Hyperobject Polycrisis
On Apocalypse-Dissonance and Earth-Grief
Czesław Miłosz, A Song on the End of the World:
”On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be…
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.”
Angela Carter: “A premonition of the imminent end of the world is always a shot in the arm for the arts; if the world has, in fact, just ended, what then?… It is possible for the true optimist to view the end of the world with sang-froid. What is so great about all this crap? Might there be something better?”
A few years back, I was at an Extinction Rebellion protest downtown. It must have been Summer— I can remember pulling my scarf over my head, the feeling of sun-fear I get when I’m outside on a blazing day. (It was the day I met Dr. Sea, because I remember she was wearing a giant blue and silver Kraken mask on her head, and when she joyfully hugged me I was engulfed in the webs between its tentacles just as if I were a small crab.) Sometime in the afternoon, a man walked through the crowd dressed as the Grim Reaper. He was tall and black-robed, and his face was hidden behind a skull-mask with a hinged jaw, so that when he moved his mouth the skull’s mouth moved too. (He didn’t speak, though; just opened and closed his teeth.) I was holding a big sign my friend Mahalski had made— a human skull rendered in pen and ink, captioned EXTINCTION. Death handed me a small leaflet. It said YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. I turned it over: AND YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE TO KILL YOUR CHILDREN.1 It was marked with the logo of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, a logo I was familiar with because my intense vegan friend Cathy2 had had it tattooed over her uterus. I looked up but the Reaper had melted into the crowd.
Last week I saw a Tiktok. An American librarian,3 with a soft cloud of hair held back by a hand-dyed hairband, wearing a t-shirt with the cover of a book on it— the t-shirt is mirrored in the video, and half-hidden behind a name-tag, so it takes me a while to read it: ‘Choose Your Own Adventure: WAR WITH THE POWER MASTER’. They have tattooed arms, but the only tattoo I can make out is of Totoro. (As I write this, I see that these are signifiers of childhood. It’s as if this adult is expressing themself as a child.) The librarian is telling a story about a homeless person they met in the library— except they don’t say homeless, they say unhoused. Watching this video over and over in order to describe it, I keep seeing new details. The multicoloured Aa Bb Cc in the background, made of cut-out paper letters stuck to the wall. I notice, too, that their tone of voice is modulated down in volume— almost whispery— but high in pitch; it’s the tone one would use to a small child. Towards the end of the video, the librarian says of the homeless person: “That is a grown-up library kid who needs help.”
But— and this was the bit I remembered, the thing that made me search this video out again— then the librarian says: “They go on to tell me their story, that a couple of days before this, they wanted to unalive themselves.”
Unalive themselves. The first time I watched the video, when I heard that word, I realised that I’d seen or heard it once or twice over the last few weeks (months?). Behold: a neologism still wet from the cocoon, pumping out its crumpled wings.
I don’t meant to cast any shade on this obviously lovely and kind librarian, nor on libraries as temples and refuges— Gods only know what / where I would be without libraries! I give full context only in order to examine the specimen in its habitat. No, it’s that word I want to talk about. I notice that both times the librarian uses neologisms— unhoused, unalive— they’re euphemisms that name a state by reference to what it isn’t.4 Mind you, homeless is already one of those: homeless and unhoused are almost the same word. Walking home late at night I tried to puzzle out why unhoused would be thought more polite than homeless. Aside from the symbolism of the gesture: look, I made a special new word to signify my respect for you!— the difference is between the weight of house vs home. The implication is, maybe, that although the person in question lacks a house, they still have a home. (Where? What if they have neither? I still don’t get it.)
Unalive, though, is simpler: its shadow-opposite, the taboo this word will not name, is death. Or— in the sample sentence that the librarian translated into nu-speak— kill. They wanted to kill themselves. Curiouser and curiouser. Saying the word ‘death’ won’t make you die; neither will not-saying it make you not-die. Death is an aspect of reality outside of mortal control.5
There’s a school of relationship theory that divides people into Direct or Indirect Communicators. The degree of direct communication people feel comfortable with is influenced by many things— culture of origin and family of origin spring to mind— but it’s also a difference in character, I think. Indirect Communicators read Direct Communicators as rude, overbearing, or inappropriate. Direct Communicators read Indirect Communicators as dishonest, weak, or unreliable.6
See… The Librarian is an Indirect Communicator. The Reaper is a Direct one.
The Internet informs me that unalive is an Algospeak word that refers to death by suicide or homicide. Algospeak is an adaptive branch of language designed to elude algorithmic censorship, which works by sniffing out specific words or phrases; Tiktok, apparently, is particularly censorial.7 Call me a middle-aged Luddite: all this is news to me. Ingenious children! Nevertheless, the whole phenomenon makes me feel deeply uneasy. (Is nu-speak more or less disturbing when it is an adaptation to external rather than internal censorship?)
It was in Te Awe8 library that I found the two books I’ve most recently read, on a climate-change-themed display-shelf. When I read the first one, Desert Notebooks by Ben Ehrenreich, I was only a few pages in before I started to think I must own this book. I didn’t want to return it to the library, I wanted to keep it. But when I started hunting for it, I couldn’t find it in the city to buy, neither new nor secondhand. And, weirdly, I couldn’t transcribe any of it down into my journal, like I normally do with things I’m inspired by. I kept trying to, but it wasn’t possible to cherry-pick it without losing the rhythm and melody of the whole. When I finished Desert Notebooks, I had a feeling like I didn’t want to immediately pick up the next thing. I just wanted to digest. But within a couple of days my literary-Jones kicked back in and I reached for the next book on the stack, Earth Grief by Stephen Harrod Buhner. I didn’t have high hopes for this one, as it gave off woo-woo vibes: A Raven Press Ecological Medicine Book.
When I started reading, though, it was immediately apparent that what he was laying down was a truth that resonates with my truth— which I try to make close to THE TRUTH, even though that’s not ever achievable— still when I say MY TRUTH I am not saying it in the sense that like, everyone’s truth is valid, man, though in another way that’s also kind of true— anyway: this old Stephen dude, and I knew he was old even before he said he was, but he was the kind of cunning old, the sinuous mind like water-worn stone, but maybe more like a snake’s muscles, the flexibility and strength of life’s-work, I mean. That’s what Barry Lopez means when he talks about elders, which he increasingly did as he became older himself— this is from Horizon, his last book, embedded in an account of assisting at an archaeological dig in Kenya:
”I once sat down at my desk and wrote out the qualities I’d observed in elders I’d met in different cultures, nearly all of them unknown to one another. Elders take life more seriously. Their feelings towards all life around them are more tender, their capacity for empathy greater. They’re more accessible than other adults, able to engage in a conversation with a child that does not patronize or infantilize the child, but instead confirms the child in his or her own sense of wonder. Finally, the elder is willing to disappear into the fabric of ordinary life. Elders are looking for neither an audience, nor for confirmation. They know who they are, and the people around them know who they are. They do not need to tell you who they are…
[I remembered that bit. But I’d forgotten what he says next:]
Living in one of the most highly advanced of human cultures, I often wonder, What have modern cultures done with these people? In our search for heroes to admire, did we just run them over? Were we suspicious about the humility, the absence of self-promotion, the lack of impressive material wealth and other signs of conventional success?9 Or were we afraid they would tell us a story we didn’t want to hear? That they would suggest things we didn’t want to do?”
See the way I just quoted there, the way I got carried away and told you the whole thing? Yeah… That’s how I felt all the way through Earth Grief. Like— is there a way I can transcribe this entire book onto my Substack? The meat of the book is very similar what I was talking about a few posts ago, in my essay about being galvanised by the end of the world rather than paralysed. What I said in that piece was Let’s assume for a moment that the blackest assessment is correct, and the world really is a terminally ill loved one. How much time do we have to get real with the dying process? I’m frustrated and bored with the mass cognitive dissonance… What if the imminent end of the world means that whatever’s yours to do or say, you should do or say it right now? Can we all please get through the denial-phase, and into reality, and start to live here and now?
I said that because this is the great unsayable,10 virtually nobody is saying it. Reading the book— which is very direct and eloquent— I felt that feeling of getting what I need, like drinking a big glass of water when I’m thirsty. What Buhner was saying felt like truth.
Buhner (and I quote this part because this is where he borrows the same metaphor I did): “With increasing urgency, over the past half century, our species has been being given a very specific diagnosis. The people who have been giving us the news, so to speak, irrespective of their titles or their schooling (or lack of them), are, in an important sense, the ecological physicians of our time. They’re the doctor telling the patient that there is a small tumor in the lung and that surgery is needed— and most especially, since the lung has been damaged and cancer is developing they should really stop smoking. (Analogies like these always break down and they’re never completely accurate and I don’t particularly like this one but it will work well enough for a little while, maybe…)
As is always true with a terminal diagnosis, there are a great many people who do not want to believe it, who are sure that it’s bullshit no matter what anyone says. There are others who do believe it but refuse to change because screw it or I don’t want to or why bother, it’s all hopeless anyway. Others have their own islands and their billions and they don’t really care what happens to the rest of us. There are still others who are demanding second and third and fourth opinions. And there are others yet who are sure there’s a technological fix out there someplace that will save them so they don’t really take the diagnosis all that seriously because science!11[…]
I think that it’s about time for all of us to look with unafraid eyes at what is right in front of us, begin to seriously grapple with the truth that’s been set before us, to actually look with clarity at the diagnosis we’ve been given. For one of the maxims of life is that if we understand the situation in which we find ourselves it is far more likely that we can take the actions needed to deal with it. And the actions needed are far different than those that most activists are talking about. (Though yes, of course, some of what they are suggesting— imploring, insisting, advocating, demanding, pleading for, telling us we must do or they will shame us endlessly if we do not— can help… a bit… probably, maybe, I guess.)”
Earth Grief is dense and chewy, hard to summarise. Like Desert Notebooks, it’s a harmonious whole: one big long argument. A few chapters on, Buhner says this (and again, I’ve quoted this passage because the whole thing feels like an expansion of my little throwaway paragraph and explains why reading the book felt like looking in a mirror that I normally never get to look into):
“And for sure you will begin to argue against what I have said and start to use all the rationalizations that have become so common in the press and in books by environmentalists and techno-utopianists for so long that everyone just sort of thinks them automatically now. Like the one that says that if we accept that the diagnosis is terminal all that will be left is apathy (everybody will just stop trying to do anything!!!), which is not actually true and don’t these people know anything about terminal diagnoses and how people in the real world actually deal with them? Or all those technical solutions will pop into your mind, the ones that are just over the horizon and that everybody but you, Stephen, knows will stop what is happening. Like wooden skyscrapers and biofuels and windfarms and science!, and . . . (Just out of curiosity: do you really know where the thoughts you are thinking right now come from?) And I suspect as well you might feel hopeless and afraid at just the touch of the possibility that the diagnosis is accurate and that the truth is there really isn’t anything any of us can do to stop what is happening now or what is going to happen even more so not too long from now.”
Last Saturday night I was at the Litcrawl12 afterparty. I had volunteered for Verb and been assigned to Litcrawl. The first two events of the evening were both uplifting. The first event was two Kai Tahu poets— cousins— reading poems and riffing deep and funny. The second was two young Māori creatives discussing the crossover between illustration and writing, and a whole lot of other stuff on the side.
On the way to our next phase Betty and I, in turn, shoved a service station pie into our faces. (I felt super weird about this because eating a pie in the street— whilst wearing a t-shirt! with words on it!— is unusual behaviour for me. I didn’t feel like myself, but like some other weird parallel-world self. I went around the corner and faced away from Cuba Mall, like a falcon mantling its kill.) The third session, though, was heavy, dealing with how trauma is transmuted through poetry. By this time it was getting quite late. Litcrawl is a long haul. Anyway, it was off the back of this emotional hill— up, up, down— that I came to the afterparty.
Leaning against a brick pillar near the door of Meow, I got into conversation with someone I’d met a few months ago and admired for his smarts: I’ll call him A. (We’d segued from a robust three-way chat with another guy— let’s call him B— about world politics, empathy, and ethics, so in my defence, I didn’t start the intensity.) B went to buy beer for everyone, bless him, and as we were on the topic of polemics, I started telling A about the book I was reading, Earth Grief.13 I might’ve said the words end of the world. I’d half-forgotten about what happens next, or maybe I thought it wouldn’t. What do you mean, he said, it’s not too late, that’s not what scientists are saying.
I said that it’s the scientists who are saying this most of all. In my circles, I added. (I was thinking of Dr. Sea, the Apocalypse conversation we’d had, reclining on beanbags on Moa Point beach, the white wolf in the firelight, white wine in plastic cups. Not doom, but high hilarity. That night I saw the rings of Saturn, Jupiter’s moons, Venus as a crescent, through a shaky cheap telescope.)
A: “Your circles are not representative of all scientists.”
I said that the situation we are collectively in is unique in the history of humans, in its degree of existential threat. A said that people thought that about nuclear power too, that it would end the world any minute— but it didn’t.14
He said that our species will not go extinct. I said that species go extinct all the time, more so right now— is ours somehow exempt? He said that thinking of his family line being extinguished would make him very sad, but luckily, he is more optimistic than me. (I have had this framing applied to me more times than I can count, and it really grinds my gears: I am neither a pessimist nor a nihilist.)
It was one of those conversations that has a momentum of its own. Like you’re riding a train and you can’t get off.15 Eventually I pulled the lever: “Sorry.”
A: “No need to be sorry, I just disagree.”
Me: “Yes— it’s impolite party chat, though.”
Then I changed the subject.
It’s no fun being a modern-day Kassandra. So why am I compelled to constantly tell this particular truth? In trying to pin down how the experience of constant, subterranean ideological friction makes me feel, I keep arriving at relationship metaphors. To be specific, the set of feelings invoked are ones I’m familiar with from bad sexual relationships, the kind that trap you in a feedback-loop of reality-fuckery. This must be because both of these scenarios— climate-change-induced societal collapse, and abusive relationships— are matters of subjective judgement: both necessitate the continual interpretation of layers upon layers of ever-evolving complexity. In other words, deciding what’s real, and what to do about it. Fuckery-loops— gaslighting— are a type of enchantment, a false consciousness. The wrongness is felt in the body,16 but can be rationally argued against, by oneself and / or others. Upholding a false narrative, though (This person loves me and I love them!) is an awful lot of emotional labour. The mind can override the body’s knowledge, but only incompletely, and only at psychic cost. Some deeper part of the self is aware that what’s happening is not-OK.
Without clear information, decision-making becomes far more difficult. If knowledge is power, then purposeful lies / withholding of truth are mechanisms of disempowerment. In climate-induced societal breakdown, as in gaslighting enchantments, the fuckery is spread out in distributed, mutable patterns rather than specific, concrete instances, and can therefore be hard to prove. The polycrisis we live inside of now is a hyperobject: a trouble so big, complex, all-encompassing, and amorphous that it’s difficult to see, to name. We’re in an abusive relationship with Neoliberal Übercapitalism. And, as with any gaslighting, the (embodied / body-felt) truth threatens the stability of the status quo. Conflicting / threatening opinions and experiences must be eliminated, shut down, or minimised.
Lived experience of abusive dynamics can make a person super-sensitive to the smell of a lie. It fine-tunes your bullshit-detector. You develop an allergy to the mechanisms of thought-control. It took me a long while to understand that in my world, direct communication— truth and truth-telling— is a safety mechanism. (Also, as Amber pointed out when we were all sitting in the sun outside Little Beer Quarter, it’s just way more efficient timewise.) Maybe that’s why I hate imprecise, euphemistic language. I don’t believe it makes anything safer, it just makes it harder to name reality.
I had a place-travel dream last week. I dreamed I found myself suddenly in a pub, in London, in the Winter. I had recently watched Bodies17 on Netflix. (Slight spoiler): there are parts where people have to convince other people that time travel is real. That is also a good analogy for how I feel— like I’m trying to convince people that time travel is real. (The scope of the perception shift required, and the urgency.)
People have always thought the world was ending, and it didn’t. It’s not ‘too late’ to save ourselves. You’re harshing my buzz, man.18
It’s a common modern fallacy to believe that one can control reality with one’s mind. It manifests in things like the belief that people get sick because of their negative thoughts, or that one can / should control what other people think. (There is a kernel of truth in both of these ideas, but there is a far larger component of reality-denial.) At the extreme end of this denialism are billionaires thinking they can buy immortality. These beliefs reveal a particular anthropocentric hubris, that we Homo sapiens19 are special, exempt, apart, Gods of the Earth.
Buhner: “Our failure to understand that we are the eaten as well as those who eat is the strongest indication of our lack of understanding of our embeddedness in this ecological scenario we call Earth. The foundational truth of the planet is ecological. It cannot be escaped no matter what technological, utopianist (or monotheistic) fantasies we put forth asserting that we can[…]
Exceeding ecological limits of necessity generates ecological adjustments. It’s not personal. Nor is it personal when we are eaten [Buhner has just shared the narrative of Val Plumwood, who was attacked by a crocodile in Kakadu National Park]. It’s just the way it is, the way it’s always been, the way it will always be. Death is built into the system.”
Driven by curiosity I did a thing I try not to do, and Googled Stephen Harold Buhner when I was halfway through Earth Grief.20 He looked pretty much as I had expected: like a merry old hippie. He looked like a dandelion seed, frail carrier of that tough, muscular voice I’d been listening to in my mind’s ear. Then I saw that he had died last year. It seems, then, that he was writing his last book— the one I was reading, published in 2022— from inside his own terminal phase.
At the end of the book Buhner quotes Czech poet Václav Havel: “The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all to be a state of mind, not a state of the world… Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart… I feel that its deepest roots are transcendental, just as the roots of human responsibility are… The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
I phoned James to talk about death-denial. (James holds an informed perspective, as a person who has experienced violent near-death.) James: “It’s about prudery. People haven’t watched birth, or sat with a dying person.21 They don’t like to actually look at death, birth, sex. This is the… [He pauses, finding words]… animal filth! This is the grimy, animal, human thing! This is the primal stuff!”
I recently subscribed to poet Andrea Gibson’s Things That Don’t Suck, and this morning I got the first letter in my mailbox. Gibson has a terminal cancer diagnosis, and the piece was about that. At the end of it, they included a link to this recent interview they did with Tami Simon: Facing Mortality and Being Adored and Cherished by the Universe.
(Recall Buhner: “don’t these people know anything about terminal diagnoses and how people in the real world actually deal with them?”)
It feels appropriate to end with the insider perspective. Terminal illness is a heavy metaphor to deploy without having experienced it from the inside. I chose to share Gibson because what they’re on about at the moment is the bliss that lies on the other side of denial. That’s the bit I find hard— impossible— to convey in ideological wrestling matches with people who aren’t on the same page or even in the same library. Again, it’s a body-thing: the relief of not fighting oneself all the time, the holism that comes with accepting No, this is not-OK, not on any level OK, and yet, this is how things are. Now what?22 The relief of re-centring Self comes only after the breakup, the breakdown, when the confusion-cloud lifts and one is able to think again, with a clear mind. There is only one way out of the maze: turn and embrace the monster.
Tip of the Wizard hat to Peter N. Limberg, whose pieces Wisdom Commons > Meta-Crisis and Prefix-Crisis Mode gave me the combination of polycrisis / metacrisis and hyperobject.
Joke’s on him LOL, I don’t have any
This was before veganism was mainstream. She called eggs chicken periods and said if meat is murder, dairy is rape. She lived on hot chips and cigarettes, taught me to hunt for magic mushrooms in the forest, and went to sea to battle whalers in the Arctic.
The algorithm has informed me the Librarian is named Mychal Threets
I went down a small rabbit-hole trying to find the name for this kind of word. No doubt there is one, as linguists love names, but I couldn’t find it. (Any black-belt grammar-fu masters, let us know in the comments.)
Unless one is a murderer
It’s far easier for me— a Very Direct Communicator at heart— to say what I don’t like about the Indirect than to put myself in their shoes and imagine what they don’t like about me.
Meanwhile on Tiktok: Erik Hoel: Osama bin Laden's TikTok popularity is based on childish notions of evil
‘The white feather plume’
See also: Ursula Le Guin’s 1976 essay The Space Crone, where she says that if aliens showed up requesting one single human to go with them, she, Le Guin, rather than sending a young strong male astronaut, would send an old woman from a little village: “The trouble is, she will be very reluctant to volunteer. “What would an old woman like me do on Altair?” she’ll say. “You ought to send one of those scientist men, they can talk to these funny-looking green people. Maybe Dr. Kissinger should go. What about sending the Shaman?”
Unthinkable, for many
Buhner’s emphases and ellipses in all Buhner-quotes; my ellipses in square brackets.
P.S. This is where I diverge from Buhner— he is something of a scientist-hater, whereas I am a scientist-lover.
Verb is the Wellington readers and writers festival. Litcrawl is the Saturday night multi-phase event in the middle of it.
I should also say that I told him my political predictions based on my dreams, which possibly made him file me in the ‘batshit’ pigeonhole.
Which, of course, doesn’t make the assessment that it could have incorrect.
Artist’s rendition of our conversation:
Remember, kids: instinct has evolved for reasons. Prioritise messages from your animal-self— i.e. your intuition, which speaks more through the body than the mind— over head-rationalisations. Easier said than done, as a lot of socialisation goes into dampening instincts down.
As the opening sequence unfolded, I knew it had to be an adaptation of an Alan Moore comic. It just had a smell of Moore. Looking him up to double-check name-spelling, I discovered that today, Saturday 18th November 2023, is his 70th birthday. Happy Birthday, Maestro!
The audience: Hurry up and get it! You’re holding up the plot!
Even that name, amirite?
I prefer not to know what a writer looks like.
Walt Whitman: “Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.
I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash’d babe, and am not contain’d between my hat and boots…”
Relief-grief; surrender to isness. I use this word-medicine sometimes: This being so, how shall I proceed? It’s designed to shortcut the part where I waste a whole lot of energy fighting with reality, so that I can move more quickly into responsive action— the only thing that actually has any effect in the world.
New from Peter N. Limberg this morning: "I am not interested in doomscrolling toward greater hopelessness. Instead, I am fostering a 'free-floating hope,' nurturing a generalized sense of hope that floats throughout my life. "
https://lessfoolish.substack.com/p/free-floating-hope
YES !
I was particularly interested in the conversation with the “optimistic” man. I never talk to anyone about this sort of thing, one or two tries and getting shut down with the “doomer” tag and from then on just keeping it to myself. To a degree I talk about it with those I call my “doomer” friends (who by the way are all doing amazing things like planting food forests and restoring land) but even amongst them, I feel like I’m the pessimist.
But like you say, that turn to acceptance, is like this incredible burden being lifted off your shoulders. All of a sudden I went from “WHAT DO WE DO??” to “ok, I’m here, this is how it’s going to be, what do you need me to do?”
I recognized the name, Buhner, he wrote some highly recommended plant medicine books and a herbal healing beers book. Sad to hear he’s become unalive. It took me so long to read your essay because I kept looking up stuff and getting lost down rabbit holes.