We Stone Prophets
We are living through a Great American Evening. A simple anecdote: sleeping indoors seems to cost a great deal more than it did for our parents. Still, some do without. Staying fed seems to cost more than it did when I was younger. Still, some do without, as much as they can. There are few dignified ways to make the ends meet. I’ve dug holes, waited tables, and taken care of other people’s children. At the tail end of that is the dream of one day bumping my head against the drop ceiling of an office building.
If bills are paid, there are even fewer dignified ways to spend whats left: once you’ve given beggars their due—the only righteous philanthropy—the next cheapest thing is amusement, and entertainment alone is the foundation of a spiritually obese diet, one that may struggle to navigate a fallen world.
So we’re amused, and largely broke. Stress levels rise. Systems fail in small, new ways. Our era’s storytellers, largely amnesiacs, erode any memory of a better way. Worse still, nostalgia argues it’s a one-way process. Regardless, it’s difficult for me to believe that those who are responsible for the slowing of all good things will see—let alone understand—the fruits of their actions within my lifetime.
For a while I considered the possibility of divine judgement. It’s how I cope. I’ve looked for evidence of a Divinely Just Prison, buried in the hot, heaving earth, into which we can force all the people who insist there is “nothing to be done” to make life less painful. I’ve looked for evidence of a Great Elysian Field in the sky that will reward my integrity if I die the right way. I dug in North American soil and found unpunished bones. I looked up through North American skies, and saw two or five birds against white, or against blue. Jets screamed, silent and uninvited, across blue yonder. In that terrible quiet, I’ve learned that there is no guillotine on this continent that will be put to good use.
Learning this, I’ve have to find something else to do other than persecute and feel persecuted. The best project I can come up with, at this time, is to craft and document a novel kind of understanding of this novel kind of world. It occurred to me that a good use of my time on earth is to become a little less confused.
I mark this as difficult. There is too much information: the world is not unstructured, it is not random, and I do not think that we are helpless to understand. Quite the opposite: we can’t seem to stop the understanding. The signals only feel like noise if you are not paying attention.
What is a person to do? I am not saying this coyly. I am asking—I am demanding—an answer. What is going on out there? What is going on inside of you? If you do not find yourself going deaf with information every time you listen for an answer, I’d argue you’ve a calloused mind. I’d argue—in some small but important way—you’re fucked. One needs all the sense they can gather.
That is why I am reaching out to you: I am asking you to take hold of your thoughts and senses and let me know what you see by this fading golden light. Our collective attention will build the world in which we must live. I am listening to you.