Things to Do with an Apocalyptic Imagination
I.
Making up stories is pretty good contingency planning for when the world decides to fuck you. Imaginary conflicts and resolutions prepare us for the inevitable crises that give our lives meaning, as we use the underground labs of our imaginations to experiment with agency, happenstance, causality, probability, fate, and our largely inscrutable psychologies. We arm ourselves through fiction to prepare for the death of a loved one, a serious injury, a lousy job, family dysfunction, political unrest, disease, oppression, our broken hearts. Lately, I’ve begun to worry that the real world is dishing out more doom, suffering, insanity, and nonsense than our exhausted imaginations can possibly keep up with. I wonder what the art of narrative is supposed to do when the gap between science fiction and reality closes to the point of becoming nearly impossible to pry apart. And I’m curious how the unifying forces of great stories are going to function with the loss of consensus reality.
I’ve been making up stories since I first picked up a crayon. From the beginning, I loved gory, violent, and transgressive stories, even though nothing in my idyllic childhood would seem to warrant an abiding fascination with blood and carnage. Maybe there’s another explanation. Recent research has begun to suggest that we carry generational trauma in our DNA. This sounds plausible. I’m the grandson of a veteran of three wars on my mother’s side and a pacifist landscape painter on my father’s; I can imagine that my attraction to dark subject matter might be the result of one grandfather’s traumas colliding with the other’s creativity at an intersection of chromosomes. Maybe Gramps’s art spirit allows me to process the shock waves of violence Poppy witnessed on the islands of New Guinea, the Korean Peninsula, and the jungles of Vietnam. Maybe reverberations of wars showed up in my subconscious through my mother, my love of art came through my father, and writing is the arena where these forces achieve balance and I find a sense of belonging in the world. These days, my writing struggles to make sense of a future that promises anguish beyond imagining.
Around 2007, I started writing a novel called Blueprints of the Afterlife that takes place in a post-post-apocalyptic version of North America, a future in which a dumbstruck, reconstituted civilization is so bewildered by the cataclysms of preceding decades that no one can agree on what actually happened. Everyone in the book’s off-kilter future refers to this historical black box of an era as the “Age of Fucked Up Shit,” or the FUS. Academics entertain competing, half-baked theories about it, including that a sentient glacier broke loose and tore an angry path across North America. At public events, whenever I read from the rampaging glacier chapter, I usually got a few chuckles from the audience as my climatological gallows humor mostly hit the mark. Today, my satirical take on climate change in that novel strikes me as irresponsibly glib. In the years since, the smirk has become much harder to sustain. The Age of Fucked Up Shit is upon us, and I’m not quite as amused about it as I was a decade ago.
II.
Among the many valuable perspectives my grandfather Poppy shared with me, the one I value most is that our collective sense of comfort, safety, and prosperity rests on a shockingly thin membrane segregating triviality from mass suffering. I remember his frustration at how blithely his carefree children and grandchildren seemed to navigate the world. He’d witnessed the speed at which human beings devolve into savagery, which informed both his loving tenderness when he held babies and his exasperation when one of those babies frittered away his adolescence on heavy metal, junk food, and professional wrestling. One day in the early nineties, as an undergraduate steeping in the philosophies of Roland Barthes, Fugazi, and Riot Grrl fanzines, I found a strange patch of common ground with my grandfather in a mall food court in my hometown. He stood in his trench coat and Legion of Valor hat beside me in my leather jacket and my hair dyed fire engine red. Gesturing to our bustling commercial surroundings, I said, “You know, Poppy, none of this actually matters.” He grabbed my arm, broke into a grin, and out rumbled his throaty chuckle, “I know! I know!”
I think what Poppy understood from lived experience and what I looked for in punk rock and snooty French philosophy had something to do with the ephemerality and false security of American prosperity. He seemed to be constantly insisting to everyone who’d listen that everything we take for granted can disappear in an instant, so don’t get attached to unimportant bullshit. This was a man who’d spent his life leaping from one brush with death to another. He’d survived a near drowning as a teenager, seen men die in the sea from a flaming munitions supply barge, and watched the Challenger burst into ribbony clouds from his back porch in Melbourne, Florida. As his first grandchild, I was cocooned and nurtured in a stable family on a bucolic farmette in the Pacific Northwest, where I restlessly sought out narratives of societal collapse. I read Stephen King’s The Stand three times by the end of eighth grade and devoured the movie, novelization, comic book adaptation, and soundtrack of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series, set a planet on which every human who has ever lived is simultaneously resurrected on the banks of a gigantic river, captivated me. The New Zealand film The Quiet Earth, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the Disney adaptation of The Swiss Family Robinson — these stories of survival at the edge of extinction comforted me as though they provided training for a world I expected to one day inhabit. Naturally, I always imagined myself among the survivors. Sure, most of society would collapse, but I would be among the lucky few to help civilization endure. This protective and egotistical sense of exceptionalism would spin out into fantasies of mass reckonings offset by daydreams of benevolent alien interventions, well-stocked underground bunkers, and secret societies of geniuses who’d recruit me into their ranks. While 99.999% of human beings had to answer for defiling the planet, I’d rise as a revered elder among those blessed by fate, invited into some sort of multi-dimensional high council, provided with a simulated, metaverse version of my life with cool indie bookstores, forest trails, art museums, gardens, movie theaters, and coffee shops where I might spend eternity blissfully making art about how a world I had once loved emphatically went to shit.
Where has all this speculative doomsday prep gotten me? Sometimes I wonder if my optimism about charting a technological path out of our climate crisis is a coping mechanism that allows me to simply function while the earth commences its sixth mass extinction with great fanfare. I sense cracks in that optimism as I grow impatient with the conceptual framing of the tribulations to come. The word “sustainability” is starting to sound like death bed bargaining to me, a foolhardy attempt to maintain Western consumerism by switching out the materials and energy sources used to produce the goods by which we insist on defining ourselves, without accepting that it is our lifestyle itself that kills with escalating alacrity. I can no longer stomach the term “carbon footprint,” having learned it was cooked up by a top-tier marketing agency for British Petroleum in an attempt to deflect attention toward performative individual consumer choices and away from industry reform. Green happy talk and eco-peppy videos appear more unhinged from reality day by heat record-shattering day.
Crucify me too, while you’re at it. I’m just as apathetically swept along toward this self-inflicted doomsday as anybody. Just yesterday, I pumped $75 worth of gasoline into my car. I give very little thought to where or how the food I eat is produced. I’m overimpressed by gestural expressions of climate outrage on LinkedIn, mistaking the fleeting dopamine hits of these nods to green lefty tribalism for actual progress, when in fact I have done less than nothing in my daily life to make one iota of real difference. Most days, I selfishly choose to spend my time watching movies and TV shows, reading The Atlantic on my phone, going to yoga, ordering take-out, playing video games, being disgusted by the news, and just sort of hanging out doing the Wordle and snacking on trail mix from Trader Joe’s instead of marching in the streets to demand the criminalization of the fossil fuels industry. What the hell is wrong with me?
III.
Could it be that our capacity to envision dystopias engages the same imaginative muscles that allow us to retreat into denial the moment those dystopias come knocking on our door? That’s the paradox of the thing. We give ourselves a little self-congratulatory pat on the back when we listen to REM’s super catchy 1987 hit “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” because we’re both hip to the fact we’re barreling toward extinction and hip enough to pretend not to care about it as we sing along. Imagination deludes and reveals, exposes and occludes, enlightens and fools. To even function in American society in 2022 is a heroic act of imagination. The other day I read about investors whose life savings were wiped out by the cryptocurrency crash — now that is imagination at work. Just think — your least amount of effort yielding exponentially multiplied rewards, your pennies blooming into billions of dollars, an eye-popping return on a negligible and painless investment. Imagine being so successful that you don’t have to expend any energy on anyone or anything but your own sensory pleasure. That, friends, is the global dream. Perpetually flexing on the losers who seethe with jealousy about the enormity of your tricked-out yacht. Racking up astronomical followers and likes. Getting free stuff sent to you just because you’re an influencer. Getting fawned over in interviews and receiving awards and attending events from which most people are pointedly excluded. Owning it.
We appear to be algorithmically accelerating to a future when every post on social media, every song lyric, and every line of scripted dialogue will be reduced to the last four words anyone will be capable of uttering: fuck you / love me. As the Thwaites glacier raises the sea level and obliterates trillions in coastal real estate, flocks of birds drop dead from the sky, and the melted permafrost up north unleashes nightmares of radon and methane, these four words will come to comprise the entirety of public discourse. Our moment, demanding that we sacrifice and rise to the greatest challenge humanity has ever confronted, finds us infantilized, pissed off, conspiracy-mad, distrustful, drugged to the gills, armed to the teeth, misinformed, gluttonous, actively lowering our own intelligence, fragile as a snowflake, and endlessly scrolling and trolling.
The earth doesn’t die screaming. It dies begging you to like and subscribe.
IV.
Wow, okay, that got dark quickly. Yikes.
Here’s what I’m desperately trying to figure out: how is it that for at least half a century, we’ve known about the dangers of anthropogenic climate change, have had the resources to reverse it, are now in a better position than ever to apply political, technological, and social solutions to the problem, and yet are maniacally increasing our emissions, accelerating and witnessing this disaster our own making in real time, and choosing death on such a grand scale that we don’t even have a word for it? What’s it even called when an entire global civilization commits suicide? Maybe it’s pointless to even coin the word because once it hits us there won’t be anybody left to scrawl it on a wall.
Could there be a secret explanation for our intertwined crises of climate change and our unrelenting helplessness to do anything proportionally serious about it? Maybe the UAPs are a future technology sent back to pull us away from the brink, but, paradoxically, that future technology won’t come into being unless our crisis reaches a certain threshold of severity. Maybe there’s a facility somewhere in Arizona or Antarctica or Shanghai where a smart person with super exclusive security clearance can flip a switch that immediately sets off some kind of geoengineering miracle we haven’t been told about. Maybe alien, celestial, or inter-dimensional beings accessible via psychedelics have tipped off world leaders that when we reach two degrees of warming, don’t worry, they’ll bail us out in the nick of time. I’m not holding my breath, if only because deus ex machinae are such lousy narrative devices.
Now that we’re staring down the sixth mass extinction, it can be instructive to revisit the prequels:
· Ordovician-Silurian extinction — 440 million years ago: It got really cold, we’re not exactly sure why.
· Late Devonian extinction — 365 million years ago: Either algae starved the fish of oxygen, or volcanoes erupted.
· Permian-Triassic extinction — 253 million years ago: Volcanoes.
· Triassic-Jurassic extinction — 201 million years ago: Volcanoes.
· Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction — 66 million years ago: Giant asteroid comes hurtling out of nowhere and slams into the Yucatan Peninsula.
Four of these mass extinctions were the result of some sort of internal force — volcanoes, basically, or possibly algae gone wild. Note that the last and most deadly mass extinction was caused by something external, a giant rock that escaped the Oord Cloud and wiped out millions of years of evolutionary progress within hours.
What’s curious about the Anthropocene is how, in just a few hundred thousand years, a bunch of smelly mammals scurried out of their caves and learned how to burn the fossils of deceased dinosaurs to harness fire and electricity and magnetism, invent a global nervous system that can detect incoming galactic threats, decipher and manipulate molecules (including ones that are the building blocks of life), and transport life off our planet. Could it be that we humans are the earth’s innovation to evolve the process of evolution itself, an eruption of biology, intelligence, resourcefulness, and sick dance moves that have fooled ourselves into thinking we’re somehow separate and independent from the earth? Perhaps we’re supposed to spread life itself, in its endlessly diverse and restless forms, to as many potentially habitable planets as possible, and to protect our own life-giving sphere from incoming projectiles as long as we can, so that consciousness has a chance to bloom under trillions of alien suns.
So why are we killing ourselves, and taking a lot of plants and animals with us in the process? I suspect it’s because humanity is on a suicide mission. The earth has had plenty of practice bringing life back in creative new forms after the temperature of the atmosphere changes, but a big enough rock can take us all out for good. Maybe provoking mass extinction by internal means is a calculated risk if, in the process, the earth develops the means to defend itself from another external threat. Consider just how resoundingly the planet bounced back from four mass extinctions provoked by fluctuations in temperature. It can handle another internally caused mass extinction just fine. Now consider how its response to an external threat was to supercharge evolution so that one species could leap from making hand prints in caves to building the asteroid-hunting, cloud- and AI-empowered Vera Rubin Observatory on a Chilean mountain top in a mere blink of geological time.
One of the prerequisites for carrying out a suicide mission is the capacity to deny you’re on one. Peel back the surface of our supposed interest in self preservation and we find unsettling evidence of how deeply invested we are in our own expendability, i.e., grown adults with fully formed neocortexes refusing life-saving vaccines and insisting to their last breaths that the pandemic is a hoax. I’m reminded of a haunting story that my firefighter cousin Seth told me when we gathered for our artist grandfather’s funeral. He and some other firefighters were at the edge of a burning California forest, watching animals flee the approaching wall of flames. A rabbit stopped in its tracks upon seeing the men, then jumped back into the blaze and died to avoid them. That self-immolating bunny and Antivaxxers needlessly succumbing to the coronavirus have something in common. Both chose the certainty of death when provided an opportunity to leap into an uncertain future.
It is right and humane to lament the suffering unleashed by poisoning our biosphere and heating our atmosphere, and to recoil in horror and offense from the suggestion that we may be triggering a mass extinction according to evolutionary forces deep beneath our collective awareness. It’s a scary, sorrowful, and frustrating time to find one’s self at least semi-conscious on earth right now, and easy to surrender to nihilism. Our bickering, preening, whining culture appears to be plunging faster toward a nadir of selfishness and meaninglessness in the late spring of 2022, as those of us in the Northern hemisphere brace for another summer of wildfire smoke and air conditioning. Despite all the evidence pointing to our species being a bunch of stupid fucking assholes, let’s never forget we’re the most efficient and creative mechanism the planet has ever devised to manipulate the matter of which it is composed. A rock doesn’t know what a rock is. But the minerals in that rock can evolve to understand what a rock is, change the molecules in that rock, invent entirely new substances that could not exist outside the context of human thought, then launch something we built with those substances into space to gaze billions of years backward through time toward the origin of our universe in an attempt to satiate our boundless curiosity and answer the question of how all this madness began. Our saving grace is that we can turn that gaze inward, to remember that our survival has always depended on cooperation, understanding, and love.
