Musings on Dread and Dystopia, or How I Get Ready to Go Back to Work Every Monday
Summer Chronicle #7
We are living in a season of dread. Even as we lose ourselves in screens so utterly that we forget who we are there is a sense that something is missing, that the gap between the world we’d imagined we’d occupy and the one we do is larger than we knew. Hence the horror of recognition that the abyss is us, that there is nothing behind the representations that flit before our eyes like the shadows in Plato’s cave.
Some of us live in it and never know it. What is silence? What is emptiness? Who is this person that I call “I.” These things are simply never asked. What would be the point?
There is no loneliness, no vast solitude of the sea or terrifying stillness at the heart of the desert. Every second of every day, each inch of space is filled with distraction. Silence is not broken because it never exists. It’s not part of the network.
No soul, no self, no node of choice at the nexus of becoming. What is the point of boredom? Annihilate it. There is only that which can be put into the service of consumption.
I buy therefore I am.
I am part of something larger than myself, tell me what it is.
There is a stark terror at the core of our busyness. It drives our violence towards each other and the world. The unexamined life IS. Lives of quiet desperation ARE.
There can never be a world where this is not so. Murder the questions. Kill those who ask.
Compassion, they say, is a form of weakness. There is no right to be alive, no fundamental obligation to anyone or anything. Freedom is the liberty to be beyond alienation.
If I move to a former nuclear silo once the end times approach, what will compel those I have hired to guard me from killing me and taking it for themselves? Who owns dystopia, the machines or their creators? What is nature once we have conquered death and crossed the border between the human and transhuman?
Is this the stuff of science fiction or is this the era we are moving into as dark forces are released into the world? What is the nature of our politics once we surrender the idea of truth? Will culture mean anything once we give up our humanity to technology? How will we live once the tipping points have all been triggered and our denial is no longer strong enough to block out the catastrophe of the end of nature?
To what end write? To what end work? To what end recognize our connections to each other? To what end reproduce? What is it precisely that we are devoted to? What does one do when the world has no place in it for you? If the collective does not include you? When the future does not belong to you or you to it, where do you land?
This land is not your land, this land this not my land. This land was not made for you and me.
I seem to be a little out of sorts lately, a bit depressed. Maybe I need to get a pet, start a new hobby. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. For some reason I just can’t get over this feeling of dread. And I know despair is not productive. What are three easy things I can do to address this looming sense of horror? Is there a TikTok you know of? I don’t think we have a lot of time. Ask your colleagues. We can use each other as resources. Isn’t this a great organization? I love it, don’t you? Maybe ChatGPT can help. I need to take a webinar or join the Zoom meeting.
Hold on, all these individualized solutions are too apolitical. How could I possibly become so self-indulgent? What can I do to finally fix the Democratic Party? Should I adopt the Abundance agenda? Consult the polling and realign?
No, that’s too bourgeois. I’m going to join a union. Oh wait, they are being eliminated. Write an angry column about my tax dollars supporting genocide? Forget it, the local paper wouldn’t print it. Hold a sign once a month? My boss might get mad and fire me.
In Gaza hollow-eyed children walk the streets, frail, skeletal figures searching futilely for food or refuge.
Time to be brave. Maybe I should join a socialist organization and transform the capitalist system through non-violent means? Or perhaps I should endorse revolutionary violence and overthrow the state? Or at least throw myself into the gears of the machine as a symbolic gesture of resistance for thirty seconds of media coverage?
What IS a person to do? Plus, I’m worried that if I do ANY of these things they’ll revoke my citizenship and deport me to a torture prison in El Salvador or banish me to Sudan. If it can happen to Rosie O’Donnell, it can happen to any of us.
Time to regroup. I’ll just go back to coaching little league. Never mind, ICE raid. Head to the clinic to serve my patients. Never mind, same. Relax at the local park with my neighbors? Ditto.
I’ve got an idea—let’s spend a few weeks discussing the Epstein files instead.
Time for a nap.
When I wake up, I’m worried about the cost of living, worried about debt, worried about healthcare, worried about my kids, worried about approximately 15 diseases I learned about from pharmaceutical commercials on TV, worried about whether I can retire, worried what will happen to me if I keep working.
You know, just fuck everything and everybody all the time. End of story.
I didn’t really mean that. It was just a fit of pique.
It’s not like I’m going do anything rash. No sir, not me. Nope. I AM worried about OTHER people doing something crazy though. There could be a stray bullet with my name on it. It would be just my luck. There I go again, down the spiral staircase of negative thoughts.
Don’t worry though, it’s probably nothing. See you at work, at school, at the gym or the megachurch or the wellness center or online or gaming or getting high or on Tinder or wherever it is we are whatever we are becoming.
Nothing to see here.
I’ll get over it. I’m fine. No worries. Just need a little news detox. This all can be dealt with in five easy steps. I’m sure of it.
Time to put my nose to the grindstone.
Note on the Summer Chronicles:
Over a decade ago, during my time writing for the OB Rag and SD Free Press, I penned a series of pieces over the summer that moved beyond the blog/column form to something a little looser and more open to improvisation and the poetic turn.
Below is the original preface for the first series of chronicles:
In the summer of 1967, the great Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector, began a seven year stint as a writer for Jornal de Brasil [The Brazilian News ] not as a reporter but as a writer of "chronicles," a genre peculiar to Brazil. As Giovanni Pontiero puts it in the preface to Selected Chrônicas, a chronicle, "allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes. The general tone is one of greater freedom and intimacy than one finds in comparable articles or columns in the European or U.S. Press."
What Lispector left us with is an eccentric collection of "aphorisms, diary entries, reminiscences, travel notes, interviews, serialized stories, essays, loosely defined as chronicles." As a novelist, Pontiero tells us, Lispector was anxious about her relationship with the genre, apprehensive of writing too much and too often, of, as she put it, "contaminating the word." It was a genre alien to her introspective nature and one that challenged her to adapt.
More than forty years later, in Southern California—in San Diego no less—I look to Lispector with sufficient humility and irony from my place on the far margins of literary history with three novels and a few other books largely set in our minor league corner of the universe. Along with this weekly column, it's not much compared to the gravitas of someone like Lispector. So, as Allen Ginsberg once said of Whitman, "I touch your book and feel absurd."
Nonetheless the urge to narrate persists. Along with Lispector, I am cursed with it—for better or worse. So for a few lazy weeks of summer, I will try my hand at the form.
Originally published at The Jumping Off Place
Jim, so expressive of what many of us feel!