Bleak Genius-Tasting the Names of God

Poetry is our only hope. Only our imagination stands between us and oblivion. Feeling the truth is better than believing the truth. As this excerpt from the book declaims: Enamored with Narcissus, enmeshed in oblivion, and celebrating emptiness: this is the generation of America. We acquiesce to the banal, profess our love to all, and soak our brains in hypocrisy, even as we scurry from sanity to embrace conspiracy, proving our shallow lives mean nothing at all. Driven by boredom in a desperate search for meaning, we think we find purpose in a passion for God. But, too often, piety eviscerates, religion destroys, integrity evaporates in cognitive dissonance, the denial of reality is not the way. Shouting louder, talking faster, spewing pabulum, all are vain attempts to deny the denial of faith. Preaching a wasteland as salvation, doctrine as truth, hate as love, vacuity as sanity, we have invited the insane to lead us, the unstable to show us the way, our own emptiness hungering for something. Spirituality as shortcut, God as the fix, the Ten Commandments displayed...instead of genuine liberty and justice. Homo sapiens celebrate our large prefrontal cortex, smothering the amygdala with synaptic power, declaring our supremacy, our evolutionary victory, almost eight billion of us. And we sit on the brink of darkness, our ephemeral culture poised on climate crisis, unable to act, to engage with what we know, to take the simplest steps toward truth. The solution to impending destruction must be another tax cut for richest 3,600 families, the one one-hundredth of one percent. If we only give the insensate rich, the insanely wealthy, more of our nation's assets, then things will be better. If we strip our safety net, if we demean the poor, if we sing of the Capitalistic Christ, then the earth will come back into balance, then Gaia will heal. Yea verily, if we will help women become helpmeets to their husbands, fulfilling their divine role as quiet supports, if we will help immigrants remain in their own proper lands, staying away from our city on a hill, if we will help lesbians, queers, gays to find heterosexual joy, so they see the error of their ungodly ways, if we form children's minds to see the danger of science, the overreliance on facts, the fallacy of evolution which proclaims the interconnectedness of life, if we will do all of this, thus proving our devotion to God, then God will heal our land of liberality, yea verily, we will be protected from social safety nets that feed the children of those parents too lazy to work, that help the unemployed or underpaid, that provide in any way for the General Welfare of the People of These United States. Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift. I contemplate, considering homo sapiens evolutionary trajectory, loving our tenacity, our flourishing upon earth, even our ingenuity to do-future, spawning civilization, as we call it, allowing us to multiply across the planet. Yes, a trajectory of rapid ascent. And descent. Because. John Calvin was right about predestination, echoing St. Augustine's theory of the Elect, for our parabolic existence, our arcing timeline, was already set when we became the nineteenth eusocial species on earth. The forces that have driven us to dominate the planet also drive us to destroy. The seminal ending was there in the beginning. Carbon lifeforms finding deceased carbon lifeforms, human ingenuity exploring energy's pathways, inevitable climate warming only a matter of time. The carbon bonanza was an amazing gift and, of course, the end. The concentrated BTUs of ancient sunlight gave us hope, a whole civilization built on oil, gas, coal. We eat, sleep on, live in, breathe, and celebrate carbon. Carbon embracing carbon. It is our bleak geni