Something around the bend

Attention, apocalypse, adaptation, and regeneration

Happy Monday Folks,

A few weeks ago, I decided to definitively focus my thesis work in graduate school on studying narratives of apocalypse, disaster, and landscape with a particular focus on the Southern Gothic lens. It felt like a major shift from the work I initially came into graduate school to do, much of which was focused on what we do with Good Folk: engaging arts communities and public folklore work, bringing together people across discipline and genre to activate arts spaces in rural areas. Then this project grew all on its own and I realized that of course, no matter what, I would still do this. But perhaps my particular research interest was not this— that there was something else I wanted to immerse myself enough in to be considered an “expert” in the field. And then, without even really thinking about it, I fell into a new thing entirely.

Have you ever had a moment where you feel you come back into your body and it is as if you are living a different life entirely? When I was in my most depressive state, I would often dissociate this way and come back into sensation in the most brutal ways, seeking out antidotes to feelings of numbness that really only left me more hurt. But I also believe there is space for joy in this sentiment— in coming back to your body and realizing that you have never been so happy, you have never been so fulfilled, you have never felt so whole. This has been my state of mind these days. The life I live now is a life that felt unimaginable even just three months ago. It is exactly the kind of life I would have once longed for and laid plans for— trying desperately to seek it out at all costs.

Here is what happened: not long ago I became so busy I no longer had time to think about the plan. Without it, I began to focus instead on the everyday, on exactly what was before me. And then everything fell open, bursting apart and blooming open. (I do also want to recognize here that busyness can be a coping mechanism, and trust me when I say it is one I used for years; busyness as avoidance is a real thing, and I in no way endorse that. But I do believe that immersion— in whatever it is you love— can also be used as a way out of overthinking. There is a small but meaningful difference between paying attention and living in the moment and using distraction as a way out.)

A few weeks ago, I found myself driving home right as the sun set. I had the windows down, and the air was cool and crisp, and exactly the right song was playing, and I knew that I had never been this happy in my life, as if the world had suddenly slotted into place. I’ve been holding on to that feeling since, letting it ripple out in a myriad of small ways: the smell of the woods after it rains, letting myself take my time when cooking a meal, staring out at a table full of people you love. Paying attention does not need to be so complicated.

Anyone who has spent time working off-grid, in the woods, or with any kind of physical labor knows that time takes on another quality when you are removed from the confines of the “real world.” Out there, in this other liminal space, it feels easy to find these small moments of joy. They are all around you. There’s a reason the Romantic poets exist, and there’s a reason so many people go to the woods to “find themselves.” There’s a constant, persistent narrative that society is bad, a distracting thing, and that in order to learn how to pay attention you must unshackle yourself from the structures of everyday life, and with that, all the seemingly-false constructions that come with it: the office, the subway, the factory, the computer. All products of industrial society, standing in direct counter to what many of us might consider “true” and “authentic.” And when we think of paying attention, it is so often only that feeling of authenticity we are seeking.

I understand this story, and I’ve lived this feeling. I also know how temporal it is. When we let our minds live in this binary— that urban industrial society is bad and commercialized and that off-grid, natural landscape is, in contrast, untouched and pure— we set up an impossible story. We force ourselves into misery, and in turn, we also build out hundreds of different stereotypes and associations with rural places. They become a space of freedom as much as a space of the unknown, holding both reconnection and displacement in their wake— of course these spaces are not uninhabited the way we imagine them to be, open for us to explore ourselves within. What an anthropomorphic and colonialist view that is. We are not separate from landscape, but very much a part of it, and what we do— whether in the city or the country— has real effects.

I could tell you here all about the romanticization of the countryside as a space of freedom at the turn of the century in England, and how false that view is when you consider so many of these country estates still existed under feudal systems, but the point I really wish to make is more about business. We often view the countryside— and by extension, rural spaces— as our way out of busyness. Life moves slower there, we believe. Rural spaces offer us a different way of being, and it’s an appealing one; there’s a reason we see such a rise in homesteading these days. We all want to escape the drudgery; we all love the idea of having the time and space to pay attention.

But, of course, anyone who has actually run a farm or worked in a garden or gone thru-hiking or attempted to live off-grid in any way knows, this is hard work. The list of tasks does not end, only shifts to take a different form. Survival, as it turns out, is not an easy thing.

Like everyone else in the world, I’ve been watching The Last of Us, which does a great job at demonstrating the difficultly in simply keeping oneself alive. But I’ve been obsessed with the end of the world for a long time. Theorists have stated that apocalyptic thinking is our most defining feature of postmodernity, but I think we’ve all been obsessed with the end times since the moment we got here. Nowadays we see apocalypse play out in disaster films, narratives of pandemic and economic disaster, stories of great waves and floods, hurricanes and zombie invasions— but historically, this has always played out through stories of religious revelation, plague and warfare, angry gods and cities sinking into the sea. We have always wondered what total collapse might look like, at least in the imaginary.

Many might say it’s a form of preparation, but there’s a part of me that thinks, at least for myself, that I was obsessed with the idea of the end of the world because I thought it might be somehow easier to exist on the other side. That I would rather fight for my survival than sit at a desk job. That at the end of the world, there was a possibility for newfound community, a hope for regeneration. I wanted the time and space to pay attention. I wanted to see the system burn, and then I wanted to be a part of whatever was rebuilt in its place. (Can you tell I was a teenager during the 2014 YA dystopia boom?)

Then, well, the world fell apart. We entered a global pandemic. People got sick and they died. Widespread protests broke out across the country. Cities shuttered and went empty. Economies fell to ruin, schools closed, travel ceased. It was everything I had been reading about and nothing like it at all. Most of us worked right through it. Most of us, instead of finding time and space to pay attention, simply learned how to adapt.

In popular apocalypse fiction, we see the world regenerate once humans are no longer there to ruin it. The natural world, which we have long seen as separate from the industrial city, encroaches and reclaims: flowers push through sidewalks, vines grow around collapsed buildings, meadows take over parking lots. In The Last of Us, giraffes even take over a former ballpark. It follows the common narrative we often saw by environmental movements in the years since the pandemic first began: that we are the virus, its effect a cause of our affect on the world.

Where in this do we hold space for adaptation? I have come to believe that the “end of the world” is not some major, unmissable event but a series of everyday disasters that we are watching play out in real time. As a consequence, we have learned, like all objects of nature, how to adapt. And as a consequence of that adaptation, many of us have stopped paying attention.

These carnivalesque, spectacular stories we see play out in Hollywood films are already happening in this country, and especially in the American South, which faces the greatest threat of climate change of any region in the country. For many here, this is not apocalyptic thinking, but already a lived reality. And when you are facing disaster after disaster, apocalypse after apocalypse, how are you supposed to pay attention? Why would we want to pay attention when paying attention only hurts?

In Emily St. John Mandel’s excellent pandemic novel, which was also adapted into an excellent television show, her character Jeevan reflects on the world and all the unnoticed pieces of it— all the pieces we don’t pay attention to. As she writes:

“Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines. Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out.”

Yes. The world is an incredibly human thing. And we are not separate from it; we are as much a part of nature as anything else, which means this infrastructure too is natural. Like everything in nature, we build and adapt in good and bad ways. I like to think, with that, we can also regenerate. But it starts with learning how to pay attention— and not only in an idealized, separate landscape, but to everything all around us. It’s about entering into sublimity in the everyday: about learning to find both the beauty and the horror of the world around us— and to allow it to be both.

We do not know what comes next around the bend. Three years ago, I had no idea what the world would become. Three weeks ago, I had no idea who I would become. Neither of those things is inherently good or bad. Nothing that exists is.

PROMPT OF THE WEEK

Write about an ending. Was it clean? Was it beautiful? Where were you within it?

FIVE THINGS THIS WEEK

1. This song played the entire time I was writing this.

2. I’ve enjoyed, even when I’ve disagreed with it, Elle Griffin’s newsletters on utopia recently. There’s some interesting points there, and I think definitely worth reading.

3. Gotta plug Ocean Vuong’s poem “Wood Working at the End of the World” again here. Remember the tree.

4. Right along these lines, I am very excited to get my hands on the new Mergoat Mag.

5. I got to the episode in The Last of Us, heard Pearl Jam, and immediately had to pause and take a breath. What a song. What a show. And what a time to be alive.

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