(no subject)
Last night, I started writing another response in a short conversation I’ve been having with belledezuylen about Canticle for Liebowitz in quirkychipmunk’s comment section, but soon my thinking wandered off and seemed rather too much to put in such a comment, so I’m posting it my journal instead. This quite long and mostly just thinking, so if that’s not what you want, skip it. Before graduation I was doing a lot of thinking, much of it with Olivia_circe, about what we termed “poetry and paradigms,” which mostly meant an examination of what I could contribute to the academic discourse and what I needed to write in my life. This quickly becomes a continuation of that thinking as it has evolved, mostly unobserved, over the last few months.
Besides being futuristic Canticle is full of the dreadful passage of time. As long as I can remember I've loved that in a text; the elegiac quality of loss and change, the images of what remains and what crumbles like funeral ash, broken even by the light touch of the breeze. In many ways, that feels like the central theme of my life in this age of extinctions and melting ice. It's a comfort somehow, to see it written and find it beautiful.
Scientists always seem to be looking for the unique thing that makes us human, separates us from "animals." We are animals, and as far as I’m concerned, the main thing that is different about us is that we are the ones doing the classifying; everything else is a matter of balance, mixture, and degree. Still, if I had to say what a human is, I think I would say that we are historical animals; animals whose episodic and contextual memories stretch back through the generations. From that, comes an incredible capacity for learning and, in many places and moments at least, an obsession with progress. It burdens me with an inescapable sadness: what is will soon cease to be, what was will never be again.
This is perhaps my fall story, not of a moment, not of an Earth/Eden duality, but of history, of falling moment by moment out of the past, of so much of Earth itself barred to us and forbidden because it has already happened, because it is gone. Of course, all are barred from the past, but we, self conscious, historical, have the capacity to see it, and we, with our chainsaws and our factories, are uniquely capable of creating change and pushing the world farther from each bit of past. Overwhelming the sadness of history, is the reckless and exhilarating urge to make more.
In some ways, there is nothing wrong with this. Change does happen, I don’t believe that it has been declared wrong by some outside moral force. Yet an obsession with creation is an obsession with destruction. An obsession with the future is a destruction of the past and of the present, moments whose preciousness we seem incapable of grasping.
And what I don’t see in our society is mourning. Yes, we mourn death sometimes, the death of friends or the death of celebrities, or the deaths of victims. Scattered about the country are people fighting against and mourning the loss of old buildings and old trees, rivers and vast expanses of lonely coast, town meetings and monarch butterflies. Yet this mourning is piecemeal, disconnected, and the very people who fight to maintain some piece of the world feed unheeding, unknowing, on the loss of another, the food brought to them by the same forces and entities that threaten their specific beloved. We do not make choices together, choices about what losses we will accept for what gains. Mourners and advocates of progress fight each other, throwing arguments and statistics. For each problem their rolls are fixed. They do not change. They do not overlap. The people who destroy are exempt from mourning; they displace their mourning onto others. We do not weigh consequences, we choose which to believe and which to care about and discard the others from our consciousness.
I eat meat sometimes now. I don’t think that’s wrong-too much is unsustainable but some is a part of what we are. Even so, I don’t really like that I am eating it, for the same reason I’ve always been ambivalent about it: I don’t do the killing. Faced with the choice between killing an animal in front of me and not eating meat, I would choose vegetables. Desperate, I would kill, but I am not desperate. So my meat eating relies on my refusal to face directly the loss that that meal entails-a loss I think justified, but none the less distance myself from. To me, that is immoral. Yet I do it. We all do it, outsourcing our grief, our mourning, and our responsibility until it becomes invisible and our actions meaningless.
I am a being of the north, a creature of cold winds and hard stars and the stillness of a thousand trees, their branches bent and hung heavy with snow, a being lifted and brought to life by ice under my feet. I live in a time of warming, a time of melting. North of me the spruce are dying, eaten by insects that ought each winter to die in the cold. South of me the hemlocks are dying. One day perhaps the sap will stop its yearly rush through the thawing trunks of the maples. How long will my habitat remain?
I am seldom an activist; my thinking doesn’t work that way. But I am a writer, and what I write is elegy because my world is dying, ending with each second, changing with each year, and the one we are helping to replace it is strange and foreign and hostile.
At least, that’s where my thinking seems to be at the moment. Thank you belledezuylen, for getting me thinking. I needed it.
Besides being futuristic Canticle is full of the dreadful passage of time. As long as I can remember I've loved that in a text; the elegiac quality of loss and change, the images of what remains and what crumbles like funeral ash, broken even by the light touch of the breeze. In many ways, that feels like the central theme of my life in this age of extinctions and melting ice. It's a comfort somehow, to see it written and find it beautiful.
Scientists always seem to be looking for the unique thing that makes us human, separates us from "animals." We are animals, and as far as I’m concerned, the main thing that is different about us is that we are the ones doing the classifying; everything else is a matter of balance, mixture, and degree. Still, if I had to say what a human is, I think I would say that we are historical animals; animals whose episodic and contextual memories stretch back through the generations. From that, comes an incredible capacity for learning and, in many places and moments at least, an obsession with progress. It burdens me with an inescapable sadness: what is will soon cease to be, what was will never be again.
This is perhaps my fall story, not of a moment, not of an Earth/Eden duality, but of history, of falling moment by moment out of the past, of so much of Earth itself barred to us and forbidden because it has already happened, because it is gone. Of course, all are barred from the past, but we, self conscious, historical, have the capacity to see it, and we, with our chainsaws and our factories, are uniquely capable of creating change and pushing the world farther from each bit of past. Overwhelming the sadness of history, is the reckless and exhilarating urge to make more.
In some ways, there is nothing wrong with this. Change does happen, I don’t believe that it has been declared wrong by some outside moral force. Yet an obsession with creation is an obsession with destruction. An obsession with the future is a destruction of the past and of the present, moments whose preciousness we seem incapable of grasping.
And what I don’t see in our society is mourning. Yes, we mourn death sometimes, the death of friends or the death of celebrities, or the deaths of victims. Scattered about the country are people fighting against and mourning the loss of old buildings and old trees, rivers and vast expanses of lonely coast, town meetings and monarch butterflies. Yet this mourning is piecemeal, disconnected, and the very people who fight to maintain some piece of the world feed unheeding, unknowing, on the loss of another, the food brought to them by the same forces and entities that threaten their specific beloved. We do not make choices together, choices about what losses we will accept for what gains. Mourners and advocates of progress fight each other, throwing arguments and statistics. For each problem their rolls are fixed. They do not change. They do not overlap. The people who destroy are exempt from mourning; they displace their mourning onto others. We do not weigh consequences, we choose which to believe and which to care about and discard the others from our consciousness.
I eat meat sometimes now. I don’t think that’s wrong-too much is unsustainable but some is a part of what we are. Even so, I don’t really like that I am eating it, for the same reason I’ve always been ambivalent about it: I don’t do the killing. Faced with the choice between killing an animal in front of me and not eating meat, I would choose vegetables. Desperate, I would kill, but I am not desperate. So my meat eating relies on my refusal to face directly the loss that that meal entails-a loss I think justified, but none the less distance myself from. To me, that is immoral. Yet I do it. We all do it, outsourcing our grief, our mourning, and our responsibility until it becomes invisible and our actions meaningless.
I am a being of the north, a creature of cold winds and hard stars and the stillness of a thousand trees, their branches bent and hung heavy with snow, a being lifted and brought to life by ice under my feet. I live in a time of warming, a time of melting. North of me the spruce are dying, eaten by insects that ought each winter to die in the cold. South of me the hemlocks are dying. One day perhaps the sap will stop its yearly rush through the thawing trunks of the maples. How long will my habitat remain?
I am seldom an activist; my thinking doesn’t work that way. But I am a writer, and what I write is elegy because my world is dying, ending with each second, changing with each year, and the one we are helping to replace it is strange and foreign and hostile.
At least, that’s where my thinking seems to be at the moment. Thank you belledezuylen, for getting me thinking. I needed it.