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