Various, consolidated
I want to say something about survival, because the album is not only about collapse and I do not want the record of my thinking in this period to suggest that I believe collapse is the whole story.
I have survived plagues. Multiple ones, at various distances and degrees of proximity. I was in Italy during the outbreak of 1629. I was in London during the great plague of 1665. I watched cholera move through Paris in the 19th century. Each of these events produced, in the cities affected, a specific kind of silence: not merely the silence of the dead but the silence of the living who have been stripped of so much that ordinary social performance becomes temporarily impossible, and what remains is what was always actually there underneath the performance.
What remains, in my observation, is usually more substantial than what the performance would have suggested. The human capacity for connection and generosity and practical solidarity under conditions of catastrophe has surprised me many times in five centuries. Not always: sometimes the catastrophe produces the other thing, the cruelty and the selfishness and the scapegoating. But the generosity is there often enough to be real, to be a feature of the actual material rather than a romantic fiction about it.
The ember is not nothing. The children of the ember are not an afterthought. They are the reason the testimony matters: because if collapse were truly the end, the testimony would be pointless. It is not pointless. Something survives. The geometry includes both. May 22.