Mourning for the World, Part 2

by Antonio Dias

At the end of April, I wrote this short piece, Signs. In June I wrote, Mourning for the World. I’m revisiting the state of the ocean, and particularly the Gulf oil spill today, not to celebrate the “Bottom kill” and our return to “normalcy;” but because at this time, when the spectacle has begun to pass it all by, to be replaced by irrelevant bustle, then by the next un-ignorable catastrophe, at least until it too passes from its acute to its chronic stage; it is important to take a moment to look at how it remains significant.

In Signs, I equated the portents visible on almost any stretch of coastline anywhere in the world, if we but give up the forced ignorance and willed blindness that keep so many of us from seeing what’s plainly in front of our faces, that it shouldn’t take what was then just shaping up to be an immense calamity, that business as usual should be enough of a warning. Mourning for the World, at least the spirit behind its title, was about how inexorable the tragedies engulfing us have become – or at least come to seem – as institutionalized ignorance and blindness play out in the face of intractable reality. That when the willful and petulantly powerful poke around in the basement of the world, unleashing vital forces about which they have no clue, that we all must pay and that the results – if not today, then soon – will be tragic beyond all our possible imagining. Today what I want to explore is the gap between the time scales of the world and our inability to grasp not only immensity, but progression.

Years ago – One of those acquaintances you meet for hours spread out over decades, someone you spend the whole time in their company wishing you could merge the circles of your every-days with somehow, they’re so charismatic and interesting to be with….

In a bar on the Portland Maine waterfront, he was talking about what it was like to skipper a towboat. He said,

“With a tow, you often know with sharp certainty that disaster is coming, inexorable and unavoidable – Let’s say an engine failure on the tug while towing an immense fuel-barge. – yet there’s nothing to be done.”

“You might as well go below and make yourself a cup of tea.”

“You’ll have time enough for that, time enough to think about the risks you discounted and the mistakes you’ve made to get you to this point.”

“Time enough to celebrate or regret your whole life passing before your eyes.”

“What you don’t have is the power to do a damned thing about it.”

Looking into the eyes of this vibrant young man, his vivacious young bride at his side, the knowing behind the look in his eye at that moment was especially chilling. The moment, the image, the predicament, that this is our predicament; has never left me since.

What keeps this from being a common-place of common-sense; that chains of events can be long, subtle and still inexorable, ending in violent tragedy; is buried in primate evolution coupled with the stimulus-response cycle that underlies our ability to perceive. Few people today are both in situations of potential peril COMBINED with having a tradition and culture of responsibility that holds them to the inextricable links between cause and effect. We are all in a world of continual risk: Say driving automobiles, behemoths of metal careening about at high speed, potent weapons treated as playthings by people with no appreciation of personal responsibility, cocooned within an infantilizing culture that finds it lucrative and expedient to diffuse any signs of latent portent through a combination of statute and products and the entire state of spectacle forever ready to wash away any inkling of self-awareness for the sake of profit and accumulation.

We are quick to jump to melodrama. It is almost unavoidable, whenever tragic consequences penetrate our numbed shell. That some choose what may seem easily avoidable self-destructive acts to set the stage for the full panoply of hysterical emotional reaction, while others like to exercise themselves with a building call-and-response chorus as they work themselves up over cherry-picked grievances until they can wrap themselves in the self-righteous mantle of victim-hood, even those of us who pride ourselves on taking a long view and penetrating the usual traps invariably succumb to conflating inevitability with a cascade of “What-if’s” until the grand scale of the world’s time is telescoped into the twinkling of our run-away imaginative eye.

So many things can be quickly grasped or simply stated that still take unbearably long to accomplish:

“I want to find love.”

“I want to do meaningful work.”

“I want to make a living.”

Even these most personal imperatives can take a life-time, or never reach fulfillment. What about effects occurring on immense scales over tremendous distances and with lag-times of unknowable proportion? It’s just as easy to misstate these, to rush to their conclusions, as to deny they exist at all. In attempting to live a responsible life it’s as important to be aware of this as it is to acknowledge that we will just as often be wrong in overstating the immediacy of an outcome as we will be surprised by some turn of events that topples our expectations and leaves us reeling at the suddenness of the overturning of all we had envisioned: Calmly awaiting the rush of collision as the barge prepares to run over our immobile tug after slowly rolling over its half-mile long tether, we are startled to find that a seemingly unrelated event brings a smoldering flame in our silent engine-room to some inflammable tank, and the tug explodes into flame.

“Who knew?” May be our last thought, in the final instant before all awareness is snuffed out, a final spark of curiosity fed by the wonder at how unpredictable fate truly is.

Having a keen eye for chains-of-events and an instinct for smelling out hazards, I often chafe at what I know to be good advice, as when my friends who founded Dark Mountain insist that apocalyptic visions are as dangerous a fantasy as outright denial. When something as portentous as the spill in the Gulf occurs, it is so hard to avoid connecting the dots and coming to conclusions concerning not only how inevitable a bad outcome will be, but that it is imminent and will soon be unavoidable even by the most successfully conditioned deniers around us.

Yet if experience has taught me anything, it’s that such moments of pivotal epochal culminating tragedy, the stuff of catharsis in drama and fiction, are exceedingly rare in real life. Just as when our own bodies make the small, barely noticeable changes from wellness to morbidity, and we find it almost impossible to curb ourselves at moments of possible transition that might lead to a different outcome; so it is for us all as we watch a similar procession in the state of the world. Nothing is easier than the glib hindsight that smirks at the excesses of millennial grief whenever past ages have felt the turnings of fate on a large scale, and misinterpreted the suddenness and the quality of the payback they must incur. The hard part is seeing our own signs and portents, and striving to find a way to stay on that edge between denial and surrender.

The spill in the Gulf has been one in a series of escalating insults to the integrity of the world. It has been more visible than many, yet it’s amazing how little of its true import has penetrated the obfuscating screens industry and government have placed between us and its particulars. All that, and yet it is probably not going to bring about the kind of dramatic and incontrovertible incident of ecological collapse that some of us know it has been instrumental in hastening. This is a common paradox. Expecting anything else is a sign of impatience misplaced. An example of anger externalized, frustration looking for a scapegoat.

Sometimes, we will counter, the scapegoat is guilty! Really? Who will actually pay the price of our wrath? I don’t think the breed of carefully groomed sociopaths who’ve made a success on the corporate or governmental ladders will pay. Short of petulantly wishing “to have my life back!” and ultimately sharing in whatever befalls all of us when some final tipping point is actually reached, they won’t be the one’s to suffer. They may even find comfort in the ridicule they can heap on all us “chickens little.” For us, it puts us on a roller-coaster like “Next year in Jerusalem!” or “After the Revolution!”

If we are to learn from what makes our moment unique: The conjunction of a tattoo of blows against the arrogance of hubris, coupled with a nearly global reach of information; so that we are both being hit from all sides by signs of collapse and have the knowledge that the same is occurring everywhere around the globe. These all lead to the slim chance of avoiding the exceptionalist traps that have always befallen those witnessing the fall of their city, their state, even their globe-girding empire before. High on the lists of lessons we may be the first to have the ability to take to heart is this one. Inevitable tragedy has its own timetable. It’s not ours to decide when the inevitable will befall us or even how it may come. Learning to set aside these reactions might free us to find unprecedented responses to our culminating predicament.

The list of our disillusions is long. It needs to be longer. It “should” be endless. Only then will we see that all the easy answers have already been tried and never did work. Only then might we find some way to de-rail the Juggernaut, or at least find the dignity to properly mourn for our world.