The Daily: 17 October 2023

There is still no frost. In all the horrible news of the last ten days or so, this is what is troubling me right now.

It is not that I am unaffected by the lurid headlines. I am sickened and disgusted and enraged and so very tired of idiots with large guns and larger egos making hell of our lives. I am worried and physically pained from the grief. We have produced too many images of small children running from one horror into the waiting maw of another. Never to safety. Never allowed to stay in place, growing to a boring adulthood in homes filled with love and warmth. So many pictures of wrecked lives. So few of ordinary comforts. We are seemingly permanently entangled in the machinations of soulless men, who kill for pleasure and profit — on all sides, there being no black or white, no right nor wrong. And none of our protesting matters. Nothing changes these monstrous men. They can’t be changed. They’re too stupid to understand that they are killing themselves and too callous to care about everything else they’ve destroyed.

So there is nothing I can do about it. Nothing you can do about it either. I don’t doubt all of us together could do… nothing. These men are embodied inhuman want, so nothing that we do short of killing them is going to change their course. However, there are other forces at work. Things that are older and far more powerful than humanity. And these things are creating change. Not for the better. But there is a chance that the small and powerless will finally be able to stop running, that societal collapse will bring relief to the hunted. Because the hunters will be preoccupied with the loss of their guns and the toppling of their hierarchies.

Human aggressions will undoubtedly bring down power structures, maybe a few overly stratified and unequal societies. But what will ultimately bring down humanity, what is bringing down humanity is not human. Or not only humans. Humans set many terrible processes in motion through their sheer idiocy, but humans didn’t cause any of this. Not in the sense of being able to control it or direct it or stop it. We make messes and then the world cleans them up.

The cleaning tools are not us. What brings down an over-reaching species is not grand displays of aggression. It is the little things. The daily disasters whittling away at foundations. It’s not the guns and bombs. It’s not demagogues. The tools that nature uses to restore balance are small and indomitable and for the most part escape the notice of humans focused on bigness and domination.

No, the truly concerning things are not those dominating humans nor any of their technologies. It’s mold and rodents and dry wells. It’s steady, monotonous rain that saturates the soil and drowns the harvest. It’s also colossal storms and earthquakes and raging fires. But these are brief causes. The deaths last long afterwards and are only indirectly related to the things we name our enemies. The waves kill hundreds. The changed world after the waves kill whole societies in thousands of ways, none of them large or imposing, none of them grand or impressive, nearly all quotidian and small deaths. Deaths of the unsheltered. Of the sick and weakened. Of the despairing and hopeless. Death by insect predation and spreading disease. Death by hunger and cold and heat. Death by thirst in the midst of the floodwaters.

Death from exhaustion.

We are already living in a changed world. We can no more put it back the way it was than we can do anything to adapt our bodies to these changes. Having caused the mess, humans are now passive participants in its remediation.

We call this collapse, but we have strange ideas about its process. There are all these stories of societies that vanished after a run-in with the cleaning crew of natural limits. What is missing from the narrative is that most of these societies still exist. There may not be elites and grand public works, but there are people living quite contentedly, often with little change wrought upon their lives by their rumored eradication. I suspect a great many of them live better than their ancestors did when their society was flourishing. Less need of building pyramids and temples, more of the year’s harvest going into their own bellies. The elites are annihilated, but the small and powerless abide. They flourish. Children never learn to run in fear. Most people never know anything but quiet lives of unremarkable fulfillment. And a few fireside tales of caution that dwindle to improbability over time.

Now, the unnerving thing that even collapsniks miss is that we have not done this before. There hasn’t been a worldwide human collapse. There have been disasters and plagues, but in the past these have largely been localized and affected urbanites far more than the rural producers in any given society. The exception to this rule is the devastation that colonizers brought to the peoples they colonized. But while we talk about guns and credos giving advantage, the main cause of death was not human. It was messes humans made inadvertently. Just like today. But not quite… because today we are everywhere and there is no escape from our messes. And we make them so fast and spread them so efficiently that there is no adaptation.

And we still don’t know that we aren’t the key to adaptation.

We are not the key to anything, and we are being reminded of this fact of life in no uncertain terms. While we make war over the dwindling reserves of the tools we use to maintain our power structures, the foundation upon which our whole society rests is eroding. The soil that produces our food. The water that makes up our cells. The air that fills our lungs and enlivens our blood. The web of life that makes our lives possible. All the prerequisites to human being are being destroyed. The good thing in all this is that the world is not standing aside to let humans wipe out everything. The world is adapting, using time-honored techniques to reestablish ecological balance. It is painful. For every body. But this adaptation means there is an end to human aggression. And it is almost in sight now.

I don’t think modern culture has much time left. There are models that talk of what the world will look like if humans continue their present course for twenty, fifty, a hundred years. I don’t think the world will allow another full decade. There is too much brokenness. There is too much used up and gone. There is too much change. As far as I can see, elites are already toast. This latest horror of egos and guns is the last volley of a dying species. These are the death throes of modernism.

I am reading Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. It is an inspiring read except for one crucial thing. Modernity doesn’t have the time left for hospice care. Nor does it want that care. Nor do I think it deserves that level of attention from me, never mind all those who have taken naught but harm from it. It deserves to die unloved and unwept. And if there is hospice work, it should be for the damaged children of modernity that we can’t save. Because there will be good things lost and we should make that loss as easy on ourselves and our cultures as we can.

And while we are picking through the rubble of a dying culture, we need to remember that we are alive. We are here and here we will likely remain. Not in these numbers. Not walking these aggressive and dominating paths. But humans are part of the world and will survive with the world. And if there are to be children, then we need to be preparing a sheltering home for them.

And this is why I am concerned about the lack of frost. This is an actual concern. A sliver of the real world. Something that affects me directly and that will affect my children. No frost in the middle of October in the middle of Vermont is a significant deviation from the past, one that has many repercussions, both beneficial and harmful, to me and to others. The continuation of warmth means that there is more time for growth and for gathering in the harvest. I have been able to harvest more tomatoes in this time that is normally long past the gardening season than I have all summer. This is good. But it means that I have to keep gardening when my body needs to rest, when there is very little daylight for work, and when I am frankly uninterested in tomatoes. This is not so good. Then, there are the prolonged hoards of microbes and insects and rodents. Those small beings might think that a delay to winter cold is great. Most of the rest of us — from humans to the garden to this house to the woods on the hills — are exhausted. We need relief from this constant struggle to stay fed and sheltered and free from disease despite the onslaught of millions of these tiny mouths.

I am trying to build a refuge from the calamity of elite collapse. But things like a very late frost show that I don’t know what constitutes this refugium. This is concerning. And it is concerning in the midst of the ongoing concerns of digging potatoes, roasting winter squash and turning all the late tomatoes into a harvest I can keep through the winter — which will come even if it is delayed. I have many concerns right now. Most small lives do. Most small lives are nothing but ongoing concerns, none of which matter much beyond those small bounds, but all of which make up the sum total of living.

This is also good to remember. What the egos and guns do is not part of life. It is not necessary. It will not last. It will fall apart. No. It will be taken apart by a world of life that will not tolerate such things in its midst. What is concerning to me, however, will remain. That is necessary. That is supported and nurtured by the world of living. What is small and unimportant in this culture will be its heir. The children will survive and will be concerned with tomatoes and potatoes and frost… and stories… but nothing of modernity will persist to darken their eyes with fear.

For this too shall fail… and that is good.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023