The Time of Monsters
There’s a quote attributed to Antonio Gramsci that is popular on the internet, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” It’s a poetic and evocative meme that seems to capture the mood of the last several years, the anxiety we all feel over climate change, Trump, Brexit, the coronavirus; the sense that the world is in flux, old structures, systems, and beliefs that held things together are disintegrating; we are not sure what will arise to take their place; it is all profoundly unsettling.
Upon further examination of the words themselves, the quote comes apart a bit– what, precisely, is meant by monsters, and why should it follow that this in-between phase of history should produce them? A more literal rendering of the Italian provides some illumination: “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.”
Interregnum essentially means “the time between kings,” the period after an old king has died but before a new successor has been chosen. These were, historically, times of great unrest. If a clear successor had not been established and agreed upon beforehand, it was a time when men’s ambitions ran wild, allegiances shifted, and wars erupted. This dynamic will be recognizable to anyone who has studied even a little ancient or medieval history or watched Game of Thrones. It is one of the reasons hereditary monarchies and laws of primogeniture were established: while they may seem outrageously unfair and antiquated to us now, to a medieval populace weary of constant battle and instability, a clear succession of leadership with a smooth transition of power would have felt like relief.
Gramsci was speaking to the particularities of Italian politics and the struggle between fascism and communism in 1930, but W.B. Yeats expressed similar sentiments a decade earlier in his poem The Second Coming:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Yeats’ own context was the upheaval and devastation experienced in Europe in the wake of World War I, yet he firmly believed that what he was writing described a universal dynamic and intended it to resonate far beyond his time and place. Described as “the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English,” lines from The Second Coming have been used, most famously, to describe the European colonization of Africa in the 19th century and the breakdown of American social mores and structures during the 1960’s (RIP Joan Didion).
The Interregnum is fundamentally a state of liminality, a place between places, a place of transition between the rules and boundaries and order of one thing and the very different rules and boundaries and order of another. The place just outside a city wall, before you get to the wild proper, is one such place. The hypnagogic state between sleep and waking is another. Death, of course, is the ultimate liminal threshold, represented in beliefs about the Bardo or Purgatory or the journey to the underworld. These are places where the old rules no longer apply and the unexpected can occur, which is why liminal states of consciousness are cultivated in shamanic, magical, and other spiritual practices.
When Gramsci wrote of it being a time of monsters, he was harkening back, whether consciously or not, to an earlier belief that his ancestors in ancient Greece and Rome held, the idea that disincarnate spirits who were for whatever reason— incomplete funeral rites, traumatic death, general orneriness— unable to complete the journey to the underworld liked to gather in these transitional spaces; it was only there they had room to exist. The crossroads, or Trivia (literally “three-way”) became the most potent example and symbol of liminality. The ancients would call upon deities like Hermes or Hekate to protect them when passing through liminal places and liminal times.
One such practice involved making offerings of food to Hekate (a goddess of liminality) during the New Moon (a time of transition from one month to the next) at a three-way crossroads (you get the pattern here). The wealthy would make the offerings, and the poor quickly snatched them up to eat. Thus the crossroads was a place where fortune could be seized and luck could turn for the better, or where one could literally be consumed by monsters, thieves, or bandits.
In T.S. Eliot’s poem The Journey of the Magi, written seven years after Auden’s, the narrator, a Persian mage recalling the long difficult journey undertaken to follow the star expresses a similar tone of apprehension and uncertainty with regard to the first coming:
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Birth and death are all a matter of perspective. The Celts said that when we died in this world, we were born into the Otherworld, and after a time we would die in that world and be born here once again. Womb and Tomb, both liminal spaces, become indistinguishable from one another.
So the question for us is, where are we now? As we look at what is dying— the industrial supply chain, old political orders, species and habitats— what will come next? Fortune or Fall, Savior or Rough Beast, Christ or Antichrist? The answer, as it was for our ancestors, and will be for our descendants, is both. How we will experience it is generally a matter of perspective, a perspective we can choose to cultivate.
How we cultivate that perspective is the primary question I’ll be taking up as I write this newsletter. What are the spiritual, philosophical, political, and practical tools and attitudes that can give us hope and purpose while allowing us to surrender to reality? What old myths and stories do we need to remember? More than anything, I will be exploring the thoughts and ideas that I find interesting and useful, my hope is that you will too.
I had considered titling this newsletter Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, you may recognize that as a collection of meditations by the great poet and preacher John Donne. Donne has long been a favorite and something of a patron saint for me, he was a man living in liminal times, learning to bridge divides between opposing ideals and factions, the most important and dangerous, for him personally, being Catholicism and Protestantism.
I have decided, for the sake of brevity and accessibility, that such a title is probably a bit too arcane and precious, but the spirit of it is guiding me as I write this. Donne wrote those essays as he lay sick and in danger of dying, determined to attend to that frightening, liminal time with as much presence and willingness to receive insight as he could muster. What results is some of his most beautiful and luminous writing.
My intention is to attend to these liminal times as best I can, and to find something like insight as I do. I will hopefully be sending these essays out at least once a week. If you find them useful, or interesting, I hope you will share them with others.
Thank you for this.
Lovely piece