From dark to light - solstice reflections (with a side of music)
We've arrived at a place where we must restore the right to say reasonable things out loud, regardless of the cost. Thoughts on the holidays, covid, and a world plunged into darkness.
As I write this on the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, with Christmas just days away and my daughter’s fifth birthday having passed a week and a half ago, I am reminded of my favorite holiday music which, hands down, is an album titled On Yoolis Night by the a cappella quartet Anonymous 4. You can stream the whole album in the YouTube clip above, the official YouTube playlist, or on Spotify:
One Christmas Eve a few years back, I walked home after midnight after getting out of the late church service. Fluffy snowflakes fell gently all around me, the streets empty and silent but for the angelic voices of On Yoolis Night emanating from my phone like a soft, warm glow extending a few feet in every direction. It was glorious — one of those moments where the holiday spirit aligned perfectly, and where I felt infused with the benign otherworldly force that, as a kid, seemed to wrap the world in a kind of blanket of goodwill on the night of December 24th.
The Winter Solstice is, by definition, the darkest day of the year and yet it seems to bring with it a sense of oncoming uplift and brightness. At least that’s how I feel this year, as my connection to the natural rhythms of the seasons deepens. I’m not a gardener, for example, but I’ve been struck recently but a strong inner push to start a neighborhood garden in my backyard. The response from people in my neighborhood has been enthusiastic. This garden wouldn’t come into being until spring, but I feel called to lay the groundwork now by making an investment at the intention level.
It’s not like I feel like we should always be projecting ourselves months ahead of where we are — in fact, I find it annoying when the very moment the summer solstice arrives in June, someone invariably moans that the days are about to get shorter when the fact is the days don’t start to feel like they’re getting shorter until months after that point. Likewise, we’re still squarely in the “dead of winter” in the part of the world where I live, and there’s a long way to go before we get to spring, but it’s nice to know that the train is en route to the station.
For most of my life, winter darkness has always felt as welcoming and enjoyable as summer sunshine. And, for the longest time, I never had an issue with setting the clocks back in the fall. As the night enveloped the day, I would get a jolt of energy akin to what I felt as the days got longer and longer in the spring, until by mid-summer I’d have this feeling of luxuriating in daylight, that there’s so much of it it’s like we’re all swimming in sunlight. Both sensations always came with a profound sense of payoff.
About four or five years back, though, I started having trouble with the autumn time change. This year, for some reason, I didn’t. I once again welcomed setting the clocks back, and the change felt nice and easy. The only part of it that I mind now is that taking my daughter to school in the pre-dawn darkness seems like it’s a bit tough for her. Otherwise, if it were just me outside on my own, I would feel fine, the darkness providing a slight boost of energy just before the sky lightens…
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My daughter was born two weeks before Christmas, and I’m being 100% sincere when I tell her that she’s the greatest Christmas gift I’ve ever gotten. I felt very connected with Christmas as a kid myself, but having my own child enter the world at this time of year has forever punctuated this point on the calendar as a herald of light, of new life and the wonder of all that’s to come. I still feel that way even though I’m well into that stretch of parenting where you get past the glow of baby-hood and you start to navigate what feel like treacherous waters. As she shows the first stirrings of a genuine despair within her spirit — an inner turmoil I didn’t expect would take root until her teen years — it’s much like the winter solstice in reverse, as I prepare for the individual darkness within her to emerge and grow and spill over into the outer world (as it does with all people).
Nevertheless, I feel a boost these days, like a cool breeze of good tidings blowing my way… a tide that can uplift the vessel of my life, my family, my home, and my community. The feeling, oddly enough, is quite strong even though it has a newborn kind of quality to it.
Since covid upended life for much of the human population in the spring of 2020 — an experience, I should mention, that was overwhelmingly positive for me on balance — it’s nevertheless become clear that humanity is now faced with confronting a malevolence that exists on a scale I never would’ve been able to imagine. I mean, I was able to imagine it, I just couldn’t comprehend it — certainly not as something I would have to find a way to contend with.
We have, I’m convinced, arrived at an inflection point in history where science fiction is no longer fiction. The dystopian horrors we’ve envisioned for decades via movies and books have manifested in earnest, having crossed the line from fantasy into reality. That worst that we imagined is here, no longer something we can keep projecting into some fuzzy “not-too-distant” point down the road.
In case you haven’t noticed: the incursion into our very bodies at the cellular level has begun. And the technology with which we’ve been slowly, deliberately enmeshed is now a weapon being used against us. Corporations, of course, emerge in this picture as inhumane entities acting with the exact same detachment as we’ve seen them depicted time and again in various forms of entertainment.
There’s a reason why we’ve been telling ourselves stories since the 1950s about science turned into a kind of runaway monstrosity. And yet it’s still as if we were caught sleeping. Much of the public, I fear, has little to no comprehension of what’s unfolding before our very eyes, or the gravity of what’s at stake. I guess it’s no surprise that, even though we’ve collectively imagined “dark futures” for centuries — particularly since the latter half of the 20th century — we kind of lulled ourselves into thinking that the doomsday scenarios we kept dreaming up would somehow stay in the future.
Every now and again, I’m struck by the sheer grimness of our current circumstances: namely, that we were coerced en masse into handing away our bodily sovereignty, and that the simple act of pointing that out and asking questions has become heretical. Anyone who dares express doubts about any aspects of covid policy faces swift and forceful censure along with public sanction. There are professional and personal consequences for daring to suggest that the triumvirate of government, pharma, and big tech have no right to colonize the body with an experimental treatment from which there is no recourse if anything were to go wrong.
Think about how far-gone a society has to be for it to be punishable to utter this basic human right aloud. Think of where we have to be for informed consent to be trampled in the name of safety. In my profession, for example, it is verboten to even broach any kind of critique of everything we’ve been impelled to go along with. (I love the fact that “verboten” is a German word. I love how the very way it snaps off the tongue like the snap of a leather whip is meant to connote a kind of government tyranny that literally devours people in its maw.)
I’m certain that some folks reading this piece expecting music commentary will recoil in horror, wondering when my thinking got corrupted enough by “right-wing misinformation” and “conspiracy theories” for me to start donning a tin foil hat. Anyone conditioned to associate covid-jab hesitancy and mandate resistance with “fascism” and right-wing media brain rot will of course reflexively shut down. That’s odd, because I’m a lifelong leftist (not to mention the son of two working medical professionals, one of whom has been in the trenches treating covid patients since this whole things started).
I’m still dumbstruck and left to wonder — aloud now — how on earth leftist politics were welded to the idea that we must give free rein to rapacious corporate entities with a long criminal history of abject disregard for sacrificing safety for profit. Somehow — ingeniously! — progressive politics became synonymous with the message that our bodies no longer belong to us, that we have no right to demand even a modicum of risk-benefit analysis before subjecting our children to shots that come with a highly alarming risk profile.
The same people who’d get red in the face decrying the government’s reversal of Roe v. Wade somehow fail to identify the parallel violation being perpetrated on populations across the globe. It’s been breathtaking — and educational — to watch as masses of people whose politics are supposed to position them against unchecked corporate power suddenly became fanatical advocates for submitting our bodies to be colonized by the most powerful corporations on earth.
This pro-corporatist fundamentalism has found support from some of the last people you’d ever expect — figures like Noam Chomsky, father of the concept of “manufacturing consent,” and Adbusters magazine founder Kalle Lasn, to name just two. Chomsky and Lasn have spent their respective lifetimes exposing the gears of power and corporate manipulation. And yet, somehow, the fear of covid deranged their thinking to such an absurd degree that they’ve both succumbed to pro-jab zealotry.
Sympathizing with Pfizer, alas, has become a religious edict. Vaccines save lives, and you must never question the monoliths of so-called medicine and science, no matter how corrupted or captured they get. To point this madness out in public, of course, is to paint a target on your forehead, to invite being branded as a fascist, a Nazi, a denier of science, a threat to public health, an enemy of the state — never mind the tens of thousands of scientists, doctors, health experts, and health professionals of various stripe also raising questions and challenging the edicts from government, health officials, and pharma. Just shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up — or else.
Who cares if you have a child? How dare you have the audacity to question a poorly regulated, industrial behemoth with a history of making grave fatal errors in the service of profit. How dare you even entertain concern on your child’s behalf? How dare you value your child’s safety — your child’s life — enough to question this new breed of biotech authoritarianism? Shut the fuck up and do what you’re told and if your five-year old develops heart problems as a side effect that we never even bothered to test for, then you WILL shut the fuck up a second time because, rest assured, you’ll get a boot shoved so far in your mouth you’ll never speak in public again.
If you dare even talk about the side effects your child suffered we will destroy your public reputation and you can count on half the people you know coming after you like a pack of hungry wolves. YOU are as evil and dangerous as the contagion itself and YOU must be punished. And, to borrow a page from Orwell, Trust The Science… (Don’t, of course, apply the deduction and constant questioning at the foundation of science, but submit to these gods we have named Science and Medicine and bow before our unquestionable proclamations.)
I’ve long preferred to express my views with a high measure of discretion — I work in an industry that’s overrun by an ideological dogma that I’ve been out-of-step with since it kicked into high gear about ten years ago. At the same time, I’m wary of “red-pill” dogma too. I’ve never aspired to be a polemicist. I prefer to say things in a way that won’t immediately turn people off. And it’s just in my nature to try to connect with people who disagree with me. The foundational premise of my approach to music commentary, for instance, is the idea that you can connect what I write/say about music regardless if you agree with my opinions on the music. Likewise, discussions of difficult, highly charged social issues require diplomacy.
But I’ve arrived — we have arrived — at a place where we must restore the right to say reasonable things out loud. And the way we get there is by just saying them and continuing to say them. By stating them plainly and letting the chips fall where they may. Bodily autonomy and informed consent are non-negotiable — period, full stop. If that’s not palatable for you, then it’s not my responsibility to coddle you. In fact, it’s my responsibility to do the opposite, even as I work to continue to value you, your perspective, and your approach.
We’ve all just lived through an attempt at a form of enslavement so comprehensive that it still takes a moment of pause to process all the implications. And there will be no escape from having to deal with these issues as they come to a head. Music, meanwhile, has turned out to be a fairly useless bulwark against this steady encroachment on our fundamental humanity. The overwhelming majority of artists who’ve railed so convincingly against the machinations of power have utterly failed in this moment. I can’t say I blame them — what we’re facing came at us from an angle that most of us simply had no way of anticipating. The warnings have been sounding for years, but to so many of us they sounded fanciful, crazy, and well beyond the bounds of what’s possible. To entertain them was to flirt with mental illness.
And yet, here we are…
In retrospect, I’ve come to view the profession I work in — music journalism — as a laboratory incubator of social consensus. It’s not that people shouldn’t be talking about music, but that music became a weapon, a means of constraining the parameters of discussion so that people would fail to see just how deeply rooted power has become. Since about 2014 or so, the entertainment/”arts & culture” wing of media has been deployed in the cultivation of the idea that your inner thoughts now fall within the jurisdiction of everyone else around you.
Media figures — and music critics in particular — tended to jump in with both feet on the idea that holding people “accountable” meant that all of us would now be monitored, judged, shamed, and publicly denounced by the people closest to us, as well as by braying mobs of strangers. No inner thought was safe from being claimed by the collective.
And thus, with shocking swiftness, life for anyone in the United States with a semblance of a public voice (which was pretty much anyone with a social media account of any kind) took a turn into an East German-style atmosphere whereby all of us suddenly had to live under the constant threat of being exposed. Exposure, of course, came with harsh punishment — loss of job and income, but also loss of personhood. Punishment, of course, would now be by doled out by an endless line of willing executioners — including your coworkers and friends.
Being “cancelled” became the new form of being stoned to death in the public square, all while the most craven apologists for this system — including the majority of my peers — gaslit us (and, perhaps, themselves) by repeating the mantra that “cancel culture is a myth,” a phantom boogeyman invented by right-wing operatives seeking to throw us off the trail from the sins of conservative politicians. The subtext, of course, if you translate this message from the language of delirium to plain spoken English, is: because conservative politicians are doing terrible things, we claim the right to be social vigilantes. And if you question that, then you’re the enemy too.
Of course, this wave of stone throwing is a form of mass sickness. And it helped lay the groundwork for the blind march into obedience we’ve been on since March of 2020.
I would urge you to take a moment to let this all sink in. Because destroying people was also sold to us in the guise of progressivism. (Seeing a pattern here?) In order to properly hold power to account, we were told in an orgy of Orwellian madness, it became our obligation to police not just the speech but the inner thoughts of the people around us, and to tear them to shreds at the slightest hint of an infraction. Over the last decade, power moved in on our value systems and our social groups, defining the relationship between the individual and the society in a crucial new way: no idea you have is entirely your own, and anything you utter or even think can and will be used against you in the court of public vengeance.
And now, since early 2021, that same power has moved into your very cells, and you’re expected to lay down and make way for it. And you will be branded as a monster for standing your ground and refusing. (Kudos and a thousand salutations to New York Music Daily for being the only music journalism platform I know of to bravely and publicly stand against covid authoritarianism. I would highly recommend their resources page.)
Power has pitted you against others so effectively that you’ll have to expend most of your energy fighting for your life against your own friends and peers just to hold off being ostracized. How can anyone try to fight against power at its source when we have to tiptoe so carefully around all the low-level enforcers?
These are all grim prospects, but it helps to be sober and honest in assessing where we are. There is most certainly a grimness threatening to engulf us. But I say that as someone who still enjoys Christmas, still writes about deluxe album reissues and box sets, still watches football and, most importantly of all, still laughs with my kid, even as I try to stave-off the most bleak and terrifying visions of what her world might look like a decade or two into the future if we don’t manage to re-direct the momentum of where we’re headed.
I’m also able to enjoy the work of people who have most fervently advocated for us to lay down and allow power to eat us from within — musicians, media figures, even Noam Chomsky and Kalle Lasn. I will not cancel anyone, regardless of what they say or do that doesn’t sit with me. Their contributions to my life cannot be dimmed, and I remain staunch in valuing them and loving them as people, even where they may not be able to find it within themselves to grant the same amnesty and grace in return. That’s okay. I will survive.
If you don’t agree with me, if you recoil in disgust, if you call me names, if you disown and disavow me, I will survive. And so will you. Your judgment doesn’t have power over me simply because I choose not to allow it to. Moreover, I refuse to lord power over you. I refuse to try to shame you or anyone, to make others feel like there are aspects of them that we should shun and punish. That’s how we got into this mess to begin with. And it’s a hell of mess.
Somehow, though, I’m still able to enjoy frivolous things — to even joke with a pro-jab friend as we tease each other and talk about sports. I’m able to keep it light for a simple reason, which is that those who feel the need to seek power do so because they’re afraid. It’s not like we have no reason to be afraid of the powerful, but we can never forget that the powerful are afraid too. It’s like when you were a kid and you expressed fear of a bug to one of your parents and they said “Just imagine how scared that bug is of you.”
Yes. Just imagine…
Light, it occurred to me recently, cannot be extinguished. The most evil, tyrannical, bloodthirsty regime in history could come into power and, while that would certainly be difficult and unpleasant to say the least (I’m not making light of that), that regime would not succeed in extinguishing the light we all carry within. (I suspect that Holocaust survivor and Man’s Search For Meaning author Viktor Frankl would agree.) Power only seeks to perpetuate itself because power is afraid of light. We must remember that at times when the light is least visible. Times like now.
Anyone who ever finds themselves with the responsibility of caring for a child, or a pet — or themselves — must brush up against the realization that it just isn’t constructive or healthy to instill shame in others. As a parent myself, I’ve realized just how habitual it is for all of us to use irritation, impatience, and disapproval as our primary means of teaching other how to behave. From our own children to the checkout person behind the counter when they’re rude to us, we punish each other in a thousand little ways all the time. And it just doesn’t work.
Shame is a tool by which we are led to turn on ourselves, to broil in the silent discomfort of not being able to come forward and find acceptance, reassurance, support, and assistance from our fellows. That discomfort — the cognitive dissonance of knowing that we are not perfect while the society around us dials-up the volume on its thirst for punishing imperfection — makes us all the more susceptible to hurling rocks the moment we catch the scent of blood of others’ imperfections.
We must say no. We must choose love over shame. As the light approaches — slowly but steadily — these are the things on my mind.
I hope you enjoy the music I shared above. And, for those who celebrate (and even for those who don’t), that you have a lovely Christmas. I hope that what I felt walking home that Christmas Eve a few years ago may find its way to you, and that it may enfold you in its warm, reassuring embrace.
I also hope that the glow may work through me so that I can be of reassurance to others. As the light approaches, I welcome the possibility that we may all become agents of healing. These hopes do not seem far-fetched in this time of “darkness.” In fact, they seem, strangely, right there within reach. Like a toolbox sitting on a dusty shelf just waiting to be opened.
Happy holidays.
<3 SRK