How Exhausting It Is To Live Through History (Time of Monsters, #3)

This is part of our ongoing “Time of Monsters” series, which is mostly about how awful this year is.

Federal Agents in Portland, Oregon. Image taken from NBC News, ultimately from Nathan Howard / Reuters.

This morning I woke up to hear that federal paramilitary forces are already at work in my hometown, and that there are plans to expand this roll-out from Portland (where it began) and Kansas City to other municipalities across the country. By the time I publish this, I’m going to guess that this has already happened. In all honesty, I’m not sure what to write on this subject.

I’ve slept, but I have not rested. Even on nights when I drink – probably more than I should, some nights – I wake up and cramp my hand recording my dreams. I can’t remember them that well, but I get enough down that I’m aware that the vignettes that my brain is putting together last all night, trying to process what my daylight self is unable to. The pen can’t move fast enough to get all of the thoughts out before my brain flushes out the unrecorded dreams, and by the time I have the first sip of coffee I’m left unable to explain why I wake up so exhausted.

Only one conclusion is really possible: living through history is exhausting.

I prefer this image, made into a meme by Twitter user @CommiePartyHats, found in this thread.

Vladimir Lenin once said that “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen” and whether or not you have a high opinion of the man, you can’t argue that 2020 has felt like that, front to back, bottom to top. We started the year off with the threat of war, it continued with wildfire and plague and economic and social collapse. Now the federal government has decided that it wants militarized occupation instead of race-related protests and cop riots.

August won’t be an improvement. November is a cliff that we’re racing towards, and we have the choice of either plunging off of it or grabbing at a branch which might just come loose in our grip.

Tell me: how does one plan for the future at a moment like this?

I think that might be the hallmark of a historic moment: the future becomes inaccessible and you’re left with just the situation right in front of you.

This suggests the possibility of an ahistoric moment – those points where the lazy vistas of possibility unfold in front of you and you can try to pick your way through the rocks. Chronos (calendar time) to the historic moment’s Kairos (sacred, or simply “proper,” time.)

Of course, for some people, life is difficult, and even their stretches of Chronos are beset by difficulty. The people living paycheck to paycheck and trying to figure out how they’re going to go see a dentist – I’ve lived there, and planning for the future was difficult then, but it was because I didn’t know how I could access those institutions I was trying to get to. I didn’t doubt that the institutions would be there.

What Kairos feels like. Also, what all of 2020 feels like (image taken from Dark City.)

Chronos is when “planning for the future” means the average person is putting money in a retirement account. Kairos is when “planning for the future” means that the average person is learning to sew and shoot a gun and spending their money on dried beans.

So that’s that, Chronos and Kairos.

What does this mean?

I’ve been thinking for a while that society is a machine for transforming the raw material of time into history. A way to process the steady drip of seconds and the slow slosh of the seasons into a record of things that have happened. Before we had history, we had legend and myth – which I would argue are a poetical interpretation of history – but with the advent of written records we had history. Even as those written records have declined in importance and acknowledgment, they are still there, still produced by those who see the benefit of knowing what went on before.

Oh, some people still build up legends and myths – the Q-Anon conspiracy theory is a vast, decentralized example of this, a postmodern phenomenon like a fandom made up of mass shooters and dupes – but these are counter-narratives that lack evidence. History aspires to factuality and falsifiability (i.e., the state of potentially being proven wrong: no conspiracy theorist will accept proof that they are wrong, so they can’t be treated as propagating a valid interpretation.)

Time does not convert directly into history. History is a record of experience across the population: experience is what happens when consciousness meets time – and I’m going to shirk from attempting to define time. Smarter people than me, with a more suitable education, have failed at the task. What I do believe is that our experience of time isn’t a direct translation of that phenomenon into consciousness: we see the world at a lag, and that lag is not uniform from person to person.

The phrasing here draws from Deleuze and Guattari a bit, who discussed a differentiation between “striated” space and “smooth” space in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. This image is often used on the internet as a shorthand for the social formation that traverses the “smooth space” — the Nomad War Machine, which lies in opposition to the Imperial state.

So time, made subjective, becomes experience; and experience, made collective, becomes history. I would say that at the level of experience is where the Chronos/Kairos split occurs. To mix my metaphors somewhat: Chronos is the smooth metaphorical space where we build the context for the metaphorically rougher space of Kairos, where the real “meat” of vulgar, events-based history is found: Kairos is where the graceful, looping trajectory of our shared history is bent and violently thrown on a new arc.

The fourth step in this process is historiography: history given interpretation. When the Kairos ends, and normal time resumes, people try to make sense of what they have gone through. Oftentimes, this is done in a way that serves the powers that be. This is why so many American school textbooks refer to Africans abducted from their homeland, shipped over the ocean like cargo, and forced to labor in an unfamiliar land among strangers under threat of mutilation and death as “migrant workers.” The reactionary forces that want to hide their ancestors’ sins have taken control of this part of the apparatus.

Historiography, though, can import meaning into the second stage in the process, can help people contextualize and understand their experiences, so that when they process time into experience, it helps them understand their lives.

In my life, up until now, I feel like there have been only three such moments: the fall of the Soviet Union, when I was five; the terrorist attacks on September Eleventh, 2001, when I was just fifteen; and the Financial Crisis of 2008, when I was twenty-two. None of these struck me directly at the time. I realize that more of these moments happened, and that I was simply insulated from them due to the fact that I live in the modern imperial core of the world. I am protected from the awful spectacle of history by the privilege I possess as a cisgender white man. This is the machine of society working as the people who pull its levers desire it to work.

The Neoliberal consensus has been about navigating this machine through the smooth portions of the map, about skirting the rough terrain of Kairos for as long as possible and declaring history to be a game that’s been won, with only a few jolts as the system corrects itself. This is a lie.

Wildfires, long deferred, tend to be worse than if they had simply been allowed to happen. Image from David McNew, a Stringer for National Geographic.

Just as scrubland left untended becomes a risk for wildfires, so to does a life solely of Chronos lead to Kairos. We’ve traveled through the smooth medium too long, and there is only the rocky wasteland where there is no rain, only a dry sterile thunder.

I don’t know if this is making much sense, or if it is the product of sleep deprivation.

What I’m trying to get at, simply, is that there are two general types of days that we wake up to: those where Nothing Important seems to happen, and we can turn our consideration to the future, and those where Something Important is happening and we can’t plan for the future. Some days fall between the two poles, but those are the extremes. The type of day that you’re having can, to some extent, be picked: you can ignore the Something Important, decide it’s really a Nothing and just go on with your life, but the longer you claim that there’s Nothing the less force your claim has. Eventually, we must confront the Something, the invasion of reality in the constructed world we live in. The longer we take, the worse it is.

By my reckoning, America has spent 19 years saying that there’s not really any problem. We’ve insisted that we’re living in Chronos – Nothing-Time – instead of Kairos – Something-Time – and if none of us rise to the occasion, then history will not just happen, but it will be happening to us.

I fear that we have waited too long, and that the Kairos is asserting itself in the streets of Portland and Chicago and New York and Kansas City. It’s asserting itself in the hospitals of Florida and Texas and Arizona. It’s asserting itself in your children’s classrooms and on the corner of your block.

We want to deal with it. We want to meet the moment on its own terms. But we don’t know how.

2020 has been exhausting, because we live more and more in the delayed Kairos of prior years. People calling for a return to “normal” are begging to have the Kairos taken from them, begging to have the smooth space of Chronos restored. I get the desire. I do. But I don’t share it. We disavow the fact that we live through history, and this is what we get for the vast majority of us ignoring what’s happening. We must pass through it if we are to find a new equilibrium.

The story of a worker’s revolution on a transcontinental railroad project in a fantasy world. Cover image is an illustrated reprinting from Subterranean Press.

I’ll leave only one final note – one of the major problems arises not from assuming that we have reached the End of History (get dunked on, Fukuyama) but assuming that such a thing as an “end” or “final state” is possible. The arc of the universe doesn’t bend inherently towards justice or tyranny. Technology doesn’t get better just because time is passing. There is no telos, or end-goal, to history: the vehicle of history doesn’t travel upon rails from a defined point of origin to an ultimate, predetermined destination; or, if it is on rails, perhaps it’s like the titular train in China Miéville’s Iron Council, with workers laying the track before it as it goes and pulling it up behind as it leaves: the collective effort forging a path forward.

We also must be ready, on the other side of this Kairos, to tell the story as it really happened: the way that public health became a battleground in the culture war, the way that the wealthy looted the economy and left the already-impoverished with scraps, the way that we were left without proper leadership through some of the worst months. All of this must be recorded, must be made part of the record, so that when we face the next crisis we don’t wait for the powerful to do the right thing.

They never will.

Now, if you’ll excuse me letting this piece just end on that note, I need to go find my passport – I’ve been making jokes along the lines of “don’t worry, we’ll be able to apply for refugee status in 2021” for a few months now, and the humor has been draining out of it for a few weeks. I’d like to be prepared.

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