My students -- most of them born around 1990 -- view the continual proliferation of electronic devices, access to information, instant communication, and incessant downpour of ideas, images, memes, and phrases from all these devices as normal. They expect it to continue. They expect that the information will continue to rain down, heavier and heavier. The mass media, and especially the internet media, continually promise faster and more complete access to information.
I see the current info-spasm of our civilization as a self-limiting condition, an aberration from the human norm. It seems as sustainable as a metastasis, and about as desirable. I anticipate a collapse of energy, of access to information, of complexity. The Transition, the passage Down the mountain. I don't think that the survivors will be carrying cell phones in 50 years.
So, which of these views is realistic? which is nostalgic?
08 December 2011
18 August 2011
Jane Smiley Rocks
Jane Smiley is one of those writers I just can't get enough of -- her style conveys generosity, humor, intelligence, and a faith in the reader's ability to be all of that as well. Rereading Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel, which once again makes me want to read all the great novelists I haven't yet (I've read hardly any Dickens; a huge oversight or a deferred pleasure) and also to return to my five unfinished novels and make something of them. I want to know how she moved from writing Thirteen Ways to her next published novel, 10 Days in the Hills.
04 August 2011
Dark Mountain Issue 2
Yes, I'm a Dark Mountaineer. Someone said in the Guardian that he wasn't "climbing the dark mountain..." Which misses the point of the Jeffers poem: we've already climbed the mountain of civilization, and now we begin to stumble downwards, in the dark. Today's economic news shows the point.
Dark Mountain aims at a re-thinking of the paradigms; not collapse, not apocalypse, not the end times. Rather, how does an unsustainable global civilization come unglued, and how might human beings respond to that unraveling -- creatively, psychologically, practically, spiritually?
A highlight of the new issue is Vinay Gupta's "Death and the Human Condition."
"Over-consumption and aggression to the planet and other people cannot go on indefinitely, and we with either transform or crash, but the age of the mall-dinosaurs is over and living in the truth strips out the lies. It does so without any bold statement, with no advert in the papers proclaiming that the end is night, but with the gentle and gradualist refusal to acknowledge other people's social fictions around consumption. It is the least we can do....
...We live in a culture which as made birth relatively safe, sex less mysterious, and death largely invisible, yet still from all three timeless points, the numinous shines.
So, too, there is a strange numinosity around the death of capitalism, the survival challenges we pose the ecosystem, and the green shoots of a new culture which ache to climb the wreckage, and instead find themselves shadowed by dead-while-standing oaks." (Dark Mountain, Issue 2, 78).
More at www.dark-mountain.net
Dark Mountain aims at a re-thinking of the paradigms; not collapse, not apocalypse, not the end times. Rather, how does an unsustainable global civilization come unglued, and how might human beings respond to that unraveling -- creatively, psychologically, practically, spiritually?
A highlight of the new issue is Vinay Gupta's "Death and the Human Condition."
"Over-consumption and aggression to the planet and other people cannot go on indefinitely, and we with either transform or crash, but the age of the mall-dinosaurs is over and living in the truth strips out the lies. It does so without any bold statement, with no advert in the papers proclaiming that the end is night, but with the gentle and gradualist refusal to acknowledge other people's social fictions around consumption. It is the least we can do....
...We live in a culture which as made birth relatively safe, sex less mysterious, and death largely invisible, yet still from all three timeless points, the numinous shines.
So, too, there is a strange numinosity around the death of capitalism, the survival challenges we pose the ecosystem, and the green shoots of a new culture which ache to climb the wreckage, and instead find themselves shadowed by dead-while-standing oaks." (Dark Mountain, Issue 2, 78).
More at www.dark-mountain.net
24 February 2011
Asymptotically aproaching a zero-point
Been reading Slavov Zizek's (with special accents over the Zs), Living in the End Times. Dense, heavy with Marxist-Freudian-Lacanian theory. I can make sense of less than half but some is startlingly relevant, stating familiar concepts in a new way. Here's a characteristic passage:
"At the geological and biological level, [Ed] Ayres enumerates four 'spikes' (or accelerated developments) asymptotically approaching a zero-point at which the quantitative expansion will reach its point of exhaustion and will bring about a qualitative change. These four spikes are: population growth, consumption of resources, carbon gas emissions, and the mass extinction of species. In order to cope with this threat, our collective ideology is mobilizing mechanisms of dissimulation and self-deception which include the direct will to ignorance: 'a general pattern of behavior among threatened human societies is to become more blinkered, rather than more focused on the crisis, as they fail.' The recent shift in how those in power are reacting to global warming is a blatant display of such dissimulation."
Does that not explain a lot?
"At the geological and biological level, [Ed] Ayres enumerates four 'spikes' (or accelerated developments) asymptotically approaching a zero-point at which the quantitative expansion will reach its point of exhaustion and will bring about a qualitative change. These four spikes are: population growth, consumption of resources, carbon gas emissions, and the mass extinction of species. In order to cope with this threat, our collective ideology is mobilizing mechanisms of dissimulation and self-deception which include the direct will to ignorance: 'a general pattern of behavior among threatened human societies is to become more blinkered, rather than more focused on the crisis, as they fail.' The recent shift in how those in power are reacting to global warming is a blatant display of such dissimulation."
Does that not explain a lot?
30 January 2011
George Eliot Sure Knew What She Was Talking About
"The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent."
(George Eliot, Silas Marner, chapter 5)
Good epigraph for a book on peak oil, ain't it?
(George Eliot, Silas Marner, chapter 5)
Good epigraph for a book on peak oil, ain't it?
18 January 2011
Epitaph of Sardanapolos
The current issue of the New Yorker has a long article about the history of the US Constitution as artifact, document, idea, and object of discussion, derision, and reverence. Early on, author Jill Lepore write, "As an object, the Constitution has more in common with the Dead Sea Scrolls than with what we now think of as writing: pixels floating on a screen, words suspended in a digital cloud, bubbles of text. R we the ppl? Our words are vaporous. Not so the Constitution."
The shift from writing as words-on-paper to words-in-electronic-aether has happened during my lifetime, rapidly. A hard-core bibliophile, I still manage to read more words on paper than words on the screen, but this is increasingly difficult to keep up as work demands more and more on-screen, on-keyboard time.
Most of the writing coming into the world at this moment is surely born on a keyboard and breathing in electronic memory. Is this writing? The value of the printed page declines in the minds of literate people. The value of the book declines even in colleges. The difference erodes between the labor of years embodied in a book, and the flicker of thought brought into evanescent life via the fingertips, the glowing screen.
I still value the books more. The parchment. Last summer I spent countless hours inscribing a poem onto a scroll of undyed muslin, ninety yards long and seven inches wide. Inscribing each letter with fabric paint, working the paint into the fabric. Each word took a few minutes; a sentence could take an hour. I thought of monks, hand-copying texts that took years to finish, in rooms dedicated to this purpose, scriptoria.
Now I think of painting words on fabric, of embroidering poems on old linen napkins. The opposite of a blog: slow, useless, permanent. Poems that can outlast the flickering pixels of this civilization. Words as objects. An organization on this island made a huge banner of the preamble to the Constitution, large enough to drape over the steps of the Supreme Court. The constitution as a giant tarpaulin draped over the house of the nation.
The blog is a leaf in the forest of the internet, a fragment, impermanent and anonymous. The poems in the books are solid as bricks. A poem or civic creed, embroidered in cotton on linen, could last a thousand years, or more. Who will pick through the fragments of this culture, looking for what we thought, what we meant?
The Epitaph of Sardanapalos
I keep the taste of feasting,
And the wage of wantonness,
And the joys shared with lovers;
But the blessings of many
Possessions I leave behind.
Anonymous, translated by Kenneth Rexroth
Poems from the Greek Anthology
University of Michigan Press, 1962.
The shift from writing as words-on-paper to words-in-electronic-aether has happened during my lifetime, rapidly. A hard-core bibliophile, I still manage to read more words on paper than words on the screen, but this is increasingly difficult to keep up as work demands more and more on-screen, on-keyboard time.
Most of the writing coming into the world at this moment is surely born on a keyboard and breathing in electronic memory. Is this writing? The value of the printed page declines in the minds of literate people. The value of the book declines even in colleges. The difference erodes between the labor of years embodied in a book, and the flicker of thought brought into evanescent life via the fingertips, the glowing screen.
I still value the books more. The parchment. Last summer I spent countless hours inscribing a poem onto a scroll of undyed muslin, ninety yards long and seven inches wide. Inscribing each letter with fabric paint, working the paint into the fabric. Each word took a few minutes; a sentence could take an hour. I thought of monks, hand-copying texts that took years to finish, in rooms dedicated to this purpose, scriptoria.
Now I think of painting words on fabric, of embroidering poems on old linen napkins. The opposite of a blog: slow, useless, permanent. Poems that can outlast the flickering pixels of this civilization. Words as objects. An organization on this island made a huge banner of the preamble to the Constitution, large enough to drape over the steps of the Supreme Court. The constitution as a giant tarpaulin draped over the house of the nation.
The blog is a leaf in the forest of the internet, a fragment, impermanent and anonymous. The poems in the books are solid as bricks. A poem or civic creed, embroidered in cotton on linen, could last a thousand years, or more. Who will pick through the fragments of this culture, looking for what we thought, what we meant?
The Epitaph of Sardanapalos
I keep the taste of feasting,
And the wage of wantonness,
And the joys shared with lovers;
But the blessings of many
Possessions I leave behind.
Anonymous, translated by Kenneth Rexroth
Poems from the Greek Anthology
University of Michigan Press, 1962.
02 August 2010
Apocalyptica: The Great Bay
The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse, by Dale Pendell, is the perfect light post-apocalyptic novel for summer beach reading. No, it's dead serious, beginning with the radical culling of the US population to 1/80th of its present size through bio-engineered plagues, followed by natural plagues, followed by famine. After that, though, things lighten up -- it's more inspiring than depressing.
The Great Bay is structured as a series of dispatches in different media: news reports, scholarly journals, interviews, third-person omniscent narration, private diaries. It covers a multitude of people and situations, beginning with the early days of the collapse, through a few generations of scavenging and "making do," toward an unwinding of the very idea of Civilization.
It says something about Pendell's view of society that the first example of a successful, humanistic, post-Collapse society is a resurrected biker gang that combines outlaw and family values and pretty much works. The timescale here is so broad that individual characters come and go, yet each is treated with compassion. I was comforted by the view across centuries, which puts the anguish of our current age in perspective as but one moment in the long, long story of Gaia.
Pendell's implicit critique of the very idea of civilization, and our notions of Progress and cultural evolution, challenges some of my long-held beliefs. I've been very invested in the spiral dynamics model and the idea that societies do evolve toward higher or more inclusive value systems. In The Great Bay, civilization simply unwinds, and the lives of the hunter-gatherers at the end of the Anthropocene are as meaning-full as those of the dazed survivors of our own time.
Buy the Great Bay righ now from your local bookseller - it's a landmark in the literature of Collapse.
The Great Bay is structured as a series of dispatches in different media: news reports, scholarly journals, interviews, third-person omniscent narration, private diaries. It covers a multitude of people and situations, beginning with the early days of the collapse, through a few generations of scavenging and "making do," toward an unwinding of the very idea of Civilization.
It says something about Pendell's view of society that the first example of a successful, humanistic, post-Collapse society is a resurrected biker gang that combines outlaw and family values and pretty much works. The timescale here is so broad that individual characters come and go, yet each is treated with compassion. I was comforted by the view across centuries, which puts the anguish of our current age in perspective as but one moment in the long, long story of Gaia.
Pendell's implicit critique of the very idea of civilization, and our notions of Progress and cultural evolution, challenges some of my long-held beliefs. I've been very invested in the spiral dynamics model and the idea that societies do evolve toward higher or more inclusive value systems. In The Great Bay, civilization simply unwinds, and the lives of the hunter-gatherers at the end of the Anthropocene are as meaning-full as those of the dazed survivors of our own time.
Buy the Great Bay righ now from your local bookseller - it's a landmark in the literature of Collapse.
12 July 2010
Apocalyptica: Little, Big
I've been collecting and reading books on the coming collapse (aka the Long Emergency, end of Civilization, Transapocalypse, or XVI = The Tower). Most of these are nonfiction and fairly obvious, but send a note if you want titles. More surprising are fiction and occult titles that address the same issues.
Little, Big, or The Fairies Parliament is a long fantasy novel by John Crowley published in 1981. My feeling on reading it is along the lines of : Where have you been all my life? It's amazing that I missed it, but wonderful because there's so much more to ready by this author. Little, Big is a sort of family epic focused on an extended family that traffics with Faery. It's located in a space similar to upstate New York and NYC and covers approximately the 20th Century. The plot is slow and meditative, with much interior rumination by the characters, and conversations often full of pauses and omitted information.
The latter part of the action takes place in a nation that is falling apart, under the sway of an incompetent dictator, a lost medieval Emperor who presides over a collapsing economy, communication grid, and energy systems. It has nothing to do with the Collapse we now face, but the specific details of life under the Lecturer Eigenblick are all too relevant, like the block of formerly-elegant New York townhouses converted to a small farm , with the facades and front rooms of the buildings encircling the crop rows, and goats housed in the former garden apartments. A beautiful, transporting book.
Little, Big, or The Fairies Parliament is a long fantasy novel by John Crowley published in 1981. My feeling on reading it is along the lines of : Where have you been all my life? It's amazing that I missed it, but wonderful because there's so much more to ready by this author. Little, Big is a sort of family epic focused on an extended family that traffics with Faery. It's located in a space similar to upstate New York and NYC and covers approximately the 20th Century. The plot is slow and meditative, with much interior rumination by the characters, and conversations often full of pauses and omitted information.
The latter part of the action takes place in a nation that is falling apart, under the sway of an incompetent dictator, a lost medieval Emperor who presides over a collapsing economy, communication grid, and energy systems. It has nothing to do with the Collapse we now face, but the specific details of life under the Lecturer Eigenblick are all too relevant, like the block of formerly-elegant New York townhouses converted to a small farm , with the facades and front rooms of the buildings encircling the crop rows, and goats housed in the former garden apartments. A beautiful, transporting book.
Garden Update
The garden is doing fine, now that we've had some proper sun and heat. We are eating lovely peas which I can hardly keep up with harvesting, the zucchinni are making their little namesakes, and some of the broccoli looks quite respectable. Half the tomatoes have the curl-leaf thing going, which doesn't seem to kill them but does slow them down. Something dreadful happened to a pile of compost I made last year and it ended up dry and not very broken down, and full of bugs. I foolishly piled it on the bed anyway, and now the beans are tortured by ants which nibble on their leaves. Or something.
This organic gardening is No Joke. Children, don't fall asleep during compost class; you'll be needing that information.
The poppies and pea flower are looking especially fabulous in various shades of purple and red. I am a fool for poppies and let them grow in the beds even where they fight with vegetables -- the rainbow chard is over shadowed by a crowd of poppies about the bloom -- apparently I prefer the poppies.
30 May 2010
Rain in Paradise and a National Day of Mourning
Here in paradise -- our little green island in Puget Sound where the giant corporation has so far NOT been able to build the giant industrial dock to haul away the gravel -- things are okay. We have hardly seen the sun, and our high temperature for May is about 56 degrees, but the trees are green. We opened up our old hive (Beatrice) to see if the new queen we got 3 weeks ago had finally got out of her cage and she had... So she's up near the top of the hive where the bees are really active.
I've been obsessed with the oil spill for a month. Posting the poem was interesting. My old poetry teacher let me know it needs a lot more work and he's right, and yet a lot of people responded to the ranting version I posted. Sometimes a rant seems like the right form.
But if the oil is going to keep erupting from the sea floor all summer -- which seems horribly likely -- there's plenty of time to work on poetics. There's time to organize protests, boycotts, and poetry readings. A lot of folks seem to be using this as an opportunity to vent their rage, often well justified rage, at corporate power, oligarchy, and poor leadership. Many demand more anger, from the citizenry, from the president, from the Congress.
And yeah, it makes sense that people are angry. If that means, let's change the law so BP is liable for $10 or $50 Billion in damages, let's do it. Let's bring criminal charges against those responsible, Svanberg and Hayward and the corporate officers and the "company man" who needed the drilling to go faster and anyone else involved, and anyone who falsified records, ignored safety regulations, failed to perform oversight. Send them to an especially uncomfortable penitentiary in the deep South, with no AC and really bad food.
But often people get angry because it's less painful than grieving. And anger is a much more socially acceptable emotion than grief, especially for men. My own feeling is much more like grief. I don't so much want to hear public official expressing anger as to hear them grieving. Rep. Charlie Melancon wept giving testimony in congress last week. It was sad to me that he was working so hard not to give in to it. Tears are appropriate. I'd like to see all of Congress weeping together in their chambers.
Demonstrations are terrific. Calls for prosecution; for sure. Sign those petitions, boycott BP and their associates. But I want a national day of mourning for the Gulf of Mexico, all the creatures and all the land and all the people who won't survive or will have their lives devastated by this. We'd not shop, not drive, not burn the lights, not spend a nickel. Walk around your neighborhood. Talk about what this means. Talk about the reality of Peak Oil -- we haven't run out of oil, but the oil we get comes at a higher and higher cost. Look at pictures of pelicans and manatees and dolpins and bluefin tuna and think about a planet without them. Eat fruits and vegetables that grew near where you live. Drink tap water. Weep with your friends. Read to your kids. Plant something beautiful in your yard or the vacant lot down the block.
There are some good pictures of today's protest in New Orleans up at the NOLA web site:
http://photos.nola.com/4500/gallery/oil_spill_protest_in_jackson_square_sunday_may_30_2010/index.html
Looks like it's raining down there too.
I've been obsessed with the oil spill for a month. Posting the poem was interesting. My old poetry teacher let me know it needs a lot more work and he's right, and yet a lot of people responded to the ranting version I posted. Sometimes a rant seems like the right form.
But if the oil is going to keep erupting from the sea floor all summer -- which seems horribly likely -- there's plenty of time to work on poetics. There's time to organize protests, boycotts, and poetry readings. A lot of folks seem to be using this as an opportunity to vent their rage, often well justified rage, at corporate power, oligarchy, and poor leadership. Many demand more anger, from the citizenry, from the president, from the Congress.
And yeah, it makes sense that people are angry. If that means, let's change the law so BP is liable for $10 or $50 Billion in damages, let's do it. Let's bring criminal charges against those responsible, Svanberg and Hayward and the corporate officers and the "company man" who needed the drilling to go faster and anyone else involved, and anyone who falsified records, ignored safety regulations, failed to perform oversight. Send them to an especially uncomfortable penitentiary in the deep South, with no AC and really bad food.
But often people get angry because it's less painful than grieving. And anger is a much more socially acceptable emotion than grief, especially for men. My own feeling is much more like grief. I don't so much want to hear public official expressing anger as to hear them grieving. Rep. Charlie Melancon wept giving testimony in congress last week. It was sad to me that he was working so hard not to give in to it. Tears are appropriate. I'd like to see all of Congress weeping together in their chambers.
Demonstrations are terrific. Calls for prosecution; for sure. Sign those petitions, boycott BP and their associates. But I want a national day of mourning for the Gulf of Mexico, all the creatures and all the land and all the people who won't survive or will have their lives devastated by this. We'd not shop, not drive, not burn the lights, not spend a nickel. Walk around your neighborhood. Talk about what this means. Talk about the reality of Peak Oil -- we haven't run out of oil, but the oil we get comes at a higher and higher cost. Look at pictures of pelicans and manatees and dolpins and bluefin tuna and think about a planet without them. Eat fruits and vegetables that grew near where you live. Drink tap water. Weep with your friends. Read to your kids. Plant something beautiful in your yard or the vacant lot down the block.
There are some good pictures of today's protest in New Orleans up at the NOLA web site:
http://photos.nola.com/4500/gallery/oil_spill_protest_in_jackson_square_sunday_may_30_2010/index.html
Looks like it's raining down there too.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)