Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
Hero lighting the Beacon for Leander
(c. 1892)

"…tall enough to maybe even catch a Glimpse of ourselves standing proud once again."

The news from our beloved Budapest this morning buoys my spirit. I feel as though I’m Glimpsing one of the most alluring futures we might also be facing. The electoral defeat of a corrupt, entrenched, extreme right-wing oligarchy that has served as the lead sled dog in the worldwide effort to unseat liberal democracy. Victor Orbán was the figure inspiring every wanna be dictator in the world, including ours. Our incumbent praised his presence and supported his efforts to hobble the European Economic Union while serving his Kremlin overlords. He even sent our vice president to campaign for him, though initial voting results strongly insist that it made little difference, and might have even further encouraged his opponents. The winner was once an Orbán insider, but left when he found himself unable to stomach the overwhelming levels of corruption dominating Orbán’s rule.

The streets of Budapest were overflowing with cheering young people, a presence that has been disturbingly absent from our domestic protest rallies.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
Pan and Psyche
(c. 1892)

“Now that it’s here, I fear it might not go away.”

I feel a sudden overwhelming need to talk myself into engaging during these EndDays. I remember a kind of naturally flowing into and back out of engagements in before times, but now I seem to need to sit myself down and talk myself into beginning or, once engaged, sit myself down to talk myself out of continuing. Whichever, I feel a missing flow, as if I sense or perhaps know I will be further endangered if I proceed. I say ‘further endangered’ because I feel surrounded by danger, threatened, imperiled. This sense lends a certain uncertainty to my proceedings, and it might successfully amplify my sense of presence, but the resulting wariness drains spontaneity from my performances. I no longer lightheartedly float through my days. I slink through them instead, more likely some days to negotiate myself out of doing very much of anything if I feel I can get away with it. I do not always feel moved to contribute.

I accept full ownership of this state.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Madness of Sir Tristram
(c. 1892)

“…Make America Meaningful Again, please!”

I think of myself as a serious person. Neither particularly pious nor frivolous, I try not to take myself too awfully seriously, but still seriously. I am not trying to fritter away my life. I think of myself as someone who supports worthy causes. I maintain a high moral standard without being prudish. I can be crude, but prefer decorous. I never mind a little pomp if not necessarily very much embellished with circumstance. I read, but not to the point where I consider myself especially well-read. I prefer a well-written novel to pretty much any other form of entertainment. I do not very much like movies, for I find them to be too theatrical and often simply too long for me to bear sitting through. I prefer audio over video because audio reproduces color better. I maintain a low tolerance for unserious performance, the sort our present incumbent seems to prefer and exclusively engage in. I find it offensive, anything but entertaining or informative. It seems a Parody of something real rather than being something real itself.

It irks me to be surrounded by such unserious business, as if it might infect me.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
Ariadne
(1863/1864)

This week’s writing carried me deeper into the lived texture of EndDays — not the grand mythological architecture of the first week, nor the disorienting loss of landmarks from the second, but something more personal and more unsettling: the daily work of continuing to exist with dignity inside a world that seems determined to make dignity impossible. The week opened in HardTimes, where I found myself having to choose between accumulating reasons not to act and finding even one dog-eared reason to proceed. It moved through Restsurrection, a quietly subversive Easter spent on my knees in the garden rather than in any pew. NewlyNormalizing brought the recognition that we may never snap back, and that the disorientation itself has become our permanent condition. PlayingChicken named the incumbent’s chief governing strategy for what it is: a child’s game played by someone holding civilization’s steering wheel. EndingAWorld mapped the despot’s oldest trick — declaring victory over an apocalypse he himself manufactured — and Esteem closed the week by tracing the low self-esteem at the root of the whole sorry spectacle, from the incumbent’s throne to the society he’s poisoned. I did not expect to find this week’s theme until I reached the end of it. Thank you for following along.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
Philip Comyns Carr
(1882)

"…the overwhelming stench of somebody chasing greatness."

Esteem must be one of the more curious human properties. Who even knows from whence it comes? We seem to more easily bestow it upon others we admire more readily than we ever consider bestowing it upon ourselves, yet bestowing it upon ourselves seems both necessary and essential. Those without self-Esteem seem to suffer a self-inflicted fate, as if they should have somehow obviously understood the absolute necessity of fulfilling this one fundamental obligation to themselves. Nobody knows better just how much their own shit stinks than the one mounting that ignoble throne each morning. What from one’s own perspective might ever lead them to hold themself in anything even approaching high Esteem?

I wager that ways exist to responsibly discover reasons to hold myself in considerable Esteem.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
Paradise, with the Worship of the Holy Lamb
(c. 1875-80)

"…expect to witness him ending worlds."

Eventually, every despot in the history of this world so far has encountered the absolute necessity of EndingAWorld. Despots rely on promises of apocalyptic transformation, something exponentially worse than any actual threat warrants. Such threats encourage a sense of powerfulness like no other stance ever does. If one can end a world, it also demonstrates that essential cavilier nature everyone expects from a despot, seemingly capable of EndingAWorld with all the sangfroid usually reserved for dispatching a gnat. Nothing screams absolute power like such indifference does, a whisper vanquishing a hurricane, a shrug demolishing some ancient civilization.

Worlds end every day, as easily and as often as worlds are born.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
"I rose up in the silent night; I made my dagger sharp and bright"
(c. 1859-60)

"Their approach reliably produces little else but chicken shit."

I believe that I can successfully judge the relative maturity of someone by identifying the kinds of games they choose to play. The field of Transactional Analysis proposes that all humans engage in game-playing behavior, though not always deliberately. The inadvertent games might disclose even more about a person than any consciously chosen one, though. As outlined in the best-selling Games People Play by Eric Berne (Grove Press, 1964, ISBN 0-345-41003-3), a book criticized by many professional psychologists, identifying these games can provide both entertainment and discernment, giving a label and therefore a meaning to otherwise confusing behaviors. Who hasn’t found insight in finally interpreting an interaction as merely a Mind Game? In my hierarchy, the more childish games often seem to be favored by the less mature.

Among the least strategic possible games stands PlayingChicken.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Garden Court, photogravure print
(1892)

"…Heaven help us since we can't seem to help ourselves."

It might be that we’re each cursed to die in some foreign land, far away from familiar territory, especially if we stay close to home ground. Changes brought on by travel or relocation hold nothing compared to those that visit me uninvited. I might have expected to hold some of my old life static as I entered the traumatic final stages of my existence, but if so, I seem destined to experience ever more deepening disappointment. My old world was not even inherently that unstable. It seemed capable of continuing to nearly ad infinitum while entropy went right ahead and had her ways with me. But we grew impatient, I guess, or discontented with the balances that have managed to protect us for the better part of three generations. We opted to seek greatness, though we struggled to agree on what achieving that might achieve. We became the product of our discontent rather than delivering ourselves from any ultimately questionable evil.

I live and grieve like I once merely lived and breathed.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Council Chamber, photogravure print
(1892)

"…resurrected again until sometime after next Christmas."

I realized again this week that I can no longer claim to be a Christian. I’m uncertain if I could ever declare myself such with conviction, even after full immersion baptism, I felt more conscript than convert. I had bowed to the peer pressure. Everyone else in my Sunday School class had enrolled in the special studying and showed up on that Sunday wearing white shirt and pants while carrying a change of clothes. We’d all stood waist-deep in the baptismal font with the pastor while the little window slid open to reveal the entire congregation watching. We’d each in turn accepted that folded handkerchief over our noses and allowed ourselves to be submerged, ruining our hairstyles for Jesus. We’d also slopped off to a changing room to towel off and change wardrobe, supposed to have been forever changed. I suspect that most of us feigned results as I had.

I still observe the Christian calendar, though.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:The Briar Wood, photogravure print
(1892)

"Waiting for perfection only perfects waiting."

This story serves as a soliloquy by me for me, an encouraging little sermon to bolster my forward momentum. Yesterday, I finally completed all the hurdles for approving my Cluelessness book for publication. The gauntlet qualified as an absurdist’s rendering of bureaucratic inefficiency, but I made my way through it. It seemed like the least effective process possible, but I still managed to make progress and succeed. I felt like simply giving up several times, but I persisted. Cluelessness will launch into another war, into a distraction machine that worsens anything The Blind Men, my first book, faced. HardTimes are not necessarily EndTimes, just EndDays with trepidations. …

—

EndDays inevitably seem like HardTimes.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
Cupid's Hunting Fields
(circa 1880)

This week’s writing carried me into the second week of EndDays, moving beyond the creation myth that anchored the first week and into the territory that creation inhabits. I found myself exploring what it actually feels like to live inside EndDays — the lowered sky, the dimming light, the missing landmarks, the unimaginable actions undertaken without my permission in my once-good name that have somehow become routine. The week opened with a DayOfRest that turned out to be anything but idle, then darkened into the spreading dimness of LetThereBe (Light) before finding its footing through TheLimit, Ungrounding, Negavation, and TheFourOppressions. I ended the writing week with a secular sermon I didn’t know I had in me, contrasting Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms against the MAGA movement’s four grim replacement oppressions. This week’s flow surprised me. The territory I traversed surprised me more. Thank you for following along!

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Sleeping Beauty from the small Briar Rose series
(circa 1890)

"I vote for four simple freedoms again. Amen!"

In the months leading up to the United States entering the already raging World War, President Franklin Roosevelt articulated what he labeled The Four Freedoms in his January 1941 State of the Union Address. He intended these points to inspire a vision of a post-war world, where freedom would once again rule. These points were aspirational then, embodying what he hoped could be the hopes and dreams of those whose faith in freedom might well be severely challenged, even discouraged, over the upcoming period. This speech came nearly a year before Pearl Harbor, when we were still squabbling over whether to lend our support to Britain. Roosevelt decided to try to settle the questions about what we thought we might be fighting for, signaling an end to our period of isolationism.

He enumerated four “essential” human freedoms: Freedom of speech and expression, Freedom of every person to worship God in their own way, Freedom from want, meaning economic understandings that secure a healthy peacetime life for all, and Freedom from fear, specifically a worldwide reduction of armaments to prevent physical aggression.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: Ruins at Chiaravalle near Ancona, Italy
(1818)

“…it might not ever snap back to the way it was…”

Familiar reconnoitering points have disappeared. Long-relied-upon way points have turned unreliable, and travel has turned into repeated bouts of disorientation, degrading into despair. Where did the old reliables disappear? I know why they fled, but I cannot know to where or if they will ever return. (I suspect they won’t.) After months of denial, a begrudging acceptance starts settling in, then an emotion almost resembling pride. I cannot successfully hide my grief over losing reliable trails, but I realize that I am no longer precisely lost. I can still anticipate, if not traditionally navigate. I accept that I will face detours and that my original estimates won’t be worth shit, as if they ever were. A different game seems to be afoot now, and I am more-or-less successfully adapting. Do I wish I had not lost the benefit of all my former experience? That’s a definite yes! Am I nonetheless pleased that I still seem capable of discovering viable alternatives? That yields a more hesitant acceptance, though it still distills into a definite yea.

I still register shock when encountering another difference.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The Prince entering the Briar Wood
(1869)

"Sic semper tyrannis!"

Just like too many EndDays Stories, this one properly begins with the fateful phrase, “If anyone had told me just two years ago…”, before going on from there. Today, I routinely engage in previously unimaginable actions, formerly genuinely unthinkable ones. Some, in defense, hoping to ward off an indistinct yet ever-present sense of impending evil, and others in preparatory offense, as if for an anticipated assault. I’m mostly making my actions up as I go along. I engage in rituals every bit as effective as those my forebears invoked to prevent The Evil Eye from getting them, rubbing salve on imaginary future wounds. For the first time in my pacifist life, I’ve begun to understand the urge my Second Amendment friends must feel when they fondle their assault rifles. I feel protective of my past, which has most certainly already passed now, and I feel genuinely insulted by what seems too likely to become our future.

The Muse and I were invited to join a conversation convened by a local executive.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Edward Burne-Jones: The Land of Beulah (1881)

"…when there are perfectly satisfying wishes lurking much closer and more convenient to home…"

In EndDays, apparent limits shift. What might once have been measured in ‘sky’ seems not nearly as impressive or high. More modest boundaries apply. I might ascribe this narrower sense to the usual limits imposed by age and experience. I’ve learned to moderate my possibility senses in anticipation of not being able to fully satisfy them. This might seem like a dandy adaptation to prevent discouragement or depression, but it also materially affects my sense of possibility. If I give up on myself without much in the way of challenging, it seems I must be prelimiting my influence. Those who cannot imagine might struggle to manifest. Back when the sky served as TheLimit, I felt much less restrained than I do entering my waiting dotage, where I hold the benefit of so much more experience manifesting even impossibilities. I feel forced to admit that I’ve been limiting myself.

I remember consulting with a group in a company that had just been acquired in a buyout.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Edward Burne-Jones: Flamma Vestalis (1884 - 1890)

Gallery Notes:
Burne-Jones’s daughter Margaret modeled for this painting. The Latin title refers to the Vestal Virgins of Rome, who tended the perpetual fire on the altar of the goddess Vesta. Begun before Margaret’s marriage in 1888, the painting aligns her with these chaste women, suggesting her innocence and purity.

— —

"Let there be light" is an English translation of the Hebrew phrase יְהִי אוֹר‎ (yehi 'or) found in Genesis 1:3 of the Torah, the first part of the Hebrew Bible. In Old Testament translations of the phrase, translations include the Greek phrase γενηθήτω φῶς (genēthḗtō phôs) and the Latin phrases fiat lux and lux sit. It is part of the Genesis creation narrative. Wikipedia

I had grown to take light in all of its variety for granted.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Edward Burne-Jones: Night (1870)

"I'm planting those flowers this morning."

The Muse and I have several flats of plants sitting beneath our sacred apricot tree. We bought them over the past two weeks in fits of the usual enthusiasm, as Spring started emerging, imagining that they’d somehow just plant themselves, I guess. It’s been more than a week now, and there they sit, still not planted. We love to plant. It’s been our shared ritual since that first Spring we spent together back in that little apartment overlooking The Willamette, just downwind from where my prior relationship played out its EndDays. We planted flowers to thumb our noses at what had so recently seemed like the end. They represented our new beginning, and planting them then seemed like the opposite of work. It was renewing and rewarding, and reassured us that we still inhabited a welcoming world, regardless of the EndDays still trailing their toxicity along just behind us. Planting day always feels like a DayOfRest to us, yet I’d still been resisting engaging.

I spent time earlier this morning, warmly anticipating planting those flowers today.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Edward Coley Burne-Jones: The Days of Creation (1876)

This was the most remarkable writing week I've experienced since I began writing this series of series 35 quarters ago. The flow quickly and easily established itself, and I found myself following two patterns I'd barely imagined before becoming entranced by them. I was pursuing deeper understanding of the EndDays sensations that almost everyone I'd spoken with lately had been remarking upon. It sure seems like something's coming to an end: civility, democracy, sanity, the rule of law, common sense. I sensed that EndDays belong to that class of sensations that cannot be wholly validated, or, indeed, really experienced until they're over, since there's no way to determine between actual and mere sensation until the EndDays end. Counterbalancing those sensations, I stumbled upon the remarkable Days of Creation hexaptych by Pre-Raphaelite painter and designer Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones — a single work composed of six panels. These six panels functioned both independently and as a unified whole, which was precisely how I employed them this writing week. Each panel stands alone as the image for its corresponding EndDays installment, while the complete sequence forms a single, coherent creation narrative underlying the entire series.

In effect, each installment this writing week introduced a part of the universe the bulk of this series will inhabit.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Edward Burne-Jones: The Days of Creation: The Sixth Day
(1870-1876)

"On the Seventh Day, The People rested."

However unsettling the election results had seemed, TheBeast that emerged from that victory was much, much worse. It became clear even to those who had not before figured out the scam that they had been had, and not by any particular master. They had been fooled by a fool, which only amplified their sense of betrayal. The sacred promises he swore all along the campaign trail fell one by one into a gutter soon overflowing with treachery. His inauguration came off as more like a funeral, with fewer attending than at any such gathering in modern history. That first day in office set a fresh record for perfidy as each presidential proclamation seemed to amplify a sense that he was abandoning reason to pursue who knew what? A deep sense of dread and stunned recognition echoed out from the quickly despoiled Oval Office. We were being screwed.

The resistance responded immediately.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Edward Burne-Jones: The Days of Creation: The Fifth Day
(1870-1876)

"…if, indeed, our politics even survives this latest unbridled EndDays assault."

Few human activities can seem more boring than the practice of good governance. It definitely does not ordinarily qualify as anything resembling any actual spectator sport, except sometimes it engages in activities of such monumental importance that it manages to attract quite the audience. This quality of only occasionally qualifying for full attention encourages politicians to engage in some studied myth-making. They speak of such things as Masters of the Senate, a label that at best describes some especially skillful bureaucrat. They occasionally engage in brinksmanship, seeming to leave society teetering on some cliff-edge, but much of that amounts to performative statecraft. The actual deals get struck far away from the House and Senate floors, though the office of the President carries by far the greatest volume of mythos, if only because the presidency’s responsibilities definitely border on the mythical.

Chief administrator of every department of government, Commander-in-Chief of the military, perennial plenipotentiary of seemingly damned near everything in our political universe, our president more than borders on the edge of a mythical being.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Edward Burne-Jones: The Days of Creation: The Fourth Day
(1870-1876)

"His results can't and don't validate anything."

The future of each despotism was written before it began, back when its founding deception barely qualified as a foundling. When the lie, wrapped in swaddling clothes, still seemed charming in comparison with many competing distractions. There will always be evil in this world, but some evils have always been worse than others. Those who merely color or circumscribe seem somewhat better than those who exemplify somebody’s essence. When their very presence depends upon some founding deception, the resulting story was already headed in an inexorable direction at inception, for there can be no redemption if the basis upon which one exists is, at root, a deception. Peel away the misrepresentations to produce perhaps much worse than a founding lie: an abiding, all-consuming hollowness inside.

Despotism harbors nothingness in its core.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Edward Burne-Jones: The Days of Creation: The Third Day
(1870-1876)

"…these thoughts haunt and terrify me every day."

Collapsing cannot be properly characterized as a state, for it cannot be validated until after it completes, and much naturally prevents that end from ever appearing. Certainly, the peril might always exist, but distinguishing between growing pains, for instance, and Collapsing patterns should properly prove frustrating. Societies thrive on experiments. They can also die due to them. There can be no sure or certain recipe for avoiding Collapsing, and even the Ancient Greeks understood the principle that one tends to produce whatever they vehemently attempt to avoid. Fifteen months ago, the United States’ economy was widely acknowledged as the envy of the world. It now seems to be leading the world into an economic depression the likes of which we haven’t experienced in almost a century. Leading indicators seem grim, though still not yet completely certain.

Our incumbent seems to embody the very ills he visits upon our society.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Edward Burne-Jones: The Days of Creation: The Second Day
(1870-1876)

"…a Goodness we will certainly have earned when it finally arrives."

The definition of Goodness changes during EndDays. What was bad before becomes a deeper sign of impending collapse, and so it becomes a harbinger of sorely needed change. In most ways, things have gotten worse each day as our self-saboteur incumbent reliably raises his already unwinnable stakes. It’s as if he’s trying to prove he can do even worse if he simply applies himself, and, increasingly, astonishingly, he repeatedly succeeds at appearing increasingly simple. However low he already showed he could go, he goes even lower. However indictable he had already seemed, he becomes convictable. However survivable his previous perilous state might have appeared, he seems just that much more like a gonner this time. While each infraction fully qualifies as truly terrible, not mere misdemeanors, the accumulating undermining effect arrives as curiously reassuring. Each insult brings him closer to total collapse. This might be the only beauty in self-sabotage.

I find many once-sturdy isms undermined like this.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz

Edward Burne-Jones: The Days of Creation: The First Day (1870-1876)

"I intend this series to serve as a ring-side seat for witnessing the upcoming EndDays."

Another new beginning, if that image isn’t too redundant to hold its intended meaning, or even if it might be. Even EndDays need a decent beginning. Not even they can survive on nothing but endings. I begin this series, my thirty-sixth by my count, since I began writing series on June 21, 2017. I sought a new beginning then, after months of professional discouragement. My courage at a historical low, I mustered my foolhardiness and committed to a practice I’ve continued since. I declared myself a writer that morning, though I insisted that I produce clear, unambiguous evidence. I proposed that acceptable evidence might appear in the form of writing, a story every morning, because writers write. If I were insistent upon being so outrageous as to declare myself a writer, I would henceforth hold myself to actually writing rather than merely thinking or talking about it. I would just need to do what I intended.

And so I have continued through thirty-five, ninety-some installment series, each began on the first day of a calendar quarter, and each ended on the eve of the following solstice or equinox.

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz