Waiting For the Apocalypse Inside the Zoo With a Bunch of Zoo-Animals and the Azure Sky

A silent little essay, and a couple new podcasts, too

The end of the world (an apropos still from an old film).

The sun is burning in the sky

Strands of clouds go slowly drifting by

In the park the dreamy bees are droning in the flowers among the trees

And the sun burns in the sky...

— “Sun Is Burning,” Luke Kelly

(Note » I started this little essay early October, and it’s taken this long to write, as tiny as it is, so think of it as an October essay, but read now in November, compounding its thematic feeling of loss.)

The sky was a nostalgic, bittersweet blue—like a never-ending kindergarten recess long ago, or like the blue air behind some Bikini Atoll atomic detonation on the cover of Life magazine in the sunnier, sweeter days of our now lost America—a couple weeks ago, when my four year old daughter and I went to the zoo, just the two of us.

We both love the eyelashes of giraffes.

We both love any number of things which, in any given moment, it becomes possible to love: a spider monkey curled up to rest on a rock, cradling her little head in her own little left arm; the many bright and chaotic veins of sunlight rippling on the concrete bottom of the seal-pool; the distant rumble of planes keeping a not-unpleasant sense of mechanical time; a lemur staring off into the blueness of heaven with luminous amber eyes, maybe out of boredom, or maybe total immersion in the universe; an anachronistic gorilla sitting “Indian-style,” her back turned to us on the sunlit grassy hill of her incomprehensible but acceptable captivity, quietly eating plant scraps behind two layers of chainlink fence and the last exhausted yellow burst of goldendrod flowers, and flutters of yellow aspen leaves in the air.

We held hands, my little daughter and I, as only two little zoo-monkeys of the Machine ourselves, but my mind kept drifting away, to how that system’s falling apart, roving around with the drones of my inexhaustible worry, floating above the tremors, the fissures, the cracks, the volcanic steam, as if, if I could only be there at the right place at the right time in my imagination of the future, to behold the one vast, tectonic slip which will hurtle us into our next world, I’ll somehow sidestep its omnivorous wave of light, so, back in realtime at the zoo, when a huge wall of wailing noise came suddenly blaring out of sky from everywhere, I heard it as a good ol’ fashioned 1950s era duck-and-cover nuclear air raid siren first.

Or, I wanted to hear it that way, as a hungry poet.

Of course, I remembered almost immediately that it was just the usual test of the neighbourhood tornado sirens every first Wednesday of the month, which I explained to my daughter, assuring her there was “nothing to worry about,” though she’d been no more worried herself than had been the little white fluffballs of arctic foxes she’d been watching doing laps around a fragrant cypress tree—only curious, since she, like the foxes, had never so much as even tasted the real idea of a siren.

But I’ve tasted a lot of bitter fruit myself, and apparently what I wanted to do, as a creative spirit, always famished, was to extract some kind of half-poetic ironic take on the whole situation, so I took out pen and scrap paper—with me wherever I go, even on father-daughter dates—and began furiously scribbling notes to myself, juxtaposing things like “autumnal sky” and “the zazen serenity of apes on sunlit grass” with “atomic bombs” and “fathers and daughters” and “world-encompassing sirens like the shofars of apocalyptic Judaism at the end of everything we’ve ever known,” et cetera—notes which I only rediscovered yesterday morning, having forgot about them for weeks, since—in terms of profundity—they were basically neither here nor there.

“Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself,” said the bright-shining Dayspring of All-Love blooming from on high, the barefoot King of all the Galilean lilies—and he should know; Hellenized first century post-post-exilic daily-Zealot-assassination Palestine under Roman military and economic occupation wasn’t exactly a walk in the park.

More like a walk through the last verse of the Luke Kelly song quoted above—Luke Kelly, that golden lion of a now lost Ireland!—in which the sun, at first shining in the park above “dreamy bees droning in the flowers among the trees,” sets in the West, then crashes down upon Earth, “shrouded in a mushroom cloud of death,” and so now

The sun has disappeared

All is darkness, anger, pain and fear

Twisted sightless wrecks of men

Go groping on their knees and cry in pain

And the sun has disappeared

—it was, in other words, like walking through the usual hellish self-catastrophe of human history, among history’s off-casts of the usual human carcasses, twisted and sightless, groping on their knees, and crying in anguish for the sun.

Like walking through Gaza today.

Or like walking through Odessa.

Or like walking through San Franscisco’s sidewalk citadels of trash, where sun-scorched statues of the flesh of precious human beings stand locked at the end of history and folded over themselves in half, half-dead and half-asleep, in places where the invisible bomb of fentanyl has just fallen again, and keeps on falling, and will always fall, and won’t ever stop falling, as far as the merely human eye can see.

“History is really the failure of man and of culture,” says the clear-eyed Russian megamind, Berdyaev, in his Fate of Man in the Modern World, “the collapse of all human plans. The things man has planned do not come to pass, and the true significance of what takes places escapes man's comprehension.”

He said that in 1935, just after the end of the beginning of the Bolshevik dream, and I hear it echoing even louder now in 2024, well into the beginning of the end of the American one. “The failure of history,” Berdyaev says, “is none other than the tragedy of the lack of agreement between what exists as human and personal on the one hand, and on the other, all objectivization, which is always extra-personal, non-human, anti-personal, and anti-human.”

Man is compelled to realize [he says] that the processes of history are fatal, inhuman forces, quite indifferent to his fate, forces as merciless as they are non-human. We find this merciless non-humanity in the history of the formation of states and empires, in the struggles of tribes and nations, in revolutions and reactions, in wars, in the industrial-capitalistic process and flowering of states and peoples, in the very formation and development of civilization. Evidently, the means with which history operates...cannot be humanized.

Well said, and truly said, as a true Russian—for whether it’s Tsarist Orthodoxy, post-Tsarist Communism, or neo-Tsarist Putinism, a Russian expects to be crushed beneath the metaphysical unassailability of something, as if by some mercilessly inhuman tower stretching from earth to heaven.

Whereas an American expects to protest against everything—or, at least, that’s how it used to be, looking back nostalgically at the utopian sunrays of experimental kinglessness in America. But what so amplifies this ominous winter-is-coming feeling of the end of a, in some ways, catastrophic golden age that, in many ways, needed to end, is the realization that the glorious cure-all of protest itself has also been our poison: We enlightened, rational, self-reliant and atomized can-do American amnesiacs, self-liberated from the oppression of European kings, self-liberated also from the impasses of European history, flooded westward like golden rays of civilizational sunlight, and also like the golden rays of an atomic shockwave, obliterating, as if mere obstacles to self-determination, whole worlds of people and animals and plants who’d spent the last several tens of thousands of years learning how to actually live together in this land, in a harmony of actually functioning kingless self-rule.

It was Americans who first conceived the idea that the current location of a tree is irrelevant.

The American dream has, in part, been a protest against the realness of reality itself; it has been a protest against the reality of living things—Indians, prairies, buffaloes, rivers, redwood trees, and so on—interjecting themselves into this schizoid daydream of the landscape as an empty grid on which to build our city on a hill, as it were, out of lifeless and interchangeable blocks:

Dry your tears, little brother, little sister: Worlds founded on the emptiness of Minecraft metaphysics were always gonna collapse anyway.

And so if now, in the twilight of America, the latest American religious mania is for internalizing our utopian war against Earth and Earth’s trees and the native children of Earth, as a war against the earthly human body itself—with the whole brutal array of lucrative technological interventions called “gender affirming” as only a thin, very, very thin, Orwellian veil for their true nature as the cold, ice-cold, fingertips of our Earth-devouring American Colossus—then this is still, after all, an essentially American asceticism, still groping around blindly for an essentially American future (we love you, little brothers, little sisters—the sisters being the girls, the brothers being the boys, in spite of everything; and we’ll come and find you inside the fiery furnace, if you want us to, and we’ll find our new home together, walking away from the shattered ruins of the statue...)

The Standing Rock Sioux philosopher and American prophet, Vine Deloria, Jr., locates the origin of this nightmare of self-eating hyper-individualism in Christianity, or at least in certain degenerated forms of Christianity, the ones that have been the main sources of our now sadly brown and brittle little American mayflower.

In Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths, Deloria says that

Christianity is said to appeal most to the individual who breaks from family and tribe and enters a larger and less homogeneous ecclesiastical community. This change, however, is simply one of rendering a living universe into a lifeless gathering of things to be used by humans indiscriminately. It does not correspond to what people feel emotionally.

And here it’s maybe good to remind ourselves once again that “family” for an archaic American, as opposed to a post-industrial one, is never nuclear, but always cosmic: The fatherhood of one’s human father is echoed in, and nurtured by, the fatherhood of the sun; the motherhood of one’s human mother is echoed in, and nurtured by, the motherhood of the Earth; and the brotherhood and sisterhood of one’s brothers and sisters ripples outward into, and inward from, the brotherhood and sisterhood of Brother Wind and Sister Wolf,into the familial intimacy of the tree-people and star-people and lily-people, and so on, all of Creation as one great family cohering in the Great Father—who, though this language is mythical and metaphorical, as all brightly alive language is, really are people and really are family—ontologically (to use the stupid philosophical word)—not just poetically and sentimentally, as it might be for a Saint Seraphim or a Saint Francis. Thus, to become uprooted from our native mesh of earthly relations is necessarily to float rootless above a shimmering-teardrop-planet-become-flat-Cartesian-dreamscape of “a lifeless gathering of things to be used.”

And if that doesn’t sound as traumatic and dehumanizing as it really is, it’s only because, for generations now, we’ve been coming as helpless infants into the world already pre-uprooted and already pre-weightless, and it’s all we’ve ever known, though of course we long for more.

And then in the same passage Vine Deloria goes on to quote Robert Bellah as praising Christianity for a “devaluation of the empirical world [=nature] and the empirical self [=one’s body, one’s tribe, one’s ethnicity, or long peoplehood], [which] highlights the conception of a responsible self, a core self, or a true self, deeper than the flux of everyday experience, facing a reality over against itself, a reality which has a consistency belied by the fluctuations of mere sensory impressions.” In Deloria’s mind, though, the price of discovering, and then floating, this quintessentially American, but now of course globalized, “true self” so far above the flux of Creation has been too high:

Here we have the emergence of the idea of an independent self but at the cost of an isolation so severe as to create societies in which personal responsibility becomes a burden too heavy to bear and individuals attach themselves willingly to institutions that then direct their lives.

And that’s probably a pretty good gloss of where we’re at now, on all sides—from the most starry-eyed recent converts to the religions of empires that don’t exist anymore, to the most hardened revolutionary nihilists of a technological paradise that will never come—on the eve of another terrible but perhaps also beautiful Unknown: the anguish of being a free-floating American ego, always difficult, has become unbearable, and our sense of meaning now almost exclusively comes from a basically infantile, umbilical attachment to the institutions—whether Church or State, or to WholeFoods and SpaceX—without which we can hardly imagine what it would take just to stay alive as human bodies, much less flourish together as the lionhearted souls of a reborn Americana.

This is the kind of dreamy crap, anyway, flashing through my mind at the zoo a handful of weeks ago, on that bright blue autumn day with my daughter—only in embryonic form, of course; consciousness is not at all as linear and tubular as sequences of words and sentences are, and it takes a lot of work—for me, at least—to make it so.

I find it hard to stay present.

I like to think about tomorrow.

I like to drift in the anchorless ship of my mind with the winds of the future, and increasingly feel, as Truman does, poised in the moment at the top of the essay, like a human zoo-animal on the verge of discovering that the blue horizon is actually a wall, and that behind the wall is actually where the life is.

And now thinking about the most literal and most immediate tomorrow, election day, although I’ve come out of the dank hibernation-hole of an immature, pseudo-spiritual world-weariness of abstention from the collapsing institutions of the Republic to vote for our American Constantine, feeling in my heart a great fondness for his beautifully defiant, free-speaking army of glorious trash, and also a great hatred for the voice-stifling, child-eating Moloch energizing his opposition, for me, whatever happens is a win-win, because, at the very least, we’re getting to the point where we’re beginning to see the wall. And whether we can feel our way toward the door in a civil manner, or whether we’re going to have to smash our way through, by the prayers of our Holy Iron John and his Twin Hammers, if we can finally see the wall, that’s definitely at least some kind of progress.

And, of course, it will be a tragic lose-lose, also, no matter what. Whoever wins, Pax Americana will still be over—obviously—and whoever is allowed to be the next figurehead on the bow of the sinking American ship will still be overseeing a terribly painful retraction of our overblown civilization, a catastrophic decline and barbarian invasion, as was only inevitable: “The things man has planned do not come to pass. The true significance of what takes place escapes man’s comprehension. The processes of history are fatal, inhuman forces, indifferent to man’s fate, forces as merciless as they are non-human; the processes of history cannot be humanized.”

At the same time, though, let’s not let the final word for America be from a Russian. Let’s let in some Spanish sunlight, also:

These are the mere surface of history...deeper than these, the reality of history lies in biological power, in pure vitality, in what there is in man of cosmic energy, not identical with, but related to, the energy which agitates the sea, fecundates the beast, causes the tree to flower and the star to shine.

(José Ortega y Gasset, Revolt of the Masses)

And let’s let in an English breeze:

Man is not simply his exterior self, bound to a set of impersonal forces; he possesses within himself a sort of microcosm in which the whole world of objective reality and all the past historical periods -- in fact everything that has happened, and possibly everything that will happen -- exist and assert themselves. Man is not what he seems -- a fragment of a meaningless world -- but is rather a world in his own right. He possess as it were a fourth dimension in which he is no longer a being conditioned from outside, but is able to condition himself from within; he is able to be free. But to enter into that dimension requires a prodigious feat of creative memory.

(Philip Sherrard, quoted in an essay by Andrew Louth, source forgotten)

And again, let’s bow before the wildflowers of native America:

I believe that Christianity and modern civilization are opposed and irreconcilable, and that the spirit of Christianity and of our ancient religion is essentially the same.

Ohiyesa Charles Eastman, The Soul of an Indian

And, most of all, let’s listen to the eternal Hebrew voice of the ancient and ever-renewing kingless Hebrew Dawn:

Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Look closely at the lilies of the field, how they grow, and look closely at the birds of the air—they neither toil nor spin, neither sow nor reap, yet the Great Father clothes and feeds them—like radiant kings! Whoever wishes to enter the Father’s kingdom of the sky must become like a little child again, or like a lily, or like one of the birds of the air. Come unto me, all you little downtrodden beasts of the world system, who are weary and heavy-laden. The door to your enclosure is wide open; walk away. Take my yoke upon you, and learn instead from me, for, unlike theirs, my yoke is easy and my burden is light, and I will give you rest.

And in Other News...

Thanks for being here! Paid subscriptions for Sabbath Empire are currently paused, as I am spending almost all my time as a seasonal driver for UPS, i.e. 35 mph package-cowboy of the brown F-16, until at least mid-January, but please definitely do sign up as a free subscriber to get whatever comes next, if you haven’t already:

In the meantime, there are plenty of free essays to read or listen to here:

Also, my little book Sunlilies: Eastern Orthodoxy as a Radical Counterculture, which is pretty good, is still available for sale here:

And I recently had another, I think, really interesting, and even poignant, from-the-heart conversation with the always-interesting Christian Baxter of the Yours Truly podcast here:

And I gave a talk at Grail Country’s Northwest Estuary conference in September, introduced and framed nicely here by Paul VanderKlay:

So, there’s some stuff for ya.

Love always in Messiah, apocalypse or no,

-Graham