Charnel Age – Julie Fredrickson

I’ve got my over the ear noise canceling headphones on playing a Solfeggio frequencies of 396 Hz which is labled as “liberating guilt and fear” on my Endel mobile application (which I recommend though I’m not involved with it).

I am doing breathing exercises with these tunes playing in the background. I have a routine of hyper stimulation autonomic exercises I do when I am in times of physical and emotional stress.

My father died this weekend. While I had been preparing for the possibility for sometime the reality of the moment is never what you expect.

Grief is a strange emotion. You forgive your parents but they don’t always forgive themselves. And then it’s over and everyone is free. The pain is over and the past arrived and your present is without them.

The past becomes a foreign country and you don’t speak the language and as you become middle aged you see your life reworked through success and failure and the hard costs which your ego previously obscured like too much greasepaint.

It is maudlin to stay in grief but if we do not let go of the past we will project past pains and old understandings of reality onto others that do nothing but harm.

It’s a beautiful thing to watch these huge emotions play out in your life. Death offers grand dramas when all you can offer is having built a future on the foundation they gave you.

The lingering live embers of Venkatesh Rao’s charnel age have left me with deadened impression in my bodily sensorium. Tasting, breathing, and seeing the culture of now feels somewhere between spoiled and not quite ripe.

One of my minor affectations is periodizing my writing into sardonically named 6-year eras…We’re about to enter the last year of the third age of Ribbonfarm, (2019-24), and I finally have a name for it: this is the Charnel Age. December 21 Ribbonfarm

I have been known to drop an Antonio Gramsci joke from time to time. This is harder to make a joke about though. The age which was being born as Gramsci was imprisoned by the fascists from 1929-1935 surely felt as filled with morbid symptoms and putrefaction.

How it compares to our current perverse extended gerontological Fourth Turning of death and rebirth is yet to be seen.

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters

That quote is a translation of Slavoj Žižek’s which isn’t quite as pithy as the Slovenian made it sound.

La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi più svariati.”

Or for those lacking Italian skills (which as I do) here is it translated more literally.

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Rao calls charnel vision “a tendency to see things from the perspective of natural processes of transience, death, and decay,” which can feel foreign to the long century of stability.

Americans enforced this order through its dollarization and the financialization . But empires change and even the longest institutional decay can be seen from far enough remove.

And so we have Swiss politicians running to Washington DC as the cosmopolitan upper classes try to enjoy an August off from the always on mania of this interregnum while also keeping an eye on matters.

As it turns out the extra mile to get to an esoteric Dolomite lake or a less well known riviera (might I recommend the Balkan coastlines to the more adventurous). If you need to find me, I won’t tell.