A Meditation on Contempt and Indifference

Here I sit - nursing a scotch, looking out at the pink and orange reflection of the sunset on the mountain—pondering my solitary act of civil disobedience.

At lunch, I asked a friend, "Do you believe there's a link between what's been described as The Great Acceleration and the current state of western societal discourse?"  So we pondered and pontificated.

But you can see it, can't you? The hideous, sweeping line. Not just the hockey stick curve of the Great Acceleration—the GDP, the progress - and costs - the sheer, staggering, insane climb of every measurable metric since 1950. That part is the easy science. That’s the graph one hangs in the university hall to impress the new arrivals with the scope of our own, magnificent, self-destruction.

No. I’m speaking of the parallel line. The ghost twin. The terrifying ascent of contempt.

They told us the internet would shrink the world, make us all villagers, quaintly linked. That was the lie. It was a lie spun in the ether, a chemical mist from the exhaust pipe of progress. What it actually gave us was the perfect mechanism for self-sorting. We didn't form a village; we built a billion tiny, soundproofed bunkers, armed with algorithms that do nothing but feed us back the shape of our own faces, only angrier, more righteous. Tribalism, they call it. A polite, academic word for: I loathe your existence because your newsfeed differs from mine.

And the source? Oh, the source is clear. The Acceleration didn't just boost output; it vaporized context. It introduced a rate of change—economic, social, technological—that outpaced the fragile, analog capacity of the human heart to process it. We were thrust into a world of hyper-complexity, massive inequality, and existential threats we can’t even properly name, much less solve.

And what is the natural, ugly, little-understood response to overwhelming complexity? A retreat to simplicity. A feverish, desperate clawing back to the black-and-white. Us and Them. The tribe. A clearly defined enemy. It's a marvelous trick, isn't it? To take the anxiety born of global, systemic failures—climate, finance, technology—and channel it into the cheap, satisfying hatred of your neighbor. They're the ones to blame. Always Them.

And here is my small, useless contribution to the geometry of it all. My Defiance.

Charles Kuralt as host of CBS Sunday Morning was always my trusted, if not droll source of information of the day.  And when I started on MySpace, it was quaint—a bulletin board of bad poems. But somewhere between Diana's death and Katrina, I had been snagged in the gin mill. Caught up in the increasing minute-by-minute chumming for sensation and outrage. Now? Mainstream and social media do not converse; they merely provoke. It is the theatre of the Pavlovian response: A flicker of outrage, a spasm of fear, and the machine has earned its next impression. I look at the screen and the world screams: "Look what he's done now! THE STORM IS COMING! Fix the interest rate! Stop the genocide!"

But I just couldn't. Can you? Of course not. You can’t solve the crushing Acceleration from your armchair, and you certainly can’t un-thread the cable of collective digital rage.

So, I chose to unplug. Or rather, I re-tuned. On social media, the algorithms now offer me only two things: the utterly trivial and the perfectly pleasant. Cat videos. Friends’ vacation pictures—a lovely, sun-drenched proof that somewhere, sanity persists. And I no longer tune into commercial mainstream media.

This isn't cowardice, understand. This is a cold, calculated act of Indifference as Defiance. I refuse to be rendered impotent by the impossible scale of their issues. I refuse to add my voice—my precious attention—to the collective roar of performative digital rage.

Instead, I choose the microscopic. The solvable. The immediate geometry of connection. My friends. My family. The community I can touch. I can offer attention. I can offer caring. I can solve the little, crucial issue of a single person’s loneliness today.

They are welcome to their contempt and outrage. I’ll be here, in the small, sunlit patch of the garden, deliberately, defiantly, tending to the things I can actually keep alive. It may be a momentary defense, a retreat.  Or it might be my best hope for peaceful longevity. But for now, it's the only honest posture left against the terrifying momentum of our own making. And perhaps... perhaps it is the only way to retain a small, vital piece of the human spirit they are so frantically trying to erase.

An Appointment with Death

A man is sitting in a tavern in Damascus, He looks up from his wine and sees Death staring at him from across the room. He cries out "But this cannot be my time!" 

He flees Damascus. He rides his horse fast, right across the desert to Samarra. When he arrives, he is thirsty. Standing before him at the well...is Death. 

Seeing Death for the second time, he cries out, "This cannot be. For I escaped you in Damascus!" Death lays his hand upon the shoulder of the man and says, 

"I was also surprised to see you in Damascus. For my appointment with you was always to be here, in Damascus."

"The Appointment in Samarra" (as retold by W. Somerset Maugham [1933])

On the Loss of Memory and Knowledge

“When an old man dies, a library burns”

- Amadou Hampâté Bâ

Enough Is Enough

“Enough is as good as a feast”

- Sir Thomas Malory

Seeing the Other

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Delicious Ambiguity

"Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity."

Gilda Radner

Aubade

noun - a poem or piece of music appropriate to the dawn or early morning.

Aubade

BY PHILIP LARKIN

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.   

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.   

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.   

Till then I see what’s really always there:   

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,   

Making all thought impossible but how   

And where and when I shall myself die.   

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse   

—The good not done, the love not given, time   

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because   

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;   

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,   

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being 

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,   

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,   

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,   

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill   

That slows each impulse down to indecision.   

Most things may never happen: this one will,   

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without   

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave   

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.   

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,   

Have always known, know that we can’t escape,   

Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring   

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

There is a Meadow in My Perfect World

There's a meadow

in my perfect world

Where wind dances

the branches of a tree

Casting leopard spots of light

across the face of a pond

The tree stands tall

and grand and alone

Shading the world beneath it.

There will come a day

when I rest against its spine.

And look out over a valley

where the sun warms, but never burns.

I will watch leaves turn

Green, then amber, then crimson

Then no leaves at all.

But the tree will not die.

For in this place,

winter never comes.

It is here, in the cradle

of all I hold dear,

I guard every memory of you.

And when I find myself frozen

in the mud of the real

far from your loving eyes,

I will return to this place,

close mine

and take solace in the simple

perfection of knowing you.

- from Wind River featuring Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen

Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds

"Humans consider themselves unique, so they’ve rooted their whole theory of existence on their uniqueness. 'One' is their unit of measure — but it's not. All social systems we’ve put into place are a mere sketch; 'one plus one equals two,' that’s all we’ve learned. But one plus one has never equaled two — there are, in fact, no numbers and no letters. We’ve codified our existence to bring it down to human size, to make it comprehensible; we’ve created a scale so we can forget its unfathomable scale… Time is the only true unit of measure. It gives proof to the existence of matter; without time, we do not exist."

I Never Let the Truth Get in the Way of a Good Story

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. - Mark Twain (1924)