I went to a Climate Strike gathering on
Friday in Santa Fe and listened to a number of young people speak about the reality
of the world situation, about organizing, about doing something in the face of
this massive catastrophe. It almost made me cry with joy. Seeing their energy, their fierceness, their joy, I think they may be
unstoppable.
With that in mind I will be posting over the course of the
next week a seven-part poem that addresses climate catastrophe.
Part desperate
inquiry, part satire, part alchemical experiment, part spell, part ceremony…
It’s called:
Solutions for the End of the World.
It started out as a psychological experiment.
About a year ago I noticed that when I read climate
catastrophe news (and the news in general),
I went into a cycle of heightened anxiety, and then
would swing between states of rage and numb paralysis.
What was at the heart of the rage, anxiety, and
paralysis
was a deep, deep sorrow – grief.
So, this summer, I decided to incorporate headlines and
frightening scientific predictions into a poem, thinking that would somehow
give me a sense of control, and so abate the anxiety and rage.
From the beginning I wanted to address the fact that
the human mind (my mind, at least) was having a hard time grasping the
insolubility of the climate catastrophe. Even if we stopped carbon emissions
tomorrow, the earth will still be significantly changed…it’s too late to save
the earth that I knew as a child.
What the youth of the world are trying to do now is
save what we’ve got left, adjust to this new earth and ameliorate massive
civilization-wide chaos.
So the premise of the poem came out of grief for what
has been and will be lost. It is the sequel to another long poem of mine on the
climate catastrophe called
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| Swansea, Wales - Location of Poem Tidal Flats |
Goya, A Feathered Eel, and Maria Prophetissa
Three characters appeared in the poem, right at the
beginning. The first character was Goya – the Spanish artist. He became the
voice of reason, of trying to look at the overwhelming situation primarily in
terms of a sarcastic (and somewhat nihilistic) rationality.
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| There is Plenty to Suck - from Goya's "Caprichos" |
The second character to appear was a mythological
Giant Feathered Eel that lives in the fracture rock somewhere below Santa Fe.
It lives somewhere below us all. The beast is a creature of both the underworld
and the sky (because of the feathers). Maybe it stands in as symbol for the
unfathomable, overwhelming aspect of climate catastrophe on the tiny, tiny
human mind. It causes paralysis, takes away speech…
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| Image of Quezacoatl - The Feathered Eel in the poem is a little different |
The third character that appears in the poem is Maria
Prophetissa. In alchemical literature, she is known as the first alchemist. She
supposedly lived in Alexandria in the third century BCE.
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| Maria Prophetissa, The First Alchemist |
It is said that she was the first to formulate the
famous (for alchemists) aphorism: “One becomes two, and two becomes three, and out of the third comes the
one that is the fourth.”
It seems like nonsense but can be interpreted as
having a relation to psychological growth (more on that later in the week).
Solutions
for the End of the World
“Not everything that
is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
James Baldwin
The certitude that
there is no salvation is a form of salvation, in fact is salvation.
Starting from here,
one might organize our own life as well as construct a philosophy of history:
the insoluble as solution, as the only way out.
E.M. Cioran
1. Introduction
of Fear, The Appearance of Goya
& A Feathered Eel
The
sun, insoluble,
rises over the eastern ridge. Shadow, mist;
everything indistinct,
unknowable
as the cracked-glass patterns
of plutonium-soaked ooze through
salt cave-walls near Carlsbad,
as it
falls, drop by drop,
into deeper
waters. I turn on the
tap.
Particles drift,
tiny last cries in the substrate, the dream-aquifer,
where final solutions float by…
I splash my face, insoluble.
Since the 80s, the
rate of ice loss has increased six-fold. Organs
in my body lift, anticipate the fall – terror
in my heart, stomach, spleen,
as they float up, while the body plummets.
I drift
out the window:
a warship; a cabbage moth; a
cluster bomb with its enticing
colorful toys, drawing
children in;
a yellowjacket spinning around a dead cicada.
Indistinct
forms merge;
solute and solvent exchange souls.
Goya appears
near the ceiling, insoluble.
He is his own uncomputable function.
And so he is wearing a pair of plastic batwings.
He smiles.
He says he could make a sketch of me,
sitting on the bed, head in hands,
foolishly trying to solve the
equation of the earth and the human soul.
He will call it “The Joke.” Caprichos.
Organs float, bodies turn in the surf. Last year, 40%
of honey-bee colonies in the US
died.
And I watch water disappear
down the drain, unused, wasted,
into a realm of Precambrian
fracture-rock,
where a Feathered Eel swims, forever
on the verge of devouring the world.
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| The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters - From Goya's "Caprichos" |
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