Tag: Climate crisis

Closing in

‘A clever lesson Alfred taught
that should remain within our thoughts:
“A threat seen in its infancy
will lose much of its potency.”
So heavy jolts have far less force
if spotted early in their course;
& you can dodge an arrow’s blow
by watching as it leaves the bow,
then keeping its approach in sight,
then ducking from its fatal flight.’[1]

July. A bad month for the Romanovs, among others, as I recall. Sedgemoor, the last major battle on British soil. Anaïs Nin begins her journal. Louis-Ferdinand Céline died on 1st July; Franz Kafka was born on the 3rd. I was not actually aware of those last two facts when the month began. More widely, it began with a pause in the heat, in the United Kingdom anyhow, though extreme weather still had a grip elsewhere, a death grip often enough. More locally, as in our breakfast table, it started with Céline’s Death on the Instalment Plan (Mort à crédit) and Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’. Yes, as in the case of Dr Johnson’s old friend, Oliver Edwards, who had tried in his time to be a philosopher, ‘cheerfulness’ is ‘always breaking in.’[2]

Since then, wildfires raging in France, Spain, Italy, Crete, Greece. . . a fire blazing in the Cairngorms national park in Scotland for a fortnight now, and a huge area in Suffolk devastated, including the Minsmere nature reserve. The climate emergency is taking itself seriously, even if some of those affected by it still, astonishingly, do not. Our ‘temperate’ country is currently enduring, in parts of the country, its fourth heat wave of the year, half of England now officially in drought, already having recorded the hottest June ever. The excessive humidity made it much worse then, of course, oppressive and exhausting, with large areas of western Europe reportedly sitting under a ‘heat dome’, so both physically and psychologically stifling, something of a theme for the times. Closing in.

It’s an old literary theme too, unsurprisingly. In Edgar Allen Poe’s tale, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, after the narrator has saved himself from the pit only by tripping on the hem of his robe, and freed himself by luring rats to chew through his bonds, the walls of the cell begin closing in. They are also red-hot and force him towards the pit in the centre of the cell. ‘I shrank back – but the closing walls pressed me resistlessly onward.’[3]

Fifty years later, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb’, Hatherley lets slip to Colonel Lysander Stark that he has realised the deception practised upon him. The Colonel is not amused, slams the door and turns the key in the lock. ‘The lamp still stood upon the floor where I had placed it when examining the trough. By its light I saw that the black ceiling was coming down upon me, slowly, jerkily, but, as none knew better than myself, with a force which must within a minute grind me to a shapeless pulp.’[4]

Encroaching walls, descending ceilings, such closings-in are at the more grotesque end of the spectrum. Others are more general, more personal, more subjective.

George Orwell (in 1940) writes of Henry Miller at the end of Tropic of Cancer, watching the Seine, ‘in a sort of mystical acceptance of the thing-as-it-is. Only, what is he accepting? In the first place, not America, but the ancient boneheap of Europe, where every grain of soil has passed through innumerable human bodies.’ Secondly, the modern age of concentration camps, bombs, purges, political murder and the rest. And, regarding Walt Whitman, to whose outlook Miller’s own is ‘deeply akin’, Orwell adds: ‘Unlike Whitman, we live in a shrinking world.’[5]

I live in a city, large parts of which—and in a country, large parts of which—were essentially designed for an earlier century: the twentieth and, very often, the nineteenth. Many roads are narrow, their pavements not designed to be blocked by huge plastic recycling bins and boxes, and by oversized vehicles parked half on pavements with their wing mirrors not even folded in on the pedestrian side. Shrubs and hedges, which used to be tidied and trimmed, now trail and jut over walls and fences. Innumerable plants, not all of them weeds by any means, sprout from the base of front boundary walls, shaving a few more inches off the pedestrian space: you might say ‘rewilding’ or, in some moods, ‘neglect’ or ‘arrant laziness’. Private premises encroach, if only—again—by inches, on designated public spaces. Urban walking now is too often done with arms by your sides, drawn tightly in, or turned sideways, or simply stepping into roads.

On a broader stage, there are a number of figures, in and out of parliament, the rousers and the easily roused, who clearly wish to shrink this country (among others) further, make it smaller, poorer, tighter—and whiter.

But then – ‘We find hope where we can, and where we cannot, invent it.’[6]

Still, the war, the wars, go on. The most stupid one in recent memory persists in stuttering on, and nobody knows how long it will do so, least of all those who started it or naively believed they controlled the narrative. And as Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote to her friend Paul Nordoff in 1946: ‘No one in wartime can quite escape the illusion that when the war ends things will snap back to where they were and that one will be the same age one was when it began, and able to go on from where one left off. But the temple of Janus has two doors, and the door for war and door for peace are equally marked in plain lettering, No Way Back. And the dead are not more irrevocably dead than the living are irrevocably alive.’[7]

Notes

[1] Simon Armitage, The Owl and the Nightingale (London: Faber & Faber, 2021), 58-59. ‘Alfred’ is Alfred the Great.

[2] James Boswell, Life of Johnson, edited by R. W. Chapman, revised by J. D. Fleeman, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 957.

[3] Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Stories (London: Everyman’s Library, 1992), 603.

[4] Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: Volume I, edited with notes by Leslie S. Klinger (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company 2006), 281.

[5] George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’, in A Patriot After All: 1940-1941, edited by Peter Davison, revised and updated edition (London: Secker and Warburg, 2000): The Complete Works of George Orwell, Volume XII, 91.

[6] Claire Messud, The Last Life (London: Pan Macmillan, 2000), 160.

[7] Sylvia Townsend Warner, Letters, edited by William Maxwell (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982), 91.

Sleeping mowers


(Camille Pissarro, Three Women Cutting Grass)

It rains, it rains,
From gutters and drains
And gargoyles and gables
It drips from the tables
That tell us the tolls upon grains.
Oxen, asses, sheep, turkeys and fowls
Set into the rain-soaked wall
Of  the old Town Hall.[1]

While much of the world is on fire, some of it quite literally, we have been frequently awash with summer rains, though complaining about it less than usual. The United Kingdom as a whole recorded the sixth highest July rainfall since those records began in 1836; Northern Ireland recorded its highest July rainfall ever. In the United States, heat-related deaths are confidently predicted to exceed those of previous years. Beijing reports the heaviest rainfall in 140 years, with many deaths and disappearances. In the Antarctic, sea ice levels are at record lows as we veer towards the final tipping point.

In response to all this, as if mindful of Samuel Beckett’s famous formulation in Worstward Ho—‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’—politicians are skipping the trying bit and simply failing again, though labouring to fail even worse than before, reaching new depths of dangerous irresponsibility. Are the voters they paw at really as selfish and unthinking as they assume? Or is it just their usual contempt for the proles? Answers on a lump of coal please, tossed into a rising and soon to be overwhelming sea.

At 05:45, the vegetable boxes are already delivered and I bring them in; by 06:30 the light has deteriorated enough to warrant flipping switches in the kitchen. Surely it’s not that many days back that, in balmy weather, the mowers were out in the park and the air heavy with the distinctive and evocative scent of freshly cut grass. ‘Do you ever feel the smell of freshly cut grass is a cry for help from the grass?’ the (dead) Lily asks Finn in Lorrie Moore’s new novel.[2]


In Alethea Hayter’s fine book—but then she wrote only fine books—Voyage in Vain, she describes how Samuel Taylor Coleridge, en route to Malta, ‘identified himself’ with a sheep in a pen, destined, like the ducks and chickens, ‘to figure on the ship’s menu’. ‘He imagined it as coming from a countryside of flat peaceable meadows, and when he saw it cheerfully eating hay, he pictured its sensations, taking the brightness and sweet murmur of the sea for “dewy grass in sunshine, and the murmur of the trees”.’[3]

On another, more hazardous voyage, late in Moby Dick, Ahab’s anguished raving to the mate has: ‘“and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field.”’[4]

Sensory commerce between ship and shore.

Helen, thy beauty is to me
   Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
   The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
   To his own native shore.

Of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘To Helen’, Guy Davenport remarked: ‘We can defend perfumed seas, which has been called silly, by noting that classical ships never left sight of land, and could smell orchards on shore, that perfumed oil was an extensive industry in classical times and that ships laden with it would smell better than your shipload of sheep. Poe is normally far more exact than he is given credit for.’[5]


(Vincent Laurentsz van der Vinne, Toad: © The Courtauld)

Wet weather tends to steer us to the nearby park, a couple of circuits by varying paths. On drier days, we still head to Arnos Vale, pausing to pluck some rosemary from the bushes in Perrett Park, eyeing in several of our usual locations the blackberries which are nearly, nearly ready. Our walk back from Arnos Vale is along Cemetery Road. At home, I sit down with a cup of tea and a Mick Herron novel called, ah, Down Cemetery Road. And there is Zoë Boehm, thinking of Joe: ‘Larkin, she thought. He’d always been fond of Philip Larkin. Give me your arm, old toad; Help me down Cemetery Road. . .’[6]

Yes, not the famous ‘Toads’:

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

But ‘Toads Revisited’:

What else can I answer,

When the lights come on at four
At the end of another year?
Give me your arm, old toad;
Help me down Cemetery Road.[7]

(Naturally, having drafted this, I see a tweet from Noreen Masud, author of the excellent A Flat Place—‘We can’t live in this world without damaging or being damaged. The point is to be deliberate about which damage to give and take’[8]—with a photograph of the street sign for Cemetery Road and, for heading, that same quote from Larkin: ‘Give me your arm, old toad’. If you believe in coincidences, this is one; if not, not.)


So the news of seemingly endless grotesque and malign misgovernment grinds on, and I think of D. H. Lawrence’s letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith in February 1917: ‘You mustn’t think I haven’t cared about England. I have cared deeply and bitterly. But something is broken.’[9]

I have too – and something is.

Notes

[1] Ford Madox Ford, ‘In the Little Old Market-Place’, Collected Poems (London: Max Goschen, 1913), 36.

[2] Lorrie Moore, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home (London: Faber & Faber, 2023), 149.

[3] Alethea Hayter, Voyage in Vain: Coleridge’s Journey to Malta in 1804 (1973; London: Robin Clark, 1993), 70.

[4] Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851; edited by Harold Beaver, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), 653.

[5] Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination (Boston: David R. Godine, 1997), 7.

[6] Mick Herron, Down Cemetery Road (London: John Murray, 2020), 353.

[7] Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, edited by Anthony Thwaite (East St Kilda: The Marvell Press and London: Faber, 2003), 62, 90.

[8] Noreen Masud. A Flat Place: A Memoir (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2023), 210.

[9] Letters of D. H. Lawrence III, October 1916–June 1921, edited by James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 91.