Sunday, March 2, 2014

We Encounter What We are, and Transform

Don't a few more people than in former eras wonder sometimes at the priority we each still put on a venture--artistic endeavor, marketing, haute cuisine, just as examples--especially when reminded that by thirty or so more years living on earth may just be all about mere survival?  Who might afford the money and time for such products, mundane or exquisite, among the desperate generations to come?

But since life demands we carry on with the things that bring us a living or inspiration, we figure we might just upgrade what we offer in accord with trends that surface. The tallest and bleakest trend in more and more people's perspective is the emerging volcanic mountain range of symptoms that indicate our own over-extension-- too many humans, too much ongoing, extractive, polluting overgrowth.  The earth's become like a human body overwhelmed by metastasis in one of its own organs. We are that organ, something that thrives at earth's skin-level.

A few years ago it sounded as if I was stating a religious belief whenever I said to anyone that I believe we're already experiencing global warming. I knew--and who didn't know?--lots of other folks who were dismissive, saying things like 'the earth is very old and has coped with many, many changes in climate through the millennia' or 'it's all a liberal hoax.' And those people are still around, caught up in their own comforts. But more and more people on their own appear to accept that the news documentaries scattered through the years introducing a changing global weather regime were correct and bode frighteningly ill for future generations.

Speaking as I am like some movement's disciple, I respectfully cite as this outlook's prophet Bill McKibben, the author and organizer who has publicly and in print described the climate crisis, mustering Americans to events crying out the need for, as nearly as possible, abolishing our mass reliance on fossil fuels. He's one of the best-known leaders of the movement to deinvest in fossil fuels. It was Bill McKibben, interviewed recently on Democracy Now, who said that before the end of the 21st century, with average global temperatures risen by seven or eight degrees F per the computer models, all of civilized life on earth will consist of emergency response measures. In the same interview he alluded, most meaningfully to me, to an earth where winter will be gone, winter as so many of us cherish it with all its majestic gliding sports and immaculate frozen scenery.

In this exhilarating winter of 2013-2014 I can't help feeling a rush of sentiment to create memorials to the snowed-in forests all around me.



https://www.etsy.com/listing/180400950/snow-landscape-surreal-watercolor-boreal?


Or I reach around me for literary parallels that help explain the behaviors of all of us who've pushed the problem to the stage we are in now. A most classic parable that could have been about the climate crisis is in Grimms' Fairy Tales: 'The Fisherman and his Wife.'

The solitary fisherman and his wife start out the story living on the sea coast in 'a miserable little hovel.' A magical fish, the flounder which the man luckily reels in one day but releases, grants wishes whose  fulfillment the wife demands from their home which she never leaves, each time sending him to call back the flounder to approve her latest.  First she wants a pretty cottage with several rooms, a larder and well-appointed kitchen. In another week or so, tired of that, the wife calls for a big stone castle in its place. Promptly the next day she finds herself disappointed to have a castle when she can't be king, so she sends the husband back to call the flounder to declare her the king. Then it's for her to be emperor, pope and finally lord of the universe. Each time the husband in his trepidation returns to the shore he finds both sea and sky uglier with turbulence and foul coloration.

By the time the woman announces she can never be satisfied unless she's made lord of the universe the man can only call back the flounder out of fear of his wife's rage. Quoting the last paragraph of the story:
     "Then he pulled on his trousers and tore away like a madman. Such a storm was raging that he could hardly keep his feet. Houses and trees quivered and swayed, and mountains trembled, and the rocks rolled into the sea. The sky was pitchy black. It thundered and lightened, and the sea ran in black waves mountains high, crested with white foam. He shrieked out, but could hardly make himself heard:
                "Flounder, flounder in the sea, 
                Prythee hearken unto me:
                My wife, Ilsebil, must have her own will,
                And sends me to beg a boon of thee."
     "Now what does she want?" asked the flounder.
     "Alas," he said, "she wants to be Lord of the Universe."
     "Now she must go back to her old hovel," said the flounder, "and there she is!"

In the event of modern-day overreach, we might justly expect there will be punishment, complete with tragic deaths of countless people. I see that this old parable is touching not just on narcissism to the extreme of wanting to be God but also hinting at a hunger to be bigger and bigger in our consequences on the face of the earth. The waves, the houses and trees react the way they do in the mega-storms repeatedly in news coverage today. Dreams in recent centuries of super-cities, climate-regulated and self-serving and mutually supportive covering the landscape, may be cast away just as some super-cities find themselves outposts of human survival, each making do with life strategies that fit the place, time and conditions. Admittedly no one really knows what the worst we can do to ourselves on the whole will look like.

'Hell on earth' comes mind, as in the last days of the Biblical Revelation, or in the notion that people are so stupidly evil and greedy that all but a few souls may be wiped from off the earth. Don't most of us agree that we will have to change course, by force or in advance, and still won't live through the worst of what's to come?

Charles Williams, the British theological novelist, poet and critic of the mid-twentieth century, ended his novel Descent into Hell with a man's death by stages down in a pit, dropping ever lower beneath the moon which the character, Wentworth, confuses with a clock-face in a tower and at the same time with his own watch, over-wound and left broken at home. A silver, million-miles-long rope has just shot from his hand upward into the moon, disconnecting him from time in which he'd remain able to act for the better or the worse.

Charles Williams' talent allowed him to narrate from within a dimension that included the metaphysical and physical interwoven. He relates the most subtle gradations of difference between one moving force and another, "percipient  and impercipient," conscious and unaware. The fictional Wentworth had allowed obsession with a woman he only knew casually to turn her into a phantasm who went with him, agreeing to all his own lustful wants, wishes and notions, till her image dwindled into something that disgusted him and collapsed altogether. He is full of hate for everyone else, rivals to his own self-importance. In the concluding few lines:

     "He had now no consciousness of himself as such, for the magical mirrors of Gomorrah had been broken, and the city itself had been blasted, and he was out beyond it in the blankness of a living oblivion, tormented by oblivion. The shapes stretched out beyond him, all half turned away, all rigid and silent. He was sitting at the end, looking up an avenue of nothingness, and the little flames licked his soul, but they did not now come from without, for they were the power, and the only power, his dead past had on him; the life, and the only life, of his soul. There was, at the end of the grand avenue, a bobbing shape of black and white that hovered there and closed it. As he saw it there came on him a suspense; he waited for something to happen. The silence lasted; nothing happened. In that pause expectancy faded. Presently then the shape went out and he was drawn, steadily, everlastingly, inward and down through the bottomless circles of the void."

What is personal among each of our motives will remain, I think, till it is burned or corroded out of each of us. Fabulous landscapes ever veering into winter will for a long time I think be mine. But in sorrowful recognition that Bill McKibben is likely right about a future earth with the phenomena of winter cooked away from its sub-polar regions, I titled the above painting Repercussions. Interpret it how you will. In dream likeness the gull is dashed to smithereens that are one with the snow flakes as it crashes against the strange edifice of combined origins, manmade hotel and cliff face.










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