The angst I expressed yesterday in my last post---it was real, but it really wasn't about the undeveloped desert. Yes it saddens me to see it ripped up. I do not like having it taken away from me. But I have known this is coming for several years now. It was a great comfort to have it available for my roaming and ambling, especially during Covid. The lockdowns reduced life to a certain set of essentials that was clarifying. Maybe that's a big reason why we embraced it so thoroughly. Such clarity feels elusive in modern world.
Really, my expressed angst was about something deeper. I pondered this yesterday. Is it a personal frustration? I suppose. But my personal life situation is not particular bad at the moment. My health is stable enough for me to consider myself lucky, all in all. I have a stable income for the moment which is quite good and my job is very nonstressful so far. Again, I can count myself very lucky. I have lost friends and family, to death and estrangement, yet at the moment I feel very lucky to have what I have. I cherish the people I am in contact with.
Usually what weights on me most is something bigger, and it has to do with the state of civilization as a whole. Notice I did not say the state of the country, but rather the state of the entire world. I mention this because it's very tricky to navigate this level of discussion without people leaping to politics. In a way I envy them, that they can focus on political solutions. If the next election goes our way, the idea goes. Our people can fix things. I lived a lot of my life in that mode.
The sadness I feel lately, that never quite leaves me, is on a higher, or deeper level, if you prefer. Writing about it here seems difficult but it seems so abstract. Also, although it is beyond politics, it is not beyond ideology, and to even try to clarify the situation on that level can mean disturbing and angering people. Or it means saying things that people think are downright crazy. What the hell are you talking about? I get shut down immediately. Or I say something that people link to their favorite public figure that they currently hate. If you hate someone in the public sphere, then everything they say is wrong and they must be discounted, shouted down as a bad person. Better just to keep my own mouth shut.
Our entire civlization--the world we have all known in our lives---feel as if it is dying. I have felt this subtly for a long time without articulating it. It first came to my conscious mind strongly after traveling in Europe and North Africa in 2014. I had traveled to Europe and Asia in the 1980s and 1990s and felt the beauty and excitement of exploring those nations and meeting people there. Now that time feels to me like an Indian summer. After 2014, I had the sense that the nations of Europe were dying out, not just in their populations, but in a cultural sense. That is why I became obsessive about photographing the languages of Europe---the street signs, the advertisements, the announcements in posters in the subways. I felt I was documenting the end of something.
After that trip, my personal life seemed to reflect that. Almost immediately I lost my job that had allowed me freedom of travel, and I never found one quite like it, even the one I have today. My mother got terribly ill and never fully recovered. My father then got terribly ill and wad dead within a year. All this played out while we were living in Portland, a city that I loved, but which now feels as if it has destroyed itself as well. I knew by summer 2015 that my feeling that we were in the same cultural epoch as the 1980s and 1990s was over. We were in a new era in which none of us knew where we were heading. Depending on your politics, you can put a finger on the cause of your misery.
Now the death of the European nations is all over social media. What I saw back then was just in nascent form.
There is no going back. There is no political solution. The very energy of our civilization is winding down. This is what ails my soul. It feels apocalyptic to me.
Most of the time I try not to think about it, but at times it overwhelms me. I cling to what I have left in my life. I cherish the people I love. It know it was my fate to watch all this happen.
Does this seem crazy and overblown? Perhaps. But it how I have seen and felt things for years now, and it only grows over time.
The decline of poetry in our culture, in our civilization, is certainly an aspect of this, a symptom. I have been thinking about T.S. Elliot a lot lately. Our current view of Elliot is that he reflected the post World War I pessimism about civilization. His poetry is about the death of the idea of wholeness as expressed in the optimism modernism of the previous century. All of that was shattered by the war.
But we went on, right? We got over it. Civilization moved forward. Or did it? Elliot gave us the shock of the awareness. What are the poetic statements that replaced Elliot? I don't think there were any. I think we are still living in that world, only much more advanced down the line. We convinced ourselves otherwise, but it was an illusion. We thought we rebuilt, but the philosophic thrust of the west, from the 1960s onward, has been that any attempt to build is itself a form of tyranny and oppression. We must smash things.
One of the great shifts in my historical awareness during my intense "down the rabbit hole" research with my friend Thor in 2005-2008 and beyond was coming to the belief that World War I never really ended. The Iraq War of 2003-2004, among other things, was merely another phase of it. I've never gotten over that War, and the belief it wrecked what was left of America.
The great artistic statement of our time surely remains Tolkein, who lived through the Great War. We are living out that epic story, perhaps, collectively and each in our own way. Should I write about that? It feels so picked over.
3 comments:
You describe how WWI has never ended, just continued in mutations. There are civil wars that are being reignited tearing apart structures of families friends faiths. Currently the rhetoric is to fight against what you hate, what you propose to be against. But what are we for? What is our hope? Are we willing to share? Pope Francis says it simply in his call not to make walls but to make bridges. Many are going g out for battle when it could just be sitting around a table for a quiet cup of tea. No one will change their mind but they might fi d the commonality of what we are For. 2 cents from pollyanna
Yes. Hate feels good to feel. I discovered years ago, while going down the rabbit hole of deep historical revisionism, that people are often willing to change their mind about someone they admire, their heroes, and see them as flawed or even as on the wrong side. But no one wants to change their mind about villains. It is almost impossible to give up the hate, even as a hypothetical experiment. There is perhaps something deeply anthropological in their about our tribal natures, and how we judge and adopt our opinions largely based on how we perceive others will receive them. Hatred of the common enemy is the tribal unifier in our now multi-tribal society. It is how we signify membership in the tribal group, much more than what we defend and love, which can remain amorphous and undefined.
Well i saw a great bumper sticker on an old bus at the Refuge today. The font is probably protietary, but the message is a good one yo burn in your brain: laugh until life makes sense. I'm not correcting the yo because it goes with the theme. I can't have a beer with you but having a beer with you with mint leaves festively placed in my nostrils.
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