In these increasingly dire times we have plenty of warners, but what we desperately need right now are more arks.
As Michael Ventura wrote: “[A]ll of this passing things on, in all its forms, may not cure the world now—curing the world now may not be a human possibility—but it keeps the great things alive. And we have to do this because, as Laing said, who are we to decide that it is hopeless? And I said to my son, if you wanted to volunteer for fascinating, dangerous, necessary work, this would be a great job to volunteer for—trying to be a wide-awake human during a Dark Age and keeping alive what you think is beautiful and important.”
~ James Hillman and Michael Ventura, We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse.
So, with that in mind, here's a little something to stow away safely in your ark, as we make preparations for the dark times ahead of us.
“Some want to turn the clock back, harkening back to some golden age of nostalgia, when women, children, the lower class, parishioners, and people of other races and creeds knew their place; not back to the 1950s, but further back: to Dickensian times and to (corporate) feudal fiefdom. They want to wind the clock back to a time before the hard-won battles for civil rights, social reforms, and worker representation. A time long, long before the ‘woke virus’, ‘illegal immigrants’, and gender identity, when life was more conservative and white lives mattered; though with a new, fundamentalist, Christian nationalist (or Islamist, or ultra-Zionist, or even atheist) and isolationist twist. And some will go to any lengths – and I do mean any desperate, violent, draconian lengths – to bring this vile and unholy vision about.”
~ Preface to Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt, a story of resistance.
Freedom
“I think hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.”
~ Ursula K. Le Guin, Speech at the 2014 National Book Awards.
Agents of Change
“Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
~ Ursula K. Le Guin, ibid.
Things are Worse Than Bad
“I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. Masked goons are dragging people from the street and throwing them into concentration camps. And there's no end to the cruelty.
“Things are worse than bad. They're crazy.”
If, like Howard Beale in the 1976 film “Network”, you're as mad as hell and you're not going to take this anymore, or you're interested in peaceful resistance, Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt may appeal to you.
Available at The Internet Archive's library;
And in full, as a PDF, at the Facebook groups Mystical Faction, Caravanserai and ishraqi institute in the Files section.
Won't you join us in this noble task?
Images
Image 1: Titanic-lifeboat-colorized / J.W. Barker (Carpathia passenger) / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain.
Image 2: The Underground Resistance Movement / ChatGPT.