I remember when it was gauche to talk about the end of the world. Talking about collapse—social collapse, empire collapse, climate collapse—made you a crazy person.
I remember just how crazy-sounding it was because my mother used to horrify me— she ranted about all the forms of collapse to come (social! empire! climate!). A leftist with complicated feelings about gun rights, she suspected that one day we might have to take up arms against a tyrannical America.
This was the 80s and 90s, the years of Western democratic smugness. We’d ended history and even the velvetest revolutions were in the rearview.
But slowly, then all at once, collapse has become commonplace. Now we’re all ranting: Troy really is burning. And there are too many Troys to keep track of—from conspiracies that would’ve shocked John of Patmos to very real endings of very real worlds. And all sorts of stopping points between.
Ordinary Apocalypse
What I’m interested in: How we keep living and creating in this time of collapse. And how to disentangle our apocalypse narratives from those forms of actual collapse—the destruction of climate and peoples and livable futures.
There’s a certain apocalyptic thinking embedded deep in Western thought—a way of seeing the world that stretches from religious zealots to urban preppers and climate doomers. We hear it in the belief that things are destined to destruct, that they need to destruct for something good and whole to be reborn.
I think we’re all a bit susceptible to these ways of thinking. I know I am.
I’ve been wrestling with these ideas in a series of essays that I’m hoping to shape into a book. And now in this moment of… whatever this is… I want to write my way through these threads in real time. To pull apart those narratives that shape our thinking about endings, how they can obscure the actuality of the current collapse. And how all this apocalyptic thinking feels like a form of societal-level suicidal thinking.
These will be weekly-ish letters and interviews on ways that we might stay alive to these endings and keep going.
Thank you for reading!
p.s. okay the whole Troy burning thing is already tenuous, but I couldn’t let it go without slipping in Sinéad O’Connor’s version of it. And her line:
There is no other Troy
For me to burn
(The only right answer to Yeats’s “Was there another Troy for her to burn?”)
I sincerely look forward to seeing where this leads. I'm interested in the idea of the necessary and vital power of creative energy. The thought that engaging in those efforts, even when they don't feel inspired, can be like tilling the soil, before the seeds are gathered.