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@ Chris Liss
2025-06-11 08:29:54Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The Second Coming — W.B. Yeats
I don’t know what I want to write about today. There are a lot of converging currents coursing through my reality right now. I feel we’re in an interregnum of sorts between what was and what’s to come. I guess you could simply describe that as the present, something that has ever been the case. But this moment feels more intense like something big is dying and something else, God knows what, is on its way “to be born".
I exchanged emails recently with an old friend, and he sent me a link to a David Foster Wallace commencement speech entitled “This Is Water.” In it Wallace tells a joke of an old fish seeing two younger fish swimming by and asks them “How’s the water?” Later on one of the younger ones asks the other, “What is water?”
Wallace hanged himself a few years after the speech. Apparently he was unable to maintain the perspective he laid out in it which was that we can choose our attitude toward what we experience in any moment, no matter how much aversion we habitually associate with it. That the act of choosing equanimity constitutes the freedom we seek. That this freedom to choose is ever present, in fact the ability to direct our attention and consciousness is itself the water. And yet out of habit we are often oblivious to this most fundamental reality.
My friend’s email was in response to my description of the dissolution I see right now. Everything seems fake. The news, the governments, the edicts of reputationally bankrupt institutions zombying along as though the last five years never happened, like the proverbial emperor still purporting to rule though everyone can now see his pale, unsightly posterior.
Yes, the coffee shops are still open, people still go on vacation with their families. Let’s go to Paris, Rome, the Greek Isles! Let’s pretend everything is as we had imagined in the before times when our goals and aspirations seemed real, when the glitchy pixels in the matrix hadn’t yet revealed themselves so glaringly.
Maybe this was always the case. All our games were always professional wrestling, a scripted charade for which we willingly suspended disbelief. But like the roadrunner in the cartoon, we have since become aware we have run out of road, four steps beyond the cliff edge.
. . .
Wallace in his speech described such indignities as being stuck in traffic after a long day of work, or in a long grocery checkout line. The mind’s usual programs run, cursing everyone and everything around us. Instead of contemplating the miracle of human existence we feel only disgust and impatience. We want to finish with the run, the work, the obligatory hour so we can move on to something presumably more pleasant.
I can handle such day to day discomforts, but the overwhelming sense of dissolution is undermining the aims to which I had once attached meaning. I set up my life for freedom and prosperity, and now, just as I have my ducks in a row, there’s an imminent magnetic pole shift or a financial and social collapse that threatens to counterfeit my efforts.
It’s easy to opt out when you’re losing, to decry the injustice, unfairness and pointlessness of the game when you weren’t getting much from it anyway. When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose, to paraphrase Bob Dylan. But as a late bloomer wanting to sample the wine of the Gods at long last, it’s dispiriting in a different way, like saving up for a new car and seeing it stolen before you had a chance to drive it.
That’s the shallow version, distress at discovering just before getting the things I had always wanted I was actually playing not just the wrong game, but a false one. That I’m upset I can’t gratify my ego in the way I had hoped, that I can’t get the pat on the back I had craved because the back-patters decided to tear up the playing field just as I finally became a contender.
The deeper version is you only get better at the game through your own efforts to discover what’s true, your own self-mastery and access to a measure of wisdom. This process transforms your life from a tedious and difficult slog to a state of ease and flow. You are more connected, more in touch with yourself and the forces within. You can handle aversion, in fact voluntarily invite it at times to hone your mind and access your resourcefulness. You love your life and connect to the people in it. You have great hope and aspirations for the future. You believe in God, or the Tao or whatever force animates all things, you can navigate the world’s imperfections and do not want it to fall into chaos and disorder.
The task of remembering this during the run, the traffic jam or the grocery store checkout line is not so difficult. But would it be the same during periods of violence and resource scarcity where literal survival is at stake, the rules of which are set by biology and physics rather than the incentives of human society?
Yes, I’d rather be eating dinner at home than sitting in traffic, but I can appreciate that I’m able to sit comfortably in my climate controlled pod, listening to music while traversing these distances rather than foraging for food in the harsh wild. Yes, this old Portuguese lady is taking an eternity to get the groceries into her pushcart, but I can imagine how it is to be old and slow and still have to shop and eat, and it’s trivial to cut her some slack.
I’m not claiming I always have this perspective, but I surely am able to channel equanimity during the ordinary aversion that arises in one’s day to day life. I do this while running on the track, the aches and pains, the discomfort, the wanting to get it over with is a battle I fight every week by my own choosing. But imagine if instead of running 10 minute miles I was forced to do them in six. It’s not so easy to keep a calm, conscious mind while gasping for breath.
The truth is these calamities I imagine are not yet real, the asteroid has not yet hit, the economy not yet collapsed. I have never experienced the kind of hardship I dread. I am ever in the grocery line, the 10-minute mile run, the traffic jam, never the concentration camp or Mad Max-style post-apocalypse. Why not just deal with that when the time comes, if it ever comes? Why die a thousand deaths like the proverbial coward rather than the one required of the brave man?
I suppose it comes down to wanting to be prepared. There’s nothing you can do if an asteroid destroys the entire earth, but if your national government devolves into tyranny, you could get out before it’s too late. There’s the adage one should only concern oneself about the things one can control, but the rub is in deciding what’s in your power and of what to let go. It’s an easy out, per the adage, to narrow your locus of control to doing your job and paying your bills. You can too easily forget that which job you have, where you live, what preparations to make are also matters in which you have a choice.
Even if you believe a magnetic pole shift could spill the earth’s oceans across continents within the next few decades — I find this plausible — you could move to the mountains to get ahead even of that. A fatalist, non-questioning attitude can be a psychological salve in times of upheaval, but “salve” and "“slave” are but a typo apart.
. . .
When I was six someone broke into my house. I was still awake, and while pretending to be asleep, I heard him rummaging through my belongings, stealing an old Fisher Price turntable and a black and white TV. My father died four years later, and at 10, I remember thinking as the oldest boy in the house, it was now my responsibility to defend my family if anything like that, or worse, happened again. Of course, I wasn’t really capable of doing this, and I knew it, but I would have to try, futile as it might be.
I imagine that psychology has stayed with me as an adult — it’s up to me to see around corners, assess the various threats to me and my family, even if some of them are too daunting for any one individual. I could let it go, I suppose, it would probably even be healthy to do so. But there is a part of me that wonders whether people like me, people who feel this irrational responsibility, are the those who survive cataclysms and shocks. I surely am not the only one who feels this way and quite likely would not be especially effective given I don’t have engineering, outdoorsman or serious combat skills. But that hyper-vigilance toward and preparation for worse-case scenarios is something someone has to do, someone who would likely be selected for the role by the particular accidents of his upbringing.
. . .
There is another way to look at this, of course. The notion one ought to step up in the face of adverse circumstances, even extreme ones, is valid. But perhaps the best way to prepare is not endlessly to assess potential threats like some black ops CIA outfit, but to have a calm and detached mind. Should the signs appear, a poised and observant person would take action insofar as he is able. That you, having trained your attention away from default habits of comfort-seeking and dread and toward conscious observation, will do what’s required if and when the time comes. That you can trust yourself, and by that I mean trust in God, so to speak, to guide your awareness and actions for the most effective and adaptive response.
The Fourth Turning might well be upon us, indeed “the centre [may not] hold.” There is no guarantee your response will ensure you or those you love survive. There has never been such a guarantee for anyone, only the freedom to direct your attention, to choose your state of mind, to the extent you are capable, in the conditions that arise. To respond to the older fish that the water is okay, it’s pretty nice actually.