Main Feature
Teach to Your Daughters A Dirge
Margaret Miller, Vancouver
Volume 29 Issue 10, 11 & 12 | Posted: December 14, 2015
Vancouver, where I live, is situated in a rain forest, so in a typical summer we have moderate temperatures and some rain – and sometimes a lot of rain. In the summer of 2015, though, we experienced extreme heat with almost no rain for months. In our garden the moss and ferns shriveled and died. The trees were stressed. Neighbours’ lawns turned brown.
In the park down the street the ponds dried up and the fish and turtles living in them died and the birds and animals who fed there suffered. Over the course of the summer we also learned more about the impact of the warm temperatures on salmon and other creatures in our oceans and rivers. Talk on the news was of a “blob” of warm water floating off the coast. We now know that for BC, as in the rest of the world, 2015 was the hottest summer on record.
Vancouver, where I live, is situated in a rain forest, so in a typical summer we have moderate temperatures and some rain – and sometimes a lot of rain. In the summer of 2015, though, we experienced extreme heat with almost no rain for months. In our garden the moss and ferns shriveled and died. The trees were stressed. Neighbours’ lawns turned brown.
In the park down the street the ponds dried up and the fish and turtles living in them died and the birds and animals who fed there suffered. Over the course of the summer we also learned more about the impact of the warm temperatures on salmon and other creatures in our oceans and rivers. Talk on the news was of a “blob” of warm water floating off the coast. We now know that for BC, as in the rest of the world, 2015 was the hottest summer on record.
There seems to be no doubt that our world is in a dire situation – the earth's ecosystems are unravelling, as scientists for decades have predicted they would if we did not make radical changes. At the height of our driest of summers I came upon Extinction Dialogs: How To Live With Death In Mind (Tayen Lane Publishing, 2015), in which Guy McPherson and Carolyn Baker share their insights into how we might walk along the road we now find ourselves on.
McPherson, who is Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona, has studied the scientific data around climate change and the data tells him that not only is “abrupt climate change” is fully underway but that it “is more deadly than asteroids.” He takes the position that we have passed the point of no return; hope for an outcome other than mass extinction is delusion, or what he calls “hopium.”
Carolyn Baker, a former psychologist and professor of psychology and history, concurs with McPherson that the nations of the world may no longer be able to “do something.” For McPherson, “doing something” implies that the nations and the fossil fuel industry will come together and take the monumentally significant co-operative action needed to halt the death spiral we have entered. In her opinion the chances of this are nil.
LAMENTS
McPherson and Baker know that for the many people who have come to the same conclusion this awareness leaves a deep sorrow for the earth and a profound need to grieve for our world. “[All] of humanity has colluded in some manner with this ecocide, and we carry within us tremendous grief, guilt, emptiness, and fear.” The world we are now inhabiting is akin to a “hospice,” and it is critical that we learn to grieve.
Quoting psychotherapist Francis Weller: “If we refuse or neglect the responsibility for drinking the tears of the world, her losses and deaths cease to be registered by the ones meant to be the receptors of that information. It is our job to feel the losses and mourn them. It is our job to openly grieve for the loss of wetlands, the destruction of forest systems, the decay of whale populations, the erosion of soil, and on and on. We know the litany of loss, but we have collectively neglected our emotional response to this emptying of our world. We need to see and participate in grief rituals in every part of this country.” As part of her work McPherson facilitates grief rituals to help people deal with their pain.
I think that the tradition of lament poetry can be a valuable part of this process. Lament is a deep, ancient, and universal form of human expression that has been created in diverse cultures and faith traditions. People familiar with the Hebrew Bible know that it contains a treasury of lament poetry – they are found in the psalms, the book of Lamentations, and elsewhere.
Laments include individual and communal pleas to God for relief from illness or human-created situations like war or social injustice. Laments cut through illusion and denial and viscerally announce that the state of the world is not right. In laments the speaker may ask questions but receive no answers; there may be no hope. God may remain silent. In the book of Lamentations in particular there is a deeply felt absence of God.
While examples are limited, we do see in the work of biblical writers laments for the suffering earth. Because of human actions, and particularly war and social injustice, the earth mourns.
How long will the land mourn
And the grass of every field wither?
For the wickedness of those who dwell in it
the beasts and the birds are swept away,
because men said, “He will not see our latter end.” (Jeremiah 12:4)
The earth mourns and withers,
the world languishes and withers;
the heavens languish together with the earth.
The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants;
for they have transgressed the laws,
violated the statutes,
broken the everlasting covenant. (Isaiah 24:4-5)
(Also see Jeremiah 12:10-11; Isaiah 24:7-8, 19-21, 23a; Isaiah 33:7-9)
The lament tradition continues to be used in a range of different contexts. In her book Lyrics of Lament: From Tragedy to Transformation (Fortress Press, 2010), theologian Nancy C. Lee explores how the tradition has been adapted by the African-American community, by holocaust survivors, victims of AIDS, and many others. The lament form allows the speaker in a wide range of cultures and times to express deep suffering and grief.
WENDELL BERRY
For the past several years we have been seeing laments for suffering nature surfacing in work of contemporary poets. Here are a few examples:
In “1988,” Wendell Berry says:
It is the destruction of the world
in our own lives that drives us
half insane, and more than half.
To destroy that which we were given
in trust, how will we bear it?
It is our own bodies that we give
to be broken, our bodies
existing before and after us
in clod and cloud, worm and tree
that we driving or driven, despise
in our haste to die, our country
spent in shiny cars speeding
to junk, To have lost, wantonly,
the ancient forests, the vast grasslands
is our madness, the presence
in our very bodies of our grief.
(From This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems [Counterpoint, 2013])
This sense that the earth’s suffering is reflected in our own bodily suffering is echoed in Pope Francis’ recent encyclical: “‘God has joined us so closely to the world around us that we can feel the desertification of the soil almost as a physical ailment, and the extinction of a species as a painful disfigurement.’” And as Carolyn Baker says, “Many of us register the abuse of the Earth in our own bodies.”
Catherine Owen’s “Litany” tolls a mournful and mounting roll call of extinction:
For a fad in feathers
in eighteenth-century milliners’ shops
the Carolina parakeet
For feline-prowess
in a mouseless lighthouse
the Stephen’s Island wren
For Mr. Odell’s crackshot
the Jamaican yellow macaw
For Ketil Ketilsson’s
left boot
the last Great Auk
For the palate of emperors
the auroch
For the hunger of sailors
the Stellar’s sea cow
For the ravaging of forests,
the despoiling of beaches,
the tainting of waters
the Rapa snail, the Israeli gerbil
and the hare-lipped suckerfish
For the cultivation of machinery
in rock quarries
a tiny wild pansy and other
statistics of rootlessness
(From The Wrecks of Eden [Wolsak and Wynn, 2001])
In “Zone: <le Détroit>” Di Brandt bewails how globalization and unbridled consumerism, and in particular our worship of the car, has wreaked havoc on North American land and creatures:
after Stan Douglas
I
Breathing yellow air
here, at the heart of the dream
of the new world,
the bones of old horses and dead Indians
and lush virgin land, dripping with fruit
and the promise of wheat,
overlaid with glass and steel
and the dream of speed:
all these our bodies
crushed to appease
the 400 & 1 gods
of the Superhighway,
NAFTA, we worship you,
hallowed be your name,
here, where we are scattered
like dust or rain in ditches,
the ghosts of passenger pigeons
clouding the silver towered sky,
the future clogged in the arteries
of the potholed city,
Tecumseh, come back to us
from your green grave,
sing us your song of bravery
on the lit bridge over the black river,
splayed with grief over the loss
of its ancient rainbow coloured
fish swollen joy.
Who shall be fisher king
over this poisoned country,
whose borders have become
a mockery,
blowing the world to bits
with cars and cars and trucks and electricity and cars,
who will cover our splintered
bones with earth and blood,
who will sing us back into –
(“Zone: <le Detroit>” from Now You Care, © Di Brandt, 2003. Reprinted with the permission of Coach House Books.)
And in Susan McCaslin’s “Dank Tureen (a dream about global warming)” we feel the pain of the swirling mass of God’s creatures, helpless casualties of ecological desecration.
Swimming the Australian crawl in a dank tureen,
the sides’ sleek stainless steel without traction or edge
Treading water, slowly treading in a heavy dark
your once cold stiff fingers pumping blood
in a luxuriousness that gathers to a lukewarm
rush now becoming spa-like disarming soup
where you are swimming with the glorious beasts
the polar bear whose whiteness is God and the
shimmering fishes who have been here before you
and can teach you a few things about swimming
and your mother and father and sisters and brothers
and the Christ-Sophia floating on her cross upholding others
and the Buddha with his empty begging bowl afloat
and the homeless exiles, and deadbeat strangers
and the corporate heads with their swirling logos
circling toward the miasmic centre of a vortex
and the goats and cows and dogs and wolves
lapping with you faithfully round and round the rim
their large panting tongues and solemn eyes—
and this goes on all day, all night, and on and all till
you all scald and drown or drowning wake together
(From The Disarmed Heart [St. Thomas Poetry Series, 2014])
HOW IT HELPS
So where does lament poetry leave us? How can it be of help? It seems to me that intellectually we may know about mass species extinction, warming oceans, and climate change. We may have the facts about what is underway and be confident that we have found ways to come to terms with them. But the harrowing nature of the problem seems to have made many of us susceptible to complacency and numbness.
We have learned to disavow our knowledge of the full impact of our lifestyles and actions on the natural world and on poor workers in countries like Bangladesh and Guatemala. As Pope Francis says, it is the poor of the earth who are being disproportionately impacted by pollution, climate change, depletion of fresh water and we are now hearing “both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”
We desperately need to grieve, and laments help us break through whatever barriers we have erected to feeling our own pain and the pain of others. From that place of empathy we may, paradoxically, find joy; with joy we can lovingly support and encourage each other and continue to take steps to help the world. And knowing this, that many of us will continue to put love into action, is what gives me hope in these most difficult of times.
Margaret Miller lives on the west coast, where she continues her studies in theology and Hebrew Bible and writes on topics around ecology and the arts.
Margaret Miller, Vancouver