And many more...

On birthdays and the horrors to come

Dear Friends,

My birthday was last week. That’s right! As of Thursday morn, I am twenty-eight years old — a number that, every time I announce it, elicits mysterious murmurs of approval from friends in their mid-thirties and forties. Twenty-eight, I am told, is a good age.

I’ll take their word for it. To my own sensibility, which has assigned personality types to numbers since the seventh grade, the move from twenty-seven to twenty-eight is a demotion. Twenty-seven is a thrill-seeker, fearless with eye contact, chaotic but self-possessed, and good at cool stuff like break-dancing. Twenty-eight is plodding, sleepy-eyed, in need of a haircut, and carries around low-calorie snacks in neat little off-brand Tupperwares — the charismatic equivalent of a Kumon session. On the one hand: less flair. On the other hand, I do carry around my cashews in neat little off-brand Tupperwares. So maybe I’d better accept where I’m at.

Where I’m at on day one of my twenty-eighth year: mildly hung-over in bed. Hungry, too. But I am a man of my word, so I put off breakfast until I’ve read the final two-hundred pages of A Court of Mist and Fury, the million-trillion-dollar fairy-smut epic that you have, no doubt, spotted in the clutches of a heavy-breathing fellow subway rider. I had promised Raiane I would finish it by today, and I’ll be damned if Prythian falls to the Hybernians because my sorry ass needs a smoothie. So I faithfully tear through two sex scenes (age gap: 480y), a demonic invasion, a hastily planned sabotage mission, a betrayal, a double-betrayal, some late-game exposition, an extremely inconvenient declaration of eternal romantic commitment, another betrayal, and finally, of course, a cliff-hanging twist. All this before my feet touch the tile. By the logic of prefigurative beginnings, twenty-eight will be an eventful year.

And while the rest of the day is perfectly lovely (I spent the afternoon with Rai and the wonderful babies she nannies, our surrogate, part-time children), it’s clear I’ve reached the age where birthdays start to lose their luster. This is a pretty common phenomenon, I think, and it’s not hard to understand. I’ve been through this routine twenty-eighth times now; if I went to Six Flags twenty-eight times, I would get tired of that, too.

Not to mention that the more time I spend in the adult world, the more conscious I become of how contingent my very existence is upon lotteries both genetic and socio-historical, as well as the hard work of two excellent parents, especially the one who birthed me. Personal congratulations feel out of place (please forward all well-wishes to Sarah). If people insist upon cheering for me once per annum, it seems to me they should do it on an occasion marking my ability to do a single damn thing for myself — such as, for example, the moment in second grade when my little wrists became strong enough to tilt a gallon bottle of skim milk over the corn flakes without adult assistance. That’s an achievement for which I will gladly accept an amaro basket.

But there’s more to this malaise. Birthdays are an annual reminder that, in certain indisputable respects, time advances in linear fashion. I can wax poetic about the cyclicality of being, how the past is ever-present, and the future is borne within us, etc., etc., but that won’t change the fact that, a year from today, I will be twenty-nine.

Or dead. Past a certain age, it is the imminence of death, or at least its inevitability, that makes birthdays an ambivalent if not unsavory occasion for lots of folks. I’m not there yet. But the (accelerating) forward march of my own calendar age does force my attention to the queasy fact that there’s nowhere for me to go but into the future.

So, I have been thinking about the future. What awaits? Obviously, it’s impossible to say. I don’t have a crystal ball (I deleted that app when it requested access to my contacts). But cascading wars in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe, the xenophobic slide in so-called Western democracies and the ever-nearer disasters wrought by climate change (Asheville? really??) paint a distressingly clear picture.

And the clarity is what scares me. Plenty of think-tank-type analysts will claim that these changes act as “chaos multipliers,” but to my view, the opposite effect is true. I can’t help but feel that the range of all conceivable futures is narrowing to a single, bleak reality. A reality, what’s more, circumscribed by forces that act along two kinds of lines: shorelines and borders.

To be more specific: by shorelines I mean the edge of the ocean (threatening to swallow coastal cities that house much of the world’s population, and especially the world’s poor) as well as climate shorelines (the isothermic thresholds beyond which agriculture and, eventually, human life become physically impossible) — in short, the shifting zones of habitability upon the planet’s surface. By borders I mean the imaginary lines that mark the boundaries of the state, which we see reified in the form of an increasingly militarized “security” apparatus — in effect, the boundaries upon the planet’s surface across which the status of “human” is granted or denied. As the shorelines advance, the borders get less imaginary, which is to say more deadly. Space constricts; so, too, do the protections of personhood.

I admit that thinking of complex historical processes in terms of lines and surfaces is a little silly. But there’s an elegance to this account for which I credit a very cool book (and my brother, for recommending it to me). The book is called Barbed Wire, and it was written by Reviel Netz, a historian / mathematician / poet who has a serious claim to one of the most stylish first paragraphs I’ve ever encountered in an ostensibly academic monograph:

“Define, on the two-dimensional surface of the earth, lines across which motion is to be prevented, and you have one of the key themes of history. With a closed line (i.e., a curve enclosing a figure), and the prevention of motion from outside the line to its inside, you derive the idea of property. With the same line, and the prevention of motion from inside to outside, you derive the idea of prison. With an open line (i.e., a curve that does not enclose a figure), and the prevention of motion in either direction, you derive the idea of border. Properties, prisons, borders: it is through the prevention of motion that space enters history.”

This is an exciting way to visualize big, complex ideas. No doubt a certain amount of subtlety is elided. But I resonate with Netz’s talk of crisp Euclidean figures because, in my present state of low-level unease (the contradiction bears naming: that I am happy, fulfilled, and safe in every meaningful respect), the direction the world is heading feels as irrefutable as a mathematical proof.

On the one side: shorelines. On the other: borders. In between: intensifying periods of violence distributed over decreasing amounts of space. Or, as the journalist John Washington writes:

“According to prevailing estimates, as many as half a billion people will be forced from their homes by climate crises in the coming decades. Consigning them to refugee camps or slums will not only be dangerous for them — and a disgraceful mark of ignominy on the world — but a grave and politically volatile abdication of basic human decency. Tens of millions of people amassed behind border walls will push us closer to political despair and explosive violence. Borders are as much a solution to the radical changes to come as an umbrella is to a hurricane.”

It’s a depressing image, and I would be happy enough to dismiss it as a pole of pessimistic self-denial if I didn’t regularly encounter real-life prefigurations of this world to come. They are everywhere: in the surveilled and securitized “private-public” spaces of midtown Manhattan, in the proliferation of cop cities around the country, in the ongoing occupation of the West Bank (not to mention Rafah and all the other Palestinian “humanitarian” kill-zones, god save us).

And here:

I took this picture on my recent trip to the Bay Area. I was standing at the corner of Telegraph Avenue and Dwight Way. Even if you are from Berkeley, you could be forgiven for failing to recognize what was, in a rosier time, known as People’s Park. A patch of grass owned by the University of Berkeley, and the site of sixty years of heated dispute over land use, housing justice, and free speech. Here was once, arguably the omphalos of the 1960’s counterculture.

And now? Cameras. Guard stations. Walls. Walls fashioned, in an ironic flourish, from the very transoceanic shipping containers that facilitate the unfettered mobility of global capital. As I stood there, I felt a little vatic shiver scuttle down my spine. All of history’s spear-tipped vectors converged on this point: humanity’s future, rendered at the scale of half a city block.

But wait. This post has become unbearably grim. Indulgently so! I was just telling you about binge-reading romantasy novels in bed. Am I for real? Can I actually believe that things are so bad?

In moments, yes. But it would be dishonest to pretend that I do not, in other moments, subscribe with equal conviction to a vision that is just as improbable as hell itself (if not more so). That, of course, is paradise.

So I’ll come clean: this past Sunday, on the occasion of my birthday, I met with a bunch of friends and family for a dinner party. The name of the gathering was Arcadia’s Table, and the intention was to commemorate, via seven dishes, places where I had experienced “paradise”: Italy, Brazil, Brooklyn, Berkeley, Colombia (technically not a plate; we did shots of viche (thanks, Liz!)), Cochabamba, Asheville, and St. Louis. My friends Adam and Ty lent us their big, blue, beautiful home on Dean Street, Raiane designed the menu with me, and the day arrived.

We cooked (Raiane, Jackson, Asia). We gathered (plenty more). And it was perfect. At the height of the evening, Amber leaned over her glass to ask me how I was feeling, and I found myself grasping for words. What was there to say, besides “Paradise is real”? Paradise is real. At least in some moments, and in the right company.

This might appear to pose a contradiction. In the hellish trajectory I plotted above, what are the coordinates of heaven? Perhaps a keener mathematical mind than my own could extend this metaphor to a differential equation that demonstrates the compatibility of perfect joy and total suffering. But to do so would reduce paradise to a value that can be calculated and optimized — and we all know where that leads.

Which suggests that geometry is too limited a way of seeing. Things of space alone do not make a complete world. But what else is there?

Last month, I met with a bunch of friends and strangers on the steps of the Brooklyn Museum. As the sky dimmed to a cool blue, we read aloud from Abraham Joshua Heschel’s inspired meditation on Jewish ritual, The Sabbath:

“We are all infatuated with the splendor of space, with the grandeur of things of space… Reality to us is thinghood, consisting of substances that occupy space; even God is conceived by most of us as a thing…

Indeed, we know what to do with space but do not know what to do about time, except to make it subservient to space. Most of us seem to labor for the sake of things of space. As a result we suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face. Time to us is sarcasm, a slick treacherous monster with a jaw like a furnace, incinerating every moment of our lives...

It is impossible for man to shirk the problem of time. The more we think the more we realize: we cannot conquer time through space. We can only master time in time.

The higher goal of spiritual living is not to amass a wealth of information, but to face sacred moments.”

(Amen.)

Time, then. A word that stands for… what exactly? Not an object. Not a place. A domain that is devilishly hard to think about, except in terms of things (and the methods, like geometry, that we use to measure them).

I am persuaded by Heschel’s case that sacredness exists in time, if only because I have experienced it myself. I felt it last Sunday evening! And while there is ample reason to believe that the physical conditions for these divine irruptions will grow ever more dire in coming years (for some people, certainly, and probably for all of us), I’m comforted by the persistence of the long traditions that point us, again and again, toward what Heschel calls “palaces in time”: the Shabbos of the Hasidic families who shoot hoops down by the track; the street vendors prostrate upon their curbside prayer rugs; the lay Catholics from the Community of Sant ’Egidio, who walk the city every Tuesday night to offer food and attention to unhoused friends on the streets of Midtown. Maybe the solace of these spiritual moments pales in comparison to the violent catastrophes before us. But how could one prove such a thing? What would you measure?

This much I am prepared to believe: that paradise is in the return, in the “again and again,” in the periodic practice of being in time (and doing so, I might add, in company). Even for the quote-unquote secular among us, opportunities to enact this return happen all the time. Occasions abound. Like what?

Well, like birthdays.

To mine then. To yours, whenever it may be.

And many more…

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Write me: rustmenagerie (at) gmail (dot) com