DARK SUMMER

The sun came up red in this fire season but pleasantly cool for sleep, which I tried to go on doing.  But I'm in a state of disillusionment this morning, more than usual.  It's all nothing, on the way to a nothing crash and then a re-creation of nothing.  So I start my reliable method of analysis, asking why.

First, it is just a plainly evident truth that I'm eighty, in a shrinking town with a terrible climate during a summer that is quite pleasant if I could only keep up with the yard -- but what for?  Neither rich nor famous nor dearly intimate with special people, I have my pride.  But in what?

Second, as my energy and ability to take hold are increasing, so that my house, garage and yard are gradually coming into order -- though not complete enough to meet the standards of people here -- it becomes something withdrawn to reveal lack of progress as though progress were a thing and a person could tell what it's worth.  Nothing to sell, nothing to keep, nothing to make anyone laugh.  Soon I can begin to discard the 4-drawer file cabinets because everything in them has been discarded.

Third, the pressing needs of dentist and doctor are over.  The kitchen sink drains reliably.  All that is left is the unending credit card bill and the inscrutable mailings from Humana.

Fourth, now we're getting to the realm of ideas.  I'm watching Januszczak's vids about art in the Dark Ages in the mid-continent Eurasian dark landscape where violence is effective and prayer is one's only chance.  Empty.  Except that cultures form, achieve masterpieces of gold and stone, but soon die again, or get pushed out to take refuge on peninsulas and coasts that are entirely different from what they know.  Today's constant indignation and sorrow are dwarfed.  It's clear that this -- US -- is a country on the skids, soon to have famine and chaos.  It never really seemed possible before, but now it does.

Our so-called president is just a big toad squatting in a poorly built, mouse-infested old house with a lot of old fashioned art.  The dignity and history are squandered.  He's not just doomed, he's ridiculous.  He's walking rotting dead.  His inheritors know it.  They will let him go.  No cure anyway.  The back-up leaders are too old, too compromised, too bought-off to do what they were supposed to do.  You can buy the Supreme Court with beer and tears.

All this is never very far from the truth and this country is not alone.  The whole planetary complex of educated people have realized that their ideals are moonbeams, they have addled the planet into uninhabitability.  The industrial revolution sold our souls for power -- but we're about to do it again for the fantasy of wise robots who will love us and save us as neither God nor our parents ever did.  (Umaihr is not alone.  I can also rant and rave.  Even though I'm a "girl.")

Fifth, for all the good it does us.  Our morality is strictly Alice at the Teaparty sort of stuff.  PBS with its doyenne of splayed fingers, over-bleached hair, and simpering fondnesses busies itself with sentimentalities over lesser peoples, a lesson to us all.  The Washington Post with its "fairness" of stories of the two wretched sides they have invented, totally ignoring the middle, the Independents who are secret, covert, plotting something but no one knows what because they are too disorganized.  They are plotting a hundred things, most of them irrelevant.

But the sixth thing, the pin that popped the balloon and also the force that drove me out of ministry -- beyond disgust with ministers who breached the standards but got only success to show for it and the laypeople who paid no attention anyway.  It's the stuff you're supposed to learn between when you turn 9 and when puberty hits -- 12?   I never got it.  it still gets me in my soft underside.

I'm on Twitter, mostly so I can post the subject of my blog everyday.  There's a sort of people who won't read a blog because they don't read anyway, but also because it's just such an ugly word.  I write long-form, a thousand words, with many references to other websites and blogs (logs).  But there are people who see twitter as a meet-and-greet, so when I make a quip or provide info (which makes them angry because their identity is based on being "the Ones Who Know") they try to draw me into conversation at the side.  Little affections and affectations.

The pattern is plain.  One alpha "girl" gathers a little circle of people she can control with praise, mockery and secrets.  Such a woman/girl on Twitter began to draw me into her circle.  I was so revolted and angry that I blocked her.  Twitter rebuked me for not being nice.  It's not Russian of them -- it's Chinese.  Also, Fifties America.  Drag queen of the neighborhood.  Sometimes we admire them and sometimes we fight hard to escape them, but they are resourceful.  Sometimes they are disguised as do-gooders.  Sometimes they are nurses.  Sometimes they push me out of jobs or even a marriage.  And all the time they praise excessively: you're so wonderful, so awesome, so exceptional.  I've found no cure except to run away from them.

Of course, I much prefer operatic bad boys with their cloaks of invisibility, but they are far away now.  Still, I can write about them, but never publish about them, just sort out the evidence I have already and analyze what it means to be alive in a world like this one, so packed with combustible shiny darkness that we work so hard to excavate, breathing death from ancient life, throwing all our energy into imprinting our feet on the dust of the moon while the polar caps are melting and the whales wash up dead.

I don't usually listen to music while I work, but today I am.  Strange stuff I picked up for free.  Paul Winter, for instance.  When I taught high school English I worked hard to get the kids to understand "sympathy" (recognizing and respecting someone else's emotion) as distinguished from "empathy" (sharing the felt inner life of someone else as it is for them).  Today's media writers get it all wrong, since they are poorly educated and just taking up space.  

But what comes after empathy?  Porges believes that it is our ability to feel others that allows us to come together as cultures of art and stone, even in dark ages on the true dark continent.  (It's not Africa.)  We form molecular and electrochemical connections of our sensory life that knit into concepts and then creations.  But what do we call this?  Penetration?  Coalescence?  Or is it just a fantasy in a time when few even achieve sympathy?  Music of the world in the manner of Paul Winter?