Very beautifully written. A very important topic. It is a tragedy that we came to such a pass that essays like this had to be written. And it is a compounded tragedy that so few of our eight billion will ever get to read it. Or if reading it, heed it.
The glaciers will melt, the seas will rise, the weather will change, the trees will burn, the species will disappear, and we? We will remain bewitched by our dreams of power and sovereignty and be reduced to witnesses of what we wrought.
Thank you, Michael. As always, you respond with empathy, poetry and grace. Let's hope that essays and responses like these push outward in larger and larger circles.
Oh, thank you so much for linking to my piece on Montana, Scotland, and water, Jason. I felt like I was fumbling about a bit in there, feeling things that were a little too unwieldy to get at. But I really want to help people see the links between all of these forces -- as you do here, too.
I never read "The Road" because I just didn't want to subject myself to something quite that depressing, though I do in general like post-apocalyptic, speculative fiction (not least of which is Octavia Butler's "The Parable of the Sower," which I love but can hardly get through sometimes because it's so dire and true!).
It's interesting reading your thoughts, which are so vital, because I just finished Waubgeshig Rice's "Moon of the Turning Leaves," his sequel to "Moon of the Crusted Snow." When the first book came out he did interviews talking about how important it is for more Indigenous peoples' stories about apocalypse to be told and heard--both fiction and nonfiction, because most Indigenous people have already *been* through apocalypse: 98% population loss in many cases, completely changed and unfamiliar environment, food sources wiped out, etc.
These books are less bleak than a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction I've read. Not idealistic, but showing a community whose ethos rejects individuality and individual survival when they come at the cost of the community. I don't want to give too much away, but I do think they're both worth reading. A different perspective, but also they're really good stories!
Thanks for all this, Nia. I might add these books to my pile, since I find myself these days more likely to dig into fiction than another big and beautiful nonfiction tome... As for The Road, the main thing to recommend it is the writing, which is exquisite (in a painful way). While the narrative details are haunting, it's the feel of the story that stays with me. I don't think you need to put it on your pile. Lots of other things to be haunted by...
As for your essay, I like when our fumbling leads to good places, don't you?
Maybe we should call it writing instead of fumbling, since more often than not it's my process. I have a starting point, some notes, and then I wander off to see what the muses offer up for a path.
I didn't pay enough attention to your original comment, esp. the Indigenous perspective on apocalyptic fiction. That intrigues me. I'll put them on my list.
Excellent writing Jason. 👏 Glad to have discovered your publication.
If we are awake and paying attention to the world around us, the emotion we might be feeling is "dread". I'm writing an essay about that in an attempt to avoid sinking too deeply into that emotion which can be paralyzing.
Thank you, Baird. I often feel that environmental dread and motivation and optimism are on a spectrum that resemble the so-called stages of grief, which as many have observed are really more like a tangle of fishing line than a straight line.
McCarthy explained somewhere that the road was intended to represent the aftermath of an asteroid strike. But some of the same basic scenes, the man pushing the cart, the roving canibals, the loss of all we knew, are doubtless in our future. They won't be playing out against a background of sunless ash likely, they will be playing out against the bright sunlit beauty of landscapes that will be the ones we knew when our model was intact. Like a perfect morning on a battlefield where people are about to get blown to bits. I'd have liked the book better in fact if it were written against a less hyperbolic backdrop. At any rate, McCarthy is i believe the greatest genius of 20th Century literature, and one of things that makes his writing most refreshing to me is he is a simple observer, he has divorced himself from the attachment to a particular outcome involving us. This is a very rare thing. Most writers of any sort have a moral or a cautionary or a "we must" message in mind all through whatever it is they write. McCarthy, on the contrary, is simply about "we are" and "we will" based on the evidence. The reality if you will, of whom we've demonstrated ourselves as being through deep history. He is simply writing "look at us." As we are, not as we'd like to be. One of my favorite quotes of his from Blood Meridian, recognized by many as his masterwork, and which i believe is definative of his worldview and indeed of our unspeakable reality that few other than McCarthy dare to speak anyway:
“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
Hmm, I missed that explanation from McCarthy. I like your point about the background being too on the nose for an apocalypse that plays out while the sun shines, but I think the weather on the battlefield in this case may be sunny but not too pretty. And yes, there is a genius in his mix of stoic calm and lyrical articulation of what's really happening behind the civilizational veil. Thanks as always for a brilliant comment.
Very beautifully written. A very important topic. It is a tragedy that we came to such a pass that essays like this had to be written. And it is a compounded tragedy that so few of our eight billion will ever get to read it. Or if reading it, heed it.
The glaciers will melt, the seas will rise, the weather will change, the trees will burn, the species will disappear, and we? We will remain bewitched by our dreams of power and sovereignty and be reduced to witnesses of what we wrought.
Thank you, Michael. As always, you respond with empathy, poetry and grace. Let's hope that essays and responses like these push outward in larger and larger circles.
Oh, thank you so much for linking to my piece on Montana, Scotland, and water, Jason. I felt like I was fumbling about a bit in there, feeling things that were a little too unwieldy to get at. But I really want to help people see the links between all of these forces -- as you do here, too.
I never read "The Road" because I just didn't want to subject myself to something quite that depressing, though I do in general like post-apocalyptic, speculative fiction (not least of which is Octavia Butler's "The Parable of the Sower," which I love but can hardly get through sometimes because it's so dire and true!).
It's interesting reading your thoughts, which are so vital, because I just finished Waubgeshig Rice's "Moon of the Turning Leaves," his sequel to "Moon of the Crusted Snow." When the first book came out he did interviews talking about how important it is for more Indigenous peoples' stories about apocalypse to be told and heard--both fiction and nonfiction, because most Indigenous people have already *been* through apocalypse: 98% population loss in many cases, completely changed and unfamiliar environment, food sources wiped out, etc.
These books are less bleak than a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction I've read. Not idealistic, but showing a community whose ethos rejects individuality and individual survival when they come at the cost of the community. I don't want to give too much away, but I do think they're both worth reading. A different perspective, but also they're really good stories!
Thanks for all this, Nia. I might add these books to my pile, since I find myself these days more likely to dig into fiction than another big and beautiful nonfiction tome... As for The Road, the main thing to recommend it is the writing, which is exquisite (in a painful way). While the narrative details are haunting, it's the feel of the story that stays with me. I don't think you need to put it on your pile. Lots of other things to be haunted by...
As for your essay, I like when our fumbling leads to good places, don't you?
I do indeed! I always seem to be fumbling so it's nice when I find myself somewhere unexpected and even delightful.
Maybe we should call it writing instead of fumbling, since more often than not it's my process. I have a starting point, some notes, and then I wander off to see what the muses offer up for a path.
I didn't pay enough attention to your original comment, esp. the Indigenous perspective on apocalyptic fiction. That intrigues me. I'll put them on my list.
Excellent writing Jason. 👏 Glad to have discovered your publication.
If we are awake and paying attention to the world around us, the emotion we might be feeling is "dread". I'm writing an essay about that in an attempt to avoid sinking too deeply into that emotion which can be paralyzing.
Thank you, Baird. I often feel that environmental dread and motivation and optimism are on a spectrum that resemble the so-called stages of grief, which as many have observed are really more like a tangle of fishing line than a straight line.
McCarthy explained somewhere that the road was intended to represent the aftermath of an asteroid strike. But some of the same basic scenes, the man pushing the cart, the roving canibals, the loss of all we knew, are doubtless in our future. They won't be playing out against a background of sunless ash likely, they will be playing out against the bright sunlit beauty of landscapes that will be the ones we knew when our model was intact. Like a perfect morning on a battlefield where people are about to get blown to bits. I'd have liked the book better in fact if it were written against a less hyperbolic backdrop. At any rate, McCarthy is i believe the greatest genius of 20th Century literature, and one of things that makes his writing most refreshing to me is he is a simple observer, he has divorced himself from the attachment to a particular outcome involving us. This is a very rare thing. Most writers of any sort have a moral or a cautionary or a "we must" message in mind all through whatever it is they write. McCarthy, on the contrary, is simply about "we are" and "we will" based on the evidence. The reality if you will, of whom we've demonstrated ourselves as being through deep history. He is simply writing "look at us." As we are, not as we'd like to be. One of my favorite quotes of his from Blood Meridian, recognized by many as his masterwork, and which i believe is definative of his worldview and indeed of our unspeakable reality that few other than McCarthy dare to speak anyway:
“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
Hmm, I missed that explanation from McCarthy. I like your point about the background being too on the nose for an apocalypse that plays out while the sun shines, but I think the weather on the battlefield in this case may be sunny but not too pretty. And yes, there is a genius in his mix of stoic calm and lyrical articulation of what's really happening behind the civilizational veil. Thanks as always for a brilliant comment.