Drowning
a refusal to be where we are
I’ve written about how people drown many times.
It’s always been applicable to our situation; but it has never been so evidently true. Basically, for a conscious, uninjured person to drown they have to reject their bodies natural buoyancy and actively submerge themselves. The reason they do this is an insistence that their will to be somewhere other than where they are is more important than accepting where they are and allowing their bodies volume to support them.
The position that is required to float is to drop the head back so the ears are underwater leaving just the face above the surface. In anything but the stillest conditions this will mean that water will sweep over the face and care needs to be taken to keep from inhaling water. Keeping the mouth closed, breathing through the nose – as we should anyway – and tolerating the discomfort of the whole thing is a necessity.
We say, “Well, it’s panic….” Yes panic.
The present moment, as the Northern Summer Solstice arrives with record heat over much of the world and pandemics sweep every land unacknowledged, everyone is focusing on maintaining a sense of business-as-usual. I’m doing it here, clicking away at the keys to write a post to shove in a bottle and toss on the seas of the inter-webs….
No one wants to admit to where we are or make any accommodations to the seriousness of our condition. Everyone, in their preferred habitual manner, is insisting on continuing to believe we are aboard a perfectly sound vessel with every expectation that we can continue with whatever we’ve been doing indefinitely while in fact the sinking has been underway for a long time and the water is already around our ankles, or higher….
The commanders and crew of this vessel justify their insistence on maintaining ignorance of the true state by claiming such knowledge would instill panic…. Although…, whose panic, whose discomfort, are they most interested in avoiding? If the rest of us become aware of the grossness of their incompetence and venality at steering us into this situation and ignoring every warning and avoiding every precaution they are afraid we might, “Take it out on them.”
This concoction of justifications and denial is their way of insisting on business-as-usual. Without it they have no way of hiding from themselves that we are all on the same boat and it is sinking.
The engines that drove us to this continue to churn, driving us into the final plunge. The screws spinning wildly ready to chew us up in droves as we flail about. The machinery of consumption. The machinery of discontent. The machinery of Power…. These are all running at “record levels.” The machinery of denial…. Just think of the effort and energy and attention squandered on which senile pathological Narcissist will get to run the “Free World” next year. Two men who may both still show a pulse by January of 2025, but most assuredly will not have the mental acuity of a cabbage between them. The gerontocracy runs on a denial of the facts of human mortality. An insistence that the propped up characters in our pantomime of “representative democracy” – at a time when clear and obvious majorities of populations around the globe show their disgust with all concerned – must continue in their roles in sequel after sequel, to “Maintain the Franchise!” if nothing else. As if nothing else matters. Nothing else could matter.
People drown when they find themselves abruptly thrown into a situation that is both immensely challenging and that catches them by surprise. In their confusion and panic the deepest and oldest habits of motion take over. As with an infant finally strong enough to hold up her head, they try to wriggle and crawl out of this new and scary situation. They attempt to climb out of the water. Every time they manage to lift themselves above the point of equilibrium the loss of buoyancy and the pull of gravity sends them back down. The higher they reach the deeper their built-up inertia will take them. The more they struggle the quicker they exhaust themselves. The more frightening it all becomes the harder it is to break the chains of habit.
A human infant instinctively knows what to do in the water. Awakening this instinct within a certain window of accessibility “drown-proofs” a person. Tossing an unprepared two year old into deep water will almost certainly kill them. Of course, as has been true for most of us who can swim, this missed opportunity can be overcome with slow careful training.
“Look out for the helpers.” Was it Mr. Rogers who used to say this, advising anxious children finding themselves in a frightening and dangerous situation? If we care to look we can see how in the most extreme conditions, under constant bombardment and in the face of hideous snipers, there are always helpers. Those who have made it their life’s work; and those who have found themselves thrust into recognizing that they cannot do anything but help; no matter how dire the situation or how much added danger this puts them in.
The “Show” doesn’t want us to see this. The “world view” of the power-mad does not allow room for anything but the monstrous greed and brutality its members are lost in and unable and unwilling to give up. Maintaining their self-justifications has proven more important to them than life itself. And so, they march off into the bunkers they will die in.
What about the rest of us?
“Drown-proofing” whether done directly by awakening the mammalian dive instincts of an infant or arrived at through practice and training later in life – The way the precursors to Outward Bound did for flyers in WWII. – develops a sense of Proprioception. We stop seeing ourselves as simply the subjects of what others are doing “to us” and feeling that reaction is the only response we are capable of; that we have no response-ablity. No ability to respond to our situation instead of simply reacting to them and wrapping our panic in self-justifications that do nothing but conspire with our dangerous situation to kill us that much more quickly….
“Drown-proofing” requires quotation marks. It’s not a guarantee. It’s only from within the morass of fear and reaction that demands of guarantees are insisted upon. A dire situation is horrific. It is fatiguing. It worms its way past any defenses. Mortality awaits no matter what. But, this avoidance. This insistence on maintaining fantasies of normality in the face of extreme and imminent danger ensurers the maximum mayhem and destruction.
We are all playing chicken. The “winner/winners” will meet their ends under the weight of horrible guilt under the weight of meters and meters of the ground they have burrowed under to avoid the fate they have rushed us all towards.
Awareness, and the possibility of life itself, is available in an instant. That instant when we either refuse to face our situation and insist we can crawl up and out of our reality through sheer Will, or that instant when we open ourselves to the possibility of responding. Of finding our responsibility and joining the helpers.
What I learned from deKooning years ago was that the way to see beyond what we merely expect to see is to be active “glimpsing glimpsers.”
That instead of avoiding “mixed-metaphors” to defend our prejudices, we seek them out and find the rhymes they give us to the way life actually unfolds. We’re slipping and sliding here between sinking ships and massive and futile bunkers, between drowning scenarios and moments of fateful triage on blood-slick floors. We have images of Mr. Rogers changing into his sneakers and of monsters autographing projectiles of death….
This is what not drowning through insistence looks and feels like.
Tony,
This is a sad but true post. Perhaps the hardest part is that solutions are obvious and yet the world avoids acting.
I understand how you feel about the presidential candidates. However there are very significant differences and although old Biden has insights gained from a lifetime of working at politics. Although he clearly hasn’t achieved what he promised he has accomplished more than any politician I’ve voted for. Politicians promise the world and short sighted electorate think big ideas can be accomplished overnight. They can’t be. Yes we need solutions now. But unless the country and the world can agree the big solutions will die a slow death. Biden seems to understand this. Will his actions be enough, probably not.
Meanwhile the rising water is at our waist and accelerating. Gabe and I are cruising down east for a couple of weeks in July. We have bought self inflating offshore life vests and slowly learning to breathe through our noses.
I ask myself every day now, at what point will life become dreary enough to let the water take me. Will it be from the sorrow of constant, implacable tragedy? Will it be because my neighbors are armed and going house to house? Will it be because, like people in India and Mexico, life is reduced to merely finding water to survive one more day? One thing I know, people prefer lies to the harsh truth we have to save ourselves, no matter the personal cost because the captain and crew of the ship are soulless demons.