KW-30 Art is essential to understanding

and must be protected

I’ve been angry for a while. Or frustrated. Or sad. I’m not sure. Somewhere in the middle of disappointed and raging.

les vaches sont brunes

Sixteen, seventeen years ago, when the possibility of stopping, slowing catastrophic climate collapse was within the grasp of the individual (go vegan, fly less), the concept was too abstract for most people to relate to. The data wasn’t any less clear than it is now, but today, the graphs are a little more dramatic, easier to be horrified by.

In the four and a bit years of the barracks, the progress I have achieved is that I look a bit less mad today than I did at the start, but the message we’re doomed has only changed slightly. It’s now we’re fucking doomed.

And still, you go to the same job, do the same things in your free time. No-one, not me, not anyone, has been able to explain to you how planning a life based on tomorrow#s being anything like today is a deciet on yourself, and you’ve still not planted that apple tree.

I try to fake a little positivity in the company of others, but it’s draining. I’m certainly not hitting it today. I have a pretty complete thesis on why it is actually impossible to have a sense of the extinction of your species. When we consider how morally irrelevant the extinction of thousands upon thousands of other species is to humanity, I guess it’s not a huge surprise that our own hardly raises an eyebrow.

And it makes me sad.

Thankfully, we have artists, writers, film makers who sometimes expose a little of the human condition to us, and the right poem, the right painting sometimes finds us at the right time.

For complicated, fireside tales reasons, I read The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft this week.

It starts:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

No, it wasn’t. And yes it is merciful. Time, space and tomorrow are all far too distant for the human mind.

AI Art generated interpretation of the first line of The Call of Cthuhlu with the “anime” filter on. Because why not?

And then, last night, I watched Never let me go, the film written by Alex Garland from the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro which he called his “happy novel”. It would appear that Kazuo is a happy doomer.

It’s a movie which presents an underclass in an entirely new way. They suffer a unique sort of oppression, justified in the same old way - If a creature has no soul, it is morally ok to exploit its life. Women, people of colour, the poor.

I read an interview with Ishiguro after watching the film. The most obvious question is “why do they not run away / fight / rebel”. His answer goes a long way to explaining our response to anthropogenic climate change.

“Sometimes it’s just passivity, sometimes it’s just simply perspective. We don’t have the perspective to think about running away. … I was looking for a metaphor for how we face mortality, and we can’t really escape from that. We can’t escape from the fact that we’ve only got a limited amount of time.”

I think that both Lovecraft and Ishiguro went a long way to helping me understand our species’ inaction. I think I thought it was passivity, but it might well be perspective.

I’ll be thinking more about it in the garden as I get on with the work list for this week:

• transplant lettuce seedlings to the potager

• pick gooseberries and black currants. Make jam.

• clear out the woodshop

• sort out the wood for the da Vinci bridge tool shed

• fix the lawnmower

• plant the paulowinas and the holly

• harvest the rye

• sort out, clean and square a few hundred bricks

and so, much love

Your Pirate Ben

xoxo