i don’t want to know
whether the weather is ok today. well . . . ok: it’s basically 20 degrees below the norm right now. like a hi 24˚ f < norm chez nous. “polar vortex shatters records” &c.; it’s supposed to go up 20 degrees tomorrow, so all will be well. hoop-la. if coronamania has taught me anything, it’s we’re un- prepared for everything record-breaking hi’s in alaska; drought in winnipeg; michigan fruit crop froze; record heat, drought in florida (wildfires + wildfires); cannes had 2x its may rainfall over the weekend; “west-nile-carrying mosquitoes managed to survive a german winter” . . . melting glaciers redraw boundaries between italy & switzerland; record hi’s in alaska, seattle . . . & if covid + locusts weren’t enough, flooding now threatens somalia’s 2.6 m “internally displaced persons” (when was the last time we heard that term . . .) massive dust storm in dehli; 50 dead of chikungunya fever in aden (i know i know — look it up); more floods & landslides in e.africa; & warnings from scientists (again) that enviro degradation = more pandemics well . . . let’s just say it’s bad & we don’t want to know (i know i know) about it . . .
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Why do people follow autocrats (& wannabe autocrats) who quite palpably deny the facts in front of people's faces? How can they get away with denying climate change, even as their country is cleaning up after devastating hurricanes? How can they deny the existence of COVID-19, with bodies in the streets?
Well, in the U.S. we have a tendency to ignore data that doesn't square with our personal beliefs, predileciton, or convenience. So, nuclear power was safe. Prosperity was just around the corner. And hell, my gradma smoked a pack a day and lived to be 115! But a lot of it has to do with the followers' relation to the autocrat: he is them. Even if he doesn't produce the goods; even if he gets you killed; it's still somehow right. I can't think of a much better formulation than this: "Having fixed our faith in a father-figure -- or in a father, or in a mother or a wife -- we must keep it fixed until inexcusable fault (and what fault of a father, a mother, or a wife, is inexcusable?) crushes it at once and completely. This figure represents our own best selves; it is what we ourselves want to be and, through, identification, are. To abandon it for anything less than crushing evidence of inexcusable fault is self-incrimination, and of one's best, unrealized self."* I would demur only in this: that in some times and places crushing evidence merely bruises and inexcusable faults are not faults at all. ______________________________ * Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955) “it boils down to
illegal burning” (fla.); “people who look at this all the time are in shock. you don’t break records by as much as we broke records.” “it’s anywhere from dry to extreme in terms of fire risk.” “it could be catastrophic, depending on how dry it gets & how hot it gets. & people just have to know that our response is going to be impacted because of the covid virus. we probably won’t be able to send as many people as we had before.” (colo.) “the ones that are calling me the most, I would say 80 percent of them, have never seen water in their home. they’ve been living in these homes 20 to 30 yrs & have never seen water like this before, or they never had sump pumps because they never needed them, they never saw water come up through the floor.” (near lake michigan) “there’s a lot of people that are on edge about it. people are thinking about what do we do, how are home values affected, what are the solutions. do you raise the house, do you move? What do you do?” “634 wildfires were registered in the trans-baikal region. on the one hand, we must take human factor into account, and on the other hand, we must do a huge job ourselves, including funding of firefighting.” (siberia) "we have so far counted 65 people dead from last night's heavy rains. we urge people to leave risk areas.” (rwanda) “every time you are trying to control in one region, there is another swarm that is happening in another region & it is not possible to control them simultaneously.” (kenya) “when you add on top of it, cyclones or whatever else we’ll have in the next 2-3 months... it's an absolutely unmitigated disaster.” “footage has shown what many have called an 'apocalyptic' wall of dust and sand engulf niger's capital city, niamey. the dust storm enveloped streets & buildings across the city, turning night into day & giving the sky a 'blood red' tint.” "we've only had 13mls of rain over the whole of april. it’s just been so hot, it’s been so dry & it’s so pro- longed. i do have a little bit of silage, & a little bit of hay but that will run out at the end of this month. if things haven't changed by then, then i'm really in trouble.” (hawke’s bay, n.z.) “i’m fucking freezing my ass off, bro!” (lawrence, ks.) The cruel are dead the kind are dead mingle the same place of no place a kind of place a cruel place a space where unripe fruit freezes in the cold over where the argive grows, the view from above but nobody is really seeing it, nobody wants to miss out by taking it all in, horizons in mist and people doing all that nasty shit in the foreground: jesus died to put an end to that, that’s why he’s not around to see it, he lifted off into the air, refused to decompose like the rest of us, athwart a tallish mount where awful wings adore.
Meanwhile, the moon always shifts a little; they used to want us to stay still, but it’s a crescent earth, a crescent, earth, a shift creaking or crunching as the world turns I feel something shift — like the buildings don’t line up, like people talking over themselves saying two things at once, like a game of telephone that gets back around the circle to you and the message is: “this is not a test. Remember what you learned: go to ground, shelter in place,” but doesn’t specify the place. Or the peaceable kingdom growling about civil war, desertification, or the ways the glass eyes always follow my own, how people are more likely to startle at baloney sandwiches. We’re always at a point in that curve, whether a circle or an arc is yet to be seen, earthquakes causing a fracturing at the scene, less gravity, more fuel. Fully above ground, we think we can avoid walking on those who are not. The asteroid heaving in our direction has made itself the talk of the town — as in what will they think of next, as in find a chronometer with a bigger dial to stretch time beyond the physical space allotted to it. Yes, things have always been this bad, somewhere or other, and no, there’s no more licorice now or anywhere else. it is 8:30 pm & only now am i
sitting down to add the latest fit to this verse chronicle -- busiest time of the skool yr + busiest time in “nature” -- a gorgeous may day here; this morning, “not a cloud in the sky”; but dangerous for those who like birds: me & my friend who’s birded the same spot for 45 years: the migrant birds that fairly “dripped off the branches” in the 90s now unusual (tennessee warblers chestnut-sided warblers blackpoll warblers he mentioned several more) i know i promised no animals, but if ginsberg can get sentimental re: the wobblies (ha ha, joe hill, y'get it??), then i can get sentimental re: the birds — esp. too-late hour to front the basic facts of life & declare its meanness to the world -- record cold in east & north, record heat in west u.s.a.; s. central brazil droughting out, as paraná gets pummeled w/rain, w/frost in the forecast(!); e. africa flooded; s. africa bone dry; driest & sunniest april on record for ireland: potato crop is suffering (again); “ongoing flooding in kenya has claimed the lives of another 164 people, a govt. official said”; & so on & i read in a study (another one) from natl. academy of sciences: “by 2070, up to 3 billion people are likely to live in conditions 'deemed unsuitable for human life to flourish’” -- esp. if you throw in a pandemic + depression -- which makes me glad i’m not 8 yrs old -- which makes me wonder if it’s not better to not worry abt anything at all, just talk the happy talk, walk the line, & if the room’s too full of smoke, just leave . . . & the kids -- well, all you can give them is a good start in life, you can’t shape the ending -- good luck, bunny so, where is the “obligatory note of hope”?? you won’t sell any blogs this way, joe, not by saying what you see as so So what’s stopping you from getting out of your writerly comfort zone and devoting more time to politics?
You mean other than the coronavirus? Well, for one thing, my students. Especially right now. They were fragile and overtaxed before the pandemic hit; now some of them are falling apart and disappearing. This phenomenon brings out a pastoral impulse in me; I want to help them as people, not as writers or literary critics. So, I’m doing a lot of “retail” teaching — writing emails, zooming with small groups, and just trying to keep track of the technology, the administrative decrees, the “student of concern” forms. All this takes time. And if anything, I’m feeling even more stressed than usual at this hectic time of year, simply trying to keep up with it all and make it work. Then there’s this problem: nobody has a plausible political strategy. It’s one thing to put your life on the line in an army with a battle plan; it’s another thing to try to run across the interstate at rush hour. There are indeed incisive political analyses available. And people have got excellent policy ideas — if only “we” are wise enough “to implement” them. But how do policies get implemented? You and what army? The white supremacists have an answer to that: they are recruiting soldiers — literally. And veterans. They’re building up their own latter-day Sturmabteilung. Meanwhile, what strategy are the gun-control advocates advocating? Write your Member of Congress. Well, okaaay . . . but . . . do who my Member of Congress is? It would make more sense to write graffiti at a well-trafficked location. It’s hard for me, ruined by reading history, to imagine the kind of economic and social changes that would be required to reverse global heating without a lot of people getting arrested, beat up, and killed. Or worse, beating up and killing. Or creating the perceived threat of those things happening. The auto workers in the sit-down strikes in Detroit in the 1930s shot car-door hinges at police cars using inner-tubes as giant slingshots. And they won. But you can do that kind of thing and lose, too — especially if you live in a surveillance state, as we increasingly do. It seems like, in today’s globalized mass everything, profound change comes about (1.) when the people with the money (and therefore the guns) decide they want things to change; or (2.) when a whole lot of people get so desperate and angry that they can’t help but rebel. That is, when people become more mad than scared. I don’t see either thing quite happening, vis-a-vis climate chaos, in the global north (let alone the United States) just yet. I’m more optimistic (if that’s the word) about the possibility of forming locally-based social structures and cultural norms that, if not changing things for the better, can at least prepare for things to change for the worse. Forget your Member of Congress: if you want to have an impact as an individual, pressure your local city commission. But also forming mutual-aid networks or neighborhood gardening (and canning) projects. Or even neighborhood picnics. Now is not a bad time to start. I think this is why I’m attracted to the “Autonomist” political philosophy (which is seeing a kind of renaissance in Europe), with its philosophy of implementing whatever social and economic change you can, now, where you are, rather than trying to do so systemically, at a national level, via mass movements. In the meantime, we in the US have an election coming up. And we haven’t come up with a better strategy — or at least a better mass movement — than electoral politics. So in the short run, it’s ID-ing your voters and GOTV, GOTV, GOTV — get your people to send in their mail-in ballots, and don’t waste time trying to change minds. This may require setting aside our pens and laptops this summer and fall. But afterwards, we may have a Member of Congress who will read what we write. here’s a writer who sez “we can’t
shelter in place for climate.” true enuf. but: warnings from the experts will have long-term effects on “societal memory,” she sez. she has a y-axis and an x-axis that prove “the real lesson of covid-19 is that society can respond forcefully & collectively when enough of us are well-informed of what needs to be done, and the government supports individual action with laws.” can’t argue with that . . . meanwhile, the “institutional investor group on climate change, members of which include black rock” (ooooooo) sez covid recovery plans “that ex- ascerbate climate change would ex- pose investors & natl. economies to escalating financial, health, & social risks in coming years,” enjoining national govts. to avoid “risky short-term emissions- intensive projects” (if it don’t sound good in a poem, it’s prob’bly not compelling rhetoric, either); the natl. leaders nod gravely & say “suresuresuresuresure” the transnational capitalist class keeps meeting and recommending; meanwhile, beneath the clouds, in forever-over-yonder: japan times asks “how much cal- amity can east africa take?” meaning: covid + “biblical” plagues of locusts + “exceptionally heavy rainfall, causing floods that threaten life and livelihood from ethiopia to tanzania and all parts in between” (which helps spawn more locusts, and so on; readers of this verse chronicle know this already); & covid means few to spray (hard-to-get) pesticides to stop the locusts; meaning, food scarcity, that regional revenant, rears its maw & haunts and hunts again this week: 5,000 displaced in uganda; 1,800 families homeless in kenya; 1.7 m burundians in need of aid, 39k displaced, “although that number is still rising as flooded houses continue to collapse” & those in “temporary relocation sites” where “everyone washes themselves, their cooking utensils & clothes in this stagnant water,” as the red cross worker sprays it w/decontaminant (“the toilets have overflown” in the floodwater) rich countries are printing money to “bail out” their own corpos; will they (literally) bail out africa? elsewhere: siberian fires 1.5 - 3 x > this time last year; in transbaikal, “a larger area than the whole island of maui” is toast; it’s almost 90 f in siberia, & "people self-isolated outdoors & forgot about fire safety”; as fires still burn in chernobyl zone; & 7k acres in yucatan, a week on; abnormally dry spring in europe; abnormally hot one in morocco; heatwaves in pakistan & shanghai; record hi’s in central u.s.; record hot march, april in dominican; driest-ever april in romania -- but no tornadoes in kansas! (so far . . . dorothy.) not so elsewhere: 351 twisters, 2nd worst for april in u.s. records, killed 40 in southeastern states . . . “communicating the facts,” sez the writer w/the graph, “continues to affect action more than so called ‘influencers.’” communicating to move “the climate risk dial of the least vulnerable segment of the population” means showing climate chaos “to be a matter ‘individually relevant’ to them, now” i think she means us, o global- northern reader hence i catalog the facts, in hopes of upping your “social acceptance” -- i.e., belief that it can happen here, is happening here, to you & yours, & maybe considering the idea that it’s time OK. Then why not forget about politics and devote more time to writing?
Maybe it’s because I was raised Catholic, with a hypertrophic sense of Responsibility (i.e., Guilt). Maybe it’s because I was raised in a “political” family. Maybe it’s because I really have done some political organizing (after such knowledge, what forgiveness?). Maybe it’s feeling more pro-social the older I get. But I can never overcome the nagging feeling that I’m wasting my time — or at least that I would do well to spend less time writing, more time organizing (for instance, in militating for increased climate change mitigation and resilience). There are those who will try to convince me that writing “makes a difference.” Well, yeah. So does flower arranging. But what kind of difference? This question is particularly stark in the genre I generally work in, poetry. “Poetry makes nothing happen,” etc. It does make something happen, but not the same things political organizing does. Perhaps it’s different for widely-read novelists, with the glamor of narrative to bring it all home to people (for those who want to bring it home and not just offer escapism). Poetry might sustain the soul, but it doesn’t shelter, feed, bathe, or clothe people, and it takes time and energy away from doing those things — which seem really, really urgent, right about now. And those are the kind of things that successful political movements of the past have provided. But maybe the drip drip drip of articles, news stories, political pronouncements, water-cooler conversations, climate fiction, even blogs, really is creating an epochal shift in public opinion. We shall see. Hopefully it’s happening faster than a melting iceberg. Then there’s the “I’m a writer, not an organizer” topos. This one just doesn’t work for me (see paragraph #1, above), in part because I have managed, at various times, to do both at the same time, at least to some extent (which is hard). But I also can’t un-remember what Michael Jordan said, of the people who make Air Jordans in sweatshops in Asia: “They do their job, I do mine.” Division of labor, at its finest. Everyone does their job; it’s just that some don’t make enough to live on and others earn 100’s of 1000’s of dollars every day. “I stick to what I know. It’s a shame about the displaced people in Africa and all, but . . . well, the political organizers and aid workers do their job, the writers do theirs.” The former make half as much money as the latter and put their bodies in harm’s way, but other than that, it’s a symmetrical comparison. And having one’s job, and keeping all one’s attention on that job, is itself a form of comfort. It is hard to do two jobs at once: just ask the people trying to hold down three (or who don’t have one). Just ask people who do full time jobs and community activism (all 5 of them). Plus which, “The big shots don’t pay you $5 a day to think about anything but your $5 a day,” as the tractor driver at the beginning of The Grapes of Wrath puts it (the one who’s bulldozing the farm family’s house). To be continued, Tuesday, Cinco de Mayo . . . |
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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. |