John Wise

The mundanity of going to a mall cannot be exaggerated as I feel absurd that I’d even step in one. I did not visit out of nostalgic sensibilities. Instead, I ventured inside out of morbid curiosity. Two years ago, during the heat of our summer days, I would walk a few miles inside this particular mall before its shops opened, and even back then, it was ghost-town-like as only about 35 shops were still in business. Today, as I pulled up, I saw that Macy’s and Dillard’s were soon to be closing, while J.C. Penny offered no hint about their future.

Once inside, I was shocked at just how empty things were. We are in a pandemic; what did I expect? I honestly don’t know, but I guess I thought that, somehow, people would be holding on and getting by. Nope, they bailed out. Now, the mall is destined for the wrecking ball with the owner promising some new mixed-use residential higher-end shopping hybrid thing. Wow, great idea, more $3,500-a-month, 750 sqft. 1-bedroom apartments because in America’s future, everyone will be making $120,000 a year and can easily afford those kinds of rents. Do you sense my incredulity, my tiny bit of pessimism, a little bit of uncertainty? I suppose what I should do is simply admit that I do NOT understand our current economic model of ever-inflating asset prices that drive the illusion of wealth, which in turn diminishes a larger percentage of people’s opportunity to have some security of being sheltered.

So, who else sees the writing on the wall that shopping locally is becoming a thing of the past? Sure, today, people shop locally due to economic limitations, but as more people move to online shopping, the prices of sending goods to our homes or having us pick up packages at distribution points will become even more affordable and commonplace. Restaurants? Seriously, how much longer can the low-brow shit that passes for restaurant fare be compatible with our palates? Sometimes, I feel that half the restaurants in the Phoenix area have stuffed jalapenos, onion rings, chicken wings, avocado toast, and burgers as a kind of children’s menu for adults. But what does this have to do with a dying mall?

What replaces this dead zone will just be another set of dead ideas after a short while because those financing this high-priced “luxury” have no real ideas of what people want. So, instead of dreaming up quality-of-life conditions for the masses, they take aim at what they think the people want and run with that. Meanwhile, the masses are pushed further and further to the fringe, where they subsist on fast food, paying over-priced rent to corporations who buy up homes in the tens of thousands and stay well away from the places where the well-to-do live. Although the poor are invited in for the menial tasks and service industry low-pay jobs, the wealthy are allowed to luxuriate, oblivious to the conditions of where we are pushing those who are less fortunate. Back in the day, these malls acted as equalizers, offering communities a kind of luxury that all too often these days become eyesores reminding people of the good old days and how their environment is turning to blight.

Here I am at the coffee shop because I seemingly cannot write at home, and I’m coming up empty on something to write about, which turns out to be something to write about. I don’t want to jump the gun about our first anniversary of living in a modified quarantine during a pandemic, but I suppose I inadvertently kind of announced that as an upcoming subject for a post. As I write this, it occurs to me I could proofread another one of the three draft posts that are either waiting for a photo or for Caroline to take her editing talons out to shred what I thought was intelligible.

Maybe I can distract myself by talking with someone who might, in turn, inspire something to tumble from my fingertips, but that I find inspiration instead of distraction is pretty unlikely. In these moments I often turn to a book, but knowing I was going to hit the keyboard running to throw down something magnificent, I left my book at home. I have Radical Animism – Reading for the End of the World by Jemma Deer as a .pdf here in my notebook, but I’m here to write. Or am I really here to look around at my environment, hoping something will jump into my head?

Checking on a dozen or more of the 25 tabs I have open in this browser offers a 5-minute respite from the struggle to write, but that starts to hint that I should give up and head home, whereas while I haphazardly stumble from distraction to distraction I’ll at least be near Caroline who I can pester, plus she’s usually full of hugs. Hmmm, hugs sound pretty good about now, and this is obviously going nowhere. Time for hugs.

We recently finished watching the Adam Curtis documentary titled Can’t Get You Out of My Head. We almost quit halfway due to a bunch of perceived loose ends that we feared could not be resolved, but we persevered. The six-part series starts off exploring some coincidences that connect various events in our global history over the past 80 years. If it weren’t for this being a recommendation from a trusted friend, I would have given up. There were moments when it felt that the tangents were too tenuous to ever be stitched together in a meaningful way.

This should not have been said with any hint of certainty because in the eighth hour, it all came together for me, and while I never enjoy reading about spoilers, here I am about to do just that. Of course, I can claim this is for my own edification as the number of people who read these missives is small enough that the random chance that I ruin this series for anyone seems infinitesimally small. With that being said, do not read further if you don’t want my half-witted analysis of the documentary before you watch it for yourself.

Part 1 begins by looking at cultural changes that are unfolding on the post-World War II global stage and how politics and power are shifting with the times. We learn of Jiang Qing, who was Mao Zedong’s wife, and how she wanted to perceive herself in a man’s world and how she would set forces into play that would affect the communist state to this day. As the filmmaker takes us on a journey through the evolving world of China, we learn of Ethel Lillian Voynich, who wrote The Gadfly, which was carried around by millions of youth in the communist block. She was the daughter of George Boole, who gave us Boolean logic regarding her married name of Voynich; she was married to Wilfrid Voynich, owner of the famous eponymous manuscript. What’s happening in the documentary (unbeknownst to me at the time) was the role stories play in moving society.

This is ironic as it was just a few weeks earlier that I learned of Jemma Rowan Deer, Ph.D., who had recently published her first book titled Radical Animism, which talks about the role of storytelling in shaping the narratives that influence the direction of humanity, specifically her desire to inspire others to communicate stories that will help protect the environment. With her endeavor ending up as a textbook, it was priced a bit too high for me to delve into, which was compounded by the fact that this is the author’s first commercial effort. So I wrote her, and to my surprise, she sent me a PDF of the book for free. I’m yet to begin reading it as I’m trying to finish a book about the 17th-century French priest and philosopher Nicolas Malebranche first, but that’s another story.

Continuing with Can’t Get You Out of My Head, the filmmaker in part 2 looks at violence, from both protesters and those in power, to affect social change and how these efforts have proven futile. Part 3 pulls back the veil on how money and conspiracy play their parts. Conspiracy and uncertainty are themes that run throughout the series, so I shouldn’t imply that this is specific to part 3, but it was here that I started feeling this was swinging too deeply into conspiracy, and I considered giving up. What kept me going was the thread Adam Curtis was weaving that kept returning to the dissatisfaction and anxiety permeating societies around the earth.

In part 4, we start looking at the psychology of those who are being controlled by the power of governments and politicians. Let me note that finding complete copies of parts 4, 5, and 6 is currently quite difficult due to content that is in dispute with various copyright holders, and even the edited versions you are likely to find are typically of inferior quality. Now with more than four hours invested in the series, we’d slog through the rest regardless if we get dropped off in utter frustration that the work goes nowhere other than posing some questions after observing a bunch of interesting coincidences.

On to part 5 and a look at the “Lordly Ones,” the controllers in the shadows who enjoy their privilege but are afraid that if the masses understood the exploitation and fear that was dictating their situations, they’d rebel. Society around the world is in decay, and all the consumption and attempts to pacify populations appear to end in failure; maybe computers and artificial intelligence can preserve order.

Systems of information play a large role in part 6. Everyone is telling or selling a story, and we’ll come to understand by the end of the series that humanity cannot entrust the mechanics of order to a select group of corruptible power brokers but that the mass of people has to take a role in creating the stories that might influence better personal outcomes. Flirting with nationalism (due to lack of imagination to see better futures) is the least desirable path and not an inevitable way we must follow, and while Adam Curtis offers a glimmer of hope that we might choose a better direction, the haunting notion of a totalitarian society is lurking right within sight.

So, while not exactly an uplifting 8 hours invested in this bit of entertainment, the idea of storytelling being the central pivot point of what directs humanity certainly resonates with me. This then asks the question, when we continue to fail at creating our own fulfilling vision of life, who do we accept as being our storytellers when we are consumed by a steady offering of horror and fear?

How do you encounter time?

This morning, Caroline looked for a photo to share with a friend in Germany in a long-neglected old Flickr account we used to maintain; we reveled in the old memories that seemed to fall out of ancient history. It turns out that this look into the past was last updated in 2017, so it is not quite all that ancient. So how did so much time seem to pass in only four years?

It’s all about the experiences we had in the interim. With a pandemic year obscuring just what else was done in those intervening years, I had to check on what’s what. I found that since that last addition to Flickr in March 2017, we’ve been to Oregon 4 times, spending 44 days on the coast. We’ve gone rafting in Alaska for a couple of weeks and flew to Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro for more of the same. Strangely, we only spent a total of a few weeks in California; we used to spend that much time over there per year. We racked up nearly 60 days in Europe. Then there was the visit of our niece Katharina, who spent a few weeks with us before returning to Germany to attend university, and of course, we gave her a grand tour of the Southwest. Not counting trips around Arizona and not being extremely accurate in counting our travel dates, Caroline and I were out and about no less than 172 days over the past 1,400 days.

Add concerts, films, talks, seminars, workshops, books, and such, and I’d like to believe we spent a solid 25% of our time during the past four years exploring novelty. While I wish it had been even more, I recognize from many of my conversations and observations of others that Caroline and I lead active lives and are incredibly fortunate when it comes to being able to dedicate so much time to jumping out of routines.

This then has me asking, how do we experience time at home, watching TV, playing video games, and working compared to reading, exploring the world around us, learning, and playing? As we live on a day-to-day basis, it appears that time disappears as though it wasn’t even experienced. Stuck in routines dominated by work, television, and habituated routines with very little else happening in our lives makes time fly with little to no memory of what has passed. I can’t emphasize enough how detrimental I feel that living in a routine blind to new experiences is to the value we are able to draw from life.

But John, you’ve said all this before. That’s okay, this is one of my mantras, and as I age I never want to lose sight of how important my experiential place on Earth is. My diet, daily walks, writing exercises, and making plans that don’t always pan out are all part of the challenge of remaining in a mindset and modicum of health that I should continue as long as possible to be enchanted by the newness I’m able to explore. This is one of those reminders to myself.