I read an op ed in the New York Times titled, “Things I Thought Made Sense Just Don’t Anymore,” by Mira Jacob (December 28, 2023).
It’s written in cartoon form and opens with: “I thought time would come back after the pandemic. I thought I would come back after the pandemic. I thought there would be an after the pandemic. None of these things have happened yet.” She goes onto say, “Most days I feel like I woke from a nap I didn’t mean to take into a world I don’t quite recognize.”
Amen, sister.
It’s a brilliant opinion piece that ranges from discussing the evolution of animals to the evolution of humanity as it relates to time and place. Jacob talks about the things that make sense like bras, subways and skyscrapers to how she can’t wrap her head around other insane aspects of life anymore. It’s a startling funny and true piece.
Jacob questions whether, “Every time we wake up it’s in an elaborate sim and every time we go to sleep, we get shifted to a slightly different earth in the multiverse and that’s why when we wake up, it’s with the unshakeable conviction that everything is deeply, deeply wrong.”
It prompted me to consider this wisdom. There are times when everything becomes aligned and I feel like I have the world of wisdom sitting at my feet. Then there are times where the world is moving so fast, that I just can’t seem to make sense of the chaos until I settle down and accept that “it is what it is.” I shake my head utterly befuddled and say “maybe this one isn’t supposed to make sense, and it’s there to remind me and humble me into a new awareness that needs to be absorbed.”
I sit and think the world is passing me by. I laugh at how fast time has come and gone. I watch myriad children grow beyond themselves making loony sophomoric mistakes only to become soulful teachers making prescient predictions that shape our world.
I see those who stood for something through reason in the 60s by “standing up to the man” become the same people who are enabling insanity and joining “the man” in helping us devolve into something we don’t recognize.
I see the folly of humanity and human circumstances repeating itself and wearing the fashions of pathos and insanity that I thought were out of style and lost after WWII – white nationalist maxims taken from the language of Adolf Hitler coming from the mouth of a US presidential candidate who says, “Immigrants are poisoning the blood of our land.” The same immigrants that helped shape this nation and upon whose backs we became the richest country in the world.
I hear excuses being made for the above saying “things could be better” when we are enjoying record highs in the stock market and an infrastructure plan that is rebuilding this country. I see the creation of a culture of fear that is settling in the nerves of the already fearful. Things can always be better, so what does that really mean?
I see twisted reasoning and mental gymnastics in formulating sense. When the weed of nonsense is pulled, it just seems to keep growing back. We haven’t arrived at the root of problem-solving challenges, nor do we care to enter that realm of thinking to stop the weed from growing.
Ignorance is boastful. Wisdom is silenced. Hypocrisy is rationalized. Narcissism is applauded. Humility denied. The foundational beliefs in democracy are facing a turning point in ‘24 and may determine if we continue with this great experiment or abolish it.
The sacred is losing traction and the secular world that denies its importance is looking for something meaningful to help make sense of the world.
There certainly is no turning back when we’ve opened pandora’s box of questions. We either stand together and try to get beyond the folly of humanity and get to answering them, or we sleepwalk to the end and let the meat grinder of technology and AI figure it out for us.
These things have been explained through art, film and music. Artists like Salvador Dali and the surrealists at the beginning of the 20th century, depicted it with stunning clarity. In his work “The Persistence of Memory” and “The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory,” Dali’s humanity as it relates to time and place comes through. It feels like the surrealists gave up trying to make sense of it all in a world replete of undermining modern humanity with technology replacing humans, industry’s insensitivity to the needs of the worker and war’s march toward annihilation with the nuclear threat.
Stanley Kubrick epically told the story in his film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” In her criticism of the film, the great film critic Pauline Kael wrote, “It says man is just a tiny nothing on the stairway to paradise, something better is coming, and it’s all out of your hands anyway. There’s an intelligence out there in space controlling your destiny from ape to angel, so just follow the slab.”
In the song “Tomorrow Never Knows,” The Beatles reminded us to “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.”
This isn’t good enough, though. Each one of these artists was faced with life, death and morality. Dali gave up painting when his muse Gala passed. He had no choice but to own being alive and was left alone with his feelings about mortality. Kubrick created some timely worldly masterpieces after “2001” and John Lennon joined the movement for peace and opposition to the Vietnam War and all things destructive before he was assassinated.
Even “absurdists” need to reconcile with morality as it relates to our world and cannot escape the moral clutches of a society that accepts the indecency of irrationality as the order of the day. In the end, we all have to form a moral universe that suits our needs, the needs of our children and those we love. Isn’t this central to what Jesus’ was talking about? “We cannot worship God and Mammon.”
Jacob’s last statement in her column says it all. “Sometimes, when I am very still in my wildest self, I can feel it already: the invisible tether growing between us, pulling us toward a world that sees what we see, a world that will love us back.”
Let’s hope she’s right.
spirit beat 