatic request in it to have the hurting end.” But he doesn’t feel persuaded by this. Being hurt and expressing it, and finding a language for it is a chance to go deeper into the hurt and not hide away from it or to mend it. He says “Hurt has to find its name and find a language that does justice to what has been seen and endured… people can hurt towards a purpose. They can hurt for some reason or merit beyond how it is to hurt and be hurt. Saying more when you think you’ve said enough is one way to begin that labor.” After seeing the end of the movie The Elephant Man with his friend Brother Blue, Blue had this to say after walking around for a bit “My heart is broken. I never want it to mend.”
Jenkinson explains how this was a prayer for a broken heart, and that Brother Blue knew that “remembering means gathering back together again something that was once whole and has been scattered, and that the human heart was built to break, and that feeling that heartbreak each time is remembering again the deep things of life that need remembering.”
What if we need to be a broken-hearted society? After all, we are living in a dying society. Why shouldn’t we be heartbroken every day?
It is extremely hard to die in the time and place that we live in now. In the way that our culture is so death-phobic, and that we prop up dying people with med-tech, and the power of euphemism. Saying everything to the dying except that they are dying. So I wonder what that means for our entire culture to die.
What if we could be grateful for the Coronavirus? What if we could be grateful for things that don’t benefit us in the slightest? Jenkinson believes this is the beginning of truly understanding what gratitude is. Dying in our time and place, our culture dying right now is not the way things are supposed to go. This is unfair. We had so much potential. Jenkinson has insight into why we feel this way.
When you worship in the Temple of Want your death is an insult, the ultimate, arbitrary frustration of your right to have things go as you deserve until you decide otherwise.
Collapse and death are similar in a lot of ways. What is collapse? Collapse is defined by Yves Cochet as “the process at the end of which basic needs (water, food, housing, clothing, energy, etc.) can no longer be provided [at a reasonable cost] to a majority of the population by services under legal supervision.” The authors of Collapse draw on a range of fields and have self-deprecatingly called their new field “collapsology” from the Latin collapsus ‘a fallen mass’. They seek to take into account all of the various ways that our petro-industrial civilization is facing imminent collapse and the implications that those failing systems present. Perhaps our society has a life cycle, and it’s coming towards the end.
People relate to the idea of collapse from global warming, or any number of things like, say, a pandemic, in a similar way they relate to death. There is denial, an attempt to find out a way to fix it. There is anger at a future they felt entitled to being taken away from them. People react to talk of collapse in many ways. The Collapse authors say that “Accepting the possibility of a collapse means accepting the death of a future that was dear to us, a future that was reassuring, however irrational it might have been. What a wretch!” Reacting with anger is not a new phenomenon. The authors of Collapse advise us to “talk about collapse, but calmly.” They know that the news they bring is shocking and that it closes many doors. But they also recognize that it “opens up countless other futures, some surprisingly cheerful.” We have to reign in these futures and make them viable.
In 1979 Hans Jonas proposed that we should listen less to prophecies of happiness, and listen more to prophecies of misfortune where the potential for catastrophe is there. The engineer Jean-Pierre Dupuy shares a similar view through what he calls “enlightened catastrophism” where the threats that present themselves to us today shouldn’t be viewed as “fateful probabilities of risks” but as “certainties.” Accepting them as inevitable will enable us to handle them as they need to be handled. “Collapse is certain, and that is why it is not tragic.” It just is. Death is certain, and that is why it’s not tragic. It just is. This view on collapse creates a paradox, however. By speaking with authority on collapse, like say heads of states saying with certainty that it is happening now, can create panic and spark a self-fulfilling prophecy, like the market failing because of the uncertainty collapse brings. How do we go about acknowledging that our system is failing, without sparking fear or panic at a large scale? Government-mandated meditation on the inevitability of death? I can imagine loudspeakers blaring “All things die, everything is impermanent” each morning. Now that I think about it more, that wouldn’t be calming, would it...
In the same way that death existed long before we ever had a chance to grapple with it, so did global warming. Morton explains that “Global warming existed long before human instruments started to detect it. For millions of years, oil oozed around deep under the ocean. All kinds of objects apprehended it, of course. When we are conscious of something, we are on a continuum with rock strata and plankton that apprehend oil in their own way.”
What if we need a little more wonder in our lives? Jenkinson says it this way.
Wonder serves mystery with grace and a humble approach. Resolving mystery is like dissecting someone you love to find out how they got so lovable.
Trying to gain a hold of our natural world, to control it, and mold it to our purposes any more than we need to is like resolving the mystery. Then trying to mend the wound, we create a Frankenstein of a society.
One way to bring back a sense of wonder is to expand our understanding of what sentience means. In the same way, Morton describes plankton and rocks apprehending oil through their particular ways of being, Jenkinson asks us to open our minds to the possibility of humans, or particular animals, not having a monopoly on sentience. In the same way that death is not a human thing, neither is life.
We have religions that sanctify all sentient beings, which is good for the sentient beings they have in mind, but this still ties “life” to having eyelashes or a central nervous system or a pulse. We are denying this quality of sentience to mountains, rivers, the air, the ground, and all that sustains us at our considerable peril and to the demonstrable corruption of the world. We should rather at least consider that mountains, rivers, the air, and the ground are all ways life has of being sentient. The realization and the humbling power of knowing that life is not a human thing could go a long way toward making us human.
When it rains, you are experiencing an entity that you are unable to see or control. Morton explains that interacting with entities in this way breaks any illusion that we can deny the reality of climate change. “The right-wing talking heads are quite correct to be afraid of global warming. (therefore denying it) It means something ontologically scary about our world. It means that not only is everything interconnected - a fatal blow to individualists everywhere - but also that the “I refute it thus” stone-kicking that we’ve come to expect from reactionaries no longer works. The “Well it’s snowing in Boise, Idaho, so global warming is a crock” meme is a desperate attempt to put this ontological genie back in its bottle.”
Now, let’s get on to the heart of the question “What is the meaning of life?” Aside from 42, and love, and all that nonsense, what if the meaning of life is what we do with our shit?
Jaques Lacan wrote that “The problem of human society is what to do with one’s shit.” And Timothy Morton expands on that by taking it out of its anthropocentric lens: “many non-humans also appear concerned about what to do with their waste.” Expanding it even further to his idea of hyperobjects, defined as “things that are massively distributed in space and time relative to humans…can be the sum of all the whirring machinery of capitalism. “Hyper” in relation to some other entity, human-made or not.” Like all of the styrofoam cups in the world, or all the plutonium we’ve ever made. Plutonium that takes 24,000 years to safely decay. What else can be seen as a hyperobject Timothy?
Even the massive density of the exponentially increasing human population itself could be seen as a hyperobject created by leaps in agricultural technology and logistics since the eighteenth-century Agricultural Revolution, and even more so since 1945. What should we do about substances that will be around many centuries after our culture has either radically changed or disappeared entirely? The problem goes beyond how to dispose of human-sized things, like the stuff that gets flushed down a toilet. What should we do about substances on whose inside we find ourselves?
In Die Wise Jenkinson gives one example of a man who told him that the “point at which continuing to live made no sense” is when “he would not be able to make his way up the stairs to the bathroom on his own.” The toilet is a marker for our quality of life. Who hasn’t once shuddered at the thought of using a porta-potty? Jenkinson goes on
He had become a North American in this, where the make or break point for Quality of Life is so often found in the bathroom. Before anyone dismisses this as ludicrous, small-minded, or Victorian, consider: Our culture places enormous emphasis on success in toilet training in our early years. There are many cultures in the world where children have little or no experience with the trauma of the porcelain throne, but here the toilet is ubiquitous, and so for us, the symbolic project that carries so much the nuance of autonomy, control, and mastery is absorbed into how we manage the vision of the void beneath us. When our last weeks are lived partly according to the dilemma of who wipes whom, the sense of regression, the loss of basic dignity, and a feeling being utterly without competence are acute, implacable, and enduring.
I think that we need to contend with the toilet of our mind. The public bathroom of our unconscious. We live in a spiritually impoverished culture, and our mind excrement reflects this. In The Eikonosphere or, The Work of Mechanical Reproduction in the Age of Terrorism Michael Judge has an interesting way of putting this
the spiritual power-vacuum created by the massive and horrific events of the early 20th century needed to be filled with the image of its own emptiness, to be rededicated in a strangely Puritan manner to the rebirth of Vanitas. After Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Frazer, Freud, we’d learned to fear the death of God; after Hitler, Stalin, Oppenheimer, we’re quite sure of God’s death, and we fear equally the birth of any new god, having seen the consequences of our most recent and popular god-surrogates. So we, as a people, replace god with his own absence, and raise to a power of religious veneration all the factors responsible for his murder: psychology, the physical sciences, and the Protestant equation of wealth with virtue.
We must struggle with these gods, we must hate them, we must break them. We have to lose them to the past so they can be present only as deities and not controlling masters. Isn’t to love, to have lost? Do we not love life, because we will die? If we don’t shatter our allegiance to these ideas, we won’t be able to move forward with the project of flushing away the Ecological destruction they have caused. Where is “away” though?
From Collapse “The idea - a simple one, after all - that diversity is essential for the stability of ecosystems (a basic lesson of scientific ecology) has apparently not penetrated the brains of most people in the political and economic elites.” Could it be because they are so dependent on the systems of physical sciences, and that they think the only way they are “good” is if they accumulate more wealth? It reminds me of a Bon Iver lyric from their song Faith “Am I dependent in, what I’m defending, and do we get to hold what faith provides?”
When the Deepwater Horizon spill happened, the BP CEO at the time Tony Hayward callously said that the Gulf of Mexico was a big body of water, and that the oil spill was tiny in comparison. Timothy Morton reveals the metaphysics of this assertion in Hyperobjects. Take it away Tim
We could call (this) capitalist essentialism. The essence of reality is capital and Nature. Both exist in an ethereal beyond. Over here, where we live, is an oil spill. But don’t worry. The beyond will take care of it. Meanwhile, despite Nature, despite grey goo, real things writhe and smack into one another. Some leap out because industry malfunctions, or functions only too well. Oil bursts out of its ancient sinkhole and floods the Gulf of Mexico. Gamma rays shoot out of plutonium for twenty-four thousand years. Hurricanes congeal out of massive storm systems, fed by the head from the burning of fossil fuels. The ocean of telephone dials mounts ever higher. Paradoxically, capitalism has unleashed myriad objects upon us, in their manifold horror and sparkling splendor. Two hundred years of idealism, two hundred years of seeing humans at the center of existence, and now the objects take revenge, terrifyingly huge, ancient, long-lived, threateningly minute, invading every cell in our body. When we flush the toilet, we imagine that the U-bend takes the waste way into some ontologically alien realm. Ecology is now beginning to tell us about something very different: a flattened world without ontological U-bends. A world in which there is no “Away”
This is apparent in the ubiquity of objects like smartphones, televisions, computers, and other such objects that are saturated with the images and sounds of mainstream noise. Judge has a somewhat relevant take on this in his Eikonosphere article. “To the extent that we’re mediatized, we’re test subjects of the American military-industrial complex, and even a meager poverty-line existence will partake unwittingly of military tech: cell phones, personal computers, electronic music, data storage, and a fair fraction of modern medical technology were paid for by the American military as a result of its nebulous and half-century-long ideological war with the Soviet Union.”
We are caught up in the results of every action that was made by every person for all of time. I need to remind myself that this is anthropocentric. Human survival is also dependent on a multitude of ecological environments that are all interconnected and living. When even one of these fungi/microorganisms/animals is affected, the whole chain is affected. From underground to surface, to air. Species extinction is a normal occurrence, but the level and rate of extinction have sky-rocketed. There can even be the extinction of ecological interactions that send shockwaves through the intricate web of the living world. The authors of Collapse note that “we are discovering, for example, that the collapse of the populations of some pollinators can cause the widespread collapse of all the pollinators of an ecosystem and thus have a serious impact on the plants that depend on it, i.e., the agricultural yields.” So one pollinator that becomes extinct can have an impact on the humans that feed off the ecosystem that is affected, and all the animals that depend on those plants that have nothing to do with the pollinators.
This is a pretty bleak picture. Can this be changed? Yes. Alternative farming systems such as agroecology, permaculture and bio-intensive micro-agriculture are able to produce comparable or superior yields per hectare as industrial agriculture with less surface used. These methods also restore soils and ecosystems “by reducing the impact on the climate and by restructuring peasant communities.” Cuba’s Grupo De Agricultura Organica (GAO) received the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the alternative Nobel Prize, by showing this was possible in a concrete, large-scale way. So why are we ‘prisoner’ to the old way of doing things? The authors bring up a phenomenon called sociotechnical ‘lock-in’.
We all stop at the petrol station to fill our tanks because our ancestors (some of them) decided at a certain point to generalize the use of the thermal engine, the car and oil. We are stuck in the technological choices of these ancestors. Current technological trajectories are therefore largely determined by our past and, quite often, technological innovations are just trying to solve the problems caused by previous ones. This ‘path-dependent’ evolution can, in many ways, lead to ‘technological dead-ends’, trapping us in increasingly counterproductive choices.
Our med-tech industry is another example of lock-in. Jenkinson explains that
The religion of medical technology goes like this: Dying is what we can do about dying. Palliative medicine is a creation of rapid med-tech innovation unaccompanied by any similarly rapid innovative practice wisdom guiding its use, governed by the unimpeachable human-centered conviction that dying is a manageable metabolic event that should be managed, animated by the root conviction if you can you should.
The “if you can you should” principle causes a lot of undue suffering for the dying. “Obliged to suffer, he or she is not obliged by the disease but by the medical innovation that has given him or her More Time and, by the inability of the law to keep pace with the innovation, to suffer.”
Alternative - and sometimes more efficient - systems cannot take hold because whichever system gets there first, lays its claim and becomes entrenched through other structures giving it support, through government assistance, subfields sprouting up to service it, etc., and diversity gets suppressed. Our ubiquitous use of cars is a good example of this. Through the promotion of ever-denser road infrastructures, governments increase the use of these structures by drivers already using them. This prompts investment and public support. Tax revenues grow, and the highways will expand and destroy other more efficient transport systems. For example, the United States destroyed the tram system along with the help of General Motors, Standard Oil, and Firestone. It is called the General Motors streetcar conspiracy. Remember the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? That’s a side plot in it.
The authors of Collapse present us with another paradox that highlights the interconnectedness of our world. And why it almost certainly means that it cannot go on.
Today, if we take away oil, gas and coal, there is not much left of our thermo-industrial civilization. Almost everything we are familiar with depends on it: transport, food, clothing, heating, and so on. The economic and political power of oil and gas majors has become disproportionate, to such an extent that 90 global companies have alone been responsible for 63 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide since 1751. Worse, proponents of the energy transition (towards renewables) need this thermal power to build an alternative energy system. This produces a somewhat droll paradox: if it can hope to survive, our civilization must fight against the sources of its own power and stability, thereby shooting itself in the foot! When the survival of civilization totally depends on a dominant technical system, it’s the ultimate lock-in.
We cannot stop growing, even though that is what we desperately need to do. “None of our institutions is adapted to a world without growth because they were designed for and by growth.”
I often wonder why I write these articles. Lately, I have wondered if the infrastructure to keep the internet running will still be up in a few years. Will you be able to see this in five years? Maybe that is part of the reason I write these, I am trying to send a signal out to others and to myself that things need to change. Really it’s just cope, dope, and hope from here on out isn’t it?
Should I print these out to keep some record of the time that I wrote them? Would those pages turn to dust eventually? Yeah, probably. I have also come to realize that the reason that I am even alive today to tippy tap this article together is because of death. As Stephen Jenkinson puts it “Life doesn’t feed on life. Life doesn’t nourish life. Death feeds life.”
Every day we are exposing ourselves to a moral hazard that the authors of Collapse define as “behaving as if we were not ourselves exposed to the risk. Some agents refuse to accept responsibility for their decisions but, more importantly, although their actions may be considered to be rational in normal times, they can lead to inevitable collective failure.” Maybe I am just having revelations so obvious everyone else had them a while ago and moved on. Or did we forget them? Do we need to move toward a more ceremonial way of living, where each morning we remember that we are in a complex system that depends on all of us and that we need to make the most of each day?
These revelations must have been so obvious that they were hiding in plain sight. I am trying to reconnect to a sense of wonder, meaning, and purpose in my life. I’ve been through edgy teen nihilist phases, but I’m not so sure I’ve moved on from them. It provides a background hum to my life. When I ask why, I think about shopping malls. So many resources wasted on something so pointless. And I begin to wonder if there is any meaning in it. And there is meaning to it because we choose our identity through what we buy, so shopping malls are our place of worship.
I’m not trying to be edgy here, this is really how we have filled the void of meaning in our lives. In Collapse the authors describe how we are living through the greatest wealth gap we have ever seen. This has many consequences, one of which is how we form our identities.
“The increase in economic disparities triggers an overall acceleration of consumption through a sociological phenomenon called ‘conspicuous consumption’, described for the first time by the sociologist Thorstein Veblen: every social class tends to do everything (and in particular to consume) so as to resemble the social class just above it…. The phenomenon is so powerful that consumption can, in rich societies, become inseparable from the construction of personal identity.”
We can’t, or maybe shouldn’t, go out and shop anymore. But then who would we be? Would we be anybody? Currently, we can’t attend events that reinforce our identities. I can’t go to poetry readings to pretend that I am a poet anymore, and my self-image, sense of self, is suffering because of it. I have had some really hard days the past few weeks, and I really wish I could do a live performance. I miss being able to conjure a certain energy into a room, and I miss what doing that means about who I am. That is worth saving to me, but all of the other madness that keeps this machine turning isn’t. I’m being selfish, but what I’d like to save is the storytelling, the movies, all of the things that should come at the very end of the chain if there is stuff leftover. We don’t necessarily go back to “a simpler time” but we create a new way of being that lets go of competence and mastery.
One patient under Jenkinson’s care was a medical doctor, and when he tells a story about working with him, we can get an idea of what it means to exist.
he had saved every nameplate from every office in every clinic and hospital and university he had ever worked, and they were all in the death room with him, bronze and silver and stainless steel declarations over and over of his name and his degrees and his accomplishments and his status in the world, reiterations that he was still what he was, that he would die an oncologist, that his competence and mastery would survive what he would not survive, testimonials all to the Quality of his old Life (emphasis added.)
The most energetic and resilient fear Jenkinson has seen in his time working with dying people is that life will go on. “That the living will continue to be the living and be able to proceed as if the dying person is past, done, over, in some way as if that person had never really, enduringly been.” We often go about most of our lives without realizing, as Jenkinson puts it, “that the real substance of our lives is contained in its witnesses, that our life is tangible in how it is to others, in the relationships we were part of. We are real, in other words, to the extent that those around us grant us our reality and we theirs.” This reminds me of the MF DOOM lyric from the song Accordion “Is he still a fly guy clapping if nobody ain’t hear it, and can they testify from inner spirit.”
Dying wise is about having witnesses, and being a witness to others dying. “Getting good at dying, for anyone involved in it, doesn’t mean that you are fine in spite of it all. It means to be wrecked on schedule. It means not wanting to die when you know you are dying. It means saying so. It means wanting more than anything for your loved one not to be dying and telling them this. It means missing people long before they die and telling them so. It means being sad with people, instead of “about” them.”
This makes me think of posting something on Instagram. I have been trying to use it less, and to establish “posting days.” During those days I will post what I want to post, try to get some “engagement” on it through liking things, and just generally being active. Then wait an hour and see who liked what I posted. Then I go through a routine of checking stories, checking my story to see who has seen it, sometimes I hope a particular person sees what I post. I want to know that what I have posted has been seen and that I am someone worthy of being liked. I will check my own profile and imagine that I am seeing it for the first time. What will someone think of me, commoditycreature, when they land on my page? Oh, decent follower to following ratio. Has a link. People like their stuff, they are active. This is who I am, this is how I would like you to see me.
The next time that I perform at a show I am going to take the advice of Brother Blue. Hugh Hill, or Brother Blue, said that during a performance look for one person in the crowd and pray for them during the show “If you can see what that one person has walked through, from their earliest time, from all their growing up time, through everything they wanted to believe in that didn’t believe in them, through everything that couldn’t last, through every heartbreak that got them to tonight, you’d fall down on your knees in awe, and there'll never be another stranger.”
I don’t want shows to be over. I miss all of my friends so much. My body is in pain, aching to see them and give them hugs. Is anyone else sad too?
Stephen Jenkinson has called the novel Coronavirus a god.
The thing that got interrupted had no business continuing. This virus, this is a god; that is not overstating things, and the gods are in the house, and god is having god’s way as gods tend to do. Our obligation is to exercise a radical hospitality to this anarchic presence and to learn how to be undone by it.
The “Whew boy, 2020, am I right?” memes frustrate me. They assume that this year is an anomaly and that things will eventually settle back into normalness. Coronavirus hasn’t done anything, it also hasn’t just happened as bad luck, it’s only revealed the vulnerabilities that are already there. Not only are we a bag of bones susceptible to disease, but we also built a system that liked to fool itself that it can beat the disease, and we are unwillingly learning that it can’t. Or at least it can’t beat death. Jenkinson:
When I say “Know death well,” I mean that we must know how singular and nonhuman death is, how it is a knowable mystery not much known by our culture, how for all its ubiquity it continues to be dreaded and entered into as separation and loss and a miserable shock.
We need to remember where we come from. We need to physically connect with the systems that keep us alive, and not be so insulated and comforted by our modern life. I say all of this from a cushy chair, through a MacBook I got in 2012 for college. Yes, I’m a hypocrite, so what?
“Dying people must stop dying trying to be remembered and begin to die remembering.”
Jenkinson notes that “People die the way they live, mostly” This presents us with the opportunity to learn how to die “well long before your turn comes.” What this means to us is that “you can practice it in all the mundane corners of daily life. It means there’s nothing to wait for. There’s no one to give you the news. Getting up again the next morning, until you can’t: That’s pretty much all the news you’re going to get to keep you in the know. Being able to eat again, until you can’t. That’s the news.” The Dali Lama describes his life work as “being a simple monk who is preparing for his death.”
Let’s try and get to know the deity of death. This feels taboo to say, but let’s welcome the Coronavirus, and let it undo us. What would it mean to get to know the holy? Jenkinson writes
Trying to get to know something of the holy during your life, and along the way hating the holy and the way things are from time to time for having to learn the way things are, that is how the meaning of your life - and the meaning of the ending of your life - gets made. In my experience, most of those dying people who think about any kind of God come to the firestorm of hating God, as do many of those who haven’t thought about God much at all.
How are things going? Coronavirus, mass protests, election tensions, no healthcare for all, ecological catastrophe. How will you contend with them? I am making music. Trying to remove myself from seeming like I care. Writing these articles. Is it meaningful? Jenkinson says
Meaning is made while you live, in all the small true moments that become your life, and it is all but inevitable that your way of living will become a part of the meaning of life that others - your grandchildren, say, or someone else’s grandchildren - will with some cobbled-together version of willingness and capacity live or not. The crucible for meaning in your life is how you wrestle with the way things are.
The authors of Collapse tried to use the word ‘crisis’ as little as possible because “it creates the illusion that the situation is ephemeral. A crisis still fosters the hope that a return to normal is possible.” This makes it possible for political and economic elites to use ‘crisis’ as “a bogeyman they can brandish to subject the population to measures that would never have been tolerated ‘in normal times’. By creating a sense of urgency, a crisis paradoxically boosts a sense of continuity.”
When will we stop being shocked, and therefore easier to control, by the fact that all paths lead to death, decay, ruin, and that all things are impermanent? No matter how many times we tell ourselves otherwise, this will remain true. There is a gravity to death, pulling us towards it.
Jenkinson talks about the med-tech industry being a profession that sells Quality of Life.
Quality of Life sells you control and mastery and competence in the face of something so singular, so personal, and so incontrovertible as Your Own Death because Your Own Death is the largest and latest and last incarnation of what beggars your insistence on control and mastery and competence.
I find this passage interesting. When I bought the Die Wise book, I knew that I had the idea running through my mind that I will learn how to be the best at dying. He isn’t really saying it’s a lifelong struggle or battle, something else to be mastered and controlled. “Whoa, that dude totally dominated dying, nice.” But that it’s a life long learning, and that when your death comes, let it come.
The time of our dying is the time for being able to recognize, maybe for the first time, that what was once supposed to be our self-directed life turned into something else. All the things that were bigger than us, and our great wrestling match with them, became our lives.
I’ve fallen into the trap of trying to solve my death. “When every deep thing in life is turned into a problem to solve, then I would say that the way the problem is understood is just about always part of the problem. The afflicted part of you generates a solution for the affliction, and so the solution is an attribute of the problem all along.” And as I type this I am still struggling with it.
How many times have you been at a funeral service and the dead were spoken about, and not to? “The dead are gone. That is where they are. What really binds them in the horizontal imagination of contemporary people is that both of them, God and the dead, are gone. They meet Somewhere Else, not here, not now, not among us. And so we live with no obligation, no duty, no purpose where our dead are concerned. Every day we turn away from our dead. They’re not really our dead at all, anymore. They’re the dead instead.”
This reminds me of the song The Numbers by Radiohead, a protest song about climate change. One line from the song may suggest a way of relating to life and death, which are non-human entities “The future is inside us, it’s not somewhere else”
Is an obligation to the dead, an obligation to the ecosphere?
What would it mean, what would we do, if we felt like we had an obligation to the dead? How would we act differently? Michael Judge in Eikonosphere brings up an interesting quote from Walter Benjamin that is relevant here.
Not long before his death, Benjamin was to write that the only historian capable of altering the present by writing about the past is the historian “who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy, if [the enemy] wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” Success aside, the enemy is still winning every battle, and the dead are perhaps even more endangered than the living.
What if we just made charnel grounds a normal thing in America? My wiki sleuthing dug up this definition: A charnel ground is an above-ground site for the putrefaction of bodies, generally human, where formerly living tissue is left to decompose uncovered.
Timothy Morton uses the charnel ground as a way to ground us in the realities of our ecological interdependence, and current catastrophe. Our fear of death is our fear of our interdependence and our being a part of ecology. It’s funny I just looked up ecology, and the wiki definition is: “Ecology is a branch of biology concerning the spatial and temporal patterns of the distribution and abundance of organisms, including the causes and consequences.” Thinking of consequences is ecological thought. Anyway here is yet another extended passage of Morton, this time on charnel grounds:
What exists outside the charmed circles of Nature and life is a charnel ground, a place of life and death, of death-in-life and life-in-death, an undead place of zombies, viroids, junk DNA, ghosts, silicates, cyanide, radiation, demonic forces, and pollution. My resistance to ecological awareness is a resistance to the charnel ground. It is the calling of the shaman to enter the charnel ground and to try to stay there, to pitch a tent there and live there, for as long as possible. Since there are no charnel grounds to speak of in the West, the best analogy, used by some Tibetan Buddhists (from who the image derives), is the emergency room of a busy hospital. People are dying everywhere. There is blood and noise, equipment rushing around, screams. When the charm of world is dispelled, we find ourselves in the emergency room of ecological coexistence.
We need to stop trying to manage our deaths. Trying to hide death away only shits the energy out somewhere else. One last extended passage from Morton:
The ethical and political choices become much clearer and less divisive if we begin to think of pollution and global warming and radiation as effects of hyperobjects rather than as flows or processes that can be managed. These flows are often eventually shunted into some less powerful group’s backyard. The Native American tribe must deal with the radioactive waste. The African American family must deal with the toxic chemical runoff. The Nigerian village must deal with the oil slick. Rob Nixon calls this the slow violence of ecological oppression. It is helpful to think of global warming as something like an ultra slow-motion nuclear bomb. The incremental effects are almost invisible until an island disappears underwater. Poor people - who include most of us on Earth at this point - perceive the ecological emergency not as degrading an aesthetic picture such as world but as an accumulation of violence that nibbles at them directly.
In Collapse we are shown how our increasing dependence on technology, a technology that was created after global genocides in the name of progress, has come back to bite us in the ass. There is a deep lack of people up to the task of keeping the nuclear infrastructure running. We thought we could keep all the information needed to run it in a data set and that the next generation could come along and interpret it easy peasy. But
More ironically, American researchers have realized that the best way to transmit knowledge over very long periods is the oral tradition, that is to say, the transmission of myths by speech (and not in writing or, even worse, via electronic data). So nuclear experts have sought advice from the ‘specialists’ of these traditions: the few North American Indians who are still alive, precisely those whose people were driven out to make way for uranium mining…
I will end with an interesting force that has been guiding me in the past few months.
I have routinely been shown over the past couple of months that my aspirations towards objectivity or reasoned and rational discourse may not be as wise or as noble as I imagined them to be. Ever since I asked myself the question “How can I write objectively” numerous texts have presented themselves to me urging me to go in the opposite direction. This passage from Die Wise is another example of that.
Thou shalt not be afflicted by that which thou proposes to treat in others. Objectivity usually invalidates experience by characterizing it as a prejudice, but objectivity itself is a prejudice. Whether or not objectivity is possible, it has never struck me as a worthy, laudable achievement. It is to me better understood not as the quieting of the self, but as the View from Nowhere - probably not helpful in working with people and not a lot to write home about.
In 1983 the Army, specifically, INSCOM, conducted research into the gateway experience, stuff having to do with brainwave synchronization and astral projecting, to assess its usefulness for training military personnel. Ronald Thomas West, whose bio describes him as “A former Sergeant of Operations and Intelligence for Special Forces, had lived over thirty years in close association with Blackfeet Indians (those who still speak their language), and is published in international law as a layman” wrote a short book titled Transcendent Warfare & Shamanism where he explores US Intelligence’s attempts at exploiting the spiritual and transcendental realms for their purposes, and how this is foolhardy and doomed to fail from the start. He writes
It follows, exploring the several so-called ‘psychic’ phenomena (e.g. telekinesis, remote viewing) from the lab of Cartesian-Platonic Western science will be an ongoing, rank fail, for the fact of the major cultural self-deceit called ‘objectivity.’ In fact all matter is consciousness imbued and any single ‘object’ cannot be ‘separated’ from awareness but only isolated from the self via a set of steps routing around any ‘object’; this requires a ‘presupposition’ or, realizing certain circumstance will be encountered demanding a practice of ‘avoidance’ (practical invisibility.) Herein (indigenous practice) is a matter of seeing but purposely, consciously not engaging but because the Western method is ‘proactive’ (projective) it cannot avoid engagement (drawing attention to itself) concerning certain laws and attending forces it does not factor in (does not know how to.)
They are playing with fire, and they are swimming in gasoline. I thought it was interesting that I ran into this passage after asking myself the question about objectivity. It could just be selection bias to be noticing all of this now, but that takes away some of the mystery doesn’t it?
The book How Everything Can Collapse has also made the argument for a more subjective approach. When the authors were first giving lectures on the subject of collapse, they stuck to cold facts and figures. They thought this would reach people’s rational minds, but they ended up reaching their hearts. Emotional reactions ranged from sadness, tears, anxiety, resentment, and outbursts of anger. They came to the discovery from these talks that they had to “add to our cold and objective discourse the heat of subjectivity - ensuring that emotions too had plenty of room as we built up our arguments.” They learned that they could learn a lot from “the discoveries of the behavioral sciences when it came to denial, mourning, storytelling, and all the other themes that could link psychological realities to collapse.”
Unfortunately, my reaction has mostly been numbness. There is a swelling rage that I hope will burst through some sort of musical expression. Think Death Grips. There is a sadness and a pain that is ever-present, and I am gobsmacked that we didn’t really change anything. Maybe it was naive of me to believe that a pandemic would do anything but make things worse. So the numbness that I feel is most likely a way to handle the overwhelming amount of feelings that I do feel. I kind of prefer it, but a good cry would feel nice.