“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
Imagine if humans had never come into being.
What then?
Or imagine if we’d not proliferated and traduced the world to the point of destruction.
What then?
But, as is our way, we don’t see it like that.
In any event, the gods have spoken and the endgame is unfolding before our very eyes.
Of course, the mainstream press, the political class and the majority of people (or at least those sold on the neo-liberal capitalist experiment) don’t see it that way.
It’s all business-as-usual, isn’t it?
If I stand back from this axe-swinging angst I can’t help feel that something has gone disastrously wrong. It’s a hackneyed expression but we’re like the cancer cell which has run amok or we’re incapable of living within a finite boundary of existence that would enable the earth to sustain us — perhaps not all 8 billion but enough of us to enable our species to exist for a few thousand years more and not to be wiped out very soon.
I don’t know about you but daily I weep; I don’t just mean at our demise but instead at the way we’ve shaped the world in our image, killing and maiming everything in our path. Examples include the factories, the roads, the cities, the annihilation of billions of species, the pollution of the seas, the excess CO2 and all those other things which we ascribe the label ‘man-made’. Weave into the plot the wars, the weapons, the inequality and starvation and there’s very little, if anything, remotely human(e). In fact, rather than being the Crown of Creation, it’s not too hyperbolic to say we’re evil, plain evil.
Some say I’m a misanthrope. Perhaps I am but I can’t be the only person to question how the hell it got like this? One minute this, the next minute that and before you know it we’ve all fallen under the dark spell of capitalism.
I know those people who live and breathe hope will say I’ve got it all wrong. There’s still time. I don’t agree, sadly. The time to act has come and gone. You only have to look at the way we’re addressing climate change to realise that’s it going to have to get a lot worse before we’ll wake from our somnambulist state but of course, many millions of people will already have died by the time we get to that point.
Perhaps we can say that we’re all to blame and we just have to accept our fate. That’s certainly how it seems but whatever your position, please don’t think this ‘normal’.
“Consider our word weird. This is the modern spelling of the Old English word wyrd, which first appears in a written account of the skaldic poem Beowulf, dating to somewhere between the sixth and tenth centuries of our era. It has not meant “strange” until fairly recently. It is typically translated by scholars as “fate.” This word’s Latin root is fatum, “a thing spoken by the Gods,” past participle of fari, “to speak.” Again we are brought to the crucible of speech. The thrust of the word is clear and powerful. Wyrd, or fate, is “the consequence of what is spoken by the Gods.” It does not mean “what is going to happen now, come what frigging may.” Nor does it mean that the fix is in, inevitable. It wonders what you will do, now that the Gods have spoken. It has a parallel in its linguistic cousin, Icelandic. There is geofa, and ogeofa, meaning “good and bad fortune.” A man’s luck is a supernatural being that guards him and may leave him, like the Greek daemon. This geofa has nothing to do with fate, if you take fate to mean a hostile plan, a beneficent plan, or any plan. The key to this notion is that the word gaefa is cognate with the verb gefa, “to give.” It refers to the good things given to you by nature, circumstances or pure chance. Hence gaefa is what you are or should be grateful for in life. You have not earned it, nor do you deserve it. Your gaefa is your blessings.” — Thorstein Gylfsson, in Njal’s Saga” — Stephen Jenkinson, Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (pp. 248-249), North Atlantic Books, Kindle Edition.
One last thing. For those of us with kids (me) or thinking of having them, just imagine the world in the year 2072. My youngest daughter will be 68 and my oldest 75. I know that the extreme weather that we’ve endured these past few weeks will be and become the norm and things like water shortages, pollution and the price of everything will make it very hard for them and many millions of other people to live anything like the same life as me and my parents’ generation.
And that haunts me every single day.
Blessings,
Julian
PS. Do let me know what you think about me sharing poetry on Substack. Should I continue to do it or try it somewhere else? I’m still not sure.