Dreaming in Multitudes - Identity Politics, Dylan, An Indifferent Universe and Despondency

It is cold, and the wind blowing hard into the room. I do not go to church - I woke coughing up a lung.

I tried only listening to The Identity Trap, but I did stop writing to watch. I have problems with identity politics. It is a long-standing problem with me, I can recall thinking on this subject back in my late twenties. Yes, I am white and male and heterosexual. I count the last as the least important - for all that the right-wingers rail against trans people and that a certain segment of the left raises gender to the status of an Article of Faith. My first encounter with this idea was with the concept of WASP. I am white and I was raised a Protestant, but with a mix of Swiss, and Scots, and Irish ancestry, I am not Anglo-Saxon. I consider myself Scots-Irish-Swiss, and I know only two others who fit into this identity. I am now a dishwasher, I have been a lawyer, I am a convicted felon. Which identity is mine? I think I am all of them. 

I side with Whitman, and his Song of Myself - I am multitudes. 

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,

Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their 

        parents the same,

I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,

Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,

Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,

I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,

Nature without check with original energy.

Others  - including the federal and Indiana governments - want to fit me into a category of their own choosing. The facts established by statutory law do put me into a certain category of criminal. Meanwhile, the government's efforts at fitting me into a certain psychological category are not supported by expert testimony. 

I do have the preference for one type of identity politics: that I am a member of homo sapiens, and that everyone within my species deserves the same dignity of status and treatment as everyone else.

 I did get some other reading done. Like The Guardian review ‘Life is about creating yourself’: on Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine

Subtitled Treasures from the Bob Dylan Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma, this is a 607-page, 11in-by-9in, five-and-a-half-pound behemoth with a dozen original essays, countless photographs, hundreds of illustrations, and plenty of connective tissue by authors Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel.

The Dylan Center opened in Tulsa in 2022. Its collection of 100,000 pieces includes everything from the tambourine that inspired Mr Tambourine Man (“actually a large, 16in-diameter Turkish frame drum known as a daf”, which guitarist Bruce Langhorne bought at Izzy Young’s Folklore Center in Greenwich Village) to a 1964 notebook in which Dylan scribbled new lyrics, top 10 lists (Dusty Springfield and the Beach Boys made it) and comedian Lenny Bruce’s telephone number (OL7 4384).

 Alex Clark's Let’s turn the air blue, girls – we should be free to curse at will I found hilarious - and so I point all women to it.

The more serious point, beyond the gleefulness with which some of us turn the air blue, is the need to resist all attempts to impose on us any misplaced notions of delicacy. For sadly for Strephon, we do indeed shit, gaudy tulips that we are.

I wonder if Oregon is seeing an influx of out-of-state applications: Field trip: inside America’s first magic mushroom school:

The state is the first in the US to allow supervised use of the psychedelic for adults 21 and older. In a few months, the students, who include midwives, educators and retirees, could support people through a magic mushroom experience at one of Oregon’s 19 service centers.

But first, they’ll need to complete a program like the one taking place at InnerTrek – the first government-recognized licensed and operating training program in the world, according to staff. After they complete the training, they can go on to apply for their licenses with the state.

I wrapped part of "Love Stinks", downloaded an Ike and Tina album, ate lunch, and read some articles from the Los Angeles Review of Books.

A Story of What-Ifs: On Álvaro Enrigue’s “You Dreamed of Empires” is a review of a book I have already noted, and this review does diminish my interest. This paragraph caught my attention:

The ending of You Dreamed of Empires, the aftermath of that fateful meeting, is both expected and surprising, the author having a bit of cake and eating it too. It has been pitched as a colonial revenge story, restitutive, and revolutionary. But these descriptors shift focus toward what happens and away from what I believe is the novel’s greatest strength: its comfort in the murky could-have-been. I find little solace in revenge and restoration—what would that even look like 500 years on? What Enrigue does in this novel is better than revenge—it is an attempt to understand. Why did Moctezuma let Cortés in? Why didn’t he kill him where he stood? Would it have made any difference if he had? All we can do now is recognize, imagine, wonder, fight, and stand until it is our own turn to fall. We don’t last. And yet, in that span, we may dream multitudes. 

I have my own doubts about the efficacy of revenge; my own experience teaches it turns on the revenger. Even more, is its resonance with my watching The Identity Trap - if we are trapped within our own little silos of experience, that reason and empathy cannot transcend the particulars of our own identities and experiences, then how can we dream multitudes?

I also read Roadside Attractions: On John Keahey’s “Following Caesar.

Finally, there was Parents Against Books: A Conversation with Nancy Agabian. I started wondering why I found its headline intriguing, but I kept writing and found what I did not expect:

Last question: There’s a moment in the novel when Na contemplates a bleak future. She observes that “all the books and libraries turning to dust, even the stuff we put on hard drives and plastic disks[,] will disintegrate in 10,000 years. Shakespeare, the Mona Lisa, Bach, all of it gone. Human intellectual production is fleeting and irrelevant.” If this scenario could occur, then why do you write?

My hope is that it does good, becomes part of a conversation that leads to greater action. I’ve felt so disillusioned about the atrocities happening overseas. It can feel like writing doesn’t make any difference. But it doesn’t mean I’m going to stop doing it. Because what else can I do? Seeing the bigotry in Los Angeles, on top of the apathy toward full-scale ethnic cleansing in Artsakh, and not to write about it—that would be a defeat. It’s hard; it’s been one of the worst things I’ve felt in my life. I don’t have any words. But I have to keep trying to find them.

I have had only one panic attack. This was during the mid-Nineties. It was at night, I was in bed, trying to get to sleep, when I started thinking about the death of the universe and how even the atoms would die. It left me thinking there was no purpose to writing, to art, to any type of human endeavor. Looking back as I had, I count this as an important point on the timeline of my depression issues. What I have come to see - by again hooking up with Albert Camus and memories of playing Scrabble with my mother's mother - it is the playing that is important when Death runs the game. I wish I had seen something like what Ms.Agabian says above - we must keep trying against all that would drown us in despondency.

Lewis H. Lapha's long but very impressive essay Power Outage: On the thermodynamics of history, I read in full. I suggest you do the same, even though I want to share a part here.

My guess is that the guardians at the gate are looking in the wrong direction. I take the cue not from a biblical prophet or a pagan oracle but from the first law of thermodynamics and the eminent British American physicist Freeman Dyson, who in the late 1940s joined J. Robert Oppenheimer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, to research quantum theory and pursue the possibility of deep-space travel. Asked to address the law of entropy and its implication of the universe as frozen as Midas in the prison of his golden wish, Dyson answers that the first law plucks out the flies from the ointment of the second. The energy reserve contained in the sun gives “strong support to an optimistic view of the potentialities of life”:

The world of physics and astronomy is inexhaustible. No matter how far we go into the future, there will always be new things happening, new information coming in, new worlds to explore, a constantly expanding domain of life, consciousness, and memory.

 What Dyson says about the future can be as fairly said about the past; the further we go into it, the more marvelous it becomes, generative and inexhaustible, a huge and expanding landscape of human energy and hope that makes possible the revolt against what G.K. Chesterton called “the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about”—these days on the White House lawn, poolside in Palo Alto, on a Swiss alp at Davos.

History is a record of events (of kings crowned and queens decapitated), but it’s more usefully understood as a vast storehouse of human consciousness that is the making of ourselves as once and future human beings. On mankind’s travels across the frontiers of the millennia, we save from the death of families and the wreck of empires what we find useful, beautiful, or true. The stories carved on the old walls, printed in the old books, are the stuff of which man’s humanity to man is made. Navigational light flashing across the gulf of time—as words in ink and paint on silk, sculpture in marble and chapters of law, bills of lading and writs of execution, in five-act plays and three-part songs—tells us who and where we are.

We confront the choice between a future fit for human beings and a future made by and for machines. For the finding of a phoenix in our ashes we have as our most abundant resource the limitless expanse of human ignorance, which rouses out the will to know, kindles the signal fires of the imagination. So sayeth Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything: “The course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities, than we tend to assume.” Where else does one live if not in a house of straw made with the shaping and reshaping of a once-upon-a-time? What is it possible to change if not the past living in the present, the present living in the past? And how else do we do so if not with the gift of metaphor and the energy of mind?

I hate to sound like one who thinks every tool is a hammer yet I read this essay (and the quoted portion, particularly) as aligned with Ms.Agabian and Albert Camus. We can succumb to despondency in the face of an uncaring, even hostile, universe (and having done so, I can say it is easy to do and difficult to escape), or we rise to the best parts of humanity and give the finger to that indifferent universe.

We may not conquer the universe, but we can fight against the worst of us to make life a better experience and the world a better place. I do not know how else to describe the opposite of succumbing to the ugliness of despondency.

Having mentioned both Whitman and Dylan, I close with:

I have not yet crossed the doorsill. Instead, I have read and written and napped most of the day away. The cat returned, rather upset with me and insistent on being let in, around 1 pm. He ate and then slept while I napped. I may need to go out to get caffeine. I am not sure I have the resolve to do so. 

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