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Barlow returns

John Perry Barlow has reappeared, sending a new rant his email list and promising more. It's not posted at his site yet, and no excerpt out of context seemed adequate, so I'm reposting the whole thing here, because it's especially eloquent and resonates so well with my own sense of the times.

THE FLOATING WORLD

Ok.

In my New Year's BarlowSpam a few days ago, I indicated that I might be about to break my long silence. Now I guess I will. But, before I go back to spamming you again, I will offer a word (or several) about how this came to pass.

Throughout the Uh-oh's - and I'm more convinced than ever that I called this decade right from the get-go - I've watched with growing stupefaction as successive tsunamis of surreality swept through the world, macro to micro, from the icy works of Darth Cheney to disruptions in my own little life that were as nonsensical as they were either menacing or exhilarating. I began to feel like Kafka, or maybe Nietzche, had become my invisible friend - but if Nietzche, then one whose God is not dead, but crazy.

Now it seems my life - indeed, the world itself - has become manic depressive.

But I am not. Not yet. Disoriented, perhaps, and certainly susceptible to occasional bouts of chemical self-immolation, but not crazy. Why bother to go crazy when reality has already done it for you?

I know. This is not the first time you've heard this sort of thing from me. After four years of raving at you about how outlandish things seemed to be getting, I've come to feel like the boy who cried, "Weird!"

But then we entered the strange dream that has been 2005. By the end of January, I had run out of psychotic superlatives and, not being Hunter S. Thompson (thank Satan), I chose to dummy up. I quit writing BarlowSpams, aside from the occasional announcement or invitation. I threw in one bland blog post from the utterly surreal Madrid conference on Terrorism in March and thence ran on radio silence. As any BarlowFriendz who've been on the list since before March would know, I made no further public pronouncements. For 9 months, Tar Baby, he say nothing.

It was certainly not that I beheld no phenomena worthy of comment. No, indeed. Rather, I've had adventures that Baron von Munchausen would have kept to himself. I beheld beauties so monstrous and horrors so sublime that they exploded my attempted descriptions like Katrina scattered seagulls. Moreover, they came upon me too quickly. (Or perhaps I came upon them too quickly. I accumulated about 150,000 frequent flier miles in 2005, at one point circling the globe, with significant stops in places like Kyoto, Geneva, and Charleston, in only 8 days.)

I began numerous BarlowSpams only to have them slam, half-written, into the next improbability, where, beached with awe upon the present, I no longer felt like reporting yesterday's apocalypse. (Perhaps one day I will bundle up some of these half-vignettes and pass them on to you.)

You, Dear Ones, worried about me in my virtual absence and I'm touched by that. I received many concerned e-mails from folks who figured that only a severe stroke, spiraling alcoholism, or Trappist vows could have shut me so completely up. But I'm alright, pretty much. I've always been something of a psychic canary in the cosmic coal mine - and thus particularly susceptible to invisible turbulence - and I'm telling you one thing about the present: Surf's up!

For about two years, it's felt like one damn thing after another, unexpected deaths, twisted romances, harrowing scrapes, whether with the law or with fate, and unexpected financial reverses. Of course, there have been as many epiphanies and shining moments, but these can be as dumb-striking as catastrophes if they are frequent and painfully bright. Much of the time I've felt tossed wildly in these waves, submitting to the whitewater, waiting, like Noah, for the feel of something solid below.

In the meantime, I tried to emulate a wise and graceful young friend of mine. Year before last her father committed suicide on her birthday, genuinely meaning it to be a gift. Shortly after that her mentor and business partner dropped dead of a heart attack at an early age. I asked her how she was handling all this and she said, "Well, for a while I was trying to find my footing, but it kept being knocked out from under me. Now I'm just learning how to swim." Me too.

But learning to handle the big surf seemed to be most of what I did last year. As you could see, I wasn't able to get much written. The words come out of my head as easily as teeth. I continued doing speaking and consulting gigs, and my take on things apparently continued to be of value to the clients, but the things I had to tell them didn't surprise me enough. I still found myself often among the rich, powerful, beautiful, or famous, but my access depended, it seemed to me, far too much on what I once did and not enough what I'd done lately. That, and a certain rote charm that feels like the very definition of unwarranted grace. I was stricken with a strange resistance to constructive action. My lists lengthened while their upper reaches withered rather than being crossed decisively off.

A sharp old ranch lady in Wyoming once said to me, "John Perry, I've been watching you a long time, and I've seen you do a lot of different things, but I believe you've always had the same career." She was more or less right about that. Though I have always taken faith in that deeper mission, there have been several times in my life when its means of expression transformed radically and in ways that surprised me. When, in 1971, I quit being a novelist and urban badass, leaving New York for California, I didn't intend to pause along the way to be a rancher in Wyoming for 17 years. When I realized that ranching was increasingly an economic impossibility, I had no sense that I was about to become an Internet guru (or whatever you'd call what I've been for the last decade or so.)

I'm at another of these points. I became a songwriter entirely by accident to begin with and now, following several acts of studio vandalism to my recent works, I think I am done with that as well. Where will those creative energies emerge now? I don't know. But they will. Certainly, pioneering the electronic frontier is no longer the riveting mission it once was. While there remains much to be done, and the liberty of our descendents still hangs in the balance, that world has become too complex for me to think I can change it, as I once could, with the help of a few smart friends. Now I leave it more to the professionals at EFF. They're smarter than I am and a lot more diligent with the details. I will go on toiling in vaporous vineyards of Cyberspace, but without the same grand sense of personal urgency. Like any old mountain man, I've become just another settler, filling in the margins and grumbling about the government.

For awhile, I've felt post-digeratum. Now, increasingly, I no longer feel post-anything. I feel pre-something else. As I say, I've been here before. This is not the first time I've had to cross these turbulent wastes of unknowing (which, I suspect, are where much wisdom lies.) This is not the first time I've waited for the mysterious orders that would define my next lifetime within a lifetime, nor is it the first time they've seemed a bit long in coming.

But this time it feels different. Previous passages through these interstitial storms felt like my own lonely struggle. Now, everywhere I look, I see others in the same condition. Fundamental life confusion - generally endured invisibly with a toxic sense of private embarrassment - is pandemic. Your personal mileage may differ, but my guess is that you are presently more riven with doubts and questions than you've letting on. I know an unusually large number of people well, scattered all over this blessed ball. And, for some reason, it seems the folks I encounter often tell me things they don't generally reveal. (Maybe I ought to become a shrink now.) Thus, I've been conducting an extremely unscientific analysis of the Global Heart for some time and never have I beheld such universal disarray.

Most of the people I know who are still conscious enough to back away from their televisions are in a kind of life-shock. Metanoia, anomie, paralysis, catatonia, existential dread - whatever you want to call it, it's wide-spread. Everywhere I look, I see people white-eyed and still as though caught in the Headlights of God. I see many people suddenly taking swan-dives into the misty unknown, like my good friend who recently quit her high-paying corporate job, left her extremely reliable husband, and has headed off to become a film-maker, or something, carrying little but a goofy grin and a sense of groundless hope,

I see people who, for years, have had the same clear sense of mission that is my usual blessing, and plenty of traction for it, and who are now either spinning their wheels at red-line or sitting quietly by the crossroads, casting about mildly apprehensive glances and looking at their watches. Waiting, as I have been, for fresh orders.

Or like my wise, young friend, we're learning to swim. But we're teaching ourselves. Surf, as I say, is up. And the water's full of weird shit. The ugly tides that covered Banda Aceh and New Orleans in 2005 became an excellent metaphor for that year. They were the geist of that zeit. What we needed was more of each other, but I, for one, had only global neighbors, which most of the time, is like having no neighbors at all. I began to feel 24,000 miles wide and no thicker than the Stratosphere. A light smear across the face of the earth, more a contrail than a person.

I was stationary for 17 years, mobile now for another 17, and I began to wonder if it weren't time to become stationary again. But where? In choosing any place, I would exile myself from the company of those many of you with whom my travels place me in eye contact. And all my current basin of attraction are problematic. Manhattan, my most gravitational way-station, is too expensive and can seduce me into its fevers in a New York nanosecond. Wyoming seems like a dream to me now, and besides, my little town, sitting atop one of the largest gas fields in the world, has come down with a bad case of methane-based economy. San Francisco has lost its sense of humor. My Portuguese isn't good enough to flee to Brazil.

Much earlier this year, I started to think that New Orleans might be the answer. (It is now marvelously ironic, like most things these days, that the Big Easy looked like solid footing to me.) Then, in what seemed like directive serendipity, a friend, the historian Doug Brinkley, called to tell me that he and Jim Clark, of Netscape fame, had created a Center for the Study of American Culture at Tulane. He invited me to come teach there. He had also invited Hunter S. Thompson. I was seriously considering it. But then the Bad Doctor realized what a corner the intense study of American culture had backed him into and escaped by the only exit still available to him. He blew himself away. And then Katrina blew New Orleans away. The water rose and fell, leaving in its wake a jumble of confusion that seems like a standing wave of chaos.

Unlike the beleaguered people of New Orleans, the generally sweet souls who have been groping through the Great Confusion lacked one central comfort: the community of being in it together. As I've said, each of us seemed to think that the paralysis and disorientation we have been experiencing is some personal failure. A kind of shame. Thus, we are afraid to reach out, since reaching out requires acknowledgement of something that feels a bit like failure. If more only knew how rare we are not. Certainly it's a cool comfort one can take, when spooked, in the knowledge that almost everyone else is spooked as well. But imagine how it would be, if you thought that the flu was a form of moral weakness, and, that having come down with it during the height of flu season, isolated yourself into the impression that you were the only one who was sick.

No. I'm telling you, if you are among the swan-divers, the free floaters, the fog-bound, the change maddened, if you are among those apocalyptic gamblers who actually hope that Spacetime will collapse in 2012, if you are squinting warily into the future, you are legion. Perhaps you've seen that great Philippe Halsman photograph of Salvador Dali, in which Dali (and everything else in the room) appears to have been tossed into the air. Dali's aloft, as is the furniture, a painting, multiple cats, and even a goldfish, its bowl and water also (separately) airborne. If you feel like that, you in a more common state than you might think.

Of course, many of us remain who are too dim, fanatical, heartless, rich, or pharmaceutically lobotomized to feel such sorrow and anxieties. There are still the Dickheads (by which I mean not only Cheney and his fellow Grays, but also ideological sociopaths of whatever faith-based initiative, whether Christian, Islamic, or Plutocratic). As in the Yeats poem, they "are full of passionate intensity," while many of the rest of us now "seem to lack all conviction." I think of the expression Congresswoman Jean Schmidt wore in Congress the day she called Rep. Jack Murtha a coward for suggesting that war is too hideous to fight if you're not sure what you're fighting for. It was a look of self-assured wickedness that seemed to have been ripped from the face of a Harry Potter villain.

There's a lot of that going around. And thriving. Many, though hardly all, of the truly heartful people I know are more financially challenged than they've ever been while an equally large percentage of the Dickheads are pig-in-shit phat. 3 years ago, I said that if Bush maintained his steal-from-the-rich to feed the poor policies, the United States would make Mexico look like Sweden in a decade. I was wrong about that. I think he well ahead of schedule on that mission.

And then there is Iraq.

Yeats also seems to have foreseen that in "The Second Coming" (the poem I quoted above) when he wrote:

"Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

What rough beast indeed? For this role there are already a number of candidates arising from the bloody sands of Babylon and Israel, but I suspect that it is the same stalking Fear that has turned NSA Director Mike Hayden, a good guy in my experience, into someone who would suddenly put the entire United States populace under surveillance and the same Fear that prevents said "free people" from rising up, fiercely indignant at this Constitutional evisceration. The same Fear that submits you to an increasing cavalcade of indignities every time you get on a plane. The same Fear that has made this decade one of the least noble in American history. I'm bloody sick of it.

Surely some revelation is at hand alright, but there are revelations and revelations. Apocalypse is a neutral term and while it may serve up a continuous hail of spent uranium on the wretched Iraqis, it also has the capacity to enlighten and literally reveal. Much can be seen now. Much of what has been hidden in our national pathology is now visible to anyone, even as I find my own weaknesses bracingly visible to me. This is an excellent time to learn, even if the course work is demanding and advanced.

We have already been in 2006 long enough for me to get a sense of it. And, so far, it has been better in every way than its predecessor.

The main change, as I said in my brief New Year Barlowspam, is that I truly feel like I am present. And it's ok. I don't know where I'm going exactly - though I expect that to reveal itself eventually as it always has - so I might as well be here. Driven into the present by an inscrutable and yet ominous future, propelled here as well by the losses of the past, I am finding myself at home in a tempospatial condition where I have to admit that things really don't suck all that much. I'm warm, I'm fed, I'm loved, and I have a fat connection to the Internet. I'm not fucked up on anything and don't wish to be. My health is excellent for a man of my age and mileage, and I have all my hair.

Yes, of course the world is going to hell in a bucket, but it usually is, and today was a sublime day in San Francisco after a siege of record precipitation. I still have a couple of daughters, Leah and Amelia, here with me, and they gladden my heart even when they're being a bit snarky. It's their job, after all, just as forbearing it is mine.

The best thing about the future is that it doesn't arrive all at once. It arrives a second at a time. This particular second is good. The next one shows every evidence of being entirely habitable. I'm just going to try to keep it like that. Right now, it feels like I can.

I hope you can too.

Let us have ourselves a year of seconds. And live fully in all 31,536,000 of them.

jon posted this at 6:56 AM
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