A thumbnail sketch, a jeweler's stone A mean idea to call my own Old man don't lay so still you're not yet young There's time to teach, point to point, Point observation, children carry reservations Standing on the shoulders of giants Leaves me cold [….] - R.E.M., King of Birds
Often when a certain mood overtakes me it’s Michael Stipe’s voice there in the background, providing the soundtrack. Stipe, for those of you who don’t know, was the lead singer and principal wordsmith of the great alt rock group, R.E.M, which for many of us was the sound track of an era (80s-90s). (I say “was” only because the band eventually dissolved, but Michael himself is still with us.) Stipe’s song lyrics are often labelled “obscure”. And I think that’s what I like about them. I think of his lyrics as painterly — strings of associative images for the listener to assemble in his heart.
None of the above is particularly relevant to what I want to loosely sketch out here — at least not relevant in a logical, rational sort of way. It’s painterly backdrop and some music.
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And here is the moment where the writer aggressively wads up his typewriter paper and tosses it into the trash can. And here is the moment when he pulls it back out, flattens it with the pressure of a palm, stares at it … wondering if it’s okay to share one’s rough sketch work in process (progress?).
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Writing is probably always mostly lonely work. But it is especially lonely if one’s writing is meant to be apocalyptic, by which I mean simply that it is meant to expose that which has been hidden from view. Apocalypse (the word) was derived from the ancient Greek ἀποκαλύπτω (apokálupsis), which simply meant to reveal, disclose, uncover, expose that which had previously been unknown and hidden. It didn’t mean the end of the world. It wasn’t a particularly religious concept. All of those associations came later.
I’ve come to believe that while our callings in life are given to us (not by God, but by the pattern of our lives, by the unfolding of ourselves in our world) they are equally something we craft. Each of these in equal measure, more or less, perhaps. So we don’t simply choose our callings. Our callings choose us, too. We are called to them — by our lives. And we can choose to go with that flow or to try and evade, avoid, flee the task at hand. But callings force us to wrestle, to struggle, to strive. Rarely is a calling a smooth path. It’s a rugged path, a fraught path, a path we often wish was not ours to take. And often a lonely path.
A calling overtakes us, and where we must strive and struggle is in crafting the particulars and details of our expression of that calling. This is how we are participants and must choose. I can choose when to breathe, but I cannot choose not to breathe. John Lennon had a nice little riff on this basic theme. “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” Our callings have us as much as we have them.
Often, I wear my callings as a burden. They test me. They are a struggle. I often want to get out of them. But I keep getting called back. “This is not the sort of artist I want to be,” I silently repeat to myself. But events make the man. And I’m living in one of the most fascinating and disturbing of events. I’m living in a time of apocalypse.
We all are.
Each day we’re presented stories, narratives, pictures … about the world … which just aren’t true. The truth of things is often rather severely marginalized — concealed, hidden. And so the first apocalypse is personal. We discover that the mainstream / conventional / popular story isn’t true. And then we discover that the popular story is keeping us (our societies, our cultures, our civilizations) from properly responding to our real situation. And then we discover that shifting the narrative isn’t going to be so simple as telling the truth, because popular untruths are comforting … and apocalypse is often very uncomfortable. Even painful. Denial isn’t a river in Egypt. Y’know?
I didn’t know it at the time, but when I read E. F. Shumacher’s Small Is Beautiful as a teenager (soon followed by A Sand County Almanac, by Aldo Leopold) I was beginning my calling. I was being called into this apocalypse.
There’s really no good shortcut for explaining our present apocalypse. But it will help to have read Richard Heinberg’s crucially important essay, Our Bonus Decade. This essay (and other writings like it) should disclose for the reader the truth that the energy regime which makes our present mode of economy (access to livelihood) possible is not going to be sustained for very long, and is presently coming to an end.
You’d think there would be a Plan B for when Plan A fails, but, shockingly, there is none. That’s our apocalypse! The apocalypse lands on an individual with the weight of a burden, a calling. How to wake my neighbors up? It’s a different question than the one faced by Henry David Thoreau. “As I have said, I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.” But shouldn’t we wake the neighbors?
If we’re not awake to what is happening, and if we don’t understand that Plan A-2 can only fail, collectively we cannot prepare for the rapidly emerging future. Not being prepared for the future is like being a squirrel that didn’t bother putting up nuts for the winter. Winter comes and so does hunger. That’s the nature of our current apocalypse. It will require more time than we have to prepare the ideal bridge into the coming world — its mode of material culture, livelihood, economy — but that’s no reason not to try and build an adequate one. Winter is coming. And this is our burden. It can’t belong just to me!
(I’ll soon write more about bridge-building — the metaphor. Stay tuned. And, hey, look. This survived the wastepaper bucket!)