W. Grey Champion
From the Moleskine
My Moleskine accompanies me everywhere, for the purpose of catching those elusive thoughts that bombard one’s consciousness and may or may not be worthy of elaboration. I have shared these musings on my blog, From the Moleskine, each week for many years. Originally a Google blog, I moved it to this website when my third book was released. In The Weekly will be recent reflections I seek to record and to share with readers. Described here are other headings, also updated weekly.
Dokusan: In Japan, dokusan is a private meeting of a Zen student with his master. For background, readers must see my book, Conjuring Archangel: Chronicle of a Journey on the Path, because the conjuring continues.
In the Courtyard: As my collaborator on the blog, my friend Anna reports under this heading from her frequent forays to the village. We often meet in the courtyard for croissants and hazelnut coffee from the French bakery.
The Carriage Lamp: Evocative of those bygone, romantic days of horses and carriages, Anna and I, Sherlockians both, will on occasion include original poems, either hers or mine. The most recent will be at the top.
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The Weekly
Are we ready for this?
Some time ago, I posted on the topic of fatalism, the doctrine that events are predetermined by fate. I alluded to the idea last week when I wrote that we are powerless against the natural process that brings the collapse of civilization and the devolution to a tribal state. As ignorant leaders now attempt to slow the process by the assassination of rivals, only to watch more tribes spring up like metastases, it occurs to me that the civilized world is unprepared for what is coming - the unbridled barbarism of tribal warfare. Some early examples may already have been scarcely remarked: the rise of Fox News propaganda; the resulting cleavage of a wealthy and powerful democracy into two irreparably severed factions, one of which has become the largest most ruthless tribe since the Mafia spread its tentacles out of Sicily.
A more recent and graphic demonstration was the tribal attack on 7 October 2023 in Israel, when Hamas warriors swept into the kibbutzim, and undeterred by any civilized qualmishness committed atrocities, butchering the despised enemies and taking off hostages to their tunnels to torture and starve for many months to follow. Horrific, yes, but typical of tribal society before civilization, a state into which we are rapidly returning. What we call terrorism equates to the guerrilla war of secretive ambush and merciless slaughter by tribes. Notice today the growing disdain of diplomacy, the geographic isolation into tribal territories engaging in the desperate hardening of borders, the subsequent migration into appropriate tribal lands, worst of all the indiscriminate rubbling of cities - the crown jewels of civilization. Military targets? Hardly that! Bomb them all - man, woman and child - to smithereens. Are we prepared?
Over some generations, the many forms of visual media have leaned into the normalization of brutality, to abate the normal human revulsion toward blood and guts in its deliberate displays of raw violence. The popularity of a film depended on its power - on the mega screen at max volume - to induce vomiting in a large portion of the audience. Some few nonconformists abjured, refusing to watch graphic, lurid enactments of savage cruelty - while multitudes paid for the emetic, seeming to believe it the quintessence of mortal pleasure. I daresay, however, that if swathes of humanity are enjoying this derivative of barbarism, others are even now bearing its reality. No wonder firearms are ubiquitous. Perhaps the more demure among us should form our own tribe. Might Greenland take us in?
