Nothing Am -- A Dystopian Fantasy

Last night, my wife and I watched a superb RSC television production of King Lear, Shakespeare's most apocalyptic play. My favorite character in this play has always been Edgar, the resilient, protean son of Gloucester who is framed as a patricide by his evil bastard brother Edmund, and escapes certain death by disguising himself as "Poor Tom," a desperate mad beggar wandering the heath. I have always loved Edgar's soliloquy, as he flees, leaving his comfortable, aristocratic life behind forever, to take refuge in madness and chaos:

I heard myself proclaim'd;
And by the happy hollow of a tree
Escaped the hunt. No port is free; no place,
That guard, and most unusual vigilance,
Does not attend my taking. Whiles I may 'scape,
I will preserve myself: and am bethought
To take the basest and most poorest shape
That ever penury, in contempt of man,
Brought near to beast: my face I'll grime with filth;
Blanket my loins: elf all my hair in knots;
And with presented nakedness out-face
The winds and persecutions of the sky.
The country gives me proof and precedent
Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,
Strike in their numb'd and mortified bare arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;
And with this horrible object, from low farms,
Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes, and mills,
Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,
Enforce their charity. Poor Turlygod! Poor Tom!
That's something yet: Edgar I nothing am!

This powerful speech brought to mind a dystopian fantasy I have often nurtured, based roughly on the story of Edgar taking refuge in madness, and then, through dint of sheer resilience, compassion, and cleverness, protecting his blinded father and returning, ultimately, to avenge Edmund. The fantasy is set (needless to say) in a postapocalyptic world, wrought by climate change. Here is a brief version of it that I wrote this morning:

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Nothing Am

After the climate threshold, the point of no return, had passed, the rate of melting polar ice accelerated steadily, according to its own insidious feedback: decreased albedo from the loss of ice resulted in ever faster melting of the remaining ice as the temperature at the poles rose steadily, and the release of methane gas from the the methyl clathrates under the sea and in the permafrost—the “clathrate gun” as it was now known--caused an even faster acceleration of melting ice. Throughout the world, coastal cities were swamped, as hordes of refugees fled to higher ground, bringing chaos and violence to those already there. The social infrastructure was collapsing, already strained to the limit by escalating hatreds and violence between rival religious and political factions, along with gangs of hungry, destitute marauders preying on everyone they encountered. Although the super-rich barricaded themselves within high walls and barbed wire, the value of their money plummeted, and their labor force rebelled in many areas, as their armed guards, formerly their servants, became in many instances their masters. Soon our once beautiful world was reduced to scattered, shrinking islands of fiercely defended wealth—not just money, but food and arable land--in a growing sea of rampant violence, chaos, starvation, disease, and death. Suicide rates skyrocketed, even among the super-rich, as people lost all faith in any future other than the vast suffering, violence, and death encroaching on them from every angle, with nowhere to run…

Edgar Markham, who only recently had been a mathematics professor at a community college in a midwestern city, living in the nearby suburbs with his wife Cindy and daughters Tracy and Laurel, was now wandering the violent, destitute streets in the last ragged set of clothes he owned, looking for anything that could pass for food—lemon peels, dandelion roots, blackberries. His house had been burned down, his family murdered in cold blood, his daughters probably butchered for food by one of the warring gangs of marauders prowling his former neighborhood. Like most other people, Edgar had often contemplated suicide, but something held him back. When he awoke one morning, having taken refuge from the chill night air and predatory marauders in a collapsing barn on a weed-choked field on the outskirts of town, Edgar remembered to perform his usual, private morning ritual. This time, for emphasis, he said it out loud. With every breath, he intoned as follows: “Breathe…Observe…Let Go…Be Well…Do Good Work…Keep in Touch…Learn…Teach…Heal…Create.”  Whether or not these verbs made sense in his—and the world’s—present dire circumstances,  they made him feel better, ready to face another day of wandering, begging, hiding, and simply getting through.

               “What’s that?” 

He jumped, startled by a female voice from the opposite dark corner. Edgar scanned the dirty floor of the barn for a board, a stick, anything to defend himself. He had learned at his cost that women were no more to be trusted in this dying world than men.

As she stepped from the shadows, he relaxed. She was, like him, ragged and destitute—nearly everyone was, except the super-rich and their hired thugs. But she had a warm, gentle, and curious expression in her eyes that was quite, quite different from the stone-cold looks of desperation, mistrust, and incipient violence that he was used to seeing everywhere else. He let out a long breath, and allowed himself a slight smile.

“It is a mantra, a kind of private ritual I invented for myself some years ago, to cope with the steadily encroaching horrors all around us, after the Catastrophe. It’s kept me alive for what it’s worth.”

“Can I try it?”

For a moment, Edgar was overtaken with a deep, unaccustomed joy that threatened, only momentarily, to morph into an aching lust. He breathed, observed, and let go of that. And then he instructed her in the mantra.

Her name was Veronica, “Roni” for short. And he found her to be a truly remarkable person. A refugee from one of the innumerable flooded East Coast cities, she had joined a “horde”—so they were called—of fellow refugees who looked out for each other, fought off marauders, scavenged or stole food, hid from soldiers and police, and set up encampments where they could, so—unlike Edgar who was very much a loner after he lost his home, job, and family--she was quite skilled in the arts of survival and community-building.  However, her “horde,” along with many others, had been massacred at night (because they were Hispanic) by right-wing death squads  and she alone had escaped, taking refuge in this very barn, and stealing out at night to harvest herbs, berries, and roots from wooded areas at the edge of the ruined fields. A devout Catholic, Veronica fingered her rosary every morning, repeating the “Hail Mary…” So she was familiar with mantras, even though she didn’t call it that.

Veronica turned out, however, to be very open to the Buddhist teachings that Edgar had learned and practiced over the past few years. She particularly liked the fact that people could use his mantra to calm their inner fears, depression, and anxiety, even if—unlike her—they were not “believers.” She had the singular capacity of isolating her devout Catholic faith from an otherwise open, inquiring mind, and so felt perfectly comfortable practicing Buddhist meditation, as instructed by Edgar, and at the same time adhering to her rosary and Catholic faith. She saw no contradiction at all, for she agreed with Edgar that Buddhism is not a "religion" or mandatory belief system at all, but rather a practice, like yoga or tai chi or even knitting or macramé, for calming and training the mind—that it was a discipline that did not require you to “believe” anything, but that allowed practitioners to believe whatever they wished, as long as it did not contradict the cultivation of wisdom and compassion—or (more properly speaking) wisdom/compassion conjoined as one. This, as Edgar explained to her, was the deep teaching at the heart of all authentic religious traditions—loving God, neighbor, and self as three-in-one.

And so Edgar and Veronica quickly became a couple, collaborating in the daily struggle for survival, defending one another against dangers, quarreling periodically, making love carefully so as to avoid pregnancy (the very idea of which they abjured, given the dying, violent world all around them). But for Veronica—and also for Edgar—simply surviving was not enough. She was determined to create another community, like the one she had lost, but even better.  Her devout faith sustained her in this effort, even as his daily practice sustained him. And it no longer mattered to her whether or not he accepted the “one true faith.” They were together, and that was all that mattered.

And soon, the community grew. They instituted “Dharma Gaia Circles,” which were groups of people who would practice Edgar’s mantra together (supplemented, for Catholics, by Veronica’s rosary practice) to alleviate despair and anxiety, and to cultivate a calm, pragmatic determination. They then instructed one another in the Three Essential Disciplines of Tonglen (or meditation to cultivate compassion), Satyagraha (nonviolent refusal to cooperate with evil) and Permaculture (the arts of self-reliance, community-building, and regenerative design, aimed at healing the planet, one site at a time.)

In time—although it may have taken centuries—this led to a Gaian culture taking root worldwide on the ruins of global agro-industrial civilization. This Gaian culture was one where everyone understood the difference between faith and belief—that faith, which is intuitive and ultimately inexpressible, is what unites us, while beliefs are mental formations that distinguish us and our clans from one another, enabling us to articulate our faith according to the norms of our particular culture or subculture. It was a culture where everyone understood that humanity was a part of, not apart from, Gaia—the sacred web of life, and that—as William Blake put it, “Everything that lives is holy.” Yet it was a pragmatic culture, informed by Permaculture principles of Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share, where education was geared toward helping people overcome ideological attachments and cultivate the scientific method of observing and interacting to see what works, in solving any given problem. It was, in short, a world of true abundance, a world of Enough—a world where the Gaian Categorical Imperative became the norm—to strive, in everything they do, to promote the health, competence, and resilience of themselves, their communities, and the one planet—Gaia—that they all share.

So may it be.