immanence

Rather like the Airborne Toxic Event in Don Delillo’s 1980s novel White Noise, these days seem, to many of us, suffused with a kind of Generalized Floating Dread. I’ve picked this sense up from students, from colleagues, from friends and neighbors. It is as if there is a cloud of dark matter around us, whose origin is unknown and whose face is invisible, but whose presence is palpable.

Okay, it is Hallowe’en. Samhain, All Souls, Dias de los muertos. The veil between the worlds is thin, as they say. Which maybe just adds another layer to everything else.

But let’s stick with everything else. In this country at least, coronavirus cases are at their highest levels ever — topping 100,000 in one day for the first time, and close to 1,000 deaths. And there is an election coming… or, rather, swarming around us, with the very real possibility that no clear result will arrive on Tuesday, or at least be accepted by all. The prospect of no clear outcome feels like the kind of vacuum that will quickly fill with possibilities we don’t really want to imagine.

We do know a few things. Polls, for instance.

But we have seen polls before. Every day has brought another refrain (each one a little less assured than the last) of “Biden’s lead is still holding up,” to the point that the clear implication (when will the other shoe drop?) is left so unsaid as to weigh like an invisible sword hanging over what’s explicitly stated. (A few droppable, last-minute shoes: attacks on servers, provoked chaos at the polls, accusations of falsified counts, massive bot war. Or will all our fears really fizzle out in a harmonious homecoming to business-as-usual?)

Republican talking points (like the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell”) have been mostly falling flat, too. But efforts to steer the electoral conversation (like Senate Republicans’ accusations that tech companies are biased against conservatives) seem more oriented toward the aftermath of the election — toward talking points when an uncertain outcome comes to dominate the nation’s news. After Tuesday.

In Shadowing the Anthropocene, I wrote about “dark flow” and “the great sucking sound at the heart of things,” quoting from Robert Heinlein’s description of the “grey and formless mist, pulsing slowly as if with inchoate life” that emerged outside a traveling couple’s open car window as they slowly drove by a roadside accident scene in The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.

Slavoj Žižek interpreted that moment as a revelation of the Lacanian “Real” (which I in turn linked to Buddhist “emptiness”). But it’s perhaps more fruitful to let that Generalized Floating Dread Event hover in the air, as with Delillo’s “feathery plume,” his “dark black breathing thing of smoke,” and to let it color the mist in which it manifests.

There are moments when that “grey and formless mist” occurs amidst necessary turbulence and seethes with a sense of possibility (as I noted during Ukraine’s Maidan revolution). This isn’t one of them.

So, we wait. Or, we act, make phone calls, donate obsessively, or keep scrolling our social media feeds with a freneticism that might momentarily wipe away the creeping mist.

Distraction may be the better option. There is, after all, a world out there — one where Belarusians have been in the streets since August, where women (and their allies) are threatening to shut down Poland, and where Chileans have just voted for their first democratic constitution since the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s.

That’s where the sense of possibility comes from. It will still be there after Tuesday.