Looking for the exit

Divining dreams in the eschaton

In my dreams I’m constantly trying to find my way out of some kind of large, impossibly structured building. A hotel, a college campus, a mall, sometimes an unholy combination of all three: these are the places where I spend hours each night. The building usually has multiple floors, hallways that open onto other hallways that suddenly become crevices. I get into an elevator that I thought was taking me to the right floor . . . only it’s the wrong floor . . . or it’s going in the opposite direction than I thought it was going. Very rarely I make my way out. Most of the time I wander and wander until I wake up, reluctantly, wishing I could have finally reached the exit before ejecting from my subconscious.

When I think about these fantastically realist locales in the light of day, they call to mind all the different buildings I used to wander around by myself through my childhood and early adolescence. The plaza where my local chapter of Kumon was located, where I’d amble aimlessly after struggling through my weekly appointment with the math gods; the lower bowels of my high school, waiting for my ride home; and, of course, my church, where sometimes I’d prefer to find an empty room with a piano, even while youth group or the Chinese New Year luncheon or the evening prayer service was still in full swing. The dream-buildings that I traverse always look almost like these complexes, but not quite; they are also suffused with an unease that I don’t necessarily associate with their real-life counterparts, a quiet anxiety that I will keep wandering forever.

I’m sure psychoanalysts could write reams of speculation about these dreams, and why they seem to occupy the entirety of my sleeping mind during my mid-thirties, in the midst of a pandemic, the corollary xenophobia of which has prompted me to bang on the doors of countless churches for the past nine months. I’m retracing my steps, trying to find where my path went awry, in hopes that I might finally see the stars. But sometimes I wonder if there’s a more allegorical understanding of these dreams—sometimes I wonder if I am not really myself in these dreams, but rather a stand in for some collective that has funneled itself into my dreaming brain, not because I’m So Special but simply because I have the misfortune of being unable to stop chewing on the miseries that should concern us all.

If “civilization” and “society” are still meaningful words (decades of the Right’s molestation of such words have left me with grave doubts), I don’t think it an exaggeration to say that the aggregate entity to which such words refer is presently stumbling around, looking for an exit. Whether that exit opens up into another form of organization or simply oblivion is entirely another matter; but that we are mostly stumbling along, with no plan and even less sense of how we’ve found ourselves in this blandly unfriendly maze, seems, from my limited perspective, indisputable.

Here’s what the front page of the New York Times happens to look like right now. I’d observe precisely how unremarkable, in 2021, this particular combination of outrages and indignities appears to the average reader: yet another picture of flooded homes, which might have gripped an earlier generation, skids by one’s field of vision. Examining closely, one sees the language of routinization, of acclimatization to a permanent state of decay. The “chaos in global shipping” that preoccupies the lead story is not a manmade clusterfuck demanding that we deconstruct the very notion of global capitalism, but a “reality that could require refashioning the world’s shipping infrastructure." The “shadow inflation” taking place all around us similarly elicits merely technical concerns about how to measure it, not moral concern about its repercussions for the precariat. “The rich have found yet another way to pay less tax,” David Wessel tells us; while the actual op-ed might offer the germ of a radical response (I haven’t read it), the world-weariness of that “yet” speaks volumes. Wessel does not need to elaborate on all the previous schemes that the rich have barely taken the time to hide from us plebes.

To his credit, Charles M. Blow tries to meet our interlocking crises with something like the alarm that it deserves: “Democrats, you’re in danger.” Note the object of his address, though—the implicit premise that a major political party’s fate is what should primarily concern readers, and not the constituents whom that party is failing miserably to serve. Meanwhile, the headline about “major climate action” presents yet another story about bills deadlocked in Congress, a situation to which the general public is so accustomed that, even though the stakes involve the very future of the planet, one cannot help but resign oneself to disappointment—that is, if one takes for granted the notion that “significant climate action” can only be taken by those who govern the settler colony known as the United States of America.

What I see when I look at these headlines is aimlessness. Certainly, one could argue that they represent the aimlessness of a particular class, the coveted middle-to-upper-class liberal demographic over which the Times’ editorial board regularly salivates. Still, even accounting for elitism, I do think that these headlines captures the experience of living in a world that is slowly falling apart, whose ostensible leaders have no idea what they are doing except to keep stumbling onward and dragging the rest of us in tow. I look at these headlines and that familiar overture of dreary anxiety from so many—most—of my dreams stares back at me.

How are we going to deal with the inevitable fruits of our port crisis? How are we going to deal with the Right’s continual and obscenely normal obstruction of anything like an adequate response to global heating? How are we going to deal with the parallel reality from which the wealthy periodically dip into our own, to update us about their literally astronomical penis envies? For the most part, I know how I personally would answer these questions. I am an anarchist, and as such, I believe that any real solutions must begin with working to dismantle both the State and the apparatuses of capital it sustains. But while there are many of us anarchists out there, we are still, for the most part, hostage to a larger body whose overwhelming temptation is to shrug and get used to the long emergency. So even as I continue my own attempts at direct action, at pushing this lumbering planet towards the exit, I can’t help but feel that the gigantic corpus of which I am but an infinitesimal part is taking another wrong left in a building it does not understand. I will continue to act in the spirit of something approaching hope; but aimlessness lurks in the air we breathe. The next pandemic is already here.

One other detail in my dreams. Often, I have the sense that I am trying to get somewhere in time for some appointment: the start of a movie, the start of a class I am taking (never teaching—I’m almost always the student), a plane or cruise set to depart very, very soon. As I said, I almost never reach this nebulous goal. But maybe the problem isn’t that I need to get to my destination; maybe the issue is that the movie isn’t worth watching, the final point of arrival not worth seeing. I wish some time, in my dreams, I could hunker down with those faceless people around me. I wish we could all stop trying to get some place and instead begin dismantling the building surrounding us, brick by brick, to find at last that I—we—are walking on some everlasting sea.

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P.S. I was on a couple of podcasts this week. Listen to my talk with Ken Fong to hear me discuss whether the direct action I mention above is a pipe dream. Listen to my appearance on the Black Socialists of America’s 1000 Cuts podcast to hear a discussion of why, really, actually, for real, China is still capitalist. As usual, my singing/screaming voice can be found here.