It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

...new airports will bring more visitors to Greenland to see the melting ice, and the increase in air travel will melt more ice—another potential feedback loop. No one desires this outcome—not the travellers and certainly not the Greenlanders, whose attachment to the ice is profound. But everyone pushes ahead anyway.  

Climate change is not like other problems, and that is part of the problem. What it lacks in vividness and immediacy it makes up for in reach. Once the world’s remaining mountain glaciers disappear, they won’t be coming back. Nor will the coral reefs or the Amazon rain forest. If we cross the tipping point for the Greenland ice sheet, we may not even notice. And yet the world as we know it will be gone. 

Elizabeth Kolbert

The New Yorker

October 14, 2024

"As much as we might like to, we can’t assume that all will be fine in the end." Joanne Freeman

Janacek composed his little symphony in 1926.  He originally wrote the opening as a fanfare for a gymnastics festival.  Aomame imagined 1926 Czechoslovakia: The First World War had ended, and the country was freed from the long rule of the Hapsburg Dynasty.  As they enjoyed the peaceful respite visiting central Europe, people drank Pilsner beer in cafés and manufactured handsome light machine guns.  Two years earlier, in utter obscurity, Franz Kafka had left the world behind. Soon Hitler would come out of nowhere and gobble up this beautiful country in the blink of an eye, but at the time no one knew what hardships lay in store for them.  This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: "At the time, no one knew what was coming." 

1Q84

Haruki Murakami

 ...the Netanyahu era no longer seemed to them like the hijacking of an imperfect democracy but instead like the completion of a fundamentally illiberal national project.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus

The New Yorker

September 16, 2024

Good And Bad, I Define These Terms, Quite Clear, No Doubt, Somehow

...it was mathematics -- not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon -- which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant.  Not that we ever did, he said, but things are getting worse.  We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives.  But it's not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories.  It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power.  It has completely shaped our world.  We know how to use it, it works as if some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it.  The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It's as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding. 

When We Cease to Understand the World

Benjamin Labatut

Limits of survival are set by climate, those long drifts of change which a generation may fail to notice.  And it is the extremes of climate which set the pattern.  Lonely, finite humans may observe climate provinces, fluctuations of annual weather and, occasionally may observe such things as "This is a colder year than I've ever known." Such things are sensible.  But humans are seldom alerted to the shifting average through a great span of years.  And it is precisely in this alerting that humans learn how to survive on any planet.  They must learn climate.

Children of Dune

Frank Herbert

1981

This was never me, but still...

I long for the days of disorder.  I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real.  I was dumb-muscled and angry and real.  This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.  

Underworld

Don DeLillo

Pay the Toll

I did not trust the era I lived in, nor did I want to live in it.  The twentieth century had been the most violent in human history.  The amount of killing had no precedent, and I had the feeling it was about to get started again, and once more by those who had never gone to war but gloated over the graves they spread through a neocolonial world.  

Clete

James Lee Burke

When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline and the wheel of progress to roll backward, there is no telling how low the one will fall or where the other may stop.

Frederick Douglas, 1894

Even with the many successes of the black freedom movement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the betrayal of Reconstruction haunts American democracy.  The nation still lives with the competing legacies of democracy and authoritarianism bequeathed by the rise and fall of the Second American Republic.  The overturning of an interracial democracy and the unrestrained triumph of capitalism and imperialism in the United States created a political thermidor that ultimately affected other groups as well -- indigenous people, women, immigrants, farmers, and workers -- in short, all Americans and democracy itself.  Until the second Reconstruction of American democracy in the 1960s, which unleashed other progressive social movements as well, the United States was not a democracy but a racist, authoritarian state comparable to European colonies in Asia and African and its lingering vestige, South Africa. 

Our own era is one of renewed challenges to American democracy, including the revival of voter suppression, the overturning of women's and gay rights, unprecedented economic inequality, and a resurgent domestic and global authoritarianism that defies democratic governance. 

...

Today, unregulated capitalism threatens not only democracy but the very existence of human beings and a livable planet. 

The Rise and Fall of The Second American Republic

Manisha Sinha

If it be now, 'tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come

In Donna Haraway's paradigm of climate change denial, game-over people rushed to a conclusion of despair, while technofixers doubled down on the false hope that humans would fix this, despite daily evidence that those with the power to do so weren't even trying.  Haraway proposed a third option: "staying in trouble".  It was a simple but powerful concept: only by allowing oneself to exist within--to fully feel--the terror, sadness, and strange beauty of what was happening could one develop new ways of to live through it. When the early poet Imru' al-Qays, chronicler of climate grief back when it was simply called grief, came across the ruins of his own world, he stood with them for a while.  That's how he began to endure the loss.  Only by first allowing himself to experience the damage could he then carry on and create from the wreckage a new form, something like a song. 

The Last Fire Season

Manjula Martina

Worlds ended all the time.  I thought of captions I'd seen beneath photographs of the sky this morning: End of the world, they said.  Apocalypse sky.  It looks like a movie.  People were understandingly struggling for ways to describe the situation, but there was an egotism to such proclamations that I didn't feel comfortable with. The idea of a singular apocalypse suggested that there was only one world, only one end.  The notion of the end of the world was itself a flexible one: Earth had already experienced five extinction-level events, and it was at the start of a sixth.  The past two decades alone had seen several historic tsunamis cause mass death of people living along the coasts or islands of the Indian Ocean, the Sunda Straight, the Java Sea, and parts of the Pacific.  Historically, volcanoes had been common world-killers: in the Permian era, about 250 million years ago, a volcanic eruption killed approximately 90 percent of all species on Earth.  There were all sorts of ways the universe could end you: earthquake, flood, plague.  The one with the dinosaurs. And of course the human-made apocalypses: war, genocide, chattel slavery, climate change, the list was as unending as the world.  The end of humans had begun the moment someone decided to burn coal for fuel.  Or perhaps the root was in one of the many moments when people decided to keep burning it, even though we all knew where this was going.

The Last Fire Season

Manjula Martin. 

In the early 2000s, sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard studied a Norwegian town that had been severely impacted by climate change via a dearth of snow.  She found that, even when met with irrefutable evidence that their environment was transformed for the worse, many residents appeared to ignore what was happening.  They wouldn't talk about it.  It wasn't a lack of emotion that silenced them; it was the intensity of their feelings.  "The word ignore is a verb," Norgaard wrote... Although ignorance might appear to be passive, Norgaard wrote, in the case of climate change such behavior is the product of a complex, systemic social reaction that allows humans, in the face of potential extinction, to downplay our feelings so that we can continue to go about living our lives.  In order to conform to social or community norms people might ignore massive events like climate change, even when faced with blatant and unavoidable evidence of the event. They might modulate the way they talked about such events in order to uphold their own internal narratives about themselves or avoid talking about it at all in order to assuage feelings of guilt. Or, they might simply disregard reality as a way to cope, to keep going.  Sociologists called these behaviors "emotion management". 

The Last Fire Season

Manjula Martin

Their Children's Hell Will Slowly Go By

This horror has no conclusion.  It will not end in my daughter's lifetime or even the lifetime of any decedent she can hope to love.  She will know no other future outside this claustrophobic emergency, this coffin we are all now pounding on the lid of. She will know death and pain with unthinkable intimacy and likely become inured to the suffering pouring forth from every region of the world in order to keep going.  No matter what ideologies arise, what myths we embrace, what technologies we invent, what dreams we offer, this crisis is effectively our eternity.

When I look at her fragile, beautiful face, when I watch her hold a pinch of dirt from our garden and go soft and quiet with mystery, I agonize over it.  What will she think of us? What will she think of the expanding deserts, lost soil, acid seas, poisoned land, baking heat, horrific diseases, and a horizon black with storms? I imagine her asking me someday with the hot fury of a teenager's clarity, Was it worth it? Was a raped and murdered world worth it for a few decades of excess? How did you let this happen? You all knew.  Everyone knew. She will gaze up into this haunting vortex, the consequences of what was done in just a single human lifetime, with nowhere to run or hid or escape this uncharted and endless future. 

The Deluge

Stephen Markley

A Lesson Never Learned and Now Too Late

When my mother arrived from California, I sat there on the starched sheets holding my baby, and my mother held me, and I cried uncontrollably, because I finally understood how much she loved me, and I could hardly stand the grace of it.

The Birth of My Daughter, the Death of My Marriage
Leslie Jamison

The New Yorker

January 22, 2024

Days of Future Past

In the cosmic calendar of the universe and life, with the Big Bang beginning on January 1st, almost fourteen billion years ago, when a supercharged universe-dense speck of energy blew open at the speed of faster-than-light and a trillion degrees Celsius, an explosion that had to create the space it exploded into since there was no space, no something, no nothing, it was near the end of January that the first galaxies were born, almost a whole month and a billion years of atoms moving in cosmic commotion until they began to flock bombshell-bright in furnaces of hydrogen and helium we now call stars, the stars themselves flocking into galaxies until, almost two billion years later, on March 16th, one of those galaxies, the Milky Way, was formed, and a six billion year summer passed in routine havoc until, at the end of August, a shockwave from a supernova might have caused a slowly rotating solar nebula to collapse -- who knows? -- but in any case it did collapse and in its condensed centre a star formed that we call our sun, and around it a disc of planets, in some cosmic clumping thumping clashing banging Wild West shootout of rock and gas and headlong combat of mater and gravity, and this is August. 

Four days later the earth came about, and a day after that its moon.

September 14th, four billion years ago (or so some think) came life of sorts, some intrepid little single-celled things that invited themselves into existence in a moment of unthinking and didn't know the holy mess they'd make, and two weeks later on September 30th some of these bacteria learned to absorb infrared and produce sulfate and a month after that the greatest feat of all, to absorb visible light and produce oxygen, our breathable liveable lungable air, though the earth was still lungless for a long time yet, and on December 5th came multicellular life, red, brown and then finally green algae which spawned in boundless fluorescence in the shallows of sunlit water, and on December 20th plants found their way to the land, liverworts and mosses, stemless and rootless but there nonetheless, then hot on their heels only thousands of years later the vascular grasses, ferns, cacti, trees, the earth's unbroken soil now root-snaked and tapped, plundered of moisture soon restocked by the clouds, looping systems of growth and rooting and growth again, competitive barging and elbowing for water and light, for height, for breadth, for greenness and colour. 

Christmas day, though Christ's not born yet -- 0.23 billion years ago, and here come the dinosaurs for their five days of glory before the extinction event that wiped them out, or wiped out at least those landlubbing ones, the plodders and runners and tree-munchers, and left in their absence a vacant spot: Wanted -- land-dwelling life forms, no time wasters, apply within, and who should apply but the mammalian things, who quicksharp by mid-afternoon on New Year's Eve had evolved into their most opportunistic and crafty form, the igniters of fire, the hackers in stone, the melters of iron, the ploughers of earth, the worshippers of gods, the tellers of time, the sailors of ships, the wearers of shoes, the traders of grain, the discoverers of land, the schemers of systems, the weavers of music, the singers of song, the mixers of paint, the binders of books, the crunchers of numbers, the slingers of arrows, the observers of atoms, the adorners of bodies, the gobblers of pills, the splitter of hairs, the scratchers of heads, the owners of minds, the losers of minds, the predators of everything, the arguers with death, the lovers of excess, the excess of love, the addled with love, the deficit of love, the lacking for love, the longing for love, the love of longing, the two-legged thing, the human being.  Buddha came at six seconds to midnight, half a second later the Hindu gods, in another half-second came Christ, and a second and a half later Allah. 

In the closing second of the cosmic year there's industrialisation, fascism, the combustion engine, Augusto Pinochet, Nikola Tesla, Frida Kahlo, Malala Yousafzai, Alexander Hamilton, Viv Richards, Lucky Luciano, Ada Lovelace, 

crowdfunding, the split atom, Pluto, surrealism,

plastic, Einstein,

FloJo, Sitting Bull, Beatrix Potter, Indira Gandhi, Niels Bohr, Calamity Jane, Bob Dylan, Random Access Memory, soccer, pebble-dash, unfriending, the Russo-Japanese War, Coco Chanel, 

antibiotics, the Burj Khalifa, Billie Holiday, Golda Meir, Igor Stravinsky, pizza

Thermos flasks, the Cuban Missile Crisis,

thirty summer Olympics and twenty-four winter,

Katsushika Hokusai, Bashir Assad, Lady Gaga, Erik Satie, Muhammad Ali, the deep state, the world wars, flying,

cyberspace, steel, transistors,

Kosovo, teabags, W.B. Yeats,

dark matter, jeans, the stock exchange, the Arab Spring,

Virginia Woolf, Alberto Giacometti,

Usain Bolt, Johnny Cash,

birth control,

frozen food,

the sprung mattress,

the Higgs boson,

the moving image,

chess.  

Except of course the universe doesn't end at the stroke of midnight.  Time moves on with its usual nihilism, mows us all down, jaw-droppingly insensate to our preference for living. Guns us down.  In another split second millennia will pass and the beings on earth have become exoskeletal-cybernetic-machine-deathless-postbeings who've harnessed the energy of some hapless star and are guzzling it dry. 

If the cosmic calendar is in fact all of time, most of which has not yet occurred, in another two months any number of things could have happened to the cool marble of earth and none of them promising from a life point of view -- a wandering star could throw the whole solar system out and earth with it, a meteor strike could cause mass extinction, the earth's axial tilt could increase, the flexing and drifting of orbits could eventually eject some planets, and in all events it'll be in roughly another four months, five billion years, that the sun will run out of fuel, expand to a red dwarf and consumer Mercury and Venus.  Earth, if it survives, will be scorched and arid, its oceans boiled dry, a cinder stuck in an interminable orbit of a white dwarf dying sun until the whole show ends as the orbit decays and the sun eats us up. 

And this is just the local scene; a minor scuffle, a mini-drama.  We're caught in a universe of collision and drift, the long slow ripples of the first Big Bang as the cosmos drifts apart; the closest galaxies smash together, then those that are left scatter and flee one another until each is alone and there's only space, an expansion expanding into itself, and emptiness birthing itself, and in the cosmic calendar as it would exist then, all humans ever did and were will be a brief light that flickers on and off again one single day in the middle of the year, remembered by nothing. 

We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life and knowing, one finger-snap of frantic being, and this is it. This summary burst of life is more bomb than bud.  These fecund times are moving fast. 

Orbital

Samantha Harvey