Getting Ready To Get Ready

It’s a beautiful summer day. The sun is shining, the sky is blue, the air is warm. I decide to run the Myrtle Edwards trail that runs along the rocky breakwater beginning at Pier 91 and ends at the Olympic Sculpture Park by Pier 70, a pleasant spot marked by Father and Son, a fountain created by Louise Bourgeois, who also provided the Eye Benches arranged on the plaza between the fountain and the train crossing, black eyeballs carved by Italian stone masons from black Zimbabwe granite, each with a hollow on one side for sitting.

On 15^th Avenue West, the AAA building across the street catches my eye. It looks like the paint is peeling. But then I notice it’s a map of the world and all of its continents rendered in white. The last time we paid a visit there R and I were preparing for our trip to Paris in 2013. They sold us a packet of euros so we’d have some cash available when we landed. That came in really handy.

I arrive home at the same time as R. We have dinner and make a run to the library to pick up Season Four of Longmire. We both really like this show. The drama, which takes place in modern day Wyoming, is centered around a man named Walt Longmire who is the sheriff of fictional Absaroka County. He’s an iconic figure, a man cast in the mold of what was once considered to be the ideal of masculinity in American culture. He is tough, taciturn, stoic, unshakable. He appears to have been teleported form the American West of the 1880s. He works closely with a young, thirty-something homicide detective from Philadelphia named Victoria “Vic” Moretti. Feisty, intelligent, witty, passionate and sexy, Vic has a big crush on Walt. There is a recurrent subplot in the series that suggests she is in Wyoming to escape reprisals from the mob back east. She persists in trying to persuade Walt to get his own cell phone.

Lou Diamond Philips plays Henry Standing Bear, a Cheyenne man who owns and manages a popular bar called The Red Pony, and is Walt’s oldest and closest friend. He plays a crucial role in helping Walt deal with the tribal police of the nearby Indian reservation, with whom both are in frequent conflict. Henry speaks with a peculiar speech mannerism, an atypical clarity in the precision of his diction and grammatical correctness. He avoids elision. He doesn’t say, “I’m here,” or “isn’t this nice.” He says “I am here.” “Is this not nice?” All of it uttered in a meticulously even tone with surgical precision. And often while tending a bar and coping with rowdy drunks. When he answers the Red Pony telephone, he gives the same greeting: “It is a great day at the Red Pony bar and continuous soirée.” He gives the same courtesy to each and every phone caller, even when he’s in the midst of a crisis, argument, or bad mood. In all situations, however worrisome or grave, he navigates chaos with a rigorously controlled aplomb.

Longmire is, in many ways, more than a mere distraction, more than just another crime drama staged in a seemingly changeless American West: the values it espouses are a relief from the evident decay of American culture, which writer Chris Hedges recently described in a recent Truthdig column as nearing collapse:

As a foreign correspondent I covered collapsed societies, including the former Yugoslavia. It is impossible for any doomed population to grasp how fragile the decayed financial, social and political system is on the eve of implosion. All the harbingers of collapse are visible: crumbling infrastructure; chronic underemployment and unemployment; the indiscriminate use of lethal force by police; political paralysis and stagnation; an economy built on the scaffolding of debt; nihilistic mass shootings in schools, universities, workplaces, malls, concert venues and movie theaters; opioid overdoses that kill some 64,000 people a year; an epidemic of suicides; unsustainable military expansion; gambling as a desperate tool of economic development and government revenue; the capture of power by a tiny, corrupt clique; censorship; the physical diminishing of public institutions ranging from schools and libraries to courts and medical facilities; the incessant bombardment by electronic hallucinations to divert us from the depressing sight that has become America and keep us trapped in illusions. We suffer the usual pathologies of impending death. I would be happy to be wrong. But I have seen this before. I know the warning signs. All I can say is get ready.

What does “getting ready” mean? It means we’ll be entirely on our own. That isn’t good. Not good at all. It’s not like we’re surrounded by acres of arable land, pretty streams of pure running water, forests full of game, and a community of warm, self-sacrificing people. We live in an urban neighborhood of extreme income inequality, barely any community at all (you’re lucky to encounter the slightest degree of courtesy or civility when you’re just out for a walk), luxury estates owned by faceless sociopaths and a small park that is barely maintained by an egregiously underfunded park department. If there is any “getting ready” to be done, it would be emptying our storage bin and loading it with dried fruit and peanut butter. We might consider moving our money into another currency and putting it in a Swiss bank account. But that won’t solve the problem of roving gangs and the spread of disease, or what might well become the obsolescence of money altogether. The real problems will be those of brute survival: trying to purify water without electricity. Staying warm when winter comes.

Remember the Boy Scout motto? Be prepared. Actually, the full Scout Motto goes like this: “BE PREPARED which means you are always in a state of readiness in mind and body to do your DUTY.”

You can’t argue with that, though I don’t much care for the word ‘duty.’ Duty generally means assuming a role of subservience at the behest of malevolent forces. As its author, Robert Baden-Powell, a British army officer and founder of the Boy Scouts, further specifies in his 1908 publication Scouting for Boys: “BE PREPARED to die for your country if need be, so that when the moment arrives you may charge home with confidence, not caring whether you are going to be killed or not.”

A willingness to die for one’s country, while sounding nobly self-sacrificing on the surface, generally does not lead anywhere good for anyone. Ask a vet. Read War Is A Racket by Smedley D. Butler.

 “State of readiness” makes sense. It’s possible, at least on some tiny level, to be psychologically prepared for the loss of everything you have grown up with, including all its customs, assumptions, ideologies, rites and beliefs. But how do you prepare for a catastrophe on the level of a sixth mass extinction and the collapse of a powerful, military empire? There are survivalist sites. I guess you could check those out. For example, did you know that a Pringle can be used to create a “cantenna” capable of boosting a Wi-Fi signal from your computer? I don’t believe that that will be of much use, however, if the Internet disappears, which I can only assume will happen if all the energy grids go down and the people that maintain the intricacies of that giant web are all foraging for food and fighting off rabid dogs with tent poles.

Me, I try finding refuge in philosophy.

While I still can.

I read Bergson’s Creative Evolution. He has some interesting things to say about intelligence and instinct. They share a common source. They are complementary to one another and are in opposition to one another. Intelligence is synonymous with invention, the making of tools. He remarks on the technology of his time, the steam locomotive, which had immeasurable consequences on the quality of human life. It is the ability to make tools of the tools themselves and to exponentiate the opportunities available to us to control our environment to our liking. Instinct is the substrate of our intellect. Intelligence doesn’t really manifest itself until whatever action we’re engaged in is somehow blocked or impeded. The void created by the inadequacy of our actions is filled by consciousness. Consciousness is the immanent light representing all the possibilities surrounding a given action. Intelligence is conscious choice, instinct is unconscious, automatic choice. But they’re not polarities. They’re differences in degree. Instinct is reflected outwardly in exact movements and intelligence is reflected inwardly in consciousness.

It is, more or less, a Roy Rogers and Trigger relationship, to quote Dylan’s Tarantula.

Dylan’s tarantula is a large hairy multi-legged thing of words and music walking across my mind in Death Valley Technicolor. It crawls, soothed and soaked in an unpredictable pattern of jackknife wobbles. Breakfast extends to the volume of my skull. Such gazing is redeeming. I have resources in the perturbed ear of a monotonous hunger. I waddle in percolated paintings. The crows all decide to leave. I wear a harmonica inside my derby. It’s butter, so don’t knock it. If you can’t live with garlic you should probably turn off the light and go to bed. Me, I know I can endure certain things. I can endure the sound of the oboe, but there’s not much I can do about Christmas. I’ll embrace a gaudy adjective if I must, but I won’t touch the coordinates. I believe that language must reach maturity by enhancing the candy it was given and roaming the eastern half of California as the velvet river dribbles dollars of sand. Eczema can be cured by turning the nails into an airplane. Time bangs around on the landscape. Fireworks tickle the intelligence of space, which is just now a ship cutting through the ice near Greenland. I don’t know if I should mention it, but if the writing is focused, the grammar gets on its legs and walks.