No.241
It is past the middle of July, and there have been perhaps two or three properly warm days in the river valley so far this year. This feels strange, and I get the sense everything around me—birds, plants, insects—also sense things are a little strange. The two raspberry plants we put in have completely given up. The ancient apples took their ‘June drop’ very seriously, a process in which a hormone is produced and a tree effectively prunes itself, knowing how many ripe fruits it will be able to support. This meant hundreds of small, unripe fruits fell to the ground over a period of some weeks, the trees knowing if left unchecked that initial quantity would have constituted too much, too heavy for their old limbs.
Sitting on the grass underneath them became a slightly dangerous pastime—will one have tiny hard fruits dropped intermittently upon the head, or not. As we have all long since forgotten what a normal, balanced life feels like, who is to say whether the perpetual cloud-cold is anything to be concerned about. Read: there is everything to be concerned about.
I could tell you, now, all the reasons why I believe the world might be ending. Of course, the world has been ending since it began—in the beginning of anything is also its end, this is a truth we live alongside—but lately it has felt as though it is ending at a much faster pace than is strictly natural. I think to myself does everyone else know this is madness and but we passed the critical points of damage so long ago and they are busy with sentencing people to long jail time for telling the truth about the planet and don’t people know that it could be so much better and I suppose I didn’t realise people could go mad this easily, so entangled in denial and degredation and greed.
This week, a UK judge sitting in front of five brave Just Stop Oil activists (they have now been sentenced to a collective total of 21 years for planning a protest) actually said the words “Facing the end of the world is neither here nor there”.
… furious for any or all of the reasons why whatever it was the world was becoming would infuriate someone. All the unbreathable air, all the unbreathable people, the distances, the dead birds, the living cockroaches, the lists she was making of all this on her way home.
“But stories create truth, no matter how untrue they may be.”
I could tell you the reasons why I believe the world is ending but such things are, apparently, nothing noteworthy, neither here nor there. The stories being told matter more than ever, with words getting hushed and omitted and banned like bad chemicals, but what do you do when no one with ‘power’ is listening to the true stories? Or acting? Or, worse, what do you do when a story is told and nobody believes it true? Or, worse than worse, some stories are filled with damage and death and those are the ones being slurped up as factual. Right now, everything is sold as truth and everything seems mad, yet so much is distinctly unture, so much is being rendered as normal when it is as far from natural and good and healthy as we could possibly be.
All of us can read, and see, mostly anything we want to. It is an amazement, something that has provided us with both unimaginable variety and also unimaginable quantities of nonsense.
Many of us have grown up alongside stories of this is just how it is and how it has to be which are perhaps some of the most dangerous stories of all. If people are prevented, in a myriad of ways, from imagining a world different and a world more beautiful, we cannot ever get there, cannot envision nor build it. Dreams precede a waking reality, and people have been kept from dreaming.
Now tell me: Do you want to be the sort who’s going to pretend this isn’t happening or the sort who’s going to start something new?
It is purportedly easier to pretend, though I don’t think any less painful in the longer term. It is possible to pretend so many things: that life will make sense sooner or later, that ‘good’ will vanquish the ‘evil’ like the fairytales we know to be mainly useless and counterproductive, that justice will prevail, that your actions of one do not matter, that we are on some immovable course.
Speaking of immovable courses: If you find yourself driving at break-neck speed straight towards a cliff, you don’t grip the wheel tighter and close your eyes, you stop, and get out of the vehicle, and turn and walk away in the direction something safer.
There is huge importance and urgency in starting new, different ways of being and living, in hastily overturning that which is bringing us to our collective knees. It is coming for us, this overturning, whether we are ready or not. It’s also sensible to remember there are countless people already overturning, countless people who have been setting examples of better and more gentle for decades. Countless communities of Indigenous people across this whole, damn tired planet who have known forever that there are better ways, that there is never a need or requirement to tear up the very ground you walk on. It all matters. And it is all difficult when there are billionaires and politicians and corporations with the collective emotional maturity of a two-year-old and the moral compass of a sunken, rotting ship.
… a snail making its way along a stalk as if the world’s collapse was of no concern to it at all.
We are, as our flawed human species, the only ones who have broken, and burned. It seems so acutely unfair on everything else and subsequently I find myself apologising to birds, to leaves. I’m so sorry we made it this way.
I exist mainly as equal parts disbelief, despair, and determination. We cycle through these states; it is important not to get stuck on the middle setting. The determination grows stronger though, as a muscle it gets more familiar with the works necessary and the resting necessary and the thousand and one inventive, often difficult ways to make this better. You don’t abandon, it all matters.
Above quotes from Ten Planets by Yuri Herrera, translation from the Spanish by Lisa Tillman
Illustrations from Everything, Beautiful: A Guide to Finding Hidden Beauty in the World (Penguin, 2022)
THIS WEEK TO FALL IN (ANGERED) LOVE WITH:
Photographs of Palestine from the Library of Congress archive taken by colonizers—the ‘American Colony’ based in Jerusalem— between about 1896 and 1919 with the majority of images produced intending to drive the nineteeth century obsession held by the United States with the idea of a ‘Holy Land’ that saw tourists, scholars, evangelists, writers, and artists (though I suppose one should categorise them all as evangelists in a way; they believed America to be a ‘New Israel’, a modern nation bestowing God’s work upon Earth) travelling to Palestine, overcome with the Christian notion that the country was an Ottoman-occupied backwater requiring resettlement to facilitate the second coming of Christ, with the 1922 British Mandate and subsequent large-scale Zionist immigration following this delusion.
The authors of Camera Palæstina stress such images should not be read as nostalgic, “a reading that suggests the loss and erasure of Palestine as a historical and present fact” but rather that photographs from before the 1948 Nakba “illuminate Palestine as a lived and living social fact”.
And it is true, these photographs should not evoke nostalgia. Nostalgia is a dangerous distraction from the direness and destruction of the present, of the last 80 years. The photographs should invoke anger: at the erasure, at the blinding, incomprehensible levels of violence, at the under-reporting and mis-reporting and near-complete lack of jouralistic integrity, at the historical and ongoing dehumanisation of people, at the death, at the deluded beliefs and actions of those might have some power to make it stop.
(Links and actions for a Free Palestine and Essays for a Free Palestine, a free ebook from Verso Books.)
“We’re going to make it,” she said.
It was a fragile and beautiful plural.
— Yuri Herrera, Ten Planets, translation from Spanish by Lisa Dillman
Paid supporters of The Sometimes Newsletter receive several additional posts each month, including things like short stories, illustrated essays, and more detailed looks into creative processes. The most recent of these is a illustrated essay, Flying Closer to The Sun:
That is why I cling to radical optimism. “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
Thank you for this.