ESSAY // WALTER FOLEY // KILLING MOLOCH: Early Pandemic Reflections on Sobriety and Transcendence
Early andemic reflections on sobriety and transcendence
By Walter Foley
Images by Frog the Parhelia
Volume 2 // Issue 1 // Summer 2020 // RESILIENCE
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
—Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
How did we get here?
Beneath the United States’ slow and clumsy response to COVID-19 was the assumption that this wasn’t the sort of disaster that happens in a country like ours. When we’re lulled into thinking that everything is going according to plan, we often zone out and leave ourselves vulnerable.
For five years I’ve worked at a moving company, where each day involves some degree of improvisation around unexpected hurdles. Although my co-workers and I are skilled at balancing heavy objects on our backs, ducking under low thresholds in deteriorating basements, and dodging unleashed lap dogs while walking backward and carrying furniture, there is one recurring obstacle that predictably causes any mover to trip, regardless of how many times he encounters it: the slightly uneven staircase.
Because a staircase conveys uniformity and stability, a slightly uneven one will often cause much bigger problems than an observably chaotic environment. Most of us can remain relatively unharmed when we know that we have to be alert; the worst disasters arise under illusions of safety.
For many people, the pandemic revealed that the results of their lifelong planning and effort could be erased in an instant: They had been showing up on time, doing what was requested of them, perhaps for meager pay, maybe taking on personal risk for an entrepreneurial pursuit, filing their taxes… And now they’re left with crushing uncertainty.
All of this is occurring while our emotions are being manipulated to an unprecedented degree in the digital realm, where short-term impulses are frequently elevated over long-term strategy, creating another layer of complication for someone hoping to start over. We’ve slowly opted into a situation in which algorithms tell us what we want, which we then mistake for what we need. Echoing our predilection toward junk food, we find ourselves craving junk information. We receive more of the known, more comfortable “choices,” and more numbness, even as our senses of self, purpose, and agency become sclerotic.
The rationality blog Slate Star Codex uses the the brutal Canaanite god Moloch, depicted in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” as a metaphor for humanity’s repeated failure to coordinate toward a better future: Although we might collectively agree that we should steer toward something positive and stable—for instance, workable approaches to health care or independence from fossil fuels—Moloch offers incentives to individuals within the system that steer everything toward destruction.
Researchers in Silicon Valley have calculated that all of the money Americans spend on “getting out of their heads”—including legal and illegal drugs, useful and bogus wellness products, pornography, IMAX theater outtings, and other entertaining luxuries that cause measurable increases in pleasurable neurochemicals—adds up to a grand total of around $4 trillion.
We are, as Neil Postman warned in the ’80s, amusing ourselves to death. But let’s try to be optimistic and assume that these Silicon Valley researchers overshot by a trillion: That would still be more than the GDP of the United Kingdom, and we should probably admit that some of this time, money, and energy could be redirected toward killing Moloch.
The system was never safe, and never stable. The coronavirus has sent countless people, many for the first time, tumbling backward down the staircase, lying in a heap at the bottom and realizing they may never stand up again, even if they’ve done everything they were supposed to do up until this point. Continuing to numb ourselves as we participate in the system “as is” won’t help.
One way out is to retrain ourselves in how to exercise control of our impulses and emotions, and to reintroduce ourselves to the remarkable mental and physical feats of which we’re capable. This could act as a ballast against attempts to hijack our attention, and help to rebuild something that works better for more people.
Fortunately, there are transformative, freeing—and often, free—options for doing this, but finding them usually requires guidance.
The Shift: Hidden Rhythms
As the pandemic lockdown dragged on from the spring and into the summer, I was periodically reminded how fortunate I was to have learned to cope, at least to some degree, with silence and uncertainty, and with being solidly in my mind and body.
I was severely addicted to alcohol for most of my twenties and spent some time in hospitals and rehabs after experiencing seizures and other life-threatening conditions due to withdrawal. Both addiction and early recovery were accompanied by painful emotional and physical tugging. Every few seconds, my brain and body would demand that I do something counterproductive to my wellbeing.
It’s disturbing to imagine the hell of hiding bottles—or going through withdrawal—during a quarantine.
“I’ve done a lot of work with people with addictions, and people with addictions don’t want to be in their body,” says Jacelyn Biondo, a dance therapist who does research at Drexel University and also works with people who have schizophrenia. “They don’t want to feel what they’re feeling a lot of the time… It’s not glamorous, but I always say, ‘You have to learn how to sit in your own shit.’ Because it’s there. And that’s this idea of a meditative practice going internally. If you can sit there, then you can do anything. If you can tolerate yourself, you can do anything. And so we work sometimes just on a reintroduction to the body. What does it mean to have this thing that holds all of your secrets? And the slightest of movement will shift your darkest stuff right up to the surface.”
Second to familial support, my recovery over the past few years can be credited to a handful of ways in which I learned how to shift into a mental space that allows for a calming type of concentration. My primary tool for focus was the drumset, but the lessons are adaptable to other creative and physical practices.
Polyrhythms inspire a sort of poetic wonder in drummers. They involve playing two or more meters of musical time at once, so they have a multilayered feel, with the rhythmic components pushing against each other during most segments of the beat and meeting back up again harmoniously at another segment. This is one of the methods employed by drummers to get the sense of tension/release that a guitarist achieves through dissonant/consonant chord structures. There is an additional tier of audial complexity: a “foreground” and “background” that an experienced listener can consciously shift between.
Listening to these types of rhythms for long periods can be meditative, but they are notoriously difficult to play for people like me, who were raised on rock and roll and pop music. Rock and pop songs typically emphasize the “strong” beats within a rhythm, the parts where an audience instinctively claps and stomps. But your ear won’t find a polyrhythm unless you search for it.
I’d struggled for years trying to make sense of this, but was able to finally make it click after reading some instructional books that pointed out the overlaps between geometric patterns and musical time. The visual components allowed me to make intuitive sense of what was going on with this multidimensional music, and, after kicking my drinking habit, I learned to reliably produce rhythmic exercises that induce a mentally and physically engaging quality of attention.
The reason why this development—a rhythmic notation system that is more conducive to intuitive learning—was so revelatory, is that it allowed me to absorb complex rhythms at a deeper level. Rather than having to think my way through a difficult beat, I could feel it in my body.
“You always have your body. It’s with you constantly, whether you want it to be or not,” says Biondo. “You can move your body whenever you need to. Whenever you need to de-stress, or stop the anxiety, or stop the intrusive or racing thoughts, or stop the voices. You have your body at all times—you can use practical tools to do this.”
Each limb of a drummer has to function interdependently with the other limbs in order to sync with the accompanying musicians in a way that sounds fluid. This in turn offers a solid foundation for a dancer, who must also be in her body and in harmony with other dancers.
Every culture on Earth has a history of playing music and dancing together. It’s only recently that we started looking for reasons to justify the impulse.
Flow States, Hydras, and Healthy Competition
Experimental dancer Megan Bridge runs the performance space Fidget in Kensington with her husband and musical collaborator Peter Price. She believes that, along with so many of our broken systems, the art world has been damaged by perverse economic incentives. It’s also been blighted by the “Cartesian split”: the proposition, rooted in the work of René Descartes, that the mind and body are entirely separate phenomena.
“Contemporary society has been built on the foundation of this idea from this one philosopher who posited the brain as the lofty leader and the body as this base thing that needed to be controlled,” Bridge says. “And so, then, the arts that are growing out of that—out of the body—are very much marginalized and not validated in our culture. That may be more specific for dance—but also, the capitalist model in general really needs to be able to point to things, especially objects, and place value on them. And with things like dance and music, there’s not an object there that you can say, ‘This has a particular value.’”
Creation for the sake of it—having fun and being motivated by wonder and mystery—is central to some of the most interesting research available on what happens in the minds of performers and artisans. It also has application to everyday people and everyday jobs.
Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced chick-sent-me-high) was born in 1934 in a time and place perfectly calibrated to forge someone who would dedicate his life to studying transcendent experience. He spent the early part of his childhood under Nazi control, and the latter part ruled by Soviets. He could not escape the torment imposed on him from the external world, so he became fascinated with the types of freedom attainable within his own mind.
“I was dismayed to find out that grownups had no idea what was going on, and were helpless to extricate themselves from the mess they had created,” Csikszentmihalyi said in an interview with science historian Michael Shermer.
Through the latter part of the century, he gained notoriety for introducing an academic framework for what he dubbed flow, which is the experience that dancers, comedians, ceramicists, hip-hop artists, surfers, carpenters, etc., feel when they are “on.” But this mental state doesn’t just apply to creatives; it’s often described by people engaged in good conversation, computer programming, gardening, house painting, and a variety of other jobs and hobbies.
During a flow state, you’re in a sweet spot right at the edge of your capabilities: pushing yourself just enough to require full concentration, but not too far that you falter. People experiencing flow are so thoroughly engaged in their activities that they are unable to worry about external troubles.
In an artistic setting, especially one with highly skilled practitioners who are considered masters, the result is often ecstatic for the performer as well as the audience. But, again, flow states occur in a wide range of practices, physical as well as mental, and they can be experienced by experts and amateurs alike. Csikszentmihalyi has written a number of books on the subject and emphasizes that it is possible to become a dilettante, “in the finest sense of the word.” You don’t have to be a virtuoso, you just have to be able to reliably find the point at which your current level of expertise is matched by an appropriate challenge. The Taoist concept of wu-wei—“effortless action” or “not forcing”—is described similarly, and maps onto my experience of “feeling” my way into a beat rather than “thinking” my way into it.
These sorts of activities also share a clear understanding that competency can’t be faked: A participant in one of these arenas cannot point to his credentials hanging on the wall and say, “See, I am a certified expert, so you must take me seriously.” Anyone attempting to fake expertise at rock climbing will be revealed the moment he faces off against a wall alongside people who have been practicing.
Drew Da Picture is a rapper and lifelong boxing fan in Philadelphia who recently started uploading to YouTube his own analyses of legendary fights, in part because he was bored with the tendency of sports fans to defer to the opinions of network-established commentators, many of whom have never participated in the sport. “What school do you go to to become a boxing expert? Where do you get that license from?” he says. “The key in ‘expert’ is ‘experience’—it’s rooted there.”
In addition to his critique of credentialism, Drew Da Picture likens some aspects of hip-hop to the ethics of sparring, motivating his collaborators to think in terms of productive competition. When trading verses on a song, rappers are often encouraged to one-up each other, in a manner similar to soloists in a jazz setting or standup comedians at a roast.
“Everybody should want to have the best verse on a song,” he says. “It’s not about who actually gets it; it’s just about the end result of the music. What’s the chance one of us is going to come with our C game if we approach it with that mentality?”
This social mechanism of creative competition—and audience reaction, of knowing that you’ll be applauded, booed, or, perhaps most humiliatingly, politely shrugged off—is one example of Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “immediate feedback.” He outlines this as an intrinsic element to a flow state: People need to receive intermittent jolts of information telling them whether they are correctly and gracefully performing a task.
Feedback first appears in the negative form, during the learning process: A rapper might fumble a rhyme scheme and be embarrassed into deeper practice. A jazz musician after a poor jam session will be sent back to “the shed” to brush up. For a boxer or rock climber, negative feedback might come in the form of something more intense.
Once you get past the negative feedback, you start to receive positive enforcement that you’re doing things right. This is another element of flow states, which feel good in a way that can’t really be described as hedonistic, since they rarely lead to negative consequences for the person engaged in them.
Expanding on related concepts on both an individual and a global scale, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former financial trader turned philosopher and risk analyst, coined the term “antifragility,” after realizing that none of the many languages he studied had a word for the opposite of “fragile.” Some things, he observed, get stronger as they are exposed to negative feedback: pain, volatility, stress, or chaos. People are among them. Appropriate doses of stressors—experienced intermittently, at levels that the person (or system) can handle—are often beneficial. Taleb used this language to criticize the banking system following the 2008 financial collapse, the last time we found ourselves in a global meltdown.
Similar ideas can be found in the psychological studies of “exposure and response prevention,” which is a form of therapy that involves controlled exposure to the stressors that would otherwise cause panic attacks in a given patient, as well as “post-traumatic growth,” which is exactly what it sounds like.
It’s important to note that antifragile systems only benefit from such shocks up to a certain point, and if taken beyond that point they will be destroyed just like anything else. In the same way that bones strengthen when you carry heavy things but break when you carry unmanageably heavy things, chronic stress and excessive burden are of course purely negative, and must be avoided.
Taleb came of age during the Lebanese Civil War, in Beirut, a city historically symbolized by the Phoenix—the mythological bird that restores itself after being set aflame—due to Beirut’s record of rebuilding itself over centuries of turmoil.
He witnessed the destruction of his homeland, as well as its rebuilding into a stronger form, and he argues that a more apt metaphor for Beirut is the Hydra, the mythological serpent-like creature that grows two heads for everyone one that you attempt to chop off. Whereas the Phoenix can be described as resilient or robust (returning to its original, neutral form), the Hydra improves with each challenge—it’s antifragile.
Related concepts echo throughout much of Stoic and Buddhist philosophy, and, like any old wisdom still worth its salt, it has practical value: It allows us to perceive our mistakes as interesting and exciting—as progress—rather than as debilitating failures.
Navigation in the Dark
It’s difficult to be hopeful—to see your situation as “interesting and exciting”—when you’re suffering through the excruciating pain of withdrawal, your survival not guaranteed, and desperately wanting things to go back to normal, especially when all you would need is a fifth of vodka to immediately make everything “better.”
But there’s a reason why the old wisdom traditions spend so much time helping us to make sense of suffering. There’s a reason why so many addiction recovery programs begin with the Serenity Prayer—a reminder to separate what’s within our control from what’s outside of it and to improve the former while accepting the latter.
There’s a reason why Moloch and similar metaphors re-emerge within the minds of our cultural critics, sounding the alarm about our out-of-control systems and widespread disaffection.
So here we are—as individuals, as a country, as a planet—feeling miserable. Every day we are given yet more painful feedback about our mistakes. But it’s a necessary corrective that allows us time for reflection and planning and developing new habits. We need to prepare ourselves. It may be worse next time.
Who do we want to be? //
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