It's been a long time since I've written at length on the world around me. Well, for free, that is. I've been burning the candle at both ends since my wife came home around the beginning of July and told me that I'm going to be a father sometime in mid-February. We immediately took off for a week-long hideaway in Vancouver to contemplate our future family, and came back to a world further on fire.
This bit of biographical background in superfluous, but it seems to be de rigeur for writers, journos and sundry other chatty bastards, under and aboveground. Perhaps it is a way to provide readers with context for perspective: If I approach my article in a personal manner, imparting some inside information to orient my argument favorably with a like-minded audience, then it may go a long way to convincing the readership of....what again?
And this is where I break down. After learning that a new life is about to come and irrevocably change my own life, all I can think about is life, life, life. Bodies, matter, evolution, degradation, the particulate data of a real world that still breathes and bleeds. What Manuel de Landa explored in his brilliant War in the Age of Intelligent Machines as a massively turbulent, self-organizing singularity. He writes:
"When the behavior of a system of particles varies from incoherent to coherent, from dispersed to concentrated, following only small variations in its initial conditions...it is a strong indication that we are in a presence of a singularity."
And what else is life, but this singular moment manifested in flesh, bone and brain? Humans, of course, are as unique as their fingerprints, which means in a rather indirect manner that when we blow them to pieces from the air or the ground, we are rendering them extinct, one corporeal entity at a time. So why replace them at all, if all we are going to do is eradicate them as they arise, manufacturing hollow rationales citing nationality, faith, sect, skin color, whatever? Why pretend we care, when it is so easy to return to our virtual lives online, in airwaves (where our coveted televisual "Reality" has replaced the bleeding one we can't stop bombing or polluting), in ideologies designed to tear us apart rather than bring us together? Is humanity's unending warfare part of this turbulent flow toward a future singularity in which our incoherent, dispersed parties coalesce into one coherent concentration of spastic violence that brings about a new era of post-human existence?
In other words, is this World War III?
And what have I done? This is the question I have been asking myself over and over again since realizing that I'm going to have to explain to my kid what it was like to have ice, freedom, perhaps a future.
Think I'm an alarmist? Go outside, open your window. Do you feel that heat? Do you honestly think it's going away, or going to weaken next month, to say nothing of next year? Look at your country, and try to remember what it was like a decade ago when we were worrying about blow jobs and fools named Newt, when your president wasn't spying on you and spitting on the Bill of Rights. Do you think that's going to get better by nominating someone from a different party who nevertheless voted for the same pointless war in Iraq that's cost our downward-spiraling United States much-needed billions that we can never retrieve?
Look at the Middle East, where whiny tribes have been fighting for millennia(!) over the same parched patches of land, mowing down anyone who gets in their way while offering pointless homilies about faith, sects, virgins in the afterlife. The father-to-be in me looks at the carnage their bullets and bombs have wrought and sees a series of political networks jostling for power without a single care for the eviscerated corpses they visit upon the world, the lives they so indiscriminately shatter. The atheist in me looks at the hypocrisies of their so-called faiths, pipe dreams of arrogant caliphates and "chosen people" who talk about peace and instead deliver only war and unending chaos. That is the only heaven they have to offer.
And what about us? Are we to blame? Are we the problem? Are we engineering this dizzying concentration of turmoil and turblence into a catastrophic apotheosis from which we will never recover? Are we the next endangered species to go?
In other words, will global warming destroy us all before we can destroy ourselves?
Let us remember, we simply cannot annihilate the environment, or the Earth. Thermodynamic law is concrete on that score: Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only change form, funnel from one "reality" into another. Therefore, we can only destroy ourselves, and through our current human-induced heat waves, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, melting ice shelfs and more, we are doing just that. So much for being pro-life.
This is why I haven't written. I've been wrestling with these thoughts for weeks now, trying to make sense of this knotted intersection of the personal and political, which has always joined the heart to the mind, no matter what anyone tells you. Through our love, my wife and I have set in motion a singularity that will change us forever. Meanwhile, our planet's nations have done the same, working feverishly towards an apocalyptic endgame that will no doubt ruin us all if we don't stop it. And stop it now.
Transference, projection, excuse, call it what you will, but what I have done is what you will have to do in the coming days. Face up to your actions. Evaluate your stance on breathing, bleeding life itself, not rhetorical exercises employed then shelved when no one's looking. And most importantly, get your fucking house in order. Soon it will have a new guest, and whether it's fascism, global warming, WWIII or a rugrat, it doesn't matter.
All that matters is that you are prepared.