Welcome to Holocene Homesick Blues, a newsletter about the strangeness of life at the end of an epoch—something humanity has only experienced once before: the end of the last ice age and beginning of the Holocene, some 11,600 years ago. In this opening post, I’ll discuss the nature of the project, and lay out a loose plan of the sorts of things we’ll be exploring as the newsletter develops. If it sounds like the kind of thing you’d like to hear more about, please consider subscribing. Once subscribed, newsletters will come directly to you through email.
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I aim for these posts to be meditations rather than structured arguments: a kind of free-association game to unlock regions of consciousness often hidden to us in our quotidian lives. Obviously, this works better with more people involved, so I’m keen to hear your thoughts and responses in the comments sections, and appreciate your sharing this newsletter with friends and family who might enjoy it.
Let’s away, then, to a little meditation on our title, an homage to Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ (1965). Have a watch/listen (lyrics here):
Of caves and light
We begin at an end. The natural, social, and technological systems that give shape to human life and civilization are transforming at a bewildering pace, in ways I struggle to comprehend. These upheavals—in our climate, our culture, and our tools—herald countless iterations of futures, each harder to make out than the one preceding it.
It should be a thrilling—and possibly terrifying—time to be alive. And yet, if your reaction is anything like mine, a dreadful paradox of this phenomenon is its near-instantaneous, overwhelming banality. Like the harried Dylan, fumbling placard after placard, I can barely keep up with these changes, each barely glimpsed before the next appears. The depth and strangeness of this extraordinary moment of upheavals is obscured by a continual flow of new and often incomprehensible developments.
The Holocene Epoch, that short period of pleasant, stable climate in which all of human civilization has arisen, is coming to an end—has already ended, probably, though I’m not sure putting a timestamp on the exact moment matters to anyone outside the geological sciences. Yet I still wake up, day after day, and go about my life, as if things are still normal, still Holocene-y. This is very, very odd. Recursively odd: odd what is happening, the ‘Anthropocene’—perhaps a misnomer if machines are soon to surpass us in intelligence; and even odder that I can’t seem to fully inhabit the oddness. To the extent that I can detect this deep strangeness, my urge is often to avoid attending to it too closely—which is perhaps why we have adopted such highly effective means of distracting ourselves.
But something about ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ seems to capture it for me, though it’s hard to pin down why. If you like, watch the video again, but this time, watch Dylan’s facial expressions: a range of bored, annoyed, amused, contemplative, etc. He smirks slyly toward us from time to time, markers that say ‘oh, there’s something to that, maybe—but no time now.’
It’s a song about, well, everything changing—contained within a singular historical moment. Accounts that attempt to decode it inevitably contradict one another. The best I’ve found is a recent article in the UK magazine Far Out, by Pubali Dasgupta. She details how Dylan wrote the song in the stream-of-consciousness style of the 50s beat poets, merging events and observations of the cultural upheavals of the mid-1960s into an impenetrable wall of slang.1 Nevertheless, and as is often the case with Dylan's songs, its cryptic lyrical fragments became free radicals, taking on new meanings as they smashed about the cell walls of our culture for decades afterward. They crop up in all kinds of places. The title of the The Weather Underground’s manifesto: You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows. Jet's debut album, Get Born. The Beastie Boys’ ‘Funky Donkey’. Radiohead’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’. REM’s ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)’. An early episode of Law & Order. And—my favorite—a sing-off on Murphy Brown.
So I’ve got some license to pluck a verse out of the final stanza that always strikes me like a gong:
‘Better jump down a manhole, light yourself a candle’.
It’s a marvelous pairing, perhaps even more so when admired in isolation. The sudden frightening plunge is both volitional and impulsive. I have to jump—I don’t ‘drop’ or ‘climb’ down the hole. And then I’m in the dark and the damp, amidst the rats. I’ve got a lighter, and a candle, but I’ve got to find a place to set it. A warren of sorts. Flame sets to wick, and there’s a liturgy to it, a small holiness. In the video reel, Dylan’s placard reads not ‘manhole’, but ‘man whole’.
What was he getting at?
Invisible Man
The verse is a reference to Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man. Not the bandaged, bespectacled guy in the trench coat: that’s H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man (1897), which was adapted into multiple Hollywood films. Wells’ character was literally invisible, hence the get-up. But Ellison’s unnamed narrator is ‘socially invisible’—a metaphor for Ellison’s own sense of intellectual and cultural ostracism from both the racist white ruling class and the essentializing ideologies of other black radicals and intellectuals of the era, most notably his fellow novelist Richard Wright.
Living in solitude underneath the streets of Harlem, the invisible man spins his life story: an existential, absurdist allegory of racial and political conditions in America that is unsparing in its depictions of both white racism and the failings of radical movements to address the real needs of black people. He is ‘invisible’ because others cannot know him; his identity is a phantom, a projection of the impressions of others.
‘I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.’
Ellison’s insight was that this invisibility was not only social and political, but cut to the very root of the human experience. The invisible man is on a spiritual quest straight from the Delphic Oracle: the search for an authentic self. If others cannot or will not know him, how can he know himself?
His subterranean haunt is lit by hundreds of electric light bulbs, powered by stolen electricity. He has ended up there by accident: chased by a lynch mob, he escapes down a manhole into a coal pit, and is then sealed in by his pursuers. But rather than find a way back to the surface world, he chooses to stay; to sit with his thoughts, his strangeness, his estrangement from himself. There he has an awakening, a glimpse into the paradox of being.
‘I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.’
Just after Invisible Man’s release, Life Magazine photographer Gordon Parks created a photo-essay, ‘A Man Becomes Invisible’, an image of which appears on the current Penguin Modern Classics edition of the novel.
Parks staged a stunning depiction of Ellison’s invisible man in his cavern of incandescence. He sits on a stool, a newspaper underneath him. Cigarette butts are strewn about the floor, but only a day’s worth—he keeps the place clean. He is well-dressed, dignified in his rolled white shirtsleeves and black dress shoes, and is focused—enthusiastically?—on a plate of waffles, above which he tips a bottle of syrup, on the cusp of a pour. Two record players appear to float in midair on either side of him. The light bulbs are arranged in an orderly but whimsical pattern, following a plan of sorts, but meandering here and there. It’s a well-ordered inner state: to be at home with oneself, to know exactly who you are: no one, except yourself.
Here, he is surrounded not by ‘hard, distorting glass’, but by the light of his bulbs. And that light is the truth of who he is:
‘The truth is the light and the light is the truth.’
Dylan sings ‘light yourself a candle’. Ellison’s image (as depicted by Parks) seems to say, illuminate yourself. Perhaps Dylan meant it this way as well, and inserted an invisible comma: ‘light yourself [,] a candle.’
I might apply that invisible-comma elsewhere, as a pause for contemplation. The invisible man is no one [,] but himself. He is nothing [,] except light. He says in the novel’s opening pages: ‘I might even be said to possess a mind.’ This unusual construction implies the mind’s lack of independent reality: it is only a projection of other minds, a collective illusion. When the narrator re-emerges into the surface world, he will be reborn, possessed of a mind but not possessed by the mind. And this state, he says, might be available to anyone: ‘Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?’
A plan of sorts
Perhaps the invisible man—and perhaps Ellison himself, who spent five years in a cabin in Vermont, writing the novel—is able to emerge back into the world because he has spent time in the depths, the ‘lower frequencies’—in the mystery of his own being. Not only that, he has made a home out of it. A secret cave that remains within him as he climbs back to the surface. A self that is not a mind, but a space filled with light.
That’s my intent for the project of this newsletter/blog/thing: to cultivate, together, an illuminated chamber, in which to dwell in the mystery of ourselves and our moment; to recognize its deep strangeness, and to meet it with our own strangeness, our own curious light, our own space.
So, very briefly, and just as a way of introduction, I’ll explore some aspects of that moment. Things that I’m aware of, but that tend to get pushed to the mental periphery, either because I am too busy dealing with everyday life, or because they seem too overwhelming to look at directly. And as I do so, I will keep some part of me in that illuminated chamber, munching waffles and listening to a Louis Armstrong record, and remember that while I can’t know what will happen, I can always know myself, my space.
It’s not a rational or scientific statement so much as a vibe or a zeitgeist, but the end of the Holocene appears to be coinciding with the end of static equilibria as predominant states in many aspects of both the natural and human worlds. Some of these things are causally connected: climate change is likely to increase geopolitical instability, for example, which in turn increases climate forcing by scuttling collective action to limit emissions. Others are not, but feel synchronistic: there’s no particular reason to think that climate change or shaky geopolitics has much to do with the rapid acceleration in the progress toward so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI)—large language models that mimic the plasticity of human thought, but hundreds or thousands of times faster. But all three (and plenty of others worthy of discussion) possess this sense, as Paul Kingsnorth and L.M. Sacasas have both noted, of everything accelerating at the same time.
The major shifts in our world appear not to be movements from one static state to another, but toward a dynamic state of constant change—a weirdness of permanent impermanence. We are, for example, likely not moving from one stable climate state to another, but from a stable climate to an unstable, ever-shifting one.
The chart above2, from a research team led by scientist Christopher Lyon, shows global warming pathways on an unusually long time-frame, all the way to 2500, attributable to differing scales of emission reductions undertaken in different scenarios. I won't get into the technical details in this introductory discussion, but the upshot is that unless governments can somehow collectively limit emissions well-beyond their current commitments (Lyons et al. explain that we are currently on track for 2.7 degrees of warming by 2100, which they deem ‘very dangerous’), we and our descendants will experience continually-escalating climate change for the foreseeable long-term future.
Most governments are failing to meet even the insufficient promises they have made, and the time to do so is increasingly short. The radiative forcing we have wrought with greenhouse gas emissions may continue for hundreds of years, building upon itself, presenting new challenges by the decade. If we survive this shift in the long-run, it will only be through the ability to continually respond to ever-changing macro-environmental realities. Unless something truly miraculous happens in the next two decades regarding global emissions mitigation—a wild shift from current efforts—we will not just ‘adapt’ to climate change once: it will be an ongoing and continual requirement, and its difficulty and cost will continually escalate.
A similar kind of acceleration is occurring in machine learning: large-language models capable of building more and more advanced artificial general intelligence are right on the horizon, if they don’t already exist beyond public knowledge. The companies racing to build these things herald them as messianic savior technologies, even while admitting that they themselves are apprehensive, even fearful, of the effects of their actions. Indeed, within the AI research community, credible experts warn that we face severe danger, and in one expert’s apocalyptic (though contested) judgment the potential extinction of the human race, if we allow current AGI development to continue to accelerate without sufficient safeguards. Technology and society thinker L.M. Sacasas has an excellent in-depth discussion of the debate on his Substack, The Convivial Society.
And yet again, if these two developments are laid side-by-side, correctly safeguarded AGI may be the only way for us to survive continually-escalating climate change over the long run, by exponentially accelerating continual adaptive measures at lowest cost. Or it might just decide to kill us all instead, if researchers get the safeguarding bit wrong.
And there it is: a thrilling and terrifying time to be alive.
As above, so below. It’s my hunch, based on nothing other than my own introspection, that these major ongoing shifts in our natural, social, and technological realities are affecting us down at the ‘lower frequencies’. And that growing pile of strangeness down there is becoming particularly unmanageable. If we can’t face it, illuminate it, we’ll go mad.
Though all of these phenomena have political implications, this is not a blog about politics or policy—about what should be done and why. That approach would see these various upheavals as problems to be managed. There are and will be plenty of problems to be managed, and lots of people smarter than I am already write about those things. I’m after something a bit different here.
An operative premise of this project is to approach strangeness with strangeness, and not with attempts to normalize or rationalize it. Something, I think, is happening that is beyond cause-and-effect, beyond problem-and-intervention. For the metaphysically or spiritually inclined, that might sound appealing. For the empiricist, it probably sounds a little daffy. But my intuition is that at the level on which we experience this deep strangeness, collisions are happening. Questions we don’t want to ask collide with feelings we cannot ultimately avoid. Material needs compete with an existential crisis of meaning. Our desire to know and understand the changing world scrapes against our ancient longing for that which is beyond understanding.
Maybe you feel it too. Let’s light the cave and see what’s down here.
Chas Chandler of The Animals claimed that a wine-drunk Dylan once told him the song was about ‘people living after the bomb was exploded.’
From Lyon, C., et al (2022) ‘Climate change research and action must look beyond 2100’, Global Change Biology, vol. 28, no. 2, pp.349-361.
There is great depth to unpack here, tapping into a myriad of emotions. It requires reading several times, and then I get it on every level. Thanks, Adam! I look forward to the next essay. Love the links too. It's a difficult struggle to cope with the parallel angst of climate change, acceleration of artificial general intelligence, and geopolitical instability (especially here in the US). Your passages awaken and stir the intellect and offer comfort and understanding in such a crazy time to be alive.
Enjoyable reading!