I have decided to do a third and final volume of plague journals. Writing another hundred thousand words is not a decision I take lightly, as it will require a lot of time and effort and thought, none of which comes with a paycheck. It is nice, however, to have real live readers and commenters willing to engage with my words. Over the previous two volumes of the journal, I’ve paid deep attention to your feedback. I welcome more of it.
As always, I would appreciate more readers. If you know anyone who would enjoy my stories/reportage/testimony, please let them know about the journal.
A change: entries will usually be shorter. Good editing, as Julie has shown me over the years, can turn less into more, and sometimes way less is way more.
The title: I’ve begun to think that we’re no longer waiting for the end of the world. It already ended on or near March 15, 2020. What we’re experiencing now is aftermath. I never thought there wouldn’t be ruins left after the end of the world, or confused survivors wandering among them. Consider me, if you will, a confused survivor in the aftermath of disaster, and Aftermath has a better ring to it than Confused Survivor.
Finally, I hope to focus more on stories rather than polemics. I can remember people whose lives bear resurrecting, and to the extent that stories can do that, I’ll try to bring the dead back to life.
Not that they don’t come back to life on their own. Think of the tropes of ghosts that hang around this plane of existence because they don’t realize they’re dead, or those people whose lives, even in the present, constantly relive the past. Vladimir Putin lives in the 19th century and is trying to drag whole countries back there with him. But it’s also easy to see that he’s a ghost who doesn’t realize he has become the dead hand of the past as it presses unbearably on the present and its children.
Anyone who doesn’t see that Donald Trump and his Republican Party are fighting a civil war that was well over in 1865 is missing the obvious.
Anyone who thinks the world of their childhood has survived artificial intelligence, gene editing, the end of easily recoverable oil, and climate change is choosing not to believe their eyes.
There’s plenty to write about, here in the wreckage. Thirteen years ago Julie and I were on the island of Phuket, in southwestern Thailand, wandering its beaches, when we came on the ruin of an enormous half-built hotel, a victim of the 2008 recession. We walked into it, past a covered pavilion that had been furnished with a bed, a sofa, chests of drawers, a small camp kitchen balanced on the edge of a darkened gas firepit, a television connected to an extension cord that ran off into the jungle, and a rusting car parked near a loading dock at the back of the building. All these were the property of a young Thai guy, who—even though it was early afternoon—was lying on the bed, watching the TV. We waved at him, and he waved back at us. We pointed at the darkened hotel and he gestured that we could go on in.
We spent an hour in dim hallways and great empty dining rooms. The bare walls of hotel rooms were decorated with Thai-script graffiti. Chunks of broken concrete tossed into doorless elevator shafts splashed long seconds after they disappeared into the dark. Palm trees had begun to sprout out of cracks in concrete balconies. Windows, where they had been installed, were broken. The place was on its way to becoming another Angkor Wat, except that it was a ruined Temple of the Tourist Who Never Came rather than a decayed memorial to a Khmer god-king.
After a while, the place got creepy and we left. We got lost on the road back and ended up flagging down a taxi to take us to our own still-functioning hotel. But on our way, we had passed other ruins of other abandoned buildings, and it was hard not to think that for Phuket, the world had ended in bankruptcy. Next to our hotel was a beach-side restaurant, empty except for one table where an earnest prostitute sat across from an aging and obese Western tourist. A sign on its wall listed, in English, a series of disasters: the recession, a recent coup by the Thai military, the 2004 tsunami, a sudden drop in tourism. TOURISTS WE ARE GLAD TO SEE YOU, it announced, in English. We ate at a restaurant down the beach that had more customers.
Since that time, I’ve thought about the caretaker of the hotel, and if he really was a caretaker or just a squatter. The hotel had been financed by Russian money and it must have been a lesson for the oligarchs to see their plans for a resort far from the permafrost upended by Western financial machinations. They must have vowed the Russian equivalent of Never Again, not realizing how much Western capitalism reflected the laws of physics rather than the malicious caricatures of their propaganda.
When I was teaching, I would tell my students that the room they were sitting in was once blueprints, and the blueprints were once just ideas. They could accept this, but it was difficult to accept that the entirety of their world consisted of ideas-made-flesh, that everything they encountered—even wilderness—was an idea. Some ideas were powerful enough to manifest physically. Some had lost every bit of power they had ever possessed, and the only evidence they had ever existed was the wreckage they had left behind.
The caretaker of the Russian hotel was the monarch of a vast and decaying empire of thought. It was slowly being eroded away by wind and water and invasive vegetation, but it was still keeping the rain off his head.
You can make a home in a pavilion once designed as a place for rich Westerners to wait—with cocktails—for the green flash when the sun sinks into the glittering horizon of the western sea. You can drag old furniture in and have friends over, and collect your caretaker’s paycheck, and sleep through the afternoons, as long as you or your guests don’t mind the ghosts that wander through in tourist gear, or the fading voices that murmur uninvited in your head.
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After a recent reading at the Hailey Library, I received an email from an audience member who had bought my latest book and was in the middle of it. She asked, “With such a starkly negative outlook, how do you maintain any sense of humor that is real?”
Fair question, and the short answer is that I laugh so I don’t cry, given what I write about and what I see when I check the headlines in The Guardian and The New York Times every morning. The long answer is more complicated. A sense of humor is one of the few genuine and lasting things we can experience. The rest of it—our possessions, our government, our roads and buildings, our currency, our bodies, our expectations of a predictable future—can melt instantly into thin air. What remains is your own sense of delighted irony, and that depends on your being able to see the widening gap between what you expected and what you got. If that causes a cynical loss of faith, remember Philip K. Dick’s advice: “Reality is what is left after you stop believing in it.”
“Are you going to believe me or believe your lying eyes?” is the gist of what a lot of politicians are asking us these days. Lots of people choose to believe the politicians. They ignore not just their eyes but also their other senses, including common sense. That’s unfortunate, but it’s useful to remember that consensus reality is what your culture attempts to enforce. You go against a powerful tide when you question it.
A child can suddenly announce she’s transsexual, or a favorite kindly uncle can start posting Let’s Go Brandon signs in his yard, or a formerly sane friend can take his guns to town or refuse vaccination or believe that the moon landings never happened. You don’t take them seriously, not at first, not until somebody kills themself or somebody else.
If you’re going to force your reality onto people, you have to be willing to kill. It’s deeply unfortunate, but a lot of suicides or mass shooters or murderous dictators are simply trying to become real. Such people have forgotten or never were taught the lesson of The Velveteen Rabbit, which is that a far better way to become real is to be loved into existence. Unfortunately, it’s easier to learn to kill than to learn how to be loved.
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Being loved is an act of consent to a reality outside of yourself. So is having a sense of humor. So is believing your lying eyes. So is telling the truth that you see. The laws of physics themselves are, according to quantum theory, a function of the act of witnessing.
Things go awry when people start bearing false witness. If quantum theory is correct, it seems like lying could poke holes in the fabric of the universe.
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For some time now I’ve been thinking about evil. I’ve concluded that at the heart of every evil is a lie. It doesn’t matter if you’re lying in the service of a greater cause, or lying to protect the children, or lying because your lie is better than anybody else’s lie. You’re still lying, and that almost certainly means you are destroying other people’s ability to know the world, its beauties and its pitfalls. You’re destroying the same ability in yourself.
For most of my life I’ve tried to tell the truth, and I’ve gotten better at it as I’ve grown older.
It helps that what was once a muddy mixture of what-should-be and what-might-have-happened has evolved into mere witnessing and faithfully noting moments of ironic humor. It’s still not easy.
I do trust my senses and I do trust my ability to render my experience into words. In this journal, I’ll continue to tell the truth as simply and plainly as I can. I will almost certainly fail, as I have failed before.
I’ll bear witness to a world three years gone, and to the fragments of that world that still lie in heaps about us. Seeing and naming what still exists is a way to stay sane, even if you’re looking in the mirror, even if you’re describing destruction, even if the beast that Yeats described as slouching toward Bethlehem has reached its destination and has set up shop.