Stating The Obvious

The canary in the coal mine assumes many forms these days. The rate of glacial melt is accelerating globally due to rising temperatures from human-caused climate change, with glaciers losing mass at a rate of approximately 273 billion tons per year between 2000 and 2023, or an 18% higher rate than previously thought. Rivers are drying up. Trees are stressed. Eggs are expensive. People are being kidnapped off the streets by ICE agents cracking windshields and intimidating pedestrians. There have been 502 mass shootings in the U.S. as of the end of August, according to the Rockefeller Institute of Government. Over 10,000 homes lost to wildfire in the Pacific Palisades and Eaton Canyon. The Santa Ynez Reservoir, situated on a hilltop directly above the Palisades Highlands, was empty, due to a tear, ostensibly, in its rubber cover. Flint, Michigan and Jackson Mississippi are still without drinkable water. Everything is penury fire and fever. Brain-eating amoeba present in the Lake of the Ozarks. Plastic nanoparticles in the human brain increased by 50% between 2016 and 2024. Godzilla wears a Stetson. Père Ubu is president. I don’t like being a bummer. But here I am. Stating the obvious.

This is it, societal collapse, Armageddon, whatever one chooses to call it. I call it done. Kaput. Tits up. I call it genocide. I call it apartheid. I call it immigrants drowning in the Mediterranean. Pregnant Ukrainian woman fighting Russia in a muddy ditch. The world – and by world I mean the human universe – is hopelessly fractured. Raped. Abused. Torn asunder by technofascist police-state corporate greed. Unobtainable healthcare. Unobtainable housing. Unobtainable food.

Planet earth will survive. But much of it, the part we live in, the forests and deserts and mountains we inhabit, is disappearing. The daily erosions are sobering, like the death of a star. Impermanence has always been a part of life. It’s a universal, existential process, natural as a woman’s pregnancy or the pop of a champagne cork. Magpies on a barbed wire fence. Dead coyote in a ditch. Burst of a meteor burning through earth’s atmosphere. It’s the unreality of the reality that gets you. Yanks a curtain open on the debris from last night’s party.

And yet, the sublime persists. Transcendence, compassion, beauty. People capable of personal sacrifice and with a deep sentiment of the common good persist. As of this writing, a flotilla of ships has set sail from Barcelona to the Gaza Strip with humanitarian aid and activists on board. They are doing what world governments have refused to do: relieve suffering. Err on the side of life.

Whatever life is, whatever brought it into being, whatever force or energy or divine power, whatever random coming together of chemicals and molecules invested the existence of matter with the baffling phenomena of consciousness, with self-awareness, is eternal. Energy can neither be created or destroyed. “There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet,” wrote Emerson. “This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title…The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even in the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows.”

Had I written this, I would’ve chosen a different word than ‘infancy.’ I know what Emerson means: he is referring to a state of pure consciousness, non-judgmental consciousness, a state of awareness in which everything is new, marvelous, amazing, astonishing, sometimes frightening, but always fascinating, always enchanting, beguiling, spellbinding.

The world abounds in subtlety. The reddish hues of krill. The shifting hues of a glass octopus. Sunlight traversing a mug of beer. Robins singing near the kitchen window. Draft of cool air. Tires skidding on steep Highland Drive after a spring rain. Shrill inquiry of a blue jay. Despite all the tons of concrete and steel employed on this globe to house enterprise and luxury suites in mid-town Manhattan and the pristine streets of Singapore, infinite subtleties remain.

What are subtleties? Duchamp called it inframince: the subtle, barely perceptible, or immeasurable differences between interacting phenomena. It’s not a clearly defined concept, but a nebular aura, such as the lingering warmth on a chair after a person has stood up. It highlights the transient and in-between states, like the presence of a bright object – Venus, the morning star  – and a pale moon that remains in the morning sky after sunrise. Inframince emphasizes the nuances of perception and the invisible qualities that enrich and enhance the sensations of living in this world, this plane, this dimension. Whatever the nervous system of the human organism is capable of absorbing, assimilating, apprehending. Nuance, undertone, trace - inframince - require a great deal of awareness and sensitivity to detect, an eccentric disposition. Eccentric: meaning outside the circle. Outside mainstream narrative. Outside indoctrination. And they’re important. Critical to the survival of the human spirit during a time of aggressive, moral inversion and unbridled materialism.

The myth of living is strangely persistent. “Even in this day, when the social and historical collapse of the Myth is commonly recognized,” wrote poet Laura Riding, “we find poets and critics with an acute sense of time devoting pious ceremonies to the aesthetic vitality of the Myth, from a haunting sense of duty which they call classicism. So this antiquated belief in truth goes on, and we continue to live. The Myth is the art of living.”

She makes modern life sound tedious, deluded and inauthentic, but what she’s really getting at is the anarchic energy at the core of the poetic urge. “Poetry,” she says, “is essentially not of the Myth. It is all the truth it knows, that is, it knows nothing. It is the art of not living. It has no system, harmony, form, public significance or sense of duty…Whatever language it uses it makes up as it goes and immediately forgets. Every time it opens its mouth it has to start all over again…In the art of not living one is ephemerally permanent but permanently ephemeral.”

Kant called it a purposeful purposelessness. Poetry doesn’t help anyone survive. It doesn’t grow food. It doesn’t make heat and light, crackle and spark in a fireplace, warming the legs and feet. It doesn’t fix things, build things, or make the bells ring at the New York Stock Exchange. What it does do is surge through the bloodstream like a wild energy, demanding focus and traction.  

This is what one tells oneself when the urge to create something coaxes and needles you into finding its expression, and the indulgence, although deeply pleasurable in the moment, will not feed a starving infant. Creativity is an odd phenomenon. There’s a madness to it. It exists outside the rational. It’s quintessentially selfish. Shakespeare’s Richard III enjoys a disturbing flamboyance. Those devoted to it are also willing to make great sacrifice. It can be alienating. It can empty a bank account in no time, just like an addiction to cocaine, or fentanyl, or negative capability. It must perplex the hell out of the private equity firms. That is, if they pay any attention to it at all. Which I strongly doubt. The only profit to be had from poetry, is the dilation of the soul.

I worry about the steady erosion of world literature. Daily reading for pleasure in the U.S. has declined by over 40% in the last 20 years, dropping from approximately 28% of the population in 2004 to 16% in 2023. This represents a sustained, steady decline of about 3% per year. 

Goodbye Shakespeare. Goodbye Dante. Goodbye Keats and Shelley and Gwendolyn Brooks. Goodbye Viriginia Woolf. Goodbye Gertrude Stein. Goodbye Ginsburg. Goodbye Kerouac.

R noticed a young dawn redwood dying from lack of water. She began toting empty cat litter jugs filled with water to water the young dawn redwood. Some of the leaves had turned brown from drought stress, but after several waters some of the leaves reverted to green. There was still life in the tree. Dawn redwoods are deciduous. Their feathery, bright green leaves turn a coppery-red or russet-brown in autumn before dropping. People sometimes wrongly assume the tree is dead when it loses its leaves. R called the park department and requested that they give the tree a wrap-around slow-release watering bag, as is the norm with young, newly planted trees. The park department came and chopped the tree down. No explanation.

A similar scenario happened to five lush rhododendrons in the park next door, growing over a bank of blackberry vines. Every spring they produced a profuse agglomeration of bloom. It was a joy to round the corner on the switchback trail and confront this assembly of robust, Rabelaisian color. The rhododendrons were watered automatically by an underground sprinkler system. When the system stopped working, the park department took it out, rather than try to repair or replace it. We began watering them ourselves, using empty cat litter jugs to carry the water. The park department chopped two down. R continues to water the remaining three. One is doing ok and two are struggling, but still alive. Summer drought is now a seasonal phenomenon, coupled with the scent of wildfire. R has no further plans to call the park department.

We’re on our own now, to quote Young’s “Ohio.” That was 54 years ago. I lived by Coyote Creek in downtown San José, a wooded ravine filled with coastal scrub and an upturned grocery cart. Fed a family of raccoons dog food. Studied Creeley and Olson by a big glass wall. Noticed a constellation of eyes watching me. Bandit eyes. Tiny hands on a pane of glass. Looking in.