June 18, 2026

In times that are darkly troubled, I hope I do not drive away too many readers by announcing that this week’s theme is apocalypse, the end of the world, or at least the expectation of it. The people who can no longer bear to look at the news are like the people who cover their eyes at scenes of movie violence, and I have considerable sympathy for them, but I cannot ignore the fact that there is a widespread mood of approaching doom, and a feeling of despair, the feeling that there is no longer any hope for America, if not for the world. I am writing because I think more and more people are approaching this point. I have a friend who at least is entertaining the notion of urging her adult children to move to Europe, along with her grandchildren, feeling that the Republicans will either subvert the midterms or, if they lose, simply mount a military takeover. Trump will declare the midterms invalid and order Pete Hegseth to “secure” American cities and impose a dictatorship. Will the military obey? Well, 36% of the population still support Trump, and clearly will support him no matter what he does, and such people clearly look forward to such a takeover. That means 126 million people would presumably support a coup. Indeed, they may be excited by the prospect, very much as the January 6 rioters were excited, because Trump enables their worst impulses. It is a worst case scenario, but it is a possibility, and it is no good averting our eyes from it. However, it is no good fatalistically averting our eyes from other prospects as well, and that is what the present discussion is really about.

Apocalypse is a mythological idea that becomes translated into political terms. Apocalyptic writing appears during times of crisis, and it is true that much of it is taken up with fantasies of violence and war, in stark black-and-white terms, the good guys against the bad. But I want to insist—strenuously, because our mental health depends on it—that there are two kinds of apocalypse. The first is paranoid and pathological, and it is this type that exults in visions of battle and triumph against the forces of evil. But the word “apocalypse” means “revelation,” and there has always been an alternative tradition in which apocalypse is interpreted psychologically, as a Western equivalent of Eastern “enlightenment.” Revelation thus becomes an act of vision that dispels evil by revealing it to be illusion, what the apocalyptic Book of Revelation in the Bible calls “the beast that was, and is not, and yet is” (Rev. 17:8). Blake called this act of the imagination “the consolidation of Error.” I have elsewhere called it “decreation.” It does not matter what we call it. The point is that there is such a thing as apocalypse as an act of hope. This discussion will by no means be all doom and gloom.

The first way to counteract evil is to reveal it, in the face of political attempts at coverup and psychological attempts at denial and gaslighting. You may say, what good does it do to reveal the evil and the evildoers? More and more they are blatantly out in the open, flaunting what they used to hide, breaking laws and daring people to stop them. But much of that bravado is a form of lying to themselves. If they were forced to see in a mirror what they really are, for many of them it would be devastating. They take refuge in all manner of delusional notions, conspiracy theories, and magical thinking in order to avoid facing the truth about themselves. They also lie and “flood the zone” in order to obscure the truth for others, so completely that well intentioned people do not know what to think. This has always been true: George Orwell talked about “doublethink” in 1984. The idea that the truth will set you free is not always just wishful thinking. That is why the motto of The X-Files was, “The truth is out there.” The idea of exposing all the dirty secrets that are covered up in order to enable those in power was behind the Wikileaks scandal. The power of revelation as a weapon against powerful men was the whole point of #MeToo. And it is the driving force behind the demand to open the Epstein files. What is being covered up and why? I write this two days after the opening of Steven Spielberg’s new movie, Disclosure Day, whose title hints at the theme of apocalypse, not I think accidentally. In the Book of Revelation itself, the idea that evil will be countered by the revelation of secrets is symbolized by the book bound with seven seals. The seals are unfastened one at a time. What is revealed by the book is the knowledge that enables a Last Judgment to take place.

In what follows, we will have to go through the valley of the shadow in order to get to the light. Thomas Hardy wrote a poem in late old age called “De Profundis,” out of the depths, a reference to Psalm 130. In it, he confronts the criticism, deriving both from his critics and himself, that he is too unremittingly bleak. Hardy knows all about gaslighting:

The stout upstanders say, All’s well with us: ruers have nought to rue!
And what the potent say so oft, can it fail to be somewhat true?....
Till I think I am one born out of due time, who has no calling here.

To one “Who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look
at the Worst”—a phrase that is often quoted—the gaslighters say, “Get him up and be gone as one shaped awry; he disturbs the order here.”

But, like Hardy, we will insist on disturbing the order. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows,” said the introduction to the old radio melodrama. Jung’s idea of the shadow, our other side, our secret side that we keep hidden because it holds all that is shameful about ourselves, has never been more timely. The last ten years of Trump, and especially the last year and a half, have made us unbearably aware of how many evil people there are, and how evil many people can be. We have always known intellectually—literature has constantly shown us—but the worst of human nature has never been more openly on display: in MAGA, in Congress, in institutions that have played ball and collaborated with Trump and caved to his demands, and, most painfully, in our own friends and families. We are exactly like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, who went into the Congo with all sorts of high-minded colonialist plans, but disappeared, sending back two messages. One was, “The horror! the horror!”. The other, which follows from the first, was “Exterminate all the brutes!”

Sometimes I am tempted to feel that way myself, although definitely not in a racial sense, and so are other would-be decent-minded people. In Little Dorrit, possibly his darkest novel, Dickens creates a criminal named Rigaud who suffers from a superiority complex that startlingly resembles that of the elite of our time. Rigaud says he is born to rule, and bound to have his way, and he will trample anyone who crosses him. In a conversation about Rigaud between a guest and a landlady, the guest speaks like a good liberal:

“It may have been his unfortunate destiny. He may have been the child of circumstances. It is always possible that he had, and has, good in him if one did but know how to find it out. Philosophical philanthropy teaches—”

The landlady cuts him off:

“I know nothing of philosophical philanthropy. But I know what I have seen, and what I have looked in the face, in this world here, where I find myself. And I tell you this, my friend, that there are people (men and women both, unfortunately) who have no good in them—none. That there are people whom it is necessary to detest without compromise. That there are people who must be dealt with as enemies of the human race. That there are people who have no human heart, and who must be crushed like savage beasts and cleared out of the way. They are but few, I hope; but I have seen...that there are such people.”

The editor’s note to the Penguin edition, in explaining that “philosophical philanthropy” refers to the liberal, rational philosophy of utilitarianism, cites Philip Collins, Dickens and Crime, as claiming that the landlady is expressing Dickens’ own point of view. Everyone accuses Dickens of sappy sentimentality, but this is not “God bless us, one and all.” If it is really the later, disillusioned Dickens’ point of view, he could have had a nice lunch with Clint Eastwood. This is not just a joke. Eastwood’s Dirty Harry is a vigilante because the law is too bound up with bureaucracy to deal with people like Rigaud. Dickens’ landlady does not make a distinction between legal and extra-legal ways of clearing such people out of the way, but the main plot of Little Dorrit expresses Dickens’ anger and frustration at the system, whose bureaucratic labyrinth not only makes it impossible to curtail injustice but ends up blindly perpetrating it.

Are there truly people so evil as to have become inhuman, beyond all possibility of empathy? Shakespeare seems to think so: he gave us Iago in Othello and Goneril and Regan in King Lear. At the end of his life, Jung became obsessed with arguing against the Catholic theological position called the privatio boni, which asserts that evil is only the deprivation of the good and not a positive thing in itself. He was vehement about it, but I cannot but agree that it is, as he once said, obscene to refer to something like the Holocaust as “a deprivation of the good.” The doctrine is not adequate to a religion whose central symbol is the nailing of a human being to a cross and watching while he dies. The best we can say is that human beings are not born evil, just born with the predisposition to be tempted by evil that Catholicism calls original sin. But once the temptation is given into, it becomes a form of possession by the shadow, the repressed elements in the unconscious, and as that possession strengthens its grip, people become less and less human, resistant to compassion, therapy, or any form of rehabilitation. They become difficult to empathize with.

Apocalyptic literature emerges at times when evil is not one lone criminal but in fact a whole system of power that has triumphed, has achieved absolute rule, and is seemingly irresistible. The good is helpless, and there seems no hope of a revolution against the forces of darkness. To some extent it resembles Old Testament prophetic literature, and is perhaps an outgrowth of it. The prophets were fond of prophesying “the day of the lord,” when it was going to all hit the fan: God’s patience will be at an end, and Israel or Judah are going to taste his wrath, usually in the form of invasion by one of the many empires surrounding them. The phrase “day of wrath” derives from Zephaniah 1:15. Its Latin form, in the Vulgate Latin translation of the Bible of the Middle Ages, inspired the famous hymn Dies irae, still recited in the Requiem Mass and on All Souls Day. The clumsiness of the 19^th-century translation approved by the Church does not obscure the theme of the Last Judgment as a bringing to light of secrets:

Lo, the book, exactly worded,
Wherein all hath been recorded,
Thence shall judgement be awarded.

When the Judge his seat attaineth,
And each hidden deed arraigneth,
Nothing unavenged remaineth.

There is an interesting moment in the lyrics of the Dies Irae in which the day of judgment is said to have been prophesied by David “along with the Sibyl.” The Sibyls were the Classical counterparts of the prophets, as Michelangelo shows by alternating them with the prophets in the interstices of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The Sibylline Oracles had also predicted the end of the world. After all, God lost his patience once before, and drowned the human race in the Flood. It is significant that the Classical version of the Deluge, the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was similarly the product of Jove’s total disgust at the unutterable evil of the human race.

Nevertheless, I detect a difference in emphasis between prophecy and apocalyptic literature. Prophecy is a warning: its message is Repent. Apocalypse, at least in its most famous example, the Book of Revelation, is a promise about what is going to happen, not to the chosen people but to their enemies. Its message is Have hope, for the powers that now rule the world are going to be toppled, their dominion scattered like a house of cards. Ironically, this message has to be a secret message, for the safety of both its authors and recipients. Apocalyptic writing, therefore, is typically in code. In the Book of Revelation, the Number of the Beast, 666, is a code name for the mad emperor Nero who was in power when the book was written. In The Living World of the Old Testament, Bernhard W. Anderson adds a second difference in what he calls “prophecy in a new idiom.” Speaking of the apocalyptic writer, he says,

But to him the struggle is not merely with flesh-and-blood enemies, but with a kingdom of evil of which Israel’s oppressors are only the tools. Since the historical struggle is blown up into super-historical or cosmic proportions, the final battle must also be super-historical. Eventually, apocalyptic writers, influenced by Zoroastrian dualism, affirmed that God’s arch-enemy is Satan, a fallen angel, who is at the head of a whole kingdom of evil. God’s final victory, then, must take the form of the overthrow of Satan, as in the Apocalypse of the New Testament. (539)

Such is the view expressed by Ephesians 6:12, attributed to Paul but not actually written by him according to the scholars:

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

Taken literally, such a view becomes the paranoid perspective of conspiracy theories such as the “Satanic pedophile” idea that prominent Democrats are Satan-worshipping sexual abusers, the obsession driving the Epstein files furor. In other words, it becomes pathological. Interpreted psychologically, however, it is an expression of anxiety about forces lurking in the unconscious whose energy gives them a numinous power that overwhelms and possesses the ego, especially the weak ego that is vulnerable to suggestion. Such a condition spreads rapidly due to psychic contagion, and large masses of psychologically vulnerable people may be collectivized. This is, as Jung saw, the ongoing crisis of our time. It produced the Nazi phenomenon in my parents’ time, and has produced the Christian nationalist phenomenon in my own.

The ultimate irony about Christian nationalism is that it believes in what some theologians used to call “the reality of evil”: it does not rationalize evil away as the mere absence of the good. What it does not recognize is that it has been possessed by that evil, that the real demonic powers are inside them, and that the enemies they see externally are only projections. Moreover, the powers that have possessed them are changing them into the image of their own malignant nature. James Talarico, running as a Christian for the Senate in Texas, was just told that he is going to hell for his “demonic” version of Christianity. Why? Because he quoted the gospel of Matthew saying that we have a duty to the downtrodden and the poor. What has happened today, evil disguising itself as good, is not new: the Bible issues repeated warnings about false prophets. But the result is that there are now two versions of Christianity, the genuine version, exemplified by Pope Leo XIV and by Martin Luther King when he was alive, and Christian nationalism, which is not Christianity at all but its demonic parody. It is not “overreacting” or “failure to consider the other’s point of view” that causes good people to recoil with horror at such false religion.

Who knows what evil lurks in the human heart? In terms of the history of this country in my lifetime, it was always there, but the powers that be did their best to keep it out of sight. But still, it was there. The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover did nasty and illegal things to persecute social critics domestically; internationally, the CIA toppled legitimate governments in the name of “American interests”; the IRS investigated Martin Luther King. But great efforts were made to keep such activities secret. America was led into two wars through lies, and it was only with the publication of the Pentagon papers that it became known that Lyndon Johnson had systematically lied to the American people about Vietnam. By the time we had lost the war in Iraq, we learned the secret that there were no weapons of mass destruction there.

But there were times when the mask dropped. The shooting of four students at Kent State University by the National Guard on May 4, 1970 showed a government willing to massacre its own people if they resisted. I was not only a college student myself at that time, but was in fact hitchhiking back from Kent State when I heard the news of the shootings. My friend was not only a student at Kent but a near-witness: she did not see the deaths, but she heard the shots from behind a building. Is it any wonder that she feels history is repeating itself, so that she ponders whether she should urge her own children to leave the country before a malignant government imposes upon them Project 2025’s version of The Handmaid’s Tale? And of course there were the secrets of Watergate that toppled the Nixon presidency: the tapes which, despite their 18-minute gap, captured a vicious and hate-spewing personality well enough.

At the same time that the dirty secrets of the American present were becoming known, a new revisionist movement in historical scholarship was revealing all the dirty secrets that had always been covered up about the American past. We learned what the United States had done to Indigenous people, to Black people, to LBGTQ+ people. We learned that the American history we had learned in grade school, in which an idealized America brought democracy into the world for the first time since ancient Greece, and fought for freedom and adequate living conditions around the world, was not so much wrong as one-sided. There is truth to that ideal vision, a vision that we aspired to and sometimes lived up to. But it was only half of the truth. What it left out was the American shadow. What the historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack newsletter has done, at least for me, is to show that the United States has struggled since its beginnings with selfishness, corruption, greed, and the will to power—and that, very often, the good did not prevail, at least not for a very long time. We are not so different from what has gone before. In one way, I find that a strange comfort. We are not uniquely shameful. In another way, it is of course disillusioning. And of course it is the revisionist truth that the Trump administration is trying to erase, to the ridiculous extent of demanding that plaques be removed from historical sites that mention slavery and the like. It is attacking the educational system, demanding that the inconvenient truths of history be kept from children, demanding that human sexual difference be driven back into the closet.

It is a public version of what happens in families, for families too have their dirty secrets. In Dickens’ Great Expectations, Pip finds that he owes his social status as a gentleman to a convict, Abel Magwitch. Dickens knew that shame: his own father was a convict, imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea. In the last year and a half, I have done extensive research into my own family history on both sides. I was not at all searching for skeletons in the closet, but the act of searching roused them and they came clattering out. I knew some of the reprehensible episodes in the lives of my relatives, but I did not know them all. At some points, the hidden history shocked me into saying, “What’s wrong with us?” But I doubt that we are much different from most families. It is not my family but the human race that is problematic. And of course eventually a preoccupation with guilty secrets becomes a reminder of one’s own, bringing with it not only shame but a deeply insecure self-questioning. Seeing the power of denial in the world makes you wonder what you are denying about yourself, an insecurity that in my case reinforces the old Catholic guilt complex that I internalized growing up, the attitude that said, as in the famous line from Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” that “Guilt is never to be doubted.” Families, unable to face the truth, deny sexual abuse to the extent of blaming the victim. Sometimes the victim herself or himself keeps the secret by repressing the knowledge. Rape victims often do not tell the police, or even their friends: this is especially true for date rape.

We have so far sketched an incomplete picture, however, for the apocalyptic perspective often begins with a wild hope for change. The bleak and bitter disillusionment and icy foreboding that many of us are experiencing now have another side that we have forgotten. There once was hope, but when that hope fails, we are left with Orwell’s vision in 1984 of that famous boot stamping on the human face forever. We may feel we were naive ever to have entertained such hope. But modern history since at least the 17^th century seems to have been cyclical. There is a revolutionary fervor, a hopeful attempt at positive social change, but the revolutionary energy crests like a wave, falters, and collapses. The first person to see such a pattern was William Blake, and possibly the most crucial insight of Fearful Symmetry, Northrop Frye’s breakthrough study of Blake, was the identification of what he called the “Orc cycle” in Blake’s mythological narratives. Orc was Blake’s embodiment of the energy of human desire in all its forms: sexual, political, creative, spiritual. Periodically, human desire rises up against that which constrains it: Orc rebels against the frozen, reactionary tyrant Urizen. But Orc fails.

The attempt at a revolution in the name of liberty had already failed during the lifetime of Blake’s poetic mentor Milton, who in the 17^th century joined the fight against the arbitrary power of monarchy, aristocracy, and state religion. But the revolution collapsed, and with it the great hope of Milton’s life. In Blake’s own time, the failure of the French Revolution shattered people, because it had for a brief moment seemed the harbinger of a democratic movement that might sweep across all of Europe. Instead, it collapsed into nightmare: first the psychotic violence of the Reign of Terror; then Napoleon, the seemingly Orc-like figure who promised change, only to end by crowning himself emperor; then the wave of reactionary backlash. The latter was bad enough that a drunken soldier whom Blake had thrown off his property was able by perjuring himself to have Blake tried for treason, an episode that reads chillingly in the light of the ICE raids resulting in innocent deaths, with public officials dishonestly claiming that the victims had threatened ICE officers. Wordsworth and Coleridge nearly got into trouble when a government snoop overheard them talking about a “Spy Nozy,” which was actually Spinoza. It was the same attempt to suppress criticism by intimidation that we see now.

The later 19^th century did not have revolutionary aspirations, but instead developed a sanguine belief in gradual progress towards a better world. But Victorian optimism was shattered by the devastation of World War I, in which a third of the male population was wiped out without anyone really knowing what they were fighting for. The literature of the period after World War I was marked by a disillusionment as great as that of any literary period I know. I had considerable sympathy for the student in my first year of full-time teaching who raised his hand in my course on Modernist poetry and asked, “Didn’t they write any happy poems?” As so often, the student who risked sounding naive went right to the heart of the matter. The answer is no. The defining poem of its time was T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, written in a sanatorium after Eliot had suffered a nervous collapse. The defining short lyric was perhaps Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” an apocalyptic poem if there ever was one. “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” And a figure at the end is “Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born,” but it is actually some sort of demonic Antichrist figure. The poem could have been written last week. The defining drama might be George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House, in which the characters pull down the blackout curtains at the end and light up the house as the zeppelins approach to bomb it, exultant at the thought of the destruction of an edifice so rotten that the only thing to do with it is blow it up.

World War II ended with the defeat of the demonically possessed Nazis, but was immediately superseded by the Cold War, whose apocalyptic rhetoric was once again about the imminent end of the world in a final World War III. It was the paranoia induced by such rhetoric that led the United States to betray the principles of its founding, and adopt the authoritarianism that always follows from paranoia. McCarthy tried, with much success, to suppress all dissent with dishonest accusations of treason. And the country increasingly did create a kind of “deep state,” justifying it by what Blake called “the tyrant’s plea, necessity.” It was spy versus spy, the method that empires use to sustain themselves. Queen Elizabeth I had her spy service, headed by the ruthless Walsingham. The Victorian British Empire operated through what Kipling in Kim calls the Great Game. The successor to Kim is James Bond, who works for a secret organization. But the more organizations operate in secret, the less they are supervised and held accountable, the more they become laws in themselves. Democracy can only survive if the government is responsible to the people. To the extent that a government becomes secretive, it has become anti-democratic. Hence the enormous importance of freedom of the press, which not only means a press that has the right to criticize the government but the right to conduct investigative journalism to expose the graft, the back-room deals, the conflicts of interest, the dishonest claims that lead toward the kind of collusion of corrupt interests we are seeing now. The point is, once again, that power lies in the telling of truth, the exposure of secrecy—and that power is apocalyptic, the power of revelation.

Still, we come back to the feeling of futility that seems to be the vibe of our moment. The first glimmer I had about this newsletter was catching a reel on Facebook in which Heather Cox Richardson is asked, “When will you give up?” I didn’t grasp the context, but what I heard in it was actually two questions, one personal and one social. The voice was possibly playing devil’s advocate, but it seemed to me I heard an edge in it that was, well, possibly irritable, possibly even a touch antagonistic. The social question is, when will you finally admit that it is all up with America, that the fat lady has sung, that it’s over, baby: it’s the end of the world as we know it, and we don’t feel fine? The personal question is, when are you going to hang it up, stop trying to save the world by your incessant writing and speaking? Her answer to both questions was: Never. But if there is a road to the better, it exacts a long look at the worse, so let us do what I urge students to do in writing, look at the opposition’s case. Let us indeed play devil’s advocate.

You writers are all alike, says the advocate—Richardson, but also Robert Reich, Paul Krugman, even that Substack guy with only a handful of readers who talks about the imagination. When will you give up trying to resist, to change, to awaken people by your work, your teaching? People don’t care! A few people do, but not enough to make any difference. Liberal education is going to be gone from non-elite universities within 15 years, and people will not even miss it. A generation ago, Bill Moyers, the PBS journalist, had a show called World of Ideas in which he interviewed various intellectual, artistic, and political figures about their ideas. But people don’t care about ideas, and they never will. They will tell you, “I’m just too busy,” but what they really care about is the price of gas. It is not just Philistinism. They are financially anxious and exhausted with just trying to survive, and they are emotionally traumatized, so that they feel they do not have the bandwidth to care about some big picture. Most of all, they feel helpless. The world has been conquered by people of immense wealth and immense power, and one person has absolutely no way to make any difference. The time when ideas mattered, when imagination mattered, is in the past. The most you can do is compose its elegy.

Rather than answer this challenge in first person, I turn to William Blake, and particularly to his last major work, Jerusalem, written in the early 1800’s when all of Europe, and England in particular, were in the grip of reactionary authoritarianism such as I described earlier. Blake lived in poverty and obscurity. Practically no one read him, and yet he kept laboring, trying to make a difference through his art. Jerusalem is one of the most difficult poems I have ever tried to read, but if I had to state its theme in a sentence, I would say it is the battle of Los, the imagination, Blake’s new hero, superseding the failed revolutionary Orc, against what Blake had come to see is the most dangerous enemy, which is exactly the mood of helpless despair that asks, “When are you just going to accept the inevitable and give up?” Like Heather Cox Richardson, he gives two answers, personal and social.

The first of Jerusalem’s four chapters is dominated by a dialogue between two aspects of Blake himself. One is Los, the spirit of the imagination, whose unceasing labors as a smith are a metaphor for the work of the poet and visual artist. The other is a figure called the Spectre of Urthona, who is the spirit of negation within Blake himself. The Spectre tries to demoralize Los:

...he sought by other means,
To lure Los: by tears, by arguments of science & by terrors:
Terrors in every Nerve, by spasms & extended pains...
And thus the Spectre spoke: Wilt thou still go on to destruction?
Till thy life is all taken away by this deceitful Friendship?
(plate 7)

The friendship he refers to is with Albion, who is at once the spirit of England and a cosmic embodiment of all humanity. The Spectre goes on to recite a litany of the terrible state of things in Blake’s own time, a time in which the bright hopes aroused in the early days of the French Revolution seem like a dream.

Los answer’d. Altho’ I know not this! I know far worse than this:
I know that Albion hath divided me, and that thou O my Spectre,
Hast just cause to be irritated: but look stedfastly upon me:
Comfort thyself in my strength the time will arrive,
When all Albions injuries shall cease, and when we shall
Embrace him tenfold bright, rising from his tom in immortality....

But what good does Los think he can do? He answers:

I labour day and night. I behold the soft affections
Condense beneath my hammer into forms of cruelty
But still I labour in hope, to still my tears flow down.
That he who will not defend Truth, may be compelld to defend
A Lie: that he may be snared and caught and snared and taken
That Enthusiasm and Life may not cease: arise Spectre arise!
(plate 9)

How will the imagination change things? By exposing the wicked as they hide out in their lies, their secrets.

Lest this seem airy-fairy intellectual, let me connect it with the story of Edward R. Murrow, the CBS journalist in the early 1950’s whose show bore the highly significant title of See It Now. In 2005, George Clooney recreated the story in his film Good Night, and Good Luck. Murrow, backed by CBS, decided to make Joseph McCarthy defend his lies on the air, so McCarthy appeared on Murrow’s show making his usual claims about Communists infiltrating the government and other institutions. McCarthy accused Murrow himself of being a Communist, and Murrow replied that anyone who opposes or criticizes McCarthy is called a Communist. This interview was instrumental in turning the tide against McCarthy, so that, during hearings based on McCarthy’s claim that there were 130 Communists working in defense plants, the Army’s lawyer, Joseph N. Welch, skewered him with the line that became famous: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” After that moment, within a month a motion to censure McCarthy was introduced in Congress, which eventually passed. Murrow, and then Nelson, exposed McCarthy’s lies, lies that were clearly motivated by a quest for power.

It all fits together: Murrow worked for CBS, which is now run by David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison, right-wing billionaire and Trump supporter. Ellison put Bari Weiss, who has no journalistic credentials, in charge of CBS, and she has presided over a series of firings that included the eminent journalist Scott Pelley, who after his firing delivered a scathing message that Weiss has been hired not to revamp CBS but to destroy it. The gist of his message was, have you no sense of decency? CBS is thus clearly a symbolic target. It was the network that played a powerful role in derailing Joseph McCarthy. Joseph Welch’s opposite number in the 1954 hearings, McCarthy’s lawyer, was Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s mentor and role model. It all fits together. They have also devastated 60 Minutes and caused late-night talk shows, with their political satire, to be taken off the air. It is a demonstration of the power to crush dissent, but we should not lose sight of one important implication: tyrants fear exposure, fear having themselves revealed for what they are. Because another word for revelation is apocalypse. If you can change the way people see, you can change everything.

Blake’s personal answer to “Why don’t you just give up?” is contained in Los’s dialogue with the Spectre of Urthona. His friendship with Albion is his social answer, again in symbolic form. Albion, the spirit of England and of all humanity, is so infected with nihilistic despair that he tries three times to commit suicide by plunging into the abyss of non-being, and Los has to gather a group of friends to hold him back. They resemble the ragtag band that gather around King Lear in Shakespeare’s apocalyptic drama, desperate but loyal. Good people need the negative education that shows the emperor’s new clothes, but they also need a positive vision of the good. Apocalypse is not just dread: it is also an image of hope. As Blake also said, “Fear and Hope are Vision.” First of all, apocalypse promises justice and restitution to the downtrodden. Gospel music is full of what can only be called apocalyptic joy. When I was 13, I was thrilled by Peter, Paul, and Mary’s version of the gospel song “Very Last Day”:

Well you can sing about the great king David
And you can preach about the wisdom of Saul
But the judgment falls on all mankind
When the trumpet sounds the call
All equal and the same
When the Lord He calls your name
Get ready, brother, for that day

I was also thrilled by Bob Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In,” an early song that moves me more than the songs from his later Christian period. It too provides images of a last judgment:

Oh, the foes will rise with the sleep still in their eyes
And they’ll jerk from their beds and think they’re dreamin’
But they’ll pinch themselves and squeal and they’ll know that it’s for real
The hour that the ship comes in

But my favorite stanza is the one about the defeat of lies, of false language:

And the words that are used for to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they’re spoken
For the chains of the sea will have busted in the night
And be buried on the bottom of the ocean

Blake understood, though, that apocalypse cannot stop with a political revolution, which may be necessary but is not sufficient. The Orc cycle of rising hope followed by bitter disillusionment, over and over again throughout history, is perpetuated by the failure to achieve a final revolution, one that must begin inwardly. So long as we remain within the perspective of what Blake called the “cloven fiction,” the alienated division between subject and object, we will remain trapped in the manic-depressive cycle. The cloven fiction, which is simply what we call ordinary experience, the reality principle, common sense, is the final secret that needs to be exposed. It is a secret that is hiding in plain sight, because it never occurs to us to question it. But so long as we do not realize that we are trapped in its alienation, we will never be free.

Frye’s discussion of apocalypse in The Great Code is barely three pages long. But it turns upon the idea of two phases of apocalypse. The first, or panoramic apocalypse, is the big-screen spectacle, the moon turning to blood, seven-headed dragons, the evildoers judged, all the stuff Christopher Nolan will probably make into a movie someday. But there is a second, or participating apocalypse that “begins in the reader’s mind.” The reader passes beyond all the cloven fictions: “the creator-creature, divine-human antithetical tension has ceased to exist, and the sense of the transcendent person and the split of subject and object no longer limit our vision” (137). To sum up, “The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared” (138).

We have no time to explore what that world might be like, and rest content with quoting some of Dylan Thomas’s “And death shall have no dominion”:

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead mean naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot....

Through they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

The dead are one with nature, but they and nature are also a form of language, “characters” in the alphabetic sense. Not ordinary language, but a language that unites subjects and objects, not words but a Word. There is no mention of God in the poem, but he is there by implication, as the Word that is the alpha and omega, the circumference of all.

But we must end where we began, with the darkness, with doomsday. In an essay called “Cosmic and Eschatological Renewal,” Mircea Eliade says that “the periodical renewal of the World has been the most frequent mythico-ritual scenario in the religious history of humanity” (158). That rather breathtaking statement expands apocalypse from one specialized genre to the whole anatomy of the imagination. But that renewal must go through the valley of the shadow. There is the risen Christ, but first there is the agony in the garden. Leonard Cohen wrote “You Want It Darker” when he was in his 80’s and knew he was dying. Out of context, that title phrase seems to sum up the mood of some who are done with comfort, with hope, certainly with religion, that opiate of the masses. Such things are “bad faith,” all part of a coverup, hiding the secret truth that life is really a pretty shitty thing unless you are one of the powerful. The lyrics speak to that kind of attitude:

They’re lining up the prisoners
And the guards are taking aim

I struggled with some demons
They were middle class and tame
I didn’t know I had permission to murder and to maim

But the “you” turns out to be God. It is God who wants it darker, and obligingly “we kill the flame,” the flame of hope: “a million candles burning for the help that never came.” That line is a reference to the Crucifixion, and the song seems to suggest that the Crucifixion represents a descent into an ultimate darkness, one that must be endured. As T.S. Eliot says in Four Quartets, “Wait without hope. / For hope would be hope for the wrong thing.”

The speaker’s attitude is completely torn and self-contradictory in the face of this vision of God. He cannot bear the comparison with God’s superiority: “If thine is the glory then mine must be the shame.” At the same time, he recognizes that by becoming human, God not only stepped down from his superior position, humbled himself: he ensured that it was humanity that was really on that Cross. Recognizing the implications of that identity of God and humanity, the speaker wants nothing to do with it: “If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game.” Yet he ends by repeating hineni, which means, “I’m here,” the answer that people like Abraham gave when God called upon them for their own ordeal. There is something that wants it darker, something profounder than our personal depression, which in comparison looks middle class and tame. We realize that that darkness is calling to us, and part of us is seized with terror. Yet at the same time, we may be astonished to hear something else within us reply, “I am here.”

References

Anderson, Bernhard W. The Living World of the Old Testament. 2^nd edition. Longmans, 1957, 1966.

Eliade, Mircea. “Cosmic and Eschatological Renewal.” In The Two and the One. Translated by J.M. Cohen. University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981. Also