The View from my Bed
Yeah, hard to believe, but this sciatica is keeping me down. I’m on Day 12 of mostly lying prone in one place or another. My folks are setting up a mattress near the xmas tree in their living room where I’ll be eating my holiday dinner later today. Blessed with a couple of nice dinner party experiences, both of which accommodated my horizontalism… Adriana has been simply angelic, revealing herself as a great chef, and enormously patient in the role of Florence Nightingale to my role as simply patient, the injured one. Now she’s sniffling with a bad cold, so we’re laughing about our mutual incapacitation…
Anyway, good time to catch up on reading (as if I will ever finish reading the books I already own!), and like this typing I’m doing right now, I find I can do my “normal” work pretty easily too, laptop in lap… I went next door last week to a small party that included what was labeled a “heart circle,” wherein any of the 15 people in attendance could take the floor for as long as they wanted and speak to anything that mattered to them. It was a cozy and intimate evening and a lot of emotions flowed, personal sagas were touched upon, memories and hopes and fears were shared. I’m glad I went, but as often happens to me in such situations, I found myself slightly revolting against the extremely personal and quasi-narcissistic focus of most of the comments. Instead, I wanted to contextualize the commentaries in the bigger picture, the end of 2007, the beginning of the 21st century, the incomprehensibly enormous moment in world history that we’re living through, mostly unconsciously.
I’ve been reading some books that encourage this longer view. In particular, the sense of collapse that I touched on in my last blog post, whether the climate change that is threatening fresh water and food production, energy and resource wars, the slowly unfolding international financial crisis that is far from finished and may land us in this century’s first Great Depression, the diminishing power of the U.S. over its own fate–a degradation made much more rapid by the Bush years… all this and more. I see it as part of a moment in history when the old paradigms are giving way, and the new ones are far from clear. It’s much more complicated than the demise of U.S. empire and its replacement by China, or by a new multilateral world order, even if those latter developments are part of what we can perceive. There’s also the demise of nation-states after the furious and passionate and urgent rise and spread of nationalism in the late 20th century.
