Friday November 16, 2018

Here we are, coasting along on this lovely planet, sharing in its seasons and cycles. I sit in a room lined with pine as day turns to night, and work relents and so begins that week of utopia known among academics as “Thanksgiving Break.” Erik Davis says the “breakdown of consensus reality,” which he believes is occurring in our current moment, “pulls out of us” a desire to engage the world as “an enchanted, magical place…where practices of awareness are practical survival necessities.” He traces the origins of the phrase “consensus reality” to Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s book The Social Construction of Reality. Davis’s talk brilliantly captures the as-yet-unnamed structure of feeling governing the current moment in the phrase “reality meltdown.” People dropping out and declaring psychedelic independence. This way of looking has made me judgmental, as if speciation occurred and one can only look back and laugh.