It snowed last week, less than a foot, but still enough to temporarily cover the bare south slopes of the foothills. Those slopes have been bare for months, so a few sunny days will leave them bare again. Mud season is as close as March.
Another side effect of the warm north Pacific: ten days ago, I went up to the neighbor’s headgate and turned water out of his irrigation ditches, which have frozen and flooded his driveway due to a lack of insulating snow. When two feet of ice in a driveway turns rotten in warm weather, it can hollow out from underneath and leave your vehicle stuck up to its axles in spring sunshine. Step out on the ice if you can get your door open, and you’ll fall on your ass.
Not a metaphor.
Low-snow winters produce fields of ice, frozen waterfalls against brown sagebrush, and house-sized ice bubbles wherever small springs seep from hillsides. Look closely into the latter and you’ll see vaguely queasy dream-shapes, the shadows of brush and rocks and willows and small lodgepole saplings.
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Vaguely queasy dream-shapes are too familiar these days, in the ice or out of it. We try not to pay much attention to them, because what they portend doesn’t look healthy.
Lucid dreaming, the kind where everything’s in focus and your ego gets to choose what happens and you gain magical power over your fate and your geography, isn’t happening.
Okay, a metaphor: a growing suspicion that we’re the little steel spheres in the Pinball Machine of Life. We’re rocketed around the bumpers, bounced spasmodically from side to side, edged ever closer to the dark slot at the bottom, waiting for the TILT sign to begin flashing red.
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This is cheery, isn’t it?
Not really. Not for me, not for you. The conscious self that thinking people have spent so much time educating and refining is getting hard to find. Dreams begin happening when we’re wide awake. In those dreams we exist as objects, not as subjects. We’re passive rather than active, alien rather than familiar. We’re not in-charge egos anymore.
I know the Buddhists consider an in-charge ego worse than useless, but it’s easy to miss yours when it disappears.
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The Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi says that either a human dreams of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreams of being a human. Or both. Impossible to tell who is what when we’re dreaming in the third person. The dream becomes an exercise in not-knowing the human or the butterfly, simply because language isn’t up to the job of describing an unsolid world.
That’s where I find myself as a writer these days. It’s a dangerous place. Bunches of people have gone crazy trying to force words into tasks they’re not suited for. If you want to know how that sort of thing turns out, grab your copy of liberationist philosopher Michel Foucault’s POWER/KNOWLEDGE and start reading (if you don’t have a copy, you can take mine—please).
Foucault is hard to read, even when translated into English. When he doesn’t make your eyes glaze over and your mind start wondering what’s for lunch, he attacks ideas and the language that houses them. Because ideas limit our freedom, he gleefully exposes their inevitable internal contradictions, destroying their power to move the human heart. Because words limit our imaginations, he shows their essential inability to describe the world.
Turns out that’s a bad thing to do to both ideas and words.
Foucault wants to achieve a total lack of cultural limits, the kind of ultimate freedom the only survivor of a nuclear war would have for the remainder of his solitary existence.
Foucault died surrounded by the ruins of ideas his thoughts had touched. He didn’t live to see his own endgame, which was a world where no philosophical argument could constrain raw power. Advocates of supreme freedom are surprised when reactionary authoritarians turn libertarian impulses into prisons and death camps. They shouldn’t be. Much of the Federalist Society’s Project 2025 depends on the thinking of self-styled postmodern freedom-fighters like Foucault.
To put it too simply: you can make any assertion true by manipulating its context. Whoever controls context [might] makes meaning [right].
Barring some radical advance in human ethics, Orwell’s vision of “a human face being stamped on by a boot—forever” is where we find ourselves, in a prosperous but faltering America in the year 2026.
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This morning’s screen-time includes a turn-of-the-20th-century televised lecture by the late Dr. Albert Bartlett on the difficulty humans have understanding exponential growth. He’s talking to undergraduates about what happens when you combine an expanding economy with a growing population and keep it up for a century or two. By the end of the lecture, his audience is looking glum, possibly about the future of the planet and its non-renewable resources, but more probably about their own dreams of security, offspring, jobs, and family life.
Some of them had plans to live out the American Dream, and Bartlett points out that by 2030 or so, those plans won’t be functional. There won’t be enough energy or raw material for our civilization—or anyone else’s—to work.
The undergraduates don’t rush the lectern and attack Dr. Bartlett, which is what you might expect when an old tired wise person delivers news of certain doom to people young enough to be his grandchildren. Dr. Bartlett’s audience doesn’t like what he says, but they restrain themselves from murdering and eating him for the meager protein he represents. One hopes that future elders will be treated with the same courtesy.
Old people have, for millennia, confused their own demise with the end of the world, and however wise they were, the world hasn’t ended. Even now, I doubt that near-term human extinction is a thing, mainly because humans have shown themselves to be able to live and thrive in lethal climates, even when they’ve created those climates themselves.
But Dr. Bartlett is no Foucault, which is to say that his graphs and charts and exercises in arithmetic do have meaning, and the meaning is something you’ve heard before: you can’t sustain exponential growth on a linear-growth planet.
You can use language that’s full of lies and evasions as long as people think your words have any relation to their reality. But at some point, words fail in the face of hunger and unemployment and lack of housing.
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2030 is increasingly mentioned as the year that will see failures of supply crash through business-as-usual. I’m also postulating that 2030 will be when our vague and slightly nauseous dreams and shadows are finally recognized as being more real and in sharper focus than our words. Dr. Bartlett’s arithmetic is closer to the world than we are.
Our language is a delicate and limited tool, dependent on a direct relationship with reality for any kind of substance. Once that relationship slips into abstraction, words lend themselves to psychosis.
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I’ll stop here, lest we get any closer to psychosis than we already are. My writing increasingly consists of attempts to stop words from insulating us from the world, and to restore to language the kind of substance it had when its highest and best use was to name the things we could reach out and touch.