Frozen grief
On the loss of the sense of the tragic
It’s ironic, in a way, that a world mired in war, death, impending catastrophe and incipent tyranny, should also be uniquely unable to reflect deeply on this situation, unable to really perceive the deeper registers of the tragedy unfolding around us.
A few days ago, John remarked that we’ve lost the sense of the tragic. That we have lost access to the depth of tragic emotions, and have no language to really help us comprehend and focus them.
I guess from an outlook wherein everything is nonsense and incoherent, and where everyone is uprooted and alone, there can be no meaningful sense of the tragic. If there’s no absolute good, and no framework of relations and attachment to bring it out to us, neither can there be no real loss.
If there’s no sin, there can be no truly profound evil.
Just opinion. The incessant gray boredom of meaningless images flickering by our numbed and over-saturated senses. Death as entertainment.
There’s a genocide being perpetrated before our very eyes. One child is being murdered in Gaza every ten minutes. Ratings and clickbait.
And this is normal. The horrifying and absurd thing is that this is entirely normal.
This is the state of affairs under capitalism and industrial society. The age-old colonial structures, the racist prejudices and the exploitative class system. The alienation and its generations of trauma. The commodification of human relations, of our basic wants and needs. Of life itself.
So we sit and read fictionalized police reports and news stories of dismembered children as a sort of grim amusement that entices the simpler emotions of righteous indignation, rage and deceptively cathartic tears.
In the midst of all of this we seem to long for the collapse. For the breakdown.
I saw a guy in the news the other day talking about his dead kid who perished from (I think) cancer. I’m not saying his grief was shallow, or that he didn’t feel a pain I could never comprehend. But he could only speak of this entire experience in a language borrowed from the world of spectator sports. Words are never adequate, but they don’t need to become merely a cruel joke either.
"The lack of genuine humour may mirror the lack of tragic emotions. In that sense the Comedy Club or Improv are not release mechanisms, but manufacturing centers for the self loathing of the new ugliness, and the latent fascist." (John Steppling)
I responded something to the effect that the lack of the tragic in the emotional and cultural registers, and the absence of a capacity to really feel loss deeply and actually mourn cut us off from genuine empathy. We cannot recognize that which we do not first know.
And what’s probably worse, this renders us incapable to really heal from the constant and pervasive trauma inflicted upon us. If we cannot empathize, neither can we be truly compassionate to ourselves. If we don’t recognize our injuries as truly evil, but only through bleak shades of gray, their real meaning will escape us. We won’t be able to integrate them as past and very tangible negations of the good which they illuminate. And if that distinction isn’t made, the trauma bleeds over into life.
After so many things, after so many hazy miles,
not sure which kingdom it is, not knowing the terrain,
traveling with pitiful hopes,
and lying companions, and suspicious dreams,
I love the firmness that still survives in my eyes.I love my own lost self, my faulty stuff,
my silver wound, and my eternal loss.
The damp grapes burned, and their funereal water
is still flickering, is still with us.Pablo Neruda
"Everything is described as decaying, and such descriptions are largely right. But, there is a metaphor here that gets ignored. People psychologically *feel* this decaying process." (John again)
Yeah. We do feel it. And we don’t have the language nor the map of the world to adequately comprehend it, or make meaning of it.
And the response to our frozen grief is this violent grasping for catharsis. For a great cleansing, a purging of the world both without and within.
Jim Kunstler said something about this on his pod a couple of days ago. He thinks that everyone perceives this decay, this process of collapse and radical transformation, but that most people can't understand nor cope with it, and cannot fit it into the framework of the dominant narratives. This tension leads many, if not most of us, to react with anger, with violence, and if possible by doubling down on the already predominant vicarious participation in the dominant discourses of power.
But there are no dominant discourses of power anymore. Not really. Saussure and the deconstructionists seem to have been right about the death of the meta-narrative.
Institutional legitimacy is badly faded. Everything’s fractured and withering, including our myths. Progress is a joke, and its digital demons little more than a mirror of the uncanny depths of our distorted souls. Democracy is likewise little more than a ghost story. “Trusting the science” became a mantra for the gullible idolizers and the pathologically fearful. And what happens after the impending catastrophic economic downturn?
I have trouble sleepin' at night. I have bad dreams like I'm falling. I wake up scared. Sometimes it takes me a while to remember where I am.
The Shawshank Redemption
I could try to tell you where I think we should go from here. I don’t know much. I think I have a few good ideas, but they often seem inadequate at the first encounter with the real world, infinitely complex and beautiful beyond comprehension.
I don’t want to pretend anymore. I’m tired of the lies, of the half-truths, and of the empty ambitions and chimeras of the world and its transient glories.
I think it was Wittgenstein who remarked that the most important thing he’d learned over a lifetime of upper-echelon philosophy, that the most useful recommendation he could give you, was that we perhaps should be a bit kinder to one another.
I think I get something of what this means. I’ve encountered genuine kindness, quite recently, and it’s healed wounds I’d even forgotten existed.
But it’s not that simple. I believe in Kindness himself, and what it cost him to actually follow through on that basic precept, all the way and beyond.
I don’t want to sell you religion, whoever you are, reading this. I can’t stand the hucksters and their smiles and their simple solutions and easily marketable phrases. But neither can I now stand my own obscurantism and its enticing promises of secret knowledge and rational superiority. That commodifies Christ as this fucking lifestyle asset just the same.
I know Him. I think I know Him. At least He knows me, that I’m sure of.
And it’s something else entirely. It’s something that only humility, this intangible lesson of a thousand lifetimes, can help us move towards. And maybe that’s just what both Wittgenstein and the Hucksters were trying to say.
I've felt the decay since childhood. School just taught me the economic and political systems that didn't make sense to me. Not because I didn't understand, but because I saw why it was naive if not rigged to fail. Sadly, most of the other kids didn't think much about it.
Neither do the adults. Why not? Perhaps because they were still having the "dream" sold to them by corporations and the government.
What I can say is that today has such an odd pattern of chaos! It tells me that the powers that be are struggling to keep us distracted. If they only just gave us more, we would go along.
But no, they stole stole stole and even hurt us with absolute garbage.
The medical stuff is coming out now... SSRIs are shit, statins are shit, quackzines don't work (or hurt you).
In a similar fashion, I suspect the truth of the economy will come out.
Then, we can address the elephant in the room that hides behind fake crusades.
The second coming of Christ seemed figurative to me.
Not a coming of a man, but a change of people to live like what Christ taught, and not the major religion interpretation of it.
As he said "the temple is within", people will learn to stand up for themselves and no longer be plugged into a group mind, whether it be politics, science, religion, etc.
I enjoyed the musical selection (reminds me a bit of the Innocence Mission’s earlier gems) – thank you for sharing it. And for your descriptive and resonate words.
You poignantly mused about, “the tragedy unfolding around us.” And our inability to truly perceive and register the evil being visited openly on the majority of Earth’s inhabitants (people, animals, the “natural” world, skies, water, plants, etc. ad infinitum).
We (the species known as the human race – for we are one race and many people groups, ethnicities, etc.) are witnesses to the escalated & now far advanced war on humanity waged by no less than fellow creatures who have successfully carried out their campaign of fear, disillusionment, and hopelessness (as well as isolation) that produces the sense of numb disbelief with an occasional flickering hope for some sort of cataclysmic and righteous correction at a magnitude and scale that will restore us to the idyllic notions we carry around about a past we once inhabited that bears less and less resemblance to the present one in which we find ourselves.
The tragedy is that we have forgotten, in our grief and purposefully perpetrated dread of the next bit of horrific news or actions against the collective or individual “us,” that there is sin and there is profound evil. There is also (though we must apprehend it in with and by faith) absolute good and One who embodies it in ways we spend our lives learning about and experiencing to greater and lesser degrees depending on our belief and our understanding of eternal and unassailable truth.
It is “new” or “nouveau” to us, though generations before us endured horrific and tragic atrocities in their lands and on their persons – unprovoked and unanticipated or desired attempts to manipulate and exterminate, enslave or control them – we are simply not the exception we grew up believing we are or perhaps ought to be or even, for some, deserve to be.
In other words, we are one with history as it repeatedly evidences that we and our world are de-volving, not evolving. The purposeful division being sown into the fabric of society – is not just intentional but also nefarious in its essence and intent. United in perception and resolve, we can be formidable. Drawing from the strength of our common (or even uncommon) bonds, from the inspiration and enabling of our LORD and Savior, our Advocate & the Redeemer of our lives, & from the knowledge that our destiny lies not in the mediocrity and opaque, colorless and dreary circumstances in which we find ourselves, but instead on a gift freely given to us, for us, that enlivens and resets us – transforming us from creaturely victims to victorious saints – sufferers, perhaps, still – but ones who have hope even in the face of the most incarnate evil yet to openly rattle it saber at us and our Hallowed Preserver. And hope defies and dismember darkness – shining in the darkness that does not and cannot comprehend or overtake it.
The “collapse” of the synthetic world in its final stages of transformation from the organic paradise it was crated to be – replete with the electronic panopticon, (for those who are not “culled” through the bioweapon jabs, the constant rain of toxic nanoparticulate metals, mircoplastics and the intentional disappearance of food staples, spiritual enoblement & essential resources that are able to, the calculated “wars”, stoking deep reactions and greater division for participants and spectators alike,
We have been influenced and ruled, for many years now (and to an ever-increasing degree as others aggregate and join them) by a cadre of psychopathic, unfeeling, powerful persons who have no inclination towards mercy, grace, compassion or benevolence – only an unshakable and unrelenting dedication to using every resource, every person, every opportunity to at last realize their feverish wet dream – of living forever and of having control of a digitally inventoried and managed every living and material (and if possible, ethereal) “thing” and of doing what they will with it all – ridding themselves of the inconveniences of our resistance, understanding and greater love for self and others guided not by self-interests but by the aspirations of benevolence and of preservation and of supporting and caring, as divine stewards, for everyone and everything that surrounds us, submitted and enabled by our LORD….who alone can bring to fruition the demise of those who despise and wish to devour or forever reduce us to feudal serfs for their entertainment. For He has foreseen their objectives, anticipated their obfuscations and ruses – has seen in advance the worst that they can do and His preserving, loving and more than sufficient response is to see them, in their deranged and demented state, repaid for their plenteous and heinous sins against Him and us.
It is right that we sense the decay and the rot from those who have only themselves and their benefit as a life objective – it is our “natural” defenses informing us that something so altogether “other” has been provided and will both defeat the evil, but also bridge the gap between what we have believed and is and our realization of it.
The catharsis -- the great cleansing, the purging of the world without and within is coming. We can choose to inhabit the role of being victims of it, or to place our trust, faith and hope in One who has already triumphed victoriously and is even now waiting for the moment when the process of revision and reclamation will begin anew and with momentum that is unstoppable and undeniable.
The dominant narratives are only the best mankind can muster, and fall short of the liberating truth and reality that we are spiritual beings, temporarily housed in these often frail bodies, living souls with a legacy and heritage who are beneficiaries of a testamentary trust, those who are rightly related to the spiritual wealth and life that is ours by bequest – the LORD Himself, the Almighty, the One who is before all things and holds all things together – the One who died, rose again, and exited the planet in that form, sending back His pledge for eventual liberation in the form of His Spirit to dwell within and rejuvenate and refresh and to direct and support our transformation and eventual co-habitation with the TRIUNITY of God, Son & Spirit that has pre-existed since before time and has allowed all of this to transpire to extend their open invitation of hope, restoration and new life with them, forever to we who are perishing – psychologically, emotionally, physically and spiritually. The hope that we have that cannot be taken is in the One who made all things, and gave Himself for us. He cannot and will not be defeated or thwarted. We live in the anticipation of what He has yet to do and is now doing, and has already done, knowing that we are no longer slaves of the degradation and sin that once characterized us – we are the new creation, the antithesis of this dark and dying place. Take Heart.