Strong Stories for Tower Times
What remains true when things fall apart?
Ursula K. Le Guin: “To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”1
Walt Whitman: “And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud,
And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth…
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.”
The open hand needs the open hand
There were 25 people on the Long Table call, the most I'd ever seen, and everyone was telling the headlines from their corners of the world. Daffodils! Spring! Morning! I was happy for them, but also, in my corner of the world it was Tomatoes! Autumn! and Night-time! The same way that Spring was newly palpable to them, Autumn was palpable to me— temperature, day-length, harvest.2 (This is an Upside-Downland minority problem from hanging out with international groups on the Internet. I mostly find it fascinating, but sometimes being a lone singer against a chorus stirs a feeling that I associate with reading dude-books or listening to dude-music, a feeling that I think of as jumping over a little wall.)3
Despite the talk of Spring, people’s faces were visibly shocked. Societal-collapse chickens coming home to roost. We’ve talked about it a lot around the Long Table, but now here it is, getting real. The Turtle Island / North American people especially— but things are getting uncomfortably close to home for a lot of people right now.
We were talking about Tyson Yunkaporta’s ideas of Right Story / Wrong Story. Were some of our dearly held stories only suitable for the good times? Did we now have to give them away in favour of other, more realistic stories? These were the questions we were pondering on. And we were also discussing how abstract news can feel to the body like imminent physical danger.
, who by a trick of the camera appeared to be wearing a flower-crown of the flower called in Swedish and French eternal and in English everlasting, was talking about how to walk the line between overwhelm or head-in-sand denial of what he called the firehose of information, i.e. the news. I got a bit nettled by that and typed into the chat that in my view it’s perfectly fine not to stay kneeling with your mouth open while the firehose is turned on your face. (Not in so many words: I said it’s a legitimate decision to disengage from the news at this point in time.)I was also thinking about Freddie DeBoer’s IS / OUGHT formulation. He explains is / ought thusly: “One of the themes I’ve come back to many times in my writing is the idea that people mistake empirical claims (this is true about the world) with normative claims (this should be true about the world).”
Or, even more simply: “There is a difference between saying ‘this is good’ and ‘this is true.”
Isn’t the proof of a story’s truth in whether it holds? We are in the widening gyre, and some beliefs do not stand. Is that because they are not fit for our times? Or is it because they were false, unsound? It’s painful and awful, but isn’t the stripping away of illusion a good and necessary thing? What are the bones, then— what is left when the centrifuge has done its work?
Back in the weird-arse year of 2020 I began to notice an interesting lockdown phenomenon. Faced with the existential shock of unprecedented information and experience, certain people crumbled and certain people thrived. Yet contrary to the prevailing mythos, those who were comfortable inside of chaos were those who had lived experience of chaos: that is, people who had personally experienced trauma, struggle, poverty, and so on.
It was like… Aaah. This I know.
And also… Well, I always felt like the axe was about to fall, and now it’s fallen… The Bad Thing is here, and weirdly, that’s a relief.
Conversely, some of the most personally outraged people, it seemed to me, were those who had seldom or never had their will opposed. Those who were accustomed to choosing, enacting, and unlimited freedom of movement were also those who were the most shocked by not being able to just… you know… make things how they wanted them to be. Life teaches what is possible— expectations are shaped by experience to date. Most times bold action is rewarded. But what happens when you come up against something that's outside your power to change?4
Maybe, I thought, just like the way psychopathy comes into its own in certain scenarios (say where cold-blooded ruthlessness is selected for), there might be times when trauma-brain— usually such an annoying impediment to healthy functioning— comes into its own. The passivity of learned helplessness is not generally useful, but there are also more subversive skills trauma teaches. Resilience. Stoicism. Getting by with little. Improvisation. Camaraderie. Soul-maintenance under oppression.
Because the gifts of struggle are a kind of wounding, enacted on the body, and because they are to do with dark things like abuse, poverty, and violence, they are wreathed with taboo. That’s why I say they are a shadow-power, an untapped source of dark electricity. Maybe these powers can be called upon in our hour of need; maybe we can wear them and wield them through the dark times.
I started thinking about how in majority culture the virtue of action is exalted and the virtue of endurance undervalued, pushed into the shadows. There is a time to act and a time to endure, and— like the serenity prayer says— the wisdom to know the difference between the two. (All of this does have something to do with addiction, which I’ll come back to later.)
I wrote: I've got this theory that there are two main modes of being in the world, two main strategies of adaptation. A balanced human will have both, and be able to choose which to deploy in response to whatever arises. We might call the two modes Yin, and Yang.... We might call them the way of Will, and the Way of Surrender... We might call them Doing, and Being.5
WILL relates to the ability to enact change, to be the agent of ideas, to make and do. SURRENDER is about the ability to accept, to take things as they are, to be graceful with uncertainty…
Unfortunately, growing up under a culturally dominant system that favours action and accumulation (often represented in the form of money or material achievement) over anything else, many of us have not had the chance to value or learn the way of acceptance, of being-ness. In a system that upholds only financial value, and upholds activity and gain as the highest virtues, this yin side is compartmentalised and channelled as religion, or the cult of positivity, wellbeing etc. (That is, as a non-threatening variation not at odds with capitalist thinking.)
So YANG activity is encouraged, and YIN disparaged and scorned, or else compartmentalised, 'othered'. (Gendered, to be specific.)…
The reason the way of YIN is subversive under a society obsessed with money is that it makes people content— it means their power and solace come from within themselves. It also means they act more selflessly as they are likelier to have deep understanding of other people's suffering. Neither of these things is likely to generate profit.
My Chinese Doctor Henry used to say I had ‘pathological Yang’, so I know about how to be more Yin. Cut out spicy food, sugar, caffeine, and alcohol; eat more fruit and green vegetables. Sleep, drink water. Get into the darkness— dim light, candle light, moonlight, starlight. My favourite Yin activity is sea-gazing, but if you’re not near the sea, any body of water will do. Basically, chill the fuck out.
I think part of the shock of the moment is that it disproves exceptionalism— the idea that the things that happened to other people in history cannot happen to us, because we are different and special. Like when Val Plumwood was being attacked by a crocodile, thinking But I’m not meat— I’m a human being!6
Last week a wētā crawled on my face while I was sleeping. When I told the story to my flatmate Kieran, he told me about the time a dead tī kōuka tree fell over from the top of the retaining wall, right into the back door. Eight or ten wētā swarmed out, scattering from their smashed apartment block. “It’s just like the Tower!” I said. (In the Tower card, people fall from a lightning-struck building.) 7
Indeed, we are in Tower times. In the words of Karl Marx, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” The Tower is bound to fall, because it is rotten, and pouring energy into propping up false ideologies is throwing good money after bad— sunk cost fallacy. If denial is a creed you uphold, a heartfelt belief, emotionally necessary, you will fight for its veracity with evangelical zeal. It’s kind of like the way people in abusive relationships spend a lot of time saying how great their partner is. While you are spending all your power on what you wish was, you cannot begin to work with what is. Say you drop it, the wrong story. What comes next? The unknowable. It is already here. Do you want to see truly? Then you must give away what is not-true.
The deeper problem with clinging to Wrong Story is that denial is an obstacle to appropriate action. This is where addiction comes in. Modernity itself is an addictive substance.8 Step One: we admit we are powerless. I think that the exceptionalist, capitalist, patriarchal story of human dominance is not (as it might superficially appear) a tool of power, but rather an illusion of power, an impediment to true power.
I’ve written about all this before.9 “Let’s assume for a moment (I wrote) that the blackest assessment is correct, and the world really is a terminally ill loved one. How much time do we have to get real with the dying process? I’m frustrated and bored with the mass cognitive dissonance. Fantasism is not going to work, hedonism is not going to work: creativity and magic are the medicine, and those only work if you are willing to labour in service of truth and beauty. Time moves only forward, never backwards! This is the only life we have— these are our times! What if the imminent end of the world means that whatever’s yours to do or say, you should do or say it right now? Can we all please get through the denial-phase, and into reality, and start to live here and now?”
How do I know about Deep Presence, Radical Acceptance, the Gift? Why am I so sure? It took me a while to put two and two together. I know because I am informed by lived experience of extreme poverty. In the smaller Zoom group of the breakout room, I found myself saying that I know about the power of powerlessness because I know how it feels to have almost nothing, to be so poor you can’t afford food or transport. In that state one feels deprivation bodily; yet paradoxically one also learns how little one needs. It’s a stripping back to the bare essentials of life. “You can’t afford the bus, so you walk,” I said. “You can’t buy food, so you go hungry. You trust that sooner or later something will show up.”
Like an Arctic explorer, conscious of the mathematics, energy in, energy out. Like a junkie, focus narrows, the world becomes small. Time changes, sharpening to the moment. The trick is not to get too caught up in dancing with those two monkeys, the Past and the Future. It’s a forced discipline of asceticism: many things— most things— are just not possible, so you let them go. (But always, still, there are choices and opportunities. One becomes resourceful in different ways, and very grateful for simple things.)10
I was in that state in the first place due to vows of independence I had made: I had sworn off State help. (Ironically, this was the phase in my life when I was most ‘employed’, but I was working intermittent short-term contracts for not much above minimum wage. I saved as much as I could, and I was extremely frugal all the time— I could make a week's wages cover two weeks expenses if I was careful— but sometimes the money just … ran out.) Even as I knew it was kind of crazy what I was doing, I also felt there was something to be learned there.
The experience of chronic poverty is not so rare, but there’s a strong shame-taboo around it, so it’s hard to talk about. Note, I am not advocating for poverty, which is both boring and terrifying. Extreme poverty or deprivation can leave lasting scars around things like food— it can turn a person feral. I’m just trying to explain why my gift economy politics feel watertight. Also (weirdly, this feels even harder to say, but those who know me can confirm) I’ve always had a need to give and share. So maybe my belief in the Gift is hard-wired to some extent.
My touchstone poverty experience is easy to call to mind. It was dark and I was walking home. It was a long walk and I was very hungry (likely chronically malnourished: this phase went on for almost a decade, on and off), weeping with fatigue. I was at the end of my strength, but I had to keep walking. Remember this, I thought. Don’t forget how it feels.
Another person in the breakout room spoke up. His name was Lloyd. “I’ve never met you before,” he said, “but I have also experienced what you’re describing. When you are hungry, people feed you.”
He told us about a time he was walking from the outskirts of London to the centre because he couldn’t afford the bus fare. He had 20p in his pocket, and he walked through a street market looking for something to buy for breakfast. He went up to a fruit stand and asked, how many apples can I get for 20p? The stall-holder handed him a whole bag of apples. When he protested, the stall-holder— who was a Muslim gentleman— said that it was his job today to give Lloyd this bag of apples.11
There is a secret shadow-truth here that one only discovers in times of true need: To need is also to give. It’s to give the giver the power to give. The open hand needs the open hand. All the great religions encode this truth, but it is older than any of them.
Another writer I love who also holds to a poverty-informed materialist analysis is
. I have a soft spot for fellow autodidacts, and reading Rhyd has helped me untangle numerous intellectual knots over the years. I was trying to work out how to weave him into this piece, when— in one of those beautiful synchronicities that often occur these days12— the perfect essay dropped into my mailbox:
In this piece Rhyd describes finding himself homeless in a foreign country. He writes: “I stayed and lived in someone’s storage garage for three months. I slept on a dirty mattress raised from the concrete floor with broken wooden palettes and old Jeep tires and tried not to accept the more ‘realistic’ conclusion that I’d fucked up pretty badly.
There have been countless other moments like this for me. And what’s funny is that those many moments are exactly why I’ve never let myself become pessimistic or cynical about the world. And at the same time, they’re also how I learned to focus more on the ‘real’ of situations and focus on actual material conditions, rather than on fantasies or Idealism.”
Rhyd writes in this piece that he is often accused of cynicism. This happens to me fairly often too, and I find it weird. I get called negative, pessimist, cynic, Doomer. In my view I’m the opposite of these things. I am not advocating trading one kind of delusion for another; I am advocating for radical presence as an infinitely flexible adaptation.
Withdrawing to preserve energy is like hibernation, or like banking down a fire before going to sleep. The grey ash appears dead, but underneath its soft blanket the coals are smouldering, waiting to be blown awake when the time comes for flame.
Alongside the economic and propaganda wars that are being waged, there is also a magical / spiritual war. Alongside, inside, emergent from: in any case these wars are intertwined, and it is by addiction that they hook you. Your psyche is a secondary battlefield. Watching may feel important, but the constant barrage of horror is impossible to process. That is not accidental: it is a dark magic designed to disempower you. If you drink from the firehose too much, you will lose heart and hope. The addict upholds the story that addiction feels good; sobriety means admitting enslavement felt bad all along. Naked reality hurts like hell at first, but it is also a relief.13
Some people like to talk about their God's plan and, each to their own, but that doesn't sit right with me. I believe in Earth rather than Heaven. What there is, is IS-NESS. A saying I like in regard to this goes This being so, how should I proceed?
For the sake of sanity it is important to be anchored in the immediate material world. Being where and when you are is a lifetime’s work. Clawing back subjectivity and agency is imperative. Pull your psychic tentacles in, get smaller. The world of matter has weight that the world of theory does not. Our animal bodies need to touch, smell, taste, and move as well as listen, watch, and think. See what is right in front of you to do. Most artists know that creativity responds to restriction: maybe that’s not accidental. Maybe that’s what it’s for.
All of this has to do with Isn’tness Theory, my attempt to articulate negative capability— the feeling of the fertile void. I wrote: Don’t throw your energy away. Fighting is capitulation, implicit submission to someone else’s terms. [I would add now that fighting feeds the monster, makes it stronger.]14 (Le Guin: “To oppose something is to maintain it… You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”)
Make something instead.
Being poor forced me to humble myself, to receive, to trust, to reside in the immediate present. Becoming a writer has taught me to work inside uncertainty, to move steadily forward into the darkness, following the thread of instinct. I started this newsletter with no idea of what it would become: I wrote my way here. I go to sleep not knowing what I will think in the morning, yet knowing that the ideas will arrive, having woven themselves overnight. It’s like Annie Dillard says, “Give it, give it all, give it now... Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.”
This feels true. By spilling words, by emptying myself, I make room to be refilled.
You must work on your mind because it is where you live, where you have always lived and will always live. Yet the mind is an ever-shifting, fluid landscape. You must tend your mind with the constant labour of a jungle gardener. Keep it clear of interference. Notice which ways of thinking— your ways and the ways of others past and present— are strong and flexible enough to encompass ANY eventuality. Notice which analyses still hold even under extreme adversity.
We were born for this. Literally: we are here, so these are our times. (As Le Guin says— it is the Archmage Ged who speaks— “This is. And thou art.”) It’s this or nothing. Being with what is is surrender, but it is not weakness. It is the beginning of strength, because it is a framework of science, first principles. Begin by knowing that you cannot know, yet nevertheless formulate, refine, and continually test hypotheses. The erosion of collective truth-finding practices means we must come home to subjectivity. We must give our energy to the small collectives inside which we actually live. Particularity is where we dwell; I guarantee that where you are is waiting patiently for your attention. While I’ve been finishing this essay the dawn has come. I’m sending it to you as the rising sun behind the dark ridgeline brightens the morning clouds into a pillar of light.
If you’re hungry for a radical reality-reset, School of the Unconformed’s Lenten tech fast started a few days ago. It’s not too late to join; it runs for 49 days. You can set your own rules, but Ruth and Peco recommend ‘feasting while fasting’— introducing hands-on activities to return your body to where you are. Read this guide: Random Acts of Anachronism. (If you don’t want to go full ascetic, you could consider this list as hands-on activity inspiration.)
It is Faxe the Weaver speaking, in The Left Hand of Darkness: they are an adept of the (Taoist-influenced) religion Handarra (opposed in the novel by the younger, more Yang cult of Meshe).
“Within the white hood Faxe’s face was tired and quiet, its light quenched. Yet he still awed me a little. When he looked at me with his clear, kind, candid eyes, he looked at me out of a tradition thirteen thousand years old: a way of thought and way of life so old, so well established, so integral and coherent as to give a human being the unselfconsciousness, the authority, the completeness of a wild animal, a great strange creature who looks straight at you out of his eternal present.”
The entire novel can be seen as an exploration of the power of Yin— Genly Ai, the protagonist, a human man, is oriented by default towards Yangness, and it is hard for him to come to terms with Gethen’s central paradox: truly ungendered people.
My headline was:
Man Bakes Bread
Woman Has Ideas
Mist Hides Mountains
What I mean is the stepping outside of self, the disjoint of having to imaginatively inhabit another reality in order to engage
Ultimately inevitable for all human beings
I illustrated this pair of concepts with the Magician card and the High Priestess card— the first two numbered cards of the Major Arcana. I wrote The Fool comes first, at 0, but the Fool is a baby, and I'm talking here about ways of being an adult.
(A somewhat glitchy version of) Plumwood’s account of the attack can be read here: Val Plumwood - Prey to a crocodile
I am indebted to Stephen Harodd Buhner’s book Earth Grief for alerting me to Plumwood. I wrote about Buhner and Earth Grief here:
Hyperobject Polycrisis
Czesław Miłosz, A Song on the End of the World:
”On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be…
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now...
Astrala says: “In Medieval Italian city-states (where many of the oldest tarot decks originate from), wealthy areas contained forests of towers, which represented the status of the inhabitants. In this way, The Tower speaks to the impermanent nature of status and wealth and the danger of building your self-concept on a foundation that is subject to such vast fluctuations of fate.”
/ A collection of stories about how things are
Here:
On Being Galvanised, Not Paralysed
Annie Dillard offers the following writing advice: “Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying patient that would not enrage by its triviality?
It’s important to note, too, that social context matters: there is more or less to share and / or scavenge depending on where and when you are.
I note now, reading this story, that the giver gave the asker what he asked for— that is, he granted him the freedom of choice.
Rhyd’s essay was followed by another synchronous post arriving— this wonderful, angry, moving essay from about being debilitated by a concussion: being forced into being rather than doing…
If you are struggling with tech-addiction, try this excerpt from
’s pamphlet ‘You don’t need a smartphone’ (which you can purchase in its entirety here.) [Edit: Embarrassingly, in my original post I also linked here to a ‘stack that I’ve since found out was made with AI. I have removed the link.]Like dealing with narcissists: withdrawing energy— what is sometimes called Grey Rock Technique— means you cease being ‘supply’.
Just after publishing this piece I came across a story in the Rebecca Solnit book I got from the op shop last week, The Faraway Nearby. She tells how in Myanmar monks and nuns publicly protested the military junta by "the rare and extraordinary rite known in Pali as patam nikkujjana kamma, the overturning of the alms bowl so that nothing can be put in it... Overturning the bowls banned the military and their families from giving alms, effectively excommunicating them... The monks marched through the streets holding their bowls upside down, a denunciation made scathingly public. To refuse to accept the gifts was to refuse to confer the reciprocal gifts, to break the threads that tied those secular people to monastic life and to the life of the spirit."
Sometime around 2019 I read an amazing, fearless essay by Catherine Ingram, titled Facing Extinction. She has since removed it from the Internet, but just now I found two quotes I had cached and then forgotten:
"You may find yourself in the company of people who seem to have no awareness of the consequences we face or who don’t want to know or who might have a momentary inkling but cannot bear to face it. You may find that people become angry if you steer the conversation in the direction of planetary crisis. You may sense that you are becoming a social pariah due to what you see, even when you don’t mention it, and you may feel lonely in the company of most people you know...
I once asked Leonard [Cohen] for his advice on how to talk with others about this. He replied: 'There are things we don’t tell the children.' It is helpful to realize that most people are not ready for this conversation. They may never be ready, just as some people die after a long illness, still in denial that death was at their doorstep. It is a mystery as to who can handle the truth of our situation and who runs from it as though their sanity depended on not seeing it."
And: "Courage is often confused with stoicism, the stiff upper lip, bravado that masks fear. There is another kind of courage. It is the courage to live with a broken heart, to face fear and allow vulnerability, and it is the courage to keep loving what you love 'even though the world is gone."