Dragon's Tongue: Breach in the Mythic
This author, she is onto something.
In the years since Sept. 11, 2001, there has been a cascade of consequences, and one of the largest, but also, perhaps, the subtlest, has been a pervasive, fundamental shift in our sense of scale. The mythic order has smashed through the mortal one, breaking the frame. You can argue, if you like, about who "our" refers to, and whether the frame was ever whole to begin with, and whose fault it all is. But that's not the mystery. In terms of the mortal order, we know what the story is: The cruel and the stupid are running the world. They would happily allow most of us, especially the poor, to drown or burn. It's the mythic order, the continual intervention of the gigantic into daily life, that's confounding. Even if the intelligent and the compassionate were to take over tomorrow, we would still be subject to its raw force. There's been a breach.
One of the many reasons that George Bush is detestable is his stiff-necked refusal during major crises to admit that he doesn't know what to do. That it's bigger than he is; that he is small, afraid, and no match for what he's up against. The bigger he insists that he is, the tinier and more pernicious he seems. (Ditto the tinny religious sideshow with its hateful corn syrup Jesus.) It is a kind of evil, this strangely passive hubris in the face of events of overwhelming magnitude and complexity. It seems very dangerous. Two weeks after the disastrous 2004 election, a friend and I were talking about the creeping sense that something else, something we couldn't quite articulate, was larger and even more wrong than the immediate political situation. "I just keep worrying," she said, "about the aquifer."
By which I think she meant not only the literal aquifer, but some force or element that subtends the very ground we walk on. I don't mean God, or even gods. I'm not sure what I mean yet, honestly, as a writer or just as a person, that the customary frame of reality has broken, broken open, over the past four years, that it continues to break. I don't know yet how it will change my work or what other people write or draw or make, this shift in our consciousness of scale. I just know that suddenly, or what seems like suddenly -- now, anyway, since 2001, since water swallowed a good part of the Pacific Rim, since the lights went out all the way to Canada, since New Orleans has become a toxic ghost town, one is more likely to imagine that: the aquifer. Oneself, so much smaller, standing above it, washing dishes, reading, walking. That the aquifer has a life that may or may not include you.
Five weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, my lover and I were walking through the ruins of the Roman Forum. It looked so much like the World Trade Center site we had walked to by night just a week before. Why were we surprised? What empire hasn't fallen? The aquifer, after all, was always there.
Five days after Sept. 11, I was with a group of people in upstate New York and none of us knew what to do anymore, so we got stoned and went to a bad movie in the town over the bridge. On the way back, the bridge was closed. Police lights were everywhere. We thought the bridge must have blown up, something like that or worse, but when we asked a policeman, he said, No, a man had jumped. In our peculiar state of mind, none of us could really understand how that could be, what it could mean, one man jumping off a bridge, who knew why, at that particular moment. We didn't know how to see it anymore: one man, falling from a very large steel structure. How could it not be connected to the massive events in the city less than a hundred miles away? It seemed as if it must be, in some way we didn't comprehend yet. Already, one man falling had something to do with the bridge, the river, the city, the ruin, the airplanes, the world, with people falling everywhere. Four years later, it only seems more true that this is, in fact, the case.
The breach is of course, I'm pissed off and sick and tired of being sick and tired of humanity's obstinancy. Sometimes I have felt like I was ringing the world like a gong, beating it until it resounded like a bell, but humanity just hasn't heard. Sometimes like in the tsunami I did ring the world like a bell. What is it that I want? I just want humanity to grow up and stop destroying civilization so I can feel relaxed enough to take a vacation, write the novel I've been working on, ask the cute blonde who lives upstairs with a very fetching bosum out on a date - without being anxious and red-eyed because of sleepless nights because I'm afraid stupid fuck-head George W. Bush is going to start a nuclear armageddon while my back is turned!!! Just like the way he fucked off and pissed on the warnings I sent in to the US government about an impending terrorist attack in late summer 2001 the last time I tried to take a freaking vacation!
Is that too much to freaking ask?!?!
Am I punishing the world because of GWB? Yes and no. Yes, because he is the proximate agent of all that is going wrong with humanity. No, because he is the figurehead through which many people and a large movement in the culture express themselves and if it wasn't him they would find somebody else. That's why simply removing him is not a solution. It's the mindset or attitude that he embodies and is a representative of and a product of that is the problem.
To be honest I would like America to grow up and for humanity to wise up and fix their own problems so I could enjoy myself and live my own life. However these issues including Global warming don't have to be addressed today and can be solved over a period of years. Some damage is already being done and the longer it is delayed the more damage will be done, but it is damage that is survivable and therefore acceptable.
Some days I dread getting up in the morning because I don't want to get up and figure out how to stop GWB from his most recent idiotic conspiracy producing nuclear catastrophe in the near term future.
I mean really, would some down time be a little too much to ask for?
