Just read Jenny Odell’s 2017 essay “How to Do Nothing.” I almost wrote “How to Waste Time” – and that is precisely her point: our time is so commodified that we have no time to formulate a critique of the commodification of time. You’re either “doing something with it” or “wasting it.” We are victims of “a colonization of the self by capitalist ideas of productivity and efficiency.” She quotes Gilles Deleuze and Bifo Berardi, who assert that doing nothing – and saying nothing – is essential to formulating something to do or to say. And why do we have to do or say anything? Observation can make one’s life worthwhile in a way that publications, say, may not. Moreover:
“I’m suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, non-commercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality. And I’m suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of others, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit.” Productivity is all about individuation, excel-lence, linear movement (away from the earth and the body, ultimately). “Maintenance,” by contrast, is a respect for cyclicality, repetition, bodily needs and processes. Perhaps most importantly, instrumental reason and productivist ideology render impossible any contact with the natural world: bodily, sensory, phenomenological proximity, sensitivity, and communication are replaced by mediation, representation, cognition. Like all binaries, this one is easy to deconstruct. But there is more than a little usefulness in it, particularly for writers – or visual artists like Odell. She doesn’t mention climate chaos, but it seems to me her assertions are especially important against that background. The equation time = money (+ engines) got us into this mess, for one thing. For another, nobody knows what to do about it; and nobody can figure it out, because they don’t give themselves time to figure it out. (It’s worth noting that Jem Bendell, Dr. “Deep Adaptation,” whom I’ve quoted before, had to take an unpaid leave from his academic post to explore the issue and couldn’t get the results placed in a peer-reviewed journal.) Odell acknowledges that “[t]here’s an obvious critique of all of this, and that’s that it comes from a place of privilege.” But as she points out, it’s only privilege because the eight-hour day is a thing of the past for most – like the labor movement that secured it. People have to work more hours for less money – which doesn’t leave much time and energy for organizing. She’s not, she says, urging us to do nothing in the sense of (for instance) doing nothing to reduce the number of hours people have to work. Rather: “. . . I believe that having recourse to periods of and spaces for ‘doing nothing’ are [sic] even more important, because those are times and places that we think, reflect, heal, and sustain ourselves. It’s a kind of nothing that’s necessary for, at the end of the day, doing something.” Perhaps poetry is a kind of doing-nothing, in this creative sense of the word. An inquiry. Loafing as spiritual invitation. Perhaps it will lead to ideas about what to do when one is doing something.
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successful climate
communication: 1. “employs frames that support the message with positive emotions” 2. “makes climate-friendly behaviors easy and convenient” (this, per: per espen stoknes, norwegian psychologist, in 2015) ok – so – know this: most places on earth are not suffering anthropogenic climage change- induced weather catastrophes at the moment: for instance: l.f.k., 6-17: hi: 84; normal hi: 85 lo: 68; normal lo: 64 partly sunny; bad as weather has gotten, it’s not as bad as the 10,000s dead from cyclones, flooding, famine we’ve seen in recent years; & if you act now, you can spare future generations cyclones, flooding, famine and prepare your community for same for just $5 a month . . . . . . we interrupt this program w/this special bulletin: greenland temps 100f above normal in june: sled dogs walking on water! (& i know i said no arctic stuff, but they’re saying it affects weather farther south like here); villages in w. alaska moved due to erosion due to thawing. saskatchewan in drought. “as you walk along you see what look like logs poking out the permafrost. but they aren’t logs, they are the bones of mammoths and other pleistocene animals” melting into the open ok – i see what stoknes means but the times aren’t giving us much to work with – like the corn belt, where planting moves slower than any season on record; corn price at 5-year hi (floods) meanwhile more floods in brazil, mexico, new bruswick; epic landslide onto highway connecting eastern colombia to rest of the country – 30 metric tons of soil, rock removal “hindered by ongoing rains”; 3k uruguayans displaced by floods; 50k people need help in yemen - flooding – women in the “door” of tarpaulin tent in camp; 364k cases of cholera this year; evolution makes us: self-interested imitative status-hungry think in short-term disregard threats we can’t see not a great recipe, under the circumstances more record highs in honolulu: “when i moved here 30 yrs back” (friend in hawai’i) “no need of A/C: trade winds instead. now it’s hot for month after month after month”; even 2015 seems so long ago . . . nowadays all those graphs & maps that go from blue to scarlet & we're in the red; we tune out block out, per per stoknes . . . global wheat price ↑ 30% due to australian harvest ↓ thirty percent. a staple. in addition to the strategies above, stoknes recommends: 3. using “the power of social networks”; cambodian govt. denies link between massive de- forestation and temps in 100s; 4. using “the power of stories to create meaning and community”; “with 43 per cent of india engulfed in a drought, 600 million people are reeling under its fury” – from “india is drying up, fast,” devinder sharma tribuneindia.com 10s of 1000s abandoning villages 5. using “indicators for feedback on societal response”; “drought leaves key african hydro dam less than a third full”; already 90f in moscow – more people connecting weather & climate & politics - hail in switzerland, france sinks boats, breaks windshields, ruins fruit crops; corsica had snow last month, now it’s 104 iraq: “wrapping outside door handles in tape to stop them getting too hot in the sun or stepping fully clothed into curbside showers to cool off.” first it was prevention, then mitigation, then resilience and adaptation . . . how do we make it fun and simple? how do we make it? The Stoic philosophers thought that it was the nature of the human animal to be rational. If that’s true, one has to ask how come rationality doesn’t seem to come naturally. At least in the mid- to long-term. We’re great at using rationality to solve problems and execute complex tasks in the here-and-now – often in the interest of whatever deluded notion of personal happiness we think we’re serving. But thinking in terms of the big picture and the larger community? Not so much. And here we are.
But we never stop talking, writing, thinking in language. It’s like animal scat: it has to be expressed, and it leaves a trail. Whether anybody else picks up the scent is another matter; but maybe that’s not the point. Just as listeners respond more to tone of voice than content of words, so speakers just want to be heard by someone who seems to be listening. The Stoics also thought it was one’s duty to follow the nature and destiny of a human being. While rationality may be a smaller part of that being than they thought, maybe writing (or singing or speaking) is in some way a fulfillment of our nature as humans. It will be in the fossil record (or storage vault) for the survivors or space aliens to find, if they’re interested (and exist), but that won’t do us any good. Fame means nothing to the dead, and neither does being read. But the act of writing means something to the writer, and the product might mean something to some reader somewhere. Is that a compelling reason to write, in the teeth of social dissolution? Or just a bunch of existential bullshit? "In Tragedy Let There Be the Economy" - from Quiddity 12:1 (June 2019). Thanks to Judy Roitman for sending this along.
“some say global warming
is the result of human activity” (tina fey qua sarah palin), “but i think it’s just a naturally occurring part of the end of days” (or something like that – “quoted” from memory) a new heaven & a new earth, we were promised – new and improved! – why worry about the old ones? the one we had yesterday in lawrence, kansas, u.s.*: hi: 81 / norm: 84 / record 107 (1953) lo: 50 / norm: 63 / record 44 (1985) & any record not in the twenty- first century i choose to take as a hopeful sign however it was a record hi in central lithuania (although six people drowned in floods as well) & ukraine – where “roads are poured w/water” meanwhile s. china: floods, mud- & land- slides killed 61, 4300 rescued, 9300 homes collapsed, 356,000 people evac’d, > 9,000,000 acres farmland damaged, & $1,930,000,000 lost – cars, trucks swooshed away cities swamped, islanded – (picture = thousand words, but only numbers count) australia still bedroughted after hottest summer ever – murray-darling basin ag getting pretty dry. hottest spot on planet monday and tuesday? (hint: not kuwait) : hermosillo, sonora, mexico: 118 f / 48 c (why won’t they get in line and do it the legal way?) record highs in british columbia; while here, barron’s, forbes, & al. fretting about midwest corn harvests; & in rajasthan, they’re marrying frogs to try to stop the drought, & i must say varuna and varsha look pretty cute in their nuptial duds (tho 28% of sugarcane fields remain unplanted) meanwhile “large, aggressive” siberian wildfires near the “megaslump” (depression 1 km long, 800 m wide, 100 m deep caused by soviet clearcuts, where “scientists found a perfectly preserved prehistoric baby horse, extinct foal of cold-resistant lenskaya species. there are hopes dna from the foal will allow scientists to clone the species back to life”); britain in drought, reservoirs parched & cracked, as other parts get 2x june rain in days: 500 rail passengers stranded 8 hrs. in lincolnshire; while around lake como they’re fleeing rising waters as rest of italy enters drought but flooding in kenya flooding in yemen (more cholera); flooding in in- donesia displaces 5,703. > 1k may wildfires in the holy land: are we lake of fire yet? clone us back to life, o lord! “weatherwatch: melting arctic ice brings u.s. heatwaves”; humph – that’s as may be; all’s i know is what i see out my window; local weather the only verifiable news I see younger writers “building careers,” and I have to wonder what sort of career it will be – how long the building will stand. Even for those who are very successful in terms of readership. Let’s say there’s 15-20 years left before the climatic (and climactic) SHTF moment arrives, when food and water scarcity, large-scale housing scarcity, and concomitant hyperinflation (or unemployment and deflation) ensues.* Nobody is going to buy books or magazines (or rather, even fewer people will buy them than now). “Streaming content” may still be available, so you could write for its providers. But that, too, will grow more expensive as everything else (electricity, ISPs, hardware) does, too.
One could imagine some very low-wattage kind of publication – probably text-only. Or a kind of samizdat network. Or even a Fahrenheit 451 set-up. These might be particularly attractive options, given that fascism seems to be creeping back all over the world – in response to insecurity spawned in part by climate change. But in any case, even the currently paltry numbers of readers, even in the global north, goes way, way down. (Indeed, the human population may go way, way down.) All of which brings up the question: does writing (as some theorists would have it) presuppose a reader – and language, a receiver? If so, what does it mean to write for a reader whose existence is purely hypothetical? Maybe that is what all readers are, to a writer. Those are much more fundamental questions than that of the shape the publishing world will take (if it exists) two decades from now. But I do think they’re the starting points for re-conceiving our ideas of writing, reading, author, and audience, in the era of Massive Climate Uncertainty. At the very least, I think, one has to decide whether or not one conceives of one’s audience as particularly (or even moderately) large. In that case, it may be that you’re like the band on the Titanic, and you just need to keep playing until the water covers your instrument. If you’re truly “writing-to-be-writing,” maybe you should consciously refrain from attempting to publish, in order to be the writer of tomorrow, today. Most of us, I think, fall in between. For us, esp. poets, paper and print are probably not the way to go, except to obtain institutional rewards (where available – print still carries the cachet). It’s a huge waste of money, trees, and energy (Wm. T. Vollman claims it costs more BTUs to make a pound of paper than a pound of concrete). Better to work with some combination of informal on-line (for your global subculture or virtual coterie) and read/recited or circulated by hand (for your local circle). The local and the immediate may be all we’re concerned with, 20 yrs. hence. ------------ * This may be generous. I just read about a report that claims several of the biggest cities in India will run out of clean water by 2020 (i.e., next year). Stay tuned. alternate title: “we’ve
never seen anything like it” may 2019 = wettest month (not wettest may, wettest month) on record in this area; but june precipitation: month to date: 0.99” norm m.t.d.: 2.30” (??) yesterday: hi: 81 / norm: 84 lo: 49 / norm: 62 (??) (o & may was u.s.’ hottest ever btw) but not quite 122f: that’s what it was in agra yesterday; four people died on the train to kerala; farther south, “village after village lies deserted . . . leaving sick & elderly to fend for themselves” – wells and handpumps dried up – 6k water tankers to maharashra daily; 8 million at risk; beed, a city of 240k, clean drinking water has run out – flushing “has become an un- affordable luxury” & “women wait for night to defecate in the open” – & 4700 farmer suicides past 5 years – we here may be seeing more of that soon – (even as upper kashmir valley sees unseasonable snowfall; lower valley rained 2 days straight) moreover: kuwait city 126f in shade; 145 in sun (but it’s dry heat); “. . . the man was found with his tools next to his body” & rome thinks they have it bad @ 99 or san francisco @ 100 (w/”meltdown” of subway); it’s only 86 in the finnish arctic . . . alberta wildfire big as rhode island . . . “no individual weather event can be attributed to climate change. however . . .” dry corridor of central america drier and hotter than ever; 55k people leave nicaragua; all of may’s rain fell in just 5 days, ruining the first harvest (“drought-to-deluge cycle,” another scientist calls it). “’conditions for agricultural production in the dry corridor don’t exist anymore," (victor campos, dir. humboldt center) “that's what this land might have in store for us: death” (subsistence farmer) meanwhile autstralia wheat harvest (world’s 4th largest producer) ↓ 11%; & global prices ↑ 15% since may in namibia, “all you see on farmers’ faces is desperation.” late rains didn’t come; now livestock too skinny to sell and feed unaffordable even as flooding in s. china: 16 dead last week; 2 million people “impacted” flooding in sulawesi (where’s sulawesi?), over 4k people evac’d; flooding in bavaria, hail hammering munich “like gunshots,” broken windshields; & in english midlands and n.e. flooded roads and rails & rain continues u.s. south, midwest; atlanta: most rain in single day; st. louis: river almost lapping base of the arch; corn planting at all-time low . . . beans not much better “we’ve entered ‘a new climate regime,’” says one report but i’ve been outside – it’s a beautiful day today . . . ------------------------------- * The short lines are the result of my trying to preserve line-breaks on the screens of mobile devices (an approach not unlike Jack Kerouac's stanza form in Mexico City Blues, which fit the size of his pocket notebook - why not?). But those screens are unforgiving, and it doesn't always work - unless I shrink the font, which makes it unreadable for those over 50. But it doesn't really matter, as this is not a real poem. In fact, none of this is real and isn't happening. But isn’t all writing about uncertainty? We enjoy unforeseen plot twists, unexpected language; and calling a book “predictable” is a put-down. And as Frost said of poetry: “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Even those who cherish the kind of poetry that affirms what they already think they know enjoy a fresh turn of phrase.
In terms of audience – well, there’s the Romantic notion of writing as self-expression (“Let that boy boogie-woogie – it’s in him, and it’s got to come out!”). This model implies the unimportance of the audience – it only involves the writer; the reader is a secondary consideration. Certain “high” modernists, in turn, saw the art object as “autotelic” – a self-sufficient entity that is its own excuse for being, regardless of whether anyone sees or reads it (“A poem should not mean but be”). And postmodernist writing is often premised on the idea that language has a life of its own – or that communication is always fundamentally miscommunication – meaning that there is nothing really for the reader to “get” – nor communication for the space aliens to receive (tho they may have implanted language as a virus). So, during the industrial age, as the economy became more and more carbon-based, the writers and artists were already preparing for the demise of the audience – albeit not in the way they anticipated. There are other strains of literary history, of course – a more “pro-social” type, whether radical left or comfortably conservative. Both the Schoolroom poets and the Proletarian poets are inconceivable without an audience. The poets of the New Negro Renaissance often seem to be writing for a community, at least as much as for themselves. And the political poetry of today – docupoetry, poets read the news, poetry of witness, etc. – is fundamentally dependent on at least the idea of a potential audience. And poets do have an audience, for now – one another. For as long as printing presses and the internet can keep operating (which may be less time than we think). So, considering the here and now – the people in your family, coterie, club, workplace, town, era – this is one reason to continue to write, even as the water rises or dries up. Another reason: as pure, existential activity – as a way of staying in the present, affirming the reality of the present, and accepting the perpetual unreality of the past and future. I believe that history and climate science are crucially important. But ontologically, the past is a mess of memories and documents (some of them faulty or lying); and the future is an hypothesis (I could be dead tomorrow; we could be dead tomorrow, with the right virus, warhead, asteroid, or super-volcano). This was always-already the case. So in a sense, we are already writing in the shadow of the falling boulder – the unfolding climate catastrophe is merely bringing it to our consciousness (some of us). Perhaps, like Seneca’s potter or Thoreau’s staff-maker, the artists and writers should continue what they’re doing for the sake of doing it – and perhaps do it with more, not less, care. Quantity and efficiency matter less to the dying; likewise, maybe the notion of a “professional” writer is an anachronism or a contradiction in terms, in the Anthropocene. But pottery, staff-making, and writing are ways to cope with the unthinkable future, while staying grounded in the present – even if they do nothing to alter that present or future in any substantive way. And then there’s everybody else. Does the writer keep writing when people around her are dying preventable deaths? Or when the crops are shriveling up? If you believe such things as virtue, morality, or ethics, can you fulfill the duties or imperatives it lays upon you merely by writing? Or, should the art take a back seat to defending, interpreting, curing, growing, sewing, well-digging? here:
18 homes destroyed another 80 damaged; 17 injured, 3 critically; miles of mangled trees and wall-less houses (aftermath of our tornado). if your house is still there it may have fine filaments of fiber- glass coating everything inside – a yard littered with nails – the stuff you don’t think of . . . yesterday’s hi 77, “normal” hi 84 lo 61; norm 61 – wish i’d put some money on that one . . . meanwhile downtown dallas: 70 mph winds topple crane – apt. bldg. hit, 1 dead, 5 hurt, lots of cars crushed in garage n. carolina 12”+ rain this weekend more drowned farms & (rail) road closures & grain barges stalled along 200 mi. of mississippi r. mean the goods don’t get to market waters too high currents too fast (+ overflowing septic systems, toxic industrial waste meanwhile all that fresh water going into the gulf kills sea life (and fishing industry); baton rouge, cairo, natchez: longest flood ever; month’s worth of water in single day along gulf, in atlanta; flooding around great lakes; & “very long duration flooding . . . can really start to wear on people.’’ (meanwhile 88k people in s.e. china evac’d due to flooding there . . . ) elsewhere: lower rio grande already tops 100f, 120+ heat indices; 110s in arizona, s. calif. locales; pushing 90 in n. finland; 126 in the shade in kuwait; over 122 in rajasthan, where heatstroke is killing the monkeys, tigers wander into town seeking water; in c., n. india, duststorms kill 34; “in jharkhand state, a man stabbed six others after he was stopped from filling extra water barrels at a public tank” summer is ready when you are (or not) drought in s. madagascar, horn of africa, & . . . don’t read about biology b/c you will see how precarious everything is; read poetry instead |
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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. |