The Process of Convergence in the Ethereal

An interpretation of dreams

               A few days ago, I had a dream. I woke up, my back aching from either the rigorous exercise regime forced upon me by the imperative of lowering government health care costs or some other physiological condition. The dream itself wasn’t important, simply my subconscious justifying sensations of my conscious. However, conversing first with my sister, and then Simona (my wife), I realized there were similarities in all our dreams, experienced at approximately the same time. Since it seemed a little strange for coincidence, I examine several similarities and apparent themes and thought I’d write them down. I know admittedly little about the interpretation of dreams and capitulate that this may just be another huge helping of my characteristic confirmation bias.

               In my dream, I was going somewhere. I was with a few others I didn’t know. We were compelled to depart our meeting place, I vaguely remember, to alert another household of something. Time was of the essence, so we jumped into a beater American pick-up. An older model made of steel. We were careening down a gravel road in a sparsely settled outpost, one not unlike the skeletal remains of mining towns in the Rockies on I-70 west of Denver. As we rounded a corner, the back end slid out and I apologized as we, first slipped, and then tumbled down a hill. I woke up after acknowledging that I and my comrades had survived relatively intact. Just a few scrapes and bruises, and my twisted back.

               Simona also had a dream with an automobile as the focal object. In her dream—details, of course, less vivid in translation—she was driving down a stair case. As she approached a landing, another car obstructed the path. She hit the gas and wedged herself between the wall and the impediment, badly damaging both, but succeeding in her passage.

               My sister explained that she, and I and others, were the prey of a vicious serial killer. She spent most of her dream trying to avoid a certain death. However, she confronted this menace on more than one occasion. When she did, it transformed into a mouse that resembled Brain, the comical menace hell bent on conquering the world, a quiet genius of dubious motive. 

               She also explained that her life-partner had a strange dream of his own. In it, he transformed periodically, under what conditions he did not disclose, into dog. And every time he strutted off to his own rhythm, he would encounter more and more dogs until, together, they formed a formidable pack.  

               Now, If I had to employ speculation in the interpretation of these dreams—and in hearing of these second two from members of our tribe separated by the expanse of the continent, I determined there must be some story of which these comprise chapters—I’d give them a revolutionary twist. And I would order the pieces into a narrative as follows.

               *We are being pursued by an evil force that seeks to destroy us. But when it is exposed to light, those that cannot chisel the façade see something smart. Capitalism seeks to consume us and we are made ignorant by the myths of efficiency, progress and inevitability.

               *To fight this menace, we must seek those who share our passions, our ideologies and our vision for true equality through transcendent love. We must build our army from these volunteers and we must embrace the fierceness of wild dogs. 

               *On our road, we must make hard choices. We will certainly have to choose sacrifice, of our possessions and of our comfort in maintaining order through easy choices. It is, after all, our own fear and inability to act in faith that has thus prevented our congealing into a coherent revolutionary force. 

               *Finally, we have little time. We don’t know when the bend in the road is going to be too tight for the speed at which we must move. We don’t know if we are going to make it to the future unmolested. However, if we can fall back onto the resilient communities (this is how I interpreted an old steel pick-up truck from the age of good craftsmanship)—our families, churches or whatever institutions we find most humanizing—we will have no trouble crawling from the heap of a mistake and continuing on toward the journey. 

               Reading some words of Emma Goldman the other day, it occurred to me that my own growing interest in the spiritual mystery teachings and anarchist political thought and practice are really two sides of the same coin. 

               The mystery teachings and anarchy are not ends, but processes of learning and love.    

 

Sobering Up

Anarchy A to Z:
a guide to understanding our history unfolding for the anesthetized and apathetic

L is for Limits

   When I was in college, I had a friend who carelessly lived--and almost died--by the 30-rack of Keystone Light. If he wasn’t with friends playing beer pong, he was managing the keg at a frat party. If he wasn’t with his brothers, he was at the bar. Our little Northern California college town was a bad place for someone who takes to the drink. Any night of the week one could find 50 cent shots, dollar pints or two dollar Long Islands. We went to a few house parties where we dumped six or seven half gallons of liquor into a plastic tub and simply add one of those cardboard cartons of Kool Aid to make it palatable. We called it Jungle Juice, but it should have been called a stupid-shit-o-meter. Every ladled cup was a step closer to a fight, an inch closer to death, a mile farther from the people who truly cared about you.

   In his worst three years, he pissed myself, spit on his sister, stole some random girls pizza before intentionally burning her with a cigarette, tried to convince a very large woman to fuck him behind a dumpster. The ambulance got called at least once and he spent three different nights in jail. And this is just a fraction of his escapades. Many told him he needed to learn my limits. But it wasn’t really about learning how to balance his physiological limits with something completely incompatible with good health. He was in a bad spot mentally, and it crept into his psyche. He had an alter ego, even though he wasn’t schizophrenic. His name was Drunk Steve.

   Drunk Steve didn’t pay attention to limits. He proceeded to stumble around town in his own universe. He didn’t need limits. He would presumably wake up in the morning a little hung over, hopefully in his own bed, without any broken bones or bloodied body parts. The fact remains that he had limits, even if he ignored them. He did, in fact, need to know his limits. It took him a long time to come to fully realize the damage he had done to his friendships. He’s still discovering the damage he did to his body.

   What if we knew our limits? Would we ride our bicycles more to save some cash and hydrocarbons? Would we plant a garden or meet our local farmer? Would we stop buying into the political circus and create parallel institutions in a spirit of mutual aid? Could we divorce ourselves from our lifestyles? Smash our Magnavox? Throw our iPods into the wind? Would we be willing to live simply, to enter into a compact of voluntary material poverty if it meant access to greater humanity or even enlightenment? 

   Ah, the hyperbole of a pessimist! And his false dilemmas! What reason has he!? We need to be pragmatists. Remember?

   Our spectacles conceal our fears. We turn to the solitude of group identities because reality is like Jungle Juice, but without the Kool Aid. It tastes like shit. We don’t want to drink the Kool Aid called reality. We would rather live and die by our spectacles, in shallow soulless shells of humans that never learned to be human. The Kool Aid won’t kill you, though, drinking it won’t save you either. But it most certainly will help you sober up.

   We live in an age of limits—I’ll be attending a conference by this name Memorial Day weekend, so check back with the Mad Mind of a Man later. Our media narratives are proof positive we are ignoring these limits. With all the talk about gas prices, you hear competing claims that domestic drilling or the Keystone XL would solve the problem on one hand and that it is simply a matter of demand on the global market—the developing world is mighty thirsty and wants to drink up the milkshake. The latter is the more factual claim, the former a political stunt to speak to the fears of crusty old white conservatives who are already deeply skeptical of science, Democrats and dark-skinned folk. To talk about oil demand immediately validates the former’s claim that we need to produce more. But that’s not going to happen. We’d rather ignore the supply side of the equation. More on peak oil later.

   We live in a world of demographic limits too. Malthus’s predictions were not disproven, only postponed. 7,000,000,000 is a lot of mouths to feed. The Green Revolution was itself a spectacle built on petrochemicals and genetic manipulation. It is a complex dinosaur. It doesn’t take much to roll the snowball down the hill. With the unpredictability of climate change-induced extreme weather, we can expect to see the Malthusian skeptics and the techno-romantics look at each other with gaping mouths. “Dude. I didn’t believe it could happen.” No shit, dude.

   Aside from food, humans need water. Many of the world’s people are already water insecure. As climate change ushers in prolonged droughts, and hydrofracking, agricultural runoff and industrial pollution continue to render potable water poisonous, Americans too will know water insecurity. An Old West adage reads: “Whiskey’s for drinking. Water’s for fighting over.” I hate needles, and pain, but I’ve always said, if I get a tattoo, it will bear this mark. If you are going to permanently brand yourself, you might as well brand yourself with something that won’t change. I suspect, it will only become more prophetic with time. If you’re from the arid West, you should know what I’m talking about.

   We don’t really need to be drinking whiskey, because we’re already drunk. And when we’re drunk we’re already past our limits. We’re drunk on the illusion that economic growth will recover, that growth can be limitless. We’re intoxicated with the present. We keep thinking, like Drunk Steve, we’ll wake up in the morning with one helluva story to tell. We keep believing that we can keep pushing our limits, that we can continue to live in an advance and complex industrial society.

   The reality of limits says otherwise. We need to sober up to our limits. But instead, we’re still stumbling around, bar-hopping as if tomorrow is as given as the sunrise. We can hydrate with some reality Kool Aid and recognize that the age of the industrial civilization is in collapse. When we sober up, our heads might hurt for a while, but at least we can begin to manage the transition to a world where less is more, a world where we no longer spin the stupid-shit-o-meter.

   Know that we have limits and we can sober up. It really is that simple. Drunk Steve eventually sobered up.

   Trust me. I was Drunk Steve.

We need to talk...

Anarchy A to Z:
a guide to understanding our history unfolding for the anesthetized and apathetic

K is for Killjoy.

   So far I’ve covered some pretty intense stuff. I’ve outlined the dominant cultural traits we experience on a daily basis without the background information and words to describe their ramifications. In doing so, I have tried to illuminate the origins of the greatest succession of crises to befall planet earth in its 4 billion year history. What about meteor strikes or ice ages? Aren’t these extinction events more significant? Not really. Past extinction events are natural phenomena. They intend to keep the cosmos humble, existing as it does in its orbiting routines, sans any exceptionalist dogma.

   Life and death is a cycle that spares no star. Thus, our own insignificance. Yet we live in an age—an extinction event slowly unfolding—where a single species has done the work of a 10km piece of stellar debris. We are losing biodiversity at a rate that exceeds adaptive mutation. We have changed the surface of the earth, removing mountain tops, dredging canals to link distinct bodies of water and building wave breaks and levees to alter the process of erosion and deposition. Geologists and anthropologists have suggested designating our current era the “Anthropocene.” This does, actually, speak to our significance. But we are cast in a dingy light.    

"The problems of mankind can be solved because we created them."

- Bright Eyes, Firewall

   Humans always create the collapse. Our institutions are monolithic invaders, wrapping their specialized tentacles around us to exact a perfectly destructive order. Our culture of consumerism replaces human relationships with empty emotional bonds with lifeless objects. We are a people of debt. This debt represents disconnection between natural accounting of creation and destruction; we continue to overdraft. Our ecology is in peril. We have been unable or unwilling to implicate ourselves in the ecosystems and climate crises. We see the nonhuman as other because we fear that which what we don’t understand. When we can’t clothes ourselves in the warmth of mystery, we cannot expect to explain our crises, let alone manage them. Instead, we divide ourselves into categories that are easy to understand, narratives of group psychology and group struggle. We cling to these groups because it confirms our biases; it is an act of identity self-preservation in an unexplainable and overwhelmingly dynamic age. We cope with spectacles, and since we can argue--perhaps without challenge--that our political system and throw-away consumer culture have devolved into the most unproductive spectacles, we have to be pragmatic in our approach to resolving our crises.  

   All of this seems pretty negative. And I admit it’s hard to frame such cold and uncomfortable facts in rosy terms. Our “history unfolding” will be the unwritten history of collapse. Our society, like dozens of human societies and animal species before, has grown too complex to survive rapid change. We can cling to emerging technologies, relishing in the vanity of our intelligence, or we can accept that human beings are not the end game of evolution. We are adaptive, and we have that to our advantage as animals whose civilization contracts around them. Yet, we need to remember that humans are merely blobs of energy that by chance alone developed the capacity to become self-aware and manipulate our environment on such a large scale. Even the brightest minds in our media and political spin rooms can’t morph that nightmare into a dream.

We need to proceed with resolute pragmatism. Pragmatism is, in a sense, the opposite of idealism. Idealism is optimism. Pragmatism is pessimism. I am a killjoy.

   Pessimism dissolves the illusions of spectacle. It renders irrelevant the fear of an unknown. “Fuck it” is the pessimist's verse. But this doesn’t make her a nihilist. It makes her better prepared to survive the collapse. The pessimist will have no qualms with the end of civilization. It’s pragmatic to accept reality and start thinking of how to make do, how to salvage the best parts of our culture. We need to think about what skills we need to survive. We need to rediscover the art of food production and preservation. We need to redevelop a spiritual relationship with the land and with each other.

   If a pessimist can share one sliver of hopeful ideal, may it be that our environmental crises do not prevent our adaptation to collapse. If they do, it would be ironically fitting to be the victims of our own genius, responsible for our own extinction. Our civilization is past its peak. So, we face a difficult choice. We can prepare for the collapse with pragmatism, accepting that we must abandon all vestiges of comfort. Or we can ignore the warning signs, desperately gripping the illusion of perpetual progress. Perhaps to aid the decision, we should consider that the longer we hold on to our dying civilization, the greater probability epic violence accompanies the transition.

   Resolving our crises is not about throwing money and mass support behind some futile solution on a drafter's table. Resolving our crises is about managing collapse in a way that preserves that which is worthwhile and fulfilling, while simultaneously undermining any attempt for our systems of injustice to be a thistle in next year's seed.