One of my favorite radio shows/podcasts is On the Media. In an episode this summer, they took up the issue of how climate scientists deal emotionally with the data they produce – which always seems to indicate that things are worse than they thought they were before. Some suffer serious bouts of depression and anxiety, both leading to personal, professional, and political paralysis. As to coping strategies, it seems that most of the strategies have to do with (a.) talking and (b.) doing. They talk about the problem, preferably to large groups of people, and (by the same token) take action – any action – from reducing one’s own carbon footprint to educating the public and policymakers.
Perhaps those of us who write about global heating and climate catastrophe are doing the same thing, viz., trying to come up with emotional coping strategies. I know that’s a big reason for this blog. And maybe that’s what all art is about. I don’t have a problem with that, provided we make the language or movement or textures interesting enough for others to want to read or see. Emotions, along with other aspects of human psychology, are a legitimate subject-matter and prompt for literature. Indeed, as we try to adjust to the new world disorder in which we find ourselves, these explorations may be the most important thing writing can contribute towards meliorating our lot. Not just by saying, “Look on the Bright Side, Brian!” – but by lending some seriousness to what’s happening. I mean, if you’re not seriously depressed or panicked these days, there’s something wrong with you. Writing can help us use our mentality and face up to reality, to paraphrase Cole Porter. And it can tell the story of what is happening – until we can’t – “so that when there is no more / story that will be our / story when there is no / forest that will be our forest.”* ----------- * W.S. Merwin, not Cole Porter.
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No customers for onions? in India?? the endless summer
came to an end: Oct. 2 hi: 89 f Oct. 3 hi: 59 f – 30° drops being not un- usual in these parts, 3 wks into sept. . . . but i shld say it came to an end for now. meanwhile oct. heat records topple in 45 cities across s. & e. u.s. – 95+ f, all; continued “flash drought” in south (not so “flash,” maybe), w/ 60% less rainfall; the s. carolina corn farmer sez "i'm starting to pay attention to some of this climate change they are talking about," because "now if you don't have irrigation, you can't grow anything"; 1st time in 50 yrs he’ll lose money on corn; meanwhile, iowa corn country got drenched – des moines doubled the previous rain record tues.; & more meanwhile, n. rockies feel record cold & record snow-dumps . . . elsewhere: kangaroos – in search of scare water & food, start raiding humans’ supplies – & getting “culled”; emaciated grizzlies scour chilly shingles for signs of fish . . . (ok ok, i promised no animals – too-convenient re- cepticles for our own transferred fear & shame). meanwhile, yet again: “onions, key to cuisines across south asia, are in such short supply india's govt. banned export” – 25% price hike due to devastating drought followed by devastating monsoons (killed over 1300 so far); oct. water restrictions for 79 of 95 french depts.; austrailia spring temps already in 90s & 100s f; floods & landslides in korea from cyclone; second tropical storm in 2 years hitting ireland . . . maybe it’s time to start paying attention to some of this climate change stuff they keep talking abt; like as if it were going to hurt us soon, as if it were happening now . . . maybe time to meet yr neighbors, learn a little abt wiring, plumbing, how to steer a boat, how to forage . . . meanwhile, meanwhile, mean- while, i have papers to grade & classes to prep for young people prepping for their future – i gotta go – I’m feeling a bit like a deer in the headlamps, these days: the truck is barreling our way, but I have no idea which way to jump. Writing helps think it through. But I have a feeling that, if it were all up to me, we’d all be road-kill before I got it thought through. (Speaking of which, do all the deer in the Midwest US have spongiform encephalitis, these days? Or is it still safe to kill em and eat em? That might be essential information before long.)
The best I can come up with: pressure our city and county commissions to develop a comprehensive climate resilience plan. The conclusion may be that all the money in the world can’t prepare us and we’re fucked. If so, people need to know that – even though it clearly does not solve the problem. And as for mitigation . . . well, I’ll participate in whatever campaign the young folks come up with – “Keep Hope Alive!” – since it’s their future on the line. But I gotta say, the facts on the ground – and even more so in the oceans – aren’t looking very encouraging. Maybe the best all-around advice for all of us is to Toughen Up. To spend more time working outdoors when it is extremely hot and humid. Spend more time working out. Go without food for days. Do as many things as possible without electricity. Camp on weekends. Only use a container when you wash and don’t leave the faucet running. Learn how to live with housemates (again). You can certainly take along your notebook or laptop when doing any of these things – or a recording device and clip-on mic – so you can write down your thoughts while doing them. But in the U.S., a resource that is even more depleted than water is time. Most writers don’t write (directly) for money; and working for money requires more and more hours from you, the worker. So, any prepping you do, not to mention writing about it, will become more and more difficult – both in terms of making the time and (esp. for us older folks) energy. At some point, one inevitably asks – how long is it worth it? When do you stop writing? When do you stop fighting (if ever)? When do you stop? all the drama from
the climate marches dying down, but our weather map looks like a yin-yang of blue & red: froze in the west & north, burnt up in the east & south: another wonky jet stream season – proved wonky in the southern hemi- sphere, too, in their winter (summer here). austin, memphis & 48 other locales sweat through hottest sept. ever (> july); nola, nashville, pensacola, mobile had hottest oct. day (all over 95 f); much of fla. shriveled in driest sept. ever; singapore had hottest and driest sept. ever (ditto perth); s.w. u.s.“nonsoon” season driest ever; 90s & 100s in s.w. australia; water shortages in alaska the endless summer continues . . . but single-digits in montana, 200-yr storm pummels minnesota and wisconsin . . . maybe long-term nothing will change, we think. maybe once we get through this everything will be better, we think. maybe i’ll be dead when it gets bad – i mean, really really bad . . . “the kind of societal transformation we need only comes when not just thousands, but millions of people take to the streets to demand it – and not just once, but again and again,” sez varshini prakash of sunrise. she’s right, of course: that’s the good news & the bad news. we need people to make it their business to raise hell; people who possess the time (money) & energy to do that other news: bahamas ripped to shreds, a no-one’s-land; lorenzo, “most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the far east atlantic,” weakens as it heads toward u.k., eire – just more rain rain rain – like in pakistan, where floods keep coming & killing (> 400 casualties since july); ditto bihar & uttar pradesh (> 100 dead this week); tropical storm narda strews damage across 1k mi. mexican pacific coast but axios reports “greta thurnberg’s protests give climate change most attention it has had all year” – all year! 9 whole months! so i’ll go to the city commission candidates’ forum on “environment & climate” tonite, maybe ask questions abt what we’ll do abt infrastructure breakdown increased food insecurity rise of heat-related illnesses housing displaced persons, but i’m not hopeful: it’s “too big a fail” – can’t cope or don’t feel it getting nearer, closing in, touching you, wiping out your money, turning yr little kansas city into abaco – and hey – maybe we’ll be okay, maybe ride it out, maybe Thomas Cahill got a history book onto the bestseller list with the help of his playfully hyperbolic title How the Irish Saved Civilization. Following Cahill’s lead, I’ve given this brief blog post a playfully hyperbolic title, but Cahill’s playful title does indicate the serious case he tries to make, and so does mine.
Hyperbole aside, I want to note that a seemingly minor mistranslation, made 400 years ago, has contributed to a major metaphysical misunderstanding that skews ecological judgment today. The metaphysical misunderstanding receives especially elegant formulation in the often-repeated poetic declaration that “God’s in His heaven — / All’s right with the world!” (The declaration can’t be taken at face value in the Robert Browning poem that is its source, where its being spoken by Pippa, an impoverished laborer at a 19th-century silk mill, saturates it with irony. But in its pop-culture life, where it exists as a decontextualized, free-floating utterance, it gets taken at face value, and it’s the pop-culture version I mean here.) It skews ecological judgment because, if I think that “God’s in His heaven — / All’s right with the world,” I won’t be much concerned with ecological issues. If I think it’s true, then I’ll also think that whatever scientists are saying about the climate is a bunch of hoo-ha. If it’s true, there cannot be any ecological problems. If it looks like something’s wrong with the world, that’s appearance, not reality. If it looks to me like something’s wrong with the world, it can only be a misperception on my part. The logic of the declaration is not I know God’s in His heaven because I’ve looked around and confirmed that all’s right with the world; its logic is because God’s in His heaven therefore all is by definition right with the world. It’s an a priori argument: no possible evidence could count against it. It doesn’t matter if glaciers are melting and a few species have lost out: I don’t have to worry. Everything’s OK. So where might I get the idea that God’s in his heaven? In a “Christian nation” such as the U.S., a great many people would appeal to the Bible. In particular, Jesus himself, in English, in the Sermon on the Mount, places God in heaven, making things right in the world. “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them” (Matthew 6:26, King James Version). But here’s the problem. The King James translators assign God to one place and birds to another: God is “heavenly” and the fowls are “of the air.” But in the Greek original of Matthew’s gospel, “the fowls of the air” is τὰ πετεινὰ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ, and “your heavenly Father” is ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὁ οὐράνιος. God is not in one place and birds in another: God and the birds both are in οὐρᾰνός. Later English translations have blindly and uniformly followed King James in using two different words to translate ouranos, “air” when it is used in connection with birds and “heaven” when it is used in connection with God. Although that distinction conveys the range of meaning of ouranos, it also creates a profoundly misleading impression. English translations all put birds in one place, the air, and God in another place, heaven. But in the Greek original, Jesus uses the same word, ouranos, to designate the medium with which the birds and God are associated. They are the birds of the ouranos, and He is your ouranos-ly Father. The primary meaning of the Greek word is the region in which birds fly; only secondarily, by extension, does it refer to a realm, figuratively above us, in which deities may reside. In English, though, “heaven” refers primarily to the figuratively “up” realm of deities, and only derivatively to the region in which birds fly. If evidence were needed that ecocriticism and ecopoetry matter, this would give a case in point. It makes sense to have a Bureau of Land Management, with a manager located in an office building in D.C. “managing” land in Wyoming or Nevada, if God is managing the world from His location in heaven. That narrative about God gives an analogy for that political arrangement. To contest that analogy, I’ve been working on a new edition and translation of the gospel that amends that narrative. Instead of separating God and the birds, as prior English translations do, placing God in “heaven” and birds in “the air,” the Gospel I’ve compiled and translated chooses the English word with the same primary meaning as the Greek word, and places birds and God both in the “sky.” In it, God is not above the environment birds live in, but within that environment. In all prior English translations of the Biblical Gospels, God is stationed outside the earth’s atmosphere; my Gospel restores the original sense of the Greek, which locates God within the biosphere. My Gospel might or might not find a publisher (this is only one of many ways in which it rejects traditional treatment of gospel material), but with or without it in print, we humans will do well to find ways to question narratives that portray God in one environment and physical life forms (birds, coral reefs, bacteria, humans…) in a separate environment. King James has led us down a blind alley; time to turn around. _______________ H. L. Hix’s recent books include a poetry collection, Rain Inscription; an edition, with Julie Kane, of selected poems of contemporary Lithuanian poet Tautvyda Marcinkevičiūtė, called Terribly In Love; an essay collection, Demonstrategy; and an art/poetry anthology, Ley Lines. |
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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. |