Everything surrounds me
in a trance of not looking.—Landis Everson, “Mass Destruction”

How to describe the strangeness of this moment/year/epoch? Needed: a phenomenology of planetary drift.

I have written my “apocalyptic” novel and nothing changed. I mean nothing changed in my consciousness, not really. (Even I, an author, am not deluded enough to suppose that a novel, at the point when it finally sees the light of print, will change anything in the world.) There was a relief in naming, in shaping my horrors into a story, in conjuring into the life of the word a group of people who do look at what is and are driven round the bend by it. (Or maybe not—maybe they are the sane ones?)

Occurrences at the periphery of consciousness. If people can dedicate themselves to bad ideas—don’t say bad say mistaken—unfortunate—deluded–if people can forsake mother and father and spouse and children to enter a monastery
to sit meditating under a tree for X years
to strap on exploding clothes and detonate themselves in shopping malls
if your body can be taken from you
piece by piece
if your people
if your posterity
if your Earth
then why might there not arise an order of “extremists” dedicated to confronting, exposing, doing what can be done to interfere with this palpable phenomenon of planetary drift
this lackadaisical promenade
at the lip of the whirlwind.

Note the fact that indeed we have at last acquired (created) truly “global” problems. It’s not just a “totalizing” fantasy, is it, when the weather, which knows no borders, has become deranged for all.

This sense that the order of things, say capitalism for short, though that too is too shorthand and limited a phrase
this sense that the way things are, the way they are tending, rushing, is about to run smack up against it.

The strangeness is not only in the temporality—that one should happen to be incarnated just now, just when the seasons are being permanently rearranged and species extinguished at a gallop, just when economic and military machines attain new levels of obliterative capacity, just when the human propensities for dominance and destruction are furnished with new techniques and new excuses, just when any and all structural barriers to the worst are being handily dismantled—
–the strangeness is in the “trance of not looking,” the feeling that everybody knows yet only parts of the truth (if that) are openly addressed.

What is the force—mysterious as surface tension–that holds the emergency outside the borders of acceptable speech?

Someone writes an op-ed about the dreadful onrush of climate change, someone decries the erosion of civil liberties and the public apathy about it. Many, many people—though far too few—speak out, demonstrate, organize against the racist horror of the U.S. occupation in Iraq, the racist horror of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the racist horror of the betrayal of the poor and dark-skinned population of New Orleans in the aftermath of a killer hurricane. All of these things appear, to the extent that they appear at all, as topics to be named and tackled individually.

As such, they still belong to the old world, the past: the time when some things (Nature, for instance) were not in our hands.

Why is there not an academic field of “World Ending Studies”? Why is the fact that we are all participant-spectators in the first ever (that we know of) Planetary Demolition Derby not a cause for comment, let alone analysis, let alone action?

This open secret (haven’t I said this before?) is so similar to all the other open secrets that define our time—the phenomenon of lies and truth circulating simultaneously, the lies in perfect complacent confidence because there’s no danger that the presence of the truth will in any way interfere with their (the lies’) efficient circulation.

I feel obvious, graceless, whenever I think of raising it. Not even to suggest any particular protest or counter-move but simply to inquire: how do you feel about this? Do you have any specific reactions to being expected to live your life (and die your death) on the apparent cusp of humanity’s final choice?

To wit:

Start getting more things right, radically reduce levels of suffering, boost the proportion of justice in the planetary mix—or cease, rudely and flatly–objectively–to be.

That imperative is today the great unspoken, as once would have been the case with questions about the body and its tendencies and urges. Or maybe the proper comparison would be to the way soldiers are trained to react. Yes, we have to realize death might be around the corner but it’s somehow unseemly to admit the knowledge. To suck it up and drive on is given the name of courage.

Nevertheless: how do you feel about the fact that the world-body of which you are a member is perhaps on its death bed? What goes through your mind after you say to yourself, while listening to the news or after guiltily indulging in a short-sleeved, bare-legged jog on a January day in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and pondering the possible connection to an extraordinarily vicious hurricane season…well, things can’t go on this way, can they now?

I think again of David Wojnarowicz’s hallucinatory projections in Close to the Knives; his strange experiments with temporal and spatial perspective—the desperate close-up hyper-realism of someone under a death sentence (as he was, from HIV) and at the same time the expansive vision, the long view: “Soon All This Will Be Picturesque Ruins.” The poet achieves the aesthetic if not moral victory because the poet, the artist, in his mind’s eye can see for miles and miles (for ages and ages); the CEO or president can only afford to look as far as the next quarterly report or national election, and thus shoves down the throats of millions the extreme irrationality in which all his rationality culminates.

In Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Samuel Delany invents a many-worlded universe whose societies are occasionally beset by a blight known as “cultural fugue”: a tailspin that, if unchecked, leads in short order to the fiery totaling of an entire planet. It seems to me that “cultural fugue” is simply a diagnostic term for the planetary drift the sensation of which I’ve been trying to describe here from the inside.

I keep thinking that the garden can be taken to the hospital
–Forough Farokhzad, “My Heart Aches for the Garden”

Beginning and ending quotations are from poems appearing in the Jan./Feb. 2006 American Poetry Review