I've been pondering James Lovelock's recent pronouncements about the unavoidability of climate catastrophe.
Do you think we will survive?
I'm an optimistic pessimist. I think it's wrong to assume we'll survive 2 °C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4 °C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left. It's happening again.
I don't think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what's coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing's been done except endless talk and meetings.
I haven't posted much or any environmental stuff on my blog recently because I've got to the point where it just seems hopeless to me. I'm not someone who simply doesn't care. I've even been employed as something called a 'green champion' in my lifetime, which is less glamorous than it sounds. I have suffered terrible anxiety over the fate of 'the planet'. I can't even say how much. That anxiety has not entirely disappeared, but, looking back, I feel as if I was seized by a kind of psychic fever more than anything else. I believed in a doom whose particulars were ever-varying but ultimately unknown to me. (The above quote is fairly specific, however, which is something.) I suppose now I just feel more constantly what I have always felt intermittently, that even galaxies die, even universes die. There is some timescale by which the lifespan of a galaxy is a mere twinkle. This is just what we are born into, and the price of being born at all.
I seem to remember a jisei (death or farewell poem) that goes something like this:
Suddenly I realise
Everything is resting upon
Pillars of ice.
Pillars of ice, of course, that are constantly melting. It is our misfortune to be tricked into believing that the Earth stands still. It does not. Incidentally, the 'pillars of ice' in this poem are, I believe, actually 'shimobashira', an interesting phenomenon that I don't remember seeing in the UK, but which I saw in the mountains in Japan. They look more, to me, like mossy filaments of ice than pillars.
I am not devoid of anxiety, but I feel that if I am able to take on board the fact that anything may happen, including armageddon, and that this is ultimately, as they say, in the lap of the gods, I shall feel much better. I was interested by this part of the Lovelock interview:
If you were younger, would you be fearful?
No, I have been through this kind of emotional thing before. It reminds me of when I was 19 and the second world war broke out. We were very frightened but almost everyone was so much happier. We're much better equipped to deal with that kind of thing than long periods of peace. It's not all bad when things get rough. I'll be 90 in July, I'm a lot closer to death than you, but I'm not worried. I'm looking forward to being 100.
I'm far from being someone who wishes to 'glorify' ideas of war and violence, but this is something that it seems to me must be considered. Mishima, in Confessions of a Mask wrote of a sense of being cheated when the war came to an end and everyone was expected to resume ordinary lives.
There's a Japanese phrase 'heiwa-boke', which translates as 'peace-time senility'. It makes me think of a section from Tennyson's long poem, 'Maud'.
Why do they prate of the blessings of peace? we have
made them a curse.
Pickpockets, each hand lusting all that is not its own;
And lust of gain, in the spirit of Cain is it better or
worse
Than the heart of the citizen hissing in war on it's own
hearthstone?But these are the days of advance, the works of the men
of mind,
When who but a fool would have faith in a tradesman's
ware or his word?
Is it peace or war? Civil war, as I think, and that of a
kind
The viler, as underhand, not openly bearing the sword.Sooner or later I too may passively take the print
Of the golden age—why not? I have neither hope nor
trust;
May make my heart as a millstone, set my face as flint,
Cheat and be cheated, and died: who knows? we are
ashes and dust.Peace sitting under her olive, and slurring the days gone
by,
When the poor are hovell'd and hustled together, each
sex like swine.
When only the ledger lives, and when only not all men not
lie;
Peace in her vineyard—yes!—but a company forges the
wine.And the vitriol madness flushes up in the ruffian's head,
Till the filthy by-lane rings to the yell of the trampled
wife,
While chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor
for bread,
And the spirit if murder works in the very means of life.And Sleep must lie down arm'd, for the villanous centre-
bits
Grind on the wakeful ear in the hush of the moonless
nights,
While another is cheating the sick of a few last gasps, as
he sits
To pestle a poison'd poison behind his crimson lights.When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial
fee,
And Timour-Mammon grins on a pile of children's bones,
Is it peace or war? better, war! loud war by land and
by sea,
War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred
thrones.
This is mere poetry, of course, but what else do we have? In the end, and perhaps thankfully, we won't be making the choice if chaos intervenes once more in our lives. It happens whether we choose it or not, whether we write poetry about it or not.
As for myself, I sometimes wonder why I fear chaos when all my life I have cursed the normality that has trapped me as a wraith in some banker's dream of safety.
Ah, the delicious, delightful End of the World News! How I love the sounds of the words proclaiming this Environmental End of Days – continuous – spasmodic – increasing – recurring – deep – rich – like a Bach Fugue touching the soul with ethereal fingertips of glowing sound.Of course Lovelock is incorrect when he says:“Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing’s been done except endless talk and meetings.”Population has continued to increase robustly, grandly assisted by messages from the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, aka Joseph Alois Ratzinger. And nearer home, we have a government of the people that has engaged in more foreign wars than any other administration in the past hundred or so years – true, all those blasts and bombs heat up the world, but the million or so dead ease the problem (ever so slightly) of feeding everyone…And we mustn’t forget the more positive aspects of our government – to combat climate change, they’ve introduced a raft of new taxes. A goodly number of our old age pensioners have shuffled off this mortal coil because of hypothermia – it’s been estimated 30,000 deaths approx. occur each year in the UK – this past winter a 10% increase in winter deaths is projected because these people can’t aford their fuel bills. How is all of this “virtually nothing”?And, anyway, who would trust the opinion of an old, old man who manages to survive each winter by keeping warm? That can’t be right, can it? How’s he doing that? And roaring around the Devon countryside in his white Honda, like a bloody formula one driver! And didn’t he originally announce, having discovered that industrial chemicals, chlorofluorocarbons, had polluted the earth’s atmosphere, that the buildup of these CFCs posed “no conceivable hazard.”?!! Sadly, perhaps, “Lovelock’s doomsday scenario is dismissed by leading climate researchers, most of whom dispute the idea that there is a single tipping point for the entire planet.”Shame. We may have to wait a little longer for apocalypse. But until then, Quentin, keep on writing!All the best.
Hello. Thanks.Shame. We may have to wait a little longer for apocalypse. But until then, Quentin, keep on writing! As you have probably guessed, this is the crux of the matter. If my medium were music there would be no such dilemma, since music is very much of the moment. Unfortunately, writing is a medium that suffers a series of delays between writer and reader. The very act of reading tends to assume a significant duration of time. It makes me feel ghostlike. Which, of course, I am.
Quentin said: “It makes me feel ghostlike. Which, of course, I am.” Indeed. But ultimately, aren’t we all as ghosts? All forms of human expression, the written word, sculpture, music, are as silent screams in the void of each and all of us.Still we must do what we can do.Often I have heard the expression: “the fate of humanity is in its own hands”. But is it? Might it not be our fate is indeed preordained, the message of preordination carried in our genes? Perhaps it is this “message” that all art strives to depose…ineffectually, probably. But that’s not important. It is the attempt, the striving that gives value to us as individuals. This, and nothing more.
But ultimately, aren’t we all as ghosts? All forms of human expression, the written word, sculpture, music, are as silent screams in the void of each and all of us. I always think of those lines from ‘The Hollow Men’ in connection with writing in particular, and alienation in general:Between the ideaAnd the realityBetween the motionAnd the actFalls the ShadowFor Thine is the KingdomBetween the conceptionAnd the creationBetween the emotionAnd the responseFalls the ShadowLife is very longEtc.And, of course, we know how this poem ends, with the natural conclusion of the tendency noted by Dostoevsky (and no doubt others before him) when he proclaimed in Notes from Underground that we have “ceased to be the sons of living fathers”.But free will interests me. If anything at all is worth thinking about (perhaps nothing is) then surely it must be the question of free will.That’s why we try, I suppose. Either that or we have no choice.