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.