I was originally going to title this post Life is Full of Vesper Situations, though it would have made sense to nobody, it being a riff on a chain of 1970s Australian TV advertisements for some processed food product or other called Vesta, that for some reason unknown even to myself remains in my head. (I always get annoying things stuck in my head. This song has been earworming me for a solid week).
The ads all featured a woman called Noelene Brown who used to be on Blankety Blanks saying, Life is full of Vesta situations – a compassionate nod to how exhausted you are this Tuesday night, after another day toiling meaninglessly in the machine, with the weekend and your brief respite from the dullness and vapidity of modern life by getting stoned and watching your boyfriend surfing at the beach being too far away for you to muster up cooking something with vegetables for an hour after you get home from typing stuff onto carbon paper. Instead, here is an invitation to save time and labour and feel progressive, to be able to reach into the pantry and quickly mix something carcinogenic in a packet into some pasta that you’re boiling on the stove because microwave pasta doesn’t get invented until the 80s.
I just watched a movie called Vesper, which has left me in a dreamy state, feeling hope for the future. I know, right, like some crazy psycho. The protagonist, an un-mad 13-year-old scientist, is secretly involving herself in midwifing life’s continual creative biological unfolding into matter. Its chance beauty, its birth and death and rebirth. The movie reflects a growing feeling in me, a slowly-rising tentative hopefulness. This hopefulness is sprouting now for three reasons: first, I now have a stable living situation. Secondly, I’ve largely turned my back on the burning insane shitshow that so consumed me in 2020-2022 that for a while there the abyss felt like it could yawn right in and take me whole. The third reason is a little bit more intangible and woo-woo. I’ve been slowly returning to a deeper sense of spirituality in the past few years. (Such a stupid word but I don’t know how else to frame it. It’s certainly not religious and there’s not much dogma to it either. I am one of those people conservative Christians used to mock as being into cafeteria religion, taking bits and pieces from everywhere just because they appeal to you you, like some kind of slutty magpie who wants 17 nests instead of contenting herself with one. But i don't mind; I've spent enough time inside one religion. Now i wish to fly higher than them all and drink what's perennial).
Slowly, I’m getting a feel for the shape of the I don’t know what to call it, my focus turning finally from the terrifying what's burning instead to the inverse, the new thing that’s bulging itself more insistently against the status quo and making it batshitcrazy with fear and controlfreakness cos it won't budge, but everything’s changing whether it likes it or not.
I added Vesper to my watchlist after running it successfully through my new-movies-to-watch filter. I realised recently that the movies I end up loving or really liking invariably have a rating of 6.something on IMDB, and are divisive – they have people rating them 8 or 9, and criticising those who label them 2 or 4 as being ruined by the twitchy need of the attentionally-deficit for Hollywood-style scenes blowing things up, while those who give the movie a low score claiming it's way too too slow and way too pretentious. This one was no different though it doesn’t seem all that slow or pretentious to me. It’s an indie sci-fi flick, released in 2022, set in a bleak post-collapse future, with a cohesive world and plot and great acting, that held me throughout despite my slaughtered concentration levels (only three interruptions!) I liked the way this movie unwound in my mind. It evoked that something in me I'm always after – some sense of wholeness, of transcendence, the feeling of life being worth it, a whiff of humanity’s possibility if we could just climb out from the boot stomping our face forever.
For a bit there, The Great Motherfuckery was the whole world, a giant black thing reflecting and regurgitating my own childhood trauma, and it felt like it would play itself out for the rest of our lives, only worse, forever and ever, world without end, doomed. Maybe it still will, I don't know. I really was consumed by the blackness of it all for a while, my insides meeting the outside and no hope to be found. But now hope (stupid word) is redawning in me, this sense of the inverse getting to play itself out too, and it maybe being kind of spiritual, or at the very least surprising, and so now, despite the grimness and the despoiling of the earth, and the precarity of our current situation, there is a feeling (see, it’s so hard to talk about this without sounding wafty), a sense that something is shifting in the world, and also in myself. A new lightness.
There is a deeper sense in me that yes, you know what, I don’t think we’re actually in climate catastrophe, or at least not in the way the predator class is framing it – there, I said it. I doubt their version of events. I mean, geez, of course I do. Everyone and everything propping up this insane system is on some basic level hollowed out and insane. I mean, there’s a whole world of experts out there, scientists, who also doubt the climate catastrophe narrative. They just don’t get any airtime or show up in the first 100 pages of Google search results. The only airtime allowed is the system’s we-need-to-constantly-be-in-a-state-of-terror-and-give-over-the-fixing-of-this-dead-thing-we-call-the-climate-and-the-environment-to-the-authorities-the-blessed-authorities-with-their-spreadsheets-crazy-levels-of-control-and-give-them-even-more-power-but-we-must-retain-this-system-where-everyday-people-like-you-and-me-are-spectators-cos-the-system’s-F.I.N.E.-and-normal. I just think that our future is definitely way bigger, and could possibly even be way better, more regenerative, more expanded, than the one our current predator class (the precursors to the builders of the Citadel in the movie), who control so much of how we see the world, keeps force-feeding us with because it suits them to have us so dulled as we are.
This hopeful gentle positivity or openness about the future, about how maybe this dead matter will get to show itself wise, sounds ridiculous if you move in certain circles. It sounds right wing. Everything is so right wing. Including the left. Anything that doesn’t treat the world as a bunch of dead matter is right wing. I’m not saying that we don’t have major issues or that the inevitable descent and slow collapse (thank you John Michael Greer) from these heady days of plastic isn’t going to be bumpy; it’s just that the communal and sanity-restoring reasons why I believe it’s going to be better than we imagine are not given airtime either.
I gave up buying into most of how the current polypropylene “cultural” environment tries to frame our reality years before the 2020-2021 pseudoscientism shitshow demonstrated how far down the corruption rabbithole it all is. I suppose what I’m saying is that my faith in the ability of life (or Life) to repair itself, to work around whatever our sociopathic little system might throw at it, has returned after being somewhat battered by The Great Motherfuckery, and along with it a return back to a more spiritual way of seeing the world again, despite how uncomfortable it feels in a way acknowleding that, and a feeling of reconnecting to that space and the strength I’ve always gained from it. But it’s all so hard to talk about without sounding like an idiot. Spirituality is so right wing.
There's not a whole lot of fillums that inspire that sort of hope in me, especially ones produced so recently. The kind of inspiration that fizzes up my spine, a feeling of swimming in the air, the kind of peak experience I'm here for but which has been hard to come by in recent years in this world. A feel that this matters. The feeling so many hidden people have which is not allowed admittance, that life is smart and teeming, that this heavy, Saturnine refusal, with its police forces, cannot go on heavying forever because even that is, when you come down to it, empty in its centre. Like every single atom, a hush at its middle. A full void of creative possibility. (Or is it molecules? I can never keep track).
I have finally fallen back into the feeling that some never lost, but which i did for a while there, being double-shift-Persephone, a deeper trust in the process i claim to hold to, that this matter is alive, that what seems so interminable, the endless control, the whittering of humanity down to something so brittle and spiky that we can all be blown away on a hard wind, really is destined to change, one way or the other, by force if necessary if it won’t budge, because the endless cycle of renewal is upon us more starkly now, cracking us all open, insisting, pushing us through, making us see, taking us where it will, where we will, as co-creative parts of a whole we have always belonged to, not bystanders, not consumers, allowing a small portion of humanity to determine where we go and what we do and what we get to perceive while we’re doing it.