Aubade

 Tonight I'd had about fifteen minutes of quasi-sleep—a lucid-dreaming welsh rabbit kind of state—when I was suddenly jolted awake in terror. The past days, weeks, months, years of steadily mounting panic about the upcoming election had suddenly concentrated to a point. There was no way out. The election is only two weeks away, as of today. Our fate cannot be delayed any further. 

And no matter how much I try to convince myself otherwise, the two binary outcomes of this election are roughly equally likely at this point. Two weeks from now, I am just as likely to be living in one of those two futures as the other. 

And suddenly, in the dark, the absolute horror of this fact came to me. From my current perspective of quantum uncertainty, both of those two futures are equally possible right now. More than that—both of them equally exist, in this Schrödinger's election. 

There is the Josh who wakes up two weeks from now to discover democracy is ended; we've elected a madman; the fate of the country and perhaps the whole human race is in jeopardy. And even if there is still a coin-toss's chance that the other Josh, the opposite Josh—the one who awakens to sweet relief and joy—will be there instead, the Josh who lives in the Trump timeline is for now just as real. 

And I feel such compassion for that Josh, in that horrifying future, that I want to weep! What a gulf is fixed between those two futures, those two selves. "Some are born to sweet delight/ Some are born to endless night," as Blake wrote. 

Am I exaggerating? I am not exaggerating. People have not allowed themselves to truly entertain what it would mean for the United States—with its military might, with its reserve currency of the world, with its largest economy on Earth—to be governed by a nuclear-armed madman—with no constraints left on his behavior, and a plan already in place to gut whatever administrative bureaucracy could restrain him.

The United States of America run by an actual, real, out-and-out fascist (as one of the U.S. military's own top generals has called him) is not a thing that humanity would necessarily survive. 

The fascist powers of the 1930s did not have nuclear weapons. They did not control the largest economy on Earth. They did not possess the world's reserve currency and the ability to hold the globe hostage financially to the same extent. Yet look what horrors they were able to inflict. So, what might a fascist United States of America be able to do, in the twenty-first century? 

What chance would anyone have to stand against it? What happens when a fascist president of the world's most powerful nation is backed to the hilt by the world's richest man, who also controls access to the world's satellite infrastructure and one of its largest social media platforms, which he actively uses to spread propaganda and lies to advance his fascist cause? 

No, we might not survive this one. And I don't just mean Americans, but all of us as humans. We might not make it through. At least—at one A.M., two weeks away from the election, with only fifteen minutes of sleep behind me, it truly seems that we might not survive. 

And straight on the heels of this realization came another cosmic horror. The future in which Trump wins—the future to which, pain me as it might, I have to grant the status of equal reality at this point—in that future the whole human story ends so abruptly, so ignominiously, so strangely. 

Was it for this the Egyptians built the pyramids; that writing and representative government were invented; that humankind aspired to culture, reason, science, art—all to culminate in this: this bizarre, vast, incomprehensible act of collective suicide by the world's greatest power? An act of gratuitous self-destruction that carries the whole human species down with it, into the endless dark? 

And when I saw that possible future, what really sharpened the panic was to think that with the sudden blasted end of the human journey would go the hope of any consciousness. The universe might go on existing in silence—endless worlds and stars with no one there to perceive them (if such a thing is possible; if the concept of existence even makes any sense without perception...). 

But the utter meaninglessness of that silence is upon me. Mountains on the moon that might go on standing still for endless time, with no one ever to know of their existence. And all because we hurled ourselves so carelessly and indifferently—with one throw of the electoral dice, one spin of the 50-50 roulette wheel of chance—into the abyss. 

And in that pitch of one A.M. terror, abjectly "pitched past pitch of grief," to quote Hopkins—I thought of Philip Larkin's "Aubade"—that great poem of early morning cosmic horror. That poem that chronicles exactly, in the most painfully accurate detail, what passes in the mind of a person who wakes in the middle of the night, in the wee small hours, and realizes that all of us will die. 

The poem tells what happens in the mind of the one who finds themselves alone in the dark, with nothing left to distract them from the inescapable fact of inevitable doom—the emptiness that awaits us all; the nothingness—those silent seas of endless night. 

One future Josh two weeks from now awakes to Blake's "endless night." That morning will come. I will have to bid it in, whether it is one of the binary futures or the other. There is no more escaping it than the future Larkin contemplates in his poem. It will come upon us, do or wish what we may. 

Aubade, lover.