islands of coherence
Buying a new cheap smart watch because it's round and comes with a lot of watch faces and thinking, what the hell, our species is going extinct, might as well have a new watch. Thoughts like that actually cheer me up. Another cheery thing is Heather Cox Richardson and Nadia Boltz-Weber appearing next to each other in my email. Like a one two punch that will get you out of bed and into action.
From HCR: "That Trump and his team are trying desperately to portray a marginal victory as a landslide in order to put an extremist unpopular agenda into place suggests another dynamic at work.
For all Trump’s claims of power, he is a 78-year-old man who is declining mentally and who neither commands a majority of voters nor has shown signs of being able to transfer his voters to a leader in waiting..... Right now, there is a lot of power sloshing around in Washington, D.C.
Trump is trying to convince the country that he has scooped up all that power. But in fact, he has won reelection by less than 50% of the vote, and his vice president is not popular. The policies Trump is embracing are so unpopular that he himself ran away from them when he was campaigning."
From Nadia: "this moment we are in is a very small moment in a very big story... looking again at my autobiography of worry, I think that at each of those anxious points in my life I was believing a story I was being told; in the media and by my friends and from our culture. Which is understandable, but in hindsight most of the stories did not end up being all that true, they just ended up being quickly replaced by new ones so we never noticed...The world tries to tell us this and the news tries to tell us that, but we are not a people of the 24 hour news cycle – we are a people of a sacred story.
How I think about the library:
"When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order." -- Illya Prigogine
The Village Murders: a classic British detective series.
Episode 1. The Company. Set in the rural English countryside, the company has a small governing board. It also has a comptroller and his assistant. The board suspects that the company's books are out of order and the company doesn't know how much money it has or where exactly the money is. Also the governing board is not allowed to see the financial records or bank account records; only the comptroller has access to those. Ends with scene of shire constabulary discovering a body nestled in the flowers at the small sculpture garden adjacent to the court building. There is no apparent cause of death. Assistant Interim Understudy Detective Investigator Tyler is called in. DEI Ty assembles a team.
Episode 2. The Consultant. The board, upon recommendation from some concerned stockholders, hires a Scottish consultant to sort things out. The consultant cannot see the bank records and has no institutional memory of how money has been spent. His long-winded opinions in a heavy accent will require captions. Flash back to scene of the consultant brokering a deal between a venture capitalist sports fan and the owner of a bankrupt soccer franchise for the sale of a stadium. The constabulary identifies the body found in Episode 1 as that of a stockholder named Fidel Fiducia.
Episode 3. Emerging Details. One member of the governing board is in the process of starting his own company while at the same time experiencing the impending death of his wife. The consultant becomes aware that there is soccer stadium nearby which might be up for grabs. The comptroller, who is also a soccer fan, meets the consultant unexpectedly at a meeting of the local Illuminati chapter. The consultant's cocaine habit comes to light.
Episode 4. Sturm & Drang
Episode 5. Denouement
In my time, my people have often lost elections in the first week of November, although none before have been this threatening to democracy itself. Hence I have rituals of comfort at this time, chief of which is a walk looking for milkweed, or harvey milkweed as I think of it. Also today I ordered two books by Dietrich Bonhoeffer for the library. On the way to the library this Thursday evening I noticed the lovely fade in the sky with a bright quarter moon and the first star. I thought of the songs of Chrys Matthews and of Amythyst Kiah's song Empire of Love:
