Hard Rain Drops

Navigating the Weirdness

Last month, I gave two talks at the Berkeley Alembic called How to Navigate the Weirdness. When I first scheduled the lectures last year, I was planning to concentrate on the unabated spread of formerly fringe possibilities — UAPs, psychedelic entities, arcane conspiracy theories — to the cultural core, a process leading to the severe weirding of consensus reality (to use that tricky but still useful term). But this year has brought the onslaught of the second Trump administration, whose violent pace, corrupt narcissism, vindictive cruelty, and chaotic incompetence are now rapidly deconstructing many of the institutional, political, and moral norms that literally “construct” — in the way that girders support buildings and traffic lights manage automobile flow — our shared social world.

In the first talk, I offered a big thinky framework to help illuminate the longer historical swells that drive the massive breakers of novelty and threat now crashing on our stranded brains. Call me old-school, but I find it hard to orient myself without a strong sense of historical context, particularly about the postwar geopolitical order installed after 1945, and its exceptionally influential imbrication of capitalism, culture, psychology, weirdness, and cybernetic technologies. Something truly strange entered the world in the 1940s, some fell pattern constellated by the CIA, LSD, ENIAC, the Macy conferences, the flying saucer, and even — at least if you believe Phil Dick — the gnostic gospels of Nag Hammadi. That’s one way to explain the many World War II flashbacks that intrude in our moment — the Nazi salutes of Musk and Bannon; Vance’s platforming of Germany’s extreme right-wing; the Holocaust discourse kicked up by Israel’s brutal pulverization of Gaza. As the global geopolitical order is dismantled, vengeful ghosts are loosed from the cage of the postwar pact.

This is a vertiginous state of affairs. Collectively and individually, our souls — or psyches, if you will — are skating on thin ice. Because of this, my second talk turned from analysis towards something more immediate, home-spun, and rooted in no-longer-normal everyday experience. I don’t know about you, but I regularly find my mind and heart assaulted by looming waves of dread, anger, grief, and shock, often infused with an almost psychedelic sense of incipient SciFi insanity. A recent example was the AI Trump Pope image, an easy-cheesy bit of AI brain rot that became, through the mere fact of being retweeted by the President of the United States, an obscene horror. In a post on his increasingly necessary Liminal News, Daniel Pinchbeck identified in this image a pure exercise of power, one that draws us into complicity through the kind of numbing nihilistic profanity — a woozy sacrilege rendered even more repellent through its banal stupidity. And yet this fucking thing is in my mind, and millions like mine, our fragile immunological bubbles punctured like Swiss cheese. The Mekons told us this in “Sorcerer,” a postpunk ditty about necromantic capitalism: “The abyss is close to home.”

These emotional maelstroms of nausea and vertigo are also by design, which means that facing the authentic reality of our feelings rather than burying ourselves in distraction — including the near distractions of doomscrolling and social media outrage — is only half the battle. We have little choice it seems but to also develop practices that, however we act on and in the world, also work inwardly and cannily with our attitudes, modes of awareness, and roiling emotions. This is not self-help, let alone self-realization. It is survival, or at least sanity.

This is the long haul, folks. The hard rain is here, and the storm will last for the foreseeable future (which admittedly is not that foreseeable). I am worried about the world, but I am also worried about us. Can we keep it together, for ourselves and for those around us? Can we hold open the creative capacity to respond to the extraordinary demands of the time without losing our minds, let alone our souls? So I humbly offer up a few of the tactics and maxims I brought up in my talk, already reworked, rewritten, and still incomplete. These aren’t solutions or commandments, but goads, probes, and slap-dash hopes. I hope some of them land.

Linda Wallace took some notes

ATTENTION IS A MARTIAL ART

It’s been over two decades since a pop business book first drew our attention to “the attention economy.” These days we are paying even more attention to attention (including claims that we are over-prioritizing the sort of steady, continuous awareness that many of us crave). But how are we doing?

Lots of us find our ability to concentrate under threat. Our stream of consciousness feels splintered, hurried, overwhelmed, fatigued, vexed, and easily interrupted. Just to make it through an ordinary day, we are forced to navigate an informational matrix in which our moment-to-moment awareness is captured, organized, and monetized by fiendishly designed distraction machines, algorithmically-crafted memes, Kafka software, and massive propaganda swarms. In response, some have turned to various attentional practices — media fasts, technological hacks, mindfulness stop-gaps. Generally these are little more than “in-app solutions,” kinda like expecting sustainability from capitalism. But they are still preferable to more costly responses like burn-out, despair, and addiction.

Peering into a very near future, where our screens are invaded by AI agents who know us better than we know ourselves, I think we need to embrace a more focused, integrated, and ornery attentional stance. The science of psychology can help, but I prefer thinking of attention as an art, and more specifically a martial art. Like traditional martial arts, the attention skills of the future sane demand a number of embodied competencies requiring will, technique, strength, and the paradox of trained spontaneity. The art of attention has spiritual, theatrical, and erotic dimensions, but these days we also need to see it as a martial art. Whether or not we consider ourselves currently subject to hybrid information warfare — which I basically do — attention now primarily moves through a multidimensional field dominated by conflict, manipulation, and lies.

One key source for the art of attention is meditation, whose popularity today may derive in part from a collective gut feeling that this shit might actually really come in handy. But unlike most forms of meditation, martial arts require a vivid and vigilant situational awareness. Such awareness aims in both directions, at once inside and out. Outwardly, attention is rooted in media critique, social research, Jedi mind tricks, and a jiu-jitsu of holds and attacks, retreats and redirections, feints and forces. But the art is also inner, requiring profound self-awareness, stable will, clear values, and some pitiless insight into our own cognitive blurs and biases.

MIX YOUR FEELS

Many of us are wrestling with strong waves of anger, fear, grief, and despair, which have now become part of a complete balanced 21^st century affect breakfast. All of these feelings are very demanding (and exhausting), and while we cannot hope to avoid them (nor should we want to, they are too intelligent), we don’t have to just hand them the keys to the car. And so we might learn to mix your feels, to enter a rich, complex, and sometimes contradictory emotional landscape in which joy and grief and fury and sadness weave into an unnameable tapestry. Such mixtures require us to disidentify with specific emotions while giving them all enough rope, a kind of intimate disinterestedness that allows them to exist alongside one another, with no one capturing the flag. Never feel bad for tasting glorious joy in these dark times, or guilt for the despondency than can abruptly drown our happiness. Just keep those feels flowing.

CONCRETIZE AND SUBTILIZE

Navigating through the vertiginous loops of today’s hypermediated reality, it is vital to be able to generate your own ground, your own center of stability. One way is to concretize: to consciously re-inhabit the body that you are, and to tune into your basic orientation in spacetime. As things get wiggy, just draw attention to the weight of your body in the chair, the ambient temperature tickling your skin, the subtle scents lifted on the breeze. Even as you dampen your symbolic frameworks and conceptual chatter, tune into the objects and events around you.

Such concrete embodiment does not just help you ground, but also helps you clarify. When we intentionally blink our eyes to improve our visual image, or splash cold water on our face to wake up, we are re-inhabiting our sensory body in a manner that in turn sharpens the mind. Such vivid awakening can in turn anchor our awareness in the here and now, crystallizing an orientation — what Carlos Castaneda calls the “assemblage point” — even when, all around us, all that’s solid melts into air.

But it is not enough simply to ground the body in some objective, quantifiable (and trackable) sector of spacetime. There are also the subtle realms to tune into, without which we are mere sacks of meat. The act of concretizing, of re-embodying, is best paired with a reverse movement, not a return into the abstractions of thought or the switching hubs of memes and data, but toward the intangible, the evocative, the delicate overtone song that accompanies the plain speech of the everyday.

Here I reach, with some dissatisfaction, for the archaic term subtilize. As with related concepts like distill and sublimate, neither of which quite gets it either, the act of subtilizing refers to an essentially chemical (or alchemical) process of purifying a substance, though “purity” here is probably better thought of as “poetry.” The return of the hoary hippie term “vibe” to today’s discourse suggests an intuition about the value of such atmospheric readings. Build your own inner version of what my friend Graham St. John calls the vibe-o-meter, a finely tuned instrument that registers the singular feels of space and time, energies that may even elude algorithmic capture or easy simulation.

KEEP YOUR COOL

It is hard to keep your cool at a time of global warming, not to mention the intense and growing friction between individuals, tribes, beliefs, and sectors of society. We live in blazing times. But that’s even more reason to keep it on the chill side, even if, for most of us, remaining cool is less an achievement than an ongoing practice. Yet it is arguably one of the key techniques in the martial art of attention, because it provides a space of equilibrium that allows one to respond non-reactively, to achieve some freedom of movement. In Buddhist terms, cool resonates with equanimity, the acceptance of things as they are, and the release of the hope that such things will in themselves deliver you from suffering.

This is not the steely teeth-grinding cool of the soldier who ignores the gory horrors before him — nor, needless to say, the cool records on the hipster’s shelf. In his pivotal essay “An Aesthetic of the Cool,” Robert Farris Thompson calls it a “transcendental balance.” In modern counterculture, such composure is linked with the cult of the individual — the rebel, the private eye, the cowboy. Such cool cucumbers not only keep their heads in a fight, but maintain a certain reserve even in their pleasures. Coolness also remains one of the most intractable gestures of refusal, even when we have no choice but to comply, as with Bartleby the Scrivener’s “I would prefer not to.”

The idea of “cool”, like so many features of hip culture, is derived from Black American sensibility, and, according to Thompson, ultimately from West Africa, where coolness is a gift of the head. You can see it in the smooth manner of Miles Davis, a man who was angry and had a lot of good reasons to be angry, but who also had reasons to fear and remained fearless. And you can really hear that transcendental balance in Miles’ music, a disarming equilibrium amidst the high-wire leaps of improvisation, as well as an unerring ability to orchestrate and magnify his various ensembles of master musicians.

This collective dimension is key. Forget the rebel; today’s hepcats offer up coolness as a gift to their fellows. Cool heads form points of collected calm amidst the chaos, a balm to friends, family, community, and creatures facing the Great Freak-Out. Thompson notes that, in the African context, the cooler a person becomes, “the more ancestral they grow.” That is, the more they can slip out of their own reactivity, and support the continuity of human resilience.

CULTIVATE FOXHOLE HUMOR

In his book From Death-Camp to Existentialism, Viktor Frankl writes that even in the concentration camps, a situation of utmost desperation, many retained a sense of humor, however faint. “Humor was another one of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation.” While most of us are still a million miles from the horrors of the camps, we may do well to consciously cultivate the art that, “more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.”

But there is a particular flavor of humor that arises in the face of terror, injustice, cruel paradox, and colossal stupidity — not to mention the nauseating absurdity of death and the omnipresent suffering Frankl describes. Some call it gallows humor, which, given the relative paucity of gallows, reminds us at least how long this mode has been with us. But I prefer foxhole humor, the trenchant art of the trenches. Here one also faces the imminence of death, but in the social context of combatants — remember that martial art — using humor to hold precariously together in the presence of extreme misery, mindless tedium, and terror.

Again those of us reading (and writing) this can mostly only imagine the grinding hell faced by soldiers on the Western Front or in the Donbas today. (For a vivid taste, you could do worse than Dan Carlin’s fabulous Hardcore History series on World War I, “Blueprint for Armageddon.”) What right do we have to pretend to emulate their extreme situation? At the same time, it’s important to remember that if these guys can crack wise, you have no excuse.

There is a tendency, particularly on the Worried Left, to hunker down in po-faced piety, to treat the presence of humor within a realistic assessment of our apocalyptic condition as some kind of sin rather than a micro-salvation. Not only has this made for easy targeting for the griefers and trolls of the Sarcastic Right, but it represses one of the key gifts of soul that keeps us struggling on Team Human in the first place. Humor is a healer and a sword, a bonding intoxicant and the final gob of spit in the eye of the executioner. It is Stoicism without solemnity, a dark pact with the cosmic giggle, and the adult’s fatalistic trace of the child’s laugh, marvelous and free of meanings. It is a lifeline in a time of monsters.

FORM POSSES

Today we are at once afflicted with loneliness and a claustrophobic excess of human presences, and particularly of human opinions. Friendship is the middle path through this feast and famine. But given the times, we also need something more collective, collaborative, and energized, but still intimate. Call it the posse, though band, squad, coven, and crew might do as well. “Tribe” and “community” are too big and gaseous. “Family” is OK, but maybe too neurotic and homogenous.

The point is to form small and tight human collectives that actively collaborate to distribute skills and knowledges, and to do it for fun, profit, mutual support, and practical survival. Whenever possible, these posses should share meat-space, ideally to hang out in unstructured spacetime and to pursue entertaining ordeals of exploration, performance, invocation, creation. Text threads and Discord channels can support the camaraderie, but you need serious boundaries and commitments to generate the continuity of the posse online.

ENJOY THE WEIRD

One of the problems with the valorization of the weird and especially weird culture is that if the weird becomes too enjoyable and accessible it ceases to be weird. One of the qualities that has attracted me to the word and many of the things it named is a kind of vexed ambivalence, as features we might associate with wonder — enchantment, awe, mystery, delight — are mixed or fused with considerably darker and more indigestible features. There is something in the weird that is yucky, perverse, alienating, bizarre, and potentially crazymaking, like, for real. Think David Lynch, or extraterrestrial abduction narratives, or (non-plushy) Cthulhu, or strange obsessives who kind of creep you out.

We live in weird times, they are only going to get weirder. That makes them extraordinary and marked with awe, but also yucky, perverse, alienating, bizarre, and potentially crazymaking. The provocation to enjoy the weird is indeed that — a provocation. It is offered partly in the spirit of Žižek’s challenge to Enjoy your symptom — to appreciate our own weird eruptions and enigmas, and their ambivalent proximity to a tragic unconscious reality that we cannot help but miss (and misunderstand). But it is also a reminder that, for all its terrors and cruelties and looming dystopias, for however much we want to make it kinder and greener and more human for crissakes, our fate does land us in interesting times.

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