Dreamlog: Rutherford’s Game
I'm playing a scripted Live Action Roleplaying Game set over a weekend in a a Gothic Revival type building somewhere in a New Zealand town, a little reminiscient of Rutherford's Den in the Christchurch Arts Centre (though this connection doesn't come to me in the dream; for some reason I think Dunedin; possibly Knox College). The building has a history of science; several famous inventors have lived and worked there. In the game we are reliving the early 1900s and have a complex plot involving espionage, secret inventions and interpersonal rivalry.
At one point in the game I round a corner and see one of the GMs, who is holding a toy rifle. We simulate a fight and I 'win'. He hands me a clue.
Dreamlog: Nuking the Canoe
Yes, I'm alive. Haven't posted much yet. But first, a dream.
After a weekend with flu (if it was H1N1, it was incredibly mild), a strange dream clip this morning.
There were two dreams, and this was the second. I had tried to capture the first as it seemed important but it slipped from memory. The second was strange in that it felt like I was eavesdropping somehow on part of a real conversation.
I am at some kind of event which is either a garden show or a church conference. The people present are mostly older or middle-aged and more generally women. Presentations are being made. Someone appears with a message to give to me, which like the first dream also slips my mind. I am interrupted by a stranger, a woman in around her 60s, telling me a piece of gossip. Apparently a major scandal in the organisation is about to break. A midlevel cleric/manager type person has been sleeping with his secretary instead of his wife, meeting in hotel rooms somewhere out on the road. All very tawdry and normally this indiscretion could be overlooked as it is in all organisations, but this time it's a case of 'dating the Mafia boss's girlfriend'; he's somehow taken one step too far and got in the way of very powerful people.
"And that," observes the woman grimly, evidently disturbed by the news, "is really going to nuke our little canoe here."
By which I take her to mean that this incident won't just 'rock the boat' but will completely destroy the institution, and particularly 'our part of it', whatever that was. But it's her phrasing which brings me up startled: a very 'street' kind of way of putting it, and one I've never heard before. Suddenly I realise that yes, people my age have grown old too, and we're going to keep speaking in the slang of our time.
"Really?" I respond, my interest piqued despite myself, and leading her away from the crowd. "Wow. I should say I have no time for slander and gossip - I should, but I'm not. This I have to hear. Tell me more. Tell me everything."
And I wake up, hard, with the strange feeling that I've just intercepted some random stranger's 'telephone conversation.'
Memories of the first dream segment are slowly coming back. Something to do with an art festival. Old factories in the industrial zone turned into lofts. Walking among the artists through this section of the city, backing onto water: canals or a polluted river. There's another layer to the festival, and it feels like an exhibition opening, lots of dinner parties, but it's low-tech, lo-fi, and with a plot about meeting particular contacts, organising the resistance. Candles in jam jars, lovingly placed among broken brickwork. Sacred space.
A Horror of Great Darkness
And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon him. And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years; And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance.
-- Genesis 15
Monday finds you like a bomb
That's been left ticking there too long
You're bleeding
Somedays there's nothing left to learn
From the point of no return
You're leaving
-- Eurythmics, "I Saved The World Today"
Sustainability workshop today at work.
The Shorter Millennium Ecosystem Assesment: We're all screwed.
Five years ago, we had ten years to save the Earth. Assuming we had the political and economic will to even begin to try to do what is necessary - and assuming we agreed in the first place on just what *is* necessary - none of which we have.
Now it's 2009, we haven't fixed any of the big problems, we didn't succeed in stopping the war in Iraq, electing Obama didn't drawdown the military in Afghanistan, Peak Oil is upon us, we've heard two clicks from the Russian Roulette revolver of pandemic flu and we're still spinning the barrel, and deep ocean fish stocks are still being depleted. We're *really* screwed.
And I'm personally, physically and emotionally, exhausted just from trying to do the tiny, ineffectual things I've tried to do for the past two decades to try to fight this planetary death machine - or at least even just to acknowledge its existence and stay sane.
The magnitudes of the global problems we seem by any reasonable interpretation of science to face here at the dawn of the 21st century are so huge that it's really hard to even fit them into my brain. Except as a series of Dante-esque images: mass extinction, mass starvation, a world reduced to smoking desert. The drought in Australia feels like the harbinger of the dragon's breath, coming ever closer.
Visiting Brazil in January-February brought the depression further home. How the rest of the world lives is intolerable by Western standards, and yet still over the carrying capacity of the Earth by ecological standards.
The equations are simple. The world has a finite amount of stuff. The human race is on an exponential growth curve. Something has to give. We might be able to change, but it's probably too late and things have already broken beyond repair in the basement. We're locked into the internal combustion engine, into fossil fuels, sprawling suburbia, electric grids, fertiliser and pesticide dependent farming, strip mining and deforestation, a global food transport grid.
Compared with the ecological crisis, nuclear war seems trivial. At least to stop that we just had to get two superpowers to agree to not pull the trigger. To stop the death of the planet... we have to change our way of life. We have to choose to destroy everything we've spent the last century building. In the face of an economic system which rewards cutthroat competition and mercilessly slaughters anyone who achieves less than total productivity. At the same time as the entire Third World is climbing aboard, and we're trying to get off, but we don't want to lose our place in the sun either.
Common sense says it can't be done. We've built a death machine. What is there left except to decide the manner of our planet's burial?
How can you build any kind of movement on the assumption that our civilisation and probably our whole biosphere is already doomed and all we can do is accept our fate?
And yet. Against this is the spiritual view which says 'this world is actually only a shadow of a much more real world in which there is no limitation'.
How do these two apparent irreducible truths - the absoluteness of finite planetary resources, and the reality of an unlimited dimension of mind and spirit - go together?
How can we possibly fix things when we still don't agree as a society that they're broken? But if we do agree that they're broken - how do we bear the guilt, pain and anger?
How can I get up and go to work in the morning knowing that just by living, I'm bringing the Apocalypse one step closer?
How do you un-fuck a planet?
