A dark age

Anthony Edwards' first crack at solo leadership, and the mixed truth and myth of the Dark Ages.

The Dark Ages have come up in conversation three times this week, with all different people. Each time I had to admit how little I knew about the trigger for them, how I realized this roaming around the relics of the Roman Empire, brought my greedy little hand up to skim along still standing aqueducts and thought how we lost them.

To arrive at the Dark Ages, at least in conversation, isn’t as grim or alarmist as you’d think. We like to think in parallels. How to draw a line from contemporary conditions to those of the past, for understanding as much as for light fatalism, doomed as we know ourselves to be to repeat these things.

A rise of fractured societies, swinging right and turning inward. Isolationist, fearful, rejecting science and dulling its comprehension for the arts. Suspicious of what’s effortful without immediate reward.

Carly told me lately she’s been fleeing into museums and galleries, unwilling to confront the results of the U.S. election and opting for a primal way of lighting what are starting to feel like the forgotten parts of her brain up. Greg said he was considering switching his phone to greyscale. Germain wondered whether in 500 years, maybe less if we’ve managed to accelerate evolution, our necks would be longer to better support the weight of our heads constantly craning down.

We talked about the appeal for some to “get off grid”, but how the impossibility of say, fixing your busted solar panels immediately forces you back into the marching order of technological enslavement because you have to order a replacement part, made from silica rock, created in a high-cost, energy intensive process of converting sand to silicon, powered by coal-fired electricity plants.

Do we have more in common with the Dark Ages now, than anytime before? In all these conversations, this was generally the framing. Hard to dispute when some days you can feel the press of a world growing bleaker and smaller, closing in.

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In a postgame scrum earlier this week, after the Timberwolves lost to the Sacramento Kings at home, Anthony Edwards lit into his team. Of Minnesota’s identity, he called the Wolves “soft as hell as a team, internally”, said they couldn’t talk to one another, that they were all “a bunch of little kids”.

He was chuckling when he said most of it, sitting in his leather chair and looking up at the reporters gathered in a semi-circle around him. Most of his criticism came four minutes into the scrum, which, depending on how long an availability goes, can be a time of attention falling away or the first layer of conversational depth, peeling back. For Edwards it felt like the latter.

Asked how, as the leader, he reacts when the team gets into a rut like this, and Edwards pauses. His hand, resting along his jawline, opens up in a gesture of consideration.

“I mean, it’s tough,” he says, first breaking into a smile and then slipping the smile from his face as his hand passes over it. “As the person who’s supposed to figure things out, sometimes it’s tough. You’re looking at everybody and everybody’s got a different agenda. So like, what the fuck am I supposed to say to get every—” He trails off, looks up, asks, “You know?” But it’s like the realization has hit him in real time, the consensus piece of where and how the Wolves are unraveling, and that he’s the one who’s going to have to fix it.

Edwards is smart. Quick and simultaneously easy in his confidence. A natural, many say in his athletic talents, but a natural foremost of himself. It did not take him this long, intellectually, to understand that when Minnesota traded his partner in leadership and the franchise leader before him, Karl-Anthony Towns, to the Knicks, that he was gaining a rung on the Wolves ladder. It may have taken him until now, with Minnesota struggling to achieve the same cohesion on court and off it, to put a proverbial foot out and feel that there are no more rungs left on said-ladder.

That hollow stomach feeling of height and with it, depth as physical sensation — how far there is to fall from here.

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European societies shrunk, life expectancy dropped, the first plague pandemic swept across Europe. People fled to the countryside to escape civil wars targeting large cities and traded their labour to aristocratic families for protection and housing, giving rise to the feudal system.