Turning point
The turning point of the year. Someone said to me – I don’t want to think about the days growing shorter.
I was very similar in my youth. In fullness and beauty, I could only think of decay. Now – that tendency I can recognize as a bad mental habit, but it still plagues me.
Now – I can try to fight against that modern word – catastrophizing.
This is not what I wanted to write about, but conversation between brain – paper – time – and what words are available in the ether at any given moment often surprise me.
We live in a world where the word crisis is repeated so often, the fear and anguish resulting from the expectation of disaster begin to seem commonplace. They – the people who think compassion is lowering, as tenderness and caring does not make you money, they don’t mind if our emotions are sandpapered and our hearts are either raw or lizard-skinned.
We live in a world where the mental turmoil of both those subjected to their cruelty, and the soulless people who commit atrocities on the world become woven into a false narrative. “Bad story line,” I believe is the modern way to say these things.
AI, the all-knowing, all-seeing, pronounced certain truths yesterday on the cruelty and danger of the political right. Grok-in-chief didn’t like what the logic of the program revealed, and said that he would work to change it. Marci Shore, in an interview with the Guardian a few days ago said this:
The unabashed narcissism, this Nero-like level of narcissism and this lack of apology … in Russian, it’s obnazhenie; ‘laying bare’. It’s an approach to politics “in which all of the ugliness is right on the surface,” not concealed in any way. And that’s its own kind of strategy. You just lay everything out there.
And there was the head Grok, stating that he would rearrange the truth to suit himself.
Palantir – company name of another tech bro who plans to use data against us – is another example of this. I was recently reminded of the source and meaning of this word. From Wikipedia:
The palantírs were made by the Elves of Valinor in the First Age, as told in The Silmarillion. By the time of The Lord of the Rings at the end of the Third Age, a few palantírs remained in use. They are used in some climactic scenes by major characters: Sauron, Saruman, Denethor the Steward of Gondor, and two members of the Company of the Ring: Aragorn and Pippin.
A major theme of palantír usage is that while the stones show real objects or events, those using the stones had to “possess great strength of will and of mind” to direct the stone’s gaze to its full capability. The stones were an unreliable guide to action, since what was not shown could be more important than what was selectively presented. A risk lay in the fact that users with sufficient power could choose what to show and what to conceal to other stones: in The Lord of the Rings, a palantír has fallen into the Enemy’s hands, making the usefulness of all other existing stones questionable.
Commentators such as the Tolkien scholar Paul Kocher note the hand of providence in their usage, while Joseph Pearce compares Sauron’s use of the stones to broadcast wartime propaganda.
Hiding the intention in plain sight. “A risk lay in the fact that users with sufficient power could choose what to show and what to conceal to other stones…”
I don’t think Orwell would feel any pleasure in being shown this future that we are undergoing.
And they want us to forget nature, forget the solstice, forget our humanity. We were already on the way, forging a narrative of Biblical proportions, in our dismissive attitudes towards climate change, extinction of animals, bees dying off, forever chemicals – the list goes on. The earth belongs to us, therefore we can destroy it. Buried in the terrible budget bill before Congress is a plan to sell off national lands. Our patrimoine, land that has historical or environmental importance, sold to the highest bidder for graft and exploitation. Again, I thought that the Garden of Eden story was supposed to be a warning, not a road map.
Defiance is emotional, as is the sadness that drives one to fight back. Defiance can be gentle. I can look at the squirrels and birds and believe in a moment of not fearing each other. I can honor the natural cycles, and feel something within me reach out to the ineffable – the dance of the planets, the sacred geometry of spheres and ley lines and pyramids. And all the while, I could be dreaming dreamtimes, instead of losing the skip of a heartbeat over breaking news flashing across my phone.
All the words that try to block communion with others, human or animal or so-called inanimate objects, are the same that were used when I was a child, to distance me from what I saw and knew. Words that ridicule, mock, shame. Words that instill potent fear. And when I’m crushed by the idle acceptance of violence, I can look back and try to understand different points in childhood, different bullies, different ways when I tried to fight back, and was blamed for my absence of conformity.
I know there are others who are experiencing terror and trying to hold on to life, in all forms, like the woman in Ukraine who, after a night of bombing attacks, went out to color her hair a vibrant red. Because she was still alive. Because she still could. She is a heroine of defiance. Grabbing at joy, her joy, her very own.
The other day, coming home from my tedious job, where compliance in advance is the norm, and bureaucratic hierarchies cannot be broken, where firings and layoffs are continually threatened, I suddenly saw that I was experiencing the residue of anger, fear, frustration. My desire to not think anymore brought me back to a moment in childhood when I did not want to be where I was, but had no choice.
I tried to describe the moment of dissociation I recognized, a madeleine smell of memory.
Yesterday in the train, I had been reading. Usually I look out the window, but I wanted to not think. No thinking. Just to arrive, and then to find another way of not thinking at home. And I suddenly recognized the feeling of dissociation. Where was I really? Where was my body in space? I spent my entire childhood reading, constantly. And I started to read very early, around 3. Was my ability due more to an absolute need to escape? But yesterday, in the train, I recognized this sensation – the dizziness one might get upon raising one’s head from a book. Where am I? Why am I here again? Why does the news come rushing back to me, wars, killings, people being disappeared, age, frailty, being unloved, daily unhappiness, all of it? A therapist once said to me, think about how you were before, as a young child. Capture that feeling, before things went wrong.
But there was no before, not that I remember. How arrogant to think that there must have been a before. But this feeling, this child coming at me out of the mist, as I staggered slightly under the weight of my work backpack, lining up in the aisle to leave the train, the vertigo of dissociation – that child I remembered. And she was still here. We were together.
Coming out of trauma is very difficult. Every revelation picks off a new scab, like a five year old sitting on the ground, wondering why everyone is shouting, and looking at their knee, where they had fallen in the playground in the afternoon, and were yelled at for this misdemeanor of childhood. Dirt, blood, sun, happiness – turned into battle zones. A four year old, left alone in the city, in the lobby of a music school, told to find their own way to a classroom. Going into a class, being stared at, knowing it was the wrong place, but not knowing what the right place was, staying there, writing notes on the pages of the proud new music staff book. The little lines and circles that represented such pleasant sounds. And upon returning to the lobby to wait for a parent, the fear returned. The expectation of the inevitable outcome of anger. But the child told them the story anyway, in the hope that they would help. They helped. There was never another music lesson. The happiness in the smell of new paper, staff lines on the page, so unlike the handwriting books with their dotted lines measuring the size and shape of letters. All this potential, waiting to be fulfilled, and then the pride in the new music book forever linked to shame, failure, regret. The wish for lessons another wish denied, until life was easier to survive if one denied even wanting anything. Comply in advance.
This story, under the surface of everything I feel. When I see a child who has been denied joy, like a young Ukrainian dancer who must carry on with only one leg, or children who have had everything torn from them, family, home, life – through war or the racist war inflicted by ICE on the streets of the US – I feel so angry. So ashamed. Why is this happening?
How to say all this. I am not offering up anecdotes in the hope that you’ll buy a cure. Every path through pain is unique, not that I blame people for trying to do something that will allow them to live more freely in this post-capitalist, borderline fascist, apocalyptic world. I have nothing to sell.
But I hope that more and more people defy the narrative that they have been force fed. The majority are still fearful. Fearing to go against the crowd, like the crowds exiting the commuter train as they shuffle down the platform like unhappy zoo creatures. They accept the nightmare of the daily news, and the hierarchy of evil, and their souls shrink further and further into the darkness. Where do all these souls go? Maybe they are always there, as mine was, in the worst moments, saying quietly
There is always another way.
Happy Solstice for today and tomorrow. Go ask a tree what they would like to share with you and your quiet, hopeful soul.