In contrast, the night before I watched the world end in 2012, a roller coaster ride of a movie that takes us through the worst that can be imagined and still manages never to touch our feelings in a serious way. The movie is essentially a retelling, without the comet, of a book I read when I was a child, When Worlds Collide, also made into a movie (now in remake). The comet thing was already done (Deep Impact, Armageddon) during another apocalypse craze back when the dot.com bubble was getting ready to bust. These visions of the End appear to come in waves every other decade or so. Perhaps we are moving closer to an event foretold in our collective dreams. More likely, in the face of the complications and real problems of the world these fantasies of collective escape or collective suicide offer a simple answer to collective despair. They certainly offer us little in the way of salvation. 

Another film about the end of the world came out this week. The Road is based on a Pulitzer winning novel by Cormac McCarthy that serves up a vision of almost unrelieved darkness. In the book only the smallest ember of humanity is miraculously preserved amid the death of almost everything. The tone is one of unrelenting sorrow and grief, in the face of which all of our usual middle class problems and situations are rendered ridiculous. 

We pray for change and at the same time resist it. Terence McKenna, a friend who pursued an obsession with repeating cycles of time, once observed in the face of all the contemporary political slogans about change, "Put on your change hats on now, because we are in for one hell of a ride." 

Do we spiral helplessly toward the brink? Is the end of civilization as we have known it surely coming to pass? Are fantasies about the end of the world merely reflected echoes of what we sense in our future? What kind of storm is coming? I've seen these dark clouds before. It was just before the streets of my city caught fire and Americans came suddenly awake, astonished by the destructive actions of those that the illusions o prosperity had left behind. That was in the sixties. Things changed then, they changed fast. As if it were a miracle, people from alien worlds of race and class and belief suddenly saw one another as if for the first time, and they spoke to one another, and somehow we made it together over the huge and threatening waves of change. 

Just so, our grandparents made it through another apocalypse. They lived through it and went on to have lives, to give birth, to bring us into the world as manifestations of the hope they carried through it all. Every apocalypse in history seems bigger than the last. It's only that our minds encompass more of the world, the universe, all the other beings we share it with. Each time there appears to be more that can come to an end. Maybe we carry the end in our genes, blood, memories. We grew up reading about The End in our holy books, accepting it to the degree that we're frightened to allow ourselves to fully believe in life.  

It's too easy to take the path of annihilation. Our challenge is to try and dig deeper, to insist that there is something more valuable that will be saved, that is well and good and provides a world for our children can live in. 

Yes, I believe a storm is coming. I actually think we are in the midst of it. A world is coming to an end. The seeds have been planted and are coming into bloom. Poverty, war, depression, economic inequality and the devastation of the third world accompany the tearing apart of the human fabric too long held together by dogma and religious belief. The end will not come through geology or comets or the rise of zombies and vampires and forces out of darkness. It won't be the descent of the Mothership or the Messiah that saves us. 

A new world is being born out of a reweaving of the web of relationships, as people once again contact their common dreams and their common needs. We are finding that there is something in all of this that's deeper and stronger than all of the myths we fabricate and the fears we imagine. We did not create the world and we will not save it. We emerged out of the life of the world and will carry that life forward. 

So I return to the films of Atom Egoyan. If there is a common vision in them it's the acknowledgement that underneath the worse pain that we can feel or inflict on one another there is a natural human intention that grows out of our need to be together. Out of love. The hurdles we throw against it, the wounds we inflict with our agendas of fear or greed, our desperate search for security in an unstable world, all are healed when the true face of love, like that of a mother toward her child, is revealed and allowed to shine forth. A world of darkness can be turned upon it's head.

Always unexpected. Always a surprise. 

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Jeremiah at Miminagish