A few years back I started incoherently ranting on about some insane notion I had that an obscure dream pop diva was in fact the Sibyl -- or the Oracle of the Apocalypse -- of this age.
This wasn't exactly a sudden realization, it's something I'd been pondering for over thirty years at that point. I can't blame anyone for not believing me: I didn't have a lot of data to work with at that point and didn't yet understand how oracles had traditionally worked in antiquity (hint: exactly like this one does now).
The apocalypse was admittedly a tough sell back in 2017. And it's such a loaded word anyway, dumbed down by decades of Hollywood and fundamentalist propaganda. However, I see the idea of apocalypse-- literally "the Unveiling"-- as fundamentally Gnostic. Apocalypses are times in our history when false realities fall away and the true hidden reality reveals itself. They're when the Great Wheel of the Tao turns.
Apocalypses (yes, plural) are not usually very pleasant times, largely because the ruling classes come to realize that they are about to fall like lightning from Heaven only they don't have a parachute. That's not the sum of it, but a very important part all the same.
We'll probably experience a series of cascading natural disasters, real plagues and wars and rumors of wars, like all the times before. Not to minimize the inevitable suffering in store for all of us, but this is just a part of the process of renewal, in the same way fires renew forests by doing away with the deadwood and thatch.
We've been here before: I'd tag the Bronze Age Collapse and the mysterious climate collapse in the early Middle Ages in Europe, as well as the microbial apocalypse in the Americas starting in the 15th Century, just off the top of my head.
But this time is different. Something else is at work. Something is happening outside what we normally think of as the natural world. I mean, I still think it's very much part of the natural world, but I'm the first to admit it doesn't rightly feel that way at the moment.
For the time being, I've landed on the Shimmer from Annihilation to model it. It's a pretty clumsy model, but it's the best I got at the moment.
Most of you probably know what I'm talking about: something seems to be happening to space and time, in ways we all sense but can't put our fingers on. A lot of people are talking about "the Timeline" and reality simulations and the rest of it, but I use the Shimmer as a metaphor because of how the movie version refracted all the information it processed and rearranged it, often responding to how people perceived it. Kind of like how subatomic particles are said to respond to our attention as well.
I think this is why everything is so incredibly fucked up and why it just keeps getting worse. There's no doubt there's major fuckery afoot, but I think this phenomenon is accelerating it and making it even more fucked up. Have you noticed how the technocrats have achieved absolute domination over every institution in America, but none of them seem to be very happy about it? Their toadies and camp followers are downright miserable, and for good reason.
We have an idiotic microcosm of the Shimmer in the distortion that social media refracts, and that's only getting worse. We have a mass of severely mentally sick people with an unprecedented amount of power and control, yet every victory they get just makes them more miserable and unhinged. Everything everywhere is being thrown massively out of balance, fueled by an insane doctrine of "disruption" that's become dogma for Big Tech. Lucifer's technologies, all right.
I think the misery and rage we see amongst the dominant overclasses is in part a result of unconscious realization that everything they've worked for is about to be swept away.
Like I've said, we're at the end of an Age, not the beginning. The technocrats, many of whom are well into the Spectrum to begin with, have been trying for years to cope with the gnawing suspicion that the sands in the Big Egg Timer in the Sky were slowly but surely falling away, and not in their favor. This is where the failed parade of messianic movements emerged from: Techno-Utopianism, Transhumanism, and now Woke.
It sucks to have worked so hard to get to the big leagues knowing the game will be called before you get to bat. It's why these people who have always had everything feel like they've never had anything.
So at the same time technocrats are planning smart cities, they're hedging those bets by building fortified compounds on South Pacific islands. There's such a sense of panic and terror, like they have to cram this brave new world square into the round hole of history.
It's already failing - miserably - and is only going to get crazy worse. Because the old codes they were programmed with no longer apply. I don't expect it, but I wouldn't be surprised that this all ends up with a solar flare or pole shift that fries all these lovely machines and forces the world to start all over again.
So, be honest: can you look at what is going on out there and tell me it doesn't look apocalyptic? I mean, even just a bit?
I've told you before about my experience during the Halloween storm in 2011, my first sneak preview of the end of (these) days. A fluffy little snow fell ever so gently, but unfortunately the trees were all still dressed.
The weight of the snow on the leaves caused branches and trees to snap, triggering off a series of reports that sounded like bombs going off. It was one of the weirdest and most terrifying experiences of my life, particularly when my son and I had to stop our ol' pussy willow from crushing my wife's car.
I remember thinking that day, "why don't they do something about this?" Then I thought who would do anything about this, and what exactly could they do? No one could ever do anything about it.
That was my red pill moment for my techno-delusions, which I ultimately realized all sprang from decades of consuming stupid nerd power-fantasies in comics, SF and Hollywood movies. That red pill became a horse pill when Sandy blew into town and looked and sounded like someone had opened the gates of the Abyss and left my placid suburban neighborhood looking like the Fall of Berlin.
But like I said, it's more that that. It's like the change is happening not only on the atomic but the subatomic level. Things are refracting and reorganizing themselves in very subtle ways. No one has ever experienced it before so no one knows what the fuck to do about it. I'm sure there are some whacked-out quantum guys who can offer up some theories, but I don't think there's any actual science about it. Maybe there will never be.
So maybe this is why the gurgly glossolalia and non-Euclidean harmonies of a manic pixie dream girl from way back in the day make such an appropriate prophecy for all of this. It's familiar but alien, all at the same time. Hark, the angel's herald sings, if you get my meaning.
But one thing I can say for this Shimmer thing is that it freed me from the quicksand of my past and the pipe-dreams of the future and landed me in the Now. And I'm getting a lot more information beamed into my brain from the Now, so to speak, than I ever had from the imaginary landscapes of the past and future.
It's how I realized that part of all this political insanity is because of people trying to conserve an imaginary past or progress towards an imaginary future. People are ultimately fighting in the streets over their fantasies. No wonder it all comes across like a LARP.
I'm nobody and no one's going to listen to me, but I think some Now would go a long way in bridging that gap. The Big Wheel is not going to turn, it's turning now. You know it, I know it, everyone does. And there aren't any road maps for the world we're heading towards.
