Wake Up Thinking

In the paper for Dublin there is a phrase, "for we haven't much time now." Since the paper is for a conference intending to propagate new cultural bone marrow, mercy not sacrifice the mantra there. I thought it odd that phrase landed in that essay. But that's what I wake up thinking almost every morning, we being Humans. You know my agenda, it's serious theories of love and reciprocality in culture and poetry's tensions and shapes as a matrix in which to learn to live in the complexity and ambiguity of this ethics -- that whole Culture of Life gig: a multi-generational project larger in scale than and directly meant to obviate phenomena like the Age of Terror and the cultures of death. It's meant to help us learn another habitus, another and more human(e) way of being, and part of the reason I like the Integral Institute so much: they're really working out a new set of bones for everything from art to economics. Not perfect, but they're giving a very serious shot. But, this cocklebur about time keeps embedding itself in my hair and rubbing on my scalp all night. The temptation to cynicism and decadence is strong.

It does not help that we're having a Texas October in Illinois. I mean, even Autumn will Texan, no lovely Keatsean Ode for us, not even the sumac will go it's blazing cheerful crimson, the sumac!, is just turning brown. No sitting under the red oak leaves, or the sunshine yellow elms, or the otherworldly sliver of the ash, and feeling the light change as it drifts, all fall and easy no more summer light slamming into the everything, just the drifty light of Autumn curling around, saying, hey, it's time for a nap. Nor does it help with the notion flitting through my head that if we have another summer or two as dry and hot this one, the trees around here will die off, leaving their enormous, cracked skeletons all over the place, tinder for very large fires indeed, and farming will become impossible. Everything I step on in the field, in the woods, cracks under my feet, crunches, fragile. No silent mushing down onto the resistant earth: just crunch, bump. I've walked the creek, Plum Creek it's called, behind my house all summer, and there's no mud on my boots. Climatologists have suggested one model in which my wide-skyed, rolling Midwest becomes a low desert. I keep looking for jobs north of here and landlocked: Vermont is looking good.

Last night I read an interview T. C. Boyle in the new AWP , he's been listening to environmentalists for a long time, and writing his novels on his mountain, and recycling and making all the right gestures, and he's feeling that humans are basically doomed, but he keeps writing. He does it, he says, because the alternative is drink himself to death. Compulsion converted to dedication and submission to calling.

Same night, on the news a story about the crews of humans and helicopters that go into Yosemite National Park TO PICK UP THE TRASH left by hikers and tourists. The trash. I mean, if you are so selfish and oblivious and fuckwitted that you littler in a NATIONAL PARK maybe you just do not deserve a sublime thing like this planet and this life we have now. Maybe what we should do is just beg Kali to get dancing and get it over with.

Really, this is the inside of my head these days. I'm not friends with it right now.

And here's the thing: I don't have to write like Boyle does. I go ages without writing or even thinking a poem. I don't need to write my essays, my books, not in that soul-kneading way. I could stop. Looking at my students yesterday, I was assigning their reading for tomorrow, about the economics of the world they're growing up into (the book Generation Debt inspired this move), and I thought: your grandchildren, or great-grandchildren won't need much in the way of clever sentences structure; they will need to know how to weave and make candles and frame a house and slaughter their own kills. It's the people in the developing world who know these skills and get through. We civilization junkies are screwed.

It's not that planet will shake us off like a bad case of fleas, as Karen said one night. It's that those of us who are left after the slow cataclysm and the violence it will spawn will be back to survival, something like the middle ages. When Lioness and I were hatching the Dublin plan, I prattled on about this, and she said to stop, she couldn't do her work in life and look into the abyss. Problem is, I always look. The abyss of the culture of death is precisely why I write and teach. And Do Not sling any cheap Nietzsche my way. I know that quote and its context better than most of the people of read this blog. It's just that for some time now, the abyss has been grinning a little too wide.

Where everything I do is pretty meta compared to survival, so meta that it's even sub to that kind of life. So, right after that thought come two more: find a job doing something useful in New Orleans, get some practice coming back from the cataclysm so you can pass that on; and the other is:

Fuck. It. Find someone you love, get a job in a coffee shop, and quit worrying, just let it all slide. Pull a Rimbaud and just get the hell out of the game. And worse: quick, make a bunch of money and blow it entertaining yourself, go see the world before it wrecks itself like some smilingly oblivious drunk driver. Suck up what's left of the beautiful since you're a member of the one the last generations that will be even able to enjoy this planet, as Speed put it one night. Quick, says my decadent angel, hie thee to Istanbul, the Orient Express, hitch around doing odd jobs in the Midi, go wash dishes in a pub in some tiny town in Ireland, go soak it up, because it's not going to be there for them, and you're here now.

And then, I work my way down the List of Things To Do, and plug away. But, I'm not doing it with that same stubborn hope I had even just a few years ago. I do it, right now, just to keep my conscience clear. And, of course, to get a job.

Which, doesn't seem enough, really. But, I'm printing off vitae and such anyway, putting them in the mail. And having a peek as Craig's List in New Orleans in case there's something there I'd rather do.