Ragnarok
On doom
--
What is the purpose of doom? For all things must have a purpose, I think.
Growing up, that word always reminded me of The Lord of the Rings. Not just Mount Doom, where (spoiler alert) Frodo ultimately casts the Ring back into the fiery chasm from whence it came. The whole trilogy is caught up with the concept of doom, this shadow hanging over the characters and their choices, forcing itself to be looked upon, allowing no avoidance or escape. Like King Théoden leading his army into war, the whole host crying out “Death!” as they charge.
Perhaps that’s what doom is for: to be the mounting weight that renders us unable to turn away from our fate. That unsticks us from where we’ve been struck dumb with fear, the antidote to decision paralysis. Doom is what forces us to do what must be done.
There is a difference, though, between doom and the threat of doom. The threat of doom is a cloud on the horizon. It chokes out the sun like wildfire smoke, makes the days grow dark in the mind, constricts hope and debilitates action. I don’t see the use in the threat of doom.
But doom: when it is here, when doom is certain or at least feels that way, that’s when the magic happens. When hope is finally lost and we have nothing left but action. When destruction is guaranteed, failure is the most likely outcome and nothing we do will stop the terrible things, so there’s nothing to stop us from doing whatever we can. I think that’s what Andrea Gibson meant in their poem “Say Yes” when they wrote, “Play like there’s no time for hoping brighter days will come.”
In a strange way, I want doom, not the threat of doom. I know how to act in a crisis. There’s always an immediate thing to be done, help to be given, problems to be solved, and there isn’t any time to worry.
The best part about disaster is that everyone else seems to feel the same way. I get the feeling of being part of something, being an essential component of a broader whole, as though the invisible fascia that connects me to all my fellow human beings, the lines that have long felt so atrophied, all reattach and grow strong. Love becomes a living thing, something immediate and tangible that I can touch and hold a conversation with.
In the aftermath of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, when over 3,000 people died and 28,000 buildings fell, requests for marriage licenses skyrocketed. Community kitchens sprang up, supply distribution sites proliferated, neighbors shared whatever they had. As is common with disasters, crisis was met with community. The writer Mary Austin wrote of her experience in the earthquake, “No matter how the insurance totals foot up, what landmarks, what treasures of art are vanished, San Francisco, our San Francisco is all there yet.” The infrastructure of the city crumbled. In its wake, the people became the city, became home for one another.
Or to quote Andrea Gibson again, “When 28,000 buildings fall, do you know how many walls are no longer there?”
But I’m not in a disaster. Not yet. The sun is shining in a clear blue sky, probably the last warm day of the year. War is raging somewhere far away, but not here. I can’t get that pit in my stomach to clear, but nothing immediate is happening.
What I have is not doom, but the threat of it. The sickly dark horizon that encourages paralysis, not the immediate confrontation that inspires action.
I tried reading Ragnarok, the old Norse myth about the end of the world when even the gods meet their doom. In one version, the world is reborn at the end. The few survivors, mortal and divine, recreate the world anew. In another version, it isn’t. The world simply ends. That’s it. It’s so over.
I hoped reading it might give me some insight, might teach me about faith and carrying on anyway in the face of a future like a rickety balcony teetering over the sea. But Ragnarok is a story of doom, not the threat of it. That’s what the word means: the doom of the gods. There’s too much certainty in it to offer guidance to the uncertain.
And that’s the reality of this time: it is, fundamentally, uncertain. We don’t know how bad things will get, in what ways they’ll get bad, and what we will do in response. We only know that darker days are likely.
I think of Lord of the Rings again, of Pippin watching the dark clouds of Mordor roll out to Minas Tirith heralding the coming of Sauron’s army. “I don’t want to be in a battle,” he says, “But waiting on the edge of one I can’t escape is even worse.”
When was the last time dark days were unlikely, though? I’ve been writing about doom for years. I’ve been declaring each new step towards it to be the final nail in the coffin. This is the collapse of capitalism. That is the end of American empire. Climate change is upon us. Liberalism is dead. Quick, everyone stop trying to pay back your student loans.
I’ve been willing doom closer and closer, beckoning it, trying to close the gap between the threat of it and the thing itself in the hopes that when it finally arrives, we’ll use it as our way to build Utopia at last. When doom is here, it’s liberating.
Think about it:
What if we stopped worrying about our pay checks and we started spending more time with our families instead? What if we stopped hyping up the petty dramas of the political class and started building mutual aid networks with our neighbors? If we stopped living for our social status and started cultivating authentic relationships and being openly vulnerable instead? What if we hastened the destruction of the old social order by divesting from it, ignoring it, and building a new one?
I wrote those sentences six years ago. I’m still waiting on that destruction, still waiting on it to catalyze utopia. Here we are, like a transition card in an episode of Spongebob: six years later.
Maybe it’s time I try a different approach. Maybe, the end isn’t nigh. Maybe, this isn’t the apocalypse. Doom is not upon us yet and brighter days will come.
Let’s try it on together, okay? We don’t have to believe it yet. We’re just going to try it out: this is not doom. This is not a death sentence. The world is not ending. Things will get better.
It tastes like sour milk to me. Even thinking it feels like a betrayal of reality, like gaslighting myself. Like that tweet that said, “Don’t worry everyone, Biden can still run in 2028.”
So I guess we’re back to doom. But doom means action, our last stand to build Utopia as we alchemize the apocalypse and build a paradise in Hell. But doom is not upon us yet, so I guess we’re back to hope. Saccharine, sickly, nauseating hope.
And I find that either way I turn, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Either the world ends in Ragnarok or it is reborn, but either way, there’s light. Even when it all just ends and nothing is reborn, the light is that we’re still alive right now. The certainty of the end makes what we do now all the more meaningful, if this is all we’ve got. The promise of a new beginning makes what we do now all the more necessary to build it.
Even doom is full of light. No matter how I try to darken it, the future keeps on shining.
Maybe that is the answer to the threat of doom: in the face of the uncertainty, to remember how certain things actually are. Either this is the end, and we must act for this is all we have, or this is not the end, and we must act to make it all continue. Either way, we act. Either doom is upon us and we have no choice but to build Utopia now, or doom is not upon us, and we may build Utopia yet.
It doesn’t matter which way we turn. We can’t escape from reasons to have faith.
The Buddhist monk Ajahn Brahm once gave a lecture about the importance how we look. He told of a brick wall he’d built, how he couldn’t stop staring at the two bricks he’d put in out of place. Every time he looked at the wall, the mistake was all he saw. One day, someone came up to him and told him what a beautiful wall he’d built. Dumbfounded, he pointed out the two bricks out of place. His companion frowned and looked at them, shrugged, and said, “Sure, those two are out of place, but what about the other 998?”
When facing a problem, Ajahn Brahm counseled, remember to look beyond it, to the right and to the left. Be sure to see what else is happening too.
Perhaps that is the use of the threat of doom: it’s a chance to practice looking beyond the problem, to everything else that’s happening to. Yes, the clouds are gathering on the horizon. Yes, what’s coming looks bleak. But the light’s still shining here, and even when the darkness falls, there’s still a light within it. We can look and see endless reasons to fear, or, we can look and see that no matter what, we have reasons to have faith.
It’s not that faith is truer than fear. It just feels better.
So for now, I’m choosing faith. I’m choosing faith until doom is upon me and there’s nothing left to choose. And if and when that day comes, I will know exactly what to do. There will be no question in my mind. When doom arrives, I will live as though no brighter days will come. I will scream Utopia into being, even if the breath is my last. I will make that day the brightest day of all.
For now, I can be certain that brighter days will come. As certain as it is that darker ones will come too, I choose faith. Because it feels better. Because I want to. And that’s enough.
