I've mentioned previously that uncertainty in the built environment is an interesting topic; now is probably a good time to examine it.
It is a good time because of our present circumstances. The dubious clouds forming over our prospects for the near future are enough to cause one to pause. Further, there is the brooding psychic space opened up by isolation and the attendant investigation of the unraveling and worsening circumstances of the virus propagation in the United States: its projected spread and reach, its effects on medical, political, and economic institutions and daily activity, its relationship to resources and the supply chain, and etc.
The virus is set to spread for some time. The social, political, and economic costs are set to deepen as well. And further, as a massive shock it has absorbed all of the attention. Those of us paying attention anticipated these consequences, and anticipate still more. There is the gnawing concern that all of those other mounting crises, now pushed to the back of our collective perception, are advancing less obstructed and in relative obscurity, and which will come to collect bills of their own in due time.
As one paces back and forth, or sits brooding at the window, one can pore over the many reckless failures of our political and economic establishment, the many insults and humiliations of daily life in a cruel, antisocial, and neoliberal society, the many advancing and anticipated complications in daily and global life, the looming dangers to one's loved ones and one's self, and so on.
Much work is currently being done to explore and probe the many weaknesses in our political economy and society in general, and to process emotionally and spiritually the meaning and implications of our greater predicament, and it is good important work. Plenty more work has been done to analyze and carry out practical measures in order to survive, and to sketch out the broad changes that must happen to move past this crisis, or perhaps disconcertingly, the sketching out of what we might not expect to happen, and as a consequence, the further destruction we can expect instead. This too is good important work.
But for my part, I'd like to sketch out the basic phenomenological dimensions of surviving such a crisis, or even related and protracted crises in the future. Pacing in a room or sitting at a window can do wonders for processing and thinking about a massive shock, and then formulating a future response. But I'd also like to suggest that too much pacing or sitting can lead to dangers and complications of their own.
Next I'd like to explore some of those problems, and working through them, in the context of survival in an increasingly unstable built environment, drawing partially from lessons of the wilderness. I'm not talking here of a cheap, self-reliant kind of survival, a kind of "I got mine" where one can celebrate one's own wit and one-upsmanship over nature and one's less gifted peers.
I'd like to consider an attempt at modest perpetuity, and an attempt at preserving not just one's own provincial self and interests - say, immediate family or some such, self-contained in one's "castle" - but a sense of hope, decency, and dignity for others, or at least those acting in good faith, even in the face of cascading crises and contractions, and further, a love and respect for that greater ecological totality, which at first glance, appears as part of the tightening noose. Well, we can get to those things in due time.
