Survival is Insufficient
On the function of art in the anthropocene
A few years ago, when I was on three months of bed rest after a severe break to my leg and ankle, I read the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert. The publisher describes the book like this:
Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us. In The Sixth Extinction, two-time winner of the National Magazine Award and New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, accompanying many of them into the field: geologists who study deep ocean cores, botanists who follow the tree line as it climbs up the Andes, marine biologists who dive off the Great Barrier Reef. She introduces us to a dozen species, some already gone, others facing extinction, including the Panamian golden frog, staghorn coral, the great auk, and the Sumatran rhino. Through these stories, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy; as Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.
It was a stunning, terrifying book, and deeply important. I thought of it yesterday when I came across this series of Instagram slides from Alice Sparkly Kat on Instagram. They read:
“We live during the sixth major extinction of life on earth and, yet, for the time being, we carry on living. / We live with extraordinary climate grief, and yet we are still alive. / This doesn’t make sense. / It feels like it must be a paradox. / This paradox is the paradox of living with grief.”
Since Kolbert’s book was published, we’ve faced a plague that has now left over a million people dead in the US alone. Climate change is rapidly accelerating, and the planet is becoming more and more inhospitable to humans.
MARÍA FERNANDA ESPINOSA GARCÉS (Ecuador), President of the General Assembly of the UN in 2019 warned the Assembly that “we are the last generation that can prevent irreparable damage to our planet.” We have fewer than 10 years to prevent irreversible damage to the Earth, meanwhile, billionaires are focusing their resources on space, already having given up on this planet.
School children are being slaughtered in school and no one will do anything. Even the police won’t protect them. And even if we aren’t in school, we apparently aren’t safe in synagogues or grocery stores, movie theaters, or shopping centers either.
Roe v. Wade will soon be overturned, effectively banning abortion in many states, including my own. Hundreds of anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced already this year as legislators attempt to turn the clock back on equality and progress.
It is very hard to put one foot in front of the other with the weight of this collective grief, much less create anything.
And yet.
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
– Bertolt Brecht, “German War Primer,” The Svenborg Poems
I’ve always loved this Brecht poem. The collection was composed while in exile in Denmark and published in 1939. The dark times of 1930s Germany would soon turn into war and genocide. I think every generation that goes through dark times must think theirs is “the darkest timeline,” but I do take comfort in how many have survived before us.
Because the thing is, what choice do we have? Even if we are doomed to a looming extinction, in the meantime, there’s still work to be done.
Two quotes keep coming to my mind, both from the Jewish text Pirkei Avot (Ethics of our Fathers), from the Mishnah, a collection of exegetical material embodying the oral tradition of Jewish law, and forming the first part of the Talmud.
Rabbi Tarfon writes, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
Rabbi Hillel used to say: “If I am not for me, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, then when?”
I am no Talmudic scholar, but both quotes bring me comfort. The first is a reminder that, like Moses who never saw the Promised Land, we must still labor toward the goal that is for the highest good of all, and we cannot put this burden down, even when it is difficult. Learn to rest, not to quit. The second quote reminds us to look beyond our own ego but to look to the larger community.
It’s said that the West is a society of individualism focused on our personal freedoms, rather than being focused on our obligations to others. I think the pandemic has proven that the majority of people are not willing to take even the smallest steps to protect others, and this is literally killing us. There’s no time to waste. We must act and work toward change today.
And art is a necessary part of that work. It might feel futile sometimes, and I’m not arguing for creating art instead of more direct action for change, but I believe, of course I do, that creativity and making art is necessary to keep us alive. Not only does art help us process our lives individually, but it allows us to come together collectively, and record history. It is also a comfort, a way of knowing that not only are we not alone, but many others have been here before, years ago.
Creating something, whether a poem, an essay, or even a newsletter, makes me feel more hopeful. I’m a Sagittarius; it’s in my nature to skew optimistic. And, apparently, there’s a science to hope, and it can be learned. Dr. Chan Hellman and his colleagues at the Hope Research Center at the University of Oklahoma, Tulsa have been studying hope for years, and believe that when you are hopeful about the future, you set goals to help bring that future about, and identify pathways that let you strategically plan how to achieve that goal, and maintain the mental willpower to follow those pathways.
One of my favorite novels is Station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel, a post-apocalyptic novel set 20 years after a global pandemic, which was recently adapted into a miniseries on HBO. (I both loved and hated the changes made in the adaptation, but that’s a topic for another day.) One of the enduring lines of the book is “Survival is insufficient,” a motto of The Traveling Symphony, the theater troupe that the protagonist Kirsten is part of. They travel around performing Shakespeare plays for survivors and believe that art is necessary for survival, even in a dystopian world. In many ways, the novel is about the function of art, and what it can—and can’t—do, especially in a world where nothing is as it once was, and it can be difficult to have hope when so many live with immense trauma, and yet Shakespeare lives on and offers immense solace.
After all, isn’t art where we turn when times get tough? Whether it’s a song at a funeral that offers some comfort, a poem we turn over and over in our mind, or a painting we put up in our house so we can stare at it as much as we want, we seek the ineffable in art. And we always will.
So I keep trying to move forward, blasting my favorite songs, saying prayers (but prayers paired with meaningful action), putting pen to paper, and memorizing poems.
Recommended Reading:
Talia Lavin’s wonderful newsletter, The Sword and the Sandwich, particularly the latest edition from Tuesday, “Hopeless and Hopeful.” I highly recommend subscribing to Lavin’s newsletter, too. She is also the author of one of my favorite books of 2021, Culture Warlords, which I wrote about in my roundup of 2021 faves.
If you are interested in further reading about Pirkei Avot, check out this illustrated version. The Sages, graphic novel style!
Tracking Wonder: Reclaiming a Life of Meaning and Possibility in a World Obsessed with Productivity by Jeffery Davis (review forthcoming, but relevant to this discussion here). In this book, Davis examines a quality that all creatives have—wonder, classifying it as “the one radical quality that has led exemplary people from all walks of life to move toward the fruition of their deepest dreams and wildest endeavors.” I was initially drawn to this book because, in a personality test I took for work, “Wonder” was identified as one of my “Working Geniuses,” or qualities that I excel in. Makes sense. I think the way we look at the world is part of what makes people creative.
Lyz Lenz’s recent newsletter Men Yell At Me, especially a recent edition, “We Keep Telling the Same Story” on #MeToo and Amber Heard
I’m really liking the new TV show adaptation of The Time Traveler’s Wife on HBO, based on the novel by Audrey Niffenegger.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer “Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, and as a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings--asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass--offer us gifts and lessons, even if we've forgotten how to hear their voices.”
Another newsletter. Roxane Gay writes The Audacity, and I loved her commencement speech for the School of Visual Arts, “On Seeing,” she recently shared:
“See the strange, remarkable beauty of the world. See the people in your lives and take care with those relationships. Take care with yourself. See a future where you can make the art you are most called to make. See a world where art matters because I assure you, it does, now more than ever.”
I’d love to hear from you in the comments about what you’re doing to keep hope alive in these difficult days.
This post includes affiliate links. I may earn a small commission when you click on the links and purchase something, at no additional cost to you.
ANDY: Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. From the movie, “The Shawshank Redemption “