If you don’t know this fellow, give him a chance: “‘2012′ and the Poet’s Dilemma” is Daniel’s latest offering at Reality Sandwich (see sidebar for primary link). The topic is very close to my own daily deliberations, and there are some great comments appended. Here’s a sample of where Daniel is coming from:

I am very concerned, right now, with the seeming incapacity of most people in our culture to awaken to the dire urgency of our present situation, and to move from passive contemplation to active engagement. I feel that not just individual works but the entire construct of the contemporary art and literary worlds are functioning as another pacifying and distracting mechanism - someone may read a novel about war and cry, but that doesn’t translate into organizing to stop the wars we are now waging. It sometimes seems to me that forces have conspired to depolitize culture and make it socially irrelevant.

The animals always interrupt, thank God.

Outside the kitchen window hangs a cheap bird feeder on a string. I filled it for the first time this season just last week with sunflower seeds that cost double what they did last year. The scrub jays don’t appear to care, but then they’re probably dizzy: the feeder is too small for them, and when they land or fly away, it spins crazily like a wobbly merry-go-round. The chickadees hang on but look confused. At the other end of the house, afternoon sunlight reflecting off the rotating feeder flashes like a strobe on the plastered adobe wall above my desk.

On the dusty, bumpy half-mile-long ride from the end of the pavement to our home out here in Llano, we always pass a rambling, ramshackle homestead sort of place on the north side of the road. A couple of the corrals are to the road, so we often see animals. Yesterday’s sighting featured a couple of horses, about two dozen sheep, and several goats all in the big corral together. Quite the sight. Occasionally we encounter a fellow on a horse herding the sheep and goats up the mesa with the help of a couple of little dogs. Some of the animals wear bells, and you can hear the clinking and clonking as they go by. Just gazing on the critters makes me feel a little more complete, resonating as it does with thousands of years of humankind looking after the animals — no, of conscious relationship with animals, nature, and the entire cosmos. It’s good to see these things. There aren’t many places left in America where you have to wait while a herd of sheep goes by, either.

That much at least is real and relevant, like my garden would have been if not for all the ‘hoppers, but the rest of this man’s life here in el Norte seems as paralyzed as it would be anywhere else.

I haven’t been able to write for months, not really write, the kind of stuff that gives me goose bumps. This isn’t “writer’s block,” though. Maybe I caught the planetary disease, the imagination-eating darkness that passes for reality and educated thought. It’s like we’re all in here together, only someone dimmed the lights, and now we have to punch our way outside and wait for sunrise.

Things haven’t always been this way. In the turbulent years of my youth, there was revolution and opportunity. You felt it in the air. Materially speaking, life was easier, facilitating taking risks: when I was a graduate student in ‘67-‘68, I supported a wife and myself on $150 a month. Tuition was $50 a semester, and married student housing was $18 per month. A visit to the doctor cost $5. My biggest expense was the $36 monthly payment for the new Volkswagen. When I started teaching at a junior college, my salary was less than $600 per month. Travel was cheap, and Motel 6’s cost $6. You could buy a house, but why bother? We rented a wonderful one for $75 (expensive at the time), had anything we wanted, and money piled up in the checking account — we couldn’t spend it fast enough.

Post-Vietnam inflation killed all that like a slowly clenching fist. But while a symptom, living standards aren’t the point, a fearless sense of freedom is. We had it once, and now it’s gone. Or so it seems.

Meanwhile back in Llano Quemado, without a moon, the hillside where we live is far enough away from town that we can see the Milky Way galaxy stretch from horizon to horizon. The other night I stood outside and tried to take it in: impossible, of course — the awesomeness is just too great to comprehend and takes us in. Standing there, I located the dark area near the middle, actually an immense dark cloud of gases at the galaxy’s core obscuring the stars spiraling in toward the super-massive black hole at the precise center of it all.

On the winter solstice of December 21, 2012, the Earth and the sun will be in perfect alignment with the galactic center. Ancient Mayan teachings pinpoint the date and give it great significance as marking the end of our current cycle of history. End of the world or not, what gives me pause is that stone carvings even mention an astronomical event last known to have occurred some 26,000 years ago! One thing that does for sure, though, is nail us to the planet, right through the heart.

Thinking about this makes me giddy, and I feel love.

It’s so difficult to write about this. The psycho-emotional pitfalls are huge and deadly.

But from all indications, the same people who brought you the Iraq war are preparing to attack and do their best to permanently cripple the sovereign country of Iran, ancient Persia, a land with over 70 million people — more human beings than live in France, just for the record. Millions more will die, and no one will stop them, either. (Arthur Silber is the best writer I know on the subject of our moral collapse, and I urge you to drop by and leave him a donation.) This is what we have become, at any rate, and there truly is nothing to be “done” about it. Politics are useless. When the rest of the world fully absorbs this lesson, it will have no choice but to shut us down, one way or the other, and we will deserve whatever happens to us. This is as predictable as the sunset, unless something unforeseen interrupts the slide, as it very well might.

Hmm. A paradox?

Although most people don’t believe it, everyday reality is instantaneously malleable and responds immediately to different levels of awareness. That’s what’s behind the buzz about the Mayan calendar: the “end of the world” could be a perceptual shift that suddenly alters mass behavior, for example. I doubt it, though. That seems to me to be just another deus ex machina fantasy to relieve us all from individual responsibility. If my own life is anything to go on, absolutely nothing counts more than consciousness itself. Grow or die, you might say. Wake up or be utterly forlorn. If anything’s to come from the first perfect alignment of the sun, the earth, and the exact center of the Milky Way galaxy in 26,000 years (!), it might be the collective effect of subtle changes in the way a critical number of us experience our lives.

Meanwhile (or regardless), we have what we have. They will claim to do this in our names, but I reject it with the full force of my being, as I similarly reject all actions taken in my name since Sept. 11, 2001. Every bit of it, from the needless slaughter to our national self-debasement — they can go to hell and certainly will. The trick here is to be aware of all this but not allow possession by fear or anger, because once you do, you’re lost (unconscious)! It’s the scariest high-wire performance ever and the only game in town. I usually fail miserably every day.

Yet this too is a test. It’s like the struggle isn’t a political or even a moral one, but an individual challenge to grow or die. Runs counter to everything we’ve ever learned, right? No movements, no petitions, no parties, no government… which is why I think it stands out from the darkness: this is something I can do.

That’s the view from Taos on this rainy Wednesday. If my wife were looking over my shoulder, she’d yell “LULU!” (Lighten Up, Loosen Up) God, I’m lucky. Anyway, you should have heard her when the bombs began to fall on Baghdad: if Bush had been in the room, his balls would have dropped clean off.

More posting later, after actual work.