The Obvious

Threatening the sovereignty and territorial integrity of two of our closest and most faithful allies, Canada and Denmark, makes me sick. It's repulsive. It's dishonorable. It's also incredibly stupid, but I don't even care about that. Stupid can be mended. Dishonor is forever.

(I don't often talk about daily politics, because others are so much better equipped and more skilled at it, but occasionally it's worth saying the obvious in so many words. My penchant for the long view and the global picture might give the impression that I think that immediate and local issues are unimportant. I don't, at all; I'm just particularly inept at addressing them. But when silence might be taken for complicity, I do think that someone with a public platform, however tiny, ought to speak up. So I might begin the next few blog posts with little statements like this.)

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It does feel ridiculous, cultivating myself while the country is wrecking itself, but what else am I to do? I must work on something, and I’m the only thing at hand. We are just at the beginning of a cascade of crises, and the only thing I’m sure of is that more will be required of me, in the new world: that there will be less room for self-indulgence and self-pity. People urge me to go easy on myself, and while I appreciate their compassion and benevolence, I think they’re wrong. What I need is to go hard on myself. I have piddled away much of my life going easy on myself.

And behind it all, the Good of the Neoplatonists, the Nature of the Stoics, whatever the hell it is: that without which nothing actually makes sense: that which dissolves whenever you look at it directly and try to put it to use. It will not be used.

Humility is the hardest of the virtues. To do the work at hand: here, now.

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When I was four years old, my parents took me to Disneyland. Underwater in Captain Nemo's submarine, I looked out through the portals. Monsters of the deep were everywhere. A shark lunged at the window; I was terrified. My mother tried to reassure me, saying, "It's all right, Evan, it isn't real." Then a giant squid attacked us; my father said it also wasn't real. At this point, my parents tell me, I looked up and asked, "Are we real?"

-- Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being, chapter 6

Replegándome

Closing in on myself, like those tiny white blossoms of miner’s lettuce at nightfall. This, here, now: studying, thinking.

Global neoliberalism has run itself into a ditch: offering people absolutely nothing larger than themselves to be part of, to cherish, to be proud of, was a strategy that was bound to lose: though it didn’t do it before trashing most of most people’s virtues. So we get these ugly, crude fundamentalisms, that would laughable if they were not so capriciously destructive and cruel. The idea that there’s anything “medieval” about Isis or White Christian Nationalism is absurd. They are wholly and distinctly modern, the responses of people emptied of virtue and starved of meaning. I know, I sound like one of their theorists when I talk that way. Still. If you don’t offer people anything substantial to eat they’ll chew the bark off the trees. There’s nothing surprising about it. What’s surprising is that we’ve wobbled along so long in this country without disaster.

It’s all very well to talk that way, of course – satisfying and invigorating, clears the pores – but it’s bombast. The florid language is a tell. And what it tells is that I myself only very dimly suspect and guess at what that larger thing is: I have nothing satisfying to offer anyone. People who vaguely assert a higher power are more definite than I am: I immediately frown and think: “just one? Higher than what? Is it, are they, on my side? Distinct from me? Does it, do they, subsume me, or participate in me, or divvy me up so that bits of me serve as poker chips in unguessable games?” This is not the stuff that religious refuge is made of. I have nothing to offer, there.

But anyway, my duty vis-à-vis it, and/or them, seems at this point pretty clear to me. I have no persuasive skills, and nothing to persuade anyone of, anyway. “They also serve who only stand and wait”: well, I hope so, because that appears to me to be my job. Or at least, to stand and listen, to wait and watch.

I guess the dignified way to say that is “he spends his days in study, prayer and meditation." That sounds respectable; way more respectable than it feels.

A Lamentable Case

Well! So far all my struggles are for naught. I have neither straightened up nor flown right; I am fat as a goose prepped to provide foie gras; I am impotent, anxious, tired, and unkempt. My beard straggles and my hair lurches over my collar. A lamentable case.

On the other hand, I am more or less over my cold (how can you really tell, when you’re so systemically inflamed?) And I should be able to take up exercise again. Start over again. Again.

Saturday! Without a meeting with Jarrett, who is in Mexico City. So all the day’s resources are free. We can do what we like.

I think we may need to stage all these changes, Monsieur le Favier. Pressure at all points is not working here: it’s only making you fretful and petulant, and threatening even those things that were secure (morning back exercises and broccoli, for example. Heaven knows back trouble is not going to help you at this point, you foolish old Hechicero.)

The constant stream of appalling political news does not help, of course. But presumably that’s a constant from now on: if things get better eventually, it’s unlikely to happen during my lifetime. So forget about the daily news. If you think about political life at all, think long-term. Think of what needs to be cultivated that can be passed on to future generations, so they can build someday. Not habits of outrage and rumination, that’s for sure.

Recall, my dear Lord of All Creation, that you are not yet retired: you have no more time or resources at your disposal than you have had these last twenty years. So maybe ratchet back the expectations a little?

There is something missing from the program, and that missing thing, maybe, is company. Maybe you need someone to read the Phaedrus with. Alas that Portland State has no Classics! What the hell kind of university has NO classics department? That’s nuts. But anyway. All in good time.

For the moment, I think we need to set a schedule and timeline for this restoration-and-improvement program. And the first projects, quite obviously, are the intertwined projects of re-establishing our exercise and re-establishing our food regimen.

Note well, young Favier, that it will only take two or three days of eating sanely to feel much better. You won’t get skinny in a couple days, but the inflammation will subside, as will the self-disgust, almost immediately. You won’t have to fly right for months and get to 170 lbs before you feel better. You’ll feel better almost at once.

So I think this is the February project. Eating and exercise. You already laid out in detail the eating. Just follow that, and track your numbers. Two weeks from now you’ll know if you need to change something. (Change the meal timing slightly, though, to a 12:30 lunch and a 5:30 dinner; the former times were too early.) Ask Martha to hid the candy dish.

And now, we just restart the exercise program, but with the reps set back by ten or fifteen percent. We are not focused on gaining strength or muscle bulk at ALL, right now. We are just restarting our program, and it would be fine if the reps were cut in half. In fact, it might even be wise to start with extravagantly reduced reps. Say two thirds. If that really leaves lots of slack, we’ll take it up soon enough.

So February is the diet-and-exercise project. Nothing else needs to happen this month. March can be the month in which I open a second intellectual front, or quit all social media, or whatever it is I do next.

This would have worked last time, if I hadn’t come down with that cold, if Martha had not done her Colorado trip, if she had not been so anxious. It’s time to stop pretending her anxiety doesn’t affect you. It affects you deeply.

But my point at the moment is simply: there was nothing at all wrong with your program. That’s not why it derailed. So you’re not being Pollyanna, in trying to start over. It’s reasonable to expect it to work.

February 2025, the month of restoring the diet-and-exercise regimen. Go, sir.