This morning I received a short, two lines of email from a friend. He commented that he was “somewhat troubled by the Presidents apparent lack of humility.” I composed a brief reply which I sent to him privately without including the rest of the group of recipients.

Each of us is an individual caught in the social maelstrom that is the cumulative effect of long standing conditions. Some of these are: dwindling financial resources, a shattering of whatever solidarity as Americans we had a generation ago by lies, half lies, character assassination that is rampant in electronic media, globalization that has resulted in diminished security for the worker. and many more.

I suggested to my friend that we are like crew members on Captain Ahab’s whaling ship, the Pequod. The mad captain is piloting all of us on an impassive sea in search of his great white whale, Moby Dick. We all are in a very precarious situation in the beginning years of this 21st Century.

Many forces compose this perfect storm. The president, a individual bereft of empathy, and the destitute immigrant families seeking asylum at our southern border are not causes, but are symptoms of deeper and longer lived causes. I and my friend with who I exchanged emails have an identical task. We must conceive of a way forward, a means of reconstructing solidarity, a common life rooted in realistic expectations, and kindness, etc.

A way forward. These kinds of collapses have happened before.

This suggestion is taken from The Uprising, On Poetry and Finance by Franco Berardi.
Language and information do not overlap. Language must escape from the matrix of the recombinant logic of information…..and reinvent a social sphere,….a new space for sharing, producing, and living.

Poetry is language’s excess; poetry is what in language cannot be reduced to information, and is not exchangeable, but gives way to a new common ground of understanding, of shared meaning; the creation of a new world.

Poetry is the singular vibration of a voice. This vibration can create resonances, and resonances may produce common space.

Angel, if there were a place we do not know, and there
On some ineffable carpet, the lovers, who never
Could achieve fulfillment here, could show
Their bold lofty figures of heart-swings,
Their towers of ecstasy, their pyramid
That long since, where there was no standing-ground,
Were tremblingly propped together—could succeed
Before spectators around them, the innumerable
       silent dead;
Would not these then throw their last, ever-hoarded,
Every-hidden, unknown to us, eternally
Valid coins of happiness
Before their pair with the finally genuine smile
On the assuaged carpet?

—Rainer Maria Rilke, “Fifth Elegy”
translated by C. F. MacIntyre