“Today, one could say that the intrusion of Gaia produces a questioning situation [. . .] calling into question all our stories, our positions, those that reassure, those that promise, those that criticize.”
– Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times (2015) Americans, in particular, don’t handle uncertainty very well. There’s a solution to every problem – or by god we go out and find it! The future is going to turn out to be the one we always wanted and expected – and if you don’t believe it, you need to get a new belief. Because if we believe it, it must be true. And we believe there are the good guys and the bad guys, and it’s easy to tell them apart by their hats. We want the future we paid for, dammit! We expect it. This aspect of the American character helps explain why so many elected officials in this country deny the reality of anthropogenic climate disruption. Many people don’t want to believe it’s true, therefore it’s a hoax. And the rest of them know all too well that it’s true, therefore they don’t want to think about it. None of which necessarily helps the American writer decide what (or whether) to write, at a time when the social fabric appears to be fraying and starting to rip, people’s illusions are being shattered, and they’re facing an increasingly grim future. Speculative fiction? Satire? Documentary poetry? Nonfiction accounts of climate-induced suffering? In the twentieth century U.S., writers increasingly saw themselves as critics – as marginal figures in a quasi-literate society, throwing brickbats from the sidelines – or as sequestered creators whose work had value precisely because it served no social function (this latter group, ironically, were some of the most assiduous in theorizing the role of the writer in society). The writer-as-critic wants to be efficacious; the writer-as-isolato wants to feel justified; and so we’re squoze between fears that we are powerless or that we are craven. So: how to proceed? [to be continued – Tues. 11 June]
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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. |