The Future: An Exercise in Pessimism (13.1)

Hopefully I can channel this momentum into something permanent. Writing is something I’m constantly coming back to, rediscovering, falling in love with all over again, becoming disgusted by and leaving. When I come back, and I always do, I don’t know how I ever existed without it, how I managed to sludge, tromp, struggle through the endless days without turning them into something, anything. And then I realize that these shifting, twisting shards of reality and memory that I am attempting to capture are beyond the fixed, unyielding words that I insist on using. Like trying to build a brick and mortar model of a cloud. Here it is, perhaps the same basic shape, but none of the consistency, the beauty, the indescribable lightness. And I leave.  For political science, history, languages, once, in a misguided fit of rebellion, for economics. But I always come back in the end to try to build models of clouds with bricks and cement. And I worry that I will never have a normal relationship with writing. That I will live the rest of my life avoiding it and wishing it was there, coming back to it and realizing it’s no good. “Spare me the pangs of love requited”. And what, what can I possibly do with my life? That’s the real question. Because modern life has taken the soul out of the rigorous humanities, has compartmentalized them beyond recognition, has made it impossible to be a politician and still take the self and art and writing seriously. And who did this? Or when did it happen? And more importantly who wants to be an unemployed author? Jesus fucking Christ not I. Better to be part of the army of undead bankers wandering around. But maybe that’s just it, isn’t it? I have no courage. None what so ever. Or maybe it’s this deeply-held belief of mine that if something really makes you happy it has to be unfeasible somehow. Work is work. Where is the rigor in something you love? I don’t even consider film, not really, because the only thing worse than an unemployed author is the fucking unemployed Cinema Studies major. And so here I am, setting out, knowing that I want to, secretly, covertly, want to write, be a writer, a great writer, but that I won’t allow myself to be one. Because, as Rainer Maria Rilke said, we fear our own greatness. Or maybe I know, subconsciously, that I can’t be one, don’t have the capacity to, and all this anxiety prevents me from discovering that awful truth. But anyways I don’t want to make a bet like that, a risky bet, a bet that might end up with me being fucking destitute and powerless and unimportant somewhere in a shitty apartment. I guess I’m just risk averse. Those economics classes have really clarified my thinking. I can’t bring myself to take the risk necessary of great artists and so on to history and politics and statistics and all sorts of mediocre, safe bets, and languages and translation, but I do love writing. But here I go and at this point I can’t really stop myself anymore.

***

I am confident that I will witness, in my life time, the triumph of information. For thousands of years livelihoods have been steadily whittled down to specialized occupations. There are no more Renaissance men or women, or very few. Specialization has finally conquered that great ocean of knowledge and wisdom and compartmentalized it into innumerable puddles of information. This next era will be the era of science and technology, of ones and zeros, of unbounded access to facts.  This access, which is instantaneous and cheap, has begun to erode the need for mental filters, to chip away at the faculties that distinguish between important and unimportant information. When all facts are available at all times we no longer need to scrutinize. And this means, as Leonard Cohen rasps in his song the Future that “your private life will suddenly explode.” It already has, into a mushroom cloud of inane details. All the intimate, crushingly boring minutiae of your life, my life, of the lives of others has been brought into public by Facebook, by Twitter, by Foursquare, by the internet. We have lost our judgment and with it any notion of privacy or mystery. And I’ve begun to realize how boring and pedestrian we all are. Hell is being forced to pay attention to the inane details of someone else’s existence. Hell is a Facebook feed. In the future we will browse a vast digital waste land where all information, public and personal, will be but a mouse click away. Privacy and with it intimacy will dissolve into the tidal wave of monotonous exhibitionism. It is the coming of the information apocalypse.

***

It is easy to convince ourselves that we are at the crux of some great historical moment. The last decade has been a litany of disasters; the suspected electoral fraud in the 2000 election, the fall of the twin towers, the invasion of Afghanistan, then Iraq, the crash of the space shuttle Columbia, the collapse of the levies in New Orleans, and the housing market bubble have all built up an incredible prophetic pressure in the national imagination. Democrats and Republicans, Christians and Atheists have hunkered down in their respective cable news channels, readying for the final battle in the culture wars. We are on the verge of something. But this pervasive feeling of historical import has existed for as long as recorded history. Conservatives have always seen apocalypse looming on the horizon as liberals have always seen glorious revolution. It is an illusion, a delusion of grandeur. History in its slow, inevitable grind towards nothing in particular does not have crucial junctures, just series of absurd moments. This is the human condition, chaotic, bizarre, and spangled with moments of unimaginable horror and joy that are as inescapable as they are unexplainable. The future is as bleak and meaningless as the present. We are mad as hell but we're still going to take it because we have grocery shopping to do and bills to pay. There will be no decisive battles. History grinds on.

***

In thousands, maybe hundreds of years vines will reclaim the asphalt jungle and this brief, elaborate, fragile world of ours will collapse into a riot of life. The rusting, crumbling proof our existence will turn to dust. And nature in its inevitable march towards nothing will obliterate humanity, which for all its awful permutations is beautiful. And this, the ultimate destruction not only of our selves, but of civilization, is beyond the ability of the mind to process. Who can understand, truly understand in more than an abstract, passive way, that our most enduring institutions are but ephemeral whispers in the raucous screaming of time? We are but a brief struggle forward into the light, a temporary escape from the heart of darkness. There was nothingness before us and there will be nothingness after. Our inevitable return to the rot of the jungle would strike most as a horrifically pessimistic thought, the kind of thought that seeps into your mind at night and keeps you awake with a nameless fear. But it is this very return that makes our momentary reign so beautiful, so priceless. The economics of the universe dictate that it is the scarcity, the heart-breaking, mind-troubling fragility, of civilization that makes it invaluable. Inevitable death and ruin give our world meaning. And they have given me an atheist's love for civilization, a desperate, vivid, intoxicating love for the precious and fragile, a love that is impossible if one believes in forever.