having thought about
climate change for years & followed u.s. politics for decades, i finally arrived at the simple solution to solve global warming – but now i’m old & i forgot what it was. see kids: this is why the future is in your hands – you are our hope & we are inspired by you. now go get em! but seriously folks: researchers at u. of colo. say laughter is the best medicine: “stand up for climate change” – a standup comedy open mic for climate humor: this is the way to change peoples’ minds they say. you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, as the saying goes – which is fine if you want more flies, but you’ll be getting that anyway w/hotter temps. climate change: now leonardo di caprio’s agin it, billie ellish came out agin it, jason momoa’s agin it, jonathan franzen’s agin it, & it’s finally beating out game of thrones as a google search term! meanwhile 7 million displaced by climate chaos. what kind of poem would you make out of that? 7 million displaced by climate chaos in the first 6 mo. of 2019, that is – more than any 6 mo. in history. more importantly, sea-level rise will make it harder for more than 60 million people in the united states to flush their toilets. that’s right: septic systems don’t work: “dirt around the tank filters out contaminants. you flush, waste fills a tank on property. bacteria breaks it down. the heavier material falls to the bottom of the tank. eventually, the effluent goes into underground pipes & gets released into the soil.” waterlogged soil = contamination of ground- water, drinking water, & all that water you see people wading through, escaping floods. “this isn’t some third-world country, this is miami – this shouldn’t be happening here.” meanwhile, the guy who shorted the housing bubble tells his clients: “the market’s failure to integrate climate science with investment analysis has created a mis- pricing phenomenon that is possibly larger than the mortgage credit bubble of the mid-2000s.” i could go on and on and talk about the “historic” winter storm smothering the n. rockies in snow & shattering record lows; or the record hi temps in the east; or “flash drought” in the south; or devastating deadly floods in n. india (yr’s worth of rain in 4 mo.) & s. africa (where climate change cost 62k jobs); or an area the size of greece burned in the amazon rain forest (so far); or state of emerg. in honduras (drought); but i won’t, b/c “leave ‘em laughing,” they say; & this is where the punch line comes in - wait for it . . . wait for it . . .
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Of course, just because there wasn’t much literature in North America prior to the 16th century doesn’t mean there weren’t stories and lyrics. It’s just that they weren’t written down in characters; they were spoken, sung, and chanted. This was true of the northern European invaders’ own tribal ancestors, of course – but Europeans were becoming Modern, so they’d forgotten that part.
There’s not much need for writing if the author is right there, has their work memorized, and is teaching it to other people. Indeed, if multiple people know it by heart, it may be more durable than paper. Unless, of course, somebody kills off most of those people who know it and inflicts cultural genocide on the survivors. This is not a hypothetical scenario. But then there’s all those books from the ancient world that didn’t survive; and those that did were saved by happenstance, as much as anything. Parchment & papyrus are mortal, too. And they can discourage the use of memory (that daggumed Thoth!). If you’re an indigenous person (anywhere) and you care about indigenous culture, that means there’s probably going to be some degree of recovery and reconstitution involved. It may be that there are surviving people who bear the traditions in their heads (possibly in the language in which they were first conveyed). It may be that some of it was forgotten but written down first. The latter may or may not have been reported accurately, or the recorder may simply not have known enough about the cultural context to understand what was being said, and so wrote it down incorrectly. Or it was one of many many variants. This isn’t just true for Native American or First Nations: one of the only reasons we know anything about the ancient Celtic religious festivals and time-keeping is through the Coligny Calendar, which is thought to be a bowdlerized, demotic, sketchy, and not-altogether-reliable version of the druidical teachings of the Gauls. Somebody kinda sorta almost remembered that stuff. But whether it’s the right time to do a particular rite, or what kinds of trees bear what fruit at what times, orature often conveys crucial information. I have a hell of a time memorizing texts; I pretty much have to repeat something every day to remember it (which doesn’t happen). Which is another way of saying I’ve become dependent on writing. But it makes me suspect that orature only survives because it is important to the people hearing it – physically, metaphysically, emotionally. I guess it’s kind of a way of prioritizing – or winnowing out. And people pick up oral traditions from other people – stories and topoi spread – hence all the stories about dueling twin brothers throughout the Americas. So, the point is not the artist’s imaginativeness and personal inventiveness; the point is education, entertainment, cohesion, identity. The text may have originated in a vision, as I suspect most “myths” do. Then each teller adds their original inventions here and there, and the traditions evolve. But it’s not about individuality: originality didn’t become a really big deal in Europe until the 18th century. And originality + individuality have given us some great art – along with a carbon-fueled economy that threatens to wipe out human culture altogether, original or not. So maybe the take-away is that, not only should we de-center humans from our cultural narratives, but we should also de-emphasize the author. Various procedural forms of writing, esp. those that rely on chance operations, do that already. But if you’re a really great poet, you’ll come up with a fascinating way of singing instructions for grinding corn or mending a tear. And you’ll be a great person if you don’t have to have your name attached to it. Such people will be contributors to whatever sort of culture is to survive, just as they have been in the past. Next time (for prose post - Tues., Oct. 1): Guest post by poet, translator, essayist, etc., H.L. Hix! “climate change” is
trending; trendy, too: social media abuzz w/ greta this & turning point that: “climate change”: donald sutherland don’t like it, angelina jolie don’t like it, & the u.n. climbs down from the climate summit w/o stone tablets – or any real anything, really. nobody will do what needs doing or will will to do it: the oceans sucked up the heat so that those of us who live on land & don’t fish hardly notice. maybe nobody can. but the angolan govt. can distribute staples to drought victims in the country’s south, w/1.5 m folks “food insecure,” i.e. hungry recently, soon, or now; the pune collector in maharastra state can evac 29k people to avoid the fate of the 12 killed by floods; & hyderabad at “a standstill” (not to mention torrential downpours & deluges in w. greece, puerto rico, & london gets month’s worth of rain in one day; 13” in 24 hrs. in michigan; & after worst flooding in 100 yrs, costa brava in spain has worst mosquito plague: asian “tiger mosquitoes”: a billion hatching round the clock, flying in huge swarms; “known to be extremely aggressive,” attack day & night & day (w/dengue and zika, at that)) the bolivian amazon looks like “an endless series of fires”; indonesia skies still red; more record heat in maui; & the i.t. worker in greenland sez “change is here, it is not some thing in the future or 100 years. it is here. it is happening” & a native inhabitant sez "we don't know what winter will come now”; nor do we here in n.e. ks.: hi’s still 10f>norm lo’s still 15f>norm if things don’t freeze, bad things happen around here; & if nothing freezes, the bad things happen there, too, there where you are, who- ever you are “Literature today lives on the narrow margin of security that the democratic West, fighting for its life, can afford; and that margin may grow more narrow every day.”
The above quote sounds like it might have been written yesterday, as both art and democracy are under threat from right-wing “populists” and authoritarians. But it comes from On Native Grounds, by Alfred Kazin, from 1942, when fascism and militarism seemed literally to be taking over the world. It strikes a chord because in times of intense pressure to survive, literature often seems a bit more marginal than it does during peacetime in a developed society. When I teach the first half of the American lit survey course, much of what we read in the first third are texts that one might not regard as “literary”: sermons, histories, letters, discovery narratives, captivity narratives, conversion narratives. That is, they were texts designed to achieve a relatively short-term goal, whether it was to save souls, promote exploration and settlement, or convey news. We read them precisely because they are time-bound: they give us an insight into what the authors – and perhaps those around them – were thinking. What we think of as literary genres don’t flourish in America until the very late 18th c.; before that, what poetry there was written was largely religious or political in character. It wasn’t for lack of learning: the authors on our syllabus are mostly highly-educated persons. It’s just that they were confronted by immediate challenges that preoccupied them: waging war, running from war, trying to survive genocide, surviving in a (to them) alien environment and territory, surviving alien invasion, trying to govern themselves, trying to avoid damnation. I tell students that I see literary works as individuals’ responses to their world. As such, it is necessarily historically situated, which is why I’m most comfortable with literary history in the context of broader history. When we say a text is “timeless” or “universal,” what we mean is that it speaks to us in our time. Whether that means that the authors have hit upon immutable truths of human nature and the universe, or we simply reinterpret their works in light of our own particular needs (as with the quotation above), is beside the point. The point is that writers write to deal with what’s in front of them. Whether that is a novel or a political tract depends upon the situation and the person. But there were more tracts than novels written in North America during the Revolutionary War. And when George Washington staged Addison’s Cato for his officers at Valley Forge, it wasn’t a USO show: he did it to achieve a particular military purpose. All of which is to say that, as we march further into an era that promises to make life less predictable and pleasant, we might not be well served by the distinction between “literature” and the rest of writing. We may need to use whatever generic conventions are ready to hand, in whatever form they occur to us, in order to meet our logistical, social, political, or psychological needs and those of our readers or students (if there are any). Horace urges us to “believe that every day that dawns will be the final one for you [and to] receive each unexpected hour with gratitude.” The same might be true of industrialized society; we may want to write whatever we’re writing as though it were the last thing we were able to write – because it might well be. It bears noting that Horace was writing a letter. (next time: orature: here first & maybe last) Next guest post will be by the multi-talented and always engaged H.L. Hix on October 1. Stay tuned!
walked home from night
class through sticky air; i’m used to this i grew up in memphis, its sept. weather just followed me here, like an inherited trait – no poem til late – poemizing, teaching poetry, i keep acting like all this is some- how important, like anyone will get hurt if i don’t. we call it doing our duty, maybe, we call it one day at a time; 1st things 1st; walk don’t run til the water reaches you knees, when you won’t be able to any- way. our brains won’t let us see our- selves as non-exempt: it will always happen to somebody else: e. africa, not e. kansas: like the somali region, where people dig into dry riverbeds, hoping for leftover water; woman who lost 1 cow, 20 goats, 5 sheep: “it rained only 5 days, very small showers; not enough to grow grass” [“o.m.g. he’ll be telling us about starving llamas next, l.o.l., snicker”] (but the title is ironic – it’s a verse chronicle, not a “poem”) i see where someone could have inhabited venus once, if someone had been around: soil full of minerals & vitamins, temperate shallow freshwater oceans (where the fishing was good), any kind of proof of life you want could be there, tho something happened then followed close upon, surprised the – like a hella herculaneum, suddenly went hot & found out it was near its sun, sweltering or “hellish,” the word, so anybody there did not go unextincted; but that was volcanoes, not smokestacks so we try to walk in stickiness that turns into amber as we move, scanning our messages, while we can’t not focus on swishing sounds, polka dots in trees, the geologic times will have their day. so we need more missions & models, more rorschach tests to determine con- tingency plans, to con- jure volcanoes spewing green lava that takes root as soon as it cools, ash that turns into rain clouds, or flying carpets to extract u.s. citizens. meanwhile, paper sez “indonesia looks like mars” – proof of the existence of trees on mars, since the ones in indonesia burn Participants in Climate Strike protest on the University of Kansas campus. Photo by Ashley Golledge. Well, our little climate strike in Lawrence, Kansas didn’t produce the numbers the ones in NYC or German cities did, but it was not bad, by Lawrence standards: about 50 people at City Hall; 75 on campus; close to 100? at the rally that evening. Fairly well-behaved, even sedate, as befits a demonstration in Kansas, but sincere and intent. Some very nice signs, too. Of course, the fact that there weren’t over 1,000 people at each of those three events suggests that people’s heads are still lodged in a very dark place, where climate is concerned.
But it was heartening to see that there were actually some young people at all of these events. Whether or not they outnumbered us grayhairs, I couldn’t tell. But the polling I’ve seen suggests that, the younger you are, the more likely you are to be worried about climate change. Which stands to reason: you’re going to experience more of it in your lifetime. The effects will be cumulative & will accumulate exponentially. Not a very reassuring prospect. My question for teachers of creative writing or leaders of writing workshops: are students/participants writing about the climate crisis? I know they’re writing about nature, or even environmentalism. But climate change per se? Personally, I haven’t seen much of it – yet. Perhaps these demos will put it on the radar of more young adults. But people, young or otherwise, write about matters of most concern to them. They write about struggles with family, with substance abuse and mental health, with racism, sexism, homophobia. They write about love (fall semester) and breakups (spring semester). They have enough problems and possibilities in life without thinking about an abstraction like “climate.” Part of it may be peer pressure: who wants to be the weirdo Debbie Downer who writes about mass extinction, weather catastrophes, and death death death? A workshop leader certainly could offer prompts relating to climate chaos (“Funny weather we’ve been having, huh?”); but I’m allergic to forcing people to write in a particular way or even about a particular subject. This issue also circles back to that fundamental question: how do you represent something that is happening everywhere at once, and therefore nowhere in particular? Call it a “hyperobject” or the “environmental sublime” or whatever, but it certainly does challenge one’s powers of imagination. So maybe that’s precisely the place to start: finding a way to challenge students to represent the unrepresentable. Such an exercise could easily devolve into talking about the globe, the big blue marble, pictures of flowers with sad faces, etc., or it’s-a-small-world-after-all faux cosmopolitanism. But more specific prompts might work. Write a story about someone your age whose house and family member have just been washed away in a flood. For the third time in two years. Do an oral history of the million-year-old person. Or a science-fiction poem from the POV of someone trying to find bugs and grubs to eat and filtering their own urine to avoid dehydration. (OK – that one’s a little traumatizing, never mind.) But you get the idea. Sure, we know we’re all immortal and invulnerable; but just imagine What if? . . . If communities and countries are going to be ready for the effects of climate chaos, their citizens and leaders are going to have to take it personally – before things really get out of hand. They are going to have to see it as a threat to their personal bodies and their families’ bodies, to their personal life routines and aspirations (e.g., starting a family and feeding them). We’ve got to make it real. And since the leaders all believe they’ll be dead before the SHTF in a big way, it de facto (and unfairly) falls to those who are going to be their age when it does. I’m averse to foisting my ideology upon students – perhaps I’m a dewy-eyed Deweyan liberal-democratic mushmind, that way. But if I can get them to envision the near future as the train wreck they can’t look away from, maybe they won’t . . . More cyclones, typhoons, monsoons, hurricanes, and tropical storms in the pipeline, according to NOAA . . .
happy almost autumn!
(if such still exists) our hi yesterday: 95 f norm: 80 our lo yesterday: 65 norm: 53 it’s not the heat, it’s . . . precip, mo. to date: 0.47 norm, mo. to date: 2.74 well, none of this means anything, really: a blip, not a trend. for that, look at the “climate stripes”: graphic rep of avg temps 1850-present – it’s become a thing – like the earth’s climate bar code, now seen on everything from stage backdrops to fashionable neckwear – in the upper left corner we could put a canton with fifty stars (the fact i thought of that means somebody has done it already) – wish i had one for the cli-stri picket line o well students in houston have an added incentive to walk out today: tropical storm imelda 2nd 1000-yr flood in 2 yrs – classroom roofs leaking, school parking lots like lakes or raging rapids, students still ptsd’d from harvey stuck at school – "i have my little ones distracted with coloring & arthur on screen. learning is NOT feasible now. acting as a mother to calm the worries of 20 children. they are very upset." schools in session while the mayor sez "wherever you are, stay where you are" (also best advice ever for nailing yr carbon footprint); as 100s are waiting for rescue, rescuers wade through water up to stinky armpits; 3 ½ ft of rain as of noon yesterday & still raining; & students are out in s. laos, too, b/c of flooding: “it’s all gone. teaching materials, the text books and even black boards, all damaged.” not to mention rice crop; + 28 dead, 500k homeless, $50m damage; while indonesian fires continue spreading smoke next door. “c” is for “climate stripes,” “d,” for “day zero”: term for when you run out of h2o, as 15 australian municipalities are about to do (incl. sydney); & after wettest year ever, washington state now faces drought . . . meanwhile trendy retailers give workers a day off to blow off cli-steam; but in bow, n.h., they’re taking aim at a coal-fired power plant, trying to shut it down & prepping to get arrested in the process; & all over the world others know they will be fired, expelled, jailed, or worse if they take part. “what am i risking? am willing to risk?” show yr stripes, yr sunrise logo, yr xr hourglass, yr black bandana, or whatever, if you can however you can cause we're in the red A few weeks ago, a fiction-writer friend told me that her agent invited her to send them any kind of work she wanted, provided it was not climate fiction. “It’s all I’m getting,” the agent told her, “and nobody wants to read it!”
Which, if you think about it, is a good analogy for the climate crisis: the climate is only getting wonkier & more dramatic, but nobody wants to hear about it. Clearly the writers of climate fiction want to hear – and think – about it, even if readers do not. One possible explanation for this mismatch is that a lot of fiction writers simply have no sense of their market; I expect this explains most of it. But still, why would novelists want to think about climate change any more than anybody else? Well, writers tend to be thinkin’ folks. I’d flatter ourselves to think we’re more thoughtful than the general population, although that’s not saying much in my country, which is the most reliably thoughtless on the surface of the earth. Still, you kind of have to think, in order to write anything interesting – and somehow or other, it needs to be in touch with everyday lived reality in order to matter, regardless of how imaginative or imaginary it is. Admittedly, though, some writers become immensely successful by not thinking, but by following a formula. And those folks tend to be the ones who hit the mass-market bestseller lists. Readers, themselves an endangered breed, are probably more representative of the general population: they don’t want to hear about climate change any more than non-readers do. People turn to fiction – esp. “genre” fiction – as entertainment, even escapist entertainment, and we are all comforted by the familiar, the repetitive, the routine. It’s fine to consider a scenario in which alien spacecraft are attacking the earth, because, so far as anybody knows, that’s not super-likely anytime soon. Climate disaster, however, is already upon us, in a big way. So nobody reads the news, either. None of this bodes well for literature as “a vehicle for social change,” as the phrase is. And maybe that’s just as well: if people are not willing to use their mentality and face up to reality, then why ruin their lives for them, while they can still pretend things are normal? Why unplug them from the Matrix if they don’t want to be unplugged?* And surely there’s plenty to write about besides depressing stuff. Alas, all this sounds far too utilitarian for anybody who takes up literature as a vocation, which is one of the least utilitarian things one can do. I write because I can’t help myself. If I had any sense, I’d learn to repair air conditioning systems – there’s going to be plenty of demand for that in the coming decades. Even wildly successful fiction writers take teaching jobs for the health insurance. Even handsome advances and royalties just don’t cover the bills, long term. In the meantime, the people who write cli-fi or cli-po or whatever will read one another’s work – not, it may be, as a mass-market paperback, but maybe as a free PDF (preferably an encrypted free PDF). It may feel a lot like wearing Special Glasses that make everything look green – or brown or gray. But a lot of writers during the Depression wrote about the Depression – it was hard to think about much else, because it was so all-encompassing. It was scary to the point that they thought something had to give. Likewise, to some of us, the massive alteration of the environment in which we live and move and have our being is kind of hard to ignore for more than a few hours at a time. And if those of us who write about the era of Climate Collapse scare ourselves or one another enough, maybe we’ll actually meet in person, in the streets. Maybe, like tomorrow, high noon. ----------- * Literary critics are another matter: they study & teach distressing “political” literature about subversion of oppression and struggles against capitalism as a surrogate for actually participating in struggles against capitalism or in movements to subvert oppression – none of which you can put on your c.v. If you’re trying to do political organizing, don’t waste time trying to mobilize academic literary critics – they’re way too busy. |
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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. |