Stop Saying That the Earth Is Doomed
You may be doomed, I may be doomed, the earth not so much.
And anyway, do you have any idea how offensive that is to the gods? To any amount of offended magics? Especially to your children? To the perpetual and ongoing miraculous? In the Underworld, such grand protestations reveal a lack of subtlety. Even hubris.
And who are we, with our unique divinatory access, that we seem to have information withheld from everything else in all time and space. And now, now we are suddenly cleaving to the ‘facts’ of the matter? Facts don’t have the story. They have no grease to the wheel, they are often moribund, awkward clumps of information that can actually conceal truth, not promote it.
I’m not even asking for hope or despair, I’m suggesting responsiveness to wonder. To entertain possibility.
And to deepen.
Cut out the titillation of extinction unless we are really prepared to be appropriately stupefied with loss.
To stop trafficking in it just to mainline a little temporary deep feeling into our veins as we post the latest TED Talk on social media. It doesn’t mean it’s not true, doesn’t mean that rivers, deserts and ice floes don’t daily communicate their flogged and exhausted missive, but there’s an odd twisted eroticism, a Western Thanatos that always comes with excessive privilege. And let’s be clear, most of us reading this are excessively privileged. I think some of us are getting off on this. That it-all-will-end inserts some poignancy to a life deprived of useful hardships. Not ever knowing appropriate sacrifice is not a victory, it’s a sedative.
But when we prematurely claim doom we have walked out of the movie fifteen minutes early, and we posit dominion over the miraculous. We could weave our grief to something more powerful than that. Possibility.
Let the buck stop with you. Where is your self-esteem if you claim the world is doomed with you still kicking in it? How can that be? What are you, chopped liver? Is that really your last word on that matter? I’m not suggesting a Hercules complex land on your shoulders, but if ever you longed for a call to action this is the moment.
Approaching the Truth That Things End
Dancing on the very same spear tip, we accept our very human response to things ending. We don’t like it. We loathe it. The good stuff at least. Though it is a historical inevitability, a biological placeholder, could we start to explore the thought that earth may appropriately proceed without us? Without our frantically curated shape? Could our footprints become pollen that swirl up for a moment and then are gone? I’m not suggesting we are anything but pulverised with sorrow with the realisation, and our part in its hastening, but I persist.
I’m offering no spiritual platitudes, no lofty overview, but for once we stop our wrestle with god and feel deeply into the wreckage of appropriate endings. That even, or especially such catastrophic loss requires the most exquisite display of love for what we did not know how deeply we loved till we knew it was leaving.
I think even to operate for a second in the Underworld without being annihilated, we have to operate from both wonder and grief, at absolutely the same time. One does not cancel the other out. It is the very tension of the love-tangle that makes us, possibly, a true human being.
Notice I said approaching, not accepting the truth that things end. That’s too swift a move, too fraudulent, too counterfeit, too plastic. Approaching is devastation enough.
This terrible, noble counterweight is what we are getting taught. But it doesn’t end there.
There in that very contrariness, something gets forged: something that is neither-this-nor-that, a deepening, ballast in the belly of the ship triality. The blue feather in the magpie’s tail, the Hermian move to excruciating brilliance through the torment of paradox, the leap of dark consciousness that we, in the name of culture, are being asked to make. The thunderbolt that simultaneously destroys and creates.
These are grand turns of phrase I’m using but I don’t apologise. You’ve been in love once or twice, you know what I’m banging on about.
I once heard that to become a sovereign of Ireland you had to attach a chariot to two wild horses. One would lurch one way, one the other. You revealed your spiritual maturity and general readiness for the task by so harnessing the tension of both that a third way forward revealed itself. The holy strain of both impulses created the royal road to Tara. A road that a culture could process down. I’m talking about something like that. That’s Underworld character.
And such sovereigns were not defined by what they ransacked, what they conquered, but how they regulated their desire, how they attended to the woes and ambitions of their steeds for a third way to reveal itself. Under great pressure and with immense skill.
The nightworld is where we are.
I say it. I say it till we may hear it.
And in that darkness, we remember what we love the most.
That itself is the candle.
