Dark Enlightenment

 Thom Hartman has connected the dots. In his words:

“A radical ideology known as the Dark Enlightenment is fueling a billionaire-led movement to gut our government, erase democratic norms, and install a technocratic elite in their place.”

I think that we are already in the midst of several catastrophes: climate change and increasing social disorder. These are the additional fuels that will combine with the radical ideology to bring the dark enlightenment to reality.

In one likely scenario, temperatures will increase and the sea level will rise 6 feet by 2100 - with all the attendant consequences including extreme weather, drought, and famine. Worse is possible. For point of reference, our grandchildren will be about our age in 2100.

What we can’t do is to keep thinking as if the future will be like it is now, only maybe just a little bit worse. The future will likely be unrecognizable to what we know now.

At any time along the way, various tipping points will occur related to our changing climate: economic failures and breakdowns in social order of various kinds will occur. It is in this environment that a great many people will be prepared to follow a leader who will rise up and promise prosperity, or at least stability, in exchange for various freedoms. The dark enlightenment will arrive.

Just imagine a Trump, or someone more competent, using AI to control people and run the government. A strong AI is almost there and it will become the perfect tool for surveillance and management with only an elite in charge. Only the promised reality won't turn out to be prosperity for all. Many will die or end up living in grinding poverty. The rest of us, of course, will do the work that machines can't do while the elite will live comfortably in their enclaves.

The specific details of the future, of course, are unknowable, but almost every path to the future looks like one we would not hope for our children or grandchildren. Climate change is already destabilizing human society. Already it is a significant part of the forces that are driving migrants from failing societies to wealthier ones And if a wall won't hold them out, then military forces will be deployed. And if we ourselves don’t comply, they might be turned on us, although with AI and social media, the populace will be malleable enough. Social coercion will be sufficient. But inequality will surely increase. Economic and social systems will be strained. The already fragile social cohesiveness of today will dissolve and tomorrow the forces of the dark enlightenment will be ready to step in.

I would like to hope that we could build a strong countervailing force to the dark enlightenment. Perhaps we might just get lucky and retake Congress in the midterms and the Presidency in four years. But then, with all of the seeds of chaos that have been already planted in society, the Democrats in power would get blamed for the high prices of eggs and gasoline - and everything else - and then a leader will rise up and, then, let’s say in 2032, the United States will will indeed finally enter the Dark Enlightenment. We’re seeing the prequel.

Too dark?

But let’s be honest. Can we stem this tide? I think climate change and social disruption are tidal forces, not merely changes in the currents. And if my imagined apocalypses only partially come to pass, I think we will need some kind of an answer that gives us and our decedents the best chance for a good and hopeful future - whatever comes.

I simply don’t think we're going to just be able ride out next four years and then we’ll (somehow) turn things around. I would very much like to believe that solar energy, EVs and perennial agriculture - or whatever - will save us. Maybe, just maybe, if we could just get to sustainable, we'd be okay? Racism and greed will – subside? At least half the country is ready to buy into a dark enlightenment vision already.

It's going to be like trying to out run a wild fire. How can the coming ecological realities not bring about the social unrest that will makes the rise of a dark enlightenment almost inevitable?

It seems likely that some version of a dark enlightenment will become the answer to control the social chaos. It will be called the Peace and Prosperity Party, or maybe just keep its old name, MAGA. People will exchange freedom for stability – and then worse. No more voting will be necessary.

If I'm wrong, moving towards closer communities will still be a good idea, but if things become more dire, our more individualistic ways of living won’t work. Our children will have to pull more tightly together, perhaps living together in intentional communities, networking with like-minded communities, to hold onto our humanity.

So if the dark enlightenment is indeed on our doorstep, this is the question: how will we prepare our children and grandchildren to face it? Our thinking and our actions need to be go beyond the next election.

I don’t have much hope to offer, but I do think that at the very least we must be clear-eyed and to learn to live as well as we can with whatever comes - within communities.

Chicken Fried Steak

I went to Tonganoxie because it was there. And then I walked into a joint called the Flashback Cafe and ordered the chicken fried steak. I mean, why wouldn’t I?

Now, chicken fried steak is nothing more – or less - than a reasonably tough cut of meat – definitely not chicken - that has been pounded sufficiently to make it reasonably tender and then breaded, fried and smothered with a generous helping of peppery white gravy. You will find variations on the theme – you might want the mashed potatoes to be a little lumpy and I can generally take or leave the green beans - but the truth is the truth. Chicken fried steak is chicken fried steak.

I just can’t say when I had my first chicken fried steak, but I do remember my first real job. It was laying carpet with Virgil and Lester. I was in high school and I was just good enough to do what needed to be done. I could hold up my end of a roll of carpet. I could haul the filthy old horsehair padding out to the van and bring back boxes of tack strip – or what ever. I could staple down new, chemical-fresh carpet pad or bring the carpet stretcher to where it was needed. I was the third hand. And at the end of the day, there it was - a brand spankin-new freshly carpeted room. It was beautiful. Not filet mignon – chicken fried. It was good. Now I didn’t realize it at the time, but in a way, that might have been the best job I would ever have. But this story isn’t about carpet laying, it’s about chicken fried steak.

The thing is, when we went out of town do a job, lunch was always on the company. And when we had a job near Durham, Kansas – and it was always near Durham, Kansas because there just wasn’t that much in Durham, Kansas – except for this one particular café. I always had the chicken fried steak. Every time. Mashed potatoes, green beans, a dinner roll. And homemade pie. We always had pie. Virgil and Lester were great guys. They paid me for doing something that was satisfying, they never made a big deal out of it when I messed up – and they bought me lunch.

So I believe.

That’s my story. There’s a whole lot of things I don’t believe in anymore, but you still gotta believe in something. So if you ever see me in Tonganoxie at the Flashback Cafe and it looks like I’m praying with a knife and fork in my hands, it’s the chicken fried steak.

Remembering in the rain - Audrey rev 12.12.21

I was walking across the Kaw River Bridge. The rain fell steadily down, stippling the surface of the water below me. The trees along the banks of the gray river were distant and shadowy. There was a soggy sameness to everything around me, but, in truth, I wasn’t discontented.

It was just a steady rain. Actually, more than a little welcome in August. My umbrella had kept me mostly dry as I walked, but by the time I got to the bridge, my shoes were pretty wet. I turned to look over the railing and I saw down below me a great blue heron standing on a rock in the shallow water near river. The heron was near enough to where I stood up on the bridge that I could see that its gray feathers were completely soaked. But the heron simply stood there, unconcerned, motionless, staring out over the river.

And then I thought of Audrey.

Audrey is a barista I know. Our separate paths are crossing at a coffee shop as we both head in different directions. Our time together will not be much more than bits of conversation - and glasses of iced tea passed from her hand to mine.

And so I had seen her only and hour or so ago. It had been just another forgettable Sunday afternoon at Aimee’s coffee shop. I had been sitting at the counter with a couple of other older guys. Staring out through the plate glass windows I could see that it was beginning to rain. There was a little idle conversation in the air. I sipped my iced tea. Just passing time.

Audrey and another barista, Riley, were putting paper trays of eggs into the refrigerator in the kitchen area below where we were sitting, stocking up for the next day. There were jokes bantered back and forth from one side of the counter to the other about what might happen if someone dropped a whole tray of eggs onto the floor.

And then Audrey picked up an egg from one of the trays and held it in her hand. Standing just a few feet away from three not very wise men sitting on the other side of the counter, she looked over at us and said, “Did you know that you can squeeze an egg in the palm of your hand as hard as you want and it won’t break?” And then she squeezed the egg and a blur of yellow yolk arced just past Riley’s head. We all laughed.

“It wasn’t supposed to work like that,” Audrey said with a rueful look on her face. And indeed the egg trick had worked a couple of Sunday’s earlier. Several of us had passed around a raw egg and had squeezed it as hard as we could. The egg hadn’t broken - then. We speculated that it had something to do with the shape of the hand and the shape of the egg. Physics. Or maybe it was hard boiled.

But on this Sunday afternoon it was hard for me to stop laughing at the failed egg trick – and at Audrey. It wasn’t just the egg breaking, squirting its insides across the room. It was the look on her face. That look was very nearly indescribable. Surprise doesn’t begin to cover it. And rueful is just another word, although it’s a good place to start. It was one of those times when you just had to be there.

I was still laughing as Audrey cleaned up the mess. “This is the high point of my day,” I said. And then then after a pause I reflected: “But then, the day isn’t over yet, so who knows?”

Audrey and I had talked earlier in the afternoon about what each other’s high points over the past week had been.

And then I had realized that I had been asking the wrong question. I changed it. “What was the most memorable thing that happened to you recently?” But it turned out that that question was not really any easier to answer.

And then it was closing time. The baristas had their real lives to get back to and I had a slow, easy walk in the rain ahead of me. I had nothing in particular in mind. I walked towards the river as I often do. The rain came down. The sidewalks were wet. Not very many people out. Cars splashing through puddles. Sometimes one day seems to blur into the next, but I still enjoy the walking, seeing what I will see.

And so, eventually, there I was, walking across the Kaw River Bridge in the rain. I saw the Great Blue Heron standing. And then it turned its head slightly to one side and stabbed its long beak into the water. And then, almost like magic, a small, white, wriggling fish appeared in its beak.

And that is when I thought of Audrey.

That is how memory works. I don’t quite understand it. What we remember seems to slip in and out of our minds faster that we can grasp our forgotten moments. And even our more memorable moments quickly fade as we move from one place and time to the next.

And so then, on that rainy afternoon on the bridge, a moment of life popped into my mind. This time it was Audrey’s face. Her smooth, freckled cheeks. Her brown curly hair. Her hand, dripping with broken egg shells and slippery egg goo. And I could almost see it all in my mind. And especially, for just a moment, I had somehow quite memorably seen Audrey’s eyes as they glanced with surprise into mine. And in those few moments as I watched the heron, I wondered what Audrey might have seen in my eyes.

But it was just the rain was coming down, steadily. I continued walking, circling around until finally I was standing below the bridge. I imagined that the heron might still be standing on the rock just below the bank ahead of me. I walked carefully towards the river in the wet grass - but not carefully enough. Suddenly the heron was flying away from me over the river, its outstretched great gray wings pulling through the rain with strong easy strokes. And in no time at all, it was just me and the river. I stood there watching the rain, my memories slipping in and out of my grasp.

I suppose that the memory thing is all a kind of trick. We see. We forget. And then, sometimes, we remember again. And then we forget all over again.

Life seems to happen in unexpected moments. And if we are lucky, we can laugh at each other and at ourselves. How indeed could we ever forget that life is full of surprises? And laughter. If we are looking, we can see our lives in each other’s eyes. And then we move on.

Magic - for PMC - July 18, 2021

 

On one reasonably warm late winter afternoon I was sitting on a low rock wall just off the north end of the Kaw River Bridge. I looked down at the river running though this patch of the planet. I have come to know it well. Across the way, the levee trail cut across my view in a straight line and then it turned, heading downstream and out of sight. The still bare trees along the banks of river, hiding the distant horizon, were beginning to show hints of green. Spring was late in coming.

The limestone boulders on the face of the levee under today’s hazy sky were a sort of reddish beige. The day was a little windy. The river rippled slowly along its way between the levee on this side of the river and the far bank.  The river reflected the sky above as it always does. 

 

I sat watching the turkey vultures as they circled high up against the sky. They were soaring with hardly any apparent effort on the updrafts lifting off from the face of the levee. Everything around me seemed quite satisfactorily beautiful. It is all, of course, just a piece of the simple beauty that I have come to expect to see in the various places where I wander up and down the river. 

Walkers and runners and bikers passed me by as I sat there on the ledge. Ordinary people enjoying an ordinary day.

I tried making a few sketches of the scene in front of me with disappointing results. But I was not really disappointed. It was just a way to practice seeing what I was looking at. The river is a frequent subject. 

For me, the river has become more than just the muddy water of the Kaw. It is a place without clear boundaries, all of its parts drawn together into a whole, embracing an ever flowing river.  And so the river has become a place where I come to be myself. The river interests me. I find it beautiful. And in the end, the river is a place that is not really about me at all - and yet I belong here. The Kaw, an everyday river, an ordinary wonder. But the river is also a place where I sometimes glimpse magic.

After thirty minutes or so of sitting and watching, I was ready to move along. I was riding a bicycle that day and so I rode off downstream along the levee trail. I rode across along the line that I had been looking at just a few minutes earlier. Peddling easy, I looked down to see islands of rocks and sand dividing the slow current of the Kaw River. I kept pace.

I hadn’t decided how far I would ride. I simply rode along the top of the levee, both seeing and not seeing the world around me. You should know that seeing everything is simply not possible. The natural world is much too rich for that. But without attention, much of the world can become a kind of background. A blur. I usually try to pay enough attention to see some of the beauty around me. I usually succeed.

And then as I was riding, part way down among the levee rocks I spotted a good-sized silver ball. Now, that silver ball was indeed out of the ordinary, but I would hardly say it was magical. Still, I slowed to a stop and then I walked my bike down a nearby gravel path to a small grassy area between the levee and the Kaw. I then carefully made my way across a short stretch of limestone boulders, reddish beige in the hazy sunlight. They were haphazardly tumbled in front of me. I watched my steps and my balance.

The silver ball turned out to be larger than it had thought standing on the levee trail above. It was quite a bit bigger than a basketball. I picked it up. It was a thin-walled chrome ball, somewhat dulled from the weather and deeply dented in several places.

I had my camera along with me so I placed the ball back on the rocks and took a few selfies with me reflected in the ball. The trees growing along the river stood there for a backdrop. Then I made my way back over the rocks and began to amble towards the river. I had been in this place many times before. I call it Pilings Point. There was a barely visible trail to follow along through the grass and leaves toward the river. Through a tangle of mostly thin tree trunks and branches, I could see the broken pilings of a railroad bridge that crossed the Kaw here about a hundred years ago. The river was low. Spring rains would be welcome.

The river – this stretch of the Kaw River and the river bank here – is as it is, the same and yet always changing. That is also how we human beings generally experience almost everything. Things are same. Things change. But this is what matters. The world waits for any of us to see it as it is and as it is becoming. And so for me, once again, this particular place held out its everyday beauty for me to see.

I sat down on the bank. After watching the sunlight playing on the surface of the Kaw for a while, I got up and turned to walk back to my bike and the levee. 

And now how else should I say it? I simply turned around - and the ordinary world disappeared. 

Magic.

It didn’t happen in an instant. But within a few gradual moments it was as if I had entered a kind of enchanted tangled river bottom forest. I lack the words to describe the sensation that I felt then. Nothing had apparently changed, but I somehow very much felt as if I was no longer in the familiar place that I knew. 

I saw the majestic, rough-barked tree with downed limbs around it. A tree that had been growing there for a hundred years or more. And other trees stood around it as though sentinels. Large vines as thick as my arms were twining up the tree trunks. And beyond my transfixion, that pale reddish beige of a hazy sunlit levee. I had seen it all before. Many times. It was all entirely the same. Except that with my turning, somehow the place I was in had become wholly magical. I existed there, motionless, within a moment of timeless wonder.

Then perhaps I broke the spell by deciding to take a few pictures. But I don't think that the kind of magic I am talking about is really like that. The magic is simply not about me at all. I think that I pass through its spell. Or perhaps it is the magic that passes through my being. The enchantment is neither bidden nor unbidden. I might miss  the magic if I haven’t opened myself to the possibility, but I don’t make the magic. It appears.

I suspect – it is not much more than a hunch, really – that magic might be always everywhere. We live within it unseeing. And then sometimes, somehow, we become aware of its presence. That afternoon I got a glimpse of the magic – for a moment - and then I came back to my ordinary life.

Let me be clear. I don’t think that there is a right word to describe my experience. Call it magic. Call it mystery. Call it whatever your want.The incomprehensible is not there to be explained. And so I have simply told you what I can tell.

It was just this: I was tramping through a perfectly good ordinary day, and then I was somewhere else. And then, some very brief moments later, I was back. 

But I am here to tell you now that there was indeed something like magic in between one ordinary moment and the next.

And so I did take a few pictures then, but really only to mark the day. And afterwards, I walked my bike up to the levee trail and rode back towards the bridge. Everything looked just as it had before. The rocks on the face of the levee were still a pale reddish beige. The hazy sun had settled closer towards the western horizon. It was time to go home for supper. The magic that afternoon hadn’t changed anything. 

Well, that's not entirely true. Magic changes me.

  

 

 

 

The woman at the corner of 6th and Mass, the pink platypus, and me.

 

It all began with the honking of a horn as I was standing on the corner of 6^th and Mass on a sweltering August afternoon.

You were trying to get my attention as I was standing on the corner. I didn’t realize that it was you at first. Then you honked again. And then it was unmistakably you. And the next thing I knew, you were driving down 6^th street and I was walking down Mass. Out of your open passenger window I had heard you say, “I’ve been thinking about you.” And then you were gone.

It felt a little like a dream.

It feels a little like a dream that we met all. But we did.

And so, when I got home from my walk that afternoon, I made a joke - just a little one – and I sent you a text. It was something about seeing a pretty young woman at the corner of 6^th and Mass - or maybe it was just sunstroke. And then a question: “Was it really you?”

I pressed ‘send’ and then, the next thing I knew, I was making a Thai curry. Prik Khing, with pork and long beans, to be specific. My mind was still drifting a little.

And then moments later, I was sitting on a bench near my garage, shucking corn on the cob.

And then my pocket ‘pwacked.’

I pulled my phone out of my pocket. It was a text from you: “It was really me, bertrude.” So it was you, the woman I saw driving by as I was standing on the corner of 6^th and Mass. I could almost hear your voice in the text. It’s how you say my name, after all. They say that there are something like 100 trillion connections in my brain.  I think that you must be somewhere in my mind. I could almost hear your voice.

And then within the discontinuity of texting, I asked if you wanted to come over for supper. I meant every word. I was making plenty of food, after all. But in the same moment, I was also making a joke. You were Eatstreeting food to people all across Lawrence after all.

But then I began to follow the thread that had begun in my mind when I saw you, standing on the corner of 6^th and Mass. trying to untangle the complications of your life as I walked.

And so as I sat with my phone in my hand, some of my mind began spilling out into a digital text. I started to tell you about my thoughts, about dreams, about heaven and hell, about time - and lifetimes. It might have been a text about hope. It was a long thread. I hit ‘send.’

I suppose that I must have managed to get something of myself into those flat words on the screen. I think that they might have been words you needed to hear. And then, when you texted back, I knew it was you. You said, “I love you, bertrude.” I could almost see your face and hear your voice.

And then, since supper for us was not an option, I texted that maybe we could do lunch on Friday. Vietnamese sandwiches. You agreed. “Sammiches,” you said. Another little joke, but we’d both been there.

 

And then it was later.

I went to bed. I couldn’t sleep, so I got up. I went down into the basement and piddled around with stuff. In the middle of the night, I was still trying to follow you and the train of my thoughts through the 100 trillion connections of my mind.

I must have traveled to the moon and back.

It’s not so important to me that I make sense all the time. Losing your mind is another way of finding yourself. You often don’t know what you need. And even when you don’t know who you are, you just have to keep looking. And sometimes – every now and then you find what you need.

And then when I turned my phone back on in the morning, another text was waiting. You couldn’t do sammiches on Friday.

And yet between us, the promise remained. It was there in a text.

I try to say what I mean. But only when I mean what I say. And sometimes when I’m making a joke, what I mean is the truth.

But I’m getting tired of texting. I’m not sure I know what I mean any more. Or who I am. What I want is to be alive. I want to be the man standing on the corner of 6^th and Mass. I want to make a Thai curry. I want to sit on a bench under a clear blue summer sky. And I want to have sammiches with you - sometime.

 

And then, as these things happen, it was the next day.  And this is where I get to the part about the platypus.

As I was about to go on my walk, I texted you that if you saw an older man with a pink platypus on his shoulder on the corner of 6^th and Mass, that would be me. It was a joke.

But then I took my platypus along with me and snapped a selfie of me and my platypus. And then I texted that photo to you. Of course it made no sense.

 

And then again in the middle of the night I was awake. Down in my basement. Messing around with stuff. I do have lots of stuff. I like things. Things you can touch. Real things. And so then I decided to take some pictures of my platypus among my things.

My basement workspace is one of my favorite places to be. And I think one good way for people to tell other people who they are is to show them the places where they are themselves.

So, since you were not there, I took the photos.

I think that you might try to look at these photos as if they were Tarot cards. You could do a reading if you wanted to. In the color and the clutter, you can see images of things that have gotten randomly shuffled over time. Haphazardly arranged. Things placed by a careless hand in the absence of my mind.

I think that you might try to look at these photos as if they were Tarot cards. You could do a reading if you wanted to. In the color and the clutter, you can see images of things that have gotten randomly shuffled over time. Haphazardly arranged. Things placed by a careless hand in the absence of my mind.

And so then in the middle of the night, I put the pink platypus down in the middle of it all, framed a picture, and clicked.

Look carefully. It’s not text this time, but midnight photos. Might the universe be telling you something in these pictures? Are they revealing some of the hidden secrets of who I am?

 

But now let’s go farther back in time. And this is the part where the pink platypus first came into my life. It was on a Halloween night several years ago. You could listen to my story from that night on this YouTube - or skip ahead as you wish.

But look at these photos. You might recognize me under the pink hat and curly gray wig.

 

And that was me and my platypus in the photo the next morning. It was really me, Jessie.

 

And this is where this story of me and the platypus really began.

It was near the end of the night. I had been sitting in the front yard in my pink hat and curly gray wig. Candy had been given out. I had scared my share of kids. I was just waiting.

And then I saw two middle school girls walking by on the sidewalk. Each of them was carrying a fuzzy pink platypus in their arms.

 Although I sat there motionless, I followed them with my eyes. And then out of the corner of one eye, I saw them stop. One girl turned and walked back to where I was sitting. She very simply put her pink platypus down on the table and said, “I think you need this more than I do.” And then she walked away. That’s all it was. I never saw her face in the darkness, but I can still almost hear her voice in a nearly forgotten corner of my mind.

So there it is. My platypus has been living in my basement ever since. From time to time, when I see it, I think about that girl. She was probably right, you know. It was what I needed

And then, the other day, I was thinking about you.

So did I tell you that I’ve been to the moon and back since I last saw you? And back into time? And do you remember the part where you honked at me? And when you texted what you texted to me?

Linear time is one thing. It started with the Big Bang more than 13 billion years ago and then in that instant, time began to point to a distant future that didn’t yet exist. And now here we are, still traveling through time. And after all these years, we are now living in a discontinuous time. Fragments here and there. Memory mingles with the present. Thoughts and feelings come and go at nearly the speed of light. Sometimes we take photos or write things down so that we can try to bring the past along with us. And sometimes we text. But we can’t really keep any of it. Time doesn’t exist. We hold things and each other for a little while and then we let go.

But some things are real. We are alive. One day a pink platypus came into my life. And one day you and I saw each other on the corner of 6^th and Mass. It was really me. And it was really you.

And Jessie, maybe there will be sammiches.

I will have to make them with bread and meat and stuff. You will pick one up in your hand. Bite into it. Maybe you will get a little mayo on the corner of your mouth. Maybe it will happen my backyard. It might be on a Wednesday. But if it happens, it will be in some real place at some real time. I will see your face and hear your voice. And you will see me.

And maybe the platypus.