I just got back from the grocery store. I wore a mask that a friend had made for my wife. It fit OK, but the straps were too wide: my glasses kept slipping off my ears (and, hence, face). Tragedy and comedy. I didn’t wipe every article when I got home, but I washed the bags and washed myself.
While at the store (our local coop), I couldn’t help but notice that there were slightly fewer items on the shelves than there were two weeks ago. Walking down the aisles, you might not notice (our superfluity here is so great a shortage can be hard to spot) — except for toilet paper, of course. Some of the shortages (or delays in supply) is probably due to hoarding; some of it due to short-staffed producers and distributors. It’s easy to imagine a spec-fic-type worst-case scenario, where your local grocery store runs out of food. T.C. Boyle has said “that day is coming.” As probable pandemics multiply the effect of inevitable multiplying weather disasters, as the water runs out and the weather gets weirder, that day is indeed coming. The novelist Arundhati Roy puts it this way, in a recent opinion piece in the Financial Times: As the lockdown enters its second week, supply chains have broken, medicines and essential supplies are running low. Thousands of truck drivers are still marooned on the highways, with little food and water. Standing crops, ready to be harvested, are slowly rotting. She’s not describing a futuristic post-apocalypse. She is describing India in April 2020 — which is only at the beginning of its own “curve” — but it could apply to the USA soon, too. It could also describe the effects of climate change, in India and in many other places. Certainly climate catastrophes disrupt transportation and limit that most important medicine of all, clean water. And we’ve seen much of the corn crop rot in waterlogged fields in the Upper Midwest and Plains states. What are the psychological and cultural effects of all this? A lot has been written recently, in both journalism and literature, about “climate anxiety” or “solastalgia.” If there’s enough anxiety in the air, it becomes a societal phenomenon. But what effect will it have on the history of the future? Is it already writing that history for us? Roy frames the problem this way: Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. I’m reminded of sad-sack Henry Adams, who, on his own account, “found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.” There have always been famines and floods, but never as many in as many places. There have been pandemics, but never at the same time as massive climatological shifts (at least since humans have been around). And this is not the last of it. Both Roy’s and Adams’ responses raise the question of how one is to deal with it. Adams, as an historian, scrambles to “stitch our future to our past” via what he calls “the sequence of force,” but it doesn’t seem to satisfy him. Roy, as a novelist, knows narrative. Realist fiction tends to foreground temporal ruptures, climaxes, epiphanies, etc. What novel worth its salt ends where it began (other than a satirical one)? No good storyteller ever lets a crisis go to waste. The challenge she puts before us is to use this turning-point in the story, this turn in the poem, to write something radically new but still believable. And that’s a consummation devoutly to be wished, in both literature and the rest of life.
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |