Laziness and Ennui

[degringolade]

 
Lotus, Summer Palace, Beijing

 

---

 

I just really haven't been all that interested in writing lately.  I think that I would be content with a simple "through the glass, darkly", but even that doesn't seem to be available right now.  I suppose that lack might be at the core of my recent, abortive attempt at understanding the Tarot, but I came to the probably premature conclusion that I didn’t have the time left me to be able to plow through the intricacies and get enough of an understanding to be able to see forward in an accurate and useful manner.

I think that one of the issues that guide this lack of effort/interest is my forever detested and usually unsuccessful tendency to try and cram the events currently besetting us into a model that was described by “historians” of the past.  Even worse, I have a marked tendency to look farther back than is actually useful in any manner.  

Even worse, reading things like “histories”, when you stand back and look at the output of “historians” you start realizing that the simplification and anthropomorphism (you gotta call it that, when treating the action of societies using the psychology of an individual) you start questioning the “explanations” of the historians.  

Somehow though, these explanations give folks the idea that the results can be reproduced/prognosticated if we just follow the cookbook provided by the hoary tomes of the past.  I am trying to pull away from that simplistic and wrong attitude, but it is a lot harder than it seems.

I am currently working on a different idea. I suppose that the idea comes out of my current re-read (after a couple of decades) of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series.  I figure that this could possibly be at least as wrong-headed and incorrect as reading the turgid prose of “historians” or “non-fiction writing” but I think that the process will amuse me.

I am not being specific here, but my base theory is that every two hundred years or so, the world as a whole begins shitting itself.  The problems during these lovely periods kinda build up to a crescendo and the world purges itself of the peculiar to that time contradictions. These are unpleasant periods when things change and something new comes in to “save the world”.

I am currently amused by the 200-year repetitions.  1250(ish) to 1450(ish) to 1650(ish) to 1850(ish) and now we are about twenty years away from the next shitstorm if this half-assed theory has anything to do with it.

I am running with this because I am thinking that (a) something better might come out of it and (b) I will be well into my long sleep by then.  I suppose that I have never thought of “copping out” as anything other than a venial sin of omission…….it isn’t the first one I have had to deal with.