OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #157, DECEMBER 18, 2023

 

OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #157, DECEMBER 18, 2023

 

Wen Stephenson.  “’”While this everywhere crying.”  The Nation (12.11-18.2023).
As a former literature instructor and faculty member in a College of Arts and Sciences, I think of all A&S colleges as potential centers for resistance to nuclear wars and warming.   Except for the Green New Deal movement, we have been so preoccupied with the deniers and greedy and indifferent or oblivious , the willfully ignorant and cynical, we haven’t begun to pay the urgent, absorbing attention to the quality of the transition needed against the chaos ahead, its beginnings already forced upon us.    Our colleges of Arts and Sciences should be laser-focused on the possible end of our civilization.  Literature departments should be cultivating a new age of elegies and courses on novels about climate change.  History departments should be concentrating on parallel cultural responses to massive loss. Our psychology , philosophy, and religions departments should be leading the study of doom, grief, and despair, emotions already affecting a few and soon to be world-wide if the present neglect of catastrophe continues.   All departments should have climate justice and nuclear war at the forefront of their course offerings. Instead, our campuses seem to think it’s the 1920’s, or 1950’s, or 2000’s.  Take a look at your A&S college’s academic reports and its journal.

       But a change in the quality of response can be recognized in Wen Stephenson’s article on the poetry of Jane Hirshfield.   Stephenson is himself a distinguished author, and his comments alone are worth reading the article.  (See his book, What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other: Dispatches from the Front lines of Climate Justice.) 

    His subject, the poet Jane Hirshfield, described by Stephenson as “among the most distinguished living poets in the English language,”  wrote to him:  By despair, “I mean something like admit the abyss is real and truly may swallow us all, because only then will we do whatever we can to prevent it.”  And she wrote the poem: ”Ghazal for the End of Time,” inspired by Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, composed and first performed in a Nazi death camp.  The poem ends with these lines: “Rock said, Burning Ones, pry your own blindness open. /Death said, Now I too am orphan.”  She wrote to Stephenson of her love for the music: “I hear in it infinite grief…hauntingly beautiful,” as in “Greek tragedies”; her poem is about “the crisis of the biosphere, the possibility that the world you and I were born into might be coming to a close.”  --Dick