Phanerozoic Part One Paleozoic (2018) — IV: Perspective
7) Permian: The Great Dying
Permian Period Hallmarks
- Pangea forms
- Trees adapt to lower humidity → More trees inland → Increased O2
- Temperature changes → Amphibian extinction → Large land animals selected for → Big reptiles & synapsids emerge, dominate food webs
- Decentralized volcanic activity, glacial methane thaw → Largest extinction in Earth’s history
Law and Cycles
The song opens by painting the picture of a land characterized by “cold winds” but where we should really be looking at the waters, “pitch black” and “already dead.” The carboniferous ended in an ice age and the Permian gradually warmed, so this geologic day begins for Life in the early Permian. It also illustrates the coldness Life perceives as it anticipates what would be the largest extinction event ever recorded on Earth, imminent and inevitable. The mind of Life has been growing with each geologic day in this album and it has been accepting of the cyclic cruelty of the Earth, so as soon as this track begins we get apocalyptic references, waking in wait of sleep, “Soon every one of us will be dead / …it makes no difference / let’s not get sentimental.”
Life embraces the cruel inevitable, “feel the cold / feel the night creep up to me.” It just wants to be with the Earth, “let’s… freeze together and rest like this forever.” The two are inextricably connected, “creep inside my bones where you have lived since the day that we were born.” Life increasingly sees these cycles of death and sleep as a return to the Earth on which it depends and from which it arises. And by this point yearns for it, its entitlement gone and gradually being replaced with a vague, decreasingly emotional macrocosmic perspective.
Life is beginning to see time as a point instead of a line, already aware of the scale of the coming extinction and that it will survive. “Sea level rise… We’ll survive the Great Dying… We’ll be a part of the 5%… I’m no longer here.” And resigned to the uncertainty and mystery of this rule “because that’s all we’ve got to know.” It almost feels like Life is beginning to deterministically remember the future, a notion that is made strangely intuitive by the film Arrival.
And where most of this has been a conversation with a silent partner, Life now begins to realize that Earth has been speaking all along, but almost in another language, “… you can still write me, like in the beginning.” The solitude Life is experiencing is not a false one but more nuanced than it realized because it didn’t understand the Earth, “You’re no longer next to me but this is how it’s always been / you were a ghost before you became real.” Whatever little bit Life can discern, it came by way of this cosmic, trans-temporal perspective, “that’s all we got to know / that’s how we got to know.” Again, worth noting how much of these themes of trans-temporal communication align with the same themes from Arrival, although the film was released about 2 years before this album.
Once Life acknowledges this, for only the second time in this entire album, it hears the Earth speak, “Now that you are not here, now that we no longer talk / I can’t remember… how you’d been offended when you realized / …that I’d kill to relieve a burden.” Life must use the Earth as its substrate but when it is abused, Earth retaliates. Life doesn’t understand this simple principle of balance yet, its nature simply being to resist decay. Complicating this further is the sense that Earth has existed for so long and had taken this extra-temporal view long before Life ever arrived. Like a raisin in a loaf of bread looking lengthwise through the loaf, a stamp of a timeline infinite and ever-moving. Earth has existed like this so long that something like Life, that is only beginning to understand the scale of time, could not perceive it properly. Earth has been speaking in its own way this entire time so it doesn’t understand why Life is so upset with the way it is punished every time it transgresses the law of balance. “If you could just look ahead like I do, and see everything that will happen, you’d stop being upset about what will happen next,” Earth might say, channeling Bran.
The Earth continues, it can also feel the cold creeping inside. It’s connected to Life and cares for it. Cares about “losing it.” And what is it about Life that is driving it away from the Earth? Life’s fears “drawn way of out scale.” Every time Life awakens it immediately begins anguishing over the impending extinction; this isn’t what Life was meant for. A life spent worrying about death is a life not actualized. Life was meant to build and grow to new heights, something that doesn’t require violating Earth’s harmony. But this anxiety rooted in entitlement instead of gratitude rooted in balance is driving Life away from the more enlightened Earth. Yes, that enlightenment. If this cycle of wake following near-death can symbolize a reincarnation of sorts then taking a perspective outside of this cycle can be seen as a sort of enlightenment, an excision from the wheel of dharma.
The next part might seem out of place, but from the perspective of a super organism that has come to understand the way of itself (like how you might have a sense of awareness that you have X personality and that you will probably become Y type of elderly person) the Earth admits that it “doesn’t love humanity.” It already knows what Life will become. But that’s not the reason for the current cycles of death. Earth “values empathy” and thus knows the pain it’s causing Life yet these cycles of suffering will continue as long as Earth is subject to a bigger law.
Grief Before Loss
But I want to return to the concept of Life occupying a post-death state before it was born. Earth knew that something beautiful and vibrant would grow from itself because of its ancient nature, and felt the presence of Life before it emerged. Again if you experience all of time as a singular point rather than a linear series, you simultaneously experience both its birth, life, and death in entirety, along with all other temporal points. One of the most beautiful and moving lines written in any song, carrying the gravity of our pain as well as our exiguity.
“You were a ghost, before you became real.”
The final verse is delivered with rising melody, “The air is getting hot and dry /… The sun burns us alive.” This might be an artistic misstep, since the Permian ended with a heat death stemming from geothermal activity, not solar activity. Or it could be a continuation of the previously stated themes, whereby the Earth sees its own death, swallowed by the Sun. This includes Life too, and Earth isn’t interested in why, “That’s all we got to know.” How Life is resigned to the logic of its substrate, Earth is resigned to the logic of its.
This is The Ocean’s greatest song, because of how it takes themes and emotions built throughout the album and delivers them from an angry helplessness, to a resigned anxiety, to a tragic, bleak apathy, and finally to a forlorn transcendence. These emotional currents move you the strongest if you prefer the method of internal liberation articulated by the Buddha. This entails accepting the suffering of the living condition and the uncompromising impermanence of all things without strife, regardless of what it means about the features of living experience for which you care. Because there’s always a law bigger than you. Acceptance, not understanding.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Phanerozoic Part One Paleozoic Essay —
IV: Perspective
