Each and Every One of Us

I’ve been attempting an assault on my morbid imagination much as one might undertake housecleaning but first must imagine the process, seeing disheveled rooms in his mind’s eye. Perhaps the homely analogy isn’t quite right:  the world’s dreadful conditions in no way match bourgeois domesticity but my analogy is a gesture toward weariness. The morbid imagination has lately spent too much time with the news, has coursed repeatedly across digital media and now has concluded there’s no hope for human kind.

There were eras when the word fortune was warmth itself. Even in the darkest corners of the globe one could conceive of a future unencumbered by the evidence the planet is dying.

In those innocent ages the future wasn’t easy and we endured hard physical and intellectual labor but the steady nature of the “coming times” was possible. (Not probable but viable).

That ended with Hiroshima but then again we could hope, even pray for disarmament. The improbable but still viable future was still in our hands.

Now morbid imagination tells me otherwise—eco-destruction is so advanced and economies of warfare are so fully determined there’s no way out. And the morbid imagination says “we’re just playing a lost game until the clock runs out”.

As I say, I’ve been attempting an assault on the M.I.. I write my name with a finger on the vapor of the future. When this doesn’t work I attempt Zen laughter. Ha Ha! So much is nonsense! All is transient. Even the planet. Life will go on elsewhere.

Oh we’re in a fix alright. My nation is dying and now apparently lacks the political will to affirm its own freedoms much less tend to the destruction of the world. I channel surf, see the bloated corporate shills who pose as national leaders. The M.I. despairs.

I try seeing myself as a mind committed to a larger body. And in a few moments I will clean the rooms of my old house. I wonder if I’m tired because I’m nearing sixty. I wonder if there’s evidence for optimism—a way to beard the lion of the M.I.. I’m having some trouble. I remember a therapist who challenged me when in an earlier time I was also morbid—who said: “When have your negative expectations, your dark visions of what’s ahead been proven true?”

She was right to ask. I have a quick and gloomy mind. I adjust. Things, good things, agains seem possible.

Herein I admit I’m fighting. I’m walking straight up to my name and touching it gently.

My friends, how are you?