I resonate with what you wrote about here. I have been eager to find others who want to discuss, rather abstractly, what a new order could look like (because I think that's what's needed). Much of this "in between" that you wrote about (and seemed somewhat unsure of how to define it in words) is merely what I see as "transition." We are in a transitional phase, one in which old models are no longer serving us and are now collapsing. I have plans to write about this in my blog soon. A big aspect of this collapse is that we need new types of leaders when we rebuild, which would result in a new type of leadership model. We can't just use old models because they are no longer appropriate for our modern society--plus, they are being destroyed too completely, making it too difficult if not impossible to change things back to how they were if Trump disappears.
In terms of new leadership and creation of a new structure, I sense that females, artists and introverts will play a big role here. But most people don't think this far ahead about society, nor do they sense these changes on an intuitive level. That is why I'm excited to read your post. Please let me know if you are part of any blog or groups that focus on what you wrote in your post.
Thank you, Jonathan, for this textured musing. I find myself both resonating with and troubled by the phrase “a time between worlds”—not because I doubt the analysis behind it (as you rightly note, Zak Stein’s grounding is robust), but because of the subtle grandiosity the phrase can carry when spoken aloud, especially in public or strategic contexts.
There’s something about it that feels a bit too… cinematic. As if modernity is already halfway buried and we’re all standing around waiting for the new protagonist to emerge. But perhaps modernity isn’t ending—it’s composting. And composting isn’t linear, nor is it photogenic. It’s slow, messy, and full of rot and life at the same time.
This is where I’ve found Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s work—Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity—especially useful. She doesn’t frame this moment as a clean exit from one paradigm into another, but as a deeply relational and metabolic process: one of sitting with grief, with complicity, and with what she calls “the dis-ease of separability.” Modernity may not be ending like a novel; it may be dying like a body, and we are midwifing and mourning it at the same time.
So rather than asking whether we’re between worlds, I’ve been wondering:
• What are we metabolizing, and what’s metabolizing us?
• What rhythms are ending in us, whether or not modernity ends around us?
• What does it mean to stay with the compost heap, rather than escape into transcendence?
I’m deeply grateful that you’re asking these questions in public. They need tending, not just answering.
I wonder if it would help to step back a little? Zak's line from 2019 is a pithy statement of the theme, but how would it shift perspective to bring in the famous Gramsci line about the interregnum, and the Messianic rumour that runs through the thought of Benjamin, Agamben and others, surfacing most recently in David Benjamin Blower's The Messianic Commons? And that taps us into a vein going back to the New Testament and beyond.
The cheap take here is the one that gets thrown at climate activists - "Oh, every generation thinks it's living at the end of the world!" The recurrence of Millenarianism as proof that "Plus ça change..."
We might wonder over the contrast between the mono-world of the Christian imagination and the ease with which other traditions have encompassed multiple endings of worlds (think Kali Yuga, or the fifth sun of the Aztecs). Is the Christian tendency to speak of THE end of THE world parochial, or prophetic (or both, and self-fulfilling)? Milbank's Hedgehog Review essay with its vision of modernity as a zombie Christendom, an undead world, has something to say for the prophetic interpretation.
I want to go a slightly different route, though, leaning into a dreamtime furnished by the Jewish and Christian currents that shaped me (and shaped the wider setting in which we're writing). What I'm reaching for is the sense of the apocalyptic, Messianic, liminal space of the death-and-birth of worlds as a dreamtime pattern, something that exists outside of time (below time?), yet shows up within time and place, and not with a flat, even distribution, but rising to the surface or receding. So there are moments when this pattern is strong and true to where we find ourselves, when it reveals something about what is or isn't worth doing, or placing hope in.
A few years ago, I was visiting Alan Garner, not long after Alex Evans had come out with a book about myth. I was talking about this and Alan frowned at me. "I fear you may be falling into the trap of trying to make the timeless useful within time." As the conversation went on, I found myself framing his caution into a thought that's halfway to a joke: "Question: what can be said about the timeless within time? Answer: it changes." The pattern doesn't change, but the fit between the pattern and the times does.
This is all a little off to the side of the thrust of your post, but perhaps something to add to the pot.
Stunning, as always. Thank you for you eloquence and sincere 'confusion'. And I don't want to be stunned into silence.
Isn't it super-importance to acknowledge that at the level of 'souls' it's always a time between worlds? Call me an existentialist then! Or am I wrong: is it not so, or not important?
As an individual who likes to and believes in thinking, I want to understand for whom you are writing. To whom. Because when you say "millions" shouldn't that read 'billions', and isn't that really a lot of the point? Vast swathes of potentiality are totally untouched by the discourse, which is therefore inevitably (by implication) 'niche'. And how is a generative ontology to do work in real time without being virally inserted into agency at the possibly only level at which a Molochian historical process can be swerved, realistically?
Is the 'next Buddha the Sangha'? (Excuse my dilletante, low expertise generalism, and bad spelling etc.)
IT MATTERS if people, (which people?), are uncomfortable with the kind of framing 'time between worlds'. And they (!) aren't straightforwardly just to be accommodated, as a nicety. Again, an existentialist? If it's modernity that is to be transcended then maybe because it always was, is and will be, and what therefore that means is any frame that self-sustains. Comfort is the enemy of being comfortable with some discomfort.
So what am I saying that could ever even be conceived to be helpful here? I like metaphysics/ metaphysical questing. The stage 1 upshot of such though seems to need to be Socratic: I don't think anything in particular needs to be deconstructed to the point of disintegration, but only so far to distinguish the region 'reality' as that which frames attempt to frame. This simple, sophisticated, over-worked idea is the sine qua non (of 'collective individuation' for instance), it seems to me.
There are so many facets here of course. It really is an a priori that there are. So generatively this is the intellectual question for me: (gimme gimme gimme) the one-that-generates-many idea of reality of which one is a part across souls, society and systems in compact and explosive and inescapable form. THE Trojan Horse for the future WE!
(Of course I'm aware of the absurdity, may well be paradox, of a one-into-many for very very many. But is that not yet maybe an instantiation, a clue, as to the form of forms (CF your 'Threeness' work)? Is such a thought a nonsense or is it precisely the point 'transcend modernity'?
And the rest from there? Do more people need to be existentialists if there's to be purchase for the particular present pressing work being mooted? And doesn't that mean the first bit of the work is to get more people to be existentialists (not just about the particular historical moment we're in, but about the human condition)? Or is that to commend a form of 'violence'?
I've had similar thoughts about this phrase and its analogues, Jonathan. My somewhat contentious conclusion is that this sense of being in a between time is an axiological condition, but it's more like a transcendental or metaphysical constant of being a human in this world than it is a comment on a certain period of time. In other words, being "in a time between worlds" is what it feels like to be human as such. William Desmond comes to mind as a thinker of this kind of in between in this sense (being in the metaxu, in his words). That concept by itself doesn't help us say anything particular about this specific moment in history, but I think it does shed light on what it's like to be a human and why we reach for this kind of language—it's accurate!
This chunks "worlds" by temporal period. Yet there are streams which run over longer terms, in streambeds which sometimes run dry, only to fill again, through many such temporally-delineated "worlds." I'm reading Shaftesbury's The Moralists, in Vol. 2 of Characteristicks as published by Liberty Fund, which has the twin virtues of maintaining the original spellings &c. while also translating the occasional Latin. One example of that, Lucan (lib. 9) in Shaftesbury's footnote: "What house is there for god save earth and sea and air and sky and virtue? Why do we look for the gods outside ourselves? All that you see, all that you feel, is Jupiter."
In Shaftesbury's perspective, the best of the "antients" already had it -- where "it" is recognizably the holistic recognition of humanity as part of Nature. One of my chief intellectual hobbies has been following the emergence of "consciousness studies" over the last several decades (attending most of the Tucson conferences, subscribing to the Journal of Consciousness Studies since it's beginning). Reading Shaftesbury it's amazing how the debates there are, in just the last few years, arriving at the same areas of central focus he was clearly describing (and using the word "consciousness" for) in a publication of 1709. The weight of his discussion favors "dual-aspect monism" (to use the modern term); and he tears Hobbes a new one against the claim that our "natural" state is predatory. (However much the current degenerative US leadership embodies that psychopathology, they are an aberation).
If we take the Enlightenment as being the streams from antiquity whose re-awakening Shaftesbury greatly contributed to -- and which were also in ascendancy in the early "Dutch" phase of the chart of the "modern" period you present here (e.g. the wonderful painting of Minerva in the Franshals Museum in Haarlem) -- and which we can see from the Lucan quote go way back to "pre-civilization" tribal views of our place in nature, to which by consensus of our current visionaries it is essential we nourish again -- perhaps the "new" age we need is properly renewed renaissance of ancient streams which have never run dry.
Consider yourself lucky not to be living in the States, then, where the in-between-worlds is no longer theoretical, but quite palpable. Even knowing how fragile the lie of America has always been, it is astonishing how quickly it is coming apart and the physical clench and heaviness of watching it happen. I don't believe the bad guys will win, but they will be leaving everything in real ruins, fragments within fragments. I have spent way too much time on Substack since the inauguration, but I was amused to stumble on a post that claimed to calculate the real time cycles of the Hindu Yugas and declared that the Kali Yuga ended this past Equinox. Of course, there's a 300 year transition period until the next Yuga...
Jack, If we don't want the evil folk to win, well, "the lie of America" is their thesis. To them, science is a lie, beauty is a lie, virtue is a lie. So they lie constantly.
I'm still going with the "which stream is ascendant" model. There's a new biography of Ben Franklin out focusing on his intellectual influences. The claim of Franklin scholars is he took his moral philosophy from Shaftesbury's Characteristicks, which Ben read closely as a teen. Meanwhile Jefferson scholars say Thomas took much of his outlook from Hutcheson, close student of Shaftesbury.
The writings of the Founders are replete with concerns about con-men, frauds and bullies like the Trumpists. They stood up a republic designed to give us the best chance against them. Yes, its badly faltering. It needs redesign. If and when we defeat these servants of the Prince of Lies, we may need a "Second Republic." And we damn well need better education in moral philosophy broadly shared among the public. Each side arguing about which hell you'll go to if you support the other is -- as Shaftesbury goes to some length to argue -- not the path which best leads people to positive virtue. We need to all be imagining better futures, to take our motivation from the beauty of their potentials. It will help in doing so to appreciate and value the real achievements of our past.
I think you have their thesis confused with their cover story. Their cover story is beauty is *a* lie but their actual thesis is beauty is *to* lie. the former they sell. The later they embody. Jack's shorthand was about the reality of the land we are on Herself. The blood and chains and extraction in the means of the present ends. It is a place to few have really met. I hear you on ascendent streams.but if your world is a bucket carried in from out, and steel between you and the ground, waiting at its rim may be the Godot ticket. I get that I hijacked your intent but talk of water these days makes the mirage ache.
My own hunch is that the real achievements of our past might have been more on lend from the Chickesaw tribal councils that Franklin admired but I admit that could be just my trip.
Isn't the prerequisite to reopening the well of imagination to admit that the water from the tap is no longer drinkable? I get that well digging may be a season and thirst is a day. So we stay alive as we shovel by cup and tap but we are still between water sources. Only the acknowledgement that the tap has no future because it is a finite cistern, bound to Technique at the molecular level rather than open to the aquifer , will keep us digging when we get past sand to harder pack. Franklin will remain (dregs or sediment) in either way (wide or narrow) but I suspect the pearl diver in the sea bed who knows his father's eyes cannot be brought up open and alive, that the in-between is ruled by scavenger holding her breath not by prince waiting for his testament, is doing more Franklin-ing than the plumbers changing out copper for pex but still ultimately bound to the main.
The end of all Things is near. We are between worlds. The one failing is just us, alone talking to ourselves. The One(s) beginning are flush with Peoples.
Andrew, Love the poetry. But the "Americans are just evil" rap is far too simple. As the English moved from absolute monarchy to greater freedom, the Whig historians wrote of recovering "ancient English liberties." True? False? Just myth? If you read Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, they make a strong case that while some tribes since humanity began were heirarchical, others were strongly egalitarian. There may have been some real tribal memory of an egalitarian past for the Whigs to call upon to strengthen their call for its return. And yes, it gets complicated. The 1st Earl of Shaftesbury helped Locke write the constitution for the Carolina colony, of which effort Shaftesbury was on the panel charged with its direction. Then again, English Whigs later largely supported American independence, despite the king.
My main point is we have to find good in the past -- real good -- in order to rekindle it in our hearths and hearts to have a better future. And there was good, even among the many tragedies and cruelties. My patrilineal descent includes Dutch pirates who captured a slave ship and set the captives free in what is now Bluefields, Nicaragua (a city known by the English translation of our name). But then, my father's mother was "passing" -- part Nigerian. We can't spin a viable future out of thin air. History is vital, not just for illustrating how our species can be vile, but also for showing the great beauty and justice achieved, perhaps, more often than you'd credit. It is true that America has too often been ugly; it's a lie to say it has not, also often, been beautiful.
Hey Whit. I pretty much agree with you here from top to bottom after a quick read. Will respond fully later but if I gave you a sense that America is nothing but any one thing, evil or other, than I was unclear. To be continued.
I resonate with what you wrote about here. I have been eager to find others who want to discuss, rather abstractly, what a new order could look like (because I think that's what's needed). Much of this "in between" that you wrote about (and seemed somewhat unsure of how to define it in words) is merely what I see as "transition." We are in a transitional phase, one in which old models are no longer serving us and are now collapsing. I have plans to write about this in my blog soon. A big aspect of this collapse is that we need new types of leaders when we rebuild, which would result in a new type of leadership model. We can't just use old models because they are no longer appropriate for our modern society--plus, they are being destroyed too completely, making it too difficult if not impossible to change things back to how they were if Trump disappears.
In terms of new leadership and creation of a new structure, I sense that females, artists and introverts will play a big role here. But most people don't think this far ahead about society, nor do they sense these changes on an intuitive level. That is why I'm excited to read your post. Please let me know if you are part of any blog or groups that focus on what you wrote in your post.
Thank you, Jonathan, for this textured musing. I find myself both resonating with and troubled by the phrase “a time between worlds”—not because I doubt the analysis behind it (as you rightly note, Zak Stein’s grounding is robust), but because of the subtle grandiosity the phrase can carry when spoken aloud, especially in public or strategic contexts.
There’s something about it that feels a bit too… cinematic. As if modernity is already halfway buried and we’re all standing around waiting for the new protagonist to emerge. But perhaps modernity isn’t ending—it’s composting. And composting isn’t linear, nor is it photogenic. It’s slow, messy, and full of rot and life at the same time.
This is where I’ve found Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s work—Hospicing Modernity and Outgrowing Modernity—especially useful. She doesn’t frame this moment as a clean exit from one paradigm into another, but as a deeply relational and metabolic process: one of sitting with grief, with complicity, and with what she calls “the dis-ease of separability.” Modernity may not be ending like a novel; it may be dying like a body, and we are midwifing and mourning it at the same time.
So rather than asking whether we’re between worlds, I’ve been wondering:
• What are we metabolizing, and what’s metabolizing us?
• What rhythms are ending in us, whether or not modernity ends around us?
• What does it mean to stay with the compost heap, rather than escape into transcendence?
I’m deeply grateful that you’re asking these questions in public. They need tending, not just answering.
I wonder if it would help to step back a little? Zak's line from 2019 is a pithy statement of the theme, but how would it shift perspective to bring in the famous Gramsci line about the interregnum, and the Messianic rumour that runs through the thought of Benjamin, Agamben and others, surfacing most recently in David Benjamin Blower's The Messianic Commons? And that taps us into a vein going back to the New Testament and beyond.
The cheap take here is the one that gets thrown at climate activists - "Oh, every generation thinks it's living at the end of the world!" The recurrence of Millenarianism as proof that "Plus ça change..."
We might wonder over the contrast between the mono-world of the Christian imagination and the ease with which other traditions have encompassed multiple endings of worlds (think Kali Yuga, or the fifth sun of the Aztecs). Is the Christian tendency to speak of THE end of THE world parochial, or prophetic (or both, and self-fulfilling)? Milbank's Hedgehog Review essay with its vision of modernity as a zombie Christendom, an undead world, has something to say for the prophetic interpretation.
I want to go a slightly different route, though, leaning into a dreamtime furnished by the Jewish and Christian currents that shaped me (and shaped the wider setting in which we're writing). What I'm reaching for is the sense of the apocalyptic, Messianic, liminal space of the death-and-birth of worlds as a dreamtime pattern, something that exists outside of time (below time?), yet shows up within time and place, and not with a flat, even distribution, but rising to the surface or receding. So there are moments when this pattern is strong and true to where we find ourselves, when it reveals something about what is or isn't worth doing, or placing hope in.
A few years ago, I was visiting Alan Garner, not long after Alex Evans had come out with a book about myth. I was talking about this and Alan frowned at me. "I fear you may be falling into the trap of trying to make the timeless useful within time." As the conversation went on, I found myself framing his caution into a thought that's halfway to a joke: "Question: what can be said about the timeless within time? Answer: it changes." The pattern doesn't change, but the fit between the pattern and the times does.
This is all a little off to the side of the thrust of your post, but perhaps something to add to the pot.
Thanks Dougald. Appreciated. I will consider this and respond in some way (here or in my next post) before long. 🙏
More than a week after the post, and a few days of reflection after that, I have tried to frame a response, largely to agree with the question you pose, and to sketch something that might point towards the source of your disquiet. https://insearchofwisdom.online/modernity-is-just-the-latest-skin-composting-the-long-arc-of-separability/ .
Keep on asking the hard questions. 🙏🏻
Stunning, as always. Thank you for you eloquence and sincere 'confusion'. And I don't want to be stunned into silence.
Isn't it super-importance to acknowledge that at the level of 'souls' it's always a time between worlds? Call me an existentialist then! Or am I wrong: is it not so, or not important?
As an individual who likes to and believes in thinking, I want to understand for whom you are writing. To whom. Because when you say "millions" shouldn't that read 'billions', and isn't that really a lot of the point? Vast swathes of potentiality are totally untouched by the discourse, which is therefore inevitably (by implication) 'niche'. And how is a generative ontology to do work in real time without being virally inserted into agency at the possibly only level at which a Molochian historical process can be swerved, realistically?
Is the 'next Buddha the Sangha'? (Excuse my dilletante, low expertise generalism, and bad spelling etc.)
IT MATTERS if people, (which people?), are uncomfortable with the kind of framing 'time between worlds'. And they (!) aren't straightforwardly just to be accommodated, as a nicety. Again, an existentialist? If it's modernity that is to be transcended then maybe because it always was, is and will be, and what therefore that means is any frame that self-sustains. Comfort is the enemy of being comfortable with some discomfort.
So what am I saying that could ever even be conceived to be helpful here? I like metaphysics/ metaphysical questing. The stage 1 upshot of such though seems to need to be Socratic: I don't think anything in particular needs to be deconstructed to the point of disintegration, but only so far to distinguish the region 'reality' as that which frames attempt to frame. This simple, sophisticated, over-worked idea is the sine qua non (of 'collective individuation' for instance), it seems to me.
There are so many facets here of course. It really is an a priori that there are. So generatively this is the intellectual question for me: (gimme gimme gimme) the one-that-generates-many idea of reality of which one is a part across souls, society and systems in compact and explosive and inescapable form. THE Trojan Horse for the future WE!
(Of course I'm aware of the absurdity, may well be paradox, of a one-into-many for very very many. But is that not yet maybe an instantiation, a clue, as to the form of forms (CF your 'Threeness' work)? Is such a thought a nonsense or is it precisely the point 'transcend modernity'?
Tell me Jonathan is it?
Thanks Joe, your initial point is right I think, and mentioned by Alex above too. Existentially we are always in some sense between worlds.
And the rest from there? Do more people need to be existentialists if there's to be purchase for the particular present pressing work being mooted? And doesn't that mean the first bit of the work is to get more people to be existentialists (not just about the particular historical moment we're in, but about the human condition)? Or is that to commend a form of 'violence'?
PS am I being dumb: I can't locate "Alex above"?
I've had similar thoughts about this phrase and its analogues, Jonathan. My somewhat contentious conclusion is that this sense of being in a between time is an axiological condition, but it's more like a transcendental or metaphysical constant of being a human in this world than it is a comment on a certain period of time. In other words, being "in a time between worlds" is what it feels like to be human as such. William Desmond comes to mind as a thinker of this kind of in between in this sense (being in the metaxu, in his words). That concept by itself doesn't help us say anything particular about this specific moment in history, but I think it does shed light on what it's like to be a human and why we reach for this kind of language—it's accurate!
This chunks "worlds" by temporal period. Yet there are streams which run over longer terms, in streambeds which sometimes run dry, only to fill again, through many such temporally-delineated "worlds." I'm reading Shaftesbury's The Moralists, in Vol. 2 of Characteristicks as published by Liberty Fund, which has the twin virtues of maintaining the original spellings &c. while also translating the occasional Latin. One example of that, Lucan (lib. 9) in Shaftesbury's footnote: "What house is there for god save earth and sea and air and sky and virtue? Why do we look for the gods outside ourselves? All that you see, all that you feel, is Jupiter."
In Shaftesbury's perspective, the best of the "antients" already had it -- where "it" is recognizably the holistic recognition of humanity as part of Nature. One of my chief intellectual hobbies has been following the emergence of "consciousness studies" over the last several decades (attending most of the Tucson conferences, subscribing to the Journal of Consciousness Studies since it's beginning). Reading Shaftesbury it's amazing how the debates there are, in just the last few years, arriving at the same areas of central focus he was clearly describing (and using the word "consciousness" for) in a publication of 1709. The weight of his discussion favors "dual-aspect monism" (to use the modern term); and he tears Hobbes a new one against the claim that our "natural" state is predatory. (However much the current degenerative US leadership embodies that psychopathology, they are an aberation).
If we take the Enlightenment as being the streams from antiquity whose re-awakening Shaftesbury greatly contributed to -- and which were also in ascendancy in the early "Dutch" phase of the chart of the "modern" period you present here (e.g. the wonderful painting of Minerva in the Franshals Museum in Haarlem) -- and which we can see from the Lucan quote go way back to "pre-civilization" tribal views of our place in nature, to which by consensus of our current visionaries it is essential we nourish again -- perhaps the "new" age we need is properly renewed renaissance of ancient streams which have never run dry.
Consider yourself lucky not to be living in the States, then, where the in-between-worlds is no longer theoretical, but quite palpable. Even knowing how fragile the lie of America has always been, it is astonishing how quickly it is coming apart and the physical clench and heaviness of watching it happen. I don't believe the bad guys will win, but they will be leaving everything in real ruins, fragments within fragments. I have spent way too much time on Substack since the inauguration, but I was amused to stumble on a post that claimed to calculate the real time cycles of the Hindu Yugas and declared that the Kali Yuga ended this past Equinox. Of course, there's a 300 year transition period until the next Yuga...
Jack, If we don't want the evil folk to win, well, "the lie of America" is their thesis. To them, science is a lie, beauty is a lie, virtue is a lie. So they lie constantly.
I'm still going with the "which stream is ascendant" model. There's a new biography of Ben Franklin out focusing on his intellectual influences. The claim of Franklin scholars is he took his moral philosophy from Shaftesbury's Characteristicks, which Ben read closely as a teen. Meanwhile Jefferson scholars say Thomas took much of his outlook from Hutcheson, close student of Shaftesbury.
The writings of the Founders are replete with concerns about con-men, frauds and bullies like the Trumpists. They stood up a republic designed to give us the best chance against them. Yes, its badly faltering. It needs redesign. If and when we defeat these servants of the Prince of Lies, we may need a "Second Republic." And we damn well need better education in moral philosophy broadly shared among the public. Each side arguing about which hell you'll go to if you support the other is -- as Shaftesbury goes to some length to argue -- not the path which best leads people to positive virtue. We need to all be imagining better futures, to take our motivation from the beauty of their potentials. It will help in doing so to appreciate and value the real achievements of our past.
I think you have their thesis confused with their cover story. Their cover story is beauty is *a* lie but their actual thesis is beauty is *to* lie. the former they sell. The later they embody. Jack's shorthand was about the reality of the land we are on Herself. The blood and chains and extraction in the means of the present ends. It is a place to few have really met. I hear you on ascendent streams.but if your world is a bucket carried in from out, and steel between you and the ground, waiting at its rim may be the Godot ticket. I get that I hijacked your intent but talk of water these days makes the mirage ache.
My own hunch is that the real achievements of our past might have been more on lend from the Chickesaw tribal councils that Franklin admired but I admit that could be just my trip.
Isn't the prerequisite to reopening the well of imagination to admit that the water from the tap is no longer drinkable? I get that well digging may be a season and thirst is a day. So we stay alive as we shovel by cup and tap but we are still between water sources. Only the acknowledgement that the tap has no future because it is a finite cistern, bound to Technique at the molecular level rather than open to the aquifer , will keep us digging when we get past sand to harder pack. Franklin will remain (dregs or sediment) in either way (wide or narrow) but I suspect the pearl diver in the sea bed who knows his father's eyes cannot be brought up open and alive, that the in-between is ruled by scavenger holding her breath not by prince waiting for his testament, is doing more Franklin-ing than the plumbers changing out copper for pex but still ultimately bound to the main.
The end of all Things is near. We are between worlds. The one failing is just us, alone talking to ourselves. The One(s) beginning are flush with Peoples.
Andrew, Love the poetry. But the "Americans are just evil" rap is far too simple. As the English moved from absolute monarchy to greater freedom, the Whig historians wrote of recovering "ancient English liberties." True? False? Just myth? If you read Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, they make a strong case that while some tribes since humanity began were heirarchical, others were strongly egalitarian. There may have been some real tribal memory of an egalitarian past for the Whigs to call upon to strengthen their call for its return. And yes, it gets complicated. The 1st Earl of Shaftesbury helped Locke write the constitution for the Carolina colony, of which effort Shaftesbury was on the panel charged with its direction. Then again, English Whigs later largely supported American independence, despite the king.
My main point is we have to find good in the past -- real good -- in order to rekindle it in our hearths and hearts to have a better future. And there was good, even among the many tragedies and cruelties. My patrilineal descent includes Dutch pirates who captured a slave ship and set the captives free in what is now Bluefields, Nicaragua (a city known by the English translation of our name). But then, my father's mother was "passing" -- part Nigerian. We can't spin a viable future out of thin air. History is vital, not just for illustrating how our species can be vile, but also for showing the great beauty and justice achieved, perhaps, more often than you'd credit. It is true that America has too often been ugly; it's a lie to say it has not, also often, been beautiful.
Postscript: Heather Cox Richardson is on these themes today: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-15-2025-thursday
Hey Whit. I pretty much agree with you here from top to bottom after a quick read. Will respond fully later but if I gave you a sense that America is nothing but any one thing, evil or other, than I was unclear. To be continued.