I sometimes wonder
if I should write a Substack (if only to pay for all the other Substacks I subscribe to). but that has a heavy air of futility and obligation hanging around it.
And superfluity. So many voices yammering, opining. The din fills the ether. Rising like smoke, like prayers, polluting the noösphere. Another effluent of this swarm.
Thoughts are just a kind of excretion of futility. You can think yourself bloody against the iron wall of power.
Meditations on the beginning of the end
from a journal
Am I pretending to believe conspiracies I don’t? Or am I beginning to … well, again, “I’m not a believer, I’m an entertainer,” and I do entertain them. Anything seems possible today. There is a belief out there that the elite are actively trying to depopulate the earth for themselves. How much difference is there between that and them thinking it would be unfortunate, but convenient if a lot of us died? (That wish is right there in The Lathe of Heaven, my all-purpose prophecy. I’ve thought it myself, but believed nature, or human nature [war], would take care of it.) The thousands of fires in food processing plants, Bill Gates amassing farmland … there’s not a lot of difference between the very wealthy trying to push the earth to the edge to try to hasten its purging and its being pushed to the edge by reckless greed and wanton poisoning of the environment, except in the second case we’re all to blame for having eagerly bought what “they” were selling. And now we’re caught between people who want to keep up the destruction because it’s short-term profitable and people who want to take it all under control and create a techno-feudal totalitarian world where the wealth is not shared by the peasants, whose numbers are to blame for an unsustainable lifestyle. There’s blame to throw around as the whole edifice begins to totter. More subjugation of nature, which alone can save us, one way or the other. Beat nature to death, nature mandates our deaths, we’re going to create a “better” world for the delectation of the few and the doping up and dumbing down of the many, the factory farmed human herd. How did this all metastasize so fast? I can’t fault any attempt to figure that out, even if a nefarious central plan is one of the more primitive explanations. Engineering, opportunism, or some of both—the results are the same.
The transhumanist shit is particularly terrifying. These techlords are literally trying to become gods. That always ends badly. What fools these mortals be—thinking they can become immortal. Shakespeare to the rescue.
There was an aerial view of the Quebec fires winking on in a synchronized arc (or was it a repurposed video of a controlled burn somewhere?) and pouring their smoke downwind, like tributaries feeding a wavefront of smoke.
***
Watched a video last night about “false heroes” (basically, any billionaire or celebrity—he even called Gandhi a messenger of the elite “swarm,” a transmitter of their shaping message to the masses). He himself (a Desi) pitched himself as a sort of regular-guy messiah, and I thought of Sabbatai Zevi, and the ghost dance. We all sense that something is going horribly wrong. That our consumer-cheer American lives with all their distractions and attractions have become a hollow shell, the skin on a cauldron, and that last façade could be whisked away at any moment now by the cook’s spoon. We cling to the vestiges of “normality,” as always before a war.
They can have their psyches as well as their persons pampered, the rich. Ayahuasca, facelifts, young blood. They make idols of themselves. Bored gods.
***
I spent a lot of yesterday “escaping” into anxious reading about the state of the world and how to get out of the trap and back into what one self-appointed guru calls “the lost timeline” that was severed by the assassinations of the ’60s. Obviously I’m susceptible to this, but I’m very wary of overidealizing the Kennedys, or believing that star power offers salvation. Humans do have a need or weakness for charismatic figures to inspire and galvanize us—to embody our wishes, hopes (and fears—we need charismatic villains too) and condense them into an action plan. But they have to wade into the dense, resistant snake pit / trash dump of the world, and there efforts can lose momentum, get fragmented and whirled away. The Dump absorbs all and goes on festering. And they also have their temptations, weaknesses, limitations.
Funny, in the image of the Dump that occurs to me, if it had a face it would be the face of Jack Nicholson in The Shining, sitting up to his neck in a heap of mud like a character in a Beckett play. That mad glee. There’s a vitality and defiance in its unconquerable festering. If you could just tap into that perverse primeval fermentation, you could fly to Alpha Centauri. It’s the pond scum on the void, the first layer from which all complex life arises and on which it feeds. And it’s unreformable, below the grasp of morality. It oozes between morality’s fingers. It’s the simmering of cells.
***
My body and my energy are running down. Housecleaning, carrying stuff upstairs, hauling cats to the vet (which I haven’t done yet but need to), my work, all are daunting and exhausting to contemplate, though less so to actually do. I dread them, particularly cleaning house for a cat sitter and preparing to travel. That my savings are also running down is a subliminal, background drain. And not least that the world is coming undone, starting to rot even though it didn’t die yet. If the world were in place, I would be much less tired. There is some kind of subliminal background effort for all of us of “holding it together,” or at least trying to make some kind of sense of the disintegration. That’s what “conspiracy theories” are, a desperate attempt to understand. There must be an agent. At the very least, there are rather suddenly too many of us, and the strong and cruel* are hell-bent on being the ones to survive. We all know there’s going to be a die-off, or waves of them, whether nuclear, famine, disease, natural disaster(s), or just people preying on each other. Wait for it.
*the “strong and cruel” today are the rich and conniving. They wouldn’t last 30 seconds in an alley fight. But they have alley fighters on their payroll along with the accountants, investment managers, and lobbyists.
Ambiance 