Requiem for a Magic Chair
Todd’s off riding the wires (he said he was going to see if there was some way he could rig things so that the What a Way to Go website comes out as the first entry in ANY online search for anything!) and I’ve got something on my mind.
I want to talk about collapse. My collapse. Your collapse. Our collapse.
When we speak of collapse (those of us who do) I notice, for myself, and for many others, that it’s often in vague and hypothetical terms. Collapse takes on the feel of an event, that brief span of time when the building is visibly falling to the ground. And it seems to lie always somewhere out ahead of us on the path. It’s coming. And when it gets here, whoo-boy, watch out!
Collapse, the once and future thing.
And yet, I do not find that either notion is particularly helpful. Collapse will surely include major events, one time crumplings of one section of the building or another. (Oh oh, there goes the dollar! Oh my god, there goes Greenland!) But, just as surely, the collapse of this global industrial culture we call civilization (or Empire, if you’re squeamish about questioning the C word) will play out over a long expanse of time, and life will unravel, or transform, or simply end, in a million different ways, in a million different places.
And how do you determine the starting point of such a thing? To those of us on the inside (and isn’t that pretty much all of us at this point?) will not the beginnings and endings seem to coincide with our own experience? If you’re a small child foraging a vast urban garbage dump for some treasure that may help you to survive another day, would you not say that the collapse has already happened? If you’re a gated American salivating over the profit potentials of carbon trading or “clean coal”, would you not say, perhaps, that the best is yet to come?
No doubt future historians will look back upon this time and offer great insights and analyses regarding such questions as cause and effect, endpoints and beginnings and sequences and durations. What remains in doubt is whether those historians will be human beings, or cockroaches with typewriters.
It helps me, to remember these things: that collapse will play out over a long, long time, and that it has already begun. It puts my life into context. And that feels more sane. I am living inside the collapse of civilization, as surely as I am living inside the sixth great extinction event (excuse me, that should be all caps: THE SIXTH GREAT EXTINCTION EVENT!!!!), and I always WILL be living inside of that collapse. It started before I got here (many of the major earth climate changes related to industrial activity began to show up on the radar before I was born) and will continue on long after I am gone. I will always live in transitional times. And I will never see the end of it. Not in this body, at least. Not with this ego.
Not only will I never see the end of it, I will likely not get to see most of it happening even while I’m alive. At some point, economic meltdown, political madness, climatic disruption, technofailure, crop failure, revolution and war (I could keep the list going, but you get the picture) will conspire to disrupt my connection with the news of the world. The grid will thrash and flail, the internet will fragment, the cell towers will fall (or get pushed over), the phone lines will lapse into lonely silence, and my view of collapse will shift from stories of melting poles, plastic seas, peaking oil wells and decimated rain forests, to that which I can see from the windows of my own home.
Climate change will feel like the escalating summer heat on my back deck, or the dried up pond behind my home. Peak oil will look like $8 per gallon diesel fuel, when I can get it, and then $10, and then none at all. Mass extinction will sound like the absence of spring peepers. And it will leave me, like the wild roses in the holler, wondering just where the heck did all the bees go? The news of the world will fade, and I’ll never find out if the polar bears have made it to shore.
And here’s the thing that wakes me up at four in the morning with an anxiety so cold that I have no choice but to get out of bed: I may never know if my own children have made it to shore.
My own children.
It’s not supposed to be this way.
But it is. And that’s one of the nicer scenarios. Tales of FEMA camps and presidential directives and secret plans for war and control and the triaging of entire segments of the population haunt the net. They haunt me. They must be taken into account.
Who will I be, living inside the collapse? Who will I be, as things unravel further? Who will you be? Who will we be together?
As we worked our way through What a Way to Go, Sally and I stopped now and then to ponder just what characteristics would be selected for in the coming bottleneck. What combination of luck and planning and doing and being would work together to help some people navigate the collapse more successfully?
The human population is in overshoot. It will crash. Which of us, if any, will survive that crash? Will it be those who hide out? Those who fight back? Will it be primarily a matter of being in the right place at the right time, a matter of luck and pluck? Will those with certain skills and knowledge have an edge? Will it be simply a matter of who has the most guns or the most extensive stores of food and water? Is there any way to know?
Lots of people have ideas and opinions regarding these questions. Each of us will have to sort our way through them. But one thing has been clear to both Sally and I from the beginning: emotional and psychological health and stability, at the levels of both the individual and the community, will be major deciding factors as things continue to unravel.
I had a taste of this just recently, as I spent most of two weeks in a place with backed-up drains (no flushing toilets, no showers) and an internet speed just slightly faster than walking and delivering the damn things by hand. I mean, yeah, those kids in the garbage dumps are sad and all, but 26.4 kbps? How much pain can we be expected to take?
I am an American by birth. I have been spoiled rotten, addicted to comfort and ease, and pretty much totally infantilized by my culture. I mean, the magic chair that makes my poo disappear… it stopped working! WTF? If you’re betting on survivors, you may want to stay clear of me. We’re talking long odds here.
Who will we be as things unravel, we pampered Americans? As the drains clog, as the water pressure slumps, as the refrigerator breaks down and there’s nobody available to repair it? Who will we be when we can no longer connect with our loved ones at the touch of a button? When we can no longer hop in our cars and head to the store? When there is no ambulance to take us to a hospital that has long since closed down anyways?
How will we feel when our clean and perfumed skins miss their morning hot showers? For a day? A week? A month? A year? How will our identities suffer when we no longer smell like sun-kissed raspberries or jojoba-honeysuckle, when our breath loses its minty fresh feel, when our hair has lost its extra body and bounce?
“Out there” ice caps will be melting, species will be dying, bees will be fleeing, corals bleaching and oceans burping, but collapse will come straight into our own homes, our own backyards, our own bodies. It will play out as loss upon loss upon loss upon loss. Loss of mobility, loss of work, loss of identity, loss of comfort, loss of familiarity. Huge losses at the scale of life and death and love. Smaller losses at the scale of luxury and deprivation. How will you deal with loss? How will you live with grief? And how will you sit with the relentless anxiety that can spring from not knowing?
All the rules have changed. Few of our expectations will emerge unscathed from the grinding wheels of collapse. The magic chairs will one day stop working, for most of us at least. Emotionally and psychologically, our drains will clog and back up. And it may not be a pretty thing to see.
Can you jump from the solid rock of the known, and into the unknowable abyss? Can you push off from the shore and let the rising waters take you where they will? Can you bend without breaking as the storm rages around you?
Or will you break down, fall to your knees, or curl up in a fetal position, distraught with grief and pain and fear, crying out for an ice cold Coke, one last episode of The L Word, or one final pepperoni pizza delivered hot and fresh to your home in less than thirty minutes or you get a free order of cheesy breadsticks?
Jim Kunstler calls it The Long Emergency. I think he’s exactly right. Short of a full-on nuclear exchange, collapse is going to go on for as long as any of us is likely to be around. It’s not something to be “gotten through”, like a case of mono or a bad break-up or a ten-hour shift at the cash register. It’s something to be lived into and through and beyond and above and between and betwixt. Collapse is the world into which we were born. It’s not just for breakfast anymore. It’s what’s for dinner.
Sorry about that.
One day, maybe quite soon, our magic chairs will lose their magic. I can think of two things to do now that will help prepare you for the emotional hammering that this will likely engender: find your people, and practice, practice, practice.
Find your people, because none of us can navigate collapse on our own. The pain and disorientation will be severe. Without a strong container of loving souls to share our pain and help hold our grief, how can any of us hope to remain whole and hale? I don’t think we can.
We will have to stop pretending that this current atrocity can continue, drop out of the distractions and expectations that keep us from action, and do the work we need to do, to find the people with whom we can face the storm. We’ve seen Katrina. There is nobody out there who is going to help us through this. We have only ourselves.
And when you find those people, begin the task of letting go. Embrace collapse as the reality it is and step into it. Shut down the magic chair and find out who you are without it. You need to know. Practice collapse, in small steps, in short leaps and brief bounds. Unplug. Disconnect. Turn off. Do without. Find out who you can be, will be, must be as things fall away, as the present unravels, as the future unfolds, as the losses accumulate. Notice how it feels, how it looks, how it sounds, how it smells. Notice who you become.
And when you find that who you are falls short of who you think you’ll need to be, find what healing and aid is available to you, with your people, and with those healing souls who live nearby. Seek healing, and work to make it yours.
Do it now. The collapse has begun. It will be with us from here on out. And one day soon, your pizza delivery will take much longer than 30 minutes. It will not come at all.
And there will be no cheesy breadsticks to soften that loss.
Gotta run. Todd’s back. He just posted a sticky saying he’s found the mother of all meta-tags. Cool.
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June 6th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Tim, thanks for this nudge to practice. It’s a timely nudge because my elderly mother is going to be gone for 2 months beginning Saturday, and I’ll be here alone to test things out. I’m one of the lucky ones who has solar panels, a well with a new pump, a great vegetable garden, two magic chairs, and plenty of creature comforts. However, unplugging the a/c, the water heater, the clothes dryer, and making do with much less than I’m accustomed to — well, this is all something I have only pondered in theory. Now it’s time to practice.
– Kit
June 6th, 2007 at 10:52 pm
Tim, I have to agree this is the only way to make the unknown even barely tolerable. I too have been in the process of “giving up” things, material or otherwise that I don’t expect to be here for too much longer. Some things I don’t miss much. But the thought of isolation is fearsome and I am about to travel up the eastern Appalachians, looking for a place where I can give my kids the best chance of survival. Some experiments in gardening, leaving the airconditioning off, walking more, centralizing my work in a closeby community, driving rarely, have taught me that I am not doing without enough and I need to plan a bit better, RIGHT NOW. For me, it will be the hardest when communications go down and what we will have is the earth (maybe), the sky and each other.
I find that I want to eat all the time, all the things I love, because I know mostly they will no longer be attainable. Better than going on a diet…that will come soon enough!
I have thought about who I will be during this transition to who knows what. I know I cant be the rock of gibralter that therapists are supposed to be. But I can cry with people, I can help mobilize people. And I can use my faith..nothing fancy just spiritual…to know that miiracles can happen, and when its my time, then I go on another leg of the journey.
My fear is for my children. Their dad died about 15 months ago…and in the grander scheme of things, I wonder why I am left to take care of them (though they are young adults). Perhaps because I am the perrenial student of everything I come across, and am always learning about things that somehow will apply to the challenges ahead. I am 60 and will not be here forever…I don’t see that life expectancy will be better in the coming years.
I also believe strongly in synchronicity. that is, no accidents in life. I did not force my children into college (though I am well educated), because they need a different type of education. My son can fix almost anything, and is very adept at solving problems with creativity. My daughter writes, like I do, is very loving, and talented with people. They both are entertainers, and lord knows we will need some of that.
Strangely, one of my favorite movies is Kevin Costners “The Postman”. I try to stay focused on what may be gained by the collapse, we have so lost our values in life, and many are so lonely.
June 7th, 2007 at 12:38 am
I’ve been feeling more and more connected through this blog. It was a great source of comfort during a recent time of disconnection. I do not need to take pharmaceuticals to check out, I’ve created a way to do it without them. When things hurt too much, or I feel invalidated, one too many times by someone awash in the Empire, a switch gets flipped and I’m here but not here. Most people in the larger world don’t even notice This last post of Tim’s is directly connected to a choice I made for myself this week before even reading Requiem for a Magic Chair. I made the decision to practice stepping outside of my comfort zone.
Another in-law was visiting from out of town, down to clean the fridge for her lawyer daughter who was moving into an upscale apartment in a notable area of the city. I was in one of my disconnected places but from that place I observed how comfortable this relative was in her life, she had enough wealth to afford her a high level of comfort and had a running dialogue to prove it.
I was shaken out of my disconnection with an overwhelming urge to strangle her, just so she would stop. I found her sense of entitlement so sickening. Then I stopped in my judgement and looked at myself and wondered where am I invested in my own comfort level. I decided to test it. I’d been invited to an Eco-Activist workshop in an old growth forest in B.C. I’d said no because I was feeling down and disconnected and just couldn’t imagine summoning up the energy required to get there. Then I was faced with this Empress of the Empire and her blatant comfort and I just knew I had to test mine. I was kickstarted out of my disconnection, I hopped a ferry and hopped a bus, travelled across island with a friend and we drove three hours down a logging road into the wilderness. When I got there it looked like I’d arrived in a refugee camp. There were tarps strung between trees and a makeshift kitchen set up which was in complete disarray. There was a fire burning with people curled up around it wrapped in blankets with the odd black lab lying at their feet.
Everything was dirty everything was strewn about.
I threw myself into the experience of living in community with people I didn’t know at a level of comfort that mimicked a refugee camp. A few of the kitchen volunteers were homeless and experiencing sores and colds and common complaints of the homeless. Which I now took personally because I was eating out of that kitchen.
People were sleeping wherever and whenever the level of cleanliness was pretty sketchy and we haven’t even talked about the latrines. I got a really good felt sense of how living rough would feel.
At the same time I found myself surrounded by 60 or so people who all saw the future the way i do …. one of collapse. I’m so used to being the only radical in the group here I was one of about 60. It was such a strange feeling. I got to hear my own conversations of the last few years being played back to me from many different angles. I also got to spend some time living in a nylon orange bag on the floor of an old growth forest it was completely magical and that beauty was puntuated by the sound of chainsaws from the logging area next door and the sound of majestic old growth trees falling in the forest. I was outside my comfort zone and in it all at the same time. I have just arrived back home and it was all I could do to not get down and hug my magic chair. I’m still processing my experience it’s really given me a lot to think about the strongest feeling the one I left with is I just want to go home and get on with preparing for the inevitable.
Vivienne
June 8th, 2007 at 12:43 am
I’d like to say hallo to Gail and say I’m really sorry for the loss of her husband and her children’s Dad.
My husband passed away when my kids were 4 and 7 and I’ve had a good few years to adjust.
My heart goes out to you, having to grieve the loss of your mate and the planet all at the same time.
From my experience I would say the most important thing is working at staying connected. It’s so tempting to disconnect when it hurts so much.
Whatever age your kids if you can give them that, in the midst of your own pain, you will have given them what they need. For the rest they sound pretty resourceful. My eldest son has turned out to be a musician too and like you, I think that will be a great skill to have and one that builds communion and community. Blessings to you and if you need to talk with someone whose been there ask Sally for my email.
Vivienne
June 15th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Wow, Tim. The “magic chair” is a great metaphor, not only for our physical conveniences, but especially for our psychic escape hatches — shopping, technological gadgets that keep us fascinated and preoccupied so that we don’t have to be in our bodies and FEEL, just about anything we use to distract and numb ourselves out. You say, “Emotionally and psychologically, our drains will clog and back up. And it may not be a pretty thing to see.”
That’s my greatest fear - not so much for myself and my husband and close friends, but for the rest of the populace-in-denial, those who don’t know how to process their emotions at all. When the shit hits the fan, I think it’s going to be the emotional shit of the unprepared that’s going to be the hardest to deal with.
After I’ve plunged my ecopsychology students into the unpleasant realities of peak oil, climate change, the global economy, species extinctions, etc., I tell them: “Deal with your emotions now, so that you can help others when the shit hits the fan. There’s going to be a ‘market’ for ecopsychologists, though you may not make a ‘professional’s’ salary when the economy collapses. But there will be a high demand for gentle, patient teachers and healers to help people understand what’s happening, why, and how to adjust to it.”
The other side of that coin is that we’ll need to protect ourselves from the insanity that will erupt. Not that it isn’t already erupting, but it will get worse. Keeping our own sanity will depend on having people around us who are committed to keeping their own sanity and helping each other with compassion. And any kind of sustainable human community that survives this century is going to have to know how to protect itself from the demons and predators that will be unleashed during the Long Emergency. That is one of the main reasons that it’s necessary to find our community and begin to prepare Now. We need to know how to protect ourselves physically as well as psychologically.
Thanks for a great post and a great metaphor. Are we done with Tod now?
Best,
Suzane
June 15th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
are we done with todd now notice the two ds are we done with todd like hes just some literary device we use whenever it suits us no were not done with todd todd is here and todd is helping and todd is doing research and todd is making the connection work in this stupid dialup podunk corner of the universe that tim lives in and todds trying to help figure out what to do so we dont kill everything todds here for the long haul
June 15th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Hey Suzanne,
Thanks for the comment. I think you’re exactly right. Glad you’re doing the work of training people for this. That’s a big aspect of what we’re trying to accomplish as well.
Looks like Todd took offense at your comment. I’ll talk to him about it. He may not have considered the possibility that you were asking because you are hoping to see more of him. It’ll be fine. He’s been hanging out in those huge climate change modeling programs all week and he’s a bit frazzled.
Take care
June 15th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
I’ve worked for years to learn how to be more definite in describing these things, but I’m also one who thinks the important thing is to recognize that the real future is an image in the fog. It’s not just that our limited understanding of nature causes us to ’see the iceberg’ just a little too late, it’s also that reality is always beyond our imaginings, our crisp and graphic images in particular, and that that is an actually useful way of telling the difference. If it’s crisp and graphic, chances are it’s a fantasy. Feint and unclearly formed, often a sign it’s reality.
As to ‘the collapse’. I think it’ll come on like turbulence, a breakdown in a flow of communication caused by little delays and misdirections that multiply, where just-in-time becomes just-too-late and backfires all the way up the line. There’s a good and bad kind, though, which would take some explaining. The bad kind would have an effect like the great depression, a dieback, and might be considerably worse. It might be triggered by discovering our errors in the plan to avert global warming and attempting to ‘turn the big ship’ even more sharply than the very rapid changes in direction that have been projected as necessary already.
June 15th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
Dear Todd, dear Tim,
I’m sorry, Todd. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, and I’m sorry I misspelled your name. I see that you are a big help to Tim and thus to all of us. Thank you for your support work.
Tim, yes, I recognize the you’re also trying to prepare and train people. That’s why I appreciate you and Sally and Todd so much. There aren’t enough of us yet! (There never have been!) So I do hope your film and dialogue work gives people the ‘permission’ and courage to begin shifting their consciousnes, speaking from their hearts and their guts, and standing up for what they know to be true.
Thanks for intervening with Todd. I can understand why he frazzled.
Best, Suzanne
June 19th, 2007 at 4:47 am
eh Tim,
gonna take your advice and practice…..one more post to VHEMT then power down. been practiceing for awile now. all seems to be indicating the slam that’s causeing all the ju-ju refractions and swirling is geting nearer…….though the impact of your work could still soften the really nasty preminitions since all is contingent upon the mind set of the ever changeing now…….hope you’re work is meet with niether skeptisism nor optimisim….just honest introspection…..rulgert