Jill Fellows
The thing I never appreciated about an apocalypse is that multiple catastrophes could be happening all around, and I'd still be going to work and buying school supplies, filing taxes and grocery shopping.
That unprecedented times could feel surreal and ordinary all at once.
That the world would keep on relentlessly turning even as it was burning.
simsa03
band
@simsa03 I like this thinking. it is not a surprise that slow and steady change is only noticed after some time has passed.
i read a recent critique of using the word "crisis" when talking about climate; crises are usually short and time bounded. the current climate changes are an ongoing condition -- no easy end in sight.
cc @tinydoctor @woodbark
tinydoctor
@band @simsa03 I concur. As the past few and decades oncoming pass out of living memory people will live the new "normal" as normal, not having experienced what came before and is no more. I already see this in my grandchildren, for whom the world of my childhood might as well have been the paleolithic. That world has ended and does not exist for them. I tell them stories, but the stories are just tales Whoopah tells.
tinydoctor
@band @simsa03 If you got in the Doctor's tardis, went to Yucatan 100 years after the fall of the last Classic Mayan cities, and asked some Mayan farmers how they felt about the collapse of civilization, they wouldn't know what you were talking about. They'd be all, what, civilization is ending?!
simsa03
simsa03
band
@simsa03 @tinydoctor
From 'A Primer for Forgetting' by Lewis Hyde (https://worldcat.org/en/title/1222828730), page 3:
> Many years ago, reading about the old oral cultures where wisdom and history lived not in boks but on the tongue. I found my curiosity aroused by one brief remark. "Oral societies," I read, keep themselves "in equilibrium ... by sloughing off memories which no longer have present relevance."
simsa03
tinydoctor
@simsa03 This is the quote of the day: "Capitalism started far earlier than people usually think: It started with the externalization and the outsourcing of remembrance." I'm copying that into my journal, wretched slave to the scribble and key that I am.
tinydoctor
@simsa03 @band I was going to say that my grandchildren are not heirs to an aboriginal oral tradition. Though as I said, I do tell stories to them, and told the same stories to my daughters before them. Ms. tinydoctor: "You are not allowed to tell them that story!" There is an oral history in my family, but there are deliberate detours around stuff not needed or wanted to be remembered. Also, I am now the elder, the only who remembers and re-embers the many-told past.
tinydoctor
@simsa03 @band My mother used to say, "Two can be a secret if one of them is dead." Well, the rest of them are dead, save an uncle in his nineties who lives in Texas whom we rarely see. I sure he could tell a tale or too that I've never heard.
tinydoctor
@band @simsa03 I think I've read Lewis Hyde before...maybe Tricksters Makes This World? Been a while.
tinydoctor
@simsa03 I wrote this 17 years ago:
EMBERS for Meg
For forty thousand generations
we stirred the embers
of a low fire,
kept the audible prowlings
of the huge night
at bay.
A small tribe,
we looked up at the stars,
and the spaces between the stars,
tracked the transits
and transformations
of the moon, counted five wanderers,
As chert or clay came to our hands,
words came to us,
and we built them into stories
nested in stories,
tool kits for making memory
into myth,
1/x
tinydoctor
@simsa03 poem continues...
to tell the children,
to tell the children,
to tell the children
how to compact the whole life of our tribe,
a small tribe,
into a bundle of words and pictures
small enough to carry
inside the head of an elder,
but enough
to survive a long trek,
and feed the whole tribe,
by the low fire,
in the great dark,
under a starry sky,
give us meaning,
give us meaning
give us the meaning.
by which we mean to survive.
2/end
simsa03
jfreebo
@jjfphd @morgan that reminds me of this essay, which was written in a different context and is sadly behind a paywall now
(quote from below fold)
https://gen.medium.com/i-lived-through-collapse-america-is-already-there-ba1e4b54c5fc
mnemonicoverload
@jfreebo
Such a good essay. I remember reading it early in the pandemic and it really had a profound effect on me.
🦁Ams 🦁
You can use this to bypass the paywall.
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