What Do We Do at the End of the World?
I'm thinking that it must be love
It's too late to be grateful, it's too late to be late again
It's too late to be hateful
David Bowie, “Station to Station”
By Christopher Fici, Ph.D
What do we do at the end of the world?
What have you been doing in the time of COVID? Consider that a decent approximation of your apocalyptic self.
How do we speak the language of apocalypse? The ways in which not just our words but our whole self, our whole elemental holographic cybernetic self-being, scratches, contort, rages against the dying light and occasionally surrenders wholeheartedly to the whole idea and reality of the end of things?
What do we do when the world ends? You might or might not be surprised to know that the world is always ending. This is not necessarily a bad thing. For example, the schools of Buddhism proclaim to us the doctrine of sunyata, aka the emptiness of reality. The starkness of the English translation (as is the wont of the English language) is deceiving. The English translation is in some ways a veil of understanding (or misunderstanding) put over the rhizomatic (1) delight which is sunyata. What “emptiness” means here is not some kind of abyss or void. Perhaps George Harrison put it best: All things must pass. We all pass in and out of the sources of our everyday reality at every moment. In the material world, nothing is permanent. Everything is always ending. The sooner we can come to understand and embrace this reality, the sooner we come into our apocalyptic selves.
But don’t panic! (Well…don’t not panic entirely, either)
Buddhists also describe reality as adhering to the doctrine of pratitya-samutpada, or the doctrine of dependent origination. In essence, the existence of everything depends on the existence of everything else. No one exists independently. Our existence is always connected, quite literally, to the existence of everything else. (this is hardly emptiness right?) Everything that is important to us is always connected to us. Our very sense of identity depends on the identity of those separate-but-always connected fellow beings who experience our reality with us.
All that is to say that all things must always pass at all times and in all ways. Buddhists and plant scientists alike will tell you that there is no ultimately solid ground to reality, even as some kind of solid ground is all we are fighting for everyday of our lives. At every moment, creation and destruction unite.
The cellular structure of our body, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, your crypto investment, the acid level of the oceans, the shape of your thoughts, all of this changes without fail at every single moment. Death, loss, and grief accompany us at every moment of existence. All the while, rebirth and regeneration also accompany us at every moment of existence.
Shared via the Creative Commons license. No changes made.
In shifting your spacetime with the everyday, everymoment reality of apocalypse, ultimately I invite you to understand this as a potential revelation at every moment in our everyday lives. That may not sound entirely comfortable, either…but alas what is life but a continuous series of revelations?
The constructive theologians Catherine Keller and John J. Thatamanil tell us that…
“...we suspect that a moment’s attention to the actual ancient meaning of apocalypse may make for more responsible uses, secular or spiritual — as a warning, a wake-up call at the edge of time. Of our time.
Contemporaries keep using the term “apocalypse,” but literalist biblical interpretation notwithstanding, the term doesn’t mean what many think it means. Deriving from the Greek apokalypsis, the word means “unveiling” or “revelation.” Hence, the title given to the final book of the Christian Bible, “The Apocalypse of John,” is accurately translated “Revelation” not “Cataclysm.” Not “The End.” Unfortunately, this root meaning has been forgotten in popular circles.
When the term is understood as “unveiling,” we can then ask the right questions: What does this pandemic unveil? What have we refused to see about ourselves and the precarious world we’ve built, a world that now stands exposed and tottering in the harsh light of this unasked-for revelation? If we permit this crisis to expose the fissures of our failing world, this pandemic will have served as properly apocalyptic. If instead, despite its devastating toll, we return to an obsolete and unsustainable world, nothing meaningful will have been revealed.” (2)
This experience of revelation can (and should?) feel like the death of what has come before, of what is no longer necessary for our cultivation of truth and meaning in our loves. The revelation of apocalypse is like the desert sun piercing the most subterranean darkness. What is there and what was there before no longer is there like it was before. The Buddhists and the plant scientists tell us this is the very nature of reality.
Yet this experience of apocalyptic revelation is never merely or primarily or formally nihilistic. The clarity of the light being shown, as rough and hot as it is, reveals the truth. The truth we obscure behind the shopping mall. The truth we obscure behind religion. The truth we obscure behind our cyborg selves. The truth from which our true identity is rooted in, historically both/and transcendentally.
We need to understand what it means to anticipate a more beautiful, resilient, and just way fortune. It is the practice, the art, of anticipation and our networks of anticipatory communities which will create the regenerative bulwark against the worst of our temptations to detain and gas the problem away.
We attempt to ask a very simple but complex question here (3): do we expect the best of each other or the worst of each other when the shit hits the fan?
Are we mere survivalists or are we anticipators?
The practice of anticipation has an inner flame: think of the anticipation one feels when one is falling in love with someone, or when one is aching deeply for a return to one’s Earthy roots, or when one is aching for a reunion with the divine beloved (these are often one and the same experience). That ache, that sense of devotion, in which prayers for such a reunion rise naturally like incense from the heart, is the inner flame of anticipation which makes the practice of anticipatory community possible.
Until the day that is the day that are no more (Always)
Until the day the earth starts turning right to left
Until the earth just for the sun denies itself (Always)
Until dear Mother Nature says her work is through
Until the day that you are me and I am you
Until the rainbow burns the stars out in the sky
Until the ocean covers every mountain high
Until the dolphin flies and parrots live at sea
Until we dream of life and life becomes a dream
Until the day is night and night becomes the day
Until the trees and seas just up and fly away
Until the day that eight times eight times eight is four
Until the day that is the day that are no more
Until the day the earth starts turning right to left
Until the earth just for the sun denies itself
Until dear Mother Nature says her work is through
Until the day that you are me and I am you
Stevie Wonder, “As”
Cut-ups (4) from r/collapse
(07/13/21)
Effects of non-ionizing electromagnetic fields on flora and fauna, part 1//Goldfish dumped in lakes grow to monstrous size, threatening ecosystems//
Angry at politicians. Angry at baby boomers. Angry at Republicans (I live in America btw). Angry at Republican voters. Angry at capitalism. Angry at the Democratic establishment. Angry at western civilization. Angry at humans.
Bootleg Fire threatens California's electricity//CEO begins to panic and blames everything on inflation, he hopes it's "transitory"
***
Is this the world we want to live in?
The logical end-point stage of terminal-stage capitalism is the world as one big shopping mall/airport.
In America, in the land of absolutely no antiquity, of ecology as capital and data, the reality that our commons and the common good is the shopping mall is taken for granted. Even though the UK is hardly “exotic” in comparison to the US, yet in the Isles there is a strange and magnificent old spirit which emerges from the moors and the locks and the ley lines. So when she is papered over by the same shopping mall aesthetic in Kingston and Stratford and Cambridge and Edinburgh it’s a little more noticeable and a little more disgusting.
Climate catastrophe be damned! They will pave over paradise!
The shopping mall-the tyranny of merit-private property.
The fact that I went to probably two dozen pubs in England and Scotland and only two of them had an alternative stout to Guinness. There is nothing inherently wrong with Guinness. Yet the real pubs have retreated into the corners and the alleyways. The ones with stouts in barrels from the time of Napoleon. Perhaps that is the strategy of anticipation. To recede. To protect the antiques. To hide in plain sight. To reemerge.
“Ours is converting the temples into luxury apartments and worshipping in the marketplace instead.” (5)
Private property-”I’m not commodity”-banging my head against the algorithm
“The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it.” (6)
The Boomers have taken everything away from us.
We are atoms-We are atomized-We are all Massed together, with “this illusion that we are thinking for ourselves, when, in fact, someone else is doing their thinking for them. And this someone else is not a personal authority, the great mind of a genial thinker, it is the mass mind, the general ‘they,’ the anonymous whole.” (7)
We all really struggle to make eye contact with each other nowadays. Have you noticed?
Loans and debts and bubbles, needing a Jubilee. My student loan debt amount is so large as to be abstract. Why even fear it when either it will be forgiven or never actually paid off? What happens when we stop paying? You can’t be neutral on a moving train.
For those at the boot end of the cops, the security forces and the truncheons, the world is ending everyday. It is a profound evil for too many people. The sinking, the flooding, the burning, “the crackle of pigskin/the dust and the screaming/the yuppies networking,” the burning, the extinctions.
Is this the world that we want to live in?
Is it wrong to want the world to end? Is it wrong, in our worst moments of frustration, when we are so tired, so tired, of banging our head against the algorithm, to desire the end of the world?
I feel like this quite often, and it’s not a new feeling anyway. There is something sickly sweet about the apocalypse. Suddenly, all that student loan debt is gone. Suddenly all the crushing pressures of needing to find a job to buy that property to invest in that property so as to have kids who have kids who go to college to produce and consume is gone.
Yet I just got married. My wife and I would like to have children as soon as we can. We want the house with the IKEA kitchen, with the island so you know you’ve really made it. We want the garden in the back, with our rows of aubergines and tomatoes which takes me back into my Grandma Fici’s garden. We indeed want the mortgages and the savings funds and the Range Rover. I want my kid to play attacking midfield for Arsenal and for the English national team so he/she/they can make millions for Mum and Pops. We want to be adults in an increasingly childish world.
Yet isn’t this, to say the least, a tad insane, considering how chaos and tumult is now the new normal. It’s normal to feel terrified. It’s normal to feel terrified at the prospect of bringing children into this new Eaarth. (8)
The end of the world is a hot fantasy, where we can imagine all kinds of scenarios of self-sufficiency and reinvention and taking the measure of the man and of no longer being dependent on a collapsing, malfunctioning, dehumanizing system.
But when the world ends, when our daily unique worlds end, it is for so many, for too many, an experience of immense suffering. The end of the world as we might imagine it and desire and yearn for it is a catastrophe for the multitude of living beings on Mother Earth. Catastrophes of all magnitudes and multitudes, already happening everyday, everywhere.
Am I saying that while the world is ending at every moment, we should never desire the end of the world? We should never desire it as an escape route from our most pressing immediate intimate desires and responsibilities for each other. You ultimately cannot tear yourself out of the rhizome.
The Apocalypse with a capital A, the one we dream about in our Bibles and our cinema-houses and our prepper communities and while washing the dishes and paying the bills and listening to the kids screaming, may seem like the release of so many of our plastic burdens. But we should all know by now that plastic does not decompose so easily.
If so many of us are feeling decomposed and disembodied and abandoned after a year+ of COVID space-time, do we really think that a terminal event (COVID X a billion) would really be all that pleasurable? Would it be the fulfillment of your dreams, especially when it means a nightmare beyond compare for so many others?
If the circumstances of the present world do much to one make one feel like a failure, sometimes in spite of every ounce of privilege or any credential one might have, then it feels natural, it feels right, to want our entire civilization to fail.
I’m preaching to the choir here. Not a day goes by in which I don’t wish the world would end. Even right now, I want the world to end. Is this the world we want to live in? If not, why wouldn’t we want it to end? But how do we anticipate a renewed world, a regenerated world? We must, and we will, continue to dream and create and make the answers together, in these pages.
Ah, a fancy word. Perhaps already what you feared from the author who proudly proclaims he is a Ph.D.
I’m going to use this word rhizome/rhizomatic quite regularly. Because us young, unformed scholars love to grab onto a concept, wring it out to death in their writing, and in the process come to a deeper space of realization and communication for us and for you. And then onto the next concept...but my dear reader (first of all thank you for reading!), as a public intellectual with an emphasis on the public in the most Joe Strummer-ish of senses, I will always aim to imperfectly translate the strange jazz which is academic writing.
A rhizome, like all good vibrations of language, has an ecological root. A rhizome are those very roots in fact. Rhizomes are horizontal root-stems of different plant species from which numerous vertical shoots can emerge. Scholars (especially the OGs Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) have adapted the rhizome as a concept to describe the rhizomatic nature of our ecological and cosmological reality. In essence, this means that our reality, whether Earth-bound or in relation to the wider cosmos, is always interconnected together in some immediate, distant, or quantum way with every other part of reality. We literally cannot breathe or eat without the immediate assistance of other living organisms who live within us. We are always in connection and relationship to the reality which we are always within and a part of. A rhizome is that matrix of interconnection and interdependence that we literally cannot live and breathe without.Catherine Keller and John J. Thatamanil, “Is this an Apocalypse? We certainly hope so-and you should too,” ABC Religion and Ethics, published April 15, 2020, accessed at https://www.abc.net.au/religion/catherine-keller-and-john-thatamanil-why-we-hope-this-is-an-apo/12151922
Again apologies from the professor: we scholars really like to put the simple and the complex together in a mash.
Using a modified digital vision of the cut-up method created by the American Beat sages William S. Burroughs and Byron Gysin. https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/burroughs-cutup.html
Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017), 172.
Ibid., 264.
Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1968), 238.
Bill McKibben, Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Times Books, 2010).