Last week marked the halfway point for this second journal of the second plague year. Most of the time, writing a weekly two thousand words has been enjoyable. Writing is a form of personal archaeology. Each paragraph removes a layer of the past, and if you keep at it, eventually you get down to the good stuff, the tombs full of jeweled necklaces, golden chariots, rust, and bones. I’ve remembered events and people I haven’t thought about for fifty years, and then, because those memories hit the page, I’ve remembered things I wouldn’t have remembered at all. I have yet to discover the end of it.
It’s been a good exercise, but it has a dark side.
In the introduction to his obscene, death-worshipping, and deliberately incomprehensible junkie novel Naked Lunch, William Burroughs suggests that we all should take a good, long look at what is on the end of our forks. He suggests that it won’t look all that palatable upon inspection, and certainly everything that Burroughs serves up in the novel is distasteful in the extreme. Scene after scene describes people killing each other or themselves.
(If you’re wondering why I read it, it was for a class on the literature of the Beatniks in college, and I remember arguing during discussions that Burroughs wanted above all to die and that he wanted a bunch of people to die with him. I called it an advertisement for suicide, which upset my professor, who saw the Beats as a revolution against the oppressive, triumphalist, neo-fascist America of the 1950s.)
I mostly remember Burroughs’s metaphor about inspecting what we’re eating, and I’ve spent much of my writing life trying to see and then describe the things impaled on our forks, what we’re eating as a country, a society, a culture, a civilization, and if we have acquired a taste for the toxic or were born with it.
I’ve tried to leaven the toxic with humor, but two years of Covid, and before that, four years of Trump, and now, Putin’s murder of Ukraine have made it hard to see the humor in things. I know, the joke’s on the Russians who are killing their brothers and sisters in the name of fraternal love, the joke’s on the Republicans who became programmed Trump cultists in the name of freedom, and the joke’s on the anti-vaxxers who are now trudging through life with Long Covid.
None of those jokes are funny, and maybe all those jokes I’ve been making about the end of fossil fuels and runaway greenhouse effects and parents who don’t want their children taught to think critically aren’t funny either. They might have been funny once, but humor apparently has an energy-return-on-energy-invested limit, and once it takes more than a barrel of laughs to get a barrel of laughs out of the ground, nobody’s laughing anymore.
Julie and I still laugh a bunch, but we live in a microcosm here in Sawtooth Valley. Laughter isn’t in short supply when the world ends at Galena Summit to the south, Marsh Creek ten miles out Highway 21, and Sunbeam, thirteen miles downriver from Stanley. That’s about all the territory we control, and by control I mean that when we decide to go to town we get to town, when we decide to go to the Post Office it’s still standing, and when we order a pizza we can go pick it up and sure enough, it looks like a pizza.
Even this efficacious state of affairs won’t last long, because tourist season is coming and the thousands of people who will be in the valley will make the beaches at Redfish look like a walrus colony, the lines at the Stanley Bakery look like Great Depression breadlines, and the highway outside our front door look like the traffic scenes in Terminator II.
I do, on occasion, write about happy things, and there are lots of happy things outside our windows. Since the big snowfalls in December and January, it’s been a low snow year. I’ve had no trouble keeping the deck clear, and lately it’s been warm enough in the afternoons to light a fire in the Solo Stove, put out some hummus and open a bottle of wine and see if the neighbors want to visit. Sometimes they do, and then there are stories and laughter and good fellowship, all of them part of a Goldilocks world that gets along like it should. It’s possible to pretend that the future will go on like the past, and our good life will keep being good and keep being life.
We know it will have to end sometime, but not now, please.
Last week, at the end of a long neighborly conversation around the fire, Julie asked everyone whether they would go back in time if they could, and what, if anything, they would change.
Nobody said they would change much, probably because all of us were familiar with the butterfly effect. We all knew a butterfly could have flapped its wings in Brazil in the late 20th century, and two weeks later, after a number of improbable atmospheric transactions, have caused a deep cold snap in Leningrad such that nobody could escape the multi-family apartment occupied by the Putin family, and Mother Putin would have snapped and beat the hell out of little Vlad, who would have tearfully vowed to become a KGB agent and get revenge on his mother and everyone else.
Which is to say that we all had utterly forgotten any number of personal decisions that, had they been slightly different, would have changed the world beyond recognition. Any decision would have reverberated down to the molecular level and back, transforming who we were and the world we lived in. We wouldn’t remember what we had done, and so would likely do something we hadn’t done. Going down a different supermarket aisle in 1987 might have been fatal, but we didn’t know for whom or what.
We all were there on the deck, with food and wine, in a happy moment. Taking the chance to put random cascading change into our past seemed foolish at best, catastrophic at worst, so none of us wanted to go back in time. All of us were linked in ways we could never understand, and because we cared for each other, it was an easy choice to keep things the way they were. Our past couldn’t be separated from our present.
I’d like to write about happy things. I don’t want to write about a world where I would change the past if I could, not for my sake but for millions of other people, whose lives have become irrevocable suffering. Thought experiments like the one Julie proposed have a tipping point between not changing anything and going back and taking that single breath, lifting that single finger, and changing everything. At some point of exceptional human cruelty or folly, it might look like a good idea to go back in time to transform the world. I hope we never get there, but a lot of people are there already. It’s a good thing they don’t have access to time machines.
Of course, if time machines existed, I’d be tempted to get a few important people together with William Burroughs for a nice long lunch.
I have twenty-five more journal entries to write in this second year of the plague.
With luck, the world and I will last long enough for me to write them. I hope all of you, dear readers, will last long enough to read them. I’ll try to find some humor in what I write about, and I hope you’ll forgive me if I shy away from the present. For a while, I’m going to give current events a rest, because you need a little perspective on the present if you’re going to find anything funny in it.
If the present suddenly turns sweet and funny and full of gentle, self-deprecating humor, I’ll reconsider.