A Brief Account of Life and Death
A short essay/poem thing
*Want to support me? Subscribe, free or paid. Re-stack this essay. Share with friends and family. Spread the word.
Screens are solipsistic narcissism machines. They distort and rearrange reality. News injects outrage poison directly into ideological veins ready to receive it. Tribalism reaches into the darkest corners of our psyches, stimulating our hyperactive egos like dynamite hurled into a foxhole.
~
I can’t think of what to write at the moment, which is exceedingly rare. I’m dipping my English Breakfast tea bag into the beige liquid pool in my massive black metal mug, scarred on the side from a backpacking trip to the Sierras with Britney a couple years ago. (I remember the perfectly flat lake just past dawn, the snow-capped mountains perfectly reflected against the water, the intense silence, the total lack of internet service, the calmness I felt and the love of the earth.)
Book spines face me, to the right of my laptop screen: Paul Auster’s Leviathan, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Franz Kafka’s The Complete Stories, Andrew Field’s Nabokov, Field’s second V.N.: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, Philip Roth’s My Life as a Man, Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.
Spain beckons; We’ll be in Madrid in two weeks. To live, mind you, not to visit. It feels shocking and nearly impossible both that we’re finally, actually going and also that we’re not already there. Now it is just a matter of waiting. Waiting seems to be the major theme of my life the past 5-6 years. Waiting to flee the Bay Area for New York. Waiting for COVID to pass. Waiting for my father to die. Waiting to get married. Waiting to get out of Santa Barbara and then Lompoc. And now waiting to leave Portland for Spain. (All of us are in a sense waiting to die by virtue of our very fragile existence.)
Loss. Grief. A dead father. Animals no longer with us. Old selves, dispatched into the netherworld, older versions of ourselves slipped off like thin costumes, draped along the chair of life. The only true condition of life is change. Not even taxes. And death is change. Ergo change is The Thing. Transmogrification. Evolution. Regression. Alteration. Transition.
We live in a time of rapid change: Technology has vastly outpaced human evolution. We are not made for or prepared for The Internet in all its current manifestations. Social media it turns out is anti-human. Connection is the opposite of addiction, people say. Human connection. Physical and literal and in-person connection, that is.
Screens are solipsistic narcissism machines. They distort and rearrange reality. News injects outrage poison directly into ideological veins ready to receive it. Tribalism reaches into the darkest corners of our psyches, stimulating our hyperactive egos like dynamite hurled into a foxhole.
Man is at war with himself. In a sense he has always been at war with himself. We need another Lincoln of our time, an Emancipation Proclamation Part II, but not for the end of slavery; rather for the end of spiritual myopia. The strictures of the age are holding us down, straps fastened against our arms and legs like Winston when he’s being tortured in Orwell’s 1984.
We exist and perform—and I use the word perform here very purposefully—as if we possess no free will, no human agency, as if we’re already half human, half robot. And maybe we are. The screens have reached into our hearts and diluted us, reached into our brains and lied to us, reached into our veins and tainted us. A collective madness.
And yet: Love presents the solution. Always. Even if only by one percent. Loving oneself. Loving one’s perceived enemies. Loving those who can’t see the forest for the trees. Loving the best version of Truth, even if truth is a word, among many, which now seems suspect at best. Reality has never been so distorted as in our time. Screens, mirrors, reflections, smoke and chaos.
The best version of ourselves is the only version that matters in the end. We’re all mightily flawed, weak and persistently pathetic. Life is ephemeral. Brief. A distant, fast spread of light under a closing door. A void with a single lightning flash. A tiny moment, a miniscule experience we do not understand.
Choice is everything. All there is is choice. We’re surrounded every second by the ability and the pressure to choose. To be an existential warrior or to perpetuate a victimhood narrative. To focus on love and humanity and goodness, or to cherry-pick the imperfections, the flaws, the uncertain past.
All that exists is this moment right now. This has been true since time immemorial.