This post is the first in a series of three about the British literary group "Dark Mountain." The second and third will run on Wednesday and Friday.
*************************************** No sooner had I debuted this blog than one of my various FB interlocutors directed me to the Dark Mountain manifesto, “Uncivilization.” And I promised back then I'd post about it, and finally here goes. The Dark Mountain group coalesced 10 years ago in Oxford, UK, as a literary-cultural response to climate change and various other emerging society-destroying tendencies. “[H]uman civilisation,” the authors claim, “is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: the belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future.” When they looked at the society around them, they concluded that “The machine is stuttering and the engineers are in panic.” They invoked Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, warning of “the inrush of the savage and the unseen” that so-called civilization elides.* Lucky for us creative types, “writers, artists, poets and storytellers of all kinds have a critical role to play” in such a crisis. We’re back in the saddle as unacknowledged legislators. We have a mission: to break “the last taboo,” which is “the myth of civilisation.” Or, more precisely, the way civilization distracts us from “the reality of our position on this Earth.” Their object was and is to de-center humans from humans’ view of the world. The answer is “uncivilised writing” – that which “attempts to stand outside the human bubble” and see humans “as one strand of a web rather than as the first palanquin in a glorious procession.” They then go on to distance themselves from “our literary lions” and from “nature poetry.” Yet the poets they hold up as positive exempla – Wendell Berry, W.S. Merwin, Mary Oliver – were all lionized nature poets. The Dark Mountaineers value Berry’s, Merwin’s, and Oliver’s “sense of place.” But in all three cases (most obviously, perhaps, in the case of Oliver), nature was something one wrote about – something that provided spiritual insights for the human writer, every bit as much as it did for William Wordsworth, albeit in a different idiom. Nature as referent. And for at least some readers, the insights often proved to be . . . well, somewhat shopworn. While Berry wrote some very powerful and incisive essays about land ethics, particularly in regard to his native Kentucky, mainstream US nature poets appeal to a large audience not because they advocate the destruction of civilization or a post-humanism, but precisely because rapport with non-human nature provides us with comfort, and its poets edify us as we return to our cubicles. US nature poetry is as humanistic as it gets. But the Uncivilsers’ poet laureate is another American, Robinson Jeffers. Indeed, the name “Dark Mountain” comes from his 1935 poem of the same name, which ends by invoking the terrible beauty of the “heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the / Dream-led masses down the dark mountain” towards destruction. This quote points to the problem with embracing Jeffers as (to use his word) an “inhumanist” writer – that is, one who disengages from the game of human society in order to produce something that shunts people to the margins: namely, he is always writing about people. He denounces them for not disengaging from the game of human society and writing about hawks and rocks, and he does so again and again. And he does so as a man speaking to men: his speaker is the unified “realist” voice, the “I” in the tradition of English-language poetry. His dark mountain is not even a real mountain; it’s a symbol – one he uses to talk about . . . civilization. Jeffers is also obsessed with human history. During WWII, he can’t stop listening to the radio and going on and on about humanity’s self-destructive obtuseness. Reading him, I want to say, “Rob – dude – just take the radio, go down to Big Sur, and throw the damn thing over the cliff!” But he doesn’t. In poem after poem, he inveighs against people and what they have created (as does “Uncivilisation”). Which, however, keeps the focus on people, not other beings or their milieu. [TBC . . .] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- * I’ll leave it to the postcolonial critics to handle these quotations. Suffice it to say these European-American poets’ sense of place was a sense of land that was expropriated.
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Really important article re: the struggles of Malawi, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe to recover from two hurricanes is quick succession this summer. As we saw with Puerto Rico, if your country's poor, it takes years to recover - maybe until the next hurricane.
were i clever, canny, practical, & smart
(which admittedly i am not), i wld do stuff like leading nature walks so both i and others cld enjoy what's left of the more-than-human world before it's gone – stuff that wld look good on a resume, too – w/o i mean talking about the “gone” part look kids – a hungry caterpillar – now go write a poem more fun than going to protests or meetings in deadeningly drab rooms; more salubrious than chronicling things most healthy people avoid thinking about but i’m me in this my only life inculcated as i was w/a definite sense of “right” & “wrong” (even nietzsche cldn’t set me straight), raised in a family that cldn’t not think about power, politics, & c. so here i go again, here i can’t help but notice: how venice’s right-wing council (the “league” + the “brothers of italy” + the “forza italia”) re- jected plans for reducing pollution, & “moments” thereafter their chamber flooded (it’s not nice to fool mother nature); more floods today, state of emerg.; smashed gondolas, idled vaporetti; “la serenissima”: blithely flaunting its artistic artificiality across a real live lagoon, w/ real sinking islands underneath; & britain starting to look like venice, on track for wettest nov. since 1852; elsewhere, drier: sydney’s reservoirs less than ½ full; 3x more wildfires this year than all of last, lapping at city’s outskirts; & out in california (& if you don’t live in california, aren’t you sick of hearing about california? you have problems of your own, right?), pacific gas & electric owes $30 b (that’s b with a “b”) in liability; “but most experts agree: even under the best scenarios, the fires & wide- spread power shutoffs will be here for years to come & californians will pay higher prices for less reliable energy.” . . . well, ok . . . that’s pretty bad & in the rest of the ironically- named united states, 400 cold temp records broke this week, including all-time nov. records (global warming schmarming!), but 2x as many record hi’s as lo’s throughout the 2010s; & “almost impossible” for car dealerships to get insurance: hailstorms getting so frequent, esp. across the “hail belt” (yes, there is: colo., neb., kansas, okla., texas); & “even an outbreak of plague in china has been attributed to climate change this week”: drought- caused explosion of rodent pop., apparently (don’t ask me); (we’re telescoping it all so you can see w/a wide-angle lens) & it’s 32 in anchorage, 31 here: in fact, assume that everything i have mentioned before is still going on: flooding in somalia, water shortages in southern africa, disease in wake of typhoons in mozambique, bahamas: these things don’t have an end date – all of it affecting children worst (don’t worry, all of that is a long, long way away & mummy & daddy won’t let it hurt you) well, now that’s over – i can go rehydrate & maybe look at the birds before i get back to work I am fully extrovert, perfectly adapted to America. In my other life, I enjoy making small talk & do not identify with Greta Thunberg. I am consistently cheerful, a great product. I do not identify with Gaea. In my other life, I play all my cards right and keep one up my sleeve at all times just in case. In my other life, I can zip it, go along to get. I am able to signal my virtue to others and then go ahead and do nothing anyways. In my other life, I don’t check to see what the jet stream is doing this week. I don’t go on and on about the polar bears. In my other life, I am not ashamed to take fabulous vacations via airplane travel, and I can dismiss “carbon shamers” as cranks, joyless nutballs, without feeling even a twinge of unease. I curate my life in my other life. Everyone likes me, on Facebook and off. In my other life, I did not grow up in the south and I was not raised Irish Catholic; in other words, I am neuronormative as fuck. True, my other life is not lived as a free person, exactly, but I don’t even know it, so much happier am I. In the other life, it is 1989, I am benevolent overlord of the world, and I know exactly what to do to avert climate catastrophe. In my other life, I just keep my head down and do my job: one day at a time & the devil take the rest, am I right? In my other life, I don’t think about whether I’m right. I may go days w/o checking the weather. No, really, I’m really happy in that other life. In my other life, I don’t have the Guardian’s “Natural disasters and extreme weather” page bookmarked. In my other life, what I do for a living is save the earth, and I earn a lot of money for it. Or I don’t save the earth but convince myself I do, and I earn a lot of money for it. In my other life, I don’t take it so seriously. There are no “climate wars,” no “climate refugees.” In my other life, I accentuate the positive, e-liminate the negative. In my other life, I don’t worry about growing old eating cat food and living in a chicken coop. In my other life, I don’t worry about creeping fascism. Or creeping deserts and seashores. In my other life, I don’t worry about climate disaster at all. In my other life, I don’t have to.
if it’s global warming where you live,
it’s global f*ing freezing here: hi yesterday 28 f / norm 57 norm lo 33 / actual 5 - 1 in garden city, breaking the record of +7, set last year: greetings from kansas in the season formerly known as autumn; colder than anchorage, alaska . . . hell, so is alabama; + early snow on top of record rains across the upper midwest, adding to farmers’ misery are you paying attention, alabama? & you, kansas? they’re paying us to keep doing things the way we do them, you know, to keep living the same lives. weird weather, huh. and I know I promise not to talk about arctic sea ice & polar bears & stuff, but that thirty-year time-lapse is about the scariest thing i’ve ever seen . . . & don’t get me started on all the CO2 bacteria put out in warmer temps . . . meanwhile water gushing through the streets of towns in s. italy + 100 kph winds + a tornado or two: “we’ve never” – yeah, I know: you’ve never seen anything like it. there’s a reason for that venice knows: “situazione drammatica”: 85% of the city underwater – hi tides keep getting higher every year – & the right-wing mayor sez “this is the result of climate change” (how do you say “duh” in italian? è 2 più 2 è uguale a 4?) & 1,000 households in england evac’d as flooding spreads; boris finally showed, & heard: “i’m not very happy about talking to you so, if you don’t mind, i’ll just mope on with what I’m doing,” meaning cleaning muck & debris elsewhere: ¼ of reservoirs in anhui province, china empty; & in s. africa, tshwane’s abt out; namibian farmers selling their herds for cheap before drought takes em; over 3800 sq mi. on fire in australia, where summer hasn’t even begun; already burning the sydney suburbs: “how much more are we expected to take?”; you can take as much as you like, mate: as the stoics said, if the room’s too full of smoke . . . & rainforest in borneo burns & rangeland in botswana . . . weird weather, duh The guest post today is a guest vid - viz., Selena Godden's call to action at the XR "Writers Rebellion" event at Trafalgar Sq, London. It is a lovely counter-balance to the quasi-doomerish stuff I sometimes write.
For excerpts of the entire event, listen to the Extinction Rebellion podcast here. There's even a short interview w/Margaret Atwood. And if you haven't heard their groovy trippy theme song, you haven't lived. on this veteran’s day, I read that
“climate change could mean u.s. military collapse, new report warns” – destruction of infrastructure, disruption of power grid, increasing number of conflicts, humanitarian missions & o yeah epidemics among military & civilians: "it is increasingly not a matter of ‘if’ but of when there will be a large outbreak” now even the Fed is worried: $500 B climate losses over last 5 yrs: “damage to natural resources & infrastructure . . . health care, supply chains, agriculture, tourism, power generation & costs . . . disrupt business operations & economic activity” & (blahblahblah) c.; as if on cue, US productivity drops for 1st time in 4 yrs. . . . it’s one of those “scenarios,” don’t you know: not necessarily a cat 5 hurricane barreling up the houston ship channel or wall street or yr power company shutting off the lights b/c they can’t keep their own lights on; but just the drip drip drip, dry dry dry of a billion here & there, until pretty soon we’re talking real money. meanwhile the jet stream does its loopy sine-wave thing, sucking the cold from alaska & dumping it on us: hi yesterday 63 f lo yesterday 32; temp now (9 am) 22 f, windchill 7 w/snow. go figure – “funny weather, huh?” that’s not all it’s dumping: “kansas city area residents say they smelled an unusual odor, which meteorologists traced to a farm in albert lea, minnesota” (the top notch stock farm) – whoosh! elsewhere, it’s summer: “australia’s most populous state declared a state of emergency monday due to unprecedented wildfire danger” – 3700 sq. mi. consumed over the weekend; practically no rain anywhere in the country; 90 blazes blazing in the state, temps in 90s; + record dry spells in california & b.c.; nov. heat wave & wildfires in israel; record hi’s in britain; huge trash fire on turtle cay, bahamas – burning leftover rubbish from dorian to keep away the rats and roaches that are rummaging through the trash. meanwhile: “as many as 39,267 people (9,007 families) staying at 84 evacuation centers” after floods & landslides in cagayan state, philippines (tho could be anywhere, nowadays); & mumbai had most rain this monsoon season since 1979 & it’s still raining (it’s still raining everywhere it’s been flooding, it seems); yorkshire & the midlands flood (again) – “danger- to-life warnings” issued; & the head of scotland’s railway sez they can’t cope w/the x-treme weather anymore & I read in the paper where kansas has 309 “high-hazard” dams, with 26 of those in “poor” condition – it only takes one epic gulley-washer & you’ll need an army of little dutch boys; emergency action plans are missing or 20 years old; “in some cases, inspectors flagged spillways too small to handle the volume of water from increasingly intense rainstorms due to . . . [wait for it] . . . to climate change.” & that in a state of only 3 million. i find it necessary to trace this track of destruction day by day: to set it forth in a verse: it is important to us as long as we are here; & as long as we are here we might as well be aware of what it means to be alive in the combustible now One thing I like about writing in a blog is that it is dated, both literally (the time-stamp) and figuratively (it expresses what you happen to be thinking at the time). In this respect, it seems more representative of real life than most texts in other media/genres.
Nowadays, in the era of climate emergency, thinking long-term is looking less and less tenable. Writing for posterity looks even more ridiculous than it ever has. If you’re writing for anyone, it’s the people in the present. This was always true, of course, but it used to be that one’s sense of the world included a narrative that extended well beyond one’s personal demise. That narrative is now in question, to say the least. We’re walking off the front doorstep into the fog w/o any sense that the next step will be underneath. We’ve been taught that great art should be a monument for the ages: if people aren’t memorizing and reciting a poem hundreds of years after its composition, then it is a failure. It has not “stood the test of time,” as we say. It’s hard to quote John Ashbery, though, because so much of his poetry is about time slipping away and the present evaporating as you speak it into being – about the evanescence of monumenality. Memorizing particular lines of an Ashbery poem in order to freeze them is precisely beside the point. But there are other ways to dwell in the present, in one’s art, besides thematizing time’s passing. Performance art is one obvious example (esp. if one does not record it in any manner). Or compose a poem, memorize it, recite it to others, then forget it. Even Robert Smithson’s earthworks are designed to disappear, albeit on a longer time-line. The term “occasional poem” could be the opposite of “masterpiece.” An occasional poem is written for an occasion, not for eternity. Of course, occasional poems have been taken up by subsequent generations – esp. if they are allegorical or symbolic enough to be re-articulated to other times and places (at how many weddings have portions of Spenser’s “Epithalamion” been read?). But there are some works that flop down so far into the weeds of the fleeting moment that they can’t be fished out, except by those of us who want to flop down into the overgrown past. I’ve mentioned, from time to time, the necessity of relinquishing our own immortality. This is esp. difficult for Americans, who always believe in a happy ending, and for whom a happy ending always means continuing to live as they have been living. The Anthropocene epoch (or the Anthropic period of the Holocene) is all about death – another mass extinction that may include our own species. This is an excellent opportunity to meditate upon transience and impermanence. One way to do that is via writing – either by reflecting upon the temporality of all flesh, or by mimicking the torrential rush of events, moment to moment. Whatever the method, anything that helps us talk ourselves into the present and out of the fiction of the future will be salubrious. this is for the 50 people killed by
floods in s. sudan & the 420,000 forced to leave their homes; this is for the 48 people killed by floods in kenya & the 17,000 forced to leave their homes; this is for the 17 people killed by floods in somalia & the 370,000 forced to leave their homes; this is for the 200,000 forced to leave their homes in ethiopia; whole towns submerged: markets, schools, houses, cattle camps; “this is so hard for a disabled person like me, everyone is trying to save themselves first. the water is getting deeper daily, i cannot crawl in it”; there will be no monument for these Kenya harvests ↓ 25%; Somalia harvests ↓ 60%; first drought, then deluge, until “cereal prices in some areas have rocketed up to five-year highs, pricing out poorer people. nearly 7m people in the region are living just below the catastrophic hunger line” this is for the people in pakistan who have fallen victim to mosquito-borne diseases – 44k this year, & for the kids in india with flourosis: “prevalent across rural India, caused by excessive consumption of the mineral fluoride, usually through drinking contaminated groundwater. as fluoride builds up in the body it leads to skeletal deformities” – groundwater gets more contaminated as the water table lowers as the rains don’t come in & for the farmers, as the rains don’t come in australia, as the nation’s bread- basket dries out & shrivels up from no rain in three years; & the p.m. wants to ban climate protests; the military now can break them up and the rains don’t come to the farms in the lower yangtze valley; or those of mendoza in argentina; & that was the warmest october on record worldwide & this is for the people whose homes will be underwater soon: turns out sea level rise will swamp the homes of 3x the number of people they thought it would (40m in 30 yrs): turns out the space radar took roofs and trees to be the surface of the earth, but the surface of the earth is lower than them. I sometimes think I should cool it on the global warming stuff – just let folks enjoy what time they have left: if they want to spend it with their head in a very dark place, that’s their choice, right? It’s like I’m trying to rouse some drunken friends to get them to leave the building that’s on fire, except there’s no outside to the building, & they can’t sober up anyhow. this is for them, too. I’ve been re-reading some of Joy Williams’ books from 20 years ago: her novel The Quick and the Dead, and her book of essays, Ill Nature. The latter opens with her essay “Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp.” It’s kind of like a philosophical dialogue between a hypostasized, typical “well-off”/yuppie USAmerican & an interlocutor who’s kind of like a Greta Thurnberg with a snarky sense of humor.
The latter starts out talking about nature photography: “you” just can’t enjoy it anymore, because you know they’ve cropped out the condos. Such photos “are making you increasingly aware that you’re a little too late for Nature. Can you feel it? Twenty years too late? Maybe only ten? Not way too late, just a little too late? Well, it appears that you are. And since you are, you’ve decided you’re just not going to attend this particular party.” The “you” then responds and allows that, while open space is nice, so are shopping malls: “Products are fun.” Yes, the speaker replies, “You believe in growth. Controlled growth, of course. Controlled exponential growth is what you’d really like to see.” In fact, “Nature has become simply a visual form of entertainment, and it had better look snappy.” But, the interlocutor You responds, “we’ve been at Ventana Canyon. It’s very, very nice, a world-class resort. It sprawls but nestles, like. And they’ve maintained the integrity of as much of the desert ecosystem as possible. Give them credit for that. Great restaurant, too. We had the baby bay scallops there.” The speaker is not impressed: “Wildlife is a personal matter, you think. The attitude is up to you. You can prefer to see it dead or not dead. You might want to let it mosey about its business or blow it away.” It’s a matter of consumer preference: Free to Choose! As to global heating, “So this is the plan: you can plant millions of acres of trees, and you go on doing pretty much whatever you’re doing – driving around, using staggering amounts of energy, keeping those power plants fired to the max. Isn’t Nature remarkable? So willing to serve?” As for those trees, “They would probably be patented trees after a time. Fast-growing, uniform, genetically created toxin-eating machines. They would be new-age trees, because the problem with planting the old-fashioned variety to combat the greenhouse effect, which is caused by pollution, is that they’re already dying from it.” What a downer this person is! The interlocutor exclaims “wow, lighten up, will you? Relax.” But she doesn’t, of course: “You want to find wholeness and happiness in a land increasingly damaged and betrayed, and you never will. More than material matters. You must change your ways.” “What is this? Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God?” “The ecological crisis cannot be resolved by politics. . . . For this is essentially a moral issue we face, and moral decisions must be made.” “A moral issue! Okay, this discussion is now over. A moral issue. . . . Who are you, is what I’d like to know. You’re not me, anyway. I admit someone’s to blame and something should be done. But I’ve got to go. It’s getting late. Take care of yourself.” Thus the essay ends. You fall asleep. When you wake up, 20 years later, your body is overgrown with weeds, your dog is gone, the rifle, rusted. You wander into town and find out it’s 2020. Everything looks the same, but somehow different. The kids don’t know who Al Gore is, but scientists know so much more about climate change! Nevertheless, the vehicles seem to have gotten a lot bigger (“SUVs,” they call them). It’s 2 climate-change accords later, and the US isn’t in any of them. They’re cleaning up after the last storm, which was bigger than the storm before, which was bigger than anything you’ve ever seen. The coal-fired power plant is still chugging away, its smokestacks a familiar landmark on the horizon (dear old power plant!). The river is down to a trickle. There aren’t many birds. You turn around, walk back up into the hills, go back to sleep. |
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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. |