Where are the climate stories?
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.Climate stories. Climate, ESG engagement, one of largest corporates in world YoYos.
I have started reading Amitav Ghosh. Ghosh argues amongst many things that the climate crisis is a crisis of imagination and culture.
Climate stories
Climate, ESG engagement, one of largest corporates in world
YoYos
Links: AI
He notes - as many creatives have - the relative lack of climate narratives.
We can examine this in the idea of “narrative plenitude”. The mainstream can produce 99 forgettable poor rom-coms, and one memorable one. There is limited pressure as there are so many of these stories.
There is only, perhaps, one horror story that also examines the immigrant diaspora experience (shout out to my friend Chi’s film).
The pressure on that storytelling is great because there is only one story. That story can be crushed in many ways.
Why have there been so few climate plays? (I would also add why have there been so few financial market plays?)
Ghosh argues:
I too have been preoccupied with climate change for a long time, but it is true of my own work as well, that this subject figures only obliquely in my fiction. In thinking about the mismatch between my personal concerns and the content of my published work, I have come to be convinced that the discrepancy is not the result of personal predilections: it arises out of the peculiar forms of resistance that climate change presents to what is now regarded as serious fiction.
Ghosh roots his arguments in
how we view the “improbable” and
how the novel has a strong root in gradualism and believability (if one swerves from the Tristam Shandy --- Borges roots of modern novel)
and the stories of colonial power, or elite power
He writes:
“humans have become geological agents, changing the most basic physical processes of the earth.” I would go further and add that the Anthropocene presents a challenge not only to the arts and humanities, but also to our commonsense understandings and beyond that to contemporary culture in general. There can be no doubt, of course, that this challenge arises in part from the complexities of the technical language that serves as our primary window on climate change. But neither can there be any doubt that the challenge derives also from the practices and assumptions that guide the arts and humanities. To identify how this happens is, I think, a task of the utmost urgency: it may well be the key to understanding why contemporary culture finds it so hard to deal with climate change. Indeed, this is perhaps the most important question ever to confront culture in the broadest sense—for let us make no mistake: the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.
Throughout history these branches of culture have responded to war, ecological calamity, and crises of many sorts: why, then, should climate change prove so peculiarly resistant to their practices? From this perspective, the questions that confront writers and artists today are not just those of the politics of the carbon economy; many of them have to do also with our own practices and the ways in which they make us complicit in the concealments of the broader culture. For instance: if contemporary trends in architecture, even in this period of accelerating carbon emissions, favor shiny, glass-and-metal-plated towers, do we not have to ask, What are the patterns of desire that are fed by these gestures? If I, as a novelist, choose to use brand names as elements in the depiction of character, do I not need to ask myself about the degree to which this makes me complicit in the manipulations of the marketplace? In the same spirit, I think it also needs to be asked, What is it about climate change that the mention of it should lead to banishment from the preserves of serious fiction? And what does this tell us about culture writ large and its patterns of evasion?
In a substantially altered world, when sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York, and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museumgoers turn to the art and literature of our time, will they not look, first and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance? And when they fail to find them, what should they—what can they—do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight? Quite possibly, then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.
This idea of what en masse we find as “believable” rings true to me in many senses. So called fantasy and science fiction have been assigned genre tags. And what happens in “real life” often seems too extraordinary to be placed in a typical modern novel. The story or charcter in a novel has to be believable enough. A writer can not place too many extraordinary happenings in a novel without a reader dismissing them.
I would add there is an element of when the story is too large for our imagination. We have trouble imagining the world of the gods (or at least today we do). We can not fully comprehend a geological change. Standing atop a volcano, or the enormity of a glacier, of the Sahara desert… is an experience we mostly cannot live 24 / 7.
Yet, surely this is where story can take us.
Perhaps we need to follow Tristam Shandy to Borges to magic realism to these forms of our arts, rather than the Jane Austen forms of novels.
As an side, recently, one writer has critiqued1 the fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson. The critique centres - IMO - on how at the level of the sentence, Sanderon’s writing is not unusual. (See end links). Brandon has a very gracious response incluing this passage:
“…let me say one thing. You, my friends, are not boring or lame. In Going Postal, one of my favorite novels, Sir Terry Pratchett has a character fascinated by collecting pins. Not pins like you might think--they aren't like Disney pins, or character pins. They are pins like tacks used to pin things to walls. Outsiders find it difficult to understand why he loves them so much. But he does.
In the book, pins are a stand-in for collecting stamps, but also a commentary on the way we as human beings are constantly finding wonder in the world around us. That is part of what makes us special. The man who collects those pins--Stanley Howler--IS special. In part BECAUSE of his passion. And the more you get to know him, or anyone, the more interesting you find them. This is a truism in life. People are interesting, every one of them--and being a writer is about finding out why.
In that way, the ability to make Stanley interesting is part of what makes Pratchett a genius, in my opinion. That's WRITING. Not merely using words. It’s what I aspire to be able to do. People are wonderful, fascinating, brilliant balls of walking contradiction, passion, and beauty.”
There is a level of loveliness in the well formed or beautiful sentence. But to give excessive weight to that lens of style is to miss the point of story. Of fantastical story, of story that can show us another way of living. One can argue at the level of society this is vital and more vital than a beautiful sentence.
With this echo, I went to see Complicite’s rendering of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Polish: Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych) at the Barbican theatre and touring.
This is a type of climate crisis play. Rendered in Complicite style the imaginative leaps of theatre takes the performance to a different place than the unreliable narrator in the novel. Ths style is charcter narration, with occasional audience breakout, immersed with visual physical images created by body, sound, digital. The performance is visceral and description only captures some of it. This trailer gives a slight sense of it.
The show and the novel are still rooted in character – albeit an eccentric one, and a marginalised one.
My sometime colloborator, David Finnigan has argued that all art is climate art now. We are making art with that backdrop.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead has climate and the value of animals at its beating heart but arguably tackles the issue at an angle. Still through character and story. And humour. So I’m very glad it adds to our works of climate stories, because we seem to have so few.
This week, I engaged with one of the largest corporates in the world and had a meeting with their head of ESG. Taking a step back, this company is probably doing more than the average - arguably investing money ($2bn in climate innovation), tackling more, innovating more than the average person, even than the average country, or organisation. One can argue that is as it should be. And investors like myself, part owners of the company should be holding such corporates to account. But, we were challenged to reflect on how much noise - or to be cynical - how much whining there is from some quarters, and how there is so little doing from those same quarters.
It’s one reason I advocate using your agency and doing… creating, making, building… solutions focused more than complaint focused.
Looking at crazy things humans do, I was watching some competitive YoYo with O. I think I prefer the 2 Yo-Yos (3A or 4A), but this recent 1A performance by Evan Nagao. encompasses the hard “DNA” trick behind his head. He was in the NetFlix doc, “We Are The Champions”.
The other 3A / 4A person to watch is Hajime Miura:
The world of AI still going at amazing speeds. You need to keep it in mind, people.
Links:
https://www.wired.com/story/brandon-sanderson-is-your-god/
And Brandon’s reply: https://www.reddit.com/r/brandonsanderson/comments/1200dzk/on_the_wired_article/