intersection of the organic and the horrible

it's interesting to think about 'your time' while immersed in it. today i'm reading this book called Babylon Girls, which talks about a half-century of black female popular entertainers in the US, including burlesque stars and anonymous chorusline kickers. I don't know why this makes me wonder about my current moment - perhaps historiography generally has this effect, it being a retrospective assessment of the past. Often historical writing is shot through with moralism - this was bad, we are good - or this was better, we've really sunk low - but I'd like to think that right now things are just about as bad as they could ever be and also just about as good as they could ever be - that we're constantly riding dual asymptotes into our swirling destiny, which parallel steeds balance out to a neutrality that is not benign, nor benevolent, that doesn't allow us to feel 'OK' about things, but is just nature - red in tooth and claw, as nurturing and mechanical as as wasp building a nest around its eggs. The wasp is not driven by nobility, nor by maternal instinct, but by something else - a sort of survival drive - that might well be the thing that moves us all. The 'will to live,' or 'to power' - and perhaps the necessity of fucking things up in the process. There's no shame in that. No absolution either.