I read this this morning and then stopped reading and thought: that's something I'd rather not see coming. I would maybe like the world not to completely go up in flames* for another let's say thirty years and then ok fine.
*We just watched that: "Flames will come out of here and there, and it'll just rise up. The mountains are going to go up in big flames. The water's going to rise in flames. There's going to be creatures running every which way, some of them burnt, half their wings burnin." I will always love this voiceover. So weird. Half their wings.
I hold with those who favor fire.
Sure. There are plenty of examples of both premonitions and secret desires for catastrophe in modern times. It's a theme in turn-of-the-last-century writing, before World War I, and also in analyses of fascism. I think it's behind Freud's eventual formulation of the death wish.
I don't think of this as a religious notion, but that may be because I haven't repressed religious thinking, but am conscious of it and its images almost constantly. So the repeated promises to save the earth, or that it will go on forever, occur to me as often as the vision of catastrophe.
So I think it probably does have the source you surmise for many people, perhaps because repressed.
I like big dramatic storms as much as the next person, but climate change doesn't instill that kind of "throw the burning couch off the roof!" relish for me.
The thrill of apocalypse is real; look at the movies! This Zadie Smith piece (perhaps already discussed?) is good on that aspect, though her attempt to link it to "relativism and deconstruction" is pretty stupid.
I don't think the resistance and inaction has much to do with fantasy death-wish, though. It's stubborness and denial on one hand, the fatal feeling of powerlessness on the other.
I am always surprised at how many years this passage of this poem has stuck with me.
Crested with mist, it looked like a giant wave
about to break and sweep across the valley,
and in my loneliness and fear I've thought,
O let it come and wash the whole world clean.
Forgive me. This is my favorite sin: despair--
Christ, lk, put an href in your a, why don't you? Here.
Ima just talk to myself about that poem. I don't love it; most of it is tame and New Yorker-grade and does not pack the punch that one expects from say Robinson Jeffers. Hence my surprise at its having achieved, in those middle five lines, something I've never gotten out of my head.
I liked it, lk! Thanks for sharing.
Those are good lines. Today I'm slightly cheesed that I can't find, online, the text of the John Hollander poem (reproduced in the appendix to Rhyme's Reason) containing the lines "O Bug bug bug bug bug that did require / The quietest devotions of our doubt!". I can't even find its title!
and New Yorker-grade
I'm rolling my eyes at you. Where do you go for your bucking USDA Prime poetry?
7 put me in mind of The Children's Hospital, a novel feverishly recommended by a friend that I read a few hundred pages of and finally just decided I didn't like well enough to finish. The event that happens very near the beginning of the book is that there's an enormous flood that drowns everything on earth except the people in a large children's hospital, which is kind of floating around or something.
I'm having a boring day at work and commenting just to comment, apparently. Sorry, ogged.
I'm rolling my eyes at you
I know, what a jerk! I do think the LRB publishes good poetry and excellent essays-on-poetry.
Chris Adrian, author of The Children's Hospital, more recently wrote an interesting if uneven (what a jerk!) novel called The Great Night, which redoes A Midsummer Night's Dream in Buena Vista Park. The first chapter was informed by Adrian's work in a pediatric oncology ward and is brilliant and sad, and was indeed published on its own in The New Yorker (+1!).
I'm no climate expert, but doesn't moving from Colorado to Copenhagen to escape the effects of global warming seem a little off? Copenhagen's on an island. A couple of meters above sea level. In a densely populated part of the world. In a region where agriculture could be very vulnerable to fairly small climactic changes. I would worry about his daughter too.
I wondered about that. Dude, stay in the country that will nuke people and take their (slightly irradiated) stuff.
7: I liked it too, and even more because of the article on its sidebar about "The Emperor of Ice Cream."
They don't mention the pun. The pun is there, but what does the pun mean, what should the Emperor of I Scream be controlling? Thing is to find the Munchian in Stevens is pretty hard, realists don't get disappointed. So the first half is the prescription for the second.
Gaza, methane, inequality.
Gonna be a fuckton of hedonism and cruelty coming as we humans realize what we are and what we have done.
Take it back, Stevens is not prescriptive. Maybe.
Mostly he is describing something he saw, probably in the Caribbean. Almost cinematic, and definitely not as overtly 1st person and confessional as the Hudgins.
Vendler et al also seen to miss the model, or depiction of masculinity (and femininity) presented in Steven's 1st stanza. The "muscular one" whips cu..s concupiscent cu... wenches while the boys fail to compete with art and science.
The big cigars always win.
OTOH, in contrast to the muscular one, the Hudgins starts with the woman laughing at and treating with contempt the narrator immediately after sex and ends with him wishing to be invisible and jump into a whole.
With the elephant thing to show how grounded he is.
Ecce 21st C homo.
OT, but 1: Flames will come out of here and there
Startled me for a sec: a friend's sometime pseudonym is "Flames" (he collects somewhat esoteric books and material on spontaneous combustion), and I thought: Flames? What's he up to now?
21: I feel somehow certain that apo has an old friend who is nicknamed Flames for entirely different reasons.
22: http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_8045.html#732199
Thanks to Bob for pointing out that Wallace Stevens sidebar. I actually covered Emperor of Ice Cream in a class in college, but if we covered the "intended" meaning, I don't remember it.
I once recommended The Snowman to my wife for her freshman composition class, and she harvested a disaster of incomprehension. I'll tease her still by doing an impression of Stevens' recorded reading, rather affectless, "He must have a mind of winter..."
I think apocalyptism is one way extroverts show depression -- why would they plan to go anywhere alone?
No idea why disaster is so appealing to the nation that made TV remotes and car cupholders common. `A leaping into cleanness'?
Since the topic here was originally climate change deniers, it's worth reading this long-form piece on the issues raised by Naomi Klein's new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Quoting the writer, D.R. Tucker:
I would give my last dollar to see a debate between Klein and Krugman, or Klein and Paulson, or Klein and former Rep. Bob Inglis on the issue of whether the climate crisis can only be resolved by shifting away from the dominant growth- and consumption-based economic model, or whether that model can simply be tweaked to avoid the worst consequences of carbon pollution. Klein is right that one cannot have infinite economic growth on a finite planet. However, I do worry about whether certain Americans will ever accept this logic--even if they accept the reality that we have a climate problem on our hands.
I suggest that the resistance of many Americans to the reality of climate change has less to do with their seekrit wish for apocalypse, and more to do with their (also secret) refusal to part from an infinite growth conception of well-being.
But the Piketty thread has demonstrated that the infinite growth conception is a bill of goods for the great majority, so that if that perception stuck, accepting limits to growth might not be such a hard sell.
IDP, do you mean the Piketty v. Graeber thread? I'm afraid I haven't yet read either that or the Piketty reading group threads.
I'd need a pointer to where people are saying that the infinite growth model is considered a bill of goods by the great majority. If that's what you're saying.
I meant the bookgroup. I meant the realization that the middle class has been hollowed out globally for generations, so that this or any rising tide isn't going to lift any boats. This may be hard for many to accept but probably millions already do, and if translated into political terms would allow growth-limiting policies to prevail. Nothing more than that.
I had meant to say earlier, that I mostly agree with the OP and that both the review linked in 6 and the quotation in 7 are well-chosen.
I think apocalyptism is one way extroverts show depression -- why would they plan to go anywhere alone?
I'm an introvert and am still inclined to occasional feelings of apocalyptism. I think despair is a word (thank you 7), and that the appeal of imagining the apocalypse combines (a) the pleasure of incontrovertible proof in the correctness of one's position ("I told you so"), (b) an alternative to imagining an endless prospect of trying to mitigate a gradually worsening situation along with (c) a willingness to imagine the world being swept away.
And (d) you and a bus of full of eighteen-year-old Ione Skye clones are all that are left to repopulate the planet.
"At least I won't have to go to work tomorrow."
32: I'm glad you appreciate the stern duty associated with a mineshaft gap
Oh I noticed the tab I'd opened for 7, I like the title and first line, which is not meant as faint praise. And the quote lk mentions, I wonder if it packs such a punch because the stanzas around it are kind of rambling and domestic, then whack.
It sounds Biblical but idle googling suggests Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
The cypress stood up like a church
That night we felt our love would hold
And saintly moonlight seemed to search
And wash the whole world clean as gold;
For engaging post-apocalypse pron, I will re-recommend Stewart's Earth Abides. Answers the Sierra Clubbers wet dream of, "What if I--keen observer of ecology--was a relatively unscarred* survivor of a catastrophe that removes most humans but leaves everything else intact".
Most of Apocalypse, the Bad Parts takes place offstage.
No idea why disaster is so appealing to the nation that made TV remotes and car cupholders common. `A leaping into cleanness'?
That phrase - a 'leaping into cleanness' - of course reminds me of Rupert Brooke in 1914:
Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary...
He's talking about the apocalypse here (albeit manmade) - the unveiling, the moment where deceit and artifice gets swept away. The Germans called it Der Tag.