If you think about it all: rot, chaos, aggression. Disintegration.
But my desk remains, my job remains, my friends and colleagues remain... I buy food, talk to students, plan trips. There are no problems.
To be honest, there have been some fairly disastrous periods even during my lifetime when one couldn't depend on governments for simple support, basic decency; and most of us pottered, or occasionally staggered, along through that.
***
You know how personal development sometimes operates, in a relatively liberal society – people allow themselves to imagine or behave in ways that may have caused them apprehension, that may have seemed shocking or impossible, gradually integrate those aspects of themselves, become comfortable with them – and gain larger awareness, peace of mind, become able to handle things and continue. Often their most radical behaviour fades, though they won't ever again be alarmed by someone offering them a joint, or a bed, or a bizarre costume...
But when the paradigm of that personal development is projected onto culture, and individuals and groups and nations split off to be possessed by shadows or demons or angels that are floating around and gathering energy in the population, then the damage can be concrete and real, and irreversible, because the real world does not absorb energy and rebound like the symbolic world. And, of course, in the worst cases, war, destruction. Including when a culture has spent some decades living with the potential of total destruction: whereupon bursts of total freedom, of irresponsibility, become a lot more... alarming. (See some of the solutions for Fermi's Paradox.)
Right now it seems as though two major governments are possessed by their own shadows: and all the demonstrations, letters, battles, have at the moment no impact whatsoever – because the politicians are acting out their own fantasy worlds, floating in strange and unreal vacuums. Even the ones who don't seem seriously dissociated – May, Corbyn – act as though they are wandering through dream spaces, making decisions that are not quite real, but that symbolise their fantasies of power and recovery....
***
The title is the third section of Tom Disch's eerily great novel 334; at one level the section is more sedate, less anxious, than the others – a kind, reasonable therapist, a middle-aged woman, works with hallucinogenic drugs in a New York a decade or two from now; the approved structure of her therapeutic interventions is that she and her patients 'live' for periods in a fantasy world where their lives can be worked out, and her particular professional fantasy world is fourth-century Rome. It is clear that, within the fantasy world, no one knows that the Empire is irretrievably dying – there are inconveniences and changes, a farm is destroyed by a wandering army, but life potters on.
Such a wonderful title: ironically academic, casual. Summing up the quotidian and the apocalyptic in a simple phrase.
Because her life, in her New York, which to the reader is clearly in trouble, is perfectly fine: she sees patients, takes out the trash, makes dinner for her husband and son. When under the drug, she and her patients sit by an unfinished pool on a farm in the Roman countryside, talk about the new mysticism from the East, ask the servants to bring things. From one angle, it is the end of an empire, all collapsing into dust: but from another, the weather is pleasant, and here are grapes and a ewer of fresh water....
•••
Life is, after all, not bad at all. My list of things to do is long – I must keep up with students, with classes; I must move ahead with work for the Jung-Institut. There are indeed three papers to write, and the one for the patient and kindly J. is so absolutely overdue that it must, must, be done in the next very few days. Like, within four days, frankly, or perhaps five.
But I feel fairly well. Sleeping a bit too much, but that's not disastrous – the body is, well, pottering along; the bed is comfortable, I come back to the desk. Food seems interesting, the apartment is clean and open. I make a point of giving away some books and CDs – and there is a bit more space around the desk, and that is pleasant.
I went to the 'other' HIV support group again – a lot of guys, it was pleasant, a place to feel at home. I even noticed that others are also a bit too chunky, or not walking with alacrity – perhaps my physical annoyances are sort of normal for people who are no longer young, who are taking complex medicines, who are part of a sedentary computerised culture. In any case none of these problems seem terribly huge.
Facebook is of course full of articulate unhappiness and resolve from American friends, and from others; but I feel as though I can't really do anything about that. Sign petitions, watch the British government to see how abysmally stupid it's going to get... think of moving smoothly, obliquely, to another, non-Anglophone country – we'll see, perhaps in a couple of years or so.
Time scales are shortened, and the world is made a bit smaller in my mind. Can't pay attention to everything.
Music, earphones, it is now late evening. Put some documents aside, that's enough work on them.
Perhaps a bath....
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