This is how it ends.

.
.
.

The world turned upside down

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold
And it has overturned
The order of the soul

--L. Cohen.

Pollution levels here reached 700 ppm a few days ago (over a 1,000 in India). The recommended safe level is 40! Fires in Australia, California and the Amazon this year have been eye-opening (though maybe you want to close your eyes).

A strong sense that what's written can't be changed (I know people don't want to talk about religion at this late stage of the day).

There's no fooling Nature. The idea that we were in rational control is rapidly changing from being naive to laughable. All those years of 'domestication' are about to be upturned- unless there's an upturning of the social and economic model that we've stuck to for so long.

Kevin Anderson on 'carbon budgets'. Really good. If we want to have any chance of keeping within +2 C then we can only release 800 Gt of carbon (we release about 40 per year which means about 20 years left). According to the economists it's 1,600 but we're talking about what scientists say.

That means if emissions peak around now there are going to have to be some drastic reductions in emissions assuming the chances of technological fixes (NETs and geo-engineering) are pretty utopian. Zero carbon by 2050 at the global level. That means 13-20% reductions p.a. for rich countries (if China continues to grow at 5% p.a.and is reducing its emissions by about 10% p.a around 2040) so that they're fully de-carbonized by 2035-40. 

Could that happen? If there was a change in how economies are fundamentally run..perhaps. But our addiction to commodities, travel, growth doesn't show any signs of abating (a global recession might help). Also, built in: urbanization, farming, ocean acidification, destruction of the rainforests (therefore fewer 'carbon sinks'). Built in to capitalism: inequality (the richest 10% are responsible for a big chunk of emissions). But also, it's not just the number of people..it's also that as they move from one class to another their consumption patterns will change (changing the demand for food, energy, cement, for example). 

The Amazon, apparently, produces up to 22% of our oxygen. What happens if our lungs become punctured? Remember, Nobel prize-winning economists like Nordhaus think that +3.5 C is "optimal". Is life on this planet going to be sustainable at that level? That's an average figure. Which means land surface temperatures could, on average, be +4.5 C. So, that means that some places might go, for example, +6 C. Think about that for a second. What does it mean for temperatures where you live to go up by 6C (11 F)?  

Personally speaking (I don't know about you, reader(s)), we're heading for the abyss (see ya, and thanks for all the fish). New estimates that with +2 C we could see up to 300 m displaced/effected by flooding. With 3 C the previous figure had been 300 million so who knows what it would be now. what does that mean for the lives of those people? What does it mean politically? Lots of people from this region are going to be royally fucked (not to mince words). Lots of poor people are going to be.

But no, carry on having your soya latte and carry on discussing the merits of Handke, the wonders of Literature. Just please don't mind if I get off the bus at some stage. 

So now you scramble to look for protective masks for the family. This is what it's come down to. 

I've got nothing against greed and stupidity as long as it is local and in small doses. Global levels of it, though, is quite a different thing altogether. Call it want you want: the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene. I couldn't give a fig at this stage. Brace yourselves ladies, the ride has just begun.    

"When we have reached the point that we no longer know where we are headed, we have gone as far as it is possible to go."

"In a stark warning over global heating, Mark Carney said the multitrillion-dollar international capital markets – where companies raise funds by selling shares and bonds to investors – are financing activities that would lift global temperatures to more than 4C above pre-industrial levels."

--The Guardian.

Those in the know, know. Handke, Trump, Brexit..all that is going to seem like peanuts pretty soon. Occupy yourself with the Kardashians or with Literature. Good luck to you. No, I mean it. 

What was that song by Lauryn Hill:

you can keep the money

you can keep the power,

I got my eye, on the Final Hour.

The way things are, the way things will be.

If this is May, it must..

There is no doubt now, at least to my mind.

There is no doubt now, at least to my mind, that something weird is happening. The seasons are out of time, Spring dancing into Summer and vice versa. It never rains in May; it has rained in May. 

Still, the yellow petals at your feet remind you that there are still some familiar signs. How will we get on when we can't read? Agamben: the end of human gestures. Were the silent films a last reminder of the stylized ways in which the hands represent the soul? And now, as I type this, my hands move in the dark.

~~~

Methane, over a 20 year period, traps 86 times more heat than carbon dioxide. Levels of methane have increased from 1650 (ppb) to 1850 (ppb) over the last thirty years. There are feedback loops: the more methane released, the warmer the climate; the warmer the climate, the more methane released (from wetlands, permafrost). But no-one is quite sure why the increase has been so rapid over the last ten years. It may be the growth in farming; it may that the atmosphere's ability to 'cleanse' it is diminishing.  

~~~

Out grave old planet still shines, still holds the memory of stone and star for now. So, here we are, here we are now, looking for something to love, with blood on our hands, the sun having darkened our faces.What goes around comes around, the only law left on this land. When all else falls away, all the things we built to divert and entertain ourselves, what will remain in the time that remains? Perhaps only this, our age-old quest for love and meaning, down in the bones, the flickering of an eyelid, somehow dimly understood despite it all. 

~ ~

We, the modern-day Eloi, glutted on the fat of the land, drowned in a sea of information, are not even sure of what to hold on to. Formed by so many years of sun-and-wheat consciousness, we carry on as if our life will never be interrupted. The books will be closed, full of dust and deeply buried thoughts. The body, finally, free of guilt, the hands signifying nothing. A man will look into his wife's eyes and say, this is not my beautiful wife.       

No poetry

Earth withdraws her riches, sinks back into the shadows. For tens of thousands of years gentle sun and slanting rain and ferocious winds were moments in the silent life of the mountain. And now we've managed to tear it all up, gorged ourselves until our senses have given way to narcissistic fantasies and then finally exhaustion, nullity.

There's no poetry left in our words, only the utilitarian calculus of planners and revolutionaries. They tell us we have twenty years to act, to slow it down, reverse it. Why not just let things be? There is no time for poetry, no time at all. We head down, head held up high, dragging the rest of creation with us.      

Here there's no stage; here there is no royalty.

The good ol' days

What will historians make of it all? The shambolic escapades, the shenanigans of the elites, the squalid aspirations and the hate-filled anxieties of the working classes. The low key resentments that seethe with every passing failure, that stifle any generosity of spirit. They  will look back in sadness at the precise moment when the fires raged uncontrollably and the ground beneath us froze. Brexit will then seem like a shoddy little episode in the wider history of a set of warring tribes that once populate the north-western frontier. It will merit a footnote but nothing else in the history that is written with immense detachment- if we continue to write, that is. 

Some will have looked back with nostalgia- it will be posited or imagined- as if they were sipping warm beer in the shade-filled artificial gardens, their turned backs slowly warmed by the low sun. With that thousand-year look on their face the old-timers will be telling the young ones: there is nothing new under the sun. And perhaps it was true after all, since their facial gestures will make them not seem so strange, not so different after all from their distant ancestors, the first peoples who sat around the hearth telling each other fresh stories. 

There will be no looking back in anger, only in wonderment. At how these people had amassed great wealth, piled up vast quantities of gold and then plastic and then trash- enamoured as they were by glitter; first by things that were everlasting, and then in the late days by things that had only a fragmentary existence. This collecting and gathering, they estimate, to have continued right until the end, without desperation, almost a deranged kind of innocence. The blurry statistics were there before them, that is for sure, but they must have passed before the eyes of the weary generation like what they called "flash photography" or ticker-tape news.

How these people were riveted fast to their delusions. In one of their newspapers, one historian discovered, the demise was even foretold since:


'A backward And dilapidated province, connected To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain  Seedy appeal, is that all it is now?'


And that was England gone. The old ways, enshrined in religious custom had gone first. A buckling and loosening of historical imagination. And soon it would go down further, right into the marrow, the bindings and inter-weavings that had kept people close to one another; the desire to laugh together, to exchange stories, to congregate and celebrate life here on earth.

That world has gone. The anchors have dissolved or are dissolving. There is neither a monetary nor religious anchor. The pound floats... The great visions of how one might associate with others – in an Empire, a Commonwealth, a socialist economy, a commune, a religious community, a trade union or even a company – have become implausible. We are individualists in a not very sovereign nation state being buffeted around by economic forces beyond our control. We madly find meaning in cults and celebrity, over-investing in family as the last redoubt of meaning, while reconciling ourselves to fewer public services and cynical companies."

---Will Hutton, The Observer.             

Five Years

Kevin Anderson writes really clearly on carbon budgets and the level of mitigation that is required if we're to have a good (more than 66%) chance of avoiding +2 C. 

Here's a graph from the recent Global Carbon Budget (available online). The kind of mitigation in emissions (9% p.a.) are roughly what Anderson concludes as well. That's global reductions, mind you! As of now, I think that's only been 'achieved' during major economic slowdowns (Russia in the 1990s?). 

So, here's the dope. Emissions increased by 2.7% this year. That's despite technological improvements (carbon efficiency). It seems clear that technology is not improving at the necessary speed (that statement is based on the last 100 years of data, not just the last year). Of course, it could be that there's going to be this one spectacular breakthrough that makes a nonsense of the average figures but that's really just like placing a bet on an unlikely event (and what are the stakes here!).

Can we expect more deforestation over the next few years? I think so (given what's just happened in Brazil). Deforestation rates in Brazil were at their highest in a decade (8,000 sq. km lost last year).

The basic point: with urbanization, increases in population, and the growth in income there's a lot of momentum leading us to disaster. Factor in the investments made into extraction (which are unlikely to be reversed) and the political climate (right-wing climate deniers) then it's hard to see how this is going to be slowed down (let alone reversed).

My own view?

After the Camps there wasn't much left to say about humans anyway. That is not to say that the end of our time here is a good thing but just to acknowledge that we have sown destruction on this beautiful planet of ours and that things are coming to a head. No wonder people are obsessed by post-humanity and artificial intelligence/robots.

I think we need to buckle down. A storm is going to come, and things are going to slide.    

The Road to Nowhere

Even as the I.P.C.C. warned that 1.5 degrees of warming would be calamitous, it also indicated that, for all intents and purposes, such warming has become unavoidable. “There is no documented historical precedent” for the changes needed to prevent it, the group wrote. In addition to transforming the way that electricity is generated and distributed around the world, fundamental changes would be needed in transportation, agriculture, housing, and infrastructure. And much of this would have to be accomplished by the time today’s toddlers hit high school. To have a reasonable chance of limiting warming to 1.5  degrees, the I.P.C.C. said, global CO2 emissions, now running about forty billion tons a year, would need to be halved by 2030 and reduced more or less to zero by 2050. And this would still not be enough.

--Elizabeth Kolbert.

Prediction: In about ten years time all the discussions about post-modernism, transgender rights, the integration of Muslims into western society etc., etc. are going to seem to be strangely irrelevant. Even the eternal questions around the 'end of the novel' and the rise of the robots will, I'd hazard to guess, seem almost quaint from the standpoint of the 2030s. Instead: Fire, drought, flooding.

Elizabeth Rush:

'A drowned world: It’s an ancient fear and a very old story. Noah and his biblical flood, a tale likely descended from the even older story of Utnapishtim in the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” but there is also Da Yu and the flood that supposedly inspired China’s imperial feats of hydraulic engineering, Brahma and Manu, and, perhaps oldest of all, the 10,000-year-old tales of certain indigenous peoples of Australia, who sing of homelands lost beneath the rising waves at the end of the last ice age. '

--NYT.

   

Outlooks

What kind of times are they, when
A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?

--Brecht.

Who is the cause of Sedition?

'The men of law, the merchants, the gentlemen..the lords, and I cannot tell who; men that have no name because they are doers in all things that any gains hangs upon. Men without conscience. Men utterly void of God's fear. Yea, men that live as if there were no God at all! Men that would have all in their own hands; men that would leave nothing for others; men that would be alone on the earth; men that be never satisfied.'  

--Crowley, 1550.

Political possibilities were opened up or narrowed down by different ways of organizing the flow and concentration of energy, and these possibilities were enhanced or limited by arrangements of people, finance, expertise and violence that were assembled in relationship to the distribution and control of energy. 

--from Carbon Democracy.

~~~

I guess you know just how huge a fan I am of Nick Cave's Skeleton Tree. Breathtakingly good. So good, in fact, that most of what else you listen to just doesn't seem real in comparison. So, it was with great disappointment that I read his recent statement. Ken Loach responded:

"Nick Cave has a choice, either to stand with the oppressed Palestinians or the Israeli state which denies them their human rights. He chooses to stand with the oppressor.”

That, I think, is a fair assessment.

~~~

Something began me and it had no beginning; something will end me and it has no end.

--Carl Sandburg. 

Learning how to think/die

I haven't read Alan Jacobs's book but there was a nice review of it by Chad Wellmon. How to think alone is not really thinking. 

~~~
Learning to Die in the Anthropocene is a fascinating book (very much in tune, you suspect, with the Dark Mountain Project). A one line summary: we're fucked.

Any book that starts with these lines has me hooked:

A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation of life, not of death.

--Spinoza, Ethics, IV. 67  

This incredible sense of an ending of the immense beauty, wonder and joy that we once felt for the natural world. 

Grey whale
Now that we are sending you to the End.

The slow world of the whale, existing in another dimension to ours, out of time. None of our clocks are in sync. Time flies. 

How long have the whales been here? Humans, who once, we would like to believe, existed within nature, or at least in a more gentle relationship with her, has finally worked it out; the self-centre narcissistic species has decided how it can go it alone. 

Nature, in order to survive, must be 'killed' (that sounds like a bad joke from Vietnam but once you see the same destructive impulses at play you'll get where this is coming from). The connection between war and the environment: scorched earth policy. Shock and Awe. 

Nature is now an ecosystem service, valued at around 33 trillion dollars (roughly twice the annual world GDP). So, it's not in our interest to destroy our home (of course, if the benefits outweigh the costs then it is!). But in the process we will kill nature anyway (now priced, and spliced, the subject of speculation, 'investment'..you can be sure the MNCs won't be too far away..follow the money, as the old saying goes). Nature is big business. Instead of the 'free gift' of capitalism its value is now internalized.

And the Elephant sings deep in the forest-maze
About a star of deathless and painless peace
But no astronomer can find where it is.

The Great Thinning is upon us. The Sixth Extinction. See E. Kolbert and M. McCarthy for the stats. It's horrific. And there's a built-in momentum what with urbanization and the relentless imperative of economic growth that shows no sign of waning. The increase in the numbers of people in the middle class as well as farming practices mean that the chances of limiting this to 2 C are thin (see Kevin Anderson).

~~~

I can't really write about the claims of sexual abuse that seem to be part of the daily news nowadays. Would require some serious reflection and not just a small note like this one. But Tariq Ramadan? Really? 

Well, not too surprising (if true). It's great that these stories are coming out and I'm pretty sure they're just the tip of the iceberg (violence and abuse are probably a lot more widespread than many would like to believe). But I'm a bit jaded when it comes to the question of whether this will fundamentally alter things. As long as the power structures remain in place and as long as there isn't a change in heart expect more of the same: war citizenship. 

In some sense, this is really just a footnote to what was said above: there's a deep sickness in the heart of man (read: heart of men).  





    

Three degrees

k

There is no poetry here, no words or art that might reconcile, bring comfort. No west wind that harbours the thought of spring deep within its cold gaze.

There is only withdrawal, sheltering, a kind of bewilderment, a startled recognition of what our hands have sown. It's too late, the dark forests are dwindling, the Roding runs dry by the hour waiting for the moon to turn, and with it the invisible weight that will reach our shores, leading to a surge and the flooding of the land, with no renewal on what was leased to us.

The brief life we have, only artificially illuminated by electric lights. Myself, a flickering 'I', a blue light in the glass.    

Every grain of soil of known lineage, well connected...

But us, our loves, dust. All our bridges floating now. Turn your face to me in the grey morning. We are shades of one another. This, the only breath we have so let the weight grow in your heart. Think now. Settle your heart. If I could name it, I would. 

Everyone is on the move today. Perhaps they've seen the future, a future with no past. You, with your Jewish hat, are in prime position to find your way back. 

If nothing shines no more then is it only the memory of star that holds you rapt? What brings me this way today? And now, on this dark journey, carried by silver and star and reflection.

In the time that remains, do we seek forgiveness and who would listen? Why, raven, is your tongue so bittersweet?

{words by Anselm Hollo and Ted Hughes}

The world as phantom and as matrix

A shadow on the wall

boughs stirred by the noonday wind

that’s enough earth

and for the eye

enough celestial participation.

How much further do you want to go? Refuse

the bossy insistence

of new impressions—

lie there still,

behold your own fields,

your estate,

dwelling especially

on the poppies,

unforgettable

because they transported the summer—

where did it go?

---G. Benn

~~

The summer is over, the storms grow, and your coffee doesn't taste right. Retreat, as far as you can go, to the very heart of the poppy seed, perhaps? We speak a darkness between us.

This image was brought to you...

The world, as sponsored by...

In 1956, two years before Arendt's Human Condition, Gunther Anders wrote a prescient essay describing the beginnings of a "phantom world". This is before the 'society of the spectacle' as well. In the article he talks about the mass production of "hermits" for whom the world will be brought to their private living rooms. This "phantom" world, always half-absent, the stage of representations, images, background banter and music..always brought to you with the express intent of rooting us to the spot, of making us consumers of images and therefore our own producers of a mass, isolated self.

The political ramifications of the loss of the public world, of the ability to act in the world, would be spelled out by Arendt. The loss of speech that comes about when we're beholden to the manufactured image has, of course, political consequences: thoughtlessness and speechlessness. 

~~~

Cities of Salt

It is unfortunate, given the epic potential of his topic, that Mr. Munif [Cities of Salt]..appears to be ..insufficiently westernized to produce a narrative that feels much like what we call a novel. His voice is that of a campfire explainer; his characters are rarely fixed in our minds by a face..or developed motivation; no central figure develops enough reality to attract our sympathetic interest..There is almost none of that sense of individual moral adventure-of the evolving individual in varied and roughly equal battle with a world of circumstane..which has distinguished the novel from the fable and the chronicle.

--John Updike.

Here's Ghosh's radical point: it is the individualism of the market (and economic theory, I would add) that has made it so hard to think about a solution to the climate change crisis. And the background culture of the arts and literature is similarly geared towards the individual! 

The 'individual moral adventure' sounds like an advertisement for the frontier capitalist. Anyone who doesn't quite buy into this model is automatically consigned to the dustbin of history, relegated to the catch-all category: "the backward".

It's not just that this individual has resolutely stood against nature; it's that he's tried to control, tame, subdue and exploit it. 

Social media and the social sciences. The irony being: there is no social! Only narcissism on the one hand, and methodological individualism on the other. And you can't but help think that this detachment, this "second turning inwards" has helped narrowly define freedom in its modern sense: Freedom from nature; and freedom from the social are then inextricably intertwined with one another. 

Repeat after me:

I am an individual.
I am an individual.
I am an individual. 

After the storm

~~~~~~~

Is this the way things end? We have lived on the body of the earth and scarred her with our ultraviolence. There was a tremendous silence on the face of the Earth once. You can't but help wonder if it will return to silence soon.  
~~~~~~

The sea around us

A narwhal turns up in a Dutch estuary. A bizarre beaked whale, the likes of which have never been seen before, is found on an Australian beach. A bowhead whale in Cornwall, 1,000 "miles and an ocean away from its designated domain" (Philip Hoare). Are these signs of warming, more acidic, seas? (Not to mention the bleaching of the coral reef).

pH levels are down from 8.1 (1800) to 8.0 now (doesn't sound much but this is a log scale so that translates into roughly 30% more acidic). If current rates continue ("business-as-usual") we could see mean pH levels of 7.8 by the end of the century (which represents a 150% increase on 1800 levels). The thing to note here is not that the sea hasn't been more acidic in the history of the earth; it's the rate of change that is important.

E. Kolbert's book, The Sixth Extinction, was chosen by the Guardian as one of the 100 most important non-fiction books and I am beginning to see why. The journalist's eye for detail and the ability to weave them into a story makes for compelling reading.

What strikes you is nature's amazing systems. Of course, we like to think of nature as wild, chaotic, random, unanalysable (a good part of the Romantic and counter-Enlightenment tendencies draw on such roots). But if you think of the coral relief as a key player in the exchange of nutrients as well as a stage in which those exchanges take place then you begin to think of it in social terms (i.e the market). So, there's a whole ecosystem that makes us think about balance and equilibrium, but also dynamics and evolution: structure and freedom.

And then if you think of the trees, plants, the flora and fauna in a forest. Of the 130 million km of non-ice land about 70 m has been modified/altered by humans (think of agriculture, deforestation, mining, urban development, etc.) Of the remaining 60 m about 36 m is forest (1/4 of all forest land is in Canada and there are only 20 species of trees there). The remaining 24 m is desert and mountain area. Now, get this: in a small area of Peru (less than the size of Manhattan) there are over 1,500 species of trees! As you move south from the ice-regions biodiversity (not just of trees) increases. Why? 

A number of theories. This part of the book was absolutely fascinating and made we want to pull out Deakin's Wildwood which has been languishing on my bookshelf for some time now. 

Couldn't but help marvel at the empirical approach to knowledge/reality as well as the commitment of the scientists to trying to make sense of it all (in sharp contrast to the dull and ideological economists whose intelligence is really second-rate at the end of the day). 

And what gets you is that if the forests make up an ecosystem as do the seas, then so, surely, does the atmosphere? And how do they all hang together like that? And within that greater order is the human order. Except that now the balance has shifted so far that humans have disrupted-perhaps irrevocably-the very sustainability of those other systems. 

At the heart of it is surely something before Descartes and the mechanical idea of nature as mere matter-in-motion; perhaps it all started with out shifting attitudes to (and therefore practices on) the land? Once we started to think of ourselves as exclusively land based creatures and the land as a resource, something to be tamed, trapped, cultivated, exploited, managed and controlled was it only a matter of time before we ended up with this crazed desire for possession? (It is difficult not to see this as an expression of war-a war against the land and war against women who must also be tamed, possessed and controlled). The fertility of the land? Sow your oats?    

Abundance and Extinction

The walled city, the grand intuition laid to rest, the abundance squandered as the great summer holds us captive. Would that my words were richer (for you). The extinction of forms we once knew, memory like a forgotten hat on the train, the sense of it all now only smoke in our hands, a stain on our fingers, the smell of tobacco loosely lingering on your old coat. The empty plot next to the library in the old country is probably now all glass and steel. 

The breath out of time, keeps pace at the last turn. The squalor of a mind without 'givenness', priors. The night-words at 3 a.m. still clinging to the dream-world, fresh from the first beginnings of the heart's radiance, like little H repeating a word five times until you turn your head to notice what's always been there...

And the blue mourned the loss of the red.

Draw up the list of what belongs to who, and who to what. "Marriage only lasts ten days," KP said. "I sit under a tree by the river and watch my life go by." The river has dried up, like our words and feelings. Sixty, seventy years ago-or so the swami says-there were crocodiles there and now the lush grass has grown so thickly over the bed that buffaloes freely roam over the lost parts of river. Within a single lifetime what is known with the surety of our senses becomes a memory. When we were children did we only imagine we saw a river? Only when there's a starless sky can you hear it murmur again. 

The plant world faces extinction, the myriad names slipping by, down far into the obscure pages of a dusty and soon-to-be obsolete book. There was more than enough for everyone, there always was. 

The term draws to a close. You prepare for the last rituals with nothing much to show for it. And yet none of that bothers you at this time. What would you write, and for who? 

More importantly: wild garlic in the morning, barley with gur in the evening, an unsurpassed summer drink. Apples (imported..I know, I know)and fresh cherries but even better: a watermelon and lemon blitz. This is the time when there's an incredible variety of seasonal fruits: plums and peaces, too. Jamun for two weeks, dry on your tongue. Then by 15th June (there is a precise day) mangoes. If you've only had the awful south American version you've missed out on one of life's great pleasures, for can anything beat the king, Sher Shah Suri's chaunsa?