Hanoi is a mobius strip.
You think you are moving in one direction and then find yourself back round towards the intersection that started it all, except for somehow it’s changed in the interim. Like somehow you slipped into an alternate reality Hanoi. Or. There are parts of Hanoi that sing with remarkable birds and vegetation hangs out from every window, off of every balcony, and into these back streets, and there are parts of Hanoi that are tight walls of junk shoppery crammed with a river of angry motorbikes and their murmuring engines. Hanoi contains every possible version of Hanoi.
Or to put it another way. Hanoi is functioning as a stand-in for my mind at the moment and its many frustrations and confusions. It is what a broken mind looks like. A mind racing in many directions at once. A mind facing the inevitable end times and the games we play to avoid facing it.
We, the human race, are the greatest procrastinators. When faced with our own impending doom, our answer is always, “Not yet.” We watch the lava rolling over the lip of our front yard and think, “Maybe it’ll go away on its own.” We witness our neighbors in the furthest housing unit swept off into the sea and say, “It has nothing to do with me.” This is us.
Some would say it’s just in our nature to act in this way. Would a lion on the African savannah be able to switch to a lettuce diet? Could a salmon keep itself from swimming upstream? For any reason whatsoever? There are those who think along these lines.
Human beings can’t help but construct flawed social structures that will be killed by their success. Human beings are inherently blinded to anything but immediate dangers. Human beings cannot comprehend working together on the massive scale the climate crisis requires.
All of this may be true. But then again, I have been predicting the end of the world since I was six, so I tend to be a little pessimistic. And miracles happen every day, even if the vast majority of them occur on the subatomic scale. And pessimism is just a more pedestrian form of optimism, as in, there’s something comforting in always expecting the worst. And your suburban ennui is indeed so fetching. And I’m mostly here to talk about myself anyway. It is my asinine life after all.
But then I saw you across a crowded room. You were eating something that hadn’t quite died yet. There was a pause. Our eyes locked in a terror of familiarity. Welcome to the end times.
Regardless of the how or the why—who’s responsible and for what particulars—the freedom you feel you are losing every day of your life is in actual fact the last burst of freedom you will ever have. In the very near future, those of us still hanging onto our little plots at the very edge of the burning abyss the rest of us have fallen into are going to have nothing but our determination left. So live it up while you can. Down your cans and shots. Eat what scat you find. Love with a love like a super nova. Except that you don’t. Why?
This is humanity in a nutshell.
All the things that are said about us humans are true. We are the selfish self-involved species they claim we are. But we are also easily gulled because we only believe what we see. Our eyes tell us what’s true in the world when what’s true in the world has very little to do with the eyes.
There are systems and laws that govern the seen universe and only in our imaginations do we even begin to interact with the universe on this more primal structural and linguistic level. But our imaginations have been intentionally stupefied by the rhetoric of reason and the MCU and other narrative products—by our cowardice and selfishness and hope—that maybe it’s all wrong, that maybe it’ll happen to someone else, that maybe we’re safe.
Perhaps it’s true that our keepers, makers, and masters began working to quiet the minds of the downtrodden in the aftermath of the chaotic sixties. It’s possible that the powers that be put on a kind of “kill their rockstars” vibe, be it JFK, MLK, or John Lennon. That the American Intelligence community embraced its darkest logic, and the American people turned to more outlandish conspiracies because they didn’t want to accept the more mundane conspiracies, and the power brokers have been undermining education, wage equality, and any mitigation of the climate crisis because it suits their immediate interests to act as they do even when these immediate interests are ending the civilization on which they are built.
But the problem’s more subtle than that. Because we built a house of mirrors and locked ourselves in. The house of mirrors is nothing but a house of mirrors, and we are too distracted by its endless illusions of hallways to ever be able to truly see what is happening in the world.
And that is an issue as old as time.
We slobber our tears into the sleeves of our day-old shirts and crumbs, commute to our endless employment, and ogle visions of impossible futures, all to conceal the horrific simplicity of ourselves—that we were born to love and die like everything else, and somewhere in there, we might just have a moment when we see the universe for what it is, but more likely than not, this will happen just as the lava is playfully splashing about our cheeks and lips.
I have been known to become unreasonably angry. I have been known to consider my life undone. I have watched its many strings and strands flapping about and done nothing because there’s always the end of everything right around the corner.
But that’s just the fact of it. It’s always right around the corner until it’s not. Until the moment when my house is the one being flooded, and it’s my foot that’s been melted in the spillage of lava. Only then will I find my mirrors fall away with a pleasant terror of nothing and nowhere, that moment of inevitability, in which the only option left is a retreat and everybody hates to retreat. Look at Putin. Look at how sad Putin is right now.
Of course I’m sad too, but for different reasons. I get choked up while watching Ken Burns documentaries like someone looking at the photographs of their honeymoon just after the divorce. Because however flawed our country is, there were some good times in there. Lewis & Clark is a good story. The Civil War still stings. Vietnam, when we finally gave in to our madness. The Civil Rights Movement and how hopeful it was. Our heroes and villains, Al Capone, Jackie Robinson, & Mae West. I want to cry when I think of them.
Default mode is chores when the darkness rises. But take a second to pause and reflect and those theoretical threads will always and invariably come to the dead end of the end times whenever they are allowed to spin out in any degree of luxuriant length.
Because despite what you want to think back in the developed world with its more developed systems of denial, civilized life as we know it is coming to an end within the next 10-20 years. Look at the MIT study from 1972, that was recently re-run only to find that we are indeed on the worst possible path towards massive die-off of not just the many species of the planet but of our own very precious species by the year 2040, and factor in the fact that panic is of necessity going to accelerate any societal collapse, that it already has, that the geopolitical fabric has been coming undone for some time, from Brexit to Trump to the war-mongering of Putin and Xi’s madcap romp of ethnic cleansing, social credits, & zero COVID.
The collapse of globalization is the spark that ignites the larger collapse of civilization. Think of it like this. What happens to specialized economies when international trade breaks down? What happens when we have to feed ourselves? As the waters rise? And extreme weather increases? And population numbers fall off the map?
These days, however, I am thinking instead of the post-apocalypse. Because there will be a post. And as a conscientious citizen, I hope to at the very least try to give shape to its nihilism with a few suggested punts and jabs even if I am doomed to die in the rioting due to the particular noodle nature of my armwork and my general habit to panic under even the slightest of applied pressures.
My hope is that in these end times, there can still be a kind of culture, and I am hoping that you hope so too. I am thinking in fact that we should begin to play this game of the end to prepare for the actual honest-to-god one around the corner. The game I am suggesting is something along the lines of Follow the Invisible Path.
The Invisible Path is just the latest in a long line of mind games I have been playing with myself from as far back as I can remember. From conjuring itineraries for the coming decades, to a kind of fanciful numerology of patterns, to the conceptual underpinnings of action and self-hood and working diligently to challenge these underpinnings in some bleak Alaskan setting or upon an altar in Sichuan as the fireworks go off and I am told to aim the arrow at my future wife as a sign of respect.
After tests of strength, will, faith, and love, I decided to test the God in me, and what I found was that there is an invisible path, and that all these little games I’ve been playing with myself are just part of this invisible path I have always been on. I have always known where I was going. I just never knew what the sets were going to look like, and who the other actors were, and what were my lines. But I knew the play, and I know which act we are in, and as long as I know that, I can improvise my way through to final curtain. This is the invisible path.
But more than this it’s also a challenge. Or that the only way to be in this play is to never let go of your childish determination to change the world. Never look away from the approaching ground as you fall to your death through the decades.
And even beyond that.
Let’s leap blind-folded into the abyss. Let’s go traipsing into the dark forest to hunt out our killers. Let’s go meekly into the dragon’s den. Let our ships take on water as the storm rages around us. Call out to the fire to come take refuge in your arms. Look into the eyes of your killer and ask her to the twist the knife.
If you stop trying to survive the apocalypse, you just might make it out alive. Like that.
But also, that the rules of this game are written in a language you will never understand, but the board is splayed out before you and clear to view, and as long as you listen for next steps from the necessities of your surroundings and what futures they portend, you will be able to play this game. To put it another way, imagine you are moving through a cave in the pitch black. You can’t see what’s in front of you, but you can feel the contours of the walls. This is following the invisible path.
Think of Hanoi as a stand-in for your mind. How is Hanoi talking to you? What is Hanoi trying to tell you in the knottings of its urban design? What whisperings of your future can be uncovered in the tea leaves of its traffic lights? In the scattering of its alleys?
Because Hanoi isn’t just a stand-in for my mind. Wherever you are right now, the place where you are sitting is your Hanoi, and you mind is only a stand-in for this place. Your mind cannot see how it is seeing except by exploring what it sees. Look out to look in. Look out using your most introspective eyes to find the places between your thoughts, the primordial stuff from which your mind is formed.
But of course, when I say ‘you’ I don’t mean you because you very probably will not survive as well. More than likely, you will find yourself face down in a puddle of your own escaping blood and will be asking yourself in those last moments, as the world takes on an airier more ethereal flavor to it, be asking yourself, “How did I get here?”
And the answer will always be: You did not see the world for what it was. We are all doomed by our blatant and conscious acts of self-deception. We are all born seeing, and spend the bulk of our short-lived lives convincing ourselves that the sky is the sea, up is down, and hands and fingers are eyes and ears. As in. We all know what we should do but somehow have convinced ourselves we can’t for reasons that will soon seem small and moot.
A life can have so many corners that it begins to seem like it’s nothing but sharp edges and unnerving shifts. And the relative peace of our largely successful social experiment does not alter the fact that it will ultimately fail, and by now, we should all know that.
So, what do you do?
There is a remarkable book called The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist, and in it, the castle where the dwarf lives falls under siege, and what the dwarf notices of his fellow citizens, trapped and waiting out their time till the eventual sacking, is that everyone just does what they did before, but more so. The priests pray more. The drunks drink more. The thieves steal more. This is us. We are just going to be more and more ourselves, more and more doing the same things we were always doing, as the flames rise up and engulf us.
COVID times come and go. Man goes running off back to the US, and then off to Vietnam all over again, this time by way of Thailand. As the scales continue to tip toward chaos. As the nations of the world come undone.
Because for me, it is the annihilating factors of our here and now that most excite this endless extremism of hope. I am a hopeless romantic who only becomes more hopelessly romantic as the fires blossom in our living rooms and tickle at our toes. Only now my hopes have changed their flavor to fit the times.
What do I hope for? The end. I hope for an end that will allow the world to begin again.
Vĩnh Yên, Vietnam, 2022
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.
