Come on Pino, We’re going Home.. by Mattjin Franssen

Last week’s laboratory musings seems to have touched something wider than myself, as more than one fellow Doomer™, or Recovering Doomer™, or Post Doomer™, or Ex-Doomer™, or Non-Doomer™ (and maybe this is the week to retire that label entirely?) reported a resonance with my words. My friend and colleague John Ludi got right to the heart of it when he said “I think it is tied into the recent environmental/climate news building up.” Yep. Last week’s post was my first attempt to process and incorporate what I’ve been calling, in FaceBook City, the “extinction by mid-century meme.” That’s what I was chewing on last week. That’s what I’m still chewing on. I’ll get as far as I get today, and save myself the pressure of having to have it “all chewed up” by the end. We’ll see…

A meme (pron.: /ˈmiːm/; meem)[1] is “an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.”[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.[3]

I’m not really interested today in analyzing or assessing the Truth™ of that meme. I may not ever be. I don’t know that that’s my work anymore. And I sense that our Universe is too chaotic, and that there are too many unrecognized variables, for me, or us, to ever really Know™ how it’ll all turn out in the end. I just want to observe that this meme is out there, that, in the past year or three, the climate news has brought more and more people to the point where they are considering, and speaking about, the possibility of human extinction, and that this meme has seeped into my consciousness and is changing me. Part of me wishes to assert that this meme is nothing new to me at all, that I have long, and perhaps always, been open to this possibility. And there is truth in that. But of course another part of me knows that it’s one thing to consider the metaphor of the “fatal diagnosis” as a useful lens through which to view our present predicament, and another thing entirely to actually sit in the doctor’s office and hear the news. And it can take quite some time to let that news really sink in. Part of me wants to say that the news that “we’re all gonna die,” is hardly news, though it may feel like such to card-carrying members of an adolescent society convinced of their invincibility. But of course extinction is not the same thing as an individual death, and seems to require an entirely new conversation.

Which is the conversation I’ve been in most of my life, I think. And which feels risky to enter into now. Sally has long confronted me on my tendency to explore the “what’s so” at the expense of “what’s possible,” and she is right to do so, I think. Following Robert Fritz, in his book The Path of Least Resistance, it’s the “dynamic tension” that gets created when we hold a clear understanding of our present situation AND a clear vision of where we wish to go that provides the motive force for movement. Too much focus on the “present predicament” can keep one stuck or despairing. Too much focus on the “possible vision” can make one ungrounded. It’s the both, the paradox, the holding, the balance, that keeps us in tension. And, in tension, we have motivation to move toward resolution.

But, wow, it’s been so hard for me to find and hold onto vision and possibility in the face of peak oil, climate change, mass extinction, and population overshoot. Hard. Wow. I found the “what’s so” of our situation so overwhelming that I had to find a vision not outside or beyond or apart from my understanding of the reality of our collective situation on the material plane, but inside of that understanding.

Curiously, in this time of the ”extinction by mid-century meme,” I’m feeling more hopeful, more vision-filled, more engaged, more joyful, more powerful, than ever. I’ve long held that my habit of staring unblinkingly at the worst possible news of the world is a spiritual practice, as it strips away the bullshit and casts me into the NOW more than anything I know. If that’s the mechanism at work, then my practice has surely worked. But if I’ve got some new handle on vision and possibility, I’m only now beginning to figure out how to speak about it. And to tell the truth, speaking vision in the face of extinction feels pretty scary to me.

What is worth doing now? That’s the question that has bounced around in my head these past few months. I mean, really. If there’s truth to this meme, this analysis of climate change, if Charlie has stolen the handle, leaving no way to slow down, then what the fuck? As John Ludi said, “It’s understandable to be OK with the idea of the end of a largely rapacious global civilization…but the notion that we may be on the verge of creating conditions that could extinguish vast swathes of life on this planet itself is where you just can’t do much more than throw your hands up and make the best of whatever time you have left.” Right. And so what does it mean, to “make the best”? What is possible, even then? What matters now?

Must human extinction be considered a complete fail? Or is there another possibility?

Like I said, risky…

And I wonder this because, as an individual human sitting in that storied and metaphoried doctor’s office and hearing the fatal diagnosis, I know, or think I know, that it’s possible, even in that situation, to find a “win” before I die. It’s possible to decide, even then, to live the best life I can live. It’s possible to complete my mission here, to gain in maturity and wisdom, to love and be loved, to grow and evolve. It’s possible, as Khaled Hosseini wrote in The Kite Runner, that “there is a way to be good again.” It’s possible, I think, somehow, in a way that matters, to come home again. And if it’s possible for an individual, then I wonder what’s possible for a culture, a people, or a species.

I can’t go any further than this today, except to offer a number of things that have moved me over the years, as places where I intend to look for clarity and understanding and vision in the coming weeks and months.

The first thing that comes to mind is that Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth contains, if memory serves, a wonderful exploration of the meaning of human extinction in our time. He was exploring nuclear weapons and war, rather than climate change, but I think there’s something in there I need to read again, as I am not who I was when I first read it.

The next thing that comes to mind is Edward Abbey’s novel, The Fool’s Progress. This is the only Abbey I have ever read, and I remember it moved me deeply as a younger man. It’s about coming home before one dies. It’s about finding oneself in the face of the fatal diagnosis. And I remember it moved me to tears.

The movie Seeking a Friend For the End of the World comes to mind. It masquerades as a Steve Carell comedy, but I think it’s much more than that. I watched it twice in as many days, and it brought me to tears each time. There’s something there, the search for love and meaning even as the comet approaches, that speaks directly to our present time. Marvelous.

And then there’s this video about coming home, which some find brutal, and others find inspiring, and which brings me to tears of grief…

And there’s this video, also about finding one’s way home, which makes me weep not only with grief, but with some strange hope…

Sigur Rós - Ekki múkk from Sigur Rós Valtari Mystery Films on Vimeo.

Like Shirin in Daniel Quinn’s The Story of B, and like Sally, I’m a bricoleur. I weave things together from the pieces I find available around me, whether they be shards of tile, film clips, or ideas. These are the things I’ve found that move me, that speak to what remains possible even in the face of human extinction, that tell me, in some way only my tears seem to understand, that there is something that still matters. I don’t know how to put these pieces into some coherent whole. Or, if I do, I don’t yet know how to speak of it in a way that satisfies. For now, here are some pieces, sitting on my lab table, waiting to be contemplated and explored.

The day is sunny. Enough of this. I wish you all peace.

T