I had a bleeding issue a short time ago. Even had to get a transfusion. You don’t need (or want) the details. My takeaway — for the purposes of this post — was consciousness. Over a period of several days, my state of consciousness shifted, waxed, and waned. Red blood cells carry oxygen. We all get this. The lack of oxygen creates a medical state called hypoxia, which means low oxygen. Gotta love professional, proprietary language. My bleeding ordeal reminded me of an Army experience.
Long ago (when I was in the Army) I was a military free-fall parachutist. We were periodically required to “chamber test,” which meant travel to an Air Force base to be tested in an “altitude chamber,” the same as Air Force pilots. The Chamber simulated rapid changes in air pressure and oxygen levels, and it was designed to identify and eliminate people who conked out too easily for whatever reason when exposed to these rapid changes. Free-fall parachuting, especially when the drops are made from above 12,500 feet, require pre-breathing oxygen through masks to saturate the blood prior to dropping through the atmosphere at a rate of around 120 miles per hour. You get the picture. Military scuba divers had to chamber-test, too.
The chamber was kind of a kick, like a carnival ride. Everyone got a good laugh when we pressure tested, simulating a rapid altitude gain (and pressure loss), because it blew up everyone’s intestines and filled the chamber with farts. Another test was a systematic drop in oxygen while we watched a color wheel on the wall. They pulled the oxygen out and pumped in nitrogen, inducing hypoxia, and we’d watch as the color drained out of the color wheels and went all monochrome. Then, as people began to babble and fall out, they’d pump the oxygen back in; and we’d watch the color come back as we felt our minds return to us.
When I was losing blood recently, based on my posture or what I was doing, I’d shift through these various states of oxygen saturation, but from the first-person standpoint, not a clinical third-person standpoint, I was feeling my grip on something we might call reality loosen, then re-tighten, then loosen again. I don’t think this is what the Bible meant by “binding and loosing,” but who knows? It made me strangely aware of how sensory-mediated and fragile this “grip” on the “real” really is.
In conjunction with this transient hypoxia, I did a couple rounds of anesthesia — which only heightened my awareness of reality as a kind of game played between I-worlds, social-worlds, and The Real. Absent my own grasp of how I perceive the world, and through which cultural filters, there is something there; but it’s far deeper, more complex, more mysterious, and “other-worldly” than we can even imagine.
I think about this when I observe today’s socio-political commentariat — newsey types with a menu of cultural filters who have a grip on our grip of some kind of socio-political “reality.” There’s an analog here to my various experiences of oxygen deprivation, upon which I’m trying to put my finger.
I’m as locked in by precarity and privatization as the next person; and I follow — albeit more and more at a distance — various organs of the commentariat. I sometimes feel like the trash-pickers I’ve seen in very poor countries, scouring for what’s useful in great mounds of malodorous refuse.
In the background of my observations and gleanings there looms an awareness that the cognoscenti of the commentariat are themselves in a permanent state of cognitive hypoxia. When we enter the chamber with them and close the door, our own color wheels go monochromatic.
I’ve followed some of the commentariat over time, from various ideological perspectives and with various preoccupations. I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t. One thing I’ve noticed is that every one of them — if you follow along for a period of months — turns out to be wrong. I mean, some will state facts and report actual happenstances, but when they attempt prognostications based on those facts and happenstances, they all fail by and by.
“Well, we didn’t see this coming!” No shit.
Few notices, because the relationship between the commentariat and its audiences is, like the altitude chamber, kind of like a carnival ride. You get your ticket, queue up, climb in, and they take you through ascents and descents, twists and turns, accelerations and decelerations, then the ride is over. You don’t remember that ride you took three months ago.
Let’s face it. No matter how committed to some vision of the common good these commentators are, they’re making their livings in an economy of attention (and therefore are inevitably attention-seekers). They rely on clicks, on clickbait headlines, on surfing the latest cultural and political obsessions, on voluntary contributions, and on audiences who self-organize into online echo-chambers. They occupy economic niches, which they then have to nurture and cultivate. As human beings, with our well-known frailties, they also inevitably self-justify, rationalize, and become defensive. Their economic milieu strains against their desire to maintain integrity, for those who are still attached to integrity. Enterprises operating within capitalism are always faced with this strain. Ask any genuinely committed church leader if the wealthiest and most “generous” members can’t strain matters.
This isn’t the only strain on the “consciousness” (or analytical depth, or prescience) of the commentariat. In the same way that my own consciousness — at its very best, when I’m riding the waves on my boat and seeing Sandhill cranes fly in the bright blue sky above the branches of a white pine dancing in the wind, or that blissful moment before bed, when my beloved is safely asleep beside me and we dwell in peace— there’s still more going on than I, or they, can even imagine. It’s all still “looking through a glass darkly.” Our oxygen-supported apprehensions are as fragile as moth’s wings.
There is infinitely more that the commentariat doesn’t know — even within their own preoccupational fields — than what they do know. Social realities, too, are far deeper and more mysterious than we can ever imagine. The commentariat’s predictions and analyses are part of the illusion of control; and we all want control. We want control in some ratio to what we desire and fear. Especially what we fear. If control’s not available, we’ll settle for the illusion. If the illusion is weak, we’ll settle for active, collective self-deception. We’ll seek out those who tell us not what we need to know, but what we desperately want to believe.
To keep us all in that temporal bubble, that carnival ride, there’s nothing like fear. Fear turns the world into an emergency, a series of tempo-tasks, and it requires us to turn our backs on the cranes flying above the white pines, the enfolding peace of love in quiet presence, and the great mystery that encompasses our I-worlds and social-worlds into which we can only enter, perhaps, upon death.
It’s a comfort to know I can take it or leave it — the commentariat. That I can refuse them when I want and the world won’t come to an end; that I can pick through the trash for what I need and leave the rest. That all my fears, and all the fears they’d infect me with, will one day — for all of us — be swallowed up in a mystery that transcends these tempests — real and imagined. And there’s no reason, except fear, for me to think this will be some inferior state. It may be that our my existence — as beautiful and horrifying and transcendent and banal as it may be — is “like a coal that’s been thrown from the fire,” and that I’ll be returned to a greater light into which we’ll all be re-unified. As Paul Simon sang, “I have reason to believe we will all be received in Graceland.”
Truth personified. TYTY, Sir! Especially liked: (Well, liked it *all.*)
"There is infinitely more that the commentariat *doesn’t* know — even within their own preoccupational fields — than what they *do* know. Social realities, too, are far deeper and more mysterious than we can ever imagine. The commentariat’s predictions and analyses are part of the illusion of control; and we all want control. We want *control* in some ratio to what we *desire* and *fear.* Especially what we fear. If control’s not available, we’ll settle for the illusion. If the illusion is weak, we’ll settle for active, collective self-deception. We’ll seek out those who tell us not what we *need to know,* but what we desperately *want to believe.*"