Thursday, March 22, 2012
Falling Already
Nothing new under the sun? The post-modern sublime treats us to a horror show of flowers. Magnolias blossoms that reached their extravagant, perfumed peak in Brooklyn on the final day of winter are falling already, under record-breaking heat.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
NOTES ON KILLING THE WORLD: I
Why is there no word for killing the world?
(I ask.)
But first you must define what you mean by "the world," the stickler replies.
Do you mean the planet? someone else inquires. For your information, the planet's just fine. It's only us who are in trouble. (Us and how many thousands of non-human species newly extinct or on the verge.)
Aren't you being overly dramatic? There've always been folks who thought the sky was falling.
Think about enslavement.
Picture the Trail of Tears.
The world doesn't end. Terrible things happen--that's nothing new. But the world doesn't end.
I persist in believing--though I'd much rather not--that the world can be killed.
Exemplary world-killing acts may be large or small
Leslie Marmon Silko's great novel Ceremony provides many examples: for instance, the task of dissecting frogs that is forced on Indian children by a white teacher; for instance, the rituals of contemptuous injury promoted by the soul-deadened Laguna war veteran Emo: both ceremonies designed to reduce a world imagined as fully alive to the status of a dead thing.
"the porous world that breathes, and can be killed" I wrote in a poem somewhere.
"The Beloved Patient," my fictional Cannibals say, referring to the planet.
There is a paradox here--or is it a paradox? We know that the big threat to humanity's survival is death by a quadrillion cuts (e.g. industrial activities generating greenhouse gases leading to drastic climate change), but there are many large acts that both graphically dramatize the possibility of world-slaughter and seem to constitute hugely relevant chapters in its unfolding. In other words, they symbolize the capability now possessed by the human species of "killing the world" as though it were possible to achieve this deadly result with a single stroke, the way a murder is usually committed; at the same time, by virtue of their literal impact, they dramatically degrade the systems (social, biological, even technological) that constitute what we call "the world."
The Things That You Love Cannot be Defended
At the other end of the scale from frog dissection, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki constitute a paradigmatic world-killing act: massively lethal; instantaneous yet with endless and incompletely unforeseeable lethal effects (the half-life of radiation); unimaginably cruel; and generative of a single iconic image of world-end (the mushroom cloud) that filled the apocalyptic imaginations of several human generations. The Nazis' death camps constitute another, paradoxically "particular" in that genocide is by definition not omnicide, yet suggestive of a principle capable of unlimited extension (and, as Aimé Césaire noted in Discourse on Colonialism, not original to the experience in Europe--methods were tried out first in the colonies). The U.S.'s vast wars of aggression, particularly in Vietnam and in Iraq, are signal world-killing acts. They were/are gratuitous, not even rationally defensible in very narrow and self-interested terms. (They partake of the local, blindered rationality that on the larger scale becomes blatant irrationality--in a phrase from the Dialectic of Enlightenment, a supposedly rational order mysteriously becomes "radiant with calamity.") They present a vast spectacle of wanton destruction, by a mighty state actor, of historically disempowered peoples. They graphically suggest: we will stop at nothing (even as the discourse surrounding them is all about good reasons and selfless motives). They call into question any notion that there are reliable boundaries to destruction.
On various occasions (notably but not uniquely that of the Iraq invasion), there are many voices-- sometimes many millions of them--counseling another course of action and warning of the world-killing potential of the aggression (or, in the case of projects such as the exploitation of "extreme energy" sources, warning against the heedless rapid deployment of dangerous technology). The implementation of the feared course of action in contempt of those warning voices is a big part of the world-killing effect. The action says to the dissenters: your efforts in defense of the world count for little or nothing. You might as well give up and go with the flow--or obey "common sense," the common sense of earlier historical eras, which says that as awful as all of this is, perhaps, somehow, someone or something will survive.
"America, great untasting devourer, you're not the only evil, just the one I know by heart." Am I relying too heavily on U.S. imperialism for my case studies?
And then to consider historical precedents. How indigenous/aboriginal peoples have faced, and imagined, the deaths of their worlds. The wanton slaughter, or attempted slaughter, of their imaginative systems. For if one mind survives, then something can go on, be reconstituted and transformed. "As long as you remember, then nothing is lost." (I quote, or paraphrase, Silko.) And yet, those worlds have in some sense "vanished."
It is not necessarily productive to try to specify exactly how different those historical experiences of colonization are from the varieties of ("post"?-colonial) contemporary experience. One obvious difference, however is that "we" (inhabitants of the "globalized" globe) are doing it to "ourselves." Who is "we"? It is necessary to reflect on the "wethey" experience--that of simultaneously feeling ourselves to be the object of actions and activities we oppose, but are powerless to stop, and knowing ourselves to be cooperative participants in systems that drive the lethal effects only partially attributable to the choices of identifiable individuals.
(I ask.)
But first you must define what you mean by "the world," the stickler replies.
Do you mean the planet? someone else inquires. For your information, the planet's just fine. It's only us who are in trouble. (Us and how many thousands of non-human species newly extinct or on the verge.)
Aren't you being overly dramatic? There've always been folks who thought the sky was falling.
Think about enslavement.
Picture the Trail of Tears.
The world doesn't end. Terrible things happen--that's nothing new. But the world doesn't end.
I persist in believing--though I'd much rather not--that the world can be killed.
Exemplary world-killing acts may be large or small
Leslie Marmon Silko's great novel Ceremony provides many examples: for instance, the task of dissecting frogs that is forced on Indian children by a white teacher; for instance, the rituals of contemptuous injury promoted by the soul-deadened Laguna war veteran Emo: both ceremonies designed to reduce a world imagined as fully alive to the status of a dead thing.
"the porous world that breathes, and can be killed" I wrote in a poem somewhere.
"The Beloved Patient," my fictional Cannibals say, referring to the planet.
There is a paradox here--or is it a paradox? We know that the big threat to humanity's survival is death by a quadrillion cuts (e.g. industrial activities generating greenhouse gases leading to drastic climate change), but there are many large acts that both graphically dramatize the possibility of world-slaughter and seem to constitute hugely relevant chapters in its unfolding. In other words, they symbolize the capability now possessed by the human species of "killing the world" as though it were possible to achieve this deadly result with a single stroke, the way a murder is usually committed; at the same time, by virtue of their literal impact, they dramatically degrade the systems (social, biological, even technological) that constitute what we call "the world."
The Things That You Love Cannot be Defended
At the other end of the scale from frog dissection, the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki constitute a paradigmatic world-killing act: massively lethal; instantaneous yet with endless and incompletely unforeseeable lethal effects (the half-life of radiation); unimaginably cruel; and generative of a single iconic image of world-end (the mushroom cloud) that filled the apocalyptic imaginations of several human generations. The Nazis' death camps constitute another, paradoxically "particular" in that genocide is by definition not omnicide, yet suggestive of a principle capable of unlimited extension (and, as Aimé Césaire noted in Discourse on Colonialism, not original to the experience in Europe--methods were tried out first in the colonies). The U.S.'s vast wars of aggression, particularly in Vietnam and in Iraq, are signal world-killing acts. They were/are gratuitous, not even rationally defensible in very narrow and self-interested terms. (They partake of the local, blindered rationality that on the larger scale becomes blatant irrationality--in a phrase from the Dialectic of Enlightenment, a supposedly rational order mysteriously becomes "radiant with calamity.") They present a vast spectacle of wanton destruction, by a mighty state actor, of historically disempowered peoples. They graphically suggest: we will stop at nothing (even as the discourse surrounding them is all about good reasons and selfless motives). They call into question any notion that there are reliable boundaries to destruction.
On various occasions (notably but not uniquely that of the Iraq invasion), there are many voices-- sometimes many millions of them--counseling another course of action and warning of the world-killing potential of the aggression (or, in the case of projects such as the exploitation of "extreme energy" sources, warning against the heedless rapid deployment of dangerous technology). The implementation of the feared course of action in contempt of those warning voices is a big part of the world-killing effect. The action says to the dissenters: your efforts in defense of the world count for little or nothing. You might as well give up and go with the flow--or obey "common sense," the common sense of earlier historical eras, which says that as awful as all of this is, perhaps, somehow, someone or something will survive.
"America, great untasting devourer, you're not the only evil, just the one I know by heart." Am I relying too heavily on U.S. imperialism for my case studies?
And then to consider historical precedents. How indigenous/aboriginal peoples have faced, and imagined, the deaths of their worlds. The wanton slaughter, or attempted slaughter, of their imaginative systems. For if one mind survives, then something can go on, be reconstituted and transformed. "As long as you remember, then nothing is lost." (I quote, or paraphrase, Silko.) And yet, those worlds have in some sense "vanished."
It is not necessarily productive to try to specify exactly how different those historical experiences of colonization are from the varieties of ("post"?-colonial) contemporary experience. One obvious difference, however is that "we" (inhabitants of the "globalized" globe) are doing it to "ourselves." Who is "we"? It is necessary to reflect on the "wethey" experience--that of simultaneously feeling ourselves to be the object of actions and activities we oppose, but are powerless to stop, and knowing ourselves to be cooperative participants in systems that drive the lethal effects only partially attributable to the choices of identifiable individuals.
Saturday, December 31, 2011
IT'S WETHEY THAT DID IT
"Climate change is an unintended consequence of human actions and shows, only through scientific analysis, the effects of our actions as a species. Species may indeed be the name of a placeholder for an emergent, new universal history of humans that flashes up in the moment of the danger that is climate change. But we can never understand this universal. It is not a Hegelian universal arising dialectically out of the movement of history, or a universal of capital brought forth by the present crisis....Yet climate change poses for us a question of a human collectivity, an us, pointing to a figure of the universal that escapes our capacity to experience the world."
--Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Climate of History: Four Theses"
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-10-30-chakrabarty-en.html
"Who's they?" the skeptics wanted to know, when they saw me on the edge of Zuccotti Park, displaying the message BECAUSE THEY'RE TRYING TO DRIVE OUR PLANET OFF A CLIFF. I might have responded, accurately if mysteriously enough, by saying, "Well, actually, I should have written 'WETHEY ARE TRYING,' but 'THEY' sounded better." Chakrabarty (in an extraordinarily thought-provoking 2009 essay that has received a lot of attention) suggests that we can't experience this strange new sort of collective agency "we" are exercising, but I want to know: why not? Surely the Hegelian dialectic is an imaginative construct, and I see no reason why "we" should not devise other images, figures, philosophical Just-So Stories to help us understand and experience as "real" the unintended effects of the complex interactions between innumerable instances of individually purposeful behavior.
"It's wethey that did it" was finally all I could think of to write in expression of my feeling that the Fukushima disaster was the "unforeseen" outcome of actions taken by groups of powerful people the likes of whom I feel irretrievably alienated from--and at the same time, the catastrophe seemed like something predictably produced by a collectivity I belong to.
Never to let go of the simultaneity of alienation and complicity. Wethey is the subject of this history that has erased the border between human self-organization and global-scale natural processes.
--Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Climate of History: Four Theses"
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-10-30-chakrabarty-en.html
"Who's they?" the skeptics wanted to know, when they saw me on the edge of Zuccotti Park, displaying the message BECAUSE THEY'RE TRYING TO DRIVE OUR PLANET OFF A CLIFF. I might have responded, accurately if mysteriously enough, by saying, "Well, actually, I should have written 'WETHEY ARE TRYING,' but 'THEY' sounded better." Chakrabarty (in an extraordinarily thought-provoking 2009 essay that has received a lot of attention) suggests that we can't experience this strange new sort of collective agency "we" are exercising, but I want to know: why not? Surely the Hegelian dialectic is an imaginative construct, and I see no reason why "we" should not devise other images, figures, philosophical Just-So Stories to help us understand and experience as "real" the unintended effects of the complex interactions between innumerable instances of individually purposeful behavior.
"It's wethey that did it" was finally all I could think of to write in expression of my feeling that the Fukushima disaster was the "unforeseen" outcome of actions taken by groups of powerful people the likes of whom I feel irretrievably alienated from--and at the same time, the catastrophe seemed like something predictably produced by a collectivity I belong to.
Never to let go of the simultaneity of alienation and complicity. Wethey is the subject of this history that has erased the border between human self-organization and global-scale natural processes.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
OH, YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT "THE ENVIRONMENT"!
I've written about the fact that one standard reaction to the sign I displayed at Zuccotti Park (BECAUSE THEY'RE TRYING TO DRIVE OUR PLANET OFF A CLIFF) was a claim of incomprehension. "What does your sign mean?" "Who's they?" Another frequent reaction, and one that depressed me increasingly the more I thought about it, was, "Oh, you're talking about the environment!" I would usually say something like, "Well, yes, that--and the endless wars, the terrible inequality...." But I would be left with a troubling sense that so much I had wanted my sign to imply had been effectively foreclosed via the application of a reassuring label.
I'm talking about murdering the world ("the porous world that breathes, and can be killed," I wrote in a long-ago poem). And you are translating my speech into something you understand as representing a preoccupation with a setting, a platform, even a sort of backdrop for the real action. Oh, yes, "the environment." That. We must definitely make sure to save "the environment," along with all else in need of saving.
There are at least two problems here. The first is the failure to understand that there is no "the environment" apart from us, and no "us" apart from the environment. We are not just autonomous mental beings that happen (inconveniently) to breathe air; we are the breath and the air that circulates through our bodies. We are not just in need of a certain amount of water as a "resource"; our bodies are made of water. We are a species that evolved on a given planet under certain geological conditions (the relative stability and temperateness of the era known as the Holocene, which did not just favor us as an individual species, but favored great webs of life with which we grew intertwined). The clever mental gymnastics to which Western thought has dedicated itself at least since Descartes, combined with all the technical savvy of the folks who brought you fracking, tar sands, the "peaceful atom," and depleted uranium munitions, are not going to make that reality go away.
The second problem with translating my sign to mean a concern with "the environment" is the assumption that the life of the biosphere is something distinct from social issues like war and inequality. Unfortunately, too much activism that gets labeled "environmentalism" in this country has operated as if this assumption were true, thereby helping promote the ridiculous idea that concern for the planet's natural systems and processes should be expressed exclusively in terms of middle-class American notions of aesthetically pleasing landscapes and "pristine wilderness" preservation. (Don't get me wrong--I like a "wilderness" hike at least as well as the next white, middle-class person from the Pacific Northwest.) This reductive view still has a lot of currency despite insights from an environmental justice perspective demonstrating that poor people, indigenous peoples, and "less developed" or global South nations are most at risk from the massive disruptions of terrain and atmosphere that characterize our new, human-dominated geological era, the Anthropocene.
I've been reading the introduction to a new essay collection focused on literary texts that in some way reflect a consciousness of how colonial legacies condition relationships to land and natural systems. It is called Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, Oxford University Press, 2011). The editors quote Edward Said, from Culture and Imperialism: "Because of the presence of the colonizing outsider, the land is recoverable at first only through imagination." I find what Said is saying here about the possible role of the imagination suggestive for our (planet-wide, locally various) efforts to fashion narrative and symbolic tools to cope with life in the Anthropocene. Because of the presence of [U.S. imperialism] [the capitalist drive to maximize resource extraction] [ruling-class tactics referrable to the "Shock Doctrine"] [endless warfare] [the internal combustion engine] [YOUR CRITIQUE HERE], the biosphere as a self-sustaining system is recoverable at first only through imagination.
I'm talking about murdering the world ("the porous world that breathes, and can be killed," I wrote in a long-ago poem). And you are translating my speech into something you understand as representing a preoccupation with a setting, a platform, even a sort of backdrop for the real action. Oh, yes, "the environment." That. We must definitely make sure to save "the environment," along with all else in need of saving.
There are at least two problems here. The first is the failure to understand that there is no "the environment" apart from us, and no "us" apart from the environment. We are not just autonomous mental beings that happen (inconveniently) to breathe air; we are the breath and the air that circulates through our bodies. We are not just in need of a certain amount of water as a "resource"; our bodies are made of water. We are a species that evolved on a given planet under certain geological conditions (the relative stability and temperateness of the era known as the Holocene, which did not just favor us as an individual species, but favored great webs of life with which we grew intertwined). The clever mental gymnastics to which Western thought has dedicated itself at least since Descartes, combined with all the technical savvy of the folks who brought you fracking, tar sands, the "peaceful atom," and depleted uranium munitions, are not going to make that reality go away.
The second problem with translating my sign to mean a concern with "the environment" is the assumption that the life of the biosphere is something distinct from social issues like war and inequality. Unfortunately, too much activism that gets labeled "environmentalism" in this country has operated as if this assumption were true, thereby helping promote the ridiculous idea that concern for the planet's natural systems and processes should be expressed exclusively in terms of middle-class American notions of aesthetically pleasing landscapes and "pristine wilderness" preservation. (Don't get me wrong--I like a "wilderness" hike at least as well as the next white, middle-class person from the Pacific Northwest.) This reductive view still has a lot of currency despite insights from an environmental justice perspective demonstrating that poor people, indigenous peoples, and "less developed" or global South nations are most at risk from the massive disruptions of terrain and atmosphere that characterize our new, human-dominated geological era, the Anthropocene.
I've been reading the introduction to a new essay collection focused on literary texts that in some way reflect a consciousness of how colonial legacies condition relationships to land and natural systems. It is called Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (ed. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, Oxford University Press, 2011). The editors quote Edward Said, from Culture and Imperialism: "Because of the presence of the colonizing outsider, the land is recoverable at first only through imagination." I find what Said is saying here about the possible role of the imagination suggestive for our (planet-wide, locally various) efforts to fashion narrative and symbolic tools to cope with life in the Anthropocene. Because of the presence of [U.S. imperialism] [the capitalist drive to maximize resource extraction] [ruling-class tactics referrable to the "Shock Doctrine"] [endless warfare] [the internal combustion engine] [YOUR CRITIQUE HERE], the biosphere as a self-sustaining system is recoverable at first only through imagination.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
MEMORIES OF THE HOLOCENE
WKCR's BachFest 2011 is underway. They've begun with the St. Matthew Passion, and its exquisite minor chords couldn't feel more appropriate. I'm looking out the window at my latest memento mori, the 50-foot stump of what until yesterday was my backyard catalpa, the tree that shaded my writing room and was the silent, palpably breathing companion of my days for over 18 years since I moved into this house. When the tree service showed up to do what I thought was going to be a routine pruning, taking off some weight and helping ensure stability, the climbing guy went up, came back down, and stood there staring up into the leafless branches. I went out to see what the problem was. "The tree is bad," he pronounced glumly in his limited but serviceable English, summarizing the conversation he'd evidently been having in Spanish with his co-worker. (I sometimes wonder what men like him think about being transplanted thousands of miles to become so intimate with the flora of a cold foreign land.) He showed me: trunk hollowed out more than we'd thought behind the visible cleft in the bark; and one of two main stems or "leaders" was weaker than the other, exacerbating the imbalance from years ago when an insect infestation caused some die-off and amputation of limbs on the side facing the house. "When it goes," he said, "it's not going to fall this way. It will go over like that," and he pointed to the neighbor's. The row house yards on that side are maybe 40 feet deep, and there was no doubt that the tree, which hugged my back fence and was maybe 80 feet tall, could do considerable damage to the neighbor's home. I didn't want to think about the fate of any people who might be in the way.
So I gave the go-ahead, and the rest of the day was about me hiding out from the sound of the chain saw, while the brave workers took apart the leafless crown. Every so often I'd venture a look. This was a much less risky operation than the tree felling I once witnessed from my back window, involving a couple of amateurs engaged by a naive neighbor to chop down a sizable tree George Washington style. On that occasion, I watched with amusement and horror as the woodsmen swung their axes, with frequent pauses to debate the likely angle of impact. On this one, I cringed at the sight of huge lopped-off limbs, secured by rope slings, being swung groundwards.
Now my yard is full of deconstructed tree. They're coming tomorrow morning to finish the job.
I knew this day would come, and in a way I'm relieved. No more listening with anxiety every time the wind picks up. No more wondering whether my tree is really fit to withstand some of the types of weather we've had a lot of recently--the tornado that did so much damage less than a mile from here, the tail end of Hurricane Irene. The combination of aging, weakened tree and increasingly wild weather adds up to a gamble I don't need to take.
Still, I know I'll never again be in custody of/partnership with such a mighty hunk of vegetation. A tree that grows that big wasn't really meant to be planted in such close proximity to fragile houses in the first place--but isn't it sweet to imagine an era when nobody worried much about the stress urban environments impose on plant life, or the interplay between global warming and local severe weather events? Presumably, that was almost 100 years ago, around the time this house and its neighbors were built.
If anybody is reading this, s/he is probably wondering how we got from poetry at Zuccotti Park to such gloomy back yard reflections. The answer (and it explains what this blog is actually about) goes back to the sign I displayed at Zuccotti: BECAUSE THEY'RE TRYING TO DRIVE OUR PLANET OFF A CLIFF. This blog is about what it's like to live now while attempting to articulate one's half-submerged consciousness of how very, very, very late it is. I think I'd like to re-name it "Memories of the Holocene."
You know, the time back then when the death of a tree was sad, but you didn't have to keep feeling like every tree was the last tree.
So I gave the go-ahead, and the rest of the day was about me hiding out from the sound of the chain saw, while the brave workers took apart the leafless crown. Every so often I'd venture a look. This was a much less risky operation than the tree felling I once witnessed from my back window, involving a couple of amateurs engaged by a naive neighbor to chop down a sizable tree George Washington style. On that occasion, I watched with amusement and horror as the woodsmen swung their axes, with frequent pauses to debate the likely angle of impact. On this one, I cringed at the sight of huge lopped-off limbs, secured by rope slings, being swung groundwards.
Now my yard is full of deconstructed tree. They're coming tomorrow morning to finish the job.
I knew this day would come, and in a way I'm relieved. No more listening with anxiety every time the wind picks up. No more wondering whether my tree is really fit to withstand some of the types of weather we've had a lot of recently--the tornado that did so much damage less than a mile from here, the tail end of Hurricane Irene. The combination of aging, weakened tree and increasingly wild weather adds up to a gamble I don't need to take.
Still, I know I'll never again be in custody of/partnership with such a mighty hunk of vegetation. A tree that grows that big wasn't really meant to be planted in such close proximity to fragile houses in the first place--but isn't it sweet to imagine an era when nobody worried much about the stress urban environments impose on plant life, or the interplay between global warming and local severe weather events? Presumably, that was almost 100 years ago, around the time this house and its neighbors were built.
If anybody is reading this, s/he is probably wondering how we got from poetry at Zuccotti Park to such gloomy back yard reflections. The answer (and it explains what this blog is actually about) goes back to the sign I displayed at Zuccotti: BECAUSE THEY'RE TRYING TO DRIVE OUR PLANET OFF A CLIFF. This blog is about what it's like to live now while attempting to articulate one's half-submerged consciousness of how very, very, very late it is. I think I'd like to re-name it "Memories of the Holocene."
You know, the time back then when the death of a tree was sad, but you didn't have to keep feeling like every tree was the last tree.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
HOW MANY LIGHT YEARS FROM THE WORLD OF RED DUST?
Did you know that every star in our galaxy revolves around a black hole? That this black hole is named Sagittarius A*? That Sagittarius A* weighs 4 million times as much as our sun and is 27,000 light years away? (http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/12/warning-black-hole-dead-ahead.html) That it will eventually consume "everything" in the galaxy? (New York Times, Dec. 20, 2011, "Black Hole Forecast: A Cold Gas Cloud" P. D3). Now, a large, cool cloud of "gas and dust" is (arguably) hurtling toward the black hole's event horizon. According to some scientific projections, by 2013 portions of the cloud will be engulfed by this maw, setting off an X-ray burst in the process.
Why do I feel like a speck of dust in that cloud?
And why doesn't the news that "we" (our atoms) are going to share with every other bit of matter in the Milky Way the eventual fate of plunging into that hole do anything whatsoever to alleviate my distress at the knowledge that our unique biosphere appears to be hurtling towards a level of near-term destruction--describable in shorthand as the climate tipping point that many climate scientists believe represents a sort of event horizon for global warming, a benchmark beyond which the warming process would continue in a feedback loop essentially irreversible by human action--apparently as difficult for us to imagine and take effective steps to forestall as is this remote, essentially fictional experience of being engulfed by a black hole?
Dust to dust. I am drawn to this image. The other day, I read in Red Pine's translation of Poems of the Masters (Copper Canyon, 2003) that "[r]ed dust (hung-ch'en) was a term used by Chinese Buddhists when referring to the world of sensation" (312).
Why do I feel like a speck of dust in that cloud?
And why doesn't the news that "we" (our atoms) are going to share with every other bit of matter in the Milky Way the eventual fate of plunging into that hole do anything whatsoever to alleviate my distress at the knowledge that our unique biosphere appears to be hurtling towards a level of near-term destruction--describable in shorthand as the climate tipping point that many climate scientists believe represents a sort of event horizon for global warming, a benchmark beyond which the warming process would continue in a feedback loop essentially irreversible by human action--apparently as difficult for us to imagine and take effective steps to forestall as is this remote, essentially fictional experience of being engulfed by a black hole?
Dust to dust. I am drawn to this image. The other day, I read in Red Pine's translation of Poems of the Masters (Copper Canyon, 2003) that "[r]ed dust (hung-ch'en) was a term used by Chinese Buddhists when referring to the world of sensation" (312).
Saturday, December 17, 2011
CONSERVATION OF CATASTROPHE
N.Y. Times article today on scientific research into melting permafrost and escaping methane gas: "Preliminary computer analyses, made only recently, suggest that the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions could eventually become an annual source of carbon equal to 15 percent or so of today's yearly emissions from human activities" ("As Permafrost Thaws, Scientists Study the Risks" by Justin Gillis, p. A16). The article goes on to say that the emissions may become an unstoppable source of warming over several centuries, and that an especially worrisome new development is the prevalence of wildfires in northern regions hitherto too moist and cold for them, a phenomenon that could promote more rapid thawing. I read all of this with something like impassivity, thinking: I have absolutely no idea how human life on earth is going to endure for the next couple of centuries.
I wonder, would my thinking be much different if I had direct biological descendants? I feel very sad for us--humans--but don't I also entertain a sort of spiteful feeling towards the young--those who will really have to reckon with all of this disaster when I'm dead and gone? So many of them are relatively insouciant now in the pride of their strength (or so I imagine, but are they? I wasn't)--and I can see what they can't. Isn't this a wicked sort of feeling to have? Possibly it's just a world-historical version of what Age has always felt towards Youth, in light of the former's awareness of physical frailty and generational evanescence.
I also read a Monthly Review article by John Bellamy Foster on the "conservation of catastrophe" under capitalism: "For [William] McNeill, who applied his 'law' to environmental crisis in particular, 'catastrophe is the underside of the human condition--a price we pay for being able to alter natural balances and to transform the face of the earth through collective effort and the use of tools.' The better we become at altering and supposedly controlling nature, he wrote, the more vulnerable human society becomes to catastrophes that 'recur perpetually on an ever-increasing scale as our skills and knowledge grow.' The potential for catastrophe is thus not only conserved, but it can be said to be cumulative, and reappears in an evermore colossal form in response to our growing transformation of the world around us" (Vol. 63 No. 7, p. 1).
Try to grasp, imaginatively, catastrophe as what occurs not "because" of our actions (the tragic fallacy, we might call this--would it were that simple), but because the interaction of the effects of our actions with other actions and processes cannot be controlled. Such a view does not rob the narrative terrain of character or a concept of agency, but it complicates them. A sense of complexity, grandeur of patterning, etc., might be transferred to the whole and away from the exemplary (artificially elevated) actions of a few characters.
I wonder, would my thinking be much different if I had direct biological descendants? I feel very sad for us--humans--but don't I also entertain a sort of spiteful feeling towards the young--those who will really have to reckon with all of this disaster when I'm dead and gone? So many of them are relatively insouciant now in the pride of their strength (or so I imagine, but are they? I wasn't)--and I can see what they can't. Isn't this a wicked sort of feeling to have? Possibly it's just a world-historical version of what Age has always felt towards Youth, in light of the former's awareness of physical frailty and generational evanescence.
I also read a Monthly Review article by John Bellamy Foster on the "conservation of catastrophe" under capitalism: "For [William] McNeill, who applied his 'law' to environmental crisis in particular, 'catastrophe is the underside of the human condition--a price we pay for being able to alter natural balances and to transform the face of the earth through collective effort and the use of tools.' The better we become at altering and supposedly controlling nature, he wrote, the more vulnerable human society becomes to catastrophes that 'recur perpetually on an ever-increasing scale as our skills and knowledge grow.' The potential for catastrophe is thus not only conserved, but it can be said to be cumulative, and reappears in an evermore colossal form in response to our growing transformation of the world around us" (Vol. 63 No. 7, p. 1).
Try to grasp, imaginatively, catastrophe as what occurs not "because" of our actions (the tragic fallacy, we might call this--would it were that simple), but because the interaction of the effects of our actions with other actions and processes cannot be controlled. Such a view does not rob the narrative terrain of character or a concept of agency, but it complicates them. A sense of complexity, grandeur of patterning, etc., might be transferred to the whole and away from the exemplary (artificially elevated) actions of a few characters.
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