The Teeming Brain

Here’s a handful of additional passages I found particularly profound, moving, fascinating, illuminating, or otherwise noteworthy and memorable in my reading last month.

Note that the title of this post and the original Potent Passages from May 2007, and also of future posts that I’ll make in a similar vein, doesn’t necessarily indicate that all of these items were first published in the month named, but merely that I read them during that month (although in the present case, the following items actually were all published in May).

In some cases the things I’ll include in these types of posts may also have been quoted in the excerpts included in a given month’s reading list. The thing is, they have a very good chance of getting buried there amidst the deluge of accompanying text, so I’ll be holding them up for more direct inspection in these “potent passages” posts.

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From John Michael Greer, “Religion and Peak Oil: The Next Spirituality,” The Archdruid Report, May 10, 2007

For the religion of progress in any of its forms — the straightforward atheist anthropolatry of Richard Dawkins and his peers, or the quasi-theistic versions that use the forms of older faiths but redefine them in progressive terms — the coming of the deindustrial age promises a major crisis of faith. The same is true of today’s Christian fundamentalism, which rejects the progressive vision but has made itself just as vulnerable to a future that shows no particular interest in conforming to its apocalyptic prophecies. My guess, and it’s only a guess, is that despite their current popularity both these faiths are on their way out; too much hostility stands between them to allow the sort of mutual accommodation that happened between Shinto and Buddhism in Japan, and some more recently arrived faiths have already begun to work the same strategy on them that Christianity worked on classical Paganism and Greek philosophy.

Catholicism is another matter. While American Protestantism has been losing members steadily for decades, the Catholic church has been holding steady, not least because so much immigration into the US today comes from predominantly Catholic countries. Demographics have worked very much in Catholicism’s favor, and will very likely continue to do so. Whether the church in America can hold together in the face of the issues pulling it toward schism is a good question, but if it can manage that, A Canticle for Liebowitz may not be as farfetched as it looks.

Buddhism, it seems to me, is also very much worth watching. In the last few decades, especially but not only on the west coast, Buddhism has transformed itself from an exotic foreign import to a homegrown faith with a growing popular appeal, and Buddhist monasteries can be found all over North America these days – there are three of them within a short drive of the town where I live. If it continues along its present growth curve, Buddhism could turn into a major religious force in North America over the next few centuries.

Yet it’s also worth watching the fringes, and keeping an eye out for wild cards. Christianity was a legally proscribed minority faith only a few generations before it seized control of the Roman world. In a world of contingencies, where slight causes can drive vast effects, some religious movement barely large enough to be noticed today might turn into the dominant religion of North America a few centuries down the road. Arnold Toynbee noted in his massive A Study of History that the downslope of civilizations seem to be the incubators of universal religions, and rarely so dramatically as in times when the most basic assumptions of a civilization are visibly disproving themselves. This is such a time, in case you haven’t noticed.

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James Howard Kunstler, “We Want Solutions!” Clusterfuck Nation, May 28, 2007

Wherever the environmentally-informed gather these days (i.e., the clusterfuck-aware), a nervous impatience often mounts, and ends up expressing itself as an outcry for “solutions.” For example, at the Telluride Mountain Film Festival, where I happened to be this past weekend, along with a couple of hundred other people who spewed airplane exhaust across the stratosphere to get there. This year’s twin themes were the Castor-and-Pollux of Clusterfuck Nation, Global Warming and Peak Oil.

Many frightening documentary films and Powerpoint talks were served up in the opening symposium (including ones by Dennis Dimick, the editor of National Geographic, Daniel Nocera of MIT, and yours truly) and, as the morning wore on, the audience grew visibly impatient, until one speaker dropped the word “solutions,” and the audience gave out a big whoop of approbation.

It only made me more nervous, because this longing for “solutions,” strikes me as a free-floating wish for magical rescue remedies, for techno-fixes that will allow us to make a hassle-free switch from fossil hydrocarbon power to something less likely to destroy the Earth’s ecosystems (and human civilization with it). And I think such a wish is, in itself, at the root of our problem — certainly at the bottom of our incapacity to think clearly about these things.

I said so, of course, which seemed to piss off a substantial number of my fellow festival attendees.

My position on this can be easily misunderstood. I don’t want civilization to collapse (I like Mozart and access to root canal). I don’t want Homo sapiens to go extinct, or the planet to parboil. I certainly don’t believe in doing nothing in the face of this emergency. But I also don’t believe we are going to make any hassle-free switch in the way we run things — or that we should want to. Would the USA be a better place if we could run Wal-Mart and Las Vegas on wind power? I don’t think so. Would the public benefit from another hundred years of suburban living — and an economy based largely on creating ever more of it? All the Prozac in the universe would not avail to offset the diminishing returns of that bullshit.

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From Jonathan Leake, “Fiddling with figures while the Earth burns,” The Times Online, May 6, 2007

If you want to get some idea of what much of the Earth might look like in 50 years’ time then, says James Lovelock, get hold of a powerful telescope or log onto Nasa’s Mars website. That arid, empty, lifeless landscape is, he believes, how most of Earth’s equatorial lands will be looking by 2050. A few decades later and that same uninhabitable desert will have extended into Spain, Italy, Australia and much of the southern United States.

“We are on the edge of the greatest die-off humanity has ever seen,” said Lovelock. “We will be lucky if 20% of us survive what is coming. We should be scared stiff.”

Lovelock has delivered such warnings before, but this weekend they have a special resonance. Last week in Bangkok, Thailand, the world’s governments finalised this year’s third and final report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) setting out how humanity might save itself from the worst effects of climate change.

. . . . Lovelock believes that the transformation is happening far too fast for humanity to tackle, especially in a world that remains committed to economic growth and whose 6.5 billion population is predicted to reach more than 9 billion by mid-century.

. . . . At first sight Lovelock’s predictions seem wildly at odds with the IPCC’s reports, but in many ways the only difference is in the vividness of the language. “The progressive acidification of oceans due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide is expected to have negative impacts on marine shell-forming organisms (ie corals) and their dependent species,” said the IPCC report detailing the impacts of climate change – its careful language draining the drama from a warning that vast tracts of the ocean may turn so acidic that little life will be left in them.

It added: “At lower latitudes, especially seasonally dry and tropical regions, crop productivity is projected to decrease for even small local temperature increases (1-2C), which would increase risk of hunger.” What these measured tones imply, warns Lovelock, is that millions – perhaps hundreds of millions – of people living in equatorial lands will be forced from their homes, with most of them heading northwards. “The world will face mass shortages of food and water. That will lead to wars and the effective clearance of vast areas of land as the deserts spread,” he said.

Lovelock’s reputation as a scientific seer was founded four decades ago when he published his Gaia hypothesis. His idea, that the Earth’s chemistry, climate and life were all closely linked into a kind of self-sustaining system, is now received wisdom. It has become clear that the first life forms on Earth transformed its early climate and atmosphere, generating the oxygen that allowed life to evolve – eventually into us.

. . . . He is not alone in predicting a huge northwards shift in human populations: in his new book, How the World will Change with Global Warming, Professor Trausti Valsson, an Icelandic academic, predicts how population centres will move north.

“The Arctic ice cap is melting. When it goes it will open up new shipping routes, new fishing grounds and new oil fields,” said Valsson. “The Arctic Ocean will become the new Mediterranean with Siberia and Canada as the centres for human culture and civilisation.”

Lovelock is fond of recounting how, on a recent lecture tour of America, he was accosted by earnest academics seeking advice on whereabouts in Canada they should buy their second homes.

Behind such comic anecdotes, however, lies the grim possibility that billions of people face a miserable life and death as humanity finds a new equilibrium with the Earth. At 87 Lovelock acknowledges that he is unlikely to be one of them. His concern is for the generations represented by his nine grandchildren. “What we have lived through, the 20th century, has been like a great party. Adults now have had the best time humanity has ever had. Now the party is over and the Earth is reckoning up.”

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Michael Pollan, “Unhappy Meals,” The New York Times Magazine, January 28, 2007

If you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

. . . . The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and — ahem — journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question an omnivore confronts. Humans deciding what to eat without expert help — something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees — is seriously unprofitable if you’re a food company, distinctly risky if you’re a nutritionist and just plain boring if you’re a newspaper editor or journalist. (Or, for that matter, an eater. Who wants to hear, yet again, “Eat more fruits and vegetables”?) And so, like a large gray fog, a great Conspiracy of Confusion has gathered around the simplest questions of nutrition — much to the advantage of everybody involved. Except perhaps the ostensible beneficiary of all this nutritional expertise and advice: us, and our health and happiness as eaters.

. . . . It was in the 1980s that food began disappearing from the American supermarket, gradually to be replaced by “nutrients,” which are not the same thing. Where once the familiar names of recognizable comestibles — things like eggs or breakfast cereal or cookies — claimed pride of place on the brightly colored packages crowding the aisles, now new terms like “fiber” and “cholesterol” and “saturated fat” rose to large-type prominence. More important than mere foods, the presence or absence of these invisible substances was now generally believed to confer health benefits on their eaters. Foods by comparison were coarse, old-fashioned and decidedly unscientific things — who could say what was in them, really? But nutrients — those chemical compounds and minerals in foods that nutritionists have deemed important to health — gleamed with the promise of scientific certainty; eat more of the right ones, fewer of the wrong, and you would live longer and avoid chronic diseases.

. . . . Henceforth, government dietary guidelines would shun plain talk about whole foods, each of which has its trade association on Capitol Hill, and would instead arrive clothed in scientific euphemism and speaking of nutrients, entities that few Americans really understood but that lack powerful lobbies in Washington. This was precisely the tack taken by the National Academy of Sciences when it issued its landmark report on diet and cancer in 1982. Organized nutrient by nutrient in a way guaranteed to offend no food group, it codified the official new dietary language. Industry and media followed suit, and terms like polyunsaturated, cholesterol, monounsaturated, carbohydrate, fiber, polyphenols, amino acids and carotenes soon colonized much of the cultural space previously occupied by the tangible substance formerly known as food. The Age of Nutritionism had arrived.

. . . . [T]he widely shared but unexamined assumption is that the key to understanding food is indeed the nutrient. From this basic premise flow several others. Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists speak) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. To enter a world in which you dine on unseen nutrients, you need lots of expert help.

. . . . This is a great boon for manufacturers of processed food, and it helps explain why they have been so happy to get with the nutritionism program.

. . . . [T]he typical real food has more trouble competing under the rules of nutritionism, if only because something like a banana or an avocado can’t easily change its nutritional stripes (though rest assured the genetic engineers are hard at work on the problem). So far, at least, you can’t put oat bran in a banana. So depending on the reigning nutritional orthodoxy, the avocado might be either a high-fat food to be avoided (Old Think) or a food high in monounsaturated fat to be embraced (New Think). The fate of each whole food rises and falls with every change in the nutritional weather, while the processed foods are simply reformulated. That’s why when the Atkins mania hit the food industry, bread and pasta were given a quick redesign (dialing back the carbs; boosting the protein), while the poor unreconstructed potatoes and carrots were left out in the cold.

Of course it’s also a lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a potato or carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.

. . . . No one likes to admit that his or her best efforts at understanding and solving a problem have actually made the problem worse, but that’s exactly what has happened in the case of nutritionism. Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or nothing to improve our health. Perhaps what we need now is a broader, less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more ecological and cultural. What would happen, for example, if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?

In nature, that is of course precisely what eating has always been: relationships among species in what we call food chains, or webs, that reach all the way down to the soil.

. . . . “Health” is, among other things, the byproduct of being involved in these sorts of relationships in a food chain — involved in a great many of them, in the case of an omnivorous creature like us. Further, when the health of one link of the food chain is disturbed, it can affect all the creatures in it. When the soil is sick or in some way deficient, so will be the grasses that grow in that soil and the cattle that eat the grasses and the people who drink the milk. Or, as the English agronomist Sir Albert Howard put it in 1945 in “The Soil and Health” (a founding text of organic agriculture), we would do well to regard “the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject.” Our personal health is inextricably bound up with the health of the entire food web.

. . . . The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000 new food products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle used to sell these products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and marketing to help us decide questions about what to eat. Nutritionism, which arose to help us better deal with the problems of the Western diet, has largely been co-opted by it, used by the industry to sell more food and to undermine the authority of traditional ways of eating. You would not have read this far into this article if your food culture were intact and healthy; you would simply eat the way your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents taught you to eat. The question is, Are we better off with these new authorities than we were with the traditional authorities they supplanted? The answer by now should be clear.

It might be argued that, at this point in history, we should simply accept that fast food is our food culture. Over time, people will get used to eating this way and our health will improve. But for natural selection to help populations adapt to the Western diet, we’d have to be prepared to let those whom it sickens die. That’s not what we’re doing. Rather, we’re turning to the health-care industry to help us “adapt.” Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick. It’s gotten good at extending the lives of people with heart disease, and now it’s working on obesity and diabetes. Capitalism is itself marvelously adaptive, able to turn the problems it creates into lucrative business opportunities: diet pills, heart-bypass operations, insulin pumps, bariatric surgery. But while fast food may be good business for the health-care industry, surely the cost to society — estimated at more than $200 billion a year in diet-related health-care costs — is unsustainable.

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From Michael Nystrom, “The Fourth Turning, Part II — Rise of the Anti-Boomers: Millennial Generation 1, Imus 0,” Bull! Not Bull,

Adults blame the current crop of kids for their own offensive media, but it is “the 30-year olds who write it, the 50-year olds who produce it, [and] the 70-year olds whose portfolio’s profit from it!” Today’s youth culture is filled with words and images that are offensive to most adults, but the adults producing it sure like the money they make from it! The big surprise is that - according to the research by Strauss and Howe - the majority of kids find it offensive, too. They go along with it is because for the time being, they have to. They’re just kids, after all.

But their turn is coming.

Strauss and Howe [authors of 1997’s The Fourth Turning) go to great lengths to take on widespread misconceptions about the rising generation. They note that prior to the defining event of the Kennedy Assassination in 1963, Boomer kids were mindlessly watching Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon in surfer movies, giving every indication that they would accept their parent’s conformist world ‘as is’ and “merge seamlessly into the world of tract houses, corporate jobs, and stay-at-home moms.” No one at the time came to the logical conclusion that they would reject it all and rebel against the status quo, just as no one now expects the current Millennial generation to complain much (what is there to complain about - they have everything!) or amount to much more than super consumers, just like their parents.

But simply trying to make a linear extrapolation of their current lives of iPods, manga, video games, internet chat and YouTube misunderstands a fundamental, recurring characteristic about all generations: They rebel. They all do, and they always do. What seems to be lost on the critics of the Millennials is that - for the time being - the kids are simply reflecting the cultural images and social mood created by their elders. How they rebel is likely to be the defining story of the next several decades.

. . . . Howe and Strauss assure us that the kids are smarter than most people give them credit for, and that they see through the hypocrisy and the double standards of the adult world quite clearly. When they’re ready, they’ll reshape the world into one that is more in line with their own - not their parents - values, much to the bewilderment of their elders. This coming of age will most likely occur against the backdrop of the Fourth Turning crisis that the authors have discussed previously, perfectly setting the stage for the re-imagining of America.

According to Strauss & Howe:

Per the experience of earlier generations, the coming of age of the Millennial Generation is likely to take place in the midst of a profound shift in America’s social mood, a shift that will match and reflect the new generation’s personna. For Millennials, this shift will focus on the needs of the community more than the individual, so it is likely to induce large-scale institutional change. Thus, the word rebellion is not entirely appropriate. The word revolution might better catch the spirit of what lies ahead.

Note: This is part three of a three-part post. Also see parts one and two.

Books

• James Atlas, Book Wars: What It Takes to Be Educated in America (1990)
• Fritjof Capra, Uncommon Wisdom: Conversations with remarkable people (1988), chapter 6—“Alternative Futures” [Features Capra’s extensive conversations with E.F. Schumacher and Hazel Henderson about the shortcomings of modern Western industrial capitalism and the viable alternatives to it that would be much more humane and sustainable]
• Richard Gavin, Omens (2007), Foreword plus first two stories
• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
• William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Act V
• Peter Straub, Ghost Story (1979), pp. 118-95

Short Fiction

• Massive number of stories for Holy Horrors anthologyoHol

Articles, Essays, etc.

• 65 student letters in response to an assignment I gave them
• Steve Andrews, “An energy postcard from China,” Energy Bulletin, May 28, 2007 (reprinted from ASPO-USA) [“Everyone reading the Peak Oil Review knows the general story about China and energy. China has the world’s fastest growth rate in energy consumption. Its domestic oil production growth is slowing, its oil imports are rocketing, coal consumption continues a worrisome climb, etc. This writer recently had the opportunity to spend two weeks in China. What follows are some man-on-the-street observations that help put a little flesh on the data bones.”]
• Bryan Appleyard, “Because we’re worth it,” The Times Online, May 27, 2007 [“The baby-boomers’ culture of hedonistic consumerism has left their offspring with the crumbs from their table. And 65% of them say their children’s lives will be worse than their own . . . . The boomer generation is suddenly waking up to the terrible truth that their legacy to their children is a nastier, tougher and more anxious world than the one they knew. And the young are waking up to the fact that it has happened thanks to the unthinking greed of their parents. Battle lines are visible in the sand; an inter-generational war is brewing. . . . The boomers have poisoned the wells and ploughed salt into the fields. Their post-war idyll is over; the world is returning to its default mode of confrontation and violence, now made more ominous by looming catastrophes like global warming. In the midst of their success and greed, the boomers forgot Edmund Burke’s most imperishable insight—that society is a contract with three interested parties: the dead, the living and the unborn. Their children are paying the price of their amnesia. For the moment, they seem resigned, but, soon enough, they’ll want their world back.”]
• The Archdruid Report (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com), weekly blog posts
• Perry Arnett, “Peak Oil, Collapse, and the Road to the Olduvai,” Oilcrash.com, April 18, 2007 [“The quality of water, food, crops, soil, air, have all deteriorated during the past 50 years or so and at such a rate, that many parents are today, probably more well nourished than are their kids, and they are probably more well nourished than are their kids!; so that the diminution, and lack of general intellect, self-discipline, will power, delayed gratification, and the increase of antisocial and criminal behaviors, diseases-of-civilization, etc., — all are probably due to fossil-fueled exponential population increase, and the consequent disastrous effects of those populations on the environment. Those best equipped to survive the coming collapse are those with ‘mongrel genes’, hardiness to disease, and ruggedness of constitution; — NOT the rich, the privileged, the educated, the well to do! Some few will make it — most will not! There will be a vast reduction of human populations from present numbers down to something FAR BELOW ‘carrying capacity’, i.e. LESS than 50 million or so globally, before population numbers begin to rise again to ‘optimal carrying capacity.’ Lifestyle standards are devolving NOW (as they have for most since ~1979), and they will continue to devolve until within say, five to seven years (2012/2014), when life will be much different for most from what it is today.”]
• Carolyn Baker, “The Spirituality of Collapse,” Speaking Truth to Power, May 8, 2007 [“Paradoxically, collapse may bring meaning and purpose to our lives which might otherwise have eluded us. In our linear, progress-based existence, we rarely contemplate words like ‘purpose.’ With civilization’s collapse, we may be forced to evaluate daily, perhaps moment to moment, why we are here, if we want to remain here, if life is worth living, if there is something greater than ourselves for which we are willing to remain alive and to which we choose to contribute energy. These decisions probably will not be made in the cozy comfort of our homes, but in the streets, the fields, the deserts, the forests, in the eerie echoing of our voices throughout abandoned suburbs, and beside forgotten rivers and trails. Purpose will rapidly cease being about what we can accomplish and will increasingly become more about who we are. In a collapsing world, the so-called ‘purpose-driven life’ will no longer exist. Humans will be ‘driven’ by only one issue: the determination to survive and assist loved ones in surviving. From that quest for survival will emerge authentic purpose, which will undoubtedly not resemble anything we can imagine today.”]
• Susan Casey, “Éminence Green,” Fortune, April 2, 2007, Vol. 155, No. 6 [“The story of how Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard took his passion for the outdoors and turned it into an amazing business. . . . (Chouinard says) ‘I don’t think we’re going to be here 100 years from now as a society, or maybe even as a species.’ . . . To Chouinard, the average suit is somewhere between alcoholic and criminal on the respect scale, and American business, when powered by the endless consumption and discarding of stuff, is unimaginative at best and evil at worst, responsible for clear-cutting forests, polluting oceans, and bulldozing wetlands to make way for the next condo development. Its modus operandi is unsustainable growth, which he compares to an ‘out-of-control tumor.’. . . Chouinard’s greatest cause for optimism comes from Bentonville, Ark. ‘The revolution really has started,’ he says with a slow, curling, and just slightly subversive smile. ‘I’m blown away by Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart does one-tenth of what they say they’re going to do, it will be incredible. And hopefully America will get the government that we need rather than one we deserve, that will put pressure on business to clean up its act. But the most powerful pressure will come from the consumer. Oh, my God, it’s going to be really powerful.’ As Chouinard sees it, there’s only one downside to this good news: It’s probably too late. ‘There’s a race between running out of water, topsoil, and petroleum. I don’t know what’s going to be first. Or maybe it will happen at once. . . . I’m a very happy person. . . . I never get depressed, even though I know that everything’s going to hell.’]
• “Britain Lays Out Energy Policy Shake-up,” MoneyNews.com, May 23, 2007 [“Britain on Wednesday set out radical plans to secure energy supplies and fight global warming, calling for new nuclear power plants, more renewable energy and less wasteful use of energy.”]
• Warren Brown, “A Gas Crisis 30 Years in the Making,” The Washington Post, May 27, 2007 [“Despite all of the happy talk you hear from lawmakers who have fooled themselves into believing that the next big exploitable oil reserve is bubbling just beneath the surface of our national will to pump it from the ground or the sea, despite profound media hand-wringing over the putative sins of the oil industry or their cronies in the car business, despite the inane congressional tendency to try to avert an energy crisis by making the car companies produce more fuel-efficient vehicles while asking consumers to do nothing except sit and wait for gasoline prices to come down, world oil production cannot match the trajectory of demand. . . . What is odd—indeed what is scary—is that there are so many Americans who don't get this, who don't believe it, who think that a quick fix is just around the corner.”]
• “Bubonic plague killed zoo monkey, health officials say,” CNN.com, May 21, 2007 [“A Denver Zoo monkey has died of bubonic plague, apparently after eating a squirrel stricken with the disease, Colorado health and zoo officials said Monday.... Zoo veterinarian Dave Kenny said that the risk of plague spreading to humans was extremely low but that visitors were being urged to avoid squirrels and rabbits.”]
• “Buffett, Icahn piling into railroad shares,” MoneyNews.com, May 16, 2007 [“Billionaire investors Warren Buffett and Carl Icahn are piling into railroad shares, first quarter regulatory filings with the SEC revealed today . . . . In Buffett's own words, it's a great play on rising fuel prices. ‘As oil prices go up, higher diesel fuel raises costs for rails, but it raises costs for its competitors—truckers—roughly by a factor of four,’' Buffett said at the company's May 5 annual meeting in Omaha, Nebraska.”]
• Orson Scott Card, “Oil—Past the Peak,” The Ornery American, May 6, 2007 [“What is obvious is that we have used up almost all the easy oil and the ‘vast reserves’ remaining in shale and other such marginal deposits are very expensive to extract. There are promising technologies that may make the extraction of that oil cheaper and cleaner. Great! What will that buy us? Another thirty years? Fifty years? What then? How short-sighted do we have to be? We have been burning oil for only a century and we've nearly used up all the easy, high-quality stuff. What if we last another hundred years before it's all gone? Do you know what that means? Six thousand years of recorded human history, and in only two hundred years we wipe out a precious resource that can never be replaced.”]
• Clusterfuck Nation (http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/clusterfuck_nation), weekly blog posts
• Kurt Cobb, “The Point of Despair,” Resource Insights, May 6, 2007 [“I don't believe our ecological predicament has any solutions by which people normally mean that we can solve our problems and then go back to business as usual. Instead, we are left with responses—responses which may prove valuable or worthless, but the results of which cannot be known in advance. In short, there are no guarantees that our responses will work. By ‘work’ I mean allow us to maintain the semblance of a technically advanced human civilization. It's no surprise that such a realization brings many people to the point of despair. Of course, if they remain there, they can accomplish nothing. But, let's not hurry forward. Let's dwell on that despair for a moment. Does it have a function? I think it does. It is at the point of despair that people can feel deep down their connection to all that has come before them and all that will come after. It is not just their personal futures that are at stake anymore. It is the whole project of human civilization, the art, the literature, the philosophy, the great works of architecture, the great institutions of learning and research, the huge store of human knowledge, and the ongoing experiment in self-government. It is also the future of the natural world, not just what it can provide for our sustenance, but also the beauty and diversity that result from its own purposes.”]
• “Foreclosure filings still soaring, up 62 percent,” MoneyNews.com, May 15, 2007
• “Gas prices: Worse than ’81 oil shock,” CNNMoney.com, May 21, 2007 [“Gas now at highest level, even adjusted for inflation; AAA’s reading of $3.20 a gallon marks ninth straight record high in current dollars”]
• Marilyn Geewax, “70’s-style gasoline crisis possible, Senate told,” The Columbus Dispatch, May 16, 2007 [“The bad news: Gasoline prices will be high all summer. The good news: Supplies will be adequate. The scary news: A strong hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico could knock out refineries and quickly send pump prices soaring. ‘We are one major incident away from a 1970s-style gasoline crisis,’ Paul Sankey, an oil analyst, warned the Senate Energy Committee yesterday.”]
• “Greenspan Fears ‘Dramatic Contraction’ in Chinese Stocks,” MoneyNews.com, May 24, 2007 [“Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said on Wednesday he feared a ‘dramatic contraction’ in Chinese stocks but said the global economy may be able to shrug off a drop in asset prices. Addressing a meeting in Madrid via teleconference, Greenspan said the recent boom in Chinese stocks could not last. ‘It is clearly unsustainable,’ he said ‘There's going to be a dramatic contraction at some point.’”]
• Michael Hanlon, “Oil-mageddon,” Daily Mail, May 11, 2007 [Review of David Strahan’s The Last Oil Shock: A Survival Guide To The Imminent Extinction Of Petroleum Man (2007). “The truth is that without oil, humanity—all six and a half billion of us—would be catapulted back into the steam age. And the results would not be pretty. . . . So why should we take warnings of a new oil shock any more seriously now than we did 30 years ago? According to David Strahan, a respected business journalist and author of the new book, the early warnings of an oil crisis were correct in every respect, save their timing. In the next couple of decades or so, he argues, our civilisation will have crossed a point where the peak of oil discovery and production has been reached. From then on, the story will be of dwindling supplies and rising prices. Is he right? Well, he marshals some impressive arguments.”]
• “Home Construction Bust May Continue Until 2011,” MoneyNews.com, May 29, 2007 [“Market experts expecting the home construction lull to end some time soon are going to have to wait longer than hoped. The chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders said new home construction in the U.S. may take until 2011 to return to last year's level.”]
• “Home Prices Drop First Time in 15 Years,” MoneyNews.com, May 29, 2007 [“Prices of existing U.S. single-family homes fell in the first quarter from a year earlier for the first time since 1991, the Standard & Poor's/Case Shiller national home price index reported on Tuesday.”]
• “Honeybee die-off threatens food supply,” USA Today, May 2, 2007 [“Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious killer that is wiping out many of the nation's honeybees could have a devastating effect on America's dinner plate, perhaps even reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet. . . . In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80% of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.”]
• Walter Isaacson, “The Empire in the Mirror,” The New York Times, May 13, 2007 [A review of Cullen Murphy’s 2007 book Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America]
• “Italy’s largest river drying up,” The Globe and Mail, May 4, 2007 [“Italy declared a state of emergency in northern and central regions on Friday due to fears of drought following unusually warm and dry weather. Farmers have been fretting as Italy's largest river, the Po, has dried up in recent months. The river, running west to east across northern Italy, feeds the broad Po valley which accounts for about a third of the country's agricultural output.”]
• Gregory Jeffers, “Denial,” Mentatt (a blog), May 24, 2007 [“Over the next 40 years or so, we are going to rewind most of the industrial revolution. . . . Financial capital will decline with the decline of energy usage, and will be back to its pre-industrial revolution level at the end of hydrocarbons. Its decline will track the decline in hydrocarbon usage. Population levels will decline with the decline in energy usage. . . . No matter how you slope that graph, or how much margin of error you give to the final date and final population, the excess deaths over births each and every year during all model periods is horrific (ever hear of Easter Island?).”]
• Amy E. Boyle Johnston, “Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted,” L.A. Weekly, May 30, 2007 [“Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands. . . . Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.”]
• Van Jones, “Green Jobs, Good Jobs on the Way?” TomPaine.com, May 25, 2007 [“At the special hearing (of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming in the U.S. House of Representatives), (California Democrat Rep. Hilda) Solis addressed the importance of using green collar jobs both as a way to curb global warming and as a pathway out of poverty. . . . A green collar job is a vocational job in an ecologically responsible trade, such as installing solar panels, weatherizing buildings, constructing and maintaining wind farms, materials re-use and recycling and doing organic agriculture. . . . The shift from dirty energy sources (like oil and coal) to cleaner energy sources (like solar, wind, and plant-based fuel) will produce hundreds of thousands of new jobs. The work of retrofitting millions of buildings so that they conserve energy will produce still more jobs. And all of these jobs will be, by definition, impossible to outsource to other countries.”]
• KPMG LLP (an audit, tax, and advisory firm), “60 percent of oil and gas execs believe trend of declining reserves is irreversible,” Energy Bulletin, May 25, 2007; reprinted from PR Newswire, May 11, 2007 [“Oil and Gas Execs Say Focus on Renewable Energy Sources Key to Addressing Declining Oil Reserves, KPMG Survey Finds. But Mass Production of Renewable Fuel Not A Near-Term Possibility, Say 60 Percent. 60 Percent Believe Trend of Declining Reserves is Irreversible.”]
• Michael Lardelli, “Economic grown to end soon—forever,” On Line Opinion, May 3, 2007 [“The weeks before Easter 2007 were a truly momentous period for the peak oil debate. Highly respected figures in the oil industry, such a energy investment banker Matt Simmons and legendary Texas oilman T.Boone Pickens, abandoned their usually restrained commentary to declare that world oil production was now at its peak and would henceforth fail to meet future demand increases.”]
• Kalle Lasn and Richard DeGrandpre, Introduction to “Toxic Culture USA,” AdBusters (online), no date [“These groundbreaking studies point to a growing toxicity in American culture. They suggest that cultural toxins have now reached dangerously high levels, helping to explain the high school shootings, the skyrocketing use of legal and illegal psychoactive drugs, our growing problems with obesity and psychosomatic illness, rage in public places, and the general sense of cynicism and hopelessness that is enveloping our culture. Yet because these studies are so controversial, because they point an accusing finger at American culture and suggest that the ‘American Dream’ itself may be one of the root causes of our deteriorating mental health, they remain in the margins—disputed, denied and ignored.”]
• Jonathan Leake, “Fiddling with figures while the Earth burns,” The Times Online, May 6, 2007 [“If you want to get some idea of what much of the Earth might look like in 50 years’ time then, says James Lovelock, get hold of a powerful telescope or log onto Nasa’s Mars website. That arid, empty, lifeless landscape is, he believes, how most of Earth’s equatorial lands will be looking by 2050. A few decades later and that same uninhabitable desert will have extended into Spain, Italy, Australia and much of the southern United States. ‘We are on the edge of the greatest die-off humanity has ever seen,’ said Lovelock. ‘We will be lucky if 20% of us survive what is coming. We should be scared stiff.’ . . . Lovelock’s reputation as a scientific seer was founded four decades ago when he published his Gaia hypothesis. . . . . His concern is for the generations represented by his nine grandchildren. ‘What we have lived through, the 20th century, has been like a great party. Adults now have had the best time humanity has ever had. Now the party is over and the Earth is reckoning up.’”]
• “Louisiana school district sued over Bibles in school,” CNN.com, May 20, 2007 [“The lawsuit was filed in federal court on behalf of the parents of a fifth-grader at Loranger Middle School” in Tangipahoa Parish [New Orleans], who were upset that Gideons Bibles were being given to students on school property during class hours.”]
• Jan Lundberg, Review of the 2007 documentary film What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire, Culture Change letter #159, May 20, 2007 [“In ‘What a Way to Go,’ all is placed onto the table before us. We can't walk away and ever be the same. With the peak oil challenge, in comparison, people can shrug and wonder if alternative fuels are going to come on like gangbusters, or wonder what portion of the population will be around in future to get around without cars. We are past that stage; our death warrants are posted, and time is running out to turn the situation around with unprecedented direct action.”]
• “Lower Prices Push New Home Sales Up 16 Percent,” MoneyNews.com, May 24, 2007 [“Sales of new U.S. homes rose 16.2 percent in April, the sharpest climb in fourteen years, while prices fell a record 11 percent, according to a government report on Thursday that showed home builders taking extraordinary steps to move houses.”]
• Jad Mouawad,” Oil Industry Says Biofuel Push May Hurt at Pump,” The New York Times, May 24, 2007 [“Some oil executives are now warning that the current shortages of fuel could become a long-term problem, leading to stubbornly higher prices at the pump. They point to a surprising culprit: uncertainty created by the government’s push to increase the supply of biofuels like ethanol in coming years. . . . ‘If the national policy of the country is to push for dramatic increases in the biofuels industry, this is a disincentive for those making investment decisions on expanding capacity in oil products and refining,’ said John D. Hofmeister, the president of the Shell Oil Company. ‘Industry wide, this will have an impact.’”]
• Michael Nystrom, “The Fourth Turning—Part I” [of II], Bull! (Not Bull), May 4, 2007 [“…the story of a new generation coming of age and ready to reshape the world as Boomers lose their cultural relevance. This generation, alternately known as Generation Y or the Millennial Generation (born 1982-2002), is an emerging force ‘that will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls,’ in ways that we have not seen since before the 1960’s. In many ways, this generation has already begun to make its cultural mark, though this remains under-reported in the mainstream media.”]
• Christopher Palmeri and Eamon Javers, “Pumping Cash, Not Oil. Exxon’s risk-averse stock-buyback strategy is the new profit model,” Business Week, May 28, 2007 [“With gas prices hitting record highs, Exxon Mobil (XOM ) Corp. ought to be drilling like mad and refining more of that black gold, right? As it turns out, the world's largest oil producer thinks it is smarter to use more of its resources to buy back stock. The indirect result: increased pain at the pump for consumers. It's Big Oil's new formula for making money.”]
• PeakEngineer, “11 incontrovertible truths of oil production and peak oil arguments,” PeakOilDesign.com, May 23, 2007 [“Perhaps these bare-bones facts will encourage more people to investigate the available data on their own and develop their own conclusions. We can all agree that energy deeply affects our lives, but there are far too few people exploring the possibility of a world with less available energy.”]
• William Rivers Pitt, “Two Hearings, One Reality,” TruthOut.org, May 11, 2007 [“Representative John Murtha's (D-Pennsylvania) Subcommittee on Appropriations heard testimony from two investigators whose work has been focused on the phenomenon of private military contractors in Iraq . . . . Both men painted a stark picture of reality in Iraq. According to Scahill, there are tens of thousands of private military contractors—a kind euphemism for mercenaries—operating today in Iraq. They are paid with American tax revenues to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while operating with virtually no oversight and free from the strictures of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”]
• Shaun Polczer, “‘Era of cheap energy is over,’ says Buckee,” Calgary Herald, May 10, 2007 [“Global oil production has peaked and will soon decline resulting in higher prices for consumers, Talisman Energy Inc. CEO Jim Buckee said Wednesday. ‘I believe we're already here (at the peak),’ Buckee said at the company's annual meeting in Calgary. ‘I think it's fair to say the era of cheap energy is over.’”]
• Michael Pollan, “Unhappy Meals,” The New York Times Magazine, January 29, 2008 [“The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science, and—ahem—journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question an omnivore confronts.”]
• Leonard Poole, “Awakening to the Threat of Excessive Material Consumption,” What Happens Next? (a blog), May 21, 2007 [“There are signs of a new awakening in post-industrial society. Increasing numbers of us are recognizing that the encouragement of over consumption of material goods is a fundamental problem for humanity. The belief that continual growth in consumption is essential for our well-being is now being called into question. Annual spending on marketing in excess $450 billion however continues to fan the flames of consumption-oriented living . . . . As society begins the movement toward a lower consumptive lifestyle it will have economic consequences. There will be difficult times as communities adjust to a new reality. Relocalisation of our economies will be challenging. However, it will be exceedingly more so if we delay facing up to the ultimate reality that we cannot continue to increase material consumption. That is clearly a physical impossibility. The sooner we accept this fact, the easier the transformation will be.”]
• “Pulte to slash workforce by 16%,” CNNMoney.com, May 29, 2007 [“Pulte Homes, the nation's fourth-largest homebuilder, announced a restructuring plan Tuesday, saying it plans to further trim its work force by 16 percent . . . . ‘Despite reducing our work force by approximately 25 percent in 2006 and early 2007, we find it necessary at this time to further reduce overhead expenditures, including, unfortunately, reducing an additional sixteen percent of our jobs.’”]
• Simon Rabinovich, “‘Agflation’ takes root in world prices,” Reuters, May 14, 2007 [“Calculations of ‘core’ inflation strip out food and energy prices, seen as volatile and therefore liable to skew any snapshot of consumer price levels. But some analysts now argue that a steep climb in the cost of food worldwide in recent months could be permanent, or at least long lasting. . . . The implication for global growth is potentially serious if the inflationary threat convinces central banks to set interest rates at higher levels than they would otherwise do. Few countries, developing or developed, seem immune.”]
• Matthew R. Simmons, “Revisiting The Limits to Growth: Could the Club of Rome Have Been Correct, After All? An Energy White Paper,” October 2000, archived at GreatChange.org, Energy Bulletin, and Simmons & Company International [“It is clear that the skeptics and scoffers of the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth got the real message of The Limits to Growth wrong, at least from an energy perspective. They turned out to be as wrong about The Limits to Growth as they were wrong about the entire energy picture as the 20^th century came to a close. These name-plate energy economists ended up spending too much time criticizing this work and attributing doomsday dates that were never even part of this written work. They then spent far too much time pontificating on how energy was gradually becoming less important to the wonders of the New Economy and would obviously cost less as time went by. . . . In hindsight, the Club of Rome turned out to be right. We simply wasted 30 important years by ignoring this work” (pp. 67, 74).]
• Matthew R. Simmons, “Gasoline Picture Looking Grim for Dog Days of Summer,” Peak Oil Review, May 14, 2007 [“The burning question is how much lower stocks can drop before shortages sweep our fragile gasoline supply system. Historically, it has been critically important that we build up gasoline stocks during the spring shoulder season (April-May) so that they can be liquidated during peak demand to prevent shortages. We seem to have run out the clock to fix the problem this summer. . . . The painful last 13 weeks ran out our USA gasoline clock. We must be right at the edge of genuine ‘minimum operating supplies’ in at least a handful of states. I am certainly glad I drive a diesel where the stock pool or inventory is tight but not nearly as tight as MOGAS (motor gasoline). This could get really ugly real fast.”]
• Loren Steffy, “Maxed out, spent down, and busted,” The Houston Chronicle, May 27, 2007 [A review of the 2006 documentary film Maxed Out. “The movie documents how the debt dealers and credit pushers have infiltrated our lives. . . . We are a nation stealing from our future, looking for one desperate financing scheme after another to keep things afloat. We live one illness, one layoff, one crisis away from financial ruin. Yet our spending is the engine that drives our economy. When we lose the ability to buy things, even on credit, what happens? Our economic foundation is the eroding sand of perpetual debt.”]
• Barry Stoll, “how I became a peak oiler,” http://barrystoll.blogspot.com, May 25, 2007 [“i started where most folks in the last couple of years did—with kunstler's long emergency. my god, were the things he was saying true? it was such a bleak vision of the future, but the way he laid it all out seemed pretty reasonable to me. i had to find out more, get other points of view. specifically, i needed someone to logically defeat the peak oil argument to my satisfaction so i could roll over and go back to ‘sleepwalking into the future.’”]
• Barry Stoll, “peak oil in 600 words or less,” http://barrystoll.blogspot.com/2007/05/peak-oil-in-600-words-or-less.html, May 30, 2007 [“the oil problem arrives not when we've harvested the very last drop of oil (which none of us will ever see), but when we've harvested all we can from an oil field without losing energy. . . . once we pass peak oil, production will fall below global demand and the price of oil will rise. and then the price of everything currently made possible by oil (from high-tech gadgets to food, shelter, clothing) will rise too. and then some of these things may not be ‘made possible’ anymore.”]
• Graham Strouts, “Preparing for Powerdown,” Energy Bulletin, May 29, 2007 [“Just to sum up so far and show how we get to this point: 1) Our culture and economy is extraordinarily dependent on an ongoing supply of oil and natural gas; 2) This supply is drying up. Oil discovery peaked in 1964 and we are now using oil 3-4 times as fast as we are finding new fields; 3) This isn’t just an oil peak—it is an all-time energy peak for humanity. Renewables and even nuclear are fundamentally dependent on a functioning fossil-fuel base. With currently only 5% of global energy supplies coming from renewables and a lead-in time of probably decades needed to switch to any new fuel source, we can be sure that the growth economy is coming to an end. Resistance is futile! Any attempts to keep the unsustainable system going for a little bit longer will only make the crash worse when it comes. Therefore we can conclude: 1) Whatever we do, we will have less energy in the future; 2) A mass public education campaign is urgently needed; 3) Solutions are to be found by creating small-scale, local communities; 4) Each community needs to work towards self-reliance in food, energy and essential trades and services.”]
• Sydney Morning Herald staff, with Australian Associated Press, “Drought puts pressure on electricity,” The Sydney Morning Herald, May 19, 2007 [“The water shortage across eastern Australia is now so acute it has begun to affect power supplies, and the country is at risk of electricity shortages next year. ‘I think we are in denial, and are going to have brownouts in NSW if we don't get snow this winter,’ a source within the electricity market said. . . . ‘Last year we had the lowest snowfall ever recorded. If this happens again we are in trouble,’ the source said. He declined to be named because electricity pricing and supply is a politically charged subject.”]
• “Tests show students learn basics in history, civics,” CNN.com, May 17, 2007 [“More students are learning the basics when it comes to history and civics, but they aren't rising to the next level, national tests show.”]
• “Thinker, philosopher U.G. Krishnamurti dead,” DNA [Daily News & Analysis, a newspaper in Mumbai, India], March 15, 2007
• Ian Welsh, “Limits to Growth?” The Huffington Post, May 28, 2007 [“We have to change the basis of our society, from one which is ultimately reliant on hydrocarbons (what happens to all those cars, all that shipping and transportation, the lineaments of our society, without it) to one that doesn't dump carbon faster into the environment that the earth can clean it up. And we need to turn energy into capital—something you can build, something whose limits to growth aren't based on how many dinosaurs died in just the right time and way into something that is much less finite.”]
• Rolf E. Westgard, “Oil Prices Blowin’ in the Wind,” Brainerd Daily Dispatch, May 25, 2007 [“The nations which have most of the world's remaining oil potential are often unstable, even hostile, and they want the lion's share. The time is past when a western oil company could pay whatever dictator was running a country a few dollars a barrel, and pump out the oil. The alternate energy effort to replace millions of years of product from nature's shale based ovens with this year's food crops, like corn and sugar cane, will provide just a modest supplement to our energy needs. That food for fuel effort is also raising food prices, and it is setting up a lethal competition between the world's 800 million drivers and a couple billion hungry poor. Oil will remain the world's primary source of transport fuel, plastics, building materials, pesticides, and numerous other products for decades. Just be prepared to pay plenty for it.”]
• Tom Whipple, “Peak oil crisis: By order of the governor,” Falls Church News-Press, April 25, 2007 [“We are really going to have to hurt badly before a consensus will form around decisive action that will upset the status quo.”]
• Tom Whipple, “The Peak Oil Crisis: Week Twelve,” Falls Church News-Press, May 3, 2007 [“Although the rate of decline dropped last week, the decline continues at a pace that eventually will lead to much higher prices and shortages. A major point to keep in mind is that the geopolitical/weather situation is relatively calm at the minute. There are still at least half a dozen major threats to our oil imports out there, waiting to happen. . . . In the meantime, the struggle among demand, prices, refining, and imports will continue. Every Wednesday morning the Department of Energy will update the score card and the picture of how much longer we can all continue business as usual will become a little clearer.”]
• Tom Whipple, “The Peak Oil Crisis: The Summer Ahead,” Falls Church News-Press, May 9, 2007 [“From unusually low gasoline stocks in the spring to frenzied Chinese economic growth later in the year—all seem destined to play a role in how much money you will be leaving at your favorite gas pump later this year.”]
• Tom Whipple, “The peak oil crisis: Alarms are sounding,” Falls Church News-Press, May 16, 2007 [“Across the world alarm bells are starting to clang. Above every gas station, a large sign is proclaiming that prices are on an unstoppable climb towards un-affordability. . . . Right now, on the top of every American’s agenda should be the question of whether we are going to get through the summer without shortages and gas lines. . . . When respected analysts say our gasoline situation is beyond the tipping point and that at least some of us are likely to be sitting in gas lines before Labor Day, we should heed the warning. Looking at the broader, worldwide picture, the situation is equally grim. When the normally staid International Energy Agency starts issuing a stream of dire warnings about shortages or much higher prices before the year is out, we should start thinking about a markedly different future.”]
• Tom Whipple, “The peak oil crisis: the minimum operating level,” Falls Church News-Press, May 23, 2007 [“It is clear that the size of our gasoline stockpile has become an important number, not only for everyone who drives, but also for the future of our economy.”]
• Randy White, “To All the Geeks, Gamers, and Non-attention Payers,” Lawns to Gardens, May 16, 2007 [“You see kids—while you are busy playing online games and watching movies (yes, I watch movies too), there is a really messed up situation in the world you need to pay attention to right now. Your very REAL life (the one you don’t get to start over) now depends on you paying attention to what I’m about to tell you, so listen up. . . . The world is about to explode in a big firefight over the earth’s remaining energy (it could even be nuclear war). . . . When lines start forming at gas stations and grocery stores start running out of food because prices have risen too high, you won’t know what to do. That’s ok… I’m not trying to finger wag—it’s all our fault. You are growing up in an energy intensive world with lots of people in it. Humans became too dependent on energy sources that power our cars, food system, electricity and everything that allows us to live the way we do, and now it’s just about run out.”]
• Claudia Willis and Sonja Steptoe, “How to Fix No Child Left Behind,” Time, Thursday, May 24, 2007 [“This year, as the five-year-old law comes up for debate, an unforgiving spotlight will be focused on its impact thus far, including its numerous unintended consequences. Many teachers are enraged by the law's reliance on high-stakes exams that lead schools . . . to focus relentlessly on boosting scores rather than pursuing a broader vision of education.”]
• Pascal Zachary, “The Silver Lining to Impending Doom,” The New York Times, May 6, 2007 [“A curious feature of capitalism is that threats, or more precisely, the human response to them, are economically and technologically stimulating.”]

Note: This is part two of a three-part post. Also sees parts one and three.

A number of passages from the things I read last month stood out as particularly memorable. I wanted to share them and decided to do it outside the boundaries of the reading log proper, in order to avoid extending its already gargantuan length.

* * * * *

From John Michael Greer, “Religion and Peak Oil: The Twilight of Fundamentalism,” The Archdruid Report, May 2, 2007

The contemporary predicament of industrial society, as I suggested in last week’s post, is among other things a religious crisis. The religion of progress, the defining faith of today’s industrial nations, staked its claim to the allegiance of the human spirit on the material benefits it offered its votaries. For the last three centuries, that offer was backed up with an astonishing expansion of wealth that left few lives in the western world unchanged, and gave the religion of progress a strength none of its rivals could easily match.

With the coming of peak oil, however, the religion of progress is headed for a pitfall of its own digging. As cheap abundant energy becomes a thing of the past, the material gifts the great god Progress has heretofore given his votaries will likely be in short supply from here on. As living standards slide, wages fall ever farther behind prices, and whatever technological advances still find their way to the market are restricted by cost to an ever smaller fraction of society, the religion of progress may have little to offer the majority of its current adherents.

Thus the likelihood of major shifts in the religious allegiance of the industrial world, it seems to me, is a factor that needs serious assessment in any attempt to make sense of the deindustrial future. As the aspect of human society that relates our lives to the realm of ultimate concerns, religion sets out the narratives that members of a society use to make sense of the world. As the religion of progress crumbles, its narratives will crumble in turn, and the new faith or faiths that seize its current place in the western imagination will likely have a dramatic impact on how we and our descendants respond to the challenges of a world after oil.

* * * * *

From Graham Strouts, “Preparing for Powerdown,” Energy Bulletin, May 29, 2007

Just to sum up so far and show how we get to this point:

1) Our culture and economy is extraordinarily dependent on an ongoing supply of oil and natural gas;

2) This supply is drying up. Oil discovery peaked in 1964 and we are now using oil 3-4 times as fast as we are finding new fields;

3) This isn’t just an oil peak—it is an all-time energy peak for humanity. Renewables and even nuclear are fundamentally dependent on a functioning fossil-fuel base. With currently only 5% of global energy supplies coming from renewables and a lead-in time of probably decades needed to switch to any new fuel source, we can be sure that the growth economy is coming to an end. Resistance is futile! Any attempts to keep the unsustainable system going for a little bit longer will only make the crash worse when it comes.

Therefore we can conclude:

1) Whatever we do, we will have less energy in the future;

2) A mass public education campaign is urgently needed;

3) Solutions are to be found by creating small-scale, local communities;

4) Each community needs to work towards self-reliance in food, energy and essential trades and services.

We should be investing the still high-quantities of fossil energy that we have to invest in infrastructure that will require very low energy to run; that we need live more locally in every way possible; and that we need to re-invent the economy to be in line with natural systems that are inherently limited by available energy.

* * * * *

From James Atlas, Book Wars (1990), chapter 7, “We Are What We Read”

Our culture is beset by an epidemic of collective amnesia. I know less than the generation of college students before me did, and the generation after me knows even less. We’ve suffered what novelist Cynthia Ozick, lamenting the decline of T.S. Eliot’s reputation, describes as a “cultural lobotomy.” Not only is the literary tradition Eliot represented gone from the scene, but the very idea of tradition has become obsolete. Who cares about “approaches to knowledge” in such a situation? If we as a society can’t agree that there is a body of knowledge to be mastered, much less what that body is, our very continuance as a literate culture will be in doubt. “If we do not provide adequate knowledge to fill those hungry minds and empty schoolroom hours, something else will,” warns [Roger] Shattuck. “That something else may well be deadening or corrupting—estrangement, anomie, idle vandalism, drugs, crime, suicide. These things cannot be said too often.”

Saving our schools isn’t just a matter of improving test scores or teaching children to read. There has to be a vision of what it is we wish them to know.

. . . . It’s pointless to sit around wishing that everyone would just get down to work and read the classics. Things have gone too far. The curricular revolution is entrenched; the students are militant; the class of educated citizens that once prided itself on a knowledge of European culture has dwindled to nothing. No one has described the situation with more elegiac fervor than Cynthia Ozick: “High art is dead. The passion for inheritance is dead. Tradition is equated with obscurantism. The wall that divided serious high culture from the popular arts is breached; anything can count as ‘text.’”

In the generation to come, there won’t even be an audience for this art.

. . . . America is foundering because Americans no longer get a proper education. In their attempts to redress injustice, the radicals of the 1960s unwittingly helped to perpetuate it; the assault on the curriculum has undermined the foundation of learning on which our society rests. The problem could be simply put: What we don’t know will hurt us. And it has.

* * * * *

From Fritjof Capra, Uncommon Wisdom (1988), chapter 6, “Alternative Futures”

The key point of [Hazel Henderson’s] critique is the striking inability of most economists to adopt an ecological perspective. . . . All goods and services are reduced to their monetary values and the social and environmental costs generated by all economic activity are ignored. They are ‘external variables’ that do not fit into the economists’ theoretical models. Corporate economists, Henderson points out, not only treat the air, water, and various reservoirs of the ecosystem as free commodities, but also the delicate web of social relations, which is severely affected by continuing economic expansion. Private profits are made increasingly at public cost in the deterioration of the natural environment and the general quality of life. ‘They tell us about the sparkling dishes and clothes,’ she observes with wry humor, ‘but they forget to mention the loss of those sparkling rivers and lakes.”

To provide economics with a sound ecological basis, Henderson insists, economists will need to revise their basic concepts in a drastic ways. . . . The gross national product, for example, which is supposed to measure a nation’s wealth, is determined by adding up indiscriminately all economic activities associated with monetary values, while all non-monetary aspects of the economy are ignored. Social costs, like those of accidents, litigation, and health care, are added as positive contributions to the GNP, rather than being subtracted. Henderson quotes Ralph Nader’s incisive comment, ‘Every time there is an automobile accident the GNP goes up,’ and she speculates that those social costs may be the only fraction of the GNP that is still growing.

. . . . Henderson also shows with numerous examples how the concepts of efficiency and productivity have been similarly distorted. ‘Efficiency for whom?’ she asks with characteristic breadth of vision. When corporate economists talk about efficiency, do they refer to the level of the individual, the corporation, the society, or the ecosystem?

. . . . Contemporary economists, in a misguided attempt to provide their discipline with scientific rigor, have consistently avoided acknowledging the value system on which their models are based. In doing so, Henderson points out, they tacitly accept the grossly imbalanced set of values which dominates our culture and is embodied in our social institutions. ‘Economics,” she contents, ‘has enthroned some of our most unattractive pre-dispositions: material acquisitiveness, competition, gluttony, pride, selfishness, shortsightedness, and just plain greed.’

* * * * *

From James Howard Kunstler, “The CNU,” Clusterfuck Nation, May 21, 2007

The final blowout of cheap oil is now ending, and the suburban juggernaut is entering its death throes. . . . There will be no more suburban subdivisions (or the accessories and furnishings of them—the strip malls, Big Box pods, and fried-food out-parcels).

. . . . .We will be inhabiting the terrain differently from now on. Whatever intact farmland remains will have to be reserved for feeding ourselves, and the “countryside” that has been regarded as having only scenic or recreational value for so many decades, will have to be both productive and carefully tended by human hands. Our big cities will certainly shrink, contract, and the fortunate ones will redevelop and re-densify at their old cores and around their waterfronts. The part of Philadelphia that we were in last weekend may be about as big as a sustainable city can get—minus the skyscrapers, which, alas, will be obsolete.

The demographic shift to come will be a shocking reversal of what has been going on since the start of the industrial revolution. The small towns and small cities of America—the places that have moldered in desolation and squalor for decades—will be coming back to life, surrounded by an agricultural landscape shaped by human attention.

* * * * *

From Carolyn Baker, “The Spirituality of Collapse,” Speaking Truth to Power, May 8, 2007

For most Americans, heads anchored firmly in the sand, shrugging off anything they are now hearing about “Peak Oil,” still driving their gas-gulping SUVs, reveling in suburban sprawl, and gullibly counting on their pensions and 401Ks to be there when they need them, the notion of civilization’s collapse is still largely relegated to the lunatic fringe. Whatever the problem, they cluelessly argue, technology will find a solution. But millions of those same individuals are far deeper in debt than they were one year ago, and during that year, they have seen the prices of gas, food, and virtually everything else dramatically increase. Some of those Americans have in the past year had to face the reality that they are part of the rapidly-vanishing middle class who are only one paycheck or one catastrophic illness away from financial oblivion—who between mortgage, car payments, monthly bills, childcare, medical expenses, gas prices, and doubling monthly credit card bills, now realize that not only will they not be able to pay for their kids’ college education but that every new day necessitates walking more precariously over an economic tightrope across a gaping precipice with a thousand-foot drop. Those folks know in their bones the reality of collapse—they feel it, smell it, taste it, but may not yet be able to allow the words to pass from their lips. It’s still too horrifying to fully contemplate.

For both groups of Americans, collapse is very bad news. It will mean the end of lifestyles they cannot imagine living without. They have become their lifestyle, and in its absence, they believe they will have no identity—that literally, they will cease to exist. For these folks, collapse will be extremely painful, and worse. Since they have isolated themselves in their hermetically-sealed suburban “dormitories,” they are not likely to survive unless they are willing to radically alter their behavior, and by the time they are, if they are, it may be far too late to do so.

Unquestionably, collapse will be brutal and agonizing. It is, in fact, the cessation of life based on fossil fuels, weather and climate as we have known them, and the money system to which we have become accustomed. It will be physically, economically, emotionally, and spiritually excruciating. It will test human beings, particularly those individuals who are not members of the ruling elite but who enjoy privileged, comfortable lifestyles devoid of sacrifice and inconvenience, beyond anything they could imagine in their worst nightmares. Some will endure; others will perish; in fact, some experts speculate that at least one-third of humans on planet Earth will not survive. Whether collapse occurs slowly or quickly, it will be torturous.

. . . . Paradoxically, collapse may bring meaning and purpose to our lives which might otherwise have eluded us. In our linear, progress-based existence, we rarely contemplate words like “purpose.” With civilization’s collapse, we may be forced to evaluate daily, perhaps moment to moment, why we are here, if we want to remain here, if life is worth living, if there is something greater than ourselves for which we are willing to remain alive and to which we choose to contribute energy. These decisions probably will not be made in the cozy comfort of our homes, but in the streets, the fields, the deserts, the forests, in the eerie echoing of our voices throughout abandoned suburbs, and beside forgotten rivers and trails. Purpose will rapidly cease being about what we can accomplish and will increasingly become more about who we are. In a collapsing world, the so-called “purpose-driven life” will no longer exist. Humans will be “driven” by only one issue: the determination to survive and assist loved ones in surviving. From that quest for survival will emerge authentic purpose, which will undoubtedly not resemble anything we can imagine today.

. . . . Spiritually, we can now begin preparing for the collapse of civilization as we have known it by opening ourselves each day to the “lesser collapses” of civilization that we see around us, such as the loss of a viable, uncorrupted electoral process, the demise of centralized systems and corporations that no one ever thought would go bankrupt, the decay of infrastructure, and the deterioration of institutions such as education, religion, health care, and the legal system. Human beings have had several thousand years to create functional societies, and in many cases, they have. Those civilizations have also collapsed because all civilizations ultimately do. The United States has had 231 years to fashion a sustainable nation. With the death of Abraham Lincoln at the end of the Civil War, corporations and centralized systems triumphed in controlling every aspect of American life, and they have been doing so until the present moment. Thus, not surprisingly, in the 1970s when corporate America knew very well that U.S. oil production had peaked and that within three decades, the nation and the world would be confronting a catastrophic energy crisis, it did absolutely nothing, choosing rather to wallow in the profits of hydrocarbon energy and suppress alternative technology rather than assist the nation in building lifeboats.

For millennia, many indigenous people have described the demise of civilization we are now witnessing as a purification process—a time of rebirth and transformation. Their ancient wisdom challenges us to face with equanimity the collapse that is in process; that is, to hold as much as humanly possible in our hearts and minds, the reality of the pain the collapse will entail, alongside the unimaginable opportunities it offers. As Pema Chödrön would say, “Get to know collapse well.”

Here’s wishing a happy 2007 to whoever’s reading this. The holiday break is now over and I’m back in my classroom, typing these words on my lunch hour. In the past I’ve been seriously and dramatically demotivated about the imminent resumption of my teaching duties after a brief break, but none of them compares to the supreme disdain and inertia that have taken hold of me at present. Who knows how this will turn out? It’s a struggle even to contemplate performing the various activities associated with the job.

On a completely different note, some years ago, after I had already spent several years working through the graduate program in religious studies at Missouri State University, and also the teacher certification program for secondary English, I began to reflect on the kind of scholarship I had pursued. I had already written a long paper examining Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a nihilistic parable about the destructive interplay between objective science and visionary fervor in Western culture. I had written the initial version of a paper, which I later expanded to greater length, that read the biblical book of Isaiah as a horror story in which Yahweh plays the part of a (roughly) Lovecraftian extracosmic monster. I had written a couple of papers about Thomas Ligotti and his works. I had written a paper that argued for the ability of modern horror films with their combination of self-reflexiveness and hardcore gore to serve as spurs to a psychological-spiritual experience of felt transcendence. And there was more. My professors and instructors had all been very generous in allowing me to pursue my horror-oriented interests within the boundaries of their various subject areas (literature, psychology, film studies, philosophy, religion).

It was after I had written all of these papers that I began to notice in retrospect that while I was quite good at using the typical scholarly apparatuses to present my ideas — e.g., the extended paper with its scholarly schema of notes and references — I was completely uninterested in the traditional scholarly goal or approach of pursuing and manufacturing knowledge for its own sake. In fact, I was pretty much unable to undertake any project at all unless it ignited a kind of fire within me — that is, unless it resonated with a kind of internal homing beacon (as it were) that was constantly on the lookout for sympathetic subject matter. This was far more than simply saying that I was interested in some things and uninterested in others. Everybody can say that. All scholars pursue lines of thought and research that interest them, and only enter into their respective fields to begin with because they find them interesting and enjoyable. But I felt as if I were positively driven to attend to certain things and pursue certain projects, and that short of feeling that drive, I was incapacitated from the start.

This led me to start speculating about the concept of “scholarship as poetry,” scholarship pursued in the interest of a kind of visionary drive more akin to the poetic impulse than the traditional scholarly one which values research and the pursuit (and production) of knowledge for its own sake. I couldn’t help viewing the latter approach as dry and dead, at least when I considered trying to adopt it myself.

Then, as often happens, I stumbled across a passage written by another author that articulated exactly what I had been trying to say to myself. It occurred after I had attained the master’s degree and the teaching certificate and had worked as a high school teacher for two or three years. And it happened here at school, at my job, in the classroom where I now sit typing these words. The author was none other than Robert Frost, the 20th century American poet par excellence. I had stumbled across a volume of his complete poetry in the school library and had brought it back to the classroom to browse. The book opened with Frost’s essay “The Figure a Poem Makes,” and I sat mesmerized as I read him state my meaning with vibrant clarity as he first explained his experience of writing poems and then ended with a brilliant distinction between the fundamental working modes of the poet and the scholar:

“For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew. I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from a cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing. The impressions most useful to my purpose seems always those I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time taken, and the conclusion is come to that like giants we are always hurling experience ahead of us to pave the future with against the day when we may want to strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere.

….”But the logic is backward, in retrospect, after the act. It must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader. For it to be that there must have been the greatest freedom of the material to move about in it and to establish relations in it regardless of time and space, previous relation, and everything but affinity.

….”Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge, but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of knowledge; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs when they walk in the fields. No acquirement is on assignment, or even self-assignment. Knowledge of the second kind is much more available in the wild freeways of wit and art. A schoolboy may be defined as one who can tell you what he knows in the order in which he learned it. The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old places where it was organic.”

How well I know that feeling of fullness, of “unexpected supply,” that Frost writes about. It’s awesomely exhilarating when one sits down to write (or to compose music or pursue any other artistic endeavor) and discovers that the fund, the well, the supply of emotional impressions and imagery, is right there for the using and is ready to arise as needed. The thing is, I encounter that experience not only when I write fiction but when I write nonfiction as well. And in that regard I am inclined and even driven, as Frost describes, to remove all types of impressions from their customary contexts and assign a kind of proprietary meaning to them. But in the category of “impressions” I’m including not just sensory and emotional experiences but concepts and data as well. I’m including items drawn from wide-ranging reading in whatever field it is that I’m studying in preparation for writing a given project. I organize these things around a thesis — and indeed I formulate the thesis itself — more in the spirit of, and in the pursuit of the emotional resonance of, poetry or fiction than in the pursuit of scholarly precision. I produce scholarship as a kind of fiction that speaks to me emotionally.

So this probably makes me a lousy scholar. And maybe a lousy fiction writer as well. In any event, here endeth the lesson.

First, my standard proviso: If you haven’t already read the first installment in this series of posts, then please do so before reading this one, since the first one lays the groundwork for what I’m going on about.

But for now, to reiterate briefly: Since childhood I have been overcome from time to time by an experience of intense longing for something that I can neither name nor remember, but that seems bound up with beauty (both natural and artistic), transcendence, infinity, freedom, melancholy, joy, poignancy, nostalgia — a whole host of strangely interrelated moods and cognitions and emotions. It trembles just beyond the edge of attainment and seems to represent the fulfillment of everything I have ever desired, and of everything I have ever intuited about the deep meaning of life. C.S. Lewis experienced the same thing and built his life around it, borrowing the German term “sehnsucht” to refer to it. I sometimes call it the Autumn Longing since it seems bound up with that season — as indeed it was for Lewis, too, who once described the way he became intoxicated with longing at “the Idea of Autumn” upon reading Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin. H.P. Lovecraft was also subject to it, and wrote about it copiously. Most of the classical Romantics knew of it. And so have a great many other authors, as I have only begun to find in recent times.

For several years now I’ve set myself the task of keeping an eye out for writings where other people describe this longing. The very act of reading them fills me with a strange exhilaration and rekindles the longing itself. It’s addictive, let me tell you. I seem to be drawn to such things even when I don’t realize at first that they’re right before me.

Which brings us to Amadeus. As a teenager I discovered the movie version of this play, which had been written some years earlier by the great Peter Shaffer. It positively entranced me. I’ve always been extremely susceptible to the mesmerizing influence of certain films, but Amadeus was and is amongst a handful that head the list. Everything about the movie coheres for me. It seems a Perfect Thing.

And so it was that when I finally looked into the original stage version a few years ago, I was astonished to find that the great longing that has been so important to me features in Amadeus as well. I hadn’t watched the movie for some years, but when I read the script for the play and saw it depicting Salieri’s great longing for the beauty he heard embodied in Mozart’s music, I remembered instantly one of the most powerful scenes in the film, where Salieri looks through a portfolio of Mozart’s work and, recalling the incident decades later, says that he seemed to be “staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at an Absolute Beauty.” And of course when I reached that point in the play script, the same line was there, and it was equally wonderful.

So here, today, I’m reprinting the two scenes where this theme comes out most clearly in the play. The first is from the part of the play where Salieri has just spied upon a young Mozart as the latter flirts rather vilely(much more so in the play than in the movie) with his fiancée Constanze. Then music starts playing in the other room — the scene takes place at an aristocratic gathering at the home of a Baroness, where musicians are assembled to play some of Mozart’s music — and Salieri realizes this vile young man before him has composed music that seems to speak with the voice of God. And God is something Salieri knows about, because as a youth he prayed fervently for God to make him a composer, and promised that if God granted this wish, then he would devote his life to making music in God’s service. Salieri speaks to God frequently, referring to Him formally as “Signore” and thanking Him for the music that he sends to his humble servant. So naturally, when he finds that a vulgar, dirty-minded little man like Mozart (as Salieri sees it, and as Mozart is here portrayed) is the one who has received God’s greatest gift of musical expression, he turns against the deity and consciously works to block Him and destroy Mozart. (This is just another theme that renders the story endlessly absorbing to me.)

The second scene is the one mentioned above, where Salieri looks through a portfolio of Mozart’s music and recognizes the same awesome beauty and longing embodied in it.  The scene departs a bit from focusing on the longing proper in order to deliver an emotional punch based on the impression of awesome power of the absolute reality that shines through Mozart’s music.  As you’ll read, Salieri is overcome and, as it seems, nearly destroyed by the revelation of this power, which is made known via some impressive theatrical and musical flourishes.  Truly, this strikes me as one of the most purely and potently apocalyptic scenes, in the pristine root meaning of the word (the Greek apokalypsis meaning literally “the lifting of the veil”), to appear in modern drama, at least in my limited experience of the field.

This whole thing — the twin package of these two scenes from Amadeus – makes me want to dig further into Shaffer’s works to see whether he pursued such subjects elsewhere. In any case, I hope you enjoy reading all of this material, which as I’ve said is endlessly fascinating to me. It also elicits profound melancholy and, on some days, unbearable despair. And that’s just a natural part of it.

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From Amadeus, Act One, Scene 5

[The Adagio from the Serenade for thirteen wind instruments (K. 361) begins to sound. Quietly and quite slowly, seated in the wing chair, SALIERI speaks over the music.]

SALIERI: It started simply enough: just a pulse in the lowest registers — bassoons and basset horns — like a rusty squeezebox. It would have been comic except for the slowness, which gave it instead a sort of serenity. And then suddenly, high above it, sounded a single note from the oboe.

[We hear it.]

It hung there unwavering, piercing me through, till breath could hold it no longer, and a clarinet withdrew it out of me, and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight it had me trembling. The light flickered in the room. My eyes clouded! [With ever-increasing emotion and vigor] The squeezebox groaned louder, and over it the higher instruments wailed and warbled, throwing lines of sound around me — long lines of pain around and through me. Ah, the pain! Pain as I had never known it. I called up to my sharp old God, “What is this? . . . What?!” But the squeezebox went on and on, and the pain cut deeper into my shaking head until suddenly I was running –

[He bolts out of the chair and runs across the stage in a fever, to a corner, down right. Behind him in the Light Box, the library fades into a street scene at night: small houses under a rent sky. The music continues, fainter underneath.]

dashing through the side door, stumbling downstairs into the street, into the cold night, gasping for life. [Calling up in agony] “What?! What is this? Tell me, Signore! What is this pain? What is this need in the sound? Forever unfulfillable, yet fulfilling him who hears it, utterly. Is it Your need? Can it be Yours? . . .”

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From Amadeus, Act One, Scene 12

[He moves upstage in a fever -- reaches out to take the portfolio on the chair -- but as if fearful of what he mind find inside it, he withdraws his hand and sits instead. A pause. He contemplates the music lying there as if it were a great confection he is dying to eat, but dare not. Then suddenly he snatches at it -- tears the ribbon -- opens the case and stares greedily at the manuscripts within.
Music sounds instantly, faintly, in the theater, as his eye falls on the first page. It is the opening of the Twenty-ninth Symphony, in A major. Over the music, reading it.]

She had said that these were his original scores. First and only drafts of the music. Yet they looked like fair copies. They showed no corrections of any kind. It was puzzling — then suddenly alarming.

[He looks up from the manuscript to the audience: the music abruptly stops.]

What was evident was that Mozart was simply transcribing music completely finished in his head. And finished as most music is never finished.

[He resumes looking at the music. Immediately the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola sounds.]

Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall.

[He looks up again: the music breaks off.]

Here again — only now in abundance — were the same sounds I’d heard in the library.

[He resumes reading, and the music also resumes: a ravishing phrase from the slow movement of the Concerto for Flute and Harp.]

The same crushed harmonies — glancing collisions — agonizing delights.

[He looks up again. The music stops.]

The truth was clear. That Serenade had been no accident.

[Very low, in the theater, a faint thundery sound is heard accumulating, like a distant sea.]

I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at — an Absolute Beauty!

[And out of the thundery roar writhes and rises the clear sound of a soprano, singing the Kyrie from the C Minor mass. The accretion of noise around her voice falls away -- it is suddenly clear and bright -- then clearer and brighter. The light grows bright: too bright: burning white, then scalding white! SALIERI rises in the downpour of it, and in the flood of the music, which is growing ever louder -- filling the theatre -- as the soprano yields to the full chorus, fortissimo, singing its massive counterpoint.

This is by far the loudest sound the audience has yet heard. SALIERI staggers toward us, holding the manuscripts in his hand, like a man caught in a tumbling and violent sea.

Finally the drums crash in below: SALIERI drops the portfolio of manuscripts -- and falls senseless to the ground. At the same second the music explodes into a long, echoing, distorted boom, signifying some dreadful annihilation.

The sound remains suspended over the prone figure in a menacing continuum -- no longer music at all. Then it dies away, and there is only silence.]

First, my standard proviso: If you haven’t already read the first installment in this series of posts, then please do so before reading this one, since the first one lays the groundwork for what I’m going on about.

I assume Poe needs no introduction to most readers, seeing as he — or at least a caricature of him: the alcoholic, opium-addled pedophile who wrote a few bizarre horror tales and a weird poem about a raven — has been a staple of high school literature classes for a very long time now. It still shocks me when I discover literature anthologies dated from only a very few years ago which, in their biographical sketches of Poe, perpetuate the smear campaign that was engineered against him after his death by editor Rufus Griswold and Poe’s mother-in-law, Maria Clemm.

But that’s tangential. As many people know, Poe was a brilliant literary critic in addition to being a poet and fiction writer of genius. He was particularly interested in the ways that various forms of literature achieve their peculiar effects, and in this regard he wrote a couple of passages in his fine essay, “The Poetic Principle,” that touch on the subject of this ethereal longing that interests me so deeply. The essay’s purpose is to identify as nearly as possible the essence of poetry, that is, the principle that motivates poets to write and infuses words with that veritably alchemical ability to affect the reader. Poe ultimately identifies this principle as “simply the Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty,” and says its “manifestation. . . is always found in an elevating excitement of the soul, quite independent of that passion which is the intoxication of the Heart, or of that truth which is the satisfaction of the Reason.” So obviously he’s talking about something sui generis, something that falls into a special category all its own.

In elaborating his ideas about the appeal of the Beautiful — note its elevation to iconic status via the capital “B” — he writes a couple of passages that focus directly on what I am here calling the autumn longing or sehnsucht. As you’ll see if you’ve read my earlier posts in this series, what Poe says interfaces wonderfully with the words of C.S. Lewis and H.P. Lovecraft, the latter of whom, perhaps not incidentally, once called Poe his “god of fiction” and remained a lifelong devotee of this fellow resident of Providence. In the first of these passages I’m quoting, Poe pursues the idea of the “sense of the Beautiful” and, like Lewis and Lovecraft, opines that beauty itself generates the impression of a supernal, transcendent reality lying behind the concrete forms that we call beautiful — the Platonic Form of the Beautiful, we might suppose. In the second passage he lists some of the things “which induce in the Poet himself the true poetical effect.” Although I do not personally, in my own affective experience, follow him when he turns in typical Poe-ish fashion to dwelling upon the supernal “beauty of woman” (not because I don’t find women beautiful, but because I’ve never encountered this particular longing in that connection), I do find it most fascinating that the first half of his catalog mentions many poignant natural beauties that echo similar items listed in Lovecraft’s letters.

* * * * *

“An immortal instinct deep within the spirit of man is thus plainly a sense of the Beautiful. This it is which administers to his delight in the manifold forms, and sounds, and odors and sentiments amid which he exists. And just as the lily is repeated in the lake, or the eyes of Amaryllis in the mirror, so is the mere oral or written repetition of these forms, and sounds, and colors, and odors, and sentiments a duplicate source of delight. But this mere repetition is not poetry. He who shall simply sing, with however glowing enthusiasm, or with however vivid a truth of description, of the sights, and sounds, and odors, and colors, and sentiments which greet him in common with all mankind — he, I say, has yet faded to prove his divine title. There is still a something in the distance which he has been unable to attain. We have still a thirst unquenchable, to allay which he has not shown us the crystal springs. This thirst belongs to the immortality of Man. It is at once a consequence and an indication of his perennial existence. It is the desire of the moth for the star. It is no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements perhaps appertain to eternity alone. And thus when by Poetry, or when by Music, the most entrancing of the poetic moods, we find ourselves melted into tears, we weep then, not as the Abbate Gravina supposes, through excess of pleasure, but through a certain petulant, impatient sorrow at our inability to grasp now, wholly, here on earth, at once and for ever, those divine and rapturous joys of which through the poem, or through the music, we attain to but brief and indeterminate glimpses.

“The struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness — this struggle, on the part of souls fittingly constituted–has given to the world all that which it (the world) has ever been enabled at once to understand and to feel as poetic.”

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“We shall reach, however, more immediately a distinct conception of what the true Poetry is, by mere reference to a few of the simple elements which induce in the Poet himself the true poetical effect. He recognises the ambrosia which nourishes his soul in the bright orbs that shine in Heaven–in the volutes of the flower — in the clustering of low shrubberies — in the waving of the grain-fields — in the slanting of tall eastern trees — in the blue distance of mountains — in the grouping of clouds — in the twinkling of half-hidden brooks — in the gleaming of silver rivers — in the repose of sequestered lakes — in the star-mirroring depths of lonely wells. He perceives it in the songs of birds — in the harp of Aeolus — in the sighing of the night-wind — in the repining voice of the forest — in the surf that complains to the shore — in the fresh breath of the woods — in the scent of the violet — in the voluptuous perfume of the hyacinth — in the suggestive odour that comes to him at eventide from far-distant undiscovered islands, over dim oceans, illimitable and unexplored. He owns it in all noble thoughts — in all unworldly motives — in all holy impulses — in all chivalrous, generous, and self-sacrificing deeds. He feels it in the beauty of woman — in the grace of her step — in the lustre of her eye — in the melody of her voice — in her soft laughter, in her sigh — in the harmony of the rustling of her robes. He deeply feels it in her winning endearments — in her burning enthusiasms — in