I have 12 more blog posts to go before I finish my three journals of the plague years. That’s 52 entries of End Notes, 52 entries of Ghost Dance, and, as of this morning, 40 entries of Aftermath. Entries have averaged a little more than 2000 words, so that’s 288,000 words, with about 24,000 words to go. When I was in high school and college, 24,000 would have been a lot of words, but I think I can handle writing that much over the next 3 or 4 months.
Julie has said she’ll handle getting them published on Amazon, so all three volumes will be available, in hard copy or on Kindle. Watch for a very small ad in the back pages of Harper’s Magazine.
For a while, I thought about looking for a mainstream editor willing to whittle three volumes of observations on climate, tourism, politics, consciousness, human nature, and the persistence of evil down into one, but Julie has convinced me that my entries are a primary-source record of contemporary American living. As such, they are a window into the daily life of people who acted as if their lives—with their wealth, security, and privilege—would continue indefinitely.
Of course, dear readers (if you can read, if you can read English, if you’re not extinct, if you’re not banned from reading any of the writing of the Ancient Ones unless you’re a member of the priesthood), you know and I know that nothing continues indefinitely. But I am confident that the complacent parts of me and my fellow Americans will believe in an eternal status quo right up until the moment when there’s a new, distinctly less comfortable (and perhaps universally lethal) status quo.
We’re not alone. Denial seems to be a defining characteristic of human thought. I try to avoid it in my writing and thinking, but given, say, a blue-sky day and 6 inches of new powder snow, it will sneak up on anyone.
I’m wondering now what to put in these last twelve entries, besides noting how beautiful our world is and how much I’m going to miss it if it goes away before I do. I’ll probably not spend much time speculating about an afterlife, except to say that if reincarnation is the norm, we all might want to spend a few eons in limbo before coming back to Earthly existence. That is, we might well allow time for the karmic entities in charge to forget what we’ve done to the planet. It won’t be easy to accept the idea of coming back as a painfully conscious form of decaying rock snot in a lukewarm, oil-slicked, PCB-polluted dead sea, especially if it’s a body of water where you once waterskied as a less-than-conscious human.
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Our world is dystopian. It’s a place of suffering, not beauty, for most of the people who live on it. Karmic entities operate after the fact. No agency is in charge of making sure all humans get their fair shares of luck, intelligence, wealth, education, and consciousness. Inequality in all these arenas is the norm. I’m sad that the world can’t be a better place, with justice, truth, beauty, education, housing, food, and water available to all. Those things count toward the sum of human happiness in the world.
Ineffectual as I am, I still have tried to add to the sum of human happiness rather than subtract from it. Seeing as The Law of Unintended Consequences is inextricably interwoven with positive human intention, I’m not sure how it’s all going to add up.
I tried to do my part, as a teacher, to make people happy (in the long run, of course). I know that my former students enjoy reading and writing more than they would have if they’d never taken my classes, and the ones I took on college ski trips are better skiers than they would have been.
At times I feel guilty for being extraordinarily lucky in my marriage and in my parents and friends, but not so guilty I’d trade places with any of the people who make me feel uneasy about my luck.
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So. Things to muse about before sitting down to write:
Frontal lobes. Not just Trump’s, which these days seem to be spitting blue fire and acrid smoke, although if you’re trying to hide the fact that you’re demented, being angry all the time is a good disguise. But frontal lobes are a relatively new part of the human brain, and if the various parts of the brain form a gestalt we call consciousness, the frontal lobes don’t join the chorus until you’re 25 or so. Some people don’t get in touch with their frontal lobes until they’re 42, which neuroscientists have identified as the age when surviving heroin addicts shed their addiction and psychopaths stop hurting other people. A few people refuse to get in touch with their frontal lobes until some overmatched religious functionary is performing last rites at their bedside, and it usually resembles a failed exorcism.
Long Covid.
Evil as an elemental substance, like air, water, earth, and fire. Missed brain connections aside, evil seems to be rampant in this world. The Manichaeans suggest that Light and Darkness are locked in an eternal battle, and it’s a fortunate metaphor for good and evil, because light will banish darkness anytime they come together. But lately evil seems to have mastered the trick of sucking all the light out of the world.
What it’s like inside Donald Trump’s brain. No one I’ve ever talked to, even the most die-hard Trump supporter, thinks he’s a happy man, was ever a happy man, or will ever be a happy man. You would not want to be inside his skull. The concept brings on an ick attack, for one thing. It also brings up the idea of demonic possession, for his detractors, or divine inspiration, for his supporters. Possession and inspiration might feel identical for the person being possessed or inspired, which is to say that consciousness has winked out and has been replaced by overweening purpose. In either case, it’s bad for the human spirit.
Getting old. Getting old without getting wise. Getting old and having to answer questions about how many falls you’ve had in the last six months, and did you hit your head? Reading the obituary columns and counting the people you’ve outlived. Getting old and not feeling old. Dreaming that you’re back in high school and you get to do it right this time.
Hannah Arendt’s chapter on bureaucracy in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt has the idea that deep inside every human being is a fear of freedom and responsibility, and totalitarianism presents itself as a preferable alternative. Bureaucracy might start out as a way of governing fairly, but it inevitably ends up as a way for humans to evade responsibility and freedom and, in the end, thinking. Then, their moral senses wrecked, they do awful things at the bidding of other unthinking bureaucrats, such as building death camps.
Tribalism. It sacrifices the young to maintain the power of the old. The message is that without your tribal identity you are nothing, and we elders will define your tribal identity. The process is conducive to cynicism for all concerned.
When do tourists become climate refugees? This summer, in Sawtooth Valley, we have good odds of finding out. Fire might play a part.
Something else we’ll find out this summer: what happens when you cross the line between climate-change denial and psychosis. The April and May headlines coming out of Thailand, Burma, and Cambodia should be prophetic.
The splitting of families, institutions, and cultures along gender lines because of anti-abortion laws. The splitting of families along generational lines for economic reasons.
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These are ideas fermenting away in my head right now, and while I don’t know if they’ll ever be the focus of a blog post, they will influence what does show up on the page. There’s enough to write about to merit a fourth journal of the plague years.
The temptation (and I’m determined to resist it) is to examine the general malaise that has settled over lives and institutions, and to look for a biological cause, some infection of the soul, something that makes the Are You Depressed? checklists at the back of self-help books meaningless because we’ve all reached a state of emotional entropy.
It’s a difficulty that deserves to be explored, but putting one’s understanding up against the spiritual sickness of humanity once a week is no picnic. I dearly love writing (No. I dearly love finishing a piece of writing. It’s a good feeling that lasts until I start something else, which usually feels like a disaster until the last paragraph is rewritten). But worrying about the heat death of the soul is hard on my mood after a while. Sometimes I forget that my default emotional state is happy-go-lucky, thankful-to-be-alive, and abdicative.
So sometime this summer, preferably before the Democratic and Republican conventions, I’ll abdicate what has been, in effect, the role of witness to our civilization’s cultural, moral, and economic decline. Between now and then I’ll try, for the sake of my far-future readers, to contemplate what I see as the causes of those and as many other declines as I can think of.
As always, I do not claim to be a prophet, except that I’ve implied so many dark futures in these journals that at least some of them will happen. I do have a sense of humor about some very bleak topics, and I’ll try to keep us all laughing as long as tasteful humor about distasteful situations is acceptable. I’ll have to be the judge of what is or isn’t tasteful, which leaves me free to say anything that bubbles up into my consciousness. Past tastefulness is no guarantee of future performance.
As always, I appreciate and respect the dignity and tolerance of my readers in the present. I couldn’t have done it without being able to imagine you reading my words. Thank you.