On the Welcoming of the Unexpected Guest

 

On December 27^th, 2023, I published an essay in The Dark Mountain Project called “At First, There Were Eight.” This was a companion piece to “Entering the Tunnel of Time in Cappadocia,” which went up on December 28^th, 2022. Coming a week or so after the winter solstice in both years, both essays were panoramic views of world destructions, with hints of a larger cosmic context and hopes for cultural renewal. These were the first and last essays in my book The Preexistent Race Descends. If asked whether these essays were pessimistic, I would say they were written at a turning point, at a time when the trees have withdrawn their sap into their roots, before new growth has appeared. I would say that they were characterized by what Yeats called “tragic joy.” If the screens that monetize our vision are destined to go blank, why not take this as an opportunity to see with other eyes?

Beginnings are not that different from endings. The east is not actually separate from the west, and it’s possible, from a great enough distance, to view the seemingly flat earth as a sphere. As I’ve come to understand it, just as both essays are simultaneously present in the book, the future, to some extent, may already have occurred. We just don’t see it yet, even as we’ve moved into it through the reading of this sentence. Similarly, 99 percent of the past may not yet have taken place. There are worlds within worlds still waiting to be discovered. The one moment in which we live continuously slips by us, as does our relationship to the ground beneath our feet. If we’ve lived 10,000 times, to what culture do we belong? We may have farther to go than we think to define our true identities.

In the essay, I had attempted to explore our relationship to deep time, or really, to the high peculiarity of time itself, to the forces, both external and internal, that keep us from looking very far beyond our stage-set, that assure us that the most up-to-date of building codes were followed, that our indifference to the extent of our lost history will protect us. How wonderful it would be if this were true. How beautifully gradualist is our geology. How linear is our progression from Lascaux to social media. Yes, how miraculous such an arc would be. If only social media were not the ritual desert of our ghost dance.

I was lucky enough to receive a comment—somewhat accusatory—from a reader called Larissa. In spite of certain misunderstandings, I was, nonetheless, grateful. Since I first began to publish online essays, in 2007, in Reality Sandwich, I’ve done my best to respond to any comment on my work. These were the wild west days of the internet. Arguments could be heated. Exchanges of comments on an issue would sometimes stretch into the hundreds. The strength of disagreements would be moderated, however, by a sense of curiosity, by the excitement of being able to communicate with people half a world away.

I learned to let no source of conflict go to waste. If attacked, I did my best to flow with my opponent, to treat even the stupidest criticisms of my work “as if” they might be true. Through such exchanges, I became more aware of my flaws, and I got better at revision. I learned to welcome each seeming enemy like an unexpected guest.

Now, sadly, even in the most literate and well written of comment sections, there often seems to be some unspoken agreement to toe the party line—without, perhaps, even knowing what this is—to valorize the “Us” and demonize the “Them.” At a time of converging crises, when so much is demanded, when we must stretch our vision to the breaking point just in order to imagine and survive what will come in the next 20 years, we often seem to be shrinking rather than expanding, regressing to the thrill of schoolyard taunts, retreating to the faux-safety of the in-group. This reflexive strategy is, perhaps, a small-scale illustration of our relationship to time itself. When overwhelmed, when we are in the grip of traumas we don’t acknowledge to exist, it’s easier to focus on the foreground than the background, on the clickbait of the day. Pay no attention to the ocean as it floods the New York subways. There is a perfectly good target on that shadow over there.

My own approach is best described by the Roman playwright Terrence, who writes, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,” or “I am a man, thus nothing human is alien to me.” So, in spite of our divergent views, I was glad to hear from Larissa, that she had taken the time to read and respond to an admittedly nonlinear and challenging essay, even if this response came as a series of insinuations. I’d hoped to open up a space where real dialogue might occur. Was this no more than a pipe dream? Life is short. My patience is long.

Continue reading at Metapsychosis: https://www.metapsychosis.com/on-the-welcoming-of-the-unexpected-guest/

My first book of essays, Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, is available through Untimely Books and Amazon: https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/

Image: Salvador Dali, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, 1954