An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k) (ROUND 7)
Let's workshop this poem about a gullible and pained and hypocritical and disturbed young woman adrift in contemporary life, seeking agency and meaning through the warped frameworks available to her.
An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k)*
Might we call her “damaged”—early twenties no longer; eyes bloodshot beneath a Sponge-Bob baseball cap; LA beauty fed by missed meals; a tarot card (afroed ebony Queen of Pentacles) on a caramel thigh, hipster-inked in mere sailor green? Our self-styled “metaverse brujita” (IG bio “Coder Botanist Gamer Divinator Brujita”; CashApp, flitting across cyber ether, “$blaxicanbruja”) sits poised on her Moon Pod, an anti-anxiety beanbag for “when adulting gets tough.” Sunlit in her one-room before a floor mirror (a full-length leaner), she gazes far into her glassy pupils. Their wavering wrestles her Zen. But this is her maiden try at the “mindfulness ritual” for “uncaging the little girl,” for “purging self-loathing.” What she really hopes, beneath the Gen-Z(odiac) haze rising from such phrases of TikTok cant, is to ward off the bitter bile toward what, more and more in tweets on the absurd jest (or, in her words, “the trainwreck”) that is being “born just to suffer,” she suggests is reality itself, not just capitalism (her foe) whose cruelty alone—and so pushing aside even the “Unbearable Whiteness of Amerikkka”—suffices for her “never having kids.”
A stick of palo santo smolders sacred whisps to cleanse residual guilt (and fart) energy from a Grubhub barrage that spiraled into a rabbit hole of self-loathing, hours lost in a sativa frenzy: first shitposting on a manga subreddit; then, after lip-bite clit smacks, lashing out at “toxic yts” she takes no care to understand but calls “problematic” (mainly because their brainpower makes her feel dumb), lashing out by flagging tweets and tremble-typing cruelty (same lip bite) from a troll account whose amygdala bio, although (because?) keyed out with hasty thought, nails the nihilistic tonality of her knotted heart (“People lie, leave. Everything ends. Everyone dies, nothing matters.”)—sad actions but exactly what, so she herself would say, any moody Aries with a twelfth house ruled by Aries would do given her “trauma,” haunted by past-life love (unable simply to sit with her heartbeat, unsquirming; unable simply to accept her heartbeat as her, unalien).
Kid Cudi’s “By Design,” on its eighth reverberation, Spotifys from her bejeweled iPhone Mini (rose quartz), last night’s kohl smudged around eyelids leaden over ruby sclera. On the soundtrack to her life’s film—a film in which only she can play herself and the screenplay for which she long ago began plotting out (granularity reaching even into camera angles and lighting effects), stressing the wholesome bits (like how in third grade, in line with her notion of student-of-the-month code, she red crayoned the name of the only other classmate nominated for student of the month, taciturn in pride despite losing by one vote; or like how in second grade, and with not even a hint of poking fun, she mobilized her clique to shower the “dorky” boy with valentines) yet cutting the sordid bits (like how, alone, she sniffs pudendum-dipped digits, slick; or like how one time, several really, she thought about diazepaming her cat and then hanging herself; or like how as a tween sitter she would pinch the toddler’s nose with pussy fingers and CPR blow down its throat, watching unease cloud its eyes as it burped up distention; or like how in stores she would slip away from her blind cousin for minutes on end (same fierce lip bite), panties soggy as his panic grew at the bouncy-ball cage; or like how she climaxes best when picturing herself a calico-gowned slave torn bloody while choke-called “filthy nigglet”)—this song is key. In the film it plays muffled from another room—coming on right after “The Man Who Sold the World” (Nirvana’s Unplugged version)—as she sits hunched on her depression-filthy toilet (knock-kneed), passing what had been a late clot, but what the film will suggest was the blastula of a scuzzy modeling agent who called her skin “caramel” and who, before everything faded in the restaurant, seemed a cookie-cutter Sagittarian: gregarious, affable. She has a Strathmore sketch pad, awash with charcoal spurts of psychography, laying out what on screen will spasm as mind-splintered flashbacks to a Beaujolais-wine dinner laced with more than just civet-stunk claims (“You got potential in this industry”):
street curb, car horns, muted laughter, backseat, black;
slow zipper, cloth ripping, black, defecation feel, black;
ceiling twirl, more ripping, “Stinky slut, huh?,” black;
shit taste, air hunger, “All the way!,” pool smell, black;
sour vomit, black, “Gotta get you cleaned up,” black;
cold dawn, car door, “Gotta watch them drinks,” black;
cruel sun, “Last stop,” car door, black, “Out, come on”;
fawn-buckling legs, black, bathroom-tile piss puddle;
head of thick soup, black, curled-up shower screams.
Although droning below as always (a baseline ambience)was that frantic revulsion at how dark her dark gums are (a dysmorphic hyperfocus whose grip has only tightened since it first latched on after dinner one high-school night while poring over photos of her too-gummy cheesings),the last iteration of the song sent her mind unspooling from nice thoughts about how striking her eyes look even denuded of her typical green contacts, to humbled awe at that red tempest (Earth-sized) on Jupiter, to an idea—a half-baked epiphany—she was just about to diary down had not a stark shadow from a cumulous cloud, mistaken for her dad, made the idea (and the plan to jot it all out)vanish. She forgot she already had that forgotten idea, though—tweeting its very tune (not even a month back): how “with so damn much of Earth’s oceans unexplored, for all we know they harbor galactic portals, swirling”; and how “the Bermuda Triangle might be such a portal, which would explain why vessels whirlpool from sight”; and how “perhaps aliens will invade from the depthslike some zombie hand of God to smite us for our sins. #SeaMysteries #GalacticGateways #BermudaPortal”
Before “By Design” the loop was “Head Over Heels” by Tears for Fears, a love song seared into her psyche by that iconic school-grounds sequence where it plays in Donnie Darko (a turn-of-the-millennium cult film, set just after Regan). Our brujita had rented it with friends(in the spirit of the subreddit “im14andthisisdeep”)right around the time when self-harm hospitalizations among the first generation of non-free-range kids—already rewired by social media before puberty—began its still-climbing spike into today’s world of chronic cortisol and chronic sleep disruption, chronic exposure to unrealistic bodies and ideas, chronic use of chronic to dampen the algorithms that have college students scream in seizure fits over campus speakers they never even have to see and that have us so intolerant of my-truth dissent that professors find themselves fired for tweeting links to “wrong think.” Our brujita does not recall that this song, an ominous cover version by the Digital Daggers, played during the Season 10 finale of Degrassi as the character Eli—the swoop-bang emo guy she wrote several fan letters to—waits for Claire at their special bench. Nor does she recall that her babysitting uncle had it playing years before as she cat-walked white Barbies with an imaginary dad(who visits still to this day, too chokey in recent years to resist rapey clit thwacks) inside her “blanket palace” between the sofa and the loveseat—this anthem drawing her head from the slit entrance to behold that dreamlike montage (over two minutes): students dressed alike and gossiping, dancing impossibly fast and then too slow, snorting substances up their nose(all in the often-twisted scrutiny of a Steadicam eye floating through a menagerie of intensive purposes alien and awesome for a girl only in kindergarten).
Augmented by the flashback pop on GTA radio stations, in consort with Netflix’s Stranger Things and Black Mirror(the “San Junipero” episode, in particular), this melody dripping friendzone infatuation stretches her nostalgia well before her time to a time (its trends, events, songs around which people dated and lost car keys and jobs and had children and died and watched TV like now) when her mom was (incredibly to conceive) just a kid: that big-hair time, and its culture—which she grasps, like humans trying to form a picture of a hypercube, only by its filtered shadow (when she even does at all)—of card catalogues and neon malls and token arcades, and of retro sunsets and ET and Members-Only jackets, and of trapper keepers and the Oregon Trail game, and of staticky analog synth and grainy pixel art; and of Polaroid flapping and Atari joysticks clicking, and of beeps and boops in wood-paneled basement dens, and of acid-wash jeans and Garbage Pail Kid door stickers, and of Madonna’s lace gloves and Jackson’s moonwalk, and of “Be Kind Rewind” and Nancy’s “Just Say No,” and of little Arnold’s “Whatchu talkin bout, Willis?" and of “It's 10 PM, do you know where your children are?" and of Care Bears and Walkmen and Aqua-Net coughing, and of claymations like Gumby and the California Raisins and of the ditty “After these messages we’ll be right back,” and of the futurist cityscape glowing in Blade Runner, and of shoulder pads and MTV and Brat Pack glitterati. Less Than Zero, in particular (one of the few artifacts of which she has direct experience), stands out to her, bottling as it does her LA as she imagines it once was: Reagan coke line, Spader and Robert Downey hickeys.
Although too unconscious for her to verbalize, it stands out to her, more importantly, because it speaks to something quite primitive in her—as do as well Nirvana grunge and Tarantino mayhem and even just the fleeting sight of any one of those knee-scraped unleaded-gas latchkey kids now limping into the weed shop for arthritis relief, for insomnia. Pro-“woke” and often “speaking truth to power”(tweeting “Can’t believe #geriatrics run the US/Go to the damn light already you #victimizers/ Let #GenZ #decolonize the US into #safespace for all/fsfsfsfs lol bye”), she would never put it this way but deep down it reminds her—like wolves might mollycoddled house dogs, or like tribespeople might air-conditioned urbanites—that we were not always wussies hooked on constant comfort and reassurance, acting as if the world owes us, interpreting anything unnerving as a violent affront worthy of dire vengeance; that we were not always nurtured in grade schools that ban the mere making of snowballs let alone the “toxic masculinity” of tossing them at a friend; that being “traumatized” was not always trending; that we were not always so anxious “call out” people—tattle—when our right not to be offended is violated; so medded out in pre-k and helicoptered by guardians giving out first-place trophies just for showing up; so hooked on screens and the dopamine of likes; so “triggered,” so viscerally “outraged,” so “displaced” by jokes and harsh facts of reality that we see to it, yes, that even those once culturally-sanctioned to trigger us(comedians, teachers) lose their livelihoods for doing so; so gung ho to “dismantle,” “cancel,” whatever makes us—or that we semi-pretend (understandably, given our time where victimhood means valor) makes us—unsettled; so bitter about living in an unswaddling “yt world”(whose rough edges do not always “validate” our feelings or “affirm” “our truth” or “center” how we “self-identify” or “recognize” and “foreground” our “lived experience”)that we openly flirt with self-harm and, yes, even suicide to prove the veracity of our professed victim narratives(perhaps in hope to be rescued by “glitter families” who will never hit us with “non-affirming” feedback).
Our brujita—yes, “dime-a-dozen” we might say— follows the palo santo with a bundle of sage twigs, their hallowed smoke—intermingling with her scent of cocoa, copper coins, and beef—“purifying the space,” “purging negativity,” while coaxing green into her life.Part-time as a dispensary tech pays McDonalds wages. And few but tumbleweeds roll through her Depop page, which sells “vintage, preloved, and reworked” clothing(upcycled y2k tube tops that say “Angel” or “Chula,” tweed skirts, calico prairie gowns, servant frocks, cheetah-print rompers, dragonfly cheongsams, steampunk corsets, sexy slips from the nineties—all modeled by her: one hip often dipped low, forcing the IT band of the jutted other to smoosh the bursa over her greater trochanter chronically enough to make non-avatar runways an Ibuprofen burden in ten years; her forearm serpent fork-tonguing her left hegu, that dime spot between thumb and forefinger on the dorsal side of the hand, which she believes(and finds) does kill pain anywhere when acupressured. Few really order anything from her Redbubble shop listing iPhone cases that say “Chula” and “Babygirl” along with Tamagotchi stickers, or stickers (often with associated images, like nail-polish bottles)that say “Treat Yo Self,” “Blk Love,” “Cyber Bae,” “Witch in the Streets, Switch in the Sheets,” and “Shy in the Streets, Freak in the Sheets” or stickers—most commonly—of retrofuturism as captured in the cyan-and-magenta-dominant neon pallet of Blade Runner, vaporwave aesthetics of futures that never came to be: perfectly polished black-to-midnight-blue wireframe flatscapes of glowing gridlines (fuchsia, mystic violet, steel blue)converging at a horizon where, below a firmament of dot stars, hovers a phantasmic triangle outline of radiant cyan, white smoke, and ghost white; a sixteen-bit supercar, like a Ferrari Testarossa, with rear-window louvers reflecting the fuchsia of a “Tokyo” skyline at Super-Nintendo dusk, red taillights oozing a halation trail in the subtle haze; a midnight blue Malibu palm tree as foreground to a huge retrowave sunset with a color gradient from Indian red on the bottom to golden yellow, its bottom half cut by thicker-to-thinner lines(the gradient here: brick red, burnt sienna, tomato),simulating its partial dipping below the horizon as if sinking into a pixelated sea of electrified mist. Few more than a hundred follow her wellness woo on YouTube, where she vlogs on various matters: chakra teas, marijuana strains, horoscopes, bitcoin, and lately how to use gaming worlds for manifestation. “Having our Sims avatars live out,” she tells viewers, “our dream romances and careers and experiences—that can literally séance such possibilities into reality. It can do so more powerfully than role models even, which makes sense because our avatars are versions of us, rather than some strangers on social media.” And the clientele for her solo-and-nipples-only Only Fans, an account she has not logged into “in like a year,” are cheap—hers at least, made up mainly of boys ready to fall for anyone, let alone a melanated Gen Z Bambi-eyed in cosplay wigs whom, over years of Twitch-streaming herself playing GTA, they watched with the Cheeto fingers change from Emo-Scene (jagged-hair over one eye Hot-Topic eyelinered in high-intensity obsidian, Cosmo-driven texting of flirt emojis to crushes; Cosmo-driven whispering so boys will lean in)and now to botanical-divination pre-med dropout (face echoing an aging uncertainty as to whether her recent dates have been culminating in rape).
Consider the infinite alternate realities beyond ours. Consider, more narrowly, the many worlds between, on the one hand, the actual world where our brujita is the same—and so pinches her nose to go underwater and daily checks the “raised by narcissists” subreddit and nightly binges “lucky-scoop” TikTok livestreams of Chinese women shoveling out A-minus crystals (towers, /sa-fears/) from rice tumblers for US buyers and plans to take curanderismo classes on Coursera and seeks trauma bonds online and digitally cutting friends when dreams fail to match reality and dissociates in the face of intrusive (stab) thoughts and thinks Mercury’s position determines her mood and sleeps with plushies long in need of a good wash and hides crystals in her friends’ rooms and vapes and bites her lip skin and slaps her clit bruised and cannot parallel park and burdens those close to her with her hyper fears and feels her body is too animal, too unanchored to her, too menacing in its odors and cravings and vulnerabilities and girlie-fantasy-breaking pimples and cellulite, to count as under her control—and, on the other hand, the world where, although still obsessed with corralling her life into a screenplay, she has for her eating disorder an anonymous IG whose description is a Simone-de-Beauvoir quote misattributed to Betty Friedan (“No one is more arrogant toward women, more . . . scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility”)and where her side gigs include clinical-trial subject, dog-sitter, and haloperidoled Horror-zine editor calling for gut-punching Lovecraftian submissions especially from nonwhite and nonhetero writers who depict neither neurodivergent characters striving to become neurotypical nor any animals getting injured across the body of their writings).Now, for whatever it might be worth to mention, in many of these possible worlds near her own she has already jumped out from an artificial cake(topless just like in that Seagal movie Under Siege, tight nipples yet to have been sex-sucked beyond the little-yearling diameters they share in actuality)to dance for bills at some bachelor party (a hand job for one persistent tipper whirling into hand jobs for most of the others who, feeling left out on what they convinced themselves came with the package, demanded entry into the hotel bathroom as well, reeking of booze and musk and stomped cigarettes)—her self-flesh dissociation in the pulse of dance music, unmuted each time the door opened, keeping intact her self-identity through all the sadistic hair-tugging by middle-aged sausage-nails cutting into her scalp.
Sitting next to her snake plant, in bloat sweatpants, our witch (she/her, but if born only five years later they/them)—yes, “gullible” we might easily say—French inhales a sativa strain from a cone (Raw-brand)to snap a messy-sexy mirror-pout selfie for her Tumblr. Her Tumblr, whose theme she HTMLed and CSSed to look like a pixel-art rendition of her actual desk(but with plum shades like #dea4ee and #ce94df),serves as a manifestation board mainly of images: fanned-out hundreds, Schiaparelli haute couture, black cats, tea leaves, druzy gems, seven-day candles, old bridges of moss stone over rainy-day streams, dried hinojo sticks for gas and bruised cervixes, dried hamula for gallbladder pain and carpet burns, dried diente de león for heartache and vulvodynia, dried barba de elote for urinary tract infections, dried yellow dock root for Bartholin-gland cysts, dried sangre de drago for sores and anal fissures, cash emojis, plant emojis, crystal-ball emojis, Hello-Kitty jewelry, purses, tiaras, makeup gear, Dior, Chanel, Gucci, Jimmy Choo, Louis Vuitton, a somewhat-braggy record of her rare modeling gigs, fat stars “gorgeous” on red carpets, perfected pouts, stills of anime girls in Lolita panties with heart eyespulsing, the occasional manacle, kinky scenes of shirtless men dad-chokey and yet not too rough—and, yes, emoji spells of her own concoction. Crystal ball, candle, cash, credit card, two houses (one without a tree and then one with a tree)closed by candle and crystal ball—that is a spell,for instance, for financial freedom and a home. Crystal ball, candle, scissor, flame, bridge and then flame, scissor, candle, crystal ball—that is a spell for cutting ties with all negative things or people.
Seated still, she rotates her SpongeBob hat to the back and leans in to exhale on Pothos, her black longhair cat—tail wavey in a sun slice among the stuffed menagerie (a velvet-patch rabbit, an eyeless teddy bear, a unicorn whose once-sparkling horn sags like a captive orca fin, a ragged plush dragon pilfered from a sleepover friend, and other animals tinged with testicle musk) on her bed (twin-sized, its duvet an heirloom quilt not passed down).The exhale sways the pheasant-feathered dreamcatcher (handmade by drunken Navajos) and a dream satchel (fringed nubuck with a color print of a mighty buffalo)hung to recharge in the full moon slated for tonight—garnet, amethyst, sodalite, mugwort, chamomile inside: chamomile to calm her mind and ensure falling asleep, mugwort to help morning recollection of her dreams, sodalite to help avoid panic attacks and nightmares, amethyst to help remain in deep sleep below dreams, garnet to help keep down intrusive thoughts of suicide.
Her clear quartz pendant (resin), wellspring of clarity, dangles free of her chest as she leans in—paused, stuck. Its machine facets refract LA sunlight into the Bacardi, one sip left (to avoid guilt). The bottle stands beside a jar of bentonite-clay face mask and her bible Liber Null, the defining book on chaos magic. It sits open (spine up),highlighted pink and green and blue as if homework—margin stars and all, especially on the passage she finds most moving. “Put a brick through your television; explore sexualities which are unusual to you” [(“!!!!”)]Do something you normally feel to be”—the words here pen circled by page-slicing pressure—“utterly revolting” “no matter how extreme” [(“No matter how” she writes)].
An insight snaps her from what she, well, does not recall in its demand to be written down. Worried it will pass, she pushes aside another key book Babalawo (source, however, of guilt since she keeps falling asleep on it), to take up her diary, ignoring another source of guilt: the card sticking out of it. (That card is a love spell to herself, Venus petitioned for solidarity. “I embrace who I am,” it says in her cursive. “Love is my birthright. My words are a spell. Remember, the more I love myself, care for myself, the less I depend on love from others.” Once she purchases some rosewater from Amazon, yet another amount the countless things she keeps putting off, she can finish the ritual: voicing the words before bed in the flickering light of a rose-oil candle echoed in the mirror, then slipping the card, sprinkled with finger-flicked rosewater, under her lilac pillow until dawn, at which point she must kiss and hang it(by a ribbon of her hair threaded through the middle)in ample sun, most likely next to her teen photo, her “fat photo” (she calls it)—long a depression trigger but now, having lost all the flab, one of empowerment.
The diary sits on her lap, as if poised for opening. The resinous joint smothers itself out, propped against her crystal pipe—aventurine (green, for money)— kicked from her spell of guilt-burger shitposting. Below a desktop shelf holding books that range from the feminine-healing guide Sacred Woman and the #metoo historical novel Blood Water Paint to Junji Ito’s Remina and Uzumaki manga series, her PC-gaming monitor, flanked by unlit candles that say “Black Girl Magic,” displays a 3d avatar of herself in a black plunge-top dress, one hand resting on her iliac crest—hyperreal (but lacking eyebags and acne). She designed it with Blender, graphics software she hopes to use in the future for what she calls “metaverse fashion modeling”(where avatars navigate virtual catwalks in pixel couture, altering hues with each stride, fabrics coded to shimmer against real-time feedback of floating hearts and flowers).
Her diary, in the center a mini headshot of her from one of those girlie instant-camera reboots (green hair in two buns at the top like Chun Li, warm-pink lip gloss named “Nymphette A40”one rhinestone sticker below each lower eyelid), is zodiac-decaled and sharpied with positives—what she calls “Princess Energy Affirmations”— such as “Money comes to me effortlessly” and “I attract all forms of green into my life” and “My skin color and hair texture are pretty” and “Princess treatment is my NORMAL!” and “I’m the very definition of an IT girl” and “But I’m just too glam to give a damn” and “I know I’m meant for so much more” and “Abundance flows to me with ease” and “The universe caters to MY serenity."
With rare neglect of her reflection, high-stuck in the full-body mirror, in the diary—beneath two all-uppercase commitments to herself (“I will practice on Blender and Python daily” and “I will date myself, buy myself chocolate, and take myself to the movies”), followed by cramped scribbles of explanation to herself(“My standards are high because I already have everything I need” and “Napping is perfectly fine. Isn’t that what the great ancestors, in their slavery, wished they got a chance to enjoy?”), followed by a romantic goal (dropping acid in the Rockies with her future husband) preceded never by explicit discussion of her predawn suspicion that her dates rarely call back not because of a lack of beauty or plans or dreams, but because of a pettiness and a pot-headed depressiveness on top of a genital malodor that daily coconut oil and rosemary dabbed garlic cloves inserted before bed and fenugreek teas and apple-cider vinegar shots and prayers to Orunmila during calendula rinses and boric-acid suppositories and yogurt baths and goldenseal-slippery-elm-bark capsules, she fears, might only exacerbate—she writes:
Like literally, for real, I can be all in my head
delusional asf, like this shit’s just a dream.
The “delusional” are happier. Call it “irrational.”
Fine. But isn’t it rational if it improves my life?
The personas we develop are delusions anyway,
right? They keep us sane to go to work each day—
how else when the universe approaches heat death?
Let my delusions be scarecrows. Let them frighten
any so-called “reality” seeking to devour my crop: ME.
To cast out demons, especially if those demons
are “realities,” requires a witch’s highest magic.
Black magic, white magic—I am the high priestess.
I am a witch. I will shut my mind from
realitiesno good for me to hear. I will hypnotize myself.
“They are just opinion. They’re Just OPINION.
My truth, my inner knowing, is all that matters.
I am my own mother. I am my own mother.
I am the programmer. My decisions, my style,
come from me, not from anything beyond me!
I do not exist as an instrument of anyone but me.
I am self-sufficient. My destiny, my fate, is my own.
I am too vital to the universe ever to decay for real.
Nothing can stop my victory over reality.
I will live in my own girlie-fantasy world:
skincare and shopping and lip gloss (all that).
I am the central Barbie in the universe.”
For real, it gets so easy, clear, once you accept
fantasy as the only real reality. GOD MODE.
Death, rape, war, divorce, dead-beat dads—
I’m the one who lets them be real or not!
*Author’s note.—
At first I was iffy about the Gen-Z(odiac) character in “An Introduction to Chaos Magic(k),” a modern young woman trying to find herself amidst the cacophony of the digital age, traditional practices, societal expectations, personal insecurities, and self-imposed fantasies. I found it easy to write her off as one of those pathetic social-media bullies, quick in their outrage to condemn (the suburban cop callers of the digital age)—one of those who, even if it takes libel and slander, will report any account (especially if nonblack-owned) that “triggers” her or does not reflect her values. The type is now well known: one of those boilerplate my-truthers, faking fragility for power and attention, common on college campuses (especially since the political rise of Trump and the subsequent reaction on the left about the dangers of free expression).
Her Himmler-like love of astrology and healing crystals and tarot, all of which seem a cover for a depressive nihilism, are particularly upsetting. She seems to believe her antediluvian superstition is congruent with black power when in truth, as too with the liquor and drugs she enjoys, they are poisonous to blacks—and to all people whose generational oppression has kept them in an intellectual darkness that makes them susceptible to such scams. In her desire to be unconstrained, she even dips deep enough into the solipsistic territory of Shirley MacLaine as to declare herself a causa-sui God—as we see at the end of the poem. Two stomach-sinking quotes, which in earlier drafts served as epigraphs, ring in my mind each time I think of her.
I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time . . . . when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.—Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World)
We stand at the end of the Age of Reason. . . . A new age of magic interpretation of the world is coming, of interpretation in terms of the will and not of the intelligence. . . . There is no such thing as truth either in the moral or the scientific sense. . . .We must distrust the intelligence . . . and must place our trust in our instincts. We have to regain a new simplicity.—Adolf Hitler (in conversation with Hermann Rauschning)
But even if the unnamed character is emblematic of US disintegration to pre-Enlightenment superstition (as China becomes the dominant world power), it is clear she is suffering and—shallow as all hell (uncritical, obsessed with makeup and designer handbags and shimmer mists and shoes, thriving on gossip and drama)—knows not what poison she spreads. Carl Sagan himself reminds us, in the same book quoted above, to restrain our tendency to poke fun at people like her.
[S]upporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.
I agree with Sagan on this, as much as I fall short in my frustration. It grows easier to remember the humanity of this young woman as time goes on. I find my respect for her grow the longer she lingers in my mind. Her innocence is a factor. Her hard work is a factor. That she has dreams is a factor. That she wants to improve herself is a factor. Perhaps the main thing, though, is my belief in her potential to do much good in the world if she can break free of her addiction to this ethos of victimhood and vengeance and magical thinking that makes her, despite what she thinks, so unoriginal and toxic.
