The Sweet Sleigh Of Resignation

I appear on paper to be a messenger. But I have no intent to be a messenger. It's in the nature of words to appear to be a message. That is what words do. That is the doing of words. To convey a message. To bring an awakening into being. To bring being into an awakening. That is a big load of responsibility. Nobody wants that role. It's always the messenger that gets killed. So no. This isn't a message. This is a crashing of waves sloshing among the rocks.

This is me drifting through time. But is that correct? Why ‘through’ time? And how do I know I’m drifting? I know I’m not propelling myself, or throwing myself through time, or rowing myself into time, or thrashing my way through a jungle of time. Why think of time as a thing? Is time a thing? Heidegger liked the term ‘temporality’ (Zeitlichkeit) with reference to our experience of time. Our experience of time is linked with being in the world. “Time,” Heidegger said, “needs to be explicated primordially as the horizon for the understanding of Being, and in terms of temporality as the Being of Dasein, which understands Being.” Sounds a little circular, like the face of a clock, but there you have it. The entire cuckoo.

I know that I have a past and that it keeps lengthening and thickening the older that I become, that I become my Being, or experience my Being, which is Dasein, which refers to the experience of Being that is unique to human beings. Strictly translated from the German, it means “to be there.” I like that.

So, first you’re here, and then you’re here, which is a displacement through time, although not necessarily space, since you might be sitting, or lying on a bed, and space itself isn’t changed. You can go from place to place without affecting space. And since it’s natural to think of traveling through space it’s natural to think of traveling through time.

The structure of my day is sectioned by a morning, an afternoon, and nighttime. This afternoon I decided to run to the Seattle Art Museum. I wanted to get some cards at the gift shop for our 23^rd wedding anniversary (February 4^th) and Valentine’s Day. Communique, the card shop that seemed to be on Queen Anne Avenue North since the beginning of Currier and Ives, is gone. The cards at Safeway and Bartell Drugs are goopy and mediocre. I wanted something good. The selection at the art museum gift shop is modest, but I found a couple of good ones, Blues and Nest, by Michelle Waldele and Falaises près de Pourville by Claude Monet. I cut through Pike Place Market on the way down to the waterfront and picked up an issue of Le Monde diplomatique. The feature article is “De Varsovie à Washington, un Mai 68 à l’envers”(“From Varsovie to Washington, a May 68 upside-down”), by Pierre Rimbert. It begins with a discussion of Germany, and how discontent with neoliberal economics has led to a deeply fractured political system in which relations with Donald Trump oscillate between the sullen and the execrable. It’s a distressing article. The hostility aroused by decades of neoliberal economics has pushed people in Germany, Hungary, Poland, England, the United States and the Czech Republic toward right-wing ideologies of exclusion and scapegoating rather than a progressive agenda of inclusion and compassion.

“Fervently anticommunist, Christian, stable, conservative to the point of practically eradicating the left altogether from the country’s politics, Varsovie is the natural ally of the United States of Mister Trump,” writes Rimbert, “and a source of growing preoccupation for Germany.”

The article ends on a note of despairing irony: “An authoritarian capitalism against neoliberal capitalism, such will be the ideological alternatives imposing themselves in the half-century since May, 1968. Will it be a May, 1968 in reverse?”

During yesterday’s run I dropped down Third Avenue West to West Roy Street and headed west toward the intersection. I heard two men shouting at one another and focused on two men at the corner of First Avenue West and West Roy Street, a tall young black man with a leashed, shorthaired dog that seemed to be all muscle, and an old man with long white shaggy hair, a colossal bushy mustache and disheveled winter clothing. The two men were within inches of one another and I thought for sure a fight was about to ensue. Each were in such a towering rage that nothing rational had a chance of calming situation. I wondered what I would do, what action I would take if a fight broke out. Would the black man let his dog attack the old man? A little distance grew between the two men as I approached. I hoped the old man would continue moving east as he continued shouting execrations at the black man which, fortunately, weren’t racist. He just seemed massively disrespected in some way. I guessed the black man’s outrage came from living in a neighborhood  -  lower Queen Anne Hill  -  that had a dense population of homeless people, and whose noise or belligerence or mere presence and beleaguered existence was a constant source of stress for him. I don’t know. I had to fill in the blanks with my own speculation. As I passed and continued west I turned around to make sure the two men hadn’t begun fighting. I had no idea what I would have, or could have, done. I’m 70 years old. I always forget that.

February 3^rd. R brings home a disturbing letter. It’s from the Director of Sales at Chaquita announcing a disruption in the supply chain of bananas due to “external conditions beyond our control.” “Temperatures have been as far as 10℉ below normal for several weeks in Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico slowing banana growth, production, and yield. Excessive rainfall and flooding in Costa Rica and Panama have damaged plantations, infrastructure, roads, and bridges while high winds and waves have resulted in shipping delays.”

This isn’t good. Not at all. It’s a sure result of abrupt climate change, specifically the melting of the arctic ice at a rate faster than scientists predicted, which is raising all sorts of havoc with the jet stream and weather globally. Severe drought in Cape Town, South Africa, and flooding in the regions around the Seine and Marne rivers in France.

I watch Paul Beckwith point out the wildly disorganized wind currents on our planet due to the shrinkage of the arctic ice cap which acts as a stabilizing force on the jet streams. He goes to a site called Earth Nullschool which is an interactive map of current wind, weather, ocean, and pollution conditions based on data from a number of computer modules such as a GSF (Global Forecasting System) and OSCAR (Ocean Currents Data). Here you can see in real time the deteriorated state of the jet stream and the havoc its causing, what Beckwith likes to refer to as a “climate casino.”

You can’t grow and harvest crops in a climate casino. Crops means food. Things like wheat and bananas.

I would like, very much, to get off this planet. I wish I could be a modern-day Noah and put every living thing aboard a colossal spaceship and set us adrift in space while we all (camels, people, microbes, kangaroos) snooze peacefully in suspended animation until our sensors find a habitable planet. Unfortunately, I’m neither in possession of a spaceship nor a way to put us all in suspended animation.

Sometimes all you have in this world is a sweet sleigh of resignation.