This weekend, I spent two days at the Malthouse Theatre talking about the climate crisis. It was part of an event called Tipping Point Australia, a series of three forums in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. As it says on the website, the forums are "for invited international and Australian artists, scientists and others to explore ways in which we can adapt to and mitigate functionally, culturally and socially the effects of climate change.” Melbourne was the first.
The nexus between artistic practice and social or political commitment represents a vexed and often anguished question. I've been wrestling with the questions around artistic practice and social conscience for years, always discovering different means of failure. In a lecture for the International Federation for the Teaching of English in 2003, I speculated on the politics of representation, and the refusal of commodification versus the entrapments of ideological utilitarianism; at other times, I've wondered how an expression of hope might be about clear-sightedness rather than self-delusion or denial. Again and again, I've concluded that art itself is an act, an awakening of larger and enabling possibilities that in turn generate forms of agency.
This is not a particularly comforting conclusion, since it suggests that art achieves nothing in itself. In the face of climate change, is art anything more than more hot air, more toxic emissions? Given the systemic nature of the environmental crisis, its mind-numbing scale and complexity, what can be done? Is it actually possible to combat the processes now in motion - the grinding self-perpetuating machine of corporate global capitalism - in order to make any difference to those disastrously multiplying predictors?
I went to Tipping Point with two major questions. One is purely personal: it haunts my practice, and recently has silenced my poetry. Is the only act that honestly remains for art, given the scale of the catastrophe we face, a lament? What use is that? I’ve been writing elegies for the natural world since I was ten years old: and if that is all I can do, then it’s difficult to see the point. The second is: given that it’s quite clear that we can’t trust even a democratic system to deliver a government that will resist the corporate drive towards destruction, are there other ways of taking action, of changing social habits and ideas and fears before the planet is irrevocably wrecked, to the point where it no longer supports mammals like us?
They are complex questions, and I came away with the beginnings of complex responses. I talked to systems designers who said effecting change is all about being able to see the levers. I talked to a man who, using the best scientific advice he could access, took two years to design a zero-emissions blueprint for Australian industry, and I talked about reclaiming public language. I heard about Julia's Bicycle, the British collective of scientists and artists who are working tirelessly - and are succeeding - in reducing the footprints of the arts industry: replacing plastic CD covers, for instance, with cardboard, which reduces emissions by a staggering 97 per cent, or mapping the environmental impacts of theatre and concerts in order to find out how to reduce them. I heard Tim Jarvis speak about the work he is doing to create change in corporate and government practices. I heard a lot about how adapting our behaviour to a waste-free, carbon-free future is an opportunity, and how that is much more than a slogan.
There's no way I can summarise every aspect of this weekend: it was fascinating, inspiring, absorbing, exciting and, most of all, encouraging. Perhaps typically, none of the bad news – the scientific evidence of irreversible and disastrous crisis, or the legislative or corporate failures and blindnesses – came as a surprise. What was surprising was the sense of hopefulness I encountered. It’s not uninformed hopefulness, it’s not blind optimism. There is no single solution to an environmental catastrophe like the one now unfolding before us: but that doesn’t mean that we can do nothing, or that we can make no difference.
When I came home, I found myself thinking about Vaclav Havel’s book Living In Truth, written when there was still a Soviet Union. In an essay called Politics and Conscience, he speaks about a childhood memory of seeing smokestacks pouring their filth into the sky on his way to school, and of how this image, even without any adult understanding, seemed to him expressive of a terrible wrongness.
"The chimney 'soiling the heavens' is not just a technologically corrigible flaw of design, or a tax paid for a better consumerist tomorrow, but a symbol of a civilisation that has renounced the absolute, which ignores the natural world and disdains its imperatives. So, too, the totalitarian systems [of the Soviet Union] warn of something far more serious than Western rationalism is willing to admit. They are, most of all, a convex mirror of the evitable consequences of rationalism, a grotesquely magnified image of its own deep tendencies....
"These regimes are the avant garde of a global crisis of this civilisation.... They are one of the possible futurological studies of the Western world, not in the sense that one day they will attack and conquer it, but in a far deeper sense - that they illustrate graphically to what the 'eschatology of the impersonal', as Bělohradský calls it, can lead. It is the total rule of a bloated, anonymously bureaucratic power, a power grounded in an omnipresent ideological fiction which can rationalise anything without ever having to brush against the truth."
“The truth”, says Havel, meaning a human truth. “We must not be ashamed that we are capable of love, friendship, solidarity, sympathy and tolerance, ” he says later. “Just the opposite: we must set these fundamental dimensions of our humanity free from their ‘private’ exile and accept them as the only genuine starting point of meaningful human community.”
There is always hope. If sometimes we feel that hope is delusory, it is not simply because the graphs tracking "business as usual" all point to doom. It is because hope implies agency, and agency is what is refused in so many aspects of contemporary life, and is lost in the splintering of our disenfranchised communities. Fear and grief can be paralysing: we shovel our anxiety into the back of our minds, so we don’t have to look at them. It's hardly surprising that our biggest health issue world wide is mental illness.
Which brings me to another thing that surprised me this weekend: the grief I feel for the natural world. When I came home, I remembered the first time I felt it: on a visit to England in the early '70s, when I was ten years old. There were some woods which, when we had lived nearby as even smaller children, we had often visited. We picked primroses in the spring or gathered pine-cones and chestnut cases in winter, to be painted silver and gold for our Christmas tree. But when we went back to see them, the woods were being chopped down. I remember watching the men in the tractors looping chains about the corpses of those beautiful trees, and dragging them away through the mud, and I remember that the sight was like a knife in my heart.
At around that time, I read a poem which was in a book that was on a shelf in the room where I was staying in my grandmother's house. It's irrevocably linked to that experience of loss, of grievously wrecked beauty. I never forgot its quick, painful music, although it must have been a decade before I read it again and gave it a name - Gerard Manley Hopkins's Binsey Poplars.
I guess that was a formative experience. Although environmental destruction has formed the dominant imagery in my poems for two decades now, although I am perfectly aware of how deeply worried I am by what we are doing to the planet, destroying entire eco-systems, species, environments, and with them entire constellations of cultural knowledge and language, I had pushed that grief to the back of my mind. My question about lament didn’t take into account that there is, in fact, little space for lamenting in our world.
Perhaps seeing that grief reflected in the eyes of others permitted me to know it as more than a background shadow to everything I do. And that is a liberating thing: background shadow manifests as paralysing depression, the helplessness we all feel as citizens. I remembered that there is a place for lament: and I also remembered that it is not the only thing that art can do. It is sometimes important to be reminded of things you already know. I am comforted by those thoughts, even as I'm daunted by what needs to be done and by the uncertainty that attends it.
My last book, Theatre, contains a poem called Beasts, which was first published in Pretext, the literary magazine that comes out of the University of East Anglia, in about 2005. For Tipping Point, we were asked to bring an object along that expressed our feeling about climate crisis, and I brought that poem. It is, of course, a lament, but I principally brought it with me because it says my sense of individual helplessness in the face of the systemic nature of the crisis. It's a poem which emerges from that "eschatology of the impersonal" which, as Havel presciently pointed out in the 1980s, is as powerfully expressed in the rationalism of western corporate economies as it was in Soviet ideology. It is the reality I experience and resist in that expression: but I want to write towards other possibilities, other actions.
I can begin to see a map. Many maps, made by many people, which imagine other kinds of futures than the destruction we're creating. In order to change anything, you have to be able to imagine a future first.
Beasts
The beasts are retreating. They are sliding
into the dusk, into the supple light of vanishing trees,
into the glue of dreams. All their strangeness
wavers behind wire, between the four sides of a screen,
odourless and deathless. The beasts stare out of
bleached pages, enclosed at last, and the zoos
are silent, except when parrots and keepers
conduct their weird orchestrations.
Panic flicks in those slotted eyes but the sadness
is only ours. Police hunt corpses in rubbish dumps,
a pregnant mother and child. Beneath the surface,
submarine cries burst the ears of whales.
Coral is leached to stone by the stripped sunlight
and houses crouch by the shore, awaiting the wave
prophets see in the distance. In forests
that glow at night, there are boars and wolves
whose futures mutate daily. There is much that is unknown
as always and even more that now will never
be understood. The cedar forests of Lebanon
are tinder dry and bears starve on the wet tundra.
In the depths of night there may be a phone call
we dare not answer or a cry in the street
which makes the hair rise on the back of our necks.
They will not come back, something is happening
at the edge of our eyes, behind the reflections,
and billboards shout in the silence, delivering words
that in a more innocent age we thought were ours.
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