Firmament

It seems to be in the nature of human beings to see precipices everywhere. I thought that meant on the steep edge of something, but now I'm all self-conscious that it instead means "peaks"? Maybe I mean crevasses. Probably not crevices, because I think that just means cracks in things. Plus "crevice" has a slightly vulgar biological/sexual connotation that I'm not really going for at the moment.* So probably more crevasses.

Cliffs! That's better. Cliffs. But not from below, looking up, all moony-eyed at the wonder of water erosion. Looking down from the top, which is way scarier.

Hang on, I googled it. Basically "cliff" and "precipice" mean the same thing. I'm not sure where I got "peak" from. Maybe I was thinking of "pinnacle." But now I'm worried that means a kind of small sailing ship.

I'm preoccupied, obviously. It's because I feel like I'm standing at the edge of a very steep down-oriented land formation, high enough off the ground at the bottom of it to induce a sense of impending dread or danger where none may in fact exist.

Our existential inability to metabolize an idea like our own mortality has lead us to things like eschatology and it's garish gated subdivision, religion. Basically eschatology with all the soap-opera details colored in. Death is easier to contemplate if it comes with a ripping narrative full of magic and reversals, battle sequences and chase scenes, ending with a big show-stopping chorus number and a last-minute reprieve just for You, faithful reader! It's the same kind of oblique second-person formulation that made the Choose Your Own Adventure books so engaging when I was 12.

It's basic narcissism and terror of the black unknown that lead so many people to believe themselves to be witnessing the winding-up of all human history. Because how could the universe contemplate spinning on without their singular consciousness to hold it together? The root-levelness of that epistemological construction tends to leak into more mundane or merely prosaic aspects of social or personal living wherein everything (morality, education, pollution, alienation, human dignity) are The Worst They've Ever Been. If they weren't, this couldn't be the End Times. And if this isn't the End Times, those of us living now are doomed to be forgotten 10,000 years from now just like... man, what's that guy's name... you know, the one from 10,000 years ago...? See, you can't think of his name either. It's spooky.

The overwhelming sense of impending doom precipitated by the necessary conclusion of Peak Awful,** strangely can also induce a state of paralysis of action. If everything is the worst ever leading to The Conflagration, where is the point in making the effort to change it? Combine this with the limits of human imagination and you end up with periods of history marked by a complacency, an endemic inaction fueled by the double-barrelled fallacies of End of the World nihilism and historical myopia. Nothing we did brought this state of affairs to bear. Nothing we will do can un-track the train. It has always been thus. We have what we have and it will not change.

This, however, only happens to some. The danger is that as many, many (most?) are goaded into lethargy, a few keep humming along, wading against the inertial flow of liquid history to drop the piling rocks that will alter its course.

It's been less than 100 years since women could vote in the United States. Effectively, minorities have been able to vote freely for less than 50. The impression has been, for most of my life (which spans as yet less than both those numbers) that these are settled issues, hard-won freedoms, but from my limited window of living, given. Like revelation. Handed down and etched in tablets of stone. So nothing is more surprising than seeing them chipped away at.

And the idea of a nation of people striving for the achievable dream of education leading to decent jobs? At least now it's more expensive than ever to start along a road that leads, if you're one of the lucky ones, to a job you hate that won't pay you enough to live on.

I want to say it seems like we're on the edge of a collapse in a lot of assumptions about the American experiment in democratic meritocracy. But that seems a little alarmist. And I'm not sure there's a lot I could do about it anyway. Plus I'm busy watching the last couple episodes of MasterChef. I don't know what the ending of that will be, but I'm pretty confident it won't include my death. So I think I'm going to keep my energies there for now.

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*Unusually for me, I know.

**Now I'm thinking of pinnaces again. Which does NOT mean male genitals. I've included no illustrating link.