The Return of the Tower of Babel: Prologue
Birth Pangs of the Aquarian World
Prologue
9/11/2001 to 11/8/2016 to 1/6/2021
“When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?” – William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 1
In September 2001, Lindy and I flew JetBlue from Boston to SFO. Three days later, Saudi and Yemini jihadists armed with utility knives hijacked two West-Coast-bound planes and flew them into the World Trade Center, another into the Pentagon—the extent of their aeronautic skills. A fourth hijacked plane, United 93, was wrested from its abductors by passengers and crashed unpiloted into a Pennsylvania field, now a cenotaph to a Satanic rite conducted in the transportation hub.
We awoke to 9/11 on Pacific Daylight time. The satellite technician who came to restore codes lost by our four-month renters remarked after turning on the receiver and staring, “Boy, we must be pissing some people off!” Still my favorite unrehearsed response.
At the time, three days seemed safe leeway. As the lesion of those planes continues to tear time, three days have come to feel like three seconds—whew! Those weren’t just terrorist deaths—casualties of Wright Brothers flight—they were sacrifices on an Inca altar. Pond-hopping may distinguish twenty-first century jets from nineteenth-century ocean-going vessels and stagecoaches, but the generations of vehicles, each based on wheels and gears, Roman wagon trails, and the bending of time, are not that different. Modernity’s journeys may be epic in terms of molecules burned, electrons moved, distances covered, and destinies shuffled, but, for all the hoopla, underlying karma doesn’t change.
Every flight is a ceremony, a sweat lodge, and an odyssey through an underworld presented celestially. Consider US Airways 1549 from New York/LaGuardia to Charlotte/Douglas (January 15, 2009), which encountered a flock of Canadian geese at 3,000 feet. The plump fowl were sucked into both jet engines, converting rotors, blades, and assorted metal parts and fasteners into salvage, casting an eerie silence over the Airbus. Captain Chesley Sullenberger glided it safely onto the Hudson River.
*
November 8, 2016. Lindy and I stayed with friends in Windsor, Connecticut, en route from New York City to Portland, Maine. After our hosts left us for an election party, we followed the returns with a poet from Hartford. We saw Yeats’ falconer unable to call his falcon; we heard the opening notes of a ceremony of innocence drowned. “Mere anarchy” had been loosed upon the world.
I didn’t know then that our hosts had cast absentee ballots in Florida for Donald J. Trump. They returned at 2 a.m., celebrating.
They are good, generous people—working-class, community-oriented, crystal and salt-lamp mavens. They saw a benign magician and working-class hero; I saw an ascended slumlord and John Wayne Gacy clown.
I learned later that a left-wing friend in Maine voted for him too. “I held my nose,” she said, “but Hillary was more dangerous.”
I went to bed in the a.m., thinking, ‘This is going to be terrible, but we will get through it. We survived the Cuban Crisis.’
I was eighteen then, and that was a single hit-and-run in the ocean, nuclear winter canceled by a phone call.
No cable would cancel this deluge, from degradation of worldwide ecosystems—seas and rainforests—to weapon-pollinated clusterfucks in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Kashmir, Ethiopia, and Central America, fascist mange spreading across India, Israel, Brazil, Belarus, Hungary, the Philippines, and the Emirates.
On August 10, 2016, I posted on Facebook:
Note to Republicans:
Telling yourself that you can stage-manage four years of a Trump presidency without major catastrophe to the country and the world is like kidding yourself that you can persuade Mohammed Atta to land the plane safely.
It had arrived, the darkness that does not precede a dawn, late and ahead of time, because magical thinking could no longer postpone it. As forests combusted like matchsticks, hurricanes reminded us of 900 miles-per-hour vortices elsewhere in our solar system. While shamans and witches tried to dance life back, rain-forest activists were jailed and executed, jungle tribes and their habitats obliterated. Jets dumped metallic particles into the atmosphere, making a Google/Amazon cloud in an attempt to control the climate, two birds with one stone.
This is the darkness that precedes not a dawn but the birth of a radically new order of things.1
For now, it is the Age of Donald Trump—whatever it really is—an interlude of gangsta, graft, grift, and queer, of “Make Love as War.” Love is treated as unavailable content, encrypted by multiple operating systems, transmuted by tweeting, sexting, tribal correctness, and cancel culture. Bye-bye “earth angel, earth angel, / the one I adore.”2
It is also the opening—breach birth—of the so-called Aquarian kalpa. Trump may not have been the herald summoned—no alchemical Whole Earth steward he, no seventh samurai or Zen master. But he was the samurai ordered—all six feet, three inches, 244 pounds, 2 billion dollars, playboy pedigree, sclerotic swagger, and golden mane. Columnist Charles P. Pierce nailed the ascent of a hollowman in Esquire:
In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and say, "And we shall overcome." I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh's madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing 'Amazing Grace' in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless.
And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.
The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. We never have had such a cheap counterfeit of a president as currently occupies the office. We never have had a president so completely deserving of scorn and yet so small in the office that it almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the requisite contempt.
Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents don't have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too. Watch him behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn't he a funny man? Isn't what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now.3
It is not as simple as that, but it also is. Pierce nailed. it When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.
At Auld Lang Syne 2019, Janus hung “their” harbingers: 150-degree days, economic decline, domestic terror, tribal diasporas, epochal floods. In 2020, “they” added a pandemic, closed borders, social distancing, death waves, a watershed election in the United States, supply-chain cleavages, a revaluation of currencies, nonfungible tokens—a transmogrification of goods and facts. These lay on a pre-Aquarian cusp, as ghosts of dissolving realities multiplied, starboard to stern. They served a prophetic function, to startle and alert, to re-engage us in a cosmic view of who we are.
For Janus’ appearance in 2021, celebrated on January 6th in honor of the old calendar, the hollowman’s followers stormed the capitol and tried to take back their imaginary America, though they never got out of Caesar’s Rome, Mission: Impossible!, and Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip. Was the battlefield on new Earth or on old Mars? Do we even remember after The Chessmen of Mars, Martians Go Home!, Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars, The Martian Codex, War of the Worlds, and Stranger in a Strange Land? We are again “only eggs.”
A lesion opened between the election of Donald J. Trump and the firestorms of the American West and Australian outback. It featured a boom economy that felt like anything but. The Inuit spoke of a shift in the Earth and Solar System’s orbits: “The sun is in a different place now,” their elders said. “Everything is tilting northward. The winds are fitful, weather unpredictable.” They checked with elders from other tribes who agreed, something celestial is happening.
‘Oumuamua, a cylindrical object of unknown scale and anomalous trajectory, acceleration, and origin, whipped through our system in 2017, changing speed and albedo, and was gone before astronomers realized that they had a black swan. Too late! It was well on its way toward Pegasus.
On September 6th, the anomalous artifact broke the planetary orbital plane from the direction of Vega, twenty-five light years away, reaching perihelion on September 9th, and was gone in a month. When Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb suggested that ‘Oumuamua’s behavior flagged a technosignature rather than another primal rock—debris from another civilization, a photon-driven sail several kilometers long and a few millimeters thick, a camera probe?—he was all but excommunicated from the guild of astrophysics. Messaging is strictly regulated in academe.
Where was NASA with its asteroid watch? It was busy tracking the location of Apophis in 2029, but can it tell where Earth is now?
COVID-19 filled the spreading lesion. Only a bit of it, but it gave a sense of how its gaps will be filled—not by plagues alone but by shadows from this overwrought, rootless civilization.
Now restaurants, pedestrians, and ports no longer look like themselves. Duration can’t be counted by gears, pendula, or cesium ticks; it is distended, becoming longer and deeper, while stalling out in some precincts and whipping by like the solar wind in others. Heraclitus’ one-way river is clogged with wormholes, eddies, switchbacks, and the sorts of relativistic relocations that make mere Proustian—even Einsteinian—déjà vu quaint. No wonder Outback, Dark, Manifest, Stranger Things, and The Sandman with their assorted Wiccans, demons, and tuxedo-wearing vampires stream across Netflix’s zeitgeist. We are rolling over epochs among standing stones, buzzing rocks, callings, and forbidden archaeologies. Remnants of Atlantis and Lemuria envelop common cities from the Emirates to Puget Sound. The old past is a time capsule, a ghost town of dumps and deserts, inhabited by movie armorers and stuntmen in a lesion somewhere between Rust and Songbird.
Cosmic distances have been warped too, space-time reorganized by orbiting Webb eyes from the farthest galaxies to crossing town. Urban zones drift apart, while individuals—Hong-Kong to Capetown, Buenos Aires to Boise—sit in a virtual chamber, connected by Zoom, where they trade cryptographies, databanks, blockchains, facial recognition, and passports, and conduct magnetic-resonance Reiki. Unnamed entities loiter on earth’s dimensional frontiers, watching, imposing new rules and meanings.
Endnotes
1. In 1970, poet Robert Kelly said to me, “We are living in the darkest West, in the dark that does not precede the dawn but the birth of a radically different order of things.”
2. Cleveland Duncan, Curtis Williams, Dexter Tisby, Bruce Tate (The Penguins), “Earth Angel (Will You Be Mine),” Dootone 1954.
3. Charles P. Pierce, “This Vicious Buffoon Is a Vessel for All the Worst Elements of the American Condition,” Esquire online, October 3, 2018.