As much as I need to live like I might die tomorrow, I need to live like I might see a hundred years on this odd green and blue planet. Unless things change, I’m not burning every bridge. I’m trying to maintain a career. If I was certain to die under a fascist regime by 2021, there wouldn’t be much point in writing novels: they take too long to write, publish, and reach their audience. I get some joy from the writing itself, sure, but I get more joy from putting my art in front of people, of letting it influence the cultural landscape. With novel writing in particular, that takes time. That takes there being a future. I want there to be a future. Almost desperately. Not enough to bank on it completely.
I’m keeping some small portion of my time and resources invested in the potential for there to be a future is important for my mental health, because it keeps me invested in maintaining that health. - Margaret Killjoy, “How to Live Like the World Is Ending,” Birds Before the Storm (blog). * I like the above quotation because it gets at the ambiguity of the situation in which we find ourselves. We face a radically foreshortened time-horizon. Ecological, geological or military disaster threaten everybody on the planet. Maybe life expectancies may remain unchanged but everyone will live under an authoritarian regime of one kind or another. Those of us in the global north can still imagine a future, no matter how “woke” to the climate emergency we may be. Indeed, it may be difficult for us not to imagine a future that is like the present, even if our imagination of the future is rather dire. We want to hedge our bets. After all, some may live to 100, others die in squalid camps at age 10 due to climate crisis. We expect to live to see tomorrow, even though we know the clock is at 2 minutes to midnight. But it’s always been at 2 minutes to midnight, right? So . . . If you don’t live like there’s a tomorrow, tomorrow may get here anyway and find you ill-prepared. But if you live like there’s no tomorrow, it might make tomorrow, if it gets here, happier and healthier than a stressed and fearful today. I write poems, mostly. Writing a poem generally does not entail as extensive an investment of time as does a novel – or any book project, really. Poetry writing also takes all hope for any substantive fame and fortune out of the equation, which brings one back to first principles. And much of the “poetry” I write nowadays ends up on this blog – that is, receives its initial publication the same day it is written. Which makes for a lot of poetry that’s green, in more ways than one. But, as Killjoy notes, there is a certain satisfaction in putting one’s work before people; and the verse I write for this blog (unlike some of the stuff I write) is definitely intended for a reader on the other end. The particulars may or may not make any difference to you 7 days from now, but hopefully the cumulative effect will. Any given entry is urgent, sure, but it’s the tick tick tick, drip drip drip that’s ultimately most important. And it’s a record – not as permanent as the pigment around the outline of a hand on a cave wall, but a trace, nonetheless. It’s a way of reassuring myself that I’m here – that we are here. That we were here. That no matter what happens tomorrow, somebody made it to today. My guiding fiction is that I will keep writing the verse chronicle until the electricity or internet connectivity shuts off for good. Maybe then I’ll keep a journal, if I can find something to write with and on. Killjoy’s guiding fiction is fiction – i.e., that there will be enough time left for her to finish her novel and for her readers to finish it, too. And the act of writing the novel reassures the writer (and maybe the reader) that there is a middle-distance future. Perhaps the very plan for the novel is the beginning of the spell to bring the future into being. But the really wise people know that all of this is a story that has been and is being told all along. The only question is whether it is written in stone or writ on water.
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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. |