The American experiment appears to be ending in a not-so-stealthy authoritarian power grab. In fact, the current administration would like you to believe the struggle’s already over and the foxes have already secured the henhouse—as they ramp up libel laws and rule by executive fiat and deport legal asylum seekers to 21st century concentration camps in El Salvador—but these are not the most omnipotent of men, and our newscasters and historians are ringing the bell from their sound stages and social media accounts. The nation you grew up in is no more! The darkness has come and you need to wake up now if you ever want to wake up again. Look into the eyes of your children and align yourself with the light before the midnight of our homeland becomes so complete that you forget where your mouth is and your body becomes strange to you. Now is the time to panic!
But even as we watch the disenfranchised and lost being treated as dogs and less than dogs, as we witness media outlets and our most hallowed institutions of learning being coerced to bend the knee or suffer the consequences, even as the alleged leader of the free world spits bile in the face of the camera like a regular schoolyard punk, as students are disappeared and the threats have only just started threading their way into our mailboxes and through the tinkling glass of our shattered windows—still—as you turn walking wound and angels castrated of their wings—even then—there is nothing there. And there’s not even that.
Because this is how it’s always been. As you marched through the corridor of your life—its graduation ceremonies and heartbreak—from the infinite promise of adolescence and on into any given number of cardboard cut-out futures and their many alternate endings and bonus tracks—bankruptcies and biopsies—the webbing of your daydreams strung with meetings and the occasional colostomy bag—where are you in this equation? At what point are you? Because you are not the person in this corridor—this corridor that never was.
The bible says, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” And we are witness to such moral idiots, such half-wits of the soul, such imbeciles when it comes to the why and the whatness of it all, that we believe ourselves to be stuck in the most lost place in the larger library of lost places—when there can be no imbalance in this optical illusion of a room. We find our way standing up to those who have lost theirs. We find ourselves in our staying true—our standing out—and when the unthinkable becomes the everyday, by being as courageous as we can—as the sledgehammers come down on our windshields—as our friends and neighbors are disappeared—as our leaders denounce us as sick—as the inner light dims and the doubt sets in—we still stand against them—even as our hands fly about as a particulate mush and our eyes can only see—and we are forever being funneled through these devices of the self—the skin that contains our thoughts and the tongue with which we speak them—these falsehoods of the body that color the universe we traverse—that was already unraveling when it first appeared upon the scene—even as all these things are true—we stand up. Because we are that which is placed in the heart, in our own heart and the heart of others, and those who have a heart that’s gone blind must be shown to see and they will, but it will always be too late for them.
We believe ourselves stuck in a room, a room that has some depth to it, as we zip out over the emptiness like Wyle E. Coyote and are only moving forward because we have yet to notice the ground’s given out. The ground that was never there in the first place.
So—what? The face doesn’t fit the parameters of the skull? There is no me in me and all the many versions of you I come across throughout the day also are very much not?
Maybe you’re trying to control hiccups of tears in the elbow of your blouse on Route 5 and announcing, Fuck you you fucking fuck, as a ticker tape of lies spills out of the radio while you lurch through the mid-afternoon gridlock and you who just lost your job or your home or your husband. Or maybe you’re a nervous tic I’ve been thinking was an actual living person from as far back as a kid could swim. Point is we all are.
*
I’m home again and sat in my kitchenette, computer unfurled upon the black marble of the countertop and in front of a thangka of such intricacy that from this distance it’s like a nonsense of color and shape that conceals many Buddhas and wrathful deities in the suburbs of its gold-enhanced lines and flaming bodies and schools of pink clouds that sit fleshy and stonelike on a canvas bordered in books—The Bluest Eye; Death’s End; On Growth and Form; Tomie; and A Survey of My Failures This Far—and in front of it is a jar of peanut butter, some cough syrup and a bundle of incense—on monastery grounds and dreaming of the destructed future because this is the stuff my dreams are made of—the halftimes of history—when the working classes get to working themselves up in a sweat over their failed leaders and failed states become all the rage and the rage become an all-consuming bloodsport sort of thing and things get to taking themselves apart until all that’s left are parts and the people are nowhere to be found. This is us. This is now.
At least that’s what it looks like from the bleachers—even when nothing can ever be out of balance—as the scales tip around and about themselves in an endless braid of timelines—still—considering the sorts of leaders we’re electing and the sorts of policy decisions they’re making and the sorts of scenarios we’re seeing played out in the various arenas of the world—the human side of the spectrum has begun to tilt and veer into a cavernous uncertainty with only bones at its bottom—and still we are singing like songbirds as we tumble into the breach.
I’m watching John Lithgow reading Timothy Snyder’s 20 Lessons on Tyranny and I’m taking notes. “A citizen who reacts in this way is teaching power what it can do.” “The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow.” “Authority needs civil servants.” “Evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves on day doing irregular things.”
And as his voice lilts its way through the horror with a luxurious calm, I contemplate exactly how we might think up a new way of speaking—maybe through some manner of uncertainty qualification we could come to grasp the trajectory of our path into the abyss and maybe a human constitution needs drafting—one that declares sides and leaves nothing to the imagination—a paring back of the eyes to that original sketch of the first eye—back when we wrestled with God and back when the ideals of our forefathers were shiny and new. For example, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” When did those truths cease to be self-evident?
The good has always been an intangible something—an art of uncertainty—a practice of ‘I’m going to trust you on this’ and a willingness to look beyond the immediacy of my self and my community and to extend my home to whoever needs it—and evil is similarly amorphous—the shutting of the door and the turning away, the willful forgetting—and when we step away from the clearly defined parameters of some legally exact moral document, like a Declaration of Independence or Bill of Rights—when the essential truth of objective knowledge and reason come into doubt—we open the Pandora’s box of the mob—of the swarm—of the radicalized shill and the bot farms of foreign powers. Postmodernism is the seed and Fox News is the result. Baby Baudrillard grows up into authoritarian Trump.
Postmodernism naturally evolves into the Premodern. The end of science and objective reality is the beginning of tribalism and post-truth.
Of course, the manipulation of “the good” in service of practices that are far from it is a method dating back to the Age of Empire and beyond—to the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment that made it possible—to the Age of Exploration and the Reformation and religious wars that fueled it—to the Renaissance—Medieval Period—Roman Era—Ancient Greece—and on back to the mythical spirits of the wood.
The question has always been how to define what the good is and for whom it is good. What we are witnessing is a reversal from a universal good to a tribal good, and why are we witnessing it now? Because of an underlying terror that the world as we know it is ending. My advice—befriend your neighborhood Zulu or ingratiate yourself with the Navajo people—because the ascendant Nazi project—in China and Russia and Israel and the USA—and their tribal politics and various types and kinds of genocide—are bringing about the end of the age of reason much faster than anyone thought possible—and progress and history are once again cycling back to the beginning, when the more literal tribes wandered the across the steppes and into the high places. This is the Apocalyptic Age.
Birds flying high, you know how I feel. Sun in the sky, you know how I feel. Breeze driftin’ by, you know how I feel. It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day—but—first it’s going to have to be midnight for a while. Think fleshpots full of steaming piles of literal human flesh and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse gorging on gore in the multi-billions. The powers that be are banking on it.
Maybe it started with Putin or Xi or the end of the Fairness Doctrine or with Citizens United or maybe if congress had taken the climate hearings of 1987 seriously and acted quickly to battle climate change—or all of the above—but the tipping point is that moment of hypernormalization—known primarily from the excellent Adam Curtis documentary by the same name, the term was coined by Alexei Yurchak in his 2005 book, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, and was used to describe the state of things in the USSR towards the end, when everyone knew the system was failing, but since no one could imagine a possible alternative to the status quo, politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society—that sense that the system is failing, its infrastructures are coming undone and there are massive shifts occurring at the tectonic level, but we all just ignore it and carry on. And this was the perfect environment for Trump to thrive.
While somewhere in between, an ideology began to form that would come to define this political moment, the Dark Enlightenment—an anti-Enlightenment anti-egalitarian and fascist movement—with core concepts being “the Cathedral,” a brand of scientific racism they refer to as ‘human biodiversity,’ Accelerationism and Formalism—the basic idea being that contemporary society and its liberal institutions are “the Cathedral,” which they associate with the Puritan church, and that socioeconomic status is a “strong proxy for IQ” and that space exploration will act as a “highly selective genetic filter” that will strongly favor Whites and Asians, that egalitarian policies only slow down acceleration towards a “technological singularity” and neo-reactionaries need to use capital and technology to destabilize existing systems, and that the US needs to “dispense with the ancient mystical horseradish, the corporate prayers and war chants, figure out who owns this monstrosity, and let them decide what in the heck they are going to do with it.”
This is the ideology behind Trump 2.0 and it comes directly from Silicon Valley and its Paypal Mafia—i.e. Musk, Thiel, et al.
While Putin has always primarily been concerned with avoiding any bloody regime changes, and specifically avoiding the ignominious fate of Muammar Gaddafi, and Xi similarly is interested in avoiding what he perceives were the mistakes of Gorbachev, and both of them looking to a return to more ancient modes of governance to enact this miracle of the undying strongman—reverting to Maoist and Tsarist narratives while simultaneously also declaring the entire Enlightenment project and its governments for and by the people and progress and reason over revelation to be null and void. Their vision has a Medieval, anti-West, and blatantly fascist perspective on history—a history they declare far from dead but still actively being fought for—in the subjugation of Ukraine and Hong Kong—in the hypocrisy of Israel and upon the waters of the South China Sea—using the openness of the West against itself to break the global system on which they and the rest of us all rely with the hopes that with it goes the rule of law and international human rights and the rest of it. In the age of globalization economy trumped ideology, but now the reverse is true—ideology trumps economy.
Because Trump is now indeed exacerbating the perhaps inevitable decline and fall of US empire—as Putin’s war and Xi’s ideological rigidity are only pushing their nations towards collapse as well—as they both face a demographics time bomb, which in China is compounded by a water scarcity epidemic and a looming economic crisis. Maybe their bet is that old school imperialism will save the day, but for them to pull off that sleight of hand, the liberal world order needs to collapse and so they’ve been spending the last decade or so declaring with some hopefulness that the liberal world order is indeed coming to an end, and now—with Trump 2.0—it looks like they just got what they wished for.
*
“The basic idea of Patchwork is that, as the crappy governments we inherited from history are smashed, they should be replaced by a global spiderweb of tens, even hundreds, of thousands of sovereign and independent mini-countries, each governed by its own joint-stock corporation without regard to the residents’ opinions. If residents don’t like their government, they can and should move. The design is all ‘exit,’ no ‘voice,’” [from Patchwork: A Political System for the 21st Century, by Mencius Moldbug; November 13th, 2008.]
The Dark Enlightenment is brutally naive corporatist fantasy that appeals to the prepper tech bro class precisely because its cynicism feels so true, but the neo-reactionary movement first spawned in the late 90’s by British academic Nick Land is nothing more than “an acceleration of capitalism to a fascist point,” according to to critical theory professor Benjamin Noys, and, “a worship of corporate power to the extent that corporate power becomes the only power in the world,” and—with the climate crisis bearing down our necks—this cyberpunk dystopia does feel somewhat plausible but only because it’s just the of last ditch means for the status quo to continue by any means necessary that the moneyed elite would buy into. The turn from democracy to corporate-fascist is just progress’s dying gasp.
And—if you can get past the belligerent and obfuscating rhetoric—what you find is a gibberish of silliness. The idea that progress is “naive” for… reasons. That wealth is a gauge of intelligence—a claim that can be easily debunked by the most casual glance into the bank accounts of the great thinkers of history—from Kant to Confucius to Beethoven to Jesus—in fact, dating back to before Jesus the wealthy have been pronouncing themselves better than everyone else because of their wealth. It’s the age old circle jerk of the capitalist class, declaring themselves special people because of all the special money in their special bank accounts—a movement on par with the Neros and the Marie Antoinettes of history.
As the world burns. As the seas rise. As the people starve.
I was watching an interview the other day—Ezra Klein talking to Catholic conservative Ross Douthat and one moment really struck me. Douthat has just said something about preferring Elon Musk to the pure pessimism that “climate change is going to kill us all and structural racism means we deserve it,” and in response, Ezra Klein says, “Let me ask about the idea that what you just described though is pure pessimism—putting aside the idea that climate change will will kill us all, which I don't believe—I think most people even on the the left don't believe. They believe there's a way out. You just have to really work for it,” at which point Douthat gives a very shade-riddled,”Mhm,” because this is exactly the problem.
We’re in a love triangle. The doomers [category A] of which I hold myself a member, who do say that climate change is going to kill us all or at least a good number of us v. the MAGA corporate-fascists [category B] who say let the tech bros run the universe v. the liberal left [category C] who says that we can fix everything if we just try harder. Most of us are in category A, but category A is the one category that does not exist on the political spectrum.
Ezra Klein comes off as naive because he is, but Curtis Yarvin is equally naive. As in, progress is indeed a naive concept given what’s coming but it’s naive for specific reasons. AMOC is going to collapse. Large portions of the Earth are going to be unlivable. Failed states will be the norm.
But why am I so confident the end of the world as we know it is just around the corner? We all see that the world is turning a corner, but what this corner is and what lies beyond it is open to wild speculation, everywhere from AI utopia to nuclear winter to an ever-increasing dysfunction as our coastal cities are swept beneath the waves.
My confidence comes first from the kid in me—the kid who declared that a “dark cloud covers the Earth” in first grade—and grew up to be the sort of person who goes hunting for the apocalypse—to make note of how incessantly scientific predictions have fallen short of the climate reality and both the rapidity and extremity of the changes we are facing—and from all of this—ultimately become a man who assumes that the worst case predictions are the most likely, and if only one of those is correct—say the collapse of AMOC before the end of the century—flooding the Eastern Seaboard of the US, causing temperatures to drop by 5-10° C, and shifting monsoon systems north leading to massive starvation in India and SE Asia—or even more maddening, a modest nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India leading to a five-year nuclear winter and the deaths of billions of people—these scenarios would happen quick, more than likely leading to the collapse of modern civilization in the process.
Which brings us to the next level of the apocalyptic shift right. If the Dark Enlightenment informs Donald Trump, then Aleksander Dugin informs the Dark Enlightenment. Regardless of whether or not Dugin has the influence on Putin that Western pundits claim he has, Dugin represents the philosophical ideology of the autocratic class. The basic premise being that the liberal world order has failed, that a new world order is coming and that it will be based on local power centers and a traditionalist return to premodern values—a rewriting of the social contract both locally and on a global scale—and he understands this through a Frankensteining of Heideggerian vocabulary to fit his ethnocentric an specifically Russian worldview—what he calls a “’post-secular’ society” because he blames our troubles on a lack of God—a sort of re-writing of Hitler through a postmodern and Heideggerian lens, with Hitler’s pagan mysticism turned into an Orthodox Christian mysticism—a Hitler scrubbed of his explicit antisemitism but utilizing a more abstract antisemitism that replaces the secular and the Muslim as the scapegoats of his twenty-first century program.
Because the left has clung to the paradigm of progress so fanatically, the right has come to be seen as the more “realistic” take on the clearly unraveling world order we see before us—with its very likely possibility of genuine collapse—and the accompanying total annihilation of the pundit class on the one hand and rise in anti-authoritarian nomadic peoples acting as stewards to the land on the other—leading to both a new religiosity and a racial diversity favoring the under-served of today—the aforementioned Navajos and Zulus of the world—whose hunter gatherer lifestyle can more easily adapt to the radical changes that are coming in our ecosystem assuming they’re in regions where survival is even a possibility—North America, say, or the Himalayas—a world that is once again made up of self-sufficient pockets but also works to maintain and slow down rather than destroy and accelerate—a world in which no one owns anything, let alone the whole of society, as if it was ever possible to “own a society.” What does that even mean?
The Dark Enlightenment is the turn in the circle—but the circle will continue to turn. Because none of the pundits on either side are cynical enough to see into the future and what’s coming. They don’t see that what we need is to reach out and hold each other against the darkness. Destroying the bureaucracy of the state and replacing it with some corporate facsimile of governance is just another stepping stone towards the inevitable chaos.
Instead, we need to be working to connect and bring together. There are many small and enduring ways we can work to maintain our community and other like-minded communities.
For starters, take responsibility for those around you. Think TAZ—or Temporary Autonomous Zone. Whether we are novelists or night managers, we need to be making the most minuscule of revolutions with our coworkers and trivia night drinking buddies—as the bar burns down around us and the stage of history comes apart around you—in clumps of floorboards at first—then nothing but flying splinters and slivers of wood shredding the already annihilated props of our government—what was once believed to be the impregnable modern world. We need to reach out for each other because it’s the only way we are going save ourselves, and we need to be doing the same thing with our words and images.
A few months before the ascendancy of Donald Trump to his second term, Timothy Snyder gave a talk in Vienna about what he called the New Paganism, and what he thinks of as a death cult revolving around the concepts of Value, Sacrifice, Charisma and Truth—as in, we’ve “reached this place where we we have sacrifice of ourselves, of the Earth, of our species, which is entirely senseless, entirely senseless, where we've reached this place where Charisma is almost entirely a matter of having the biggest lies, we've reached this place where value is senseless even for the people who have the most of it,” but more specifically, that the MAGA movement is a death cult, sacrificing itself to the Charismatic leader, people like Putin, Musk, and Trump, these rich leaders who are behaving like the Norse gods of old, that “they can take it with them,” not just their riches, but that the whole world must be put on the funeral pyre with them, as the rest of us take in this new reality through glowing screens we treat as if it contained Oracular Truth—that each tweet is like a divine message from the great leader.
This is the best summation of our moment I have yet seen.
In the suburbs, border towns, and their environs, the government’s being gutted, commandeered, jerry-rigged, turned a black magic of itself, and all the while, we watch on with eyes look like they were drawn in after you’d had one too many and a mouth is a scrawl scribbled at high speed. As the AI universe is expanding into ours—and illusions are increasingly being given the veneer of things—and we are the cattle—and you need to leave the ranch before the death cult comes for you. As it careens around the many corners of our five-cornered cube—and infests the wilderness we inhabit when we’re alone in the back corner of the kitchen—and multiplies the dead we’re currently digging up to fill in the corners of the future—because that’s the kind of history we’re writing right now.
Because. Yarvin was right about one thing. You need to leave. When you have no voice, the only other means to respond is radical non-participation. Cease all involvement with the society that is destroying the planet. Start a never-ending boycott of the USA and all that it implies. Destroy this corporatist takeover by refusing to play its game.
“The design is all ‘exit’ and no ‘voice.’” You need to exit.
Also—who are you again?
*
I’ve been watching this Yale course online about the American novel after 1945. The professor, Amy Hungerford, makes a strong case for a particular trend in the novels of this period, that they often revolve around what she calls the Identity Plot, in which a character is working to define themselves both in relation to a majority group they don’t belong to and a minority group that they also find themselves at odds with—using books like Franny and Zooey and The Human Stain as examples of this. And as I watched Ms. Hungerford’s lectures, it struck me that this is the literature of the last age—the age of the global village and the end of history—when progress was an inevitable law of human nature and the only question was how long. The autocrats of our own times are screaming that these former times have ended and they’re not wrong.
But it wasn’t them that killed it. It was us. In our disingenuousness, we forgot that who we are in our hearts is who we are. We smirked and snickered and played lip service and had it both ways and reveled in our double standards and the people saw and were not happy. And they said, If that is how you are then we will show you how you are. And they created a monster but the monster was us all along.
The twentieth century with its style over substance, its fetishization of pure meaninglessness and absolute selfishness, its ‘The Individual above all else’ and endless disposable everything, its have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too of both the rejection of the idea of progress while also very much living in the comfort of the paradigm of progress—as in, I will cynically attack the society that makes my particular type of existence possible because my faith in the stability of this society is just that great—has naturally evolved into a pariah state parody of itself—because the greatest good inevitably becomes the greatest evil—from Enlightenment France to Napoleonic France—from Romanticism Germany to Hitler’s Germany—from 20th century America to contemporary America—and what has been glibly described as late capitalism—and our literature is no better.
Think of the breath, the place where the body meets the mind, the mystical project. Create narrative landscapes that teach you how to see further in. Utilize the methods of the surrealists to come to understand your symbological framework from the back end. Grow metaphorical puzzles of a complexity you will never be able to untangle. Work to counteract the corrosive effects of technology through a kind of centering of the mind between my own pretty blatantly internal experience and the internal experience of others through the practice of the MS. Manuscripts teach us to see in new and unusual ways. We need to push this exercise to its limits because we need to do a lot of thinking in a very short period of time—i.e. things are coming down around us and we need to figure our path through the tsunami.
Carve your poems into the oaks lining your community park and spray paint the clapboard front of your local abandoned church. Blubber out some nonsense by the steel frame pool in the backyards of long lost sweethearts now married with kids. Prophesy over whiskey sours upon the carpets of your peers. Croon your cabaret half-truths in the post-apocalyptic speakeasies of Gen Z and their borrowed lofts.
The point is that the focus on identity and the focus on the individual are key elements to the ending of the modernist age, and the new age needs to turn to ancient ideas—ideas like karma-phala-tyaga—or “renunciation of the fruits of action” as the Bhagavad Gita would have it—a world where we create for no other reason than to create—where we resist despite the impossible odds—where we hope when hope is laughable—where we give even when our body revolts against our endless compassion like a user suffering from junk sickness.
But most of all, stand up, look them in the eyes and tell them that one age is ending and another is coming to be—yes—but the people are the ones who will end this. What the new age looks like depends on those who write it, and you need to write the new age into being.
While personally, as our home country turns a jungle of yes men and storm troopers working to ingratiate themselves with their yes men overlords, I have chosen to instead run off to a monastery in the mountains on the other side of the world—and down the rabbit hole of introspection—where both God and the government are become a fifth wheel to any cosmological vehicle—its six realms and three thousand universes—and—sure. Our progress is killing us. And things do need to break and they are breaking. But none of this wreckage will solve the wreckage that’s coming. There was never going to be a smooth transition to the apocalypse.
At the dark heart of progress is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be human—because—we were never going to be rational animals.
So what is a person? A story unraveling? The hole in the room? A confluence of tendencies that are corralled through this same story even as it unravels with old age and the inherent disappointments? The room becoming aware of itself through this aforementioned hole occupying the table by its far corner? An accident of space? A necessary component in the larger functioning of the universe? How about—a person is something that cares.
The more you care, the more you are. There is a sad emptiness to Donald Trump. He is the least human person and his passing will be the most pathetic moment of his miserable life. You need to not be that. Donald Trump will always be remembered as what not to be. He is the perfect example of a person who is nothing. And this nothing is killing the world.
Another gem I discovered recently while reading the Bhagavad Gita is the mantra, Om Tat Sat, which means something like ‘only the good really exists,’ as in, beginning with the first syllable [Om] and then ‘that’ [Tat] and then either ‘that which is’ or ‘that which is good’ [Sat], and not that unlike St. Augustine’s famous position—because evil is a lack—of necessity, of heart, of intelligence—and it is our lack of an imagination is killing the world—from the cubbyholes beneath your bed to the atrocities in the news—we see only the lesser monsters of our childhood when the monstrosities on the horizon are something new and impossible to comprehend—and we can only stop these monsters by being our best selves as we also look through the fields and declare that whatever is beyond the horizon is ours and that no matter how many eyes we lose in the process, we are going to love the clouds of uncertainty that are bearing down upon our backs. We can make it through. We can make it home. As Timothy Snyder says, “Stand up. Someone has to.”
*
Being lost can become a way of life. It can get so that you’re only comfortable when you have no idea where you are. But sometimes you get so lost—forever slipping round the far side of the world—home and away lose all sense of meaning—and the foothills of the Himalayas turn familiar while the dying strip malls of Upstate New York become an impossible thing—poignant and intricately strung in American accidents and the dead eyes that house them, but also now impenetrable to the mind in its endless discounts and work vests glittering in flare.
And as I age out of my lifestyle, the angles of the room are increasingly playing tricks on me. Sometimes my black marble countertop is the most comfortable entertainment center I have ever had and sometimes it’s like the props that fill my room are from someone else’s life. And generally speaking the threads of the skull’s operating theater slip off into impulses and compulsions as the light leaves the sky and the Internet’s talking heads crowd themselves into the curves and swatches of a man’s theoretical soul turned cancerous and closely knit about itself. I become a crowd of one. I become somewhere in between. Only at the moment of death will you hear the standing ovation.
It may be that the systems of the past are coming apart, but we need to create our own systems, not by creating a new kind of art or a new kind of literature, but by creating for a different purpose. The market is dead and we must learn to live outside it as we reinsert the numen onto the page and the canvas and the stage—as we relearn what it means to be human in this inhumane age—as we unite against the most ephemeral of paper tigers and the lies that shield him.
We have become paralyzed by the coming storm, but the thing that stands in the way becomes the way says Marcus Aurelius. The obstacle becomes the path.
We will look back on these times and mention things like the Dark Enlightenment and Mencius Moldbug—Aleksandr Dugin and his “divine absence” and—a return to a Maoist China for fear of a Gorbachev-like breakdown of party and country—and the puppets these ideas are playing—Trump and Putin and Xi—the true axis of evil. Those of us who rise up in the larger context of this Apocalyptic Era are the opposite of this. We are threading a path of meaning through the dark. But all the same—nothing can ever be out of balance.
We see things as coming and going when in fact it is always us. In our stationary universe, the violence is out there and we are safe in our beds, when the reverse is true. The universe sings and we are the song it’s singing. The thicker the walls, the more dangerous the darkness becomes. Live on a razor’s edge and you will wake up.
When here my entire body’s gone asleep as I drag it about upon the backdrop of the Himalayas. In living rooms empty of everything but the one chair.
We have been living in this Apocalyptic Age for some time now while pretending it’s all still the twentieth century—that miracles of innovation are just around the corner—that the wheels of progress will never stop turning—that this current madness is just another fluke in a long string of flukes and we’re going to make it out swinging after all—even as we watch our politicians cannibalize the state and the genocides are just getting started—as God and the Devil take to shooting their craps over the exact nature and outcome of the coming apocalypse. And we’re trying to figure out who we are just as we’re unraveling around the tatters of the globe. We are looking in our respective mirrors and taking up our respective hatchets and running at the walls. How did we end up like this? Will any of us survive to the closing credits? That’s the big bet.
I spent the month of January Amtraking it across America—through the snow-erased mountains of Oregon and a carpet of evergreens across Montana—and in the condos of Chicago they were murmuring about it and in the hippy houses of Woodstock, NY, we pretended it had nothing to do with us—and in Boston three childhood friends from their choir school days stumbled off to the bar one night after a poignant show in a small performance space in Inman Square—and then—my last stop on that journey back to America was to Canada. I spent my time there shouting about publishing over jazz concerts, drinking from the bottle in the dive I was staying above that jazz club, breakfasting with poets while we recounted what we’ve been up to the past decade, saunaing and sampling Guinness at Hooters, and coming to understand the Canadian soul, its tendernesses and truths. And that final day, as I struggled across the bridge while glancing off to my left and at an icy Niagara Falls, while again I wove my way through tunnels of wind and dragged that rolly full of books up endless avenues on the American side, consisting mostly of ghetto and kids dancing in the slush of the ghetto, and a Chinese restaurant that appropriately was actually an Indian restaurant. And me on my way back home to a monastery nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas on the far side of the world.
America may not be home anymore but then again nowhere ever is.
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release can be found below. You can read more about him here.
