A Strange Year

by Ralph E. Melcher
www.arclist.org

I was laid off once from a computer software company with the
boss saying to me, "You're kind of a liberal arts sort of guy." He
had a point, and it was true that I didn't really fit in with the
climate and culture of the place. What he wanted was more on the
STEM side of things. More about numbers and programs and
accounting and less about words and magic. I’ve always had
trouble with numbers but have never veered from a fascination
with the hidden underside of things.

This was a year when all of the lessons I should have learned were
taken out of the theoretical realm and brought rather severely to
earth. The barriers between the worlds of wishful thinking and the
awful realities that threaten our planet no longer held. It was time
to put aside hopeful speculation and face down some awful truths.

It was a bad year for dilettantes. From January on it was as if, after
the numb horror of events had begun to give way to the appalling
normalcy of daily assault, an enormous dark sinkhole had opened
in the collective psyche, and absolutely everything was sucked
down into its depths so that all one looked at was somehow
infected by the dread and anger that issued out of an unavoidable
hellmouth, like something in a painting by Heironymous Bosch.

Now that we are past the initial shock and have accommodated
ourselves somehow to the steady degradation of our public life we
can perhaps leave it to unfold (and degrade) without the need to
push or pull. It will unfold anyway, and perhaps someday the dirty
tide will recede a bit of its own accord and meanwhile we can take
stock of what’s going on in the world that lives inside of us.

I’ve always been compelled to take in everything there is in order

to see the links between. To pursue one object or another to the
end of its particular tunnel is an activity left to those so inclined,
while my own interest is to follow the branches as they lead back
from twig to trunk, fascinated less by the fleeting detail than by
how it all connects. I could be called a ‘dilettante’ or perhaps a
philosopher or something equally ‘iffy’ in terms of consistently
reliable income streams. In the long run this generally places me
somewhere at the ‘bleeding edge,’ or slightly on the outside of
things that occupy most people from moment to moment. I often
feel as if I’m looking on, observing with fascination, from some
distance this or that quest for particulars and rarely feel fully
engaged with those who spend most of their time in the weeds.
Instead of attending to the particular I’m obsessed with the thread
that connects this particular to another, and anot!
her, along the long and almost mystical yarn that comes from the
past and stretches ahead to the future.

In this old year waning and new year dawning I’ve decided to go
‘cold turkey’ in terms of politics, hoping to free up energy for
something a bit more connected to larger and longer streams that
portend the creative or at least the positive. This past year felt like
a full-on war, fought with words and images rather than missiles
and bombs. All the words flung back and forth hammering
relentlessly at any sense of civility or even responsibility, for the
purpose of differentiating ‘us’ from ‘them,’ breaking the branch
from the tree. All having a deeply corrosive effect on the bonds
that make us feel connected in a way that makes some kind of
collective sense. Most of us are reduced to sitting helplessly
observing, trying to apply the old rules of civility to a situation
where they’ve apparently become irrelevant. We are like mad
children in some re-enactment of ‘Lord of The Flies,’ let loose to
trample the bonds of the social order like they are brittle fur!
niture left around for us to trash.

I tell myself in better moments, when my mind isn’t so mired in

the details of our day-of-horror unfolding, that out of chaos
comes creativity. On other days I want to join in with the trashing.

Why should I even care? Even if politics and war are more
entertaining than any other sport I could name, its become the
sport by which we the people tear each other to pieces. My new
thought is that I should stop being concerned or finding myself in
any way responsible for the outcomes. My fellow citizens after all,
dug this grave for themselves. Why should I not allow them to shit
in their own hole and then lie down in it? Even if I must share the
hole with them (there is no true escaping in this world), perhaps I
can hold my nose and look away toward the sky.

Not so easy this for me, to be mired and yet to turn away as if
nothing’s amiss. It’s like a sports addict deciding to turn off ESPN
and ignoring the Super Bowl, the World Series, the Olympics.
Actually not so hard for me to imagine, as I’ve ignored these things
for most of my life, politics being my ‘sport’ and the one interest
that ties me to the things that apparently matter to the people
around me from day to day.
I’ll turn to my only real audience, which is this presence inside of
me, this all-judging voice that measures the world that I see and
most of all that measures me. Instead of the usual ‘Politico,’
‘FiveThirtyEight,’ Pod Save America,’ today I listen to ‘The Paris
Review,’ and ‘The New Yorker Radio Hour.’ Instead of Netflix I
find myself in books: Jack Kerouac’s Scroll, Haruki Murakami,
Dave Hickey. I am edified and entertained, inspired even. I
rearrange my apartment, twice.

Then, of course, there are all the counter voices, telling me,
“You’re being irresponsible and arrogant. How can you be so
uninvolved when the country is going to shit? You have to be
INVOLVED, even if it’s only being aware and passing your
awareness on. And I realize there is no way to be uninvolved, as
the slippage we all feel is like some gravimetric beacon bending
every current and pulling everything toward itself. We are all at
some level compelled to respond, as we walk an ever narrowing
collective path toward the future.

And of course, all things are political. “We’re either part of the
solution or part of the problem.” Is there no escape? Of course
there isn’t. The world moves on and we come around on our
endless loops of self-doubt and over-confidence, trying to find
that median place called ‘decision.’ We decide, we move on, we
face the crisis brought about by yesterday’s decisions.

Amazingly, these two days off without once checking the news
beyond the headlines, which are reliably and predictably grim,
begin to feel like an actual weekend (even though my ‘weekend’
days these days are in the middle of the week). I realize that for the
past year I’ve been living outside of myself, disembodied, a ghost
on social media, juiced on the rage I see and feel all around me
there, feeding it back in return, almost forgetting that I ever had a
real life or that there are real people out there who are just living.

And yet, over the year I’ve written over a thousand words, mostly
captions and short comments, an occasional thumb-length essay,
and always in reaction to something OUT THERE. You can look
at my Facebook page and find a running chronicle of anger and
despair that’s book length and illustrated, a veritable museum
exhibit of the Year in snapshots. But, very little of what you see
goes beneath the armor. It’s merely a chronicle of suffering, as if
every move we made was constrained by the straitjackets of fear
and rage.

I fell into the very traps I’ve been warned to avoid and have
warned others about. In my studies of magic and media and the
dangers of astral space (where ideas and images are born and fed)
I was aware of the potentials for getting lost in the endless gulf
that opens between imagination and matter. Into that gulf is where
the ‘enemy’ projects his tricks, his spells, his signals of doom. The
tragedy is that we gave him the biggest platform from which he
could play his tricks.

So we were played.

On the bright side, I learned to write with my thumb. This was

entirely written and edited on my iPhone.
Arclist