[Extensively edited & revised]
(Little of what follows will be easy to write, but I’ll try to keep it short. In the end, I will fail.)
I received most of my political education while attending the University of Texas in the ’60s. Early on I marched to desegregate a local bar, and later on I took part in every anti-war demonstration I could. It wasn’t hard at all, because the war was so wrong. From studying German writers like Bertolt Brecht, I learned that none of us lives in a vacuum, and that artists must never be silent in the face of evil and injustice. But things are different today.
Speaking out (in the normal sense) against the onrushing lawless momentum of the current administration is useless for effecting change, because much of what we call America is broken (see Glen Greenwald’s current post), at least for now. Interactive digital publishing and networking offered promise, but for all their dedication, energy, and sincerity, the netroots mainly mirror the right-wing noise machine in a cosmological sense. All that venting in cyberspace! How easily we forget that but for a single mob of fewer than two dozen Republican goons literally banging on the doors where vital ballot recounting was going on in Miami, Al Gore might be president today. I remarked to a client this morning that if the blogosphere didn’t exist, Karl Rove would have invented it! — and I love the goddamn thing.
A much too cynical view, perhaps, but where’s the action, then? They’re planning to drop atom bombs on Persia, with at least a billion people downwind. This upsets me in a fundamental way until I realize it hasn’t happened yet. I read the blogs and there it is again, conspicuous by its absence, like a forbidden secret diagnosis of Stage III cancer.
For those of us raised in the past to be responsible and do our civic duty, the internal pressure is enormous. And yet, so much of we’ve learned is either swept aside or obsolete. Activism is useless, outside of limited issues of no consequence to the powerful. The email pleas I regularly get from advocacy groups are loaded with the smell of death. Voting doesn’t work either, because Democrats are merely Republicans who apologize, saying they’re sorry and then “going along…” With what? It simply blows my mind that we had a Congressional election and the winners think they lost — why would anyone think it reasonable to elect more of them?
But I truly don’t don’t want to argue. I’m talking about trying to stay sane.
I’ve discovered I have a gift for looking deep inside and expressing what I see. I go out into Nature and find there’s a spiritual dimension behind the building blocks of the physical world. I experience this like you feel cold water splashed right in your face. On the one hand, I feel I have a duty to my self to put this out there with the talent I’ve been given. This isn’t “navel-gazing,” but reporting on the nature of reality, to the limited extent that can be done with words and images. On the other hand, the former could be bullshit and I’m simply following joy. What happens then if I’m lucky (and with all true art) is that the audience feels a resonance they didn’t know was there before. Something stirs, and barriers fall. The creative process becomes shamanistic healing as all participants are forever changed.
When I’m able to write like that, I feel ecstasy and unity with all Creation. It’s like an athelete performing an “impossible” feat with seeming effortlessness and grace. I live for that… When I’m in that state, I don’t care about money or sex or food. I don’t care about who I am or what I am. I don’t care if I’m in the front of the line or at the very end. I don’t even care if I’m alive or dead, because it seems I’m in the same place, either way.
All that goes out the window when I feel the anger rising.
What I really experience, moreover, may be possession by an apocalyptic archetype manifesting in the world. I feel I HAVE to fight but intellectually know it’s useless — a couple minutes of that, and you spiral into the end of everything. Right now, for example, the onrushing lawlessness seems unstoppable, with nothing to prevent the neocons from bringing on the final act. Nothing, that is, except “chance,” or intention acting on the quantum field. The bitter irony is that even talking about this in a supposedly enlightened way kills possibility and invariably sucks me right back into the hole.
I don’t believe in “the Apocalypse” or the “end times,” but when I’m in the feedback loop, the sense that something’s going on is hard to shake. It’s like we’re at the end of a long road and have to be reprogrammed for whatever comes next. The apocalyptic archetype is very real, and I can feel the pull. Something of an evolutionary teaching moment, perhaps, I don’t know, though my heart tells me that the inner call to fight and man the barricades, while terrifically compelling, is in some way deceptive… (That will be likely be misunderstood, so imperfectly do I write, and I apologize in advance for not responding to comments until I grow much wiser.)
Quite possibly I am gone round the bend and best ignored. Almost certainly, my own projections are involved. This post describes my own struggle, in any case, going on for quite some time now (I feel much better for the writing of it, but frankly would love to forget the whole damn thing). Hopefully I’ll get off my sainted ass and go hiking in the mountains soon, which brings us back to that which can’t be named. If art of any consequence results, please thank the stars…
I will have had little to do with it, after all.
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