A meditation on seeds

It's apt that my last post featured Madeline Miller's Circe because I happen to be re-reading it as part of a social campaign, the #CirceReadalong by Little, Brown & Co. for the book's paperback release.

This week I've read chapters 1-5, and it feels good to be back in this world. My eyes slide down the story like water over stone, and small synchronicities are leaping out, things I didn't see before, because I've changed and the world's changed, too.

This marks France's sixth week in enforced confinement. Between my last post and now, I left Facebook (then returned), then all the social networks (just for a break, then returned). I left operations at Hurrah, days before confinement dropped. I quit smoking. I learned to cook. (It's fun! Who knew?)

And spring began.

I'm digging the introspection available in this strange snow globe, the opportunity it's provided to burrow and tease out the particulars of what I want to become at this point in my life. I've got all the time in the world, it seems, holed up in my office with its soft yellow light, a frankincense diffusion going and tea brewing and my fingers kissing the keyboard until the black outside goes deep electric blue, a world briefly submerged, it seems, by water—my favourite part.

Here are two quotes from those early chapters of Circe that've leapt out, for me, in relation to the confinement I'm living.

That's my life right now. As we all know, I'm also mortal. So part of me feels a little dangerous, like getting really spendy on the Croisette when you know it's all on credit. 

It's such a gorgeous way to encapsulate the immortal conception of time. I thought about how, in the narrative, many generations pass between Circe meeting Prometheus and meeting Glaucus. She doesn't feel that time pass, and we don't either. Most of it passes in idleness, boredom, small pleasures in the home she's always known: A childhood.

Six weeks have gone by. The world outside my window is a timelapse of the springtime sun rising and setting, and the moon traversing her phases in between. I feel the ways I've gotten strange, rewilded. I am already so far from the person I've been for the last five years that thinking about it gives me vertigo. It's frightening.

This feels like the compelling, unavoidable conflict happening in all our conversations right now. Per a YouGov poll in the U.K., just 9% of polled Brits want their lives to return to how they were. A Sociétés poll in France found similar results for one French person in two: When all this "ends"—and I'm sceptical we see an end the way we assume things end, neatly and on time, a train ride from one place to the next—people want to seriously revisit the rhythms of their lives and how they consume.

It takes, what, 60-odd days to change a habit? We'll all have been in some context of confinement that length and longer still. We are changing whether we want to or not. 

Yet when you look at how certain governments are trying to strong-arm a return to economic "normalcy" into the too-near future, there's palpable concern that all of this will have been for naught. Can they enforce a return to mindless consumption, a new iPhone every year, double the plane-trips to compensate for all the networking events and conferences missed... maybe just with masks and elbow-bumps?

Idiocy.

I think they'll try, but the reality we knew is gone, whether we like it or not. "Normalcy" packed her gone-for-good suitcase and didn't look back. 

Pandemics have a way of ending a chapter that everyone mistook for reality itself. The Bubonic Plague ended feudalism—reality as most Westerners knew it for an unbelievably long time. The Plague of Athens corroded Athenian democracy. The Spanish Flu struck the match that would become the fire that would sever the formal colonial bond between Great Britain and India. (Among other things.)

"But," some guy somewhere on Twitter whines, "you're talking about times when we had less scientific know-how and technology."

Shut up. It is blind confidence in the dogma of our current reality that makes it so hard to learn, not only from our own history, but from what these new rhythms we've taken on are already telling us. I'm not saying I don't believe in science or tech; of course I do. I'm saying our models are currently unsustainable, which is something we all hopefully know by now. I'm saying we get this free crash-course in how much our kids actually eat in a day, what consumables matter most, which food is actually local to our areas, who our neighbours are, what we care about, and for whom we matter.

Our systems are more fragile than we believe. Nothing is a monolith. And if we are so married to something that's gone, we will be poorly equipped for the progress we can make in the brave new world flowering before us. Mourn if you like; that's healthy. But don't drag the corpse around and force people to interact with it.

Personally, I look forward to the day this changed world, and this changed me, meet. I haven't any idea what we'll create between us, but the timing is right. Nothing I've already been seems to fit anymore. 

Inklust #24: Lessons from Circe

Let me say what sorcery is not: it is not divine power, which comes with a thought and a blink. It must be made and worked, planned and searched out, dug up, dried, chopped and ground, cooked, spoken over, and sung. Even after all that, it can fail, as gods do not. If my herbs are not fresh enough, if my attention falters, if my will is weak, the draughts go stale and rancid in my hands.

—Circe, Madeline Miller

I have been studying witchcraft for a year. It's creative and interesting, learning to use herbs, draw sigils, design spells suited for the purpose, memorise incantations, choose the moment, focus. Focus, focus. All this requires understanding your own intent, honing it to a sharp point.

...the draughts go stale and rancid in my hands.

This past year I learnt how little we actually know of what we want—past what we're asked to want, past what's appropriate, past what makes money, past a stagnated dream we've probably outgrown. What do we want when all the jockeying and the incentives to parrot a well-learnt response go away?

Strong will, the capacity to bend reality to your desire by magic or otherwise, requires an intimate connection with oneself. Everything, everyone, works to keep us from achieving that. (Our systems are fragile. We don't know this, don't think of it, but they rely entirely on our self-doubt—our bottomless need to find some solution outside ourselves, coupled with the suspicion that we are never quite doing enough, never quite good right here.)

I also realised how much of our shared reality is magic: Our belief in the stability of money. Our unquestioned treatment of corporations as people. The misguided assumption that consumption of the right things will yield preservation of the planet at large.

Consumption is always the hero. Magical thinking. The wrong kind, though. It's the kind that fuels addiction.

Think on Circe: What it means to make magic with the earth, with space, with yourself, this moment; to sharpen the deepest part of you into a subtle knife. Don't let the draught go stale and rancid in your hands.

Photo Credit: "Circe Invidiosa" by John William Waterhouse. The title means "Jealous Circe"; she's pouring the draught that will turn Scylla, "her rival," into a monster. In other words: Just another "inspired" man capturing a woman mid-catfight. Sigh. But I like it because of that tilt in her head, the furrow in her brow: She's concentrating. Even after the potion-making's over, one must still do the work of intent and execution. Circe works hard. She does not fuck around.

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What is "Inklust"? Boy am I glad you asked. Here's the manifesto: part I and part II.