My current time/space coordinate is 2011 Lynnwood, WA, USA, just before the Autumn Equinox, on approach to the Libra New Moon. Planet Earth, in the solar system sometimes identified as Sol. My brother has a telescope with which he watched the full moon a few days back from the second story back deck of my family's home. The house is a standard-issue late-1970's suburban house, white, with a cracked cement driveway leading to a two-car garage, half of which has been taken over by storage. There's a rotting basketball hoop overhanging the driveway. The house, which my parents have lived in since I was an infant, is wooden, with aluminum siding, and is situated near the end of a cul-de-sac in a quiet suburban neighborhood.
The neighborhood is comprised of several housing developments: the one my family lives in is the oldest, 30-odd years old now, while up the hill is a slightly newer development consisting of perhaps twenty or thirty single-family two-story homes, all of them of essentially the same design, though not identical. The rest of the immediate area used to be undeveloped forest, except for a creepy old abandoned church with a large clearing in front of it at the top of the hill, which everyone avoided and naturally assumed was haunted. That church was torn down long ago now, along with most of the surrounding trees. In their place are more developments: completely identical houses which, though probably about the same in terms of square footage, are more compact than the older houses, taller but more cramped, with very little in the way of yard space. Behind my parents' house is a ten-foot green belt along which squirrels, birds, and the occasional raccoon still roam, but beyond that is more new housing, each house more identical to the others than the others.
This destruction and homogenization of the surrounding lands continues as one leaves the immediate neighborhood: what were once expansive lands of pine and fir trees are now strip malls, car dealerships, Costcos and Starbucks and Targets. The same as everywhere. This tale of bland suburban expansion is hardly unique -- it's happening everywhere, at least in the United States, 2011 Earth, third planet of the Sol system. What is fascinating about all this isn't the sameness of it all, but rather the capacity for uniqueness in this, the least interesting of all possible scenarios. This expanding suburban nightmare is eternal and necessary to the completeness of the universe, yet fragile and fleeting, as all moments in space and time are, and in this realization we can find beauty, hope, and deep and profound meaning.
Thinking about the endless expansionism and destruction of ecological richness which typifies the present-day world often fills me with a deep and paralyzing depression. How can we, as a society, as a species, hope to survive, if we relentlessly pollute and destroy our environment, at a pace rivaled only by the meteor strike which we assume was the cause of the last great "extinction event" on this planet, some 60 million years ago? When we willingly and intentionally choose this extinction? When the mechanisms we've established to support our day-to-day lives are tantamount to the rape and murder of the planet which supports our lives?
Well, perhaps we can't. That's the answer I keep coming back to, and from my current subjective perceptional viewpoint, the vast American Suburbs, which are rapidly losing their plurality and becoming The Suburb, an enormous strip-mall without border or end, it's hard to argue otherwise. And yet, would the utter collapse of our society be such a terrible thing? In the short term, of course it would, of course, of course, of course. Panic, pandemonium, famine, death, misery. How many people are on the planet now? Six billion? Seven? Eight? I can't keep track. The count increases every time I look away. In a true civilization-collapse scenario, how many of those would die? Half? Three quarters? More? Billions, in any case. Unfathomable despair. We're running out of drinkable water. As we cut down more and more trees, which are the lungs of the planet, we run the risk of running out of breathable air. And yet.
In untended parts of the suburbs, the pavement cracks. My parents' driveway hasn't been maintained or repaired in a very long time. Weeds sprout between the cracks. Green things. As more species become extinct by the day, pigeons thrive in the inner cities. Cockroaches, rats, mosquitoes, fruit flies: these creatures we see as disgusting, even hazardous, teem and multiply. And the smog over the cities refracts the light of sunsets in the most brilliant way. If one believes, as I do, that each instant is an eternity, complete and whole in itself, these broken instants of our failing civilization are cause for celebration. Touch your lips against the rusting metal of an abandoned train track. It is forever, as are we, even as we fade into memory. Whose memory, I don't know. But catalogued in the annals of existence, fragments of a universe which, if it is everything, must be comprised of all possible eventualities, even pre-apocalypse Lynnwood, Washington, USA. It's ok. We're all here together, in that eternity. Hold onto your loved ones, but not too tight. We're all fading away, and never will.
No comments:
Post a Comment