notice to reader: the following post deals (in part) with suicide
* * * * My wife takes the “cyanide pill” approach to potential societal collapse: that’s the time to “check out.” Or, as she puts it, “Take me to the attestup.”* I may feel that way if sociopaths with automatic weapons are breaking down my door. And my wife may feel differently. But the c.p. approach may be a way to push the whole issue away (psychologically) by referring it to a time that remains a distant hypothetical improbability. Hopefully it is. But, as Claudia Rankine puts it, we Americans believe, on some level, “that we will survive, no matter what.” So what is it that makes me think about life after civilization? Or fantasize about a period when it “won’t be all that bad” – when we can still “make a way”? Maybe it’s a guy thing: you gotta do something – you gotta go down fighting! Or an American thing: No matter how dark things look, we’ll find a way to overcome, because we are an Optimistic People. (Notice how dystopian novels by Americans often have a happy ending?) Then I think of Cato at Utica. Everybody talks about how he ran on his sword to prevent Caesar from taking him as a captive trophy to Rome. And surely that was politically significant. But the image that stays in my mind happens just before that: it’s of him on the docks, helping out the people who are bailing on him, making sure their ships are sound and that they have enough provisions before they flee. If I could hang on long enough to do some good, I would like to think I would, even if I couldn’t hang on long. Maybe help migrants coming to or fleeing from my town . . . Or is that the fantasy of the eternal persistence of the self, smuggled into an otherwise gloomy scenario? Dystopian novels have protagonists, after all. Somebody has to survive for at least 250 pages or so. The point is: what would you do now, if you believed a breakdown of social order and withdrawal of things like running water and electricity was going to happen in your lifetime? Live each day as though the shit were about to hit the fan in a big, big way at any moment, and it could be tomorrow or it could be in 20 years? That seems rather . . . stressful. If it really is out of our hands, as it is to a large extent, then perhaps the thing to do is to live each day as though it were your last and do what good you can now, while you’re alive. Even with the knowledge that, ultimately, it won’t make the overall picture much brighter. When I read that back, it sounds like self-aggrandizing existentialist bullshit – backing out of politics to tend your own garden. That can’t be morally acceptable. I mean, we gotta do something! . . . Right? ---------- * The ättestupa were supposedly precipices in Scandanavia in viking times from which older people jumped (or were thrown) to their deaths, as a form of senicide. As it happens, it’s a 17th c. invention: never happened. We found out about the legend by watching a series that parodies all the other series about vikings and barbarians.
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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. |