Revisiting Elizabeth Willis' Notes from and on a Landscape: Hell, Fire, and Brimstone

 

    although I read this shortly after it came out in 2014, it was nevertheless shocking to read the following passage of this excellent, wonderfully rambling and rumbling essay (and I see in her words and tones the evidence off our familiar heritage)

 "Bertholt Brecht said he had nothing to say to those who did not already know that the world was on fire."

   Last year more of the United States was burning than in any other year on record—7 million acres before the end of August. Kenya and Mongolia were on fire. Every state in Australia was on fire. The peat fires ignited during Siberia's 90-degree afternoons went underground last winter and resurfaced with the thaw.

  How in this world can anyone be excluded from the discourse of fire?

  Those of us who know that the world is on fire have ridden shotgun on the brooms of crones and degenerates, opium eaters and speakers in tongues, poets and tellers of fact, excommunicants and sodomites, insider artists and citizens of the outer dark, malcontents and depressives, urban farmers and dwellers in tents."  

read the whole thing here:

http://www.thevolta.org/ewc42-ewillis-p1.html

   as I read this I continue to wonder how clouded over, distant, doped out, numb and or depressed the minds and spirits of the age have become and I am puzzled by how quickly the liberals have forgotten julian assange, how covid 19 has squashed the climate change movement, how we blew the blew the chance covid 19 lockdown gave us to move towards reducing the emissions and reigning in the garbage, how easily a little bit of economic fear of what amounts to a fake and unsustainable growth rate causes whole social movements to disperse with a fart from the alt right and some squabblers from the dark web, and where has gret thunberg gone? the latter I fear, like most of these other disappearances is the product of a media gone mainline to the pocket of the corporations

  "Keeping in mind a history of the occult, I want to consider more broadly that which is occluded, hidden, overlooked.

   Think for a moment about what obstructs vision. Our vision, as a species and as poets. What distracts us from looking more deeply. What ideological and imaginative barriers lead to an acceptance of the entrenched binaries of party politics, of gender, of race, of religion, of class, of technoculture. What interferes with wilder patterns of inquiry?

   How invested are we, individually and collectively, in the concept of hell—or even in a hell-making device that forces certain individuals to pay for their crimes? And what kinds of progressive thinking does this block, as we live among each other’s crimes, and in the case of global issues like climate change, pay for them collectively, albeit unevenly.

   We—specifically and generally, as creatures and fellow-participants within larger systems—cannot afford for the network of resources that binds us together to be broken by actuarial science."

 please read on...  catch a fire, as marley might have them say

     Reduce your carbon footprint and your mind will follow. (George Clinton.)