The Free List : Vol. 1, No. 12
I BELIEVE WE MAY HAVE STRUCK GOLD IN THE MIDDLE OF DISASTER; AN EMAIL IN THREE MOVEMENTS.
/1/
(||: Whitney—she is like the Ocean. Does the Ocean have friends? The Ocean speaks. We listen. But in the end, we fill her with plastic. We Feel Bad About It, but we don’t stop using plastic. I must’ve used 12 plastic things bags, lids, straws—over the past week and I huff and puff about plastic hoooo haaaaa plastic boooo bahhhh plastic puh puh puh puh but then there it is.
There,
Invented––maybe by cotton fields or chains or maybe just Newark.
There is a some kind of empty a fuck
a powder
a paper–
pill won’t fill.
and it’s ancient.
Old.
Like some kind of sidecar
not attached to its host
and it’s just there
when you know the love is gone;
down at the bottom of the ocean;
and your mother can’t give it to you
because she don’t know where to find it,
and no one will help her look. :|| )
/breath/
WHEN SHE WAVES BACK, WE LOOK
R
I mean, do you try to define the ocean?
C
well it's a large body of water
R
that once was a glacier that once came from an asteroid that once was a planet that once broke from a star that once began everything. (:||) So I’m asking what your definition is supposed to tell me other than she was from god and is god and will be god as god is the ocean and the ocean is her.
C
She did love the Ocean.
R
Of course she did. because what was the difference?
//2//
(emphases mine)
“There are two kinds of responses. all too frequently to the horrors of the anthropocene and the capitalocene:
Technology will somehow come to the rescue or God will fix it.
[A] response, harder to dismiss, is probably even more destructive. Namely a position that the game is over: ‘It’s too late there’s no sense trying to make anything better, the sixth grade extinction is already far advanced, the carbon already in the atmosphere is enough to raise the temperature 3 degrees or more there’s no way to turn around capitalismit’s too strong, there’s simply no way, it’s too strong, we’re too weak.’
There’s no sense trying to make anything any better, or at least no sense in having any “active trust” in each other, in working and playing for a resurgent world.
Some scientists I know express this kind of bitter cynicism, even as they actually work very hard to make a positive difference.
Some people who describe themselves as critical cultural theorists or political progressives express these ideas, too; I think the odd coupling of actually working and “game over” attitude is facilitated by various kinds of futurisms:
One kind seems to imagine that only if things work, do they matter. Or worse, only if what I and my fellow experts or political allies do to work to fix things does anything matter.
More generously, scientists and others who think, read, agitate, and care actually know too much, and it is too heavy, Or at least We think we know enough to reach the conclusion that life on earth that includes human people in any tolerable way really is over, that the apocalypse is nigh.
It matters what stories tell stories.
It matters what thoughts think thoughts.
It matters what worlds world worlds.*
Endings have occurred before and indeed; genocidal extinctions have occurred before and probably the Native peoples of North and South America; the depopulation of the colonial era. The end of the world has already happened before and is still happening.
What makes this end of the world so distinctive?
well, one answer to that is: Nothing and it really should pay serious attention to the fact that it’s not the first and probably not even the most important. But, the fundamental metabolism of the planet is transforming in ways that it hasn’t before. There is a unique capacity to respond across all of this. This is a biological phenomenon as well as a cultural one.
—Donna Hararway, Center for 21st Century Studies, 2019
*thank you again to Free List love Erin Shipley for introducing me to Haraway's work.
///3///
Kasaun: I believe we may have struck gold in the middle of disaster.
Me: Well, isn’t that how it goes? That’s the Black experience.
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