Do something, for a change

Here’s one for the list of unparalleled opening sentences: Why is the measure of love loss? (Jeanette Winterson, Written on the body, 1992)

I first came across this sentence (and the novel that followed in its wake) in 1996, at an age when I was too young and too naive to grasp all that hovered between its lines, like bodies, or the desperate intimacy they crave, hover between bed sheets. But I have never forgotten it. And lately, I can’t get it out of my head.

Does it really have to come to this? Do we have to witness everything that is good about this incredibly privileged life on earth crumble between our fingers, swept away amid freak storms, heat waves, unimaginable droughts, rising sea levels, world-wide loss of animal and plant life, before we are starting to realise the actual gravity of our situation?

“We really did have everything, didn’t we? I mean, if you think about it?”
That’s one for the list of unparalleled last words.

So yeah, I saw Don’t look up, too. And I would advise everyone to watch it. Just a click away if you’re hooked on Netflix, and the rest of you: go find yourself a nice pirate website and download it. There’s plenty of those around.

I did not sit and weep, like The Guardian-columnist George Monbiot did. I did not experience the depressing recognition so many climate scientists attested to, professionals for whom this film hits home like a painful kind of reality, since they have long battled against exactly this sort of absurd unwillingness to accept facts on the part of both the political establishment and the wider public. I merely thought: finally. Finally, here’s a picture that shows us to ourselves in an ice-cold, realistic mirror. What keeps surprising me, is that we insist on calling it a satire.

There’s a subject I have breached in this blog on earlier occasions: the exercise of the imaginary medical consultation. In other words: imagine you only have one year left to live. If that were really the case, what would you do with it? What is it that your heart and your soul yearn for, but you always brushed aside, or bustled forward into some safe and distant ‘later’, convinced that there would always be such a time? But what if there wasn’t anymore? Which endeavours would be worth investing the last of your time and your failing strenghts in? And which, on the other hand, would you throw out without a second thought, being utterly unimportant when it actually came to it? If you were honest? If a year was really all you had?

We all have an individual set of dreams, our very personal definition of what it means to walk this earth in human form for a limited number of years. Those dreams can vary widely and wildly, and that’s perfectly fine. But what lies underneath is always the very same yearning: that one way or another, it mattered. That we found a way to express that which moves us, heart and soul, and share it with this world and through this short timespan we call our life.

Those who proclaim not to believe in such things, usually spend their days in search of every possible form of temporary gratification and ways to sedate their fear. A short term for it would be drugs. I do not mean to judge it (or them), but we don’t need to make things prettier than they are, either.

Back to the climatological chaos headed our way at tornado speed. I cannot image that we would look the end of a human-habitable planet in the eye and go: ‘Oh, how I would love to go shopping at Primark’s, once more.’ Or: ‘I still desperately need to order something from Zalando. That one dress that’s on sale there, now…’ As long as that is the ongoing discourse, we simply haven’t understood any of it.

When the global financial crisis was about to explode in 2008, brokers in London called home in a panic, urging their spouses to drop everything and rush to the supermarket for emergency stock-up. They foresaw a scenario (which was all but unrealistic) of international trade coming to a stand-still in a matter of days or even hours. (Source: Swimming with sharks , Joris Luyendijk, 2015).

At that particular moment, international politicians acted with lightning speed, and probably just as well. We collectively bought out the banks, with billions of government money — which means our civilian money. For it was ‘worth’ it. But when it comes to the very climate on earth, the ecological circumstances that provide the vital and necessary conditions for human life on this planet, and a crisis of a magnitude that effortlessly eclipses every single crisis we have ever faced, we somehow still manage to continue to act as if nothing is happening. We keep on believing that potable water, nourishing food and breathable air somehow fall from the sky like manna. Or we keep putting our faith in the powers of the so-called free market, which is even worse.

This is the moment when a writer’s lively imagination like mine becomes a burden, or a blade on which I fall: it allows me to imagine the chaos we are headed into all too well. It genuinely frightens me. I want to tug at people’s sleeves and cry: Please, understand what this means! But I stop myself, for fear of being put down as hysterical and overreacting and therefore untrustworthy, exactly like Kate Dibiasky in the movie. But the truth that is thundering down on us doesn’t care about media training. And it is particularly unpleasant. (And that would be one for the list of unparalleled understatements.)

The breakfast table provides the setting for most of the in-depth sociological discussions in our family. My husband, frustratingly more active and awake than I am at that ungodly hour of the morning, makes point after point in an analysis of society’s current dynamics, nailing them right between the fruits, cereal and cups of coffee, scoring point after point against which I have nothing to argue, mainly because we agree on most issues from the start.

Only most of what he’s telling me is a bit heavy to handle on an (my) empty stomach. I prefer not to start my day in a state of depression, for that tends to jeopardize any constructive endeavors I had planned for the remainder of the day.

So I listen to him — with one ear only, some days — and then I go about my own affairs. I turn to writing, in an ever more desperate attempt to both retain my own mental equilibrium and to bring some sort of insight and beauty to the world. I work on photographs or collages, images I hope that might stir feelings we hadn’t truly or consciously embraced before. But beneath it all is the incessant static of unrest, a gently swelling prelude to panic, about what it is we are heading into. And I pray, I beg, I try with all my might for every single day of my living and working life to make a tiny difference in the balance between realizing and not wanting to know, in the battle between mindlessly racing to the precipice and slowing down, if only a little, to reconsider.

And then a film like Don’t look up comes along and all I can think is: just watch it. It will save me the trouble of trying to explain it all, yet again.
And when you’re done crying, you might want to get your shit together and do something, for a change. Like, wake up.