During this present moment of breathtaking global turmoil that’s characterized by crumbling foundational assumptions and free-falling civilizational presuppositions, the above video, published at BoingBoing, may constitute the most necessary viewing on the entire internet. Words and narration by long-time Teeming Brain friend Erik Davis. Card manipulation by renowned magician and “magic experience designer” Ferdinando Buscema. Musical soundscape by Bluetech. Overall production and direction by Italian mentalist Francesco Tesei. All of it focused on the matter of “the ongoing pandemic, disorder, and the opportunity emerging from the entropy.” (Thank you, btw, to Teem member David Metcalfe for alerting me to the video’s existence with a tweet.)
The first part of Erik’s narration sets the philosophical scene:
Everyone knows what a house of cards is. But until recently, you probably didn’t realize you actually lived in one. Normally, we ignore the complexity of the human world around us, this network of unstable structures propped up through improvised designs and just-in-time responses. But the pandemic has now shown us just how flimsy these structures are. Now we can all sense the fragility of our institutions, especially for the most vulnerable. The mask is off. From financial markets to health care, from jobs to the food supply, from debt to news, we can feel the rickety edifice of civilization begin to wobble and crack. The rug, it seems, is being pulled out from under us. And as we hunker down, anxious and isolated, our own personal realities begin to disintegrate as well.
Erik goes on to point out that such periods of crumbling structures and their accompanying apocalyptic anxieties, which have erupted into human affairs throughout history, bring with them an unexpectedly salubrious result and a major opportunity as they deliver us from the unacknowledged prison of what we have mistakenly thought of as solid, permanent arrangements, and toss us right into the heart of “the chaos that precedes all creation.”
That particular wording brings to mind the theologian Catherine Keller and her article “The Lost Chaos of Creation,” a portion of which I used nearly 20 years ago, with her permission, as the closing epigraph to my Divinations of the Deep. More recently, in fact just last month, she and her fellow theologian John J. Thatamanil wrote an op-ed for the ABC’s Religion and Ethics portal titled “Is this an Apocalypse? We certainly hope so — and you should too.” Their point, which they built around the original and profound meaning of the word “apocalypse” (something I’ve talked about here many times in the past), resonates warmly with the house of cards illustration above:
Contemporaries keep using the term “apocalypse,” but literalist biblical interpretation notwithstanding, the term doesn’t mean what many think it means. Deriving from the Greek apokalypsis, the word means “unveiling” or “revelation.” Hence, the title given to the final book of the Christian Bible, “The Apocalypse of John,” is accurately translated “Revelation” not “Cataclysm.” Not “The End.” Unfortunately, this root meaning has been forgotten in popular circles.
When the term is understood as “unveiling,” we can then ask the right questions: What does this pandemic unveil? What have we refused to see about ourselves and the precarious world we’ve built, a world that now stands exposed and tottering in the harsh light of this unasked-for revelation? If we permit this crisis to expose the fissures of our failing world, this pandemic will have served as properly apocalyptic. If instead, despite its devastating toll, we return to an obsolete and unsustainable world, nothing meaningful will have been revealed. . . .
So what might coronavirus “reveal” to us? Is it at once our inescapable interdependence with an earth-full of humans and nonhumans? Does that entanglement turn deadly when we repress it? When we think we can control, commodify and consume the matter of the world, does it bite back at our own mattering bodies? . . .
Perhaps, if we are able to awaken to what is unveiled in this apocalyptic moment, we will make our way forward into a new world rather than shore up the old one. . . .
[W]hat are the chances for a habitable and hospitably shared future? Close to none, if responsibility for the damage remains concealed. Which is why, even in the midst of flood, fire, or pandemic — a way, a wisdom, can get revealed. Apocalypse after all? May it be so!
As I myself argued here some seven years ago, apocalypse, rightly regarded, is a path of spiritual awakening. You walk it when you deliberately allow and encourage the crumbling of surface appearances and seemingly solid structures around you, and even within you, to serve as spurs to awakening. When you let the death of the false, which you had formerly and mistakenly regarded as the true, wake you up to the real. When you embrace the exit from Plato’s Cave because somebody blew it up around you. When you embrace the desert of the real that came into view when you woke up from the Matrix because somebody pulled the plug.
As I said seven years ago, like any real spiritual path, this is ultimately not something that you choose but something that chooses you. And as it so happens, with the advent of the Coronacene, the Way of Apocalypse has apparently chosen all of us at once. It remains to be seen how many of us will prove to be like Cypher, who begged to be plugged back into the Matrix, to reenter the dream because he hated reality. How many of us will be like the prisoners in Plato’s cave who didn’t want to leave because they loved their imprisonment in illusion. We’re seeing aspects of that particular psychological and cultural tension beginning play out right now. The quote from Philip K. Dick that rounds out the house of cards video (drawn from his 1978 speech/essay “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” whose title helps to explain the title of the video) supplies a necessary and steadying insight for such things:
Do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things.