Grinding Through Chaos

I always wondered how people lived through the buildups. Ian’s book about life in Berlin during the war (Stay Alive, Berlin 1939-1945, Penguin) will come out in March and explain how people on the wrong side lived through the duration. But the preamble? Iraqis posted on Twitter about about daily life in Baghdad before our invasion , and I was fascinated . How do you balance the dread and helplessness with the need to buy garbage bags, go to the dentist, see friends ?

I still go to ballet class. When I’m doing my pliés at the barre, the face of Renee Nicole Good under her knitted hat hovers between me and the cream walls, and the video of the disabled woman on the way to the doctor, yanked from her car by a masked mob keeps playing through the “Polovotsian Dances” from Prince Igor that accompany our grands battements.

Rwanda 1994. Syria 2011, when the torture of the Daraa schoolboys who’d written anti-regime graffiti set off the protests that led to Syria’s war on its own people. Argentina during the Colonels, who ‘disappeared’ some 30,000 . The House on the Neva, Kristallnacht, and that’s the then.

The now is the thousands of protesters shot in Iran yesterday. The wars on Ukraine, on Gaza, in South Sudan, in Yemen. Offshore prisons, Honduras, Alligator Alcatraz. Oh, and the Brits send asylum seekers to Rwanda, in a loop of wrong.

You try to push away the thoughts, but as a contemporary to these actions you are a witness , and to be silent is to be an accomplice. The people of Minneapolis are brave. The thugs are licensed. The thugs have the power.

I didn’t think it would be this.

When the young man told us in 2024 that he’d voted for the candidate who embodied the values of his church, I looked up that church. Local, dedicated to bible study for end times.

End Times.

What a quaint concept, I thought, the charismatic hellfire preaching in American literature, movies, and TV, the waiting for the end , hoping for the end. Soliciting the end in American cults: Jim Jones in the jungle, Branch Davidians in Waco, all those smaller standoffs in empty landscapes. Octavia Butler and Cormac McCarthy. The big spectacle Apocalypse movies that flirt with an absolute end to everything, although the day is usually saved by brave warriors in fast fighter planes . And there’s all that Left Behind stuff, in which the Rapture claims its kind. The most recent Rapture was due on September 23 of last year.

Because I grew up over there, I know that Europeans don’t have the same impatient attachment to end times, nor a taste for religious rapture. They’ve had enough wars of religion to know that God doesn’t take sides.

America likes Big Bangs and small bangs; it thirsts for God and his answers. It was thought a heathen place until settlers declared the spectacular sunsets over the Hudson proof of the presence of a recognizable God .

I keep half-hearing of zealots and ambassadors who wish to fulfill biblical prophecies.

The end of everything makes some people hot. Armageddon is the ultimate money shot. The frisson of end times, or End Times, is the thrill that comes from playing chicken, seeing how far something can go before it’s fatal. Dares, challenges, weird sex games with choking and plastic bags, addicts gambling that what’s in the syringe is actual heroin, kids surfing the roofs of subway cars. Anything stupid and fast that could kill you. If it could be fatal it’s really, really potent.

The thrill of an absolute ending.

The 20th century frisson, fed by books and movies, was about a nuclear warhead striking your city, another nuclear warhead striking the enemy’s city and onto the full Doctor Strangelove, until the last sign of life at the end of On The Beach was a lone Coca Cola bottle leaning against an isolated radio transmitter on an island.

Children were taught to hide from nuclear weapons under their desks. The exercise was called “Duck and Cover”. At the London Lycée, we didn’t hide under desks, but we were scared. The white winter skies of Northern Europe could mask an approaching missile. It almost happened, once: in 1998, we learned that back in 1983, Russian air defense detected missiles coming from the USA; one Lieutenant colonel Petrov correctly judged that the missiles were false alarms due to a malfunction, and refused to pass the information up the chain of command, where it would have set off nuclear retaliation.

The Cold War ended in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down; three years later, Francis Fukuyama announced The End of History . Some heard that as the End of Human History.

I still believed in the self regulating system that had kept postwar civilization churning along through the incidents of Gulf War 1, Kosovo, Rwanda, South Sudan. I firmly believed that heads of state would at least pretend to have the interests of their people at heart, that cooler heads existed to prevail, that there was a fundamental rightness in all things. That movement was towards progress, despite multiple, endless relapses into bloodshed. The arc of the moral universe had to bend towards justice , and the fundamental caution of the sober older men in grey suits would stop the world from blowing up.

I aged into being an adult, then an elder with the faint indifference of long experience. The sober old men in grey suits are now unreliable young men, and the person with absolute power in the world is a rotting, frothing elder.

Caution is gone. Rightness has frayed.

Before 2000 we all feared Y2K, which fell short of a Scarefest until later that year, when the election non-result marked the first turn towards a singular wrongness.

9/11 signaled the end of fortress America, so we bombed Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. I watched the BBC news, writhing, but didn’t think end times.

So here we are now , under the explosive diarrhea of threats. We bomb Nigeria on Christmas Day. Kidnap Venezuela’s president after killing fishermen from warplanes . Threaten Greenland so that Denmark, Germany, France and Sweden are massing there to protect it.

Venezuela and Greenland are closer to us than Minneapolis. I lived in the Venezuelan fishing village for ten days when I played Mrs Prest in Mariana’s Aspern Papers, which she shot on a cacao plantation near Choroni . N was in Greenland twice, the second time when his late wife Jennie directed the National Theater of Greenland’s actors in A Midsummer Night’sDream, a feat in a country with neither trees nor midsummer nights.

I tried three different anti-depressants last year; only the Klonopin remains useful, if I wake in the night. I ground my teeth so hard that one tooth was about to jump from my jaw, so I replaced the night guard with an expensive series of plastic trays to guide the chaos of teeth back into line. I clenched my fists so hard I couldn’t open my hands in the morning, so now sleep with a round stone in each hand.

Someone T-boned us on River Road, totaled the car, and left me with a stammer that kicks in at the slightest alarm. The door to the. stammer is always open; every day brings cause for alarm.

After the accident we began meditating at a friend’s house on Sundays, and me alone with Tracy’s zoom group on Tuesdays. I was still a mess, but in the summer I overheard Judith, the ballet teacher, tell a student that she meditated every morning before she got out of bed. I copied her, digging a small area out of time before the world can assert its madness. Not becoming a Buddhist , a holy person, a vegetarian, but just enforcing some silence, in a routine.

The dentist gave me a new bite guard on Friday, dyed pink like the old one so it won’t vanish into the surroundings.

I ground my teeth through the night into whatever poisonous plastic the guard is made of, and on Saturday morning I woke less afraid than I’d been for a year.

Maybe all it takes is a hard piece of pink plastic in the mouth. Not quite a gag. A chew toy. My chew toy.

Just before noon, Susan came over with Kerry and Elizabeth, who carried the only sign, handwritten on a mailer envelope. We walked up to the demonstration at the intersection of Main and Market. There were 200 of us, or 5% of the village. Most of us in varying states of old.

We chanted “Renee Nicole Good.” It felt sad, it felt not enough , it felt firm, clean, wholehearted. The cars driving by honked in solidarity; only one—a pickup— deployed the metallic fart from hell of some military-grade horn.

A man named Paul had written new lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner”. It begins : “Oh! It can happen here..”

We walked home. I gave my friends tea, macarons from New Year’s Eve, almond cookies, chocolates and Sari’s stuffed dates. They ate happily.

I felt happy. We’d done a small thing, shown up together, stood with strangers. In Iran we’d have been shot. So we have that.

Oh yes, but Minneapolis. The world is all the same place.