Echoes in a Hollow Space

Currently reading:



(Subtitle: The life and mysterious death of Scottish churchman and scholar Robert Kirk and his influential treatise on fairy folklore.)

*

I have two novels that are fighting it out for my attention, one about goddesses and one about Faery with a substantial appearance by the Rev. Robert Kirk of The Secret Commonwealth fame who has been after me for years to tell a version of his story. They have been team tagging me for months, first one then the other.

But both novels are wrapped in a cloud of ennui and exhaustion that is summer seasonal affective disorder, with a side of pandemic miasma. My health hasn’t been great the last few months, most especially the last two weeks, so that is adding to the funk. Nothing serious, I don’t think, but chronic. Which means that any progress I make on these two novels is sporadic at best.

I am so not alone in this. I know many creators who are facing similar struggles, but I do feel that I’ve slipped my mooring and am drifting in circles, becalmed in a Sargasso Sea.

I get occasional signs from the universe that it isn’t done with me yet, and the Sargasso, beneath its floating mat of seaweed, is a fertile region of biodiversity for many species. But I wonder if I have another novel in me? And if I do, is it only one? Will I be able to finish both of these projects? I don’t know the answer to that.

All I can do is to keep chipping away at the marble, hoping that the form within will eventually reveal itself and come to life: a real flesh and blood woman. Or man. I have no preferences. Only a forlorn hope. And two metaphors, neither of which I can choose between.

Please note that I have capitalized Skepticism. I am referring here not to healthy skepticism, which any reasonable person must apply to dubious claims, whether of the paranormal or elsewise, but to the sort practiced by the Skeptical Inquirer, various magicians, Richard Dawkins and others who have made Skepticism their one true religion. Pseudoskeptics, in other words. These Skeptics use sometimes very sloppy science to bludgeon experiencers into submission, have been caught in out-and-out suppression of genuine inquiry, and when all else fails fall back on tropes without evidence to counter claims of the paranormal. For them, no evidence—no matter how good—can ever stand up to their “it must be faked/hallucination/lies” counterargument. All, of course, expressed in the most pompous and mocking tones.

Dishonest Skepticism does not achieve its most desired goal: the extermination of all belief in the extraordinary. In fact, it encourages people to disregard what these Skeptics are saying because it’s so easy for most people to see through that kind of dishonesty. Worse, it encourages people to disregard skeptics and experts of all sorts. It’s not a very long leap from disregarding a dishonest Skeptic to questioning the veracity of immunologists during a pandemic.

Yes, reasonable people will still use their brains in those matters, but the doubt begun with dishonest Skepticism grows in the dark and spreads like a cancer. People who are credulous, who have had the experience of their own eyes mocked or disregarded without sincere investigation, are more likely to believe well-told lies. Once they’ve bought any of the lies, it’s easier to sell them the next lie. Very soon, the fact-based, science-backed words of the genuine expert can be dismissed as “that’s just his opinion.” (Something I’ve actually heard hoax believers say about the COVID precautions urged by Dr. Fauci.)

Maybe the spirit of one’s dead mother didn’t appear beside the bed to say she was happy and not to worry, maybe it was just a comforting dream. Maybe those weird lights in the sky were just a misidentification of something natural, although they did perform in very unnatural ways. Maybe that immensely tall hairy manlike creature didn’t stand in front of you ten feet away before loping off into the woods and disappearing. Maybe that was just…well, very hard to rationalize that away without falling to the fake/lie/hallucination trope—but you get my drift. The thing is, a healthy skepticism would say, “I don’t know what it was you saw. It may be exactly as you say, or it may have had a rational explanation, but I don’t have one right now.” A Skeptic, on the other hand, would not rest until the experiencer was mocked into submission, hiding away in the dark corners of the internet where the Religion of the Lie can take root and spread.

Do I expect the Skeptics to rethink things and shut up? Of course not. This is their religion, after all. True believers never reconsider their positions. They know the Ultimate Truth and will go down in flames to defend it. Just like those who believe lizard people have taken over the government and are eating babies in the basement of the Capitol building. Unfortunately, these two extreme fringes of discourse threaten to take the rest of us down in flames with them.

Belief has always been experiential in nature. I suppose, healthy skepticism is non-experiential in nature. Skepticism, on the other hand, the unhealthy variety, strikes me as a bone-deep existential terror that the Skeptic may not know the answer to all things and that there may be more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy.

Predictions of our imminent demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Repeatedly and throughout history.

I watched a show last night on the History Channel about the various predictions that the world will end in 2012. December 21, 2012, if you follow the Mayan calendar. This show's gig was all about showing how various prophets of doom from many different cultures . . . all predicted that 2012 is the year!

Of course, a certain amount of stretching and manipulation were involved to make these predictions One Size Fits All—but then, that's sort of the Prophecy of Doom game, isn't it? The late Terence McKenna apparently came up with some mathematical formula for the I Ching . . . that no one in history had ever noticed before! He concluded from this that the Mayans were right and 2012 is . . . The End!

The TV show dusted off the Prophecies of Merlin (Myrddin) from the 11th century, the fake prophecies of Mother Shipton from the early 16th century (actually written by some guy in the 17th, I think), John of Patmos (Mr. Revelations) who was actually writing about Emperor Nero and the political situation in first century Rome, and just to bring it home to the internet and technology . . . the Web Bot Predictions!

They all agree. We're all going to die . . . and soon!

You know, I'm a student of history and science so it's not like I don't know that sweeping and catastrophic changes can swamp a society and end it; that catastrophic planetary or interplanetary events can squish us like bugs. We are vulnerable and fragile creatures sitting on a vulnerable and fragile planet. Doom is infinitely possible. Probable, really, if you look at the BIG picture.

I realize all that and more can happen to us. I just don't believe any human being or group of human beings has a lock on predicting the future. I mistrust our fascination with predicting doom and with becoming mesmerized with patterns and twisting them to confirm our preconceived prejudices. We are very clever monkeys used to picking out and seeing patterns in nature. Sometimes that's our salvation and sometimes that our, well, yes, doom—at least our psychological doom.

(And just as I am writing this Asteroid 4179 - Toutatis from Holst's The Planets came up on iTunes. Funny iTunes! It must be a sign!)

Don't get me wrong: I believe a great many silly things. All my life I've had a cynic on one shoulder and a true believer on the other. As a for instance, the only thing that has sufficiently explained to me this psychological duality is that my Sun in Virgo is in perfect opposition to my Moon in Pisces. Many people find that a silly belief, I find it a fact of life.

But I don't, I just don't, buy into Predictions of Doom. Or more precisely, Predictors of Doom. The future is a mystery and infinitely changeable, depending on what we do with our individual lives at any given moment and how those individual lives effect the society at large.

Unless the Singularity or the Asteroid or the pandemic creeps out of the closet one night and mugs us in our beds. I guess we'll all know on December 21, 2012.