A long essay for Reality Sandwich from November 2007, written after a refresher course in Machiavelli, Rousseau, Marx, Marcuse, Arendt and Bookchin. Pinchbeck settles on Hardt and Negri’s Multitude as the most satisfying account of the present, and asks whether an economic plunge would open awareness or drive a retraction into fundamentalism.
Published on Reality Sandwich in November 2007. A reader in Portland asks how the argument of 2012 bears on contemporary poetry; Pinchbeck answers at length, defending literature’s role in intensifying consciousness while suggesting that individual artistic ambition may need to wait on the collective work of the moment.
A Conscious Choice column from October 2007. Pinchbeck reads the subprime collapse as the visible edge of a longer dynamic — industry outsourced, a credit-based populace left with little to produce — and consults Ervin Laszlo’s chaos theory on whether the coming instability opens a decision window rather than simply closing one.
A Conscious Choice column from autumn 2007. Pinchbeck traces his own alienation from politics back to the Watergate hearings, then uses Hardt and Negri’s Multitude to argue that the crisis of political legitimacy conceals a real potential for constituent power, and that self-knowledge and social responsibility cannot be separated.
Published on Reality Sandwich in September 2007. Pinchbeck recounts a public disagreement with Whitley Strieber, who insisted a massive human die-off was mathematically certain, and reads the quarrel through Ramesh Balsekar’s denial of individual agency — the self as a part written by a universal consciousness enjoying its own play.
A Conscious Choice column from August 2007. After a separation in which monogamy stopped working for him, Pinchbeck asks whether other models of relationship are possible or desirable, and frames the present as a second and more conscious phase of the sexual revolution that crested thirty-five years earlier.
A Conscious Choice column from July 2007. Pinchbeck traces the childhood certainty that something extraordinary was about to be revealed, the shock of learning that maturity meant accepting constraint, and argues that a revival of shamanic practice may be what is needed to meet what presses in from beyond the edges of the interpreted world.
A Conscious Choice column from June 2007 on the exhaustion of the future as an idea. Reading Children of Men and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as avoidance mechanisms, Pinchbeck argues that the interlocking crises may not be solvable by rational means, but might dissolve if approached from a different level of consciousness.
An extended assessment of Richard Tarnas’s Cosmos and Psyche, published on Reality Sandwich in May 2007. Pinchbeck reads Tarnas’s thirty-year case for archetypal astrology as a serious challenge to the modern cosmology of accident, and values it less as a crystal ball than as a way of reconceiving the relation between psyche and cosmos.
A Conscious Choice column from May 2007. Pinchbeck sets the projections on species extinction, tropical forest loss and fishery collapse against a culture that seeks its drama at the cinema, and argues that the real thriller is whether humanity wakes from its trance of material progress in time.