I am reading a beautiful book: Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. I picked it up after judging it extremely favorably by the cover, pictured
above.
So far, under the covers of those starlit tents, a troupe of
gypsy-performers wander through the deserted landscape of a world collapsed after
an eerily credible flu pandemic sweeps through and decimates the global population, rendering human life on Earth Third World/Medieval in a matter of weeks. These gypsies act out
Shakespeare and play classical music in the shanty towns of other survivors.
Mandel’s wasteland is a thorough and believable—most of the
population is gone, the internet is gone, plumbing is gone, electricity is
gone, gas is gone. People come to a hands-on, survivalist, practical way of
being in the world that I find more refreshing than frightening. The modern infrastructure we rely
on without thinking is impossible. Bandits wander around in horse-drawn cars,
candles and fire are the only light, new communities spring up, some with
strange beliefs bred of fear and desperation and post-traumatic relief at
surviving, some with good governance and productive order, and some, the
marauding actor-musician types, with the powerful, Star Trek infused belief
that “survival is insufficient.”
I’m drawn, as ever, to the creative and passionate
people outside the margins.
Because we need more of us out there—pulling back from the
brink, waking up and rethinking how the world operates. The status quo is
unacceptable.
A friend and I were talking the other day about Hurricane
Katrina. She was reading Sheri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial, about the ethical and bureaucratic horror that was
New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center during the storm. Doctors and nurses had
their hands tied by legalities as they tried to save what lives they could in
conditions that no one, ever, should need to be prepared for. My friend
explodes with fury that the state of the medical complex is such in our country
that, at the worse of times, good and trained medical professionals are
impotent to act on their skills and instincts.
We were talking on the same day that the House of
Representatives was voting on the Keystone XL Pipeline. One of my high school
students had come to the library to talk to me about that vote, saying how she
had just done a research project on the election in Louisiana this year, and how
the Keystone Pipeline played a huge role, because of the jobs that such a
project might bring to the region. Without saying so explicitly—as I am
supposed to demonstrate appropriate vocabulary with teenagers, even when it
seems nothing but the profane will suffice—we agreed that this was a truly
fucked up state of affairs.
This pattern of life is killing us. We are the ouroboros,
the snake that eats its own tail. We all know this.
Almost everywhere I seem to look, the culturally entrenched
patterns and infrastructure are destructive and crumbling, yet we continue to
live within their frameworks and priorities. Scratch surface of the economy,
the environment, the educational system, the emotional well-being of the
population, politics, and a whole lot of rotten jerry-rigged systems, full of
Catch-22s and evil contradictions emerge. A storm is coming, and doctors mix
euthanasia cocktails for patients, because this is—in the moment and with the
protocols on hand—some iteration of “best practices.” In this same state,
ravaged by a carbon emissions exacerbated hurricane almost a decade ago and
flooded with oil from a leak in an off shore well five years ago, elected
officials—who, I believe have a mandated responsibility to protect and advocate
for the safety of their constituents—invite, woo and welcome the same beast in
again in order to create jobs. Jobs that will allow, demand, to continue
participation in the same culture, the same system, the same economy built on
debt, of the carrot always being just out of the horse’s reach, so that we
become depressed, live within the toxic thought that we are neither—nor will we
ever have or be—enough.
Is it any wonder that I adore gypsies who rise up as society
collapses?
Though, as I think about why, it is not the freedom of the
road that draws me to them. For all my wandering, I crave a home-place and
roots far too much to join a pioneer caravan or circus train. I am lit on fire,
though, by the idea of being part of a fluid community that lives outside the
bounds of expectation. Perhaps it is all smoke and mirrors and fortune-teller
lies, but living with a hint more imagination of what could be makes the
reality of what is more expansive.
I can think of nothing better than being united with others
who act and believe in this mode of being, roaming together through the world,
sprinkling bits of magic and imagination in our wake, bucking trends of normal
and living out the reality that something else is possible.
We need more and louder and happier gypsies, I think. People
who simply refuse to drink the poisonous Kool-Aid of normal.
And, we’re around, hiding in plain view as mild-mannered
librarians, for example.
It would be easier, sweeter, if we were all within sight of
each other. If we traveled literally together, if we caravanned by day, set up
our tents at night together, performed magic and plays and told fortunes
together in the same towns. I love the thought of waking up every day and going
to sleep every night in the camp and company of people who share a common
allergy for normal and a common delight for imagination and possibility, of
being a rooted in a place with a gypsy heartbeat.
It would be lovely, and it is magical when you stumble
across a lost or new member of the tribe we do have. Mostly, though, we are
scattered, each laboring solo in the hope that someone else is out there, doing
the complimentary work necessary to keep the rebel troupe’s spirit alive, well,
and fomenting.
They are. I am. You are. We are. Remembering that, repeating
it like a mantra, a magic spell helps cut the loneliness, the doubt, the
sneaking suspicion that we are each the only one trying to do this, the great
beautiful thing of magic and hope and
labor and love that we are doing.
What we’re doing—all the wonderful artists and teachers and
builders and growers and doers and explorers and poets and assorted rebels who
I count among my tribe of gypsies—is all part of the same great magic trick we
are struggling to make real, and it would be a lot easier and a lot more reassuring
if we could hold hands over the rough patches more often. We are trying to save
the world—from any and all of the myriad of ways in which it is, at present,
totally fucked up.
This is a tall order. By the metrics of normal, it seems
impossible, statistically unlikely, and politically/economically
disadvantageous that we can do this, all or any of it.
But, on the other hand, what is easily possible,
statistically likely, and good for politics and the economy is precisely what
is constantly threatening to destroy everything I hold dear and ethically
sensible.
In that light, joining the intangible tribe of imaginative and practical gypsies makes more sense than
anything else I can fathom.
Who’s in?
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