Global, catastrophic climate disruption is something big – for us. But look at this photograph: what do you see? Can you make out a little white pixel? Like one that’s burned out on your computer screen? That’s us. It’s the earth, as photographed from the edge of the solar system by the Voyager 2 spacecraft. The stripes are glare from the sun in the camera lens; Carl Sagan used the metaphor of a dust mote in a sunbeam to describe the look of the planet from this distance.
That’s it – that’s what all the excitement is about. That’s it. Thousands of people have died in a blink of an eye for a tiny sliver of that tiny pixel. There are oak midges, and there are the oak mites that parasitize the oak midges. And the oak mites have millions of organisms in their guts. And so on, all the way down. And all the way up: is anybody on the other side of the galaxy noticing? If so, we’re nothing but a mathematical blip on a very powerful instrument. OK, this is all pretty banal stuff if you start talking about it too much. But what I notice is not the tininess of the earth – it’s the hugeness of everything around it. And that blackness is full of bright energy, dark energy, visible and invisible matter. Possibly in multiple dimensions at once. All of that is “nature.” When people use that word, they usually mean trees and birds and stuff. But nature is everything that is (including us, of course). Nature writing should include outer space. I don’t say that in order to conclude that coal-fired power plants, SUVs, and fracking were all natural processes after all – that smells too much like ethical off-gassing. But I do say it to put things in perspective. Why should we – why would we – be saved? Why would nature writ large care about that speck? Why would that speck – which to us is the titan Gaia – care about one lousy species? It’s gone through five mass extinctions so far, each of which almost scrubbed the planet clean of biota. And then things re-evolved in very different form. “The Tao treats the 10,000 things as straw dogs, to be cast into the fire,” writes Lao Tzu. Considering current events from that perspective might be a species of the Sublime. The Sublime is an incredibly complex topic with a long history and tons of ink spilled about it. It doesn’t mean what it means in common parlance (superb, out-of-this-world excellent). Suffice to say that it usually involves something that is terrible and beautiful; something that could kill you but hasn’t (yet); that invokes awe rather than fear. In this philosophical sense of the word, that describes the immensity of space, its coldness, its non-humanness. Poets have never hesitated to write about the sublime, though it has fallen out of fashion. Perhaps the geophysical era currently underway will bring it back. Right now, the rain is coming down in sheets, in waves, blurring the houses and trees behind. The trees in the foreground transform into frantic beasts. I can feel the wind whumping the walls. Crack of large branch; thunks on the roof. The neighborhood uncannily transmogrified into one of those other planets with opaque atmospheres and storms the size of the earth. This is it -- one of those other planets we always heard about.
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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. |