Apocalypse Forever
The End of the World in Wyatt Daze's "Infancy Blues"
If you need to refresh your memory, you can find this week’s poem in the hyperlink above. This is just my interpretation of a few lines.
The world is not going to end. But things sure might be easier if it did.
For one, you wouldn’t miss a thing. I think that’s kind of funny. When you talk to people about death, just asking questions like, why do you care about this aspect of death, or that aspect, etc., you start to realize that what they really don’t like about death is how everyone parties without them. My impression of this is: 1. The scarcity is in our bones. And 2. we need to be partying more efficiently and to greater effect.
This poem by Wyatt Daze makes me think about how the apocalypse isn’t an event, blasting cleanly through everything and ending all the stories at the same time like Return of the Jedi . . . but is instead an internal condition.
It’s just, like, how many apocalypses can we live through? Our parents had the Cold War. I got ushered out of class for 9/11, came into the full ripeness of my adulthood in this pandemic. It never happens. Those who we have lost, we salute you. The rest of us must party on.
“I was grasped by the doctor, with forceful hands, and he yelled to the nurse, start the clock!”
There is an intense pressure in Daze’s poem. He is haunted by the next paycheck. Living paycheck to paycheck is like being a horse with blinders on. There’s all this noise around you, all this life! But they’ve worked you to the bone, so you need that next meal, need it so bad, so you have strength . . . for when they work you to the bone again. Here is the place you can stay forever and ever, if you pay your rent. I know this because I am like a horse with blinders on.
The things we want . . . don’t bring us much happiness when we get them. That much is clear. Yet we all keep wanting the same things.
“. . . truth lies in innocence, try to derive objective meaning from that message!”
So imagine that everything in the world is constantly shifting and changing and you can’t really know anyone or anything. Every time you tried to “grasp” something, you would have to essentially freeze it in place, cutting off the complexities of its past and its future . . . what I am saying is that to know the world you have to kill it.
I think that’s just one of the reasons that the world feels so dead, because so many of us are constantly neurotically “knowing” it. Knowing it to death. I don’t know. What I do know is every once in a while, someone reminds you to be brave but no one ever tells you to try to “not be neurotic!” I wouldn’t have minded it!
“Infancy Blues” is, at its heart, an earnest plea to stop killing the world inside you.
THREE THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW
The only time the world was saved, a Russian named Stanislav Petrov decided NOT to relay nuclear missile attack warnings to his superiors, suspecting them of being false alarms. Would make a terrible action movie, but a great rationale to fall back on during a spat with your boss who grew up on James Bond.
There are reports of UFO’s activating nuclear launch codes in US bases, which had to be disabled manually. Look it up.
If the world was to end, the person who lived the longest would have the worst time.
I think the reason most people have aversion to death is because they don’t know what comes next. I believe Even the most staunch believers in an afterlife still have a shred of doubt that allows room for the fear of not knowing to creep in. Most people despise being the person who doesn’t know…. I think the cure for the mass neurosisi in our wikigoogle culture is practicing the art of ‘not knowing’ from the perspective of a beginners mind. Practice allowing oneself to not be the expert or know something ‘already’- especially even if you do know already. I think in this culture of mass information, ‘ not knowing’ can be a place of rest and also an opportunity to listen. And also a practice for facing death when it occurs from a place of skillful means by meeting it with curiosity and not dread.