We, The People, Are NOT in Control

Surviving Chaos

When Poetry, Thought, Word Magick launched in the fall of 2021—amidst the pandemic—in the aftermath of the January 6th insurrection—“chaos” was an apt term for one’s experience of the world. We hoped it would calm down. I intended for myself and for readers here to explore and determine how to maintain creative thrust in the midst of desperate, chaotic times. Simultaneously, my The Killing Joke (now finished and still forthcoming, still forthcoming from its publisher!) loomed with the archetype of the Jester of Chaos, its then current avatar seemingly waning—resurgent, recurrent now to the nth degree, against all hopes! I thought I knew chaos then, but the chaotic is now ten times that and more, exponentially more: there are powers of chaos. Like infinity, I know now chaos has its varying, intensifying degrees!

It has long been a fascination of mine, the notion that there are degrees of Infinity. Georg Cantor—the discoverer of varying, hierarchical infinities—is a poet’s mathematician, himself poetic (for better and worse) in thought, temperament, and life: infinity—also loss and conflict—disbalanced him to an unbearable degree and he had to be hospitalized multiple times. There are degrees of infinity and there are degrees of chaos, as there is a kind of infinity within chaos. Let me be a poet living in interplay with both! I’ve fantasized about discovering a wild, new, as-yet-untracked degree of infinity, only having any chance of being able to do so I suppose through poetic license since I lack the necessary mathematical command: I think I understand that, according to Cantor, there are an infinity of infinities, so perhaps it isn’t impossible. As to the infinity within chaos, that must be a different order of infinity than the infinity within order; anyways, chaos itself demonstrates by degrees its ominous capacity for unraveling!

Exclamations abound amidst chaotic spirals! Trust me to refrain for the rest of this signaling. Was it possible to imagine how screwier things could get since the last one two months ago?

All Emergency All The Time

Here’s the chaos this week, unto today, this spiraling hour: in the beginning of the end for due process, the Trump administration defies court orders to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia from an El Salvador mega-prison, setting up a de facto stateless zone beyond the reach of U.S. law, into which no one is safe from being disappeared.

Almost quaint in comparison: how long ago was it that we had Signalgate? (a term to interweave with this signaling, attempted attunement to true news, signals and significance within the racket, strategies of deliberate distraction). Jeffrey Goldberg first reported the breach of national security on Monday, March 24th, less than a month ago, but it feels as if aeons have passed, or that we’re in another time, another timeline. Chaos tricks out our minds’ jumbled timelines.

Signal/News through the Noise: We, The People, Are NOT In Control. 
This is what authoritarianism lives like

How can this be our country? The constitutional crisis is here. What will happen, what’s next?

What to hold onto for survival, what life raft? Don’t flinch.

Creative Surge, recurrent: in the midst of politics and changing times, creativity (whatever your career) is the answer: more than solace, though it is that; more than healing and catharsis, though it can be such; our innate creativity opens us to unknown powers.

Wherever we are, whatever is happening.

No evasion. Face what needs to be faced. Stay, sit with the reality. This signaling, it’s dire, degrees worse from last time’s alarm, emergency, when noise became the signal. Deliberate flooding the zone, propaganda beyond spin, everything’s swirling; past the matter of power, the culture has shifted, irrevocably, in a matter of months—the culture is louder, crueler, cruder. Still, within the stillness of ourselves, perhaps within the stillness of loving communion when and where we can find it, we overcome this relentless Blaring. Our own minds and spaces deny tyranny’s grasp.

We can, we have to, go from here. First, what is here? Reality is infinite with possibility—& Chaos. What is here, and what is absent now? What has been undone, what has been lost? Usually I follow up a signaling with a prompt and a spiritual exercise for paid subscribers. For now, just the signaling. Acknowledge where we are. & what the follow-up? Today, tomorrow, I’ll let it uprise.

Georg Cantor, Mathematician of Infinity (1845-1918)

Just as one can place a distinguished, historic face next to an infinity symbol, forever entwines the personal. What’s universal implicates the individual.

Even as I have in this venue exulted in and upheld the personal as an abstraction (it is no less personal for being abstracted, as likewise the internal is comprehended as objective and no less internal for being so), I don’t frequently get too specific here, or too confessional.

So, if I hint at how DOGE has hit close to home, in company with more than a few P,T,WM readers I know of who’ve been directly affected by the barbarism perpetrated against our own government and the world economy, I’m admitting us into further than usual intimacy.