Moving in Crisis

If you have a pretty good predictive model, and you have the resources to establish with relative certainty what direction a complex system will move next, then it certainly pays to divert one's energy in the direction that makes the most sense. The more localized and simplified a system in question, the easier as well.

And swift directional movement tends to further restrict possibility and avenues of action. If you're perched up on a ladder that is beginning to fall, the array of options you have available to you becomes ever more sharply constrained the more the ladder proceeds down the arc of its fall. 

The more complexity, and the greater breadth and depth of the system you are attempting to anticipate, the more it pays to cultivate a greater variety of practices in response to its movements, so that you have the resources available to further lean into whatever avenue makes the most sense as things become more kinetic, and the actual avenues of action constrict in unpredictable ways. 

Because what is the cost of moving in the wrong direction at the wrong time? One's resources are sunk into a limited avenue that quickly loses its viability, and then you are left with a deficit in one direction, just as a surplus is needed in another. 

If you have failed to understand the nature of a falling tree, and you've already begun moving and your attention is focused elsewhere, and there is a shadow growing over you, the falling tree picks up steam, the window of action is rapidly narrowing, and the trap is closing shut. 

Collectively, it certainly does help to act in a manner that regularly refrains from setting large masses in motion, but it seems that today, that ship has sailed.

Fires, Floods, And Plagues

What great fires, floods, and plagues all have in common is mass movement. And what a successful and sustained mass movement requires is a wide open field for its advance, or in other words, an environment which serves to fuel and encourage it as it moves. This is a movement that not only requires the directional transfer of a large amount of energy, but also the general conditions needed for the transfer to take place. In this case, these phenomena are the products of systems and systematic action. 

There are systems embedded in the general environment which are acting on the general environment in universal and systematized ways, generating broad forces of transformation that are acting simultaneously. These are systems built to affect a certain constant low level of material perturbations, implied in the perpetual cycles of industrialized production and consumption. 

Further, effects of these perturbations are allowed to accumulate and accelerate. Short term fixes, which don't fundamentally threaten the systems in place, such as the improvement of living habitation, are used to address low level effects of accumulating greenhouse gases, such as heat and climate changes, but which end by producing more of the said gases through various avenues of energy consumption. 

So, in the U.S. West, the increasing heat and drought are drying out the forests. Dehydrated trees have trouble fending off insects, and are more susceptible to disease, and for various other reasons die off, or have large sections of dead material, which either hang there or slough off or break off in the wind and snow. Living trees are full of water, and so dead trees dry out and become tinder. We're talking about a vast oversimplification here, because there are numerous land management and resource extraction processes to take stock of as well, and the incredibly complex environmental transformations set in motion by those processes. 

For example, the same over-energetic and over-agitated human populations which through their ever-growing industrial activities are setting more carbon free, have simultaneously also covered increasing amounts of land with developments of varying natures, penetrated single family housing and the movement of transportation deeper into forested land, extended power infrastructure every which way that is then neglected through political economic processes, over-zealously suppressed natural fire cycles, and so on. 

And in the East, the accumulation of moisture set free by greater heat and energy, and the increasing velocity of the movement of that moisture thanks to increasing ambient temperatures and water temperatures lends to a greater preponderance of flooding and severe wind events. Loosened sediments set free by industrial activity and ecological destruction readily move with the movement of flood waters and accumulate along obstructions put in place by industrial activity and the land and the soil are transformed, and ecosystems are destroyed, and then rinse and repeat. 

A plague on the other hand - and different plagues are a little different and behave a little differently - might at first appear as a different category of force altogether, but in the end it is set loose by the same systematic forces. Because what a plague requires is both the compressing together of a multitude of living things - so that it can continue to jump and sustain itself - and the far and wide movement of those living things, so as to further spread to every corner of the earth. What better vectors are available than the gargantuan industrial flows, which take up the living multitudes, attempting to blend them all together in to a monolithic paste, and then spread that paste to every corner of the earth? 

Now, there is too much material and energy in motion, and it is moving too fast for most living systems to cope, and the industrial system is gasping in panic, belching out those elemental polluting materials leading to greater accumulation and greater movement. The endgame here, the approach of some sort of equilibrium, which contrary to what neoliberal economists will preach, is itself fleeting, is a scenario in which the growing waves of energy set in motion begin to chew into the regular functioning of industry itself. 

Fire Sun

 

Ghostly Rituals

Capitalism as a set of perpetuated and reenacted rituals becomes more apparent through the ongoing development of high technology, and the life quality changes emanating from that development. The rituals, beginning as visceral sets of practices based upon necessity, begin to appear as machines as the reality drifts from their ongoing cycles, and the machines are artificially shored up and fortified, running in strict repetitions and unable to regenerate themselves, but living on with the help of regular maintenance from external powers. 

The strange artificial constrictions of the flow of data say, or the heart-rending sprawls of empty housing, kept as dragon-treasure by absentee owners, the speculated-upon oil reserves taken out of circulation, or the overflowing food commodities which go to the landfill as a matter of maintaining the integrity of market distribution, all have underneath them mechanisms that can be read as the echoes of provisional social convention, their shapes maintained with increasing energy costs juiced out of a growing class of precariat, through the machinations of the super rich, who are increasingly the only ones to benefit from them.   

Protocol

The Virus, because of its silent, invisible, chaotic, and porous movements, can be anywhere at any time, undetected, and its effects only become known after it is too late, after one is infected and the dice are rolled to determine one's fate. 

Protocols to deal with The Virus then take the form of a continually revised ritual, built up upon the less stringent cleanliness rituals unfolding out of germ theory and associated knowledge, experience, and practice. 

It is a ritual that has become abstracted from the particular and then universalized, and has to be adhered to out of faith, as one can't respond to the threat with a simple exercise of the senses by situation, as the threat makes its appearance. One has trust in the protocol as a matter of daily operation.  

This is a faith that is placed in a whole set of institutions and an ever-evolving body of knowledge and practice, which are interpenetrated with technologies of perception and research which further the knowledge and practice that at the same time produce them. And these technologies of perception and research are embodied in concentrated resources which require concentrated disciplines to marshal them, so that their direct interface with the whole population on a daily basis is impossible. 

Which as it happens works quite well in isolation, and the faith is well-placed in theory. But it is knowledge and practice which must be perpetually renewed with both changing knowledge and practice and the underlying reality itself, and the institutions and individuals doing the work must be working in good faith and trustworthy.  

Of course as an abstracted and universalized protocol whose power to compel rests upon the health of the institutions invoking it, its efficacy can be damaged by forces of destruction well separate from its locally generated truth. The health of the institutions can be damaged by forces quite remote and seemingly unrelated, such as concentrations of wealth, political betrayal, forces of social destruction set loose by propaganda and social manipulation, and so on. 

Small wonder that The Virus has flared up ferociously and perpetually in the United States in particular, where, like lights flickering on and off as the distant power station struggles, the various collective protocols wink on and off in their efficacy and cohesion, ultimately destroying continuity, and accelerating those centrifugal forces of separation. 

Yes, The Virus is quite real, I can attest to that. And the protocol is sensible and works. But The Virus itself was given wings by the massive and constantly growing and intensifying industrial processes bound up with the universal institutions of governance, which no longer have the conviction in their voices when they say, "trust us." Now, when an entity like the U.S. nation or a similar imperial industrial nation - at least as a cohesive collective phenomenon - merely moves, say to administer itself or tend to its surroundings, it spreads crisis in many forms and many levels. Viruses in many senses pour forth from its exhalations. It is an open question whether it really wants to "cure" itself.   

Smoke Day

The doors and windows are shut tight against the smoke moving into the canyon from the west. Bunkered down and taking refuge. Ah! The perfect day to sit down and get caught up on writing about the perpetual fires, physical and otherwise.