Stuart Cooke

Jul 21

Breaking Up

non-fiction

“Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder.”[1]

“It was in exactly the period in which human activity was changing the earth’s atmosphere that the literary imagination became radically centered on the human.”[2]

Rome

It is early March, 2020. All of reality is burnt at the edges, has yellow-browned with wear.

I am walking alone through the streets of Rome. I am hidden with a hat, sunglasses, and earphones; my thoughts are tied into little balls of rhyme. John Farnham and INXS cluster on my playlist. I am walking past Largo di Torre Argentina, the place of Caesar’s assassination, but I am thinking of Australia in the mid-80s, the Australia of my childhood, before everything went wrong.

I am in a car, it’s my dad’s car. I am so small that I can’t see out the window. We have stopped somewhere. Dad has turned to me and given me this gift, this Whispering Jack; I accept it just like I accept everything he gives me, with complete reverence. This bold, young country with so much to win, with so many songs on the charts of the world, look at what we can do.

Now I am in the rear seat of another car, we are driving along the edge of a holiday, we are on Australia’s green lip, it’s Les Murray’s season of the Long Narrow City, we’re crossing the Myall, entering the North Coast, that big stunning snake.[3] My mum is smiling with the window down, my dad is saying we can stop at McDonald’s for lunch. It is good to come out after driving and walk on bare grass; / walking out, looking all around, relearning that country…

But I’m back on the streets of Rome or hovering over them with my floating mind. I am overwhelmed with how this synth and those bagpipes can fill me with the past, and with the grief that rises in its absence. Then wake up to a brand new day / To find your dreams are washed away…[4]

A week ago, on the day the first stage of the lockdown began, I arrived for my class at the language school and no one was there but my teacher. All schools and universities had closed down, he told me, and all classes would move online.

Walking back to the tram stop, Rome was breathing peacefully in the bright morning light. Things weren’t too bad: I could sleep in a little, log in to class on my couch in my pajamas, and afterward I could head out to wander through the stories of this glittering city.

At lunch I was the only one in the restaurant; no one stared at me but the waiter.

A week later, I have been severed from most of space. Restaurants and museums have closed, gyms have closed, businesses have shut down.

And the city is stripped of its tourists. Rome is forced to stop, to hear the wind blowing through its old heart, those cold, empty crypts and cathedrals.

Hidden deep in the news feed, snow is melting into rain across Antarctica, the driest continent on Earth.

Ruins

I am in Rome for a six-month fellowship. I’ve planned to write a new collection of poems, but I can’t get it out of my head that what is happening here should be a novel. Like something Ben Lerner would do, Leaving the Atocha Station in Italy instead of Spain. But I can’t do what Ben Lerner would do, I tell myself, because then it would be dismissed as something that Ben Lerner would do. This makes me worry about over-determining my work in terms of comparisons with other writers, as if starting out this way can only ever lead to failure, because no matter what you write it will never be satisfactorily equivalent. And if I was really going to do Ben Lerner then it would only work if I was more Ben Lerner than Ben Lerner, if Lerner himself would read it and be so impressed that he would write to me and say, Thank you for showing me what my style is capable of. But that could never happen, not because Lerner would be too insecure to afford such praise, but because I could never write like that, because there is too much of me that I could never let go, it weights my work down, it weighs me down, I can barely lift my head.

When he twists and weaves along a crowded street he looks at no one, says nothing. He protects his self by burying it so deeply that even I can’t find it.

But the crowds have vanished behind Rome’s closed doors. So that now, when he walks down the street, he is forced to remember what it was that he was hiding. Hopefully, the ruins will distract him, as he descends upon them.

Here they come descending, the last tourists scattered through this humbled city, they are quietly delighted, like vultures chancing upon a dying beast.

As he wanders through the Roman Forum, desperately trying to stare it back to life.

I rest inside the Basilica di Santa Francesca Romana and try to take it all in. What has happened? What am I looking at? How does time emerge from matter? A landscape of broken images, a succession of crumbling forts and basilicas and colosseums, and more forts…

But the images are alive, their abstract forms are wrestled into the elemental; form as erosion, decay. Slowly, it reveals itself to me. Their sharp edges rounded and softened by sun and wind, the buildings are melting, drooping, their stark geometries are sagging with gravity. Imperceptibly, monuments of human form are becoming earth form, natural form; cracks are appearing in walls and floors and breaking wider, so that light spills into small dark alcoves, and trees and weeds burst out into sunlight, filling what were once bedrooms and kitchens with profusions of green webs.

He circles the Colosseum as if he were its tiny moon. It was closed off days ago, but he can still catch sight of the interior through the archways. He complements these glimpses with patches of memories: from Gladiator, then a Bruce Lee movie, where the genius fights Chuck Norris under an arch.

Outside on the grass, someone eating a hotdog stamps desperately at a pigeon, visibly unsettled by the possibility that the bird might come closer. Could it be that simple, I wonder, that we have become most afraid of what is most familiar, that we have made it Other?

As temperate weather blankets the horn of West Antarctica, as we sail into an oblivion where ice islands big as cities obscure the horizon’s thin dream: a rapid decay, a thermal rot; ice fabrics, long-wave flexures, ghostly sutures or relic fabrics; infinitesimal cracks in the fabric propagate.

As a great white continent starts to thaw and break apart.

These ruins insist on their failure. Against gravity, they yearn for the sky, but they are increasingly unable to fulfill their function: emaciated by time into ribs of aggregate and rock; flecked, pocked, slumping, they provide testament to nothing but our frailty, our stubbornness, to how power and cognition, that most destructive mixture, can accrete occasionally in glory.

In the completion provided by afternoon light, they can only stare back blankly, while those myriad materials trapped inside the bricks and blocks, the lime mortar, the pozzolana and stones, they ask you: What do you want of us, now that you’ve extracted us from the dark? But whatever brought them to the surface has become unspeakable loam in the base of my imagination.

Anyway, the earth slowly gathers, rises, creeps up, crawls over, spills over, subsumes.

What comes from nothing ends in nothing; to think of the end is to think of beginnings, pure zeros, beautiful simplicities. The simplicity of Antarctica is stupefying.[5] Contrast, comparison, and metaphor dissolve before the pure immensity of the ice monolith. Art stumbles in from the north and finds itself without information; senses are stripped; perception vanishes into a white nirvana. I try to approximate its frozen invariance; nature as modernist.

But the iceberg escapes this condition. Spinning in a slow gyre, tabular bergs and glacier bergs jostle with bergy bits and growlers, brash ice, and blue ice. Broken out of the ice field, the berg grows motions, properties, structures, offers brilliant contrast: ice with sky, with sea, with earth. There is even sound: bird call, wave slap, and whitecaps, air bubbles hiss from glacial ice.

In breaking away, the berg breaks, at last, the enormous silence of the ice.

If you stop telling yourself to be awestruck, even just for a moment, if you stop and look all the way down the Via dei Fori Imperiali, if you look from the Foro di Traiano down to the Colosseum, you can almost jettison the baggage that you’ve brought to this place, all that flotsam you’ve hauled all the way from school, from books, from what your parents gave you, what their parents gave to them. In its near-complete emptiness, the entire, rolling topography could be a nondescript park in any regional city. A few small groups chat on the grass, couples walk through shadows of columns and chiese, birds chirp from rooftops or while hiding in skinny trees.

As I sit and write notes, a lone woman stops in the middle of an empty Piazza del Arco di Costantino. She looks around; seeing no bench or raised surface nearby, she carefully places her bag and jacket at her feet. She has sunglasses on and is quite far away, but I know she has noticed me. For a moment I think about going over to help her, but then I wonder if I should—if something might not be transferred between us, and then what will happen? Then what? What?

Leaning back, with her phone held at arm’s length, she takes a photo of herself with the Colosseum in the background. Then she picks up her things and walks away in the direction from whence she came. Moments later a police car drives past to clear everyone from the area.

Walking on, suddenly you’re filled with thoughts of someone you know on the other side of the world, suddenly you’re wanting her again, needing her, it fills you in a rush. But you cannot have her anymore, it’s likely you won’t see her ever again, she may as well be on Mars. Someone must become no one, there is no one anymore, all along the streets, no one, across the stars, you cannot have anyone, you must be alone.

From my mind leaks a new mechanics: what I have always feared begins to manifest as what must be.

Then you are walking up the polished cobblestones of a vast, open boulevard. The tock tock of your feet cracks through space.

There’s so much time, what’s a little more time?

The ruins are all well below the level of the road. They peek out, as if to beckon me over. But when I cross, look down, they reveal little more than the bases of columns, strewn blocks, rectangular foundations.

Now, in this drowning instant, the image these ruins hitherto suggested, the scene they could only sketch, is fully realized: a city deserted, an empire leaning into ruin. Each remnant villa and temple could be a chunk broken off a berg. All around me, so many ice islands and bergy bits, their jagged angles rounded by the ocean winds, their tall hulls gorged out in collisions. They are all melting with imperceptible slowness but with a consistent, stubborn velocity, melting on continental scales, such staggering quantities of melting, it cannot be stopped.

10.

Beyond the strewn details of the foreground, all you see, on the high path leading up from Via Sacra, is an endless, flat line punctured occasionally by church domes and squat apartment blocks; a surface awash in sky’s milky light. Otherwise, everything human is compressed beneath tree level.

In this moment you experience the world as if it were finite as a painting on a wall. What you see is nothing but wood, flesh, vegetable matter—all those fibreoptic cables and satellites, all they are for is to connect such matter. But when it’s all stripped away, when our artifice is pulverized by the sun and blown into the sea, the only remains of our lives will be in crude stone quadratics, some twisted metal, and then, on a level we can’t comprehend and flowing like subterranean lava beneath this dreamworld of stasis and discrete object: endless clouds of coagulant, of plastics and effluent, of exiled carbon, of stubborn lead, mercury and chromium, of millions of tonnes of enriched uranium—watch it mutating wildly into plutonium and americium, vomiting gamma and then finally igniting as the coolant expires and the reactors seize, at last, our most horrid gift, the injection of our vilest physics into airstreams, oceans, into the depths of geological time, our greatest legacy washing up as sludge to darken the sands of even the whitest beaches.[6] This, our most lasting poetics.

11.

At the end of this long strip of circus: some ruins rise above the trees; a crumbling wall. Closer to hand, corvids pick amongst the gravel.

12.

Beyond the convergence, disintegration is inevitable. Slowly spinning its final rotations, a patch of green flashes like a semaphore; the berg blinks like a dying pulsar, then disappears: reshaped to unearthly minima, drawn back to the spiraling ice nebula.

Concentrate

Blending the story and the poem: the fragment?

As crisis blossoms across northern Italy, as the diagnoses unfold like myriad, sickly petals around those fetid stamens of the damned…

The day after his visit to the Colosseum, the whole country goes into complete lockdown. All commerce, its glistening, transnational hive, has collapsed into scattered supermarkets. People are fined for going to parks. They wait in elongated queues out front of supermarkets, staring silently at each other with new, masked faces.

Will you come home, ask friends and family. But there is nothing about this that is unfamiliar to him—as Rome is sucked indoors, as people languish in front of screens or sing to each other from their balconies, as all sociality is steadily stretched into thin nothingness across space. His social phobia, the burrow in which he hides, has become a powerful, adaptive behavior. The introvert blooms in his element.

I video chat with a friend in London. He is one of the most extroverted extroverts I know. Only into his second week in lockdown, he has spoken to no one but his wife for days. I’m already struggling, he says, and I’m not even alone! He lies back on the couch, relaxing a little in the gaze of someone else.

Social entanglement has been reduced to a series of discrete, manageable parcels, to messages, emails, and video calls. All of it is safely contained by screens, which can be paused or put away when things get too much.

The introvert blooms in his element.

What was comfortable for him, but what no one hopes for their children, has now become appropriate, even exemplary. Suddenly his life is the result of reasonable, healthy decisions. He is watching Netflix alone because of his strong, social conscience. He spends the weekend reading on the terrazzo because he cares primarily about his community. He’s a good man, a fully-formed human, look at his life, look at its important context!

Still, he notices that it becomes harder to concentrate on other things in between the tightly-parceled interactions. He can’t write, and it takes him much longer to read a short paragraph, after which he will probably have to read it again. It’s like he’s trying to think in the middle of a big, noisy crowd. Rather than taking place elsewhere—in cafes, in bars, in other people’s homes—the conversations he’s having on the phone and online are all happening right there, around him, as if everyone were in his apartment and talking to him all at once, so that he feels a heightened sense of their presence and, with it, a heightened sense of exposure to their thoughts and opinions.

But, knowing that they are not there in front of him, knowing that his friends and family are spread around the globe, he starts to feel his mind stretch outwards, beyond his body, beyond his apartment, out across Rome and around the entire world. So that his personal space is all but fully submerged in this immutable techno web. He no longer feels alone, but he has lost all contact with any kind of fleshy socius, too. He is stretched out to airy thinness (he drags the quote from its context), he is nowhere.

It isn’t that you’re happy living with a heightened possibility of death, but rather that it’s a relief to be able to share the feeling with others at last. It’s familiar as a limb, that looming, crippling fear of what the future could bring. You still hope, you look forward to things, but usually this optimism comes because you’ve forgotten that you will always be in this body, with this head, that no matter what you do, where you go, your worry will cloud the future like blood billowing from a wound in water.

To live with an anxiety disorder is to live with Wolverine’s fist clenched in your stomach: throughout the day, who knows when, it can happen anytime, with any stimuli, those adamantine claws will shoot out and rake across the lining of your gut. Only at night is there any relief, when the world starts to slow, when whatever mistakes you could make are deferred until the next day; for now, all you need to do is cook and eat and sleep.

The following morning I walk out onto my terrazzo and I see it blurry and vague around me. But gradually, as I notice a lone man walking along the street below, as I watch a mother and her son on a balcony over the road, it all starts to align into crystalline focus. The world of my mind—that savage, unpredictable reality in which any pleasure should be guarded and savored greedily because at any moment things might be torn apart and the earth will open and then I will fall into its bubbling magma—is leaking from my head: slowly, as it is saturated in them, the world is binding to my fears. Soon, I think, my mind's acid will contaminate the entire planet. Everyone will retreat to keep what is precious protected, they will be filled with the same dread of what might come.

I am afraid because the world is a dangerous place. As much as I order and repress, I remain flimsy, open, exposed. I watch as this caustic fear soaks into all the apartments of the buildings around me, as polymers of control, of our dominion over reality, slapped like so many coats of paint on walls and furniture, are broken down by its lye.

Polis

His sociality was already tenuous enough. But now, after weeks without human touch, it feels like his isolation has become a protective shell. If I were to meet someone, if they were to talk, wouldn’t I be overwhelmed by the onslaught of their gestures, their mood, their history? How could he stand up, let alone face them, let alone take their weight in his arms?

Contrary to what you might have imagined, your anxiety hasn’t diminished because everyone now shares it; instead, it has multiplied into ubiquity. Your gut still tremors throughout the day, but the fear it signals has a more consistent clarity: you worry, but less about whether or not you should worry. So, what used to be fragmented fears about your self, its failures and incapacities, have hardened into worries about the world, about the impossibility of any kind of future. My feelings about my body have mutated into feelings about my planet.

Perhaps you feel less lonely, gathered with the rest of the city in this anxious church. Perhaps, in your lighter moments, you even feel like a seer. But for too long now you’ve known that ‘happiness’ and ‘hope’ are never more than fractured hunks of ice, continental remnants reduced to bergy bits, brash ice, and ice rinds, the odd ice cake or stalactite, melting pockets of cool in a factory of friction. You will pass some that are close enough to touch; some, if you approach carefully, can be landed—but many of these are balancing so precariously that, if you walk across them, they will suddenly lurch and flip over, taking you down. Even if you stay in your boat and drift by slowly, even if you slow to touch them, letting the tips of your fingers go numb on their slick hides, they are already floating away, soon they are lost in the fog and the blood has returned to your fingers.

Then, the black, impervious sea, thick as molten glass…

What you did wrong in the past, the people you hurt, the way you turned from your mother, dismissed your father, the way you ran from women who loved you, let their hearts bleed out on pavements… No, you can’t grow beyond that, it feeds your fear and grounds your being. You can’t ever let that go.

Every day, family and friends keep writing to ask if and when I’m coming home, but I feign more surprise. Why would I want to leave? I scoff.

In moments between screens, I tell myself that I’m staying here because I want—no, because I need—to write—to write this—that it’s my job as a writer to stay here. It sounds reasonable, logical, weighty with gravitas. I have to live life on the front lines. I could be a foreign correspondent, maybe 7.30 will contact me… Tonight on the program we talk to an Australian poet trapped in Rome.

From a poem you wrote years ago:

I like to think that my being here’s but momentary
on the longer trajectory of a life.

I like to think, then, that something’s
taking care of me, and ensuring

that it will all turn out okay in the end…

I have a deep, faith-like sense that my life is determined by two opposing kinds of luck:

1) I’m being protected or looked after by something or someone (e.g. I’ve survived acute myeloid leukemia [and early-90s chemotherapy], hepatitis, malaria, two bouts of pneumonia, deadly snake bites, and escaped largely unscathed from a rich melange of other, similarly life-threatening situations).

2) If bad things can happen then they will happen to me (eg. I’ve had acute myeloid leukemia [and early-90s chemotherapy], hepatitis, malaria, two bouts of pneumonia, deadly snake bites, and have found myself in a rich melange of other, similarly life-threatening situations).

I keep wondering which of these two will come into play here. As the plague spreads further across Europe, increasingly I feel like it will be the second. I can already see it unfolding in my mind’s eye and, with it, the sense that I should just resign myself to it. It’s too familiar for déjà vu; it’s like you are anchored to a deeper, more pervasive reality—right there, a meter or so under the surface of things, a rocky floor of hard and immovable facts. No matter where you go, it will always be beneath you. So I initiate a procedure with which I’m too familiar: I resign myself to disaster, I jettison all remaining hope.

When he thinks of what would happen if he gets sick, if he gets the virus, he leaps straight to the worst possible outcome. He is alone in a Roman hospital—probably the hospital he has walked past, a few blocks from here—with a room that looks out over the cold, blue city. There is no way he can get home. He is too weak to call everyone he cares about, so he posts news of his imminent death on Facebook. He goes over and over the wording in his head. It becomes a mantra, it calms him down: Dear friends and loved ones, I’m sorry to have to write this here, but I’m not able to contact each of you individually. Unfortunately, I’ve contracted corona, and my case is a bad one. I’m not going to make it home…

But as he enters the supermarket it’s like stepping into a shower of positivity: the bright lights, the colors, and then so many humans buying food. Because Romans are living their lives, and they intend to keep on living them! Suddenly he’s fine, it’s fine, we’re all here, we’re all OK, why would he want to go anywhere else?

But whatever shared feelings or preoccupations might bind me to this city, they are flimsy and fleeting as the moods they generate. In Rome I can hardly talk; my Italian is sufficient only for telling the man at the supermarket checkout that I can’t understand what he’s saying. I cannot read the newspapers; I cannot understand the radio or TV. Everything comes from my laptop, from my phone: all my music and movies and news are funneled into personalized streams from a world of Anglophone references. With Rome, then, I don’t even share a virtual polis. I consume, I consume, I enjoy only what I want, which comes only from what I know; when I turn it off and go to bed, the rest of the world is night.

Generations

Does he dare to venture out and take this generation into his I? Based on what community, what faint memory?

At the source of a great series of vortices: a profound stillness, a cold that halts all motion, pushes absolute zero. The extreme cold of the source slows movement to a vanishing point.

Rather than any confected sense of myself as a Writer or of what a Writer is or should do, maybe I stay here because I just can’t bear to let this opportunity go—

because I deserve it—

because it’s mine—

because I know nothing other than limitless horizons, limitless opportunities.

So that I have a late-twentieth-century mind, which is at odds with what’s needed for twenty-first-century living; I want unlimited freedom—the pursuit of whatever I want, however I want it, with dangling etceteras all the way to the moon—but I’m being confronted with unprecedented limitation and restraint.

You are but one of an entire generation, which is actually composed of multiple generations. You are part of a conglomerate of first-world, multi-national, multi-generational cosmopolitans. An imperial generation, perhaps, the first to properly span the earth. Like the rest of this great, largely mono-lingual extension, you’ve fled your nest and sprawled out over the world. You’ve become oblivious to locale, you’re a global citizen, your phone works anywhere, on any network. Once when I was working in New York, in Amsterdam, in Tokyo and we went on a holiday to London, to Los Angeles, to Shanghai… You take what you want, you build machines with what pleases you.

From planetary expansion to the most condensed location: locked down in isolation, suddenly, my home is all I have.

Our tentacles have relinquished the planet and we have contracted back into our shells. The only trace of our travels is a slightly luminescent slime and then, like a galactic constellation of the most vapid, unending monotony, the ones and zeros of our photos filling our feeds, immortal as myth, as that gluttonous snake devouring its own tail. Otherwise, all we are left with are distant friends and memories from elsewhere; our physical worlds, once propped up by that modest planet (what was it called?), have imploded.

But deep in our minds, where time takes longer to reach, we are each still the size of a star.

After the rapid implosion of a mega-object, after the matter that remains is sucked back into the node, gravity maxes out and time slows down. The end, like the beginning, rests on timelessness. Entropy’s shut out, wanders off to warmer climes.

Here, in this cold loneliness, will writing become increasingly cathartic, melancholy, desperate? As sticky, social webs dry up and break, and we are each forced to confront the appalling separation between our stillness and the acceleration into crisis…

By the late third century, Rome’s empire was in slow decay. The world’s greatest state had split into smaller, semi-autonomous rural units; only ten percent of the population remained in the urban centers. Abandoned by the magnates, who had fled to their fortified country estates, cities degenerated into “ghettoes of poverty, riot and famine.”[7] No longer a unified expanse of imperial provinces anchored by towns, the great Empire had become a collection of fragments: squalid cities and arrays of giant, isolated estates—monasteries and magnates’ strongholds; landscapes of retreat dissected under siege.

Commercial exploration, travel and sightseeing came to a standstill. As a consequence, appetite for scenic itineraries and descriptive writing waned and fell “into a kind of delirium.”[8] Forsaking the expanses of factual topography, humans turned inward, yearned for inviolable seclusion. “In communities increasingly isolated, stationary and beleaguered, swallowed up in a ubiquitous countryside, encircled by demons, marauders and dereliction, monks and poets pen an ideal landscape of seclusion, as sanctuary or sortie.”[9]

10.

As he climbs the last flight of stairs, as he sets his bags down at his door, as he turns the key five times to unlock the heavy, spidery mechanism on the other side, as he puts another key in the second lock and turns it only three times, as he nudges the door open, as he picks up his bags, as he goes in, as he takes off his mask, as he puts his bags down, as he closes the door, as he relishes the metallic click, as he turns the key again, in the small lock first, then the larger one, as he locks himself in, as thick, metal bars spear from the locking mechanism into the roof and the floor, as he locks it, as he locks it, as he breathes, he feels a measure of peace, he can feel something like control, he’s safe, he’s home.

The feeling only starts to dissipate once he has gone into the kitchen, once he has unpacked the groceries and put them away—at some point soon, the food he has bought will be gone, and he will have to go outside again. He watches as life is shaved down to the line of the horizon. He will have to go back out into the air, onto the street, into the supermarket, I will have to encounter once again those masked faces and their language, which is similarly masked.

11.

In that age of anxiety, amidst outbreaks of Christian persecution “climaxing in waves of monastic warfare against diabolic forces,”[10] the poets moved Eden to the peaks. Monasteries were built in virtually inaccessible places, on lofty crags or steep mountain sides: Mount Latomos, Mount Sinai… To get to them you needed to be hauled up in a cordial basket, or to climb a long, perilous rope ladder.[11]

12.

But for now, I tell myself, trying to breathe deeper and slower, for now, I am OK, I have plenty of food, the sun is shining, it is a beautiful, bright day. I walk out onto my terrazzo and savor the warmth on my face and arms, I shiver with a little ecstasy (that this is only for me, that it cannot be taken from me, that this moment is mine), I look out over the homes of Trastevere, I look down to the solitary tram snaking up the street and the motorcyclist waiting for it to pass, to one or two people still walking along the pavement, I look at them all as if observing a gigantic aquarium or an exhibit at a zoo. I look briefly but soon I want nothing more to do with any of it, all I want to think about is the warmth on my body, my small rectangle of freedom here beneath the sun.

13.

The Abbot Nilenus (circa 450 AD): “Invulnerable from the enemy is he who loves quiet: but he who mixeth with the crowd hath often wounds.”[12]

14.

If I betray my privilege by reaching back millennia for some kind of cultural memory of extermination, it is because I cannot begin to imagine how it must feel for those who have lived through more recent exterminations, or who have inherited such experiences from their parents and grandparents. I see a post on my feed from my friend, the Wamba Wamba writer Stevie Ross: “Thinking a lot about the mobs around the Country,” he wrote, “this stuff is embedded in our racial memory.”

15.

Thus, from within the fantasy that my interior condition has subsumed the entire world, I consider that I embody the end of an epoch, or its karma. Holed up in my retreat at the top of an apartment tower, afraid to leave for even my sustenance, I touch on delirium, I grow into a symbol of my race. For so long we have pushed, cleared, conquered, controlled, we have lied then lamented, and then apologized and lied some more. Our power has grown so large that at times it is imperceptible, but like any super-massive object it must implode, it has imploded, it has been reduced to my single, irreducible point, in which all meaning and story are packed in super-tight. So that in our implosion we have freed the earth. As I bow my head in resignation, nothing’s so sweet as the fiction of my magnanimity.

16.

“Time is the drive to return to a time before time.”[13]

Terminus

On the day before the lockdown, I am sitting out the front of a café in Trastevere, on the corner of two narrow, cobblestoned lanes. I am sipping an espresso and nibbling a biscotto. The low, winter light streams down one lane, frays through the branches of trees, and catches on the curves of cars and scooters crammed together along the curbs. I am wearing fashionable sunglasses and a nice jacket. I am scribbling in my notebook. I am in Rome, doing things in a Roman way.

But the scene is eerily quiet. At this time of day at any other time of year, these lanes would be flooded with tourists. Now, all I hear is Italian—from the shopkeepers, and from the couple at the table next to me. I pretend that I am just like them, that I’m no tourist. I scribble notes about baroque art, about marble, chiaroscuro, pain, and revelation. I won’t think about what’s happening, I insist on being oblivious to it. To be Roman is to play the long game: traversing waves of chaos with the confidence that, in the end, everything will be fine, there will be good coffee and wine and cathedrals and salty light on the horizon.

But I am not Roman, and I know hardly any Romans. I put my pen and notebook back on the table. What’s going to happen? What should I do?

A small bird—a swallow, I think—has been watching me ever since I sat down. Every time I take a bite of the biscotto s/he approaches, and each time s/he gets a little bolder and comes a little closer. I break a piece into some crumbs and hold them out in my palm. S/he flies up and lands on the back of the seat next to me, and sits for a moment, watching, considering. Then, just as I’m about to give up and take my hand away, the swallow hops down from the seat onto my little finger and grasps it like a thin branch. S/he pecks quickly, powerfully, but delicately, until all the crumbs have disappeared. All I can feel are those tiny feet clawing on.

Perhaps it’s a sign, some kind of salvation. Because, even as I feel the weight of my tradition rise up to consume it, the moment remains clear and singular: the scene may be Roman/tic, but this is also a bird on a human hand. And despite whatever I see and whatever is behind my seeing, the bird soon flies off through strips of winter light to a place that is unknown to me.

“we have done thy
habits disservice by feeding thee much junk
yet the air plankton & swallow might restore when we are gone & our
kind, gone—”[14]

As the earth slowly devours these decrepit crypts for the human ego, as it starts to reawaken, blossoming with dolphins in Venetian canals, as the snowy teeth of the Himalayas rise up over northern India for the first time in decades…

To project forwards from here, to imagine from within the cocoon of my misanthropy: were all of this to continue, were infections to keep increasing exponentially, were deaths to sky-rocket and bodies to pile high as the tallest rockets, were we to disappear completely, imagine:

With industry collapsing, with no more chlorine or bromine leaking into the air, the ozone layer replenishes and ultraviolet levels subside. Within a few centuries—you can almost smell them—most of the carbon dioxide has dissipated, the atmosphere and the oceans have cooled.

Meanwhile, heavy metals and dioxins are diluting, flushing from systems. Every dam on the planet has silted up and spilled over, fresh water slides untouched past cotton farms, rivers have been replenished, the Murray has picked up the song again, that long, liquid line to our ancestors, and burst back into the sea.

Then, a while later, after plastic fibers and polychlorinated biphenyls have been ground smaller and smaller in their ceaseless passage through body and soil, anything truly intractable has ended up buried, ready to be metamorphosed one day or subsumed into the planet’s mantle.

And then, all those floating bergs and islands of ice will be reclaimed by the long tongues and the continental shelves, which will flower outwards in ever greater profusion from the frozen poles of zero time.

“… nihilism and romanticism… are both limited, insofar as their engagement with th[e] Real is concerned, and excessive, insofar as this effort to so engage with it yields destruction as its only terminus, either of self or all.”[15]

“What we need… is to find a way out of the individualizing imaginary in which we are trapped.”[16]

As you sit here, cooped up in the stench of your thoughts, the only liberation, the only enervating onrushing, is to think of this: if not our extinction, then at least our contraction; a sudden, drastic reduction in the human, plummeting emissions; a pause, in which the earth turns over and realizes it can breathe deeper.

So that the relief, the happiness, is not through ‘staying connected’ with others—maybe it never was (all those misunderstandings and thin skins)—but through what is other. Removed from stifling nets of norms, perhaps your isolation is an opportunity to think about the hyper-social, the more-than-ourselves: the vast, planetary concrescence; earth sculptures, geopoetics, climate operas.

“—& the wren can see us
from its canister of loud joy but we cannot
see it.”[17]

But don’t turn away just yet; in this relief, there is also your death. How to hold the heart open without this finale of destruction? Perhaps in understanding the difference between death of the one and death of the many; after the former, at least, possibilities keep flourishing. For the one, then, what are the options? Can we think of a subject who shimmers, half-dead and -alive, its flesh flickering into ghost form?

10.

“… new, hybrid forms will emerge and the act of reading itself will change once again…”[18]

The Path

“The creatures that we met this morning
marveled at our green skins
                                   and scarlet eyes.
They lack antennae
              and can’t be made to grasp
                             your proclamation that they are
our lawful food and prey and slaves…”[19]

Do we need a new genre, perhaps, straddled somewhere between documentary realism and dystopian science fiction?

But what is about to happen does not come from the future; it has grown from what we have done in the past. So, when I listen closely, I hear echoes of it even in the loosest, sandiest topsoil of the culture: premonitions, stirrings, rumblings.

Then I look out to those thin, spire-like glacial bergs and bergy bits as they float up from the south, all that strange, homeless flotsam. We already knew who we were, we were already tracing out the contours.

Is the problem to do with our love of stoicism? The way we find implicit value in someone’s determination to do things solo, to refuse help, to be happy with their own capacity. So that we are seduced too easily by the narrative of one man, one hero, his battles and doubts and victories; the quest, that most incessant archetype.

But we are here because we are many, because we are radically open and porous—not just to one another, but to a world of microbial plenitude. So that the task instead might be to tell the stories of many bodies through time, while the danger would be to be trapped in just one of them. But how to narrate such abundant multiplicity? In comparison to such scales, surely the stories of 5, 10, 50 people are little better than a tale of one?

Perhaps, then, the problem is with narration itself, with the allure of a particular groove or carving through the world’s thriving menagerie. Can we resist narration, its linear imagination, and skip instead from field to idea to field?

As hordes gather in the north once more…

As microscopic hordes gather in the north…

As hordes gather in northern Italy to threaten this primordial, imperial city, as this essay comes to a close, what will happen has already happened, is only just beginning.

Boromir: “It is a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing… such a little thing”.[20]

Finally, his resolve breaks. Fleeing Italy in the same kind of machine that transported this horror everywhere in the first place, he tries to lose himself in films from his youth (from the time before everything went wrong).

10.

Agent Smith: “Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with their surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to another area and you multiply, and you multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague…”[21]

11.

We laid out the path.

12.

We laid out the path for the plague; all it needed to do was shadow our footsteps, our weekend itineraries, our flight plans, our bucket lists. Now, as we wander in small circuits through the rooms of our apartments, wandering and wondering why this? why now?, we are expressing disbelief in the very basis of our empire: in fleeing the virus we are attempting to flee from ourselves.

Or, if not ourselves, then our closest relatives. Long have we thought that we’d left them behind in dwindling, African forests, where they could remain conveniently hidden from our vainglorious self-portraiture. As if we were alone on an island, with dominion over all of its biology…

13.

A story of what happened to our repressed symbioses, where the horizon never disappears. Suddenly, a large, dark ship appears on it.

14.

Later that day, the ship has dropped anchor in your bay, and hordes of sailors are piling into zodiacs. They speed into the shallows and run their boats aground and swarm onto shore and tear up your lawn. They have bodies like yours, but their heads are nothing but large mirrors. “They have come from the land of the dead,” say the elders, “and will not return without us.”

15.

Closer to us than the eons between genetic variations and gradual speciation, far more akin to us than any ape, are the viruses from which we flee. Some fit so perfectly within my body that the relationship could have been divinely ordained. And now, locked up in a tower, it is a virus that might become my closest companion. Can I find a way of caring, somehow, for that which calls me home? The challenge is to learn how to love the unlovable.

[1] Virgina Woolf, Orlando, 2014 ed. (London: William Collins, 1928). p. 134

[2] Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: climate change and the unthinkable, The Randy L. and Melvin R. Berlin Family Lectures (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2016). p. 66

[3] From “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle,” in Les Murray, Collected Poems (Potts Point: Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002). pp. 137-46 (138)

[4] Michael Hutchence and Andrew Farriss, "Original Sin," on The Swing (New York: WEA, 1983).

[5] My descriptions of Antarctica are indebted to Stephen J. Pyne, The Ice: A Journey To Antarctica, 2004 ed. (London: Orion, 1986).

[6] My imagination of a post-human world has been enriched by Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, 2008 ed. (New York: Picador, 2007).

[7] Chris Fitter, Poetry, Space, Landscape: toward a new theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). p. 112

[8] Ibid. p. 113

[9] Ibid. p. 113

[10] Ibid. p. 115

[11] Ibid. p. 114

[12] Quoted in ibid. p. 113

[13] A.J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens, and Jon Roffe, Lacan Deleuze Badiou, 2015 ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). p. 51

[14] From “Earth’s Shadow,” in Brenda Hillman, Practical Water (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2009). p. 82

[15] Bartlett, Clemens, and Roffe, Lacan Deleuze Badiou. p. 44

[16] Ghosh, The Great Derangement. p. 135

[17] From “The Nets Between Solstice & Equinox,” in Brenda Hillman, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2013). p. 60

[18] Ibid. p. 84

[19] From “Discovery of the New World,” in Carter Revard, How the Songs Came Down (Cambridge: Salt, 2005). p. 97

[20] Peter Jackson, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001).

[21] Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, The Matrix (1999).

Stuart's latest books include the poetry collections Land Art (Calanthe, 2022) and Lyre (UWAP, 2019), and he is the co-editor of Transcultural Ecocriticism (Bloomsbury, 2021). He lives in Brisbane, Australia, where he lectures in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Griffith University.

Barzakh Mag