Any less barbaric than the sun

“There is no bliss like this.”

Below is a travel essay I’ve been working on since we got back last week. It’s not news and not local journalism and shouldn’t be read as such!

Getting all the self-promotion out of the way so as to leave the essay uninterrupted. 

And don’t forget about the dad hats in the merch store! 

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Any less barbaric than the sun

1.

I tap the credit card on the credit card machine and we take our yogurt cups over to a standing bar lining the glass wall of the Pret a Manger. 

We’re inside Victoria Station, a transit hub just a short walk away from Buckingham Palace and Big Ben and all the other gilded monuments of a once-global empire. Below us, down a flight of stairs, is the bustling train terminal. But here it feels like a suburban mall.

Katie reaches into her purse and pulls out a vacuum-sealed bag containing 10 grams of magic truffles we’d bought a few days earlier in Amsterdam. The brand is “philosopher’s stone” or something stupid like that. They’re advertised as low potency—good for walking around in public, as we’re about to do. I rip open the package and portion the psilocybin-filled nuggets into the two cups. Katie mixes the smuggled drugs into the toppings. We put our breakfast back in the backpack and head to the bus terminal just outside the walls of the retail-stuffed terminal. We’re in London, the City of Westminster to be precise, and in a few hours we’ll be at Stonehenge, by way of a two-hour ride on a coach bus. It’s going to be a good day. 

On the way out of the station, I grab a copy of the day’s Guardian from a newsstand. Reading a physical newspaper is a somewhat rare treat for me, and besides, I haven’t absorbed any news at all since Logan and my self-proscribed social media break. Through the entirety of our previous three-day stay in Amsterdam, I remained blissfully unaware of the world. 

This vacation is the most lavish I’ve ever experienced, to the point it sometimes makes me feel guilty or reckless, depending on the moment. Three days in Amsterdam, three in London, four driving around the southern coast of Ireland. But it’s also a necessary one. The year prior was the worst chapter of both mine and Katie’s lives, and hers considerably moreso. Booked around her birthday, this trip is a way of closing that chapter and opening a new one. There’s no ‘normal’ to return to after a battle with cancer. That past life is gone, as if it’s a different person. You’re left to wallow in the grief of that severed life or build anew. This 11-day backpacking trip through Europe is a bookend in the service of that ‘anew.’ The explosive start of a different normal—one that has nothing to do with chemotherapy and exhaustion and endless doctors appointments and listless days over months spent in the cyclical limbo of a treatment you aren’t sure will work. 

It’s a hell of a way to spend a year, and without saying as much this trip marks our resolve to keep it contained in that year and not a life. Katie is not a ‘cancer survivor’ more than she is a human being. I am likewise not the caretaking partner begging for GoFundMe money and answering endless questions about my partner’s well being. We were both reduced to those roles by the necessity of circumstance. Now, in foreign cities half a world away, detached from everyone but each other, we get to reclaim our lives outside a disease, on our terms. A new normal of our creation. 

So, yeah, we take some smuggled mushrooms at Stonehenge.  

At the bus terminal there’s benches with a jarring anti-homeless design. They flip up when you’re not sitting on them, making them impossible to lie upon. The flipping seats are thin and porous, almost like the seats of some cursed swing set. No one sitting on them looks comfortable. I’m reminded of the advisory I saw in a park the day prior about “anti-social behavior,” and how it will be “strictly enforced.” England’s euphemism for homelessness, apparently—analogous to our preferred term: ‘quality of life.’

Sleeping on a bench is the sort of intolerable ‘antisocial behavior’ that we here in Worcester would call a threat to ‘quality of life.’ In England as in America, we allow a police state to strip us of comfortable public spaces in their effort to inflict punishment on a vanishingly small minority of said public. It’s an obvious assault on both social behavior and quality of life by the dictionary definition of either. 

With that dark thought rolling around my head, I board the bus and pull out my copy of the Friday, Sept. 13 print issue of the Guardian. The A1 photo is a billionaire in space. 

In the “world” section, the first American headline I’ve encountered since leaving reads “Pet eating claim: Bizarre rant blamed on conspiracy theorist.” “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats.” The theorist is Laura Loomer. She traveled to the debate with Trump and Trump wants to make her part of the campaign staff, against the judgment of other advisers. 

In my normal routine, I observe, this meme moment would be inescapable—the background hum of the moment. Reading this at a continental remove, I get a pang of sharp embarrassment and loathing all at once, and then it fades. I’m not immersed in it for days, as the meme slowly abstracts itself out of relevancy. I turn the page.

2.

At Logan, a few days prior, the first thing I notice in the airport is a big “NO LOITERING” placard. A testament to the state’s dismal shelter policy and artificial “migrant crisis.” They made sleeping at Logan illegal as a “policy response.” Fucking “blue no matter who” fascism. I’m so happy to leave America in this moment. I take a picture of the placard and compulsively thumb over to Twitter to fire off something snarky. But then I hesitate. My thumb hovering over that stupid little X, I resolve to be purposefully offline the entire trip. I fire off just one tweet, halfway through the trip, bored in the Amsterdam airport, about houseboats. But other than that, I don’t check Twitter or Instagram or my email once. I keep my phone on do not disturb and airplane mode for the most part. It is bliss, but more than that, revelatory. 

Later, at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, large crowds mill around the more popular paintings in the spacious, modernist building. It proves difficult at times to get a full look at certain pieces. Often, an unimpeded view requires shuffling along in a diffuse line—you’re looking over four shoulders, then three, then two, then you get a few seconds of unobstructed viewing before you start to feel the impatience of the person behind you. There’s a certain unspoken order to it. 

At perhaps the most popular of all the paintings, “Almond Blossom,” I witness a social transgression that fills me with such shame and second-hand embarrassment I can barely focus on the piece when it’s my time to shuffle into a full view. 

A young woman butts to the front of a big group around the painting to have someone take pictures of her looking at the picture. She only looks at it while the camera is on her. After she gets her content, she leaves. In the process, she blocks the view of about 20 people who have waited patiently for their turn at an unimpeded look. It’s one of the most vapid things I have ever seen. What is even the point of experiences anymore? (I’m reminded, after the trip, of the Hertz shuttle bus driver, talking about how his son doesn’t know how to use a washing machine at 20 years old. “Where did we go wrong?” he asks. “I mean really, where did we go wrong?”) 

As I put this together after the trip, I read Katie the above passage. It reminds her of a bathroom she was in at one point during the trip, when she overheard an older woman yelling at two younger girls—“everyone is in their own little world and you need to pay attention to what’s around you.”

Throughout the trip I read Faith, Hope, and Carnage, a book-length Q&A between Nick Cave and journalist Seán O’Hagan. Social media is a recurring theme. At one point, Cave writes:

It makes great demands on us, not just on our precious time, but damaging emotional demands, as far as I can see. I personally find the dissonance and narcissism of social media energy-sapping and counter-productive.

And at another: 

I think in a way my work has become an explicit rejection of cynicism and negativity. I simply have no time for it. I mean that quite literally, and from a personal perspective. No time for censure or relentless condemnation. No time for the whole cycle of perpetual blame. Others can do that sort of thing. I haven't the stomach for it, or the time. Life is too damn short, in my opinion, not to be awed.

At a rural cabin in Annascaul, Ireland, days after the Van Gogh Museum and Stonehenge, I’m up at dawn, on the porch. I spend a minute taking in the scenery. There’s crows on the telephone line. I can see a sliver of the bay in the distance. Beyond the bay, mountains and rising clouds fuse together to create an indiscernible horizon. The rising sun hits the hill behind us first. Barren and brown and glowing as my eyes adjust to the new light. Then the sunshine lowers to the deck, cutting the dew and setting off a rising fog. A warmth sets in. In front of me, a field of wild grass, fence poles running along the long driveway coming up from the narrow country road. The rolling green hills around us are pockmarked and crisscrossed with rows of hedges. Cows moo in the distance.

Life is too damn short not to be awed, I think, remembering the Nick Cave line I’d read somewhere en route to this place. Nothing about the moment has a damn thing to do with the internet. It isn’t content. It can’t be shared or liked or monetized. A moment of awe, mine alone. 

3.

We’re on the bus to Stonehenge and I’m reading the news. This issue of The Guardian, read front to back, is a stunning document. Other headlines: Jewish Chronicle accused of planting an Israeli spy’s false stories about Yahya Sinwar and hostages that help Netanyahu politically. The Guardian story about these false stories runs with a picture of the Hamas leader holding up a young child who’s clutching an AK-47 in his tiny hands. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer defends the decision to send missiles into Ukraine. Putin calls it an act of war. Gaza school gets hit by Israeli missile. Several aid workers among those killed. Domestically, the British National Health Service is falling apart. New debt report shows the country is going broke at startling speed, requiring cuts to social services. A U.S. psychologist retroactively wins the B-level Nobel Peace Prize for how to put a pigeon inside a bomb. Regulators water down “capital buffer rules” meant to discourage risk in banking after the 2008 financial collapse. The inside double-page photo spread is of two 100-year-old British ladies from the Royal Women’s Airforce taking their last ride on spitfire jets. The photo is stunning.

They saved us from the Nazis but only for a short little while, as we now enter this era of the Zone of Pinterest. The brutal maintenance of empire is brat, now, actually. 

It’s Friday the 13th by the way. We’re on our way to one of the oldest and most unknowable wonders of the world, and the news back home is the former president saying immigrants eat cats and dogs. Thirty minutes out, we dig into our magic breakfast. WWIII is imminent and America has lost it and the billionaires are scurrying like rats on a sinking ship and we’re getting high and looking at rocks. 

There’s one story buried in the paper that spins me more than the rest of the stories in this surreal document. The Dutch return a 335-year-old magic cloak to Indigenous people in Brazil. ‘You can have it back now that we’re no longer using it.’

“Several Tupinambá cloaks were worn by the courtiers during a 1599 procession of the court of the Duke of Württemberg in Stuttgart.”

The Indigenous Brazilians have been trying to get the cloak back since 2000. It seems between the lines that the Brazilian government brokered the return by way of a trade for rights to more of the Indigenous group’s land to plunder and strip. 

It’s said the cloak is one of 10 such treasures European aristocrats had stolen from what they called at the time the West Indies. Suddenly, I’m reminded of the curious hooks on the top of the brownstones in Amsterdam’s historic downtown, and I think about how the city was built on millions of such robberies. 

4.

A few days earlier, in Amsterdam, we learn on a canal tour that the colonial merchants who populated and built Amsterdam would use their attics as warehouses for their goods. The hooks serviced pulley systems for cargo to go up into the attic and down out of it. Now, they stand as a visible reminder of what built the wealth and supremacy of Europe over the rest of the world. Ships returning from Asia and Africa and the Americas brought the merchants of Amsterdam goods pried from far off places via far off violence. Up the pulley they went, into the attic warehouses of brownstones owned by competitors in a nascent capitalism. And when they came down, eventually, by that same pulley system, it was to somewhere else in Europe, at the marked-up price that made storing the goods worthwhile. It was the process that financed the construction of these now historically-protected and preserved brownstones. These testaments to “culture.” 

The merchants competed among each other, we learn, to build bigger and better houses, necessitating more and more plundering, more and more slave labor. They’d design the houses with oversized front doors and tiny windows on the top floors, to give the impression the house was bigger than it was. It was that competition for status that built the city, gave it the “character” that now makes it attractive for tourists like me and Katie, and the whole process rested on the profit to be made on untold and obscure misery halfway across the world. 

The hooks, still there on the facade as little reminders of the plundering and passing around that maintains the center-periphery. Now, such hooks are no longer physical, but they still exist. Stronger than ever, even. 

I think about the shipping box containing one of those prized, colorful cloaks. How it probably went up and down one of those hooks before ending up with the Duke of Württemberg in Stuttgart. And then, after he was done with the novelty, how many other hooks the cloak traveled in the 350 years it stayed in Europe, away from its rightful home. 

On the same canal tour, we learn that the massive opera house/municipal office compound in the downtown was a deeply unpopular urban renewal project in the 1970s that required the demolition of whole blocks of housing in a Jewish neighborhood. A day earlier, we’d walked by that compound on the way to a pancake restaurant. A tour guide was surrounded by a ring of tourists, and as we walked past I caught him saying “most of the Dutch collaborated with the Nazis but there was some resistance.”

Downtown Amsterdam is a World Heritage Site, and it is objectively stunning. And it’s hard to reconcile that beauty with the understanding that it was built on the ill gotten gains of centuries of colonial exploitation. That, now, European countries trade on that historic beauty by way of robust tourism economies, inviting the middle classes of America and China to come in and do their own plundering. The trade is no longer ivory or slaves or precious metals or sacred cloaks, it’s ‘the experience.’ 

5.

Anyway, we’re on our way to Stonehenge, remember, and I’m done reading the paper now. As we roll through the farmland, I stare absently, then decide to crack open the book of Stevie Smith poems in my bag. An English poet, recommended by Nick Cave, whose book I picked up before the trip hoping it would unlock some understanding of this place previously unavailable.

The first poem I read is “Conviction (IV)” and its simplicity is disarming. 

The next poem, “Villains,” complicates the simplicity. It makes the apparent innocence of the prior poem seem defiant, complicated, political.  

A few pages later, the one that really hits me: “The Poets are Silent.” 

Smith lived in England through both world wars. It’s a hard reality to imagine, let alone relate to. It’s similarly difficult to wrestle with the idea that a poet’s silence can hold more power than any work they produce. I find the idea endlessly interesting: Does an artist debase themselves in some fundamental way when they consider war to be worthy of art? That art is too important in the long arc of human history to be sullied by considerations of the state and its violence. 

Even the most potent anti-war art I can personally think of has taken as an assumed fact that wars are important events and thus worthy subjects of art. And none of them stopped the war in question, of course. Smith’s idea of the merit in staying silent runs afoul of a core belief of the current moment: that ‘speaking your mind’ is the foundational act of politics, that expressing yourself matters. It accomplishes an objective. More people expressing themselves will lead to more positive changes. 

What if none of that is true? That’s the question Smith’s line leaves me wrestling with. I find her idea of meritorious silence fascinating and deeply subversive. Smith was wrestling with heady questions about art and war, expression and pointed silence, the poet’s role in a society. And, at the same time, she wrote a poem like “Conviction” with an opening line like ”I like to get off with people.” There’s so much defiance built into that. It is an intensely political act to present a poem with the line “I like to laugh and be happy” as legitimate art and then say that art about the war is de facto illegitimate. To end the poem with a simple, unadorned statement: 

“There is no bliss like this.”

There’s a fundamental challenge in Stevie Smith’s seemingly innocent work that I can’t fully understand. But it provides a great baseline mood to carry into a mushroom trip.

6.

Our truffles digesting and the trip setting in, we walk around the big rocks of unknowable origin, and we mostly laugh. We don’t try to figure it out. We don’t take the guided tour. We do silly poses and giggle at the silly poses of other tourists. We go baaaaa at the sheep. We lose our composure a bit when it dawns on us that the busker playing a traditional Irish flute by the entrance has been doing it the whole time, actually. No... the whole time? Wait, how long have we been here? The flute guy is pretty much a side quest character in a video game, we decide. We need to go up to him and press X and he’ll introduce a fetch quest adventure and we’ll accept it. We wonder why the flute cuts through the air so well. Is it the mushrooms? Is there an audio/visual thing going on here? Or does that little instrument really carry across hundreds of yards? And is that a feature of these ancient, purposeful rocks? Was the structure meant to amplify sound? It doesn’t matter. The sun is out. The clouds are fluffy lily white. They roll by steadily like the breeze. I hold my Katie and give her kisses and I don’t think about the war. 

I don’t think about the content, either. As we walk back to the bus, I don’t post an Instagram story. I don’t rate ‘the experience’ on a scale for the benefit of some other experience consumer. I don’t consider the return on investment. I don’t feel compelled to formulate a take. 

How is what we’ve come to worship any less barbaric than the sun? I let this question bounce around in my head as we pass the busker and the front entrance and start the walk back to the bus, crossing a road lined with dozens of small Euro-style camper vans, presumably staking prime real estate for the upcoming solstice. How is the sun a more barbarous idol than money? Which of the two has a stronger claim to spiritual significance? Why does “progress” go uninterrogated? Why do we tacitly assume the people who constructed this monument are “less advanced”? What have we built in my lifetime that will last as this has lasted? Is the internet actually an advancement? Or is it the grand facilitator of a devolution? Is our idol—“money” or “growth” or “status”—not sentient? Is it not waging a quiet war on humanity? Is it not driving us to demise, conscripting our worst impulses to facilitate our mass extinction? Would the sun march us to such a cliff? Would it push us off? Would we be better off if the poets collectively discredited war as worthy of poetry? Are we not entering a new era of barbarism? Has civilization failed? 

I don’t know and don’t particularly care. 

In this moment, there’s more merit in silence than any online engagement could provide. It is a rare bliss—a freedom, even. Self-expression feels useless, when normally it’s the default impulse. The act of it carries a distinct note of tyranny. I avoid the scary territory that thought might take me. I’m tripping harder than I expected and as such I’m hyper aware of the Bad Places. I see the sun cutting through a thin grove of young trees and it’s so beautiful it vanquishes the Bad Place to the subconscious. I take a picture of it and the picture fucking sucks—stripped of all magic in the reality-to-phone conversion process. I laugh at myself for trying. Why do I need the woods on my phone, exactly? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Our walk takes us out of the grove to a large open field on rolling hills. Katie says it looks like the Windows 95 screensaver and we laugh and laugh and laugh. It does, I say. It really does. 

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Some other Worcester Sucks travel essays like this:

Oct. 14, 2020 | The desert is dead and beautiful and still 

May 31, 2023 | There’s a lightness of spirit in that

May 8, 2024 | Moral of the story is wear your seatbelt

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