This article is about the best thing I've read on the phenomenology of climate change.
"Hold the problem in your mind. Freak out, but don’t put it down. Give it a quarter-turn. See it like a scientist, and as a poet. As a descendant. As an ancestor."
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That title sounds like it could be an AWP panel, right? “This panel will examine ways in which today’s MFA program can prepare student writers for a world in which they have no viable future. Emphasis on practical measures administrators can take to capitalize on the growing market of confused and desperate young people.”
I teach (in part) in a creative-writing program, and I must say I’m feeling increasingly uneasy about that, at least for grad students. For one thing, there’s no future in the academy for new faculty, except as part of a pauperized, “flexible” labor force. And even to get that far, you’ll have to undergo the usual humiliations required to get published. But in addition to the institutional issues, there’s the question of what we think we’re teaching people to do. I daresay most of us might rethink our writing if we had a terminal diagnosis. But in the old days, they withheld that information from the patient. I think maybe we’re doing that to our students. Or we’re all still in the denial phase of grieving for the world we grew up in, with publishing houses and career paths and literacy, and stuff. In the era of climate breakdown, in the twilight of the Holocene, all that is starting to seem a bit unreal, and worrying about them, rather complacent or even self-deluding – like choosing the musical program for the RMS Titanic for the evening of April 15, 1912. But supposing that MFA/CW programs survive into the 2040s. What will they look like? Will the workshop be viable, even logistically? Will people still be interested in literary history – and if so, what aspects? The answer, of course, will be closely tied to the fate of colleges and universities – public ones, especially. Indeed, given the ascendency of neoliberalism + climate breakdown, it seems likely that the number of postsecondary institutions will decline precipitously, leaving only a few elite institutions for the ultra-rich (i.e., pre-Civil-War stuff). It may be that workshops survive, but not as a part of college curriculum, but in refugee camps, community support groups, or subcultural enclaves of various sorts – perhaps taking place in the abandoned buildings on college campuses. That is, they may be very de-professionalized. What can you do? You can write stuff that matters. You can write stuff that gets read. But nobody wants to hear the truth if it’s scary and bad. The left and the center are just as fact-averse as the right wing, if the facts don’t confirm what they already want to hear (hence Jay Inslee, the single-issue “climate-change candidate,” just dropped out of the presidential race). Writers are no different. Some are writing climate-fiction – or “ecopoetry” that addresses climate change at one or two removes – but we’re not really registering the seriousness of the situation. It’s going to diminish, dilute, and maybe destroy the degree programs that many of us work within, the degrees we grant, and the postsecondary institutions that grant them. And sooner or later, it’s going to affect everything all of us write about: relationships, politics, mores, everyday life, war, ethnicity, gender, class – and o yeah, nature. there’s no way to make
art out of news: art is timeless, immemmortal or marmoreal, or something like that, & news? well news is time-bound, earth-bound, sits in the poor body, has an expiration date, like us. art is supposed to survive us, stand the test of time, utter universal truth. universal on this planet or in the universe per se? not the same thing. on this planet, the nightingale’s on its way out. on this planet, time is moving faster, nature and hence human nature per se aren’t what they used to be: e.g., i see where green- land is melting “50 yrs ahead of schedule” & kids swim in the arctic sea, which is contra natura & will render their particular universal truths less utile; & yes, virginia (or alaska), there really is a northwest passage, now sea-ice moves farther from coasts; & europe’s increase in “extreme heat days” is happening ahead of schedule, too; & brazil’s defense minister sez the fires are under control & “already cooling down nicely” – while the forest engineer sez the worst is yet to come; 430 sq. mi burned so far this month in the amazon, from 40k fires; 5x that burn in africa; but only 247 sq. mi. charred in alaska, which makes that the good news i guess; b/c in tropical thailand the farmer sez “i don’t know why the gods, sky and soil, are punishing me like this. what is going on this year and why is there no rain?” monsoon season “fails to deliver,” ochre ground cracked, the paper sez (is this chronicle what they call “poetry of witness”? is it what they call “poetry”? probably not, but that’s not the issue anymore); meanwhile, water levels drop in siberian rivers to unnavigable levels; villages & towns can’t get winter supplies; 41 french départments on “crisis alert”: extreme drought (at bottom of article: “french vocab - la sécheresse - les restriction d’eau - usage prioritaires); the u.s. s.w. waits but small rains down don’t rain; while 2.6 m kenyans running out of food (b/c drought + hurricanes); meanwhile 8 die of tornado (china), 3 die of flooding (japan), 7 die after dam burst (morocco), & 5 feared dead in e. uganda (mudslides); 90 in myanmar this summer (monsoons) (speed it up get it over with); & the artist sets up chunks of glacier ice in london to prove that it melts; he sez art “can bring a physical narrative to some- thing that one knows,” which can bring “a certain em- powerment.” can anything make you feel it really feel it? like setting the thermostat to a higher temp? or going without food or water for a day? even so you can’t feel what’s happening, can’t feel the whole world in your hands. & alls i can do is picture it Poets are always writing about the seasons; musicians, too; and, of course, painters paint them. But what if the seasons aren’t the seasons anymore? Nowadays, it seems like it’s freezing one day and balmy the next; a baking drought one week, and flash floods the next. All the conventional seasonal references that have accreted from the days of ancient pastoral will have to be explained to the young uns. And changed, going forward. To call a day “springlike” already feels like nostalgia. What was spring like, grandpa?
Maybe this state of affairs will focus our mind more on the present and force us to describe that present more precisely. What season is today? Or this morning? We should adopt an inductive seasonality, to deal with the unpredictable and uncertain contingencies of the present. Perhaps in the meantime an entirely new set of conventions will emerge to describe the increasingly unconventional climate. Or to live in it. Indeed, those abrupt changes and reversals could become the material for a lot of literature, in their own right. Maybe the distinction between poem sequence and journal will collapse, since “timeless truths” are looking a lot more time-bound than they ever have, in the current climate (physical and political). Or the seasons will be replaced by the weather, as theme. Instead of The Four Seasons, maybe someone will write a musical composition called The Twenty-Seven Types of Day. Next Tuesday, Sept. 3, be on the lookout for the first Writing Out of Time guest post, by poet and political organizer Stephen Collis. It's pretty great, IMHO.
anyhow,
let’s do the numbers: yesterday’s hi 78 f norm: 88 lo 67 norm: 63 rainfall, month to date: 9.54”, norm mtd: 3.65; & places are flooding people never saw flood before around here – even a road on top of a hill. spooky. & 2nd st is cut off once again: the pump is out of order, so the underpass fills. me, i’m just dealing w/the lake in the back yard & wondering when water will creep into the house for the first time. lotsa floods all over, in fact – streets turn into rapids, wash away cars nr madrid; torrential rain + tornado in malaga; bridge collapse in turkey; 9” in alabama on sunday; 13- year-old drowned in missouri; homes, businesses, vehicles awash in new orleans; inundated streets, sinkholes in mexico w/ 2 dead (electrocution); 5200 evac’d (mudslides) in nagasaki prefecture; 62 dead, 98 injured, 36k families affected since july in sudan i won’t go on b/c it is what it is as they say. but elsewhere, plants & creatures sizzle or burn, of course: fires still going in bolivia & brazil + 7k in angola, 3400 in d.r.c.; 400 (more) hectares incinerate in siberia; & a heatwave in chile, where it’s winter: 37 c / 99 f; 100s evac’d on samos; & “record heat & wet weather in the u.k. have created ‘perfect’ environment for fleas to thrive, leading to a huge jump in complaints.” & greta thunberg sails the atlantic to come to try to save us all, & the democrats prohibit candidates from debating an emergency that’s hurtling us backwards into the future like an asteroid headed for a planet where intelligent life once throve _______________ * It doesn't stop, so neither will I. Whether or not the rainforest or taiga are burning or not (and they are, most of the time), most USAmericans go through their day without thinking once about climate change, especially its potentially destabilizing social and economic effects. The percentage of people who do so is probably around 1% of the population. So what's up with these “one-percenters” (that is, people like me)?
Possibly it's people who were raised in religious households, who imbibed stories of the Apocalypse from an early age, and then lost their faith. The psychological imprint of a vividly depicted "End of Days" is hard to erase, and easy to re-attach to similar scenarios produced by science (i.e., the study of physical reality). And an End of Days without the Millennium and the Last Judgment (in which you, the Chosen, will be resurrected body and soul) becomes a grim scenario indeed. Possibly it's people who dislike the state of the world as it is and so want it to end - perhaps as a kind of secular Last Judgment for our ecological sins, or a Deluge to erase everything and make the way for re-evolution. Possibly it's those few persons with an extraordinary adherence to reason, ability to face facts squarely and to assess the best practical actions to take to bring about the best possible outcome. If these people exist, they are not in politics. Or, possibly climate-change obsessors constitute a portion of the many, many people who suffer from chronic or recurrent depression. The theory of neurodiversity holds that the many neurological dispositions that we see as pathologies are in fact evolutionary adaptations. So perhaps depressives are the only ones who can see and admit how bad things are – the ones who sound the alarm or at least deal with nasty realities. Anyway, perhaps neurology explains why some of us can't look away from the train wreck – why, instead of insulating oneself from this baddest of bad news (as the neuronormative world does), depressives may seek it out, want to know the gory details. But then: what do you do with that? Put a depressive in the White House instead of a narcissistic sociopath, perhaps. Or maybe rationalize away all the doom and gloom as just another psychological symptom, rather than a legitimate reason for concern. Or maybe you write about it. In any case, a lot of writers are world-class depressives (or bipolar). In some cases, it was or is the source of their genius or inspiration. I wouldn't be surprised if Octavia Butler was or if Margaret Atwood is. But at what price? It is difficult, socially speaking, to depict things the way you see them – esp. in the U.S. – if you don’t “keep on the sunny side of life,” even if there ain’t much sunlight left. And if you are honest and tell the truth as you see it – especially if you aren’t funny – it will get you ignored, or even shunned. That’s why climate fiction has such a small audience – as do Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise. I’m guessing that Cassandra may not have been a seer, but just a depressive. She was right, of course; but look where it got her. Who wants to go down that road? Problem is, we may be hurtling down it anyway. "For those of us who haven’t yet seen climate change fill our lungs with toxic air, fill our pipes with poisonous water, carry away our homes, kill our crops, or drown our families, grief is an aperture. It’s an opening in the soul where the pain of those faraway people can rest with yours."
A very moving essay from New York magazine. Read the rest here. climate change
is a “thing” this week – until the smoke clears, maybe (if it does): bolsonaro bows to “intl. pressure” & sends army to fight forest fires; meanwhile, the scientist sez “if we kill enough Amazon forest . . . it almost means game over for our battle against climate change” (wait, there’s a battle?); well, that sort of talk gets yr attention, esp. when 7k sq mi had already burned from jan - july.; nobody knows how much has burned since then; but bolivia has lost 2900 sq mi so far. & gov. jay inslee, the “climate-change candidate for prez drops out: people not interested; & a fiction-writer friend sez her agent sez: “send me anything but climate fiction – it’s all I’m getting but nobody wants to read it.” & can you blame em? the message is: hunker down, critters – there’s no stoppin it – you can’t get off the tracks, so better duck – whatever that means to you. there is a cyclone headed for the arctic. & a megalithic circle reemerges from the bottom of a dried-up reservoir in spain! back to the stone age . . . meanwhile floods in nigeria destroy tents in refugee camp, hundreds killed, thousands dis- placed; but if drowned or suffocated people don’t get to you, think about the donkeys of namibia, apparently in its worst drought ever: canals and fields “are messed up with stinking rotten donkey carcasses as drought takes its toll on the poor draught animals. Village dogs on continuous meat feast – they take along their puppies to feed”; & if donkeys die, fields don’t get ploughed; if fields don’t get . . . well, you see where this is going . . . I'm off to an all-day departmental "retreat" [insert appropriate emoji] - do they do these in the real world, or just academia?? Anyway, I will be back at it this evening. See you then!
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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. |