Happy new year, friends.
I recently learned we have a foxtail agave in the backyard. It’s a classic California succulent that grows year round in a minty, cool green.
Every 10 years, the foxtail agave blooms. Its leaves expand like a giant exhale, and in the center, a giant, fuzzy, and very phallic stalk shoots up, covered with hundreds of tube-like flowers. These flowers contain the seeds for the next generation of foxtails.
The process is all consuming. The succulents expend all their energy in the rapid production of seeds—soon after, they die. They are monocarpic: plants that flower, set seeds and then die. They dusts their graves with ingredients for rebirth.
This cycle of rebirth feels very fitting for a year many of us want to bury in the past. Getting through 2020 can make you feel like Daenerys emerging from the fire: impossibly strong, resilient, a mother of dragons, a breaker of chains, QUEEN OF THE SEVEN KINGDOMS! … you get it.
A part of me is very excited to let 2020 scatter to the wind. And it feels like this really is a new beginning. Trump is slowly but surely leaving Page 1, vaccine distribution is underway, and this yearlong pause has forced many people to question and redesign their lives for the better.
But, another part of me fears that our collective shifts will be temporary. Without a visible enemy —COVID, raging wildfires, daily reminders of police brutality, school closures and childcare gaps causing 1 in 4 women to drop out of the workforce — will complacency set in? Will we forget that our healthcare system is fundamentally broken? That climate change is real and comin’ in hot? That structural and systemic racism remains entrenched in all aspects of American life? Will we forget that we’re actively inhibiting the health and wealth of millions?
Ed Yong explains in a brilliant Atlantic piece,
There is a likely future in which America’s immune system learns lessons from COVID-19 but its collective consciousness does not. Indeed, the U.S. has a long history of plastering over social problems with technological fixes. It and other wealthy countries have already monopolized global vaccine supplies, and, despite having the worst outbreaks, are likely to reach the pandemic’s endgame first. They might deduce that magic bullets won the day, forgetting the costs of idly waiting for those solutions and leaving vulnerable people to die.
“In The Past Is a Foreign Country, the historian David Lowenthal wrote, “The art of forgetting is a high and delicate enterprise … It can be a process of social catharsis and healing or one that sanitises and eschews the past.”
As we start this new year and eventually emerge from this waking nightmare, my hope is that we pause to heal before collective amnesia sets in. Even more, my hope is that we act like the foxtail, and we energetically, enthusiastically, and with monocarpic force say goodbye to what was and plant seeds for a drastically better future.
So for this edition of Muddled Fairytales, here are a handful of pieces that helped me rethink what was and reimagine what is.
Repetition, by Kevin McGloughlin and Max Cooper
A collaboration between the London-based electronic musician Max Cooper and the visual artist Kevin McGloughlin in Ireland, Repetition invites viewers to take a mind-bending dive into an audiovisual world of infinite regress. Extrapolating from everyday images, McGloughlin constructs roads and traffic lights that intertwine endlessly, and escalators and elevators that traverse high-rise buildings with no top floor. These mesmerising visuals are accentuated by the ceaseless, steady pulse of Cooper’s ambient score. Intermittent land- and oceanscape imagery seems to draw out parallels between patterns in human engineering and nature, as well as tensions between human expansion and the natural world.
What If You Could Do It All Over? The uncanny allure of our unlived lives. - Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker
h/t Lauren Sloss
Minimizing Pain, Maximizing Joy. - Hidden Brain
h/t Ami Gosalia
Life is filled with hardships and tragedies — a fact that 2020 has made all too clear for people across the globe. For thousands of years, philosophers have come up with strategies to help us cope with such hardship. This week on Hidden Brain, we talk with philosopher William Irvine about ancient ideas — backed by modern psychology — that can help us manage disappointment and misfortune.
[H]e was quivering. And why? Because he let the entire world press upon him. For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made the self negligible. Which spent military billions on foreign enemies but would not pay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind.
— Saul Bellow, Herzog
Do not go gentle into that good night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas - 1914-1953
P.S. - “Be Impeccable With Your Word. Don't Take Anything Personally. Don't Make Assumptions. Always Do Your Best.”