Where we are

London Fields outdoor Pool - The Guardian. Photo by Linda Nylind

I was doing my 1500 metres in the pool yesterday, lap, swim, turn, lap, roll, stretch, concentrating on my breathing, thinking of what novelist, inventor, academic, Eric Willmot said to me on the phone the other day, talking of his recently written essay on human and planetary survival. I had read the pages he sent me, describing our progress of us all, the twenty third species of human on this planet..the story aint all pretty. Well, I think we know that, but where do we go from here? We seem to be running out of time. Eric is convinced that the global warming we are experiencing is a prelude to another ice age.

Ice Age (with a black hole in it as well!)

Our nearest refuge, that is, nearest to our earthly conditions in toto, is Venus, but that planet is a green house gaseous inferno. So that’s out. Another solar system like our little ‘Goldilocks zone’ around the sun, surrounds the star Gliese 581, but that is twenty light years away, beyond our capacity to reach in all our lifetimes. Without some sort of quantum leap in our capacity to travel, our interplanetary air bus is going to run out of gas, if not time.

And even if we get there Gliese 581 may not be quite for us. It hasn’t sent us any kind of signal, let alone a welcome email they want us over for any holiday coming. We better find out then. We could send the executives of Fanny Mae and Freddi Mac and a few bank presidents, the whole of Wall Street in fact, on ahead to check it out, investigate the real estate and other markets and set up for us. In the meantime, we’ll sit it out and wait down here, glued to the telly for messages, filling our neighbourhoods (and the silent universe) with the sounds of humanity, eating, drinking and getting inordinately merry, all those goings on, as we use up the planet we’re whizzing around on.

Eric has some ideas on what we can and can’t do. Are we facing extinction? Are we staring into the abyss, not so blissfully un-a-ware as impotently more-than-scared? Rabbits in the headlights of some rogue comet or asteroid heading relentlessly our way? What should we do? Recycle our rubbish, turn off our appliances, walk to work, invest in nuclear reactors using Thorium (pronounced /ˈθɔːriəm/ wikipedia tells me).

Well, I think the first thing we should do is get up to speed on the actual conditions, educate ourselves. Get to know our options (even if the picture aint pretty). We’ve faced threats before – Hitler, the Cold War, the nuclear holcaust. Let’s face this one, form neighbourhood groups to discuss intra and interplanetary survival.

Well..okay…let’s do nothing then..just sit and wait and watch it happen. Let’s climb into the warming pot we call this world and boil slowly and then when the fuel burns out, slowly descend down into that big freeze.

Parodical Influences

I grew up watching Superman, The Cisco Kid, O.S.S., hearing war stories, chasing down moth-eaten army uniforms back when milk arrived in a horse and cart, marvelling at the colour, style of actual coca leaf content in Coke bottles, blinking at motor cycles, Dick Van Dyke falling over a couch, cowboy films shot in daylight B&W and in colour at night, or at my father’s home-grown vegetables. I was born with words in my mouth -’gimme-that’ , ‘how-dare-you’ and later I guess ‘what-the-fuck’- ideas as fixed and eternal these days it seems as the Iraq war. My world grew into Kidnapped, bicycles, desert boots, Seventy Seven Sunset Strip, DisneyLand, Rear Window,Psycho, Lawrence of Arabia, and the senseless annual anxiety of packing the car at holiday time, the essence of each and every moment forever mysterious. Parodies of life or art weren’t even an option. I knew the Beatles before the Monkees, Bogart before Belmondo, and can’t say I either recall the Summer of ‘42 before it was an idea a moviemaker or some clown from Mad magazine conjured or parodied, or whether it co-existed at the same time in the northern hemisphere in some dinky toy mind like George W. Bush’s. I believe I’m not alone in being bewildered by the incoherence of everything, the products, images and texts that have surrounded my life from birth setting out to arrest me. My natural river environment in the far southern climes was severely challenged by the commercial and cultural crap that suddenly appeared to blot out my childhood but I can no more claim that I knew or regretted this then than I can claim that my natural world was not a parody of some story I was told by my mother, any more than I can pretend the baked sidewalk I stood on hearing JFK was dead, or pink socks on the rock ‘n rollers, were moments, things or events in themselves sent by whoever up there to make life even more dangerous or curious than it normally is, or that any of it was a direct result of the existence of the industrial military complex, Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry even. I simply didn’t know jack shit of politics, origins or influence.

And boy, whew! If that wasn’t enough.. then there was George Bush’s stuttering but heartfelt concern for life and death around the world – he was so worked up about us all – everything so pretty and organically interconnected, woven into beautiful cordant threads – take that great general valuelessness! We all were held held dear by so many in the years on from that day when morality lost its head and footing on the street, that guy left the back of the Limo. He didn’t do it deliberately, did he? We all motored on blinded by camera flashes thinking of that spot.. when, what the…? Hope? A brand new day? Broad daylight?