The Oracle of Despair - Oct 30 2022

 

The Oracle of Despair

Oct 30 2022

The prediction

that things will get worse

has proven correct.

I take no satisfaction in this.

Vindication, under such circumstances

is meaningless;

I wish I'd been wrong.

Not that I'm some kind of seer, oracle

clairvoyant.

I don’t soothsay or prophesy,

don’t read the leaves of tea

or sacrifice animals

to examine their entrails.

I just notice the signs.

And have become resigned

to human frailty

and the flaws of human nature.

Know

that while history doesn't repeat, it rhymes.

And that in my own life

I also find myself replaying

the same mistakes

despite knowing better.

So what's new, the goldfish died

friendship lapsed

relationship failed,

the divorce

couldn’t have been nastier.

Not nuclear Armageddon.

Not famine or war.

No lives lost.

Just the usual drama

understandable regret.

The end of history, as foretold?

Hardly.

It's just that we don't remember well.

And that the past

is as uncertain as the future;

rewriting history

to serve whatever purpose

suits the current moment best.

I just read a front page article about permafrost melting, methane release, climate change tipping points, and the runaway train of positive feedback effects. Finally! Something I’ve been railing about for literally decades, but no one’s been listening. Vindication? Hardly. More like cynicism and despair; throwing my hands in the air and giving up.

But despairing at all that's going wrong in the world, as well as the fatalism that we are doomed, no matter what, by our own essential flaws — greed, short-term thinking, the lure of power, anthropocentrism, consumerism, xenophobia, historical ignorance, irrationality, superstition, denialism, and while I'm at it all the deadly sins — is too bleak. So I took the poem in a more personal direction. Which is a kind of forgiveness for our folly: after all, why expect anything different of us collectively when our own personal histories are equally prone to the same repeated mistakes, the same short-term thinking?

I've also been thinking about how, from the way it's taught in school, we think of history as fixed. When, in fact, it keeps getting rewritten: in a good way, by serious academics; and a nefarious way, through the wilful blindness and simplification of self-serving populists and rabble-rousers. (For more about the malleability of history - how it can be rewritten and politicized — this article might be of interest: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/american-historical-association-james-sweet/671853/) Who would have thought that the past could be as murky as the future? That objective truth about the past (if such a thing is even possible) can be almost as hard to get right as successfully predicting the future! (A redundancy, I know — predictions are always about the future, after all! — but hard to word any other way.)