Somewhere over the horizon

Having been someone with a pretty loud internal monologue manifest over the course of my forty-six years of life, it has always been a source of interest to me to dispassionately observe the topics that make up the main theme of the monologue at various times - through periods of change and continuity, through personal crises and successes, through epoch-making instances, and to the extent that the dull, daily drivel of being a productive contributor to the global economy determines your abiding self-image.

The main theme that's running through my head these days is; ageing. That's not really a surprise considering that my main source of employment involves long, meaningful hours spent contemplating and managing the daily foibles of a plethora of older people availing of federal government subsidies to sustain their independence in (what they don't always describe as) their golden years.

My monologue, though, has also been considering ageing through a lens of pitiful self-awareness - I now have two chronic health conditions, diagnosed over the last couple of years, necessitating the daily intake of medication, and shaping just how my prospects appear to me over the next (possible) thirty-plus years of a now compromised life. It dwells on a sudden, unprepared-for end and what it would leave behind in its financial wake. How that would shape my wife's and daughter's remaining years - in the context of my own experience of the loss of my parents. What retirement really means. What fantastical experiences remain to me over the following years. What legacy I have left behind. What emotions I have engendered among those who have known me. What memories I will linger in, and what must be forgotten or hidden.

I am painfully becoming aware, through my internal monologue, that I have now become something that I don't recognize; that I have preoccupations now that preternaturally defeat my will to keep a sense of myself as weak away at the far recesses of consciousness. I have even started to forget spellings of words and their meanings; I used 'they' instead of 'there', and 'respectively' instead of 'respectfully' in two work emails recently - something that I sincerely could not have imagined myself doing, considering that 'proof-reading' is an existential matter to my sense of self... proving that even the hitherto rock-solid checks and balances in the sacrosanct are now at risk.

My monologue also continues to delve into the idea of violence; a fitful concept that hasn't visited me that often physically and, if I am honest, not even psychologically or emotionally in any sustainable way through my life. It seems like the occasional violent thought that runs through my internal monologue is some kind of last-ditch effort to retain a whiff of that wild, uncontrollable rebel I confronted in the mirror each day in my late teens and early twenties; reflecting the current status of the pathetic, miserable, and scared young man I was, posturing with all my might about... what could be.

Liminality or Death

I'm not sure if this is to be my last post on this blog or the first post in a new series... 

I'm not sure if the world will ever awaken from this dribs-and-drabs consciousness of our place in deep time or if we are condemned to fade away like every other apex species - a victim of our own sentient capriciousness and greed.... 

I'm not sure if the oceans will soon rise up in protest and wash off, once and for all, the stains of our dastardly presence on this good earth or if we will, once and for all, limit our impact on the natural rhythm of this unique, singular, precious sphere of nurtured life - at once full and impossibly diverse and absolutely solitary in the vastness of space...

I'm not sure if right is ever going to be clearly delineated from wrong, if universal truths are ever again going to be distinguished from cultivated falsehoods, if violence and predation is going to overwhelm balance and custodianship in our relationships with everything 'other' that is 'useless' to our lives...

I'm not sure if I live or die in this time and place - in this actual moment - in this air and temperature and motor-neuron function manifest in the typing of this dribble.

I'm sure, though, that I will miss it dearly when it is all gone.

The Age of Peak Gaslighting

If there is a word that has discovered a contemporary relevance in the modern world far beyond its original raison d'être - as a gag used to psychologically manipulate a hapless spouse in a movie first made in 1938... a word that was also Merriam Webster's Word of the Year in 2022, gaslighting has so thoroughly transcended its common usage in quasi therapy-speak as to now actually and fully describe the current status-quo of global realpolitik.

It is fortuitous that I finally write this long-distilled screed during the exact moment when the International Criminal Court as well as the International Court of Justice finally begin the process, after eight long months of genocide, to assign the nation of Israel a richly deserved pariah status and declare it a country so far beyond rehabilitation (despite the best efforts of the world's richest and most powerful countries to save it from itself) to be almost doomed to disappear after a mere hundred years of contentious existence.

In time, these events will barely warrant a footnote in the history books; inevitably remembered as an interregnum during which madness took over the earth and comeuppance eventually claimed the wicked... to be included amongst a million other footnotes describing various times in history during which humankind's march towards emancipation was periodically stymied by the tenuous bonds of our wild evolutionary passions. But I don't think a lot of us who have lived through these last eight months will ever cease being uneasy that all this was allowed to occur in a world where the confluence of technology, ethics, and entertainment delivers to us day-after-day a chimeric vision of a world marching towards a real and everlasting justice - for all the peoples of the earth. 

We see the righteous protagonists emerge victorious in fantasy-world creations in our cinemas, learn about Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela in our classrooms, go to see Ai Weiwei's latest exhibition at the gallery or take in David Attenborough's latest entreaty about climate change on our subscription streaming service.The lessons from almost every media landscape we inhabit lull us into this notion of a reflective parody of a time when justice was once hard-fought which thankfully is now overcome and whose retelling we can take for granted as natural heirs of a world enlightened.

The tens of thousands of the children of Palestine now lost to us will never have that luxury.

The tens of thousands of homes destroyed, of futures ended, of families erased will not have that reposeful relief.

The tens of thousands of histories and stories and dreams eradicated will never see the light of that day.

What we have allowed to occur over the last eight months is evil - in every possible sense of the term that has ever been allegorically and explicitly used since the dawn of time. And I hope the blood of the children and the innocents we have allowed to be massacred stains our souls and haunts our quiet reflections right until we close our eyes for the final time.

We live in a world in which we look at ourselves in a giant mirror - as we wilfully dim and brighten the gas lights that allow us to be seen - all the while wondering why the lights are getting dimmer and then brighter..... dimmer and now brighter.... now dimmer and then brighter.