Staging the End of the World: Theatre in a Time of Climate Crisis 9781350309913, 9781350309951, 9781350309944, 9781350309937

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Staging the End of the World

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Staging the End of the World Theatre in a Time of Climate Crisis Brian Kulick

METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Brian Kulick, 2023 Brian Kulick has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Ben Anslow Cover image: Rain Dance, copyright 2003, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison. Courtesy of the artists. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3503-0991-3 PB: 978-1-3503-0995-1 ePDF: 978-1-3503-0993-7 eBook: 978-1-3503-0992-0 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For my mother, Karen Fixler, who brought me into the world and introduced me to all its wonders.

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Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: On transforming our social imaginary

1

Part One  This is the way the world ends in ancient times 1 2 3

Lessons among the ruins; or what survives and why: How the cultural detritus of the ancients can be a kind of first philosophy Slouching toward Kurukshetra: A brief look at the Mahābhāratas of Bhāsa, Bharati, and Brook Diasporas old and new: What Euripides’ Children of Herakles can teach us about the coming climate wars and resulting refugee crisis

19 29 50

Part Two  This is the way the world ends in the age of faith 4 5

6

Noahs, arks, and floods: Why medieval mystery plays still have something to say about our own modern-day end of days Shipwrecks, recursion, and the necessity of deep ecology: Surviving Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the breaking of our Anthropocene ways On earthquakes and metaphors: Bouilly’s Disaster of Lisbon and the Fukushima variation

71

89 113

Part Three  This is the way the world ends in modern times 7 8 9

Plague’s threat to our immune and belief systems: A look at Pushkin’s A Feast in Time of Plague A canary in the bourgeois coal mine: Part one. Pollution and direct critique in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People A canary in the bourgeois coal mine: Part two. Denial and indirect critique in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard

131 150 164

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Part Four  This is the way the world ends now 10 Ethics during dark times: Brecht’s He Who Says Yes and He Who Says No 11 On the other side of the Apocalypse: The broken worlds of Beckett and Bond 12 Nostalgia for the future: The fraught tomorrows of Rivera, Churchill, Washburn, and Kushner

181 195 213

Coda

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Notes Index

237 258

Acknowledgments What’s that old joke, “Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt”? Both denial and the actual Nile have been very much on my mind throughout the writing of this little book. Denial because it is one of the major themes of this work and the Nile because it became something of a central image for the various tributaries that flowed into this vast and inky river of a text. One of these key tributaries has been the Classic Stage Company (a.k.a. CSC) where, as its former artistic director, I was able to consider and program several of the plays and authors that have found their way into this study. I am forever grateful to all the artists and audiences who participated in this informal twelve-year investigation of works from the past that still speak to our present. The other major tributary has been a series of courses devoted to political theatre that I taught at Columbia University’s School of the Arts in our graduate Theatre Program. These classes were made up of a truly remarkable constellation of young artists that included Zoë Adams, Mark Barford, Catalina Beltran, Josue Castaneda, Miguel García, Samuel Gibbs, Miriam Gill, Ares Harper, Camille Hayes, Rebecca L. Kratzer, Mikhaela Derva Mahony, Kelly O’Donnell, Jeffrey Paige, Rakesh Palisetty, Danica Selem, Colm Summers, Yibin Wang, and Katherine Wilkenson. Their collective insights were invaluable to my understanding of many of the plays that make up this study. I am also immensely grateful to Anne Bogart, Oskar Eustis, Kathryn Grody, David Ives, Nancy Keystone, Mandy Patinkin, Carey Perloff, and Rosemarie Tichler. This dear community of friends and colleagues allowed me to hijack many a lunch or dinner to talk about the issues of this book ad nauseam. Their patience, feedback, and encouragement kept me and this work afloat. Then there was Rakesh Palisetty who helped jump start the first stages of this book, Josue Castaneda who aided in its research, and my son Noah Kulick who helped it reach safe harbor. I would also like to thank Laurence Marie for her felicitous translation of the stage directions from Bouilly’s Disaster of Lisbon. Finally, I must give a HUGE set of thanks to Mark Dudgeon, Anna Brewer, and Ella Wilson from Bloomsbury; together they have made a warm and wonderful home for this somewhat wayward book. Last and never least, is my wife Naomi who continues to let me disappear down the rabbit hole of works like this and is always there when I eventually return to reality. None of this would be possible without her love.

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Introduction On transforming our social imaginary

I Dream of Obsolescence Unlike any of my other books, I sincerely hope that this one becomes completely obsolete. Should some wayward reader from the future stumble upon it in the bowels of a library, I hope they’ll simply laugh and say, “A book on plays about the end of the world? What a preposterous subject. The world is fine. We have righted our ecological wrongs. All is now well with planet earth. We’ve no need for such antiquated apocalyptic hand wringing.” You see, I desperately want this book to be totally incorrect, terribly misguided, and subsequently relegated to the dustbin of misbegotten futurologies. And yet such a future, according to most of our scientists and climatologists, might be just around the corner. There is, at this precarious moment in our history, the very real possibility that — if we do not reverse our carbon-insistent way-of-being — there will be no tomorrow. This would mean no such library, with no such book, and, most frightening of all, no such reader to not read it. An alternate future is inching, every day, closer and closer, moving us from the realm of science fiction to science fact. It is a potential reality that is terribly hard for us to wrap our minds around, and therein lies both the problem and the impetus of this book. Put simply: How do we, in the theater, talk about tackling such an enormous challenge which faces humankind? How can our art form, perhaps the most ephemeral of its aesthetic siblings, impress upon audiences the necessity for action? And, conversely: Why is this so very hard for our field to seem to do? Is this just a failure on theater’s part? Or does this problem plague all our sister arts? Does the current climate crisis, as some are wont to say, render all our aesthetic responses somewhat impotent when attempting to rouse our audiences to fight

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for the future of our planet? Such a question, inadvertently, gives rise to another set of equally troubling questions, which begins with the age-old suspicion that art in general is simply incapable of effecting any real substantial change on the world stage. Such naysayers insist that the whole idea of art as a catalyst for any form of praxis is doomed from the outset. According to them, we might as well put down our pens and brushes, pick up a nearby banner, and storm the citadels of climate denial. While we’re doing so, an older and perhaps even more pernicious question re-insinuates itself: Is even taking to the streets, or any form of collective action, capable of changing the status quo that is now regulated by the diffuse and yet seemingly implacable forces of neoliberal globalism? Are we still capable of collective change against such an invisible foe? All these questions send me to a memory:

From the Dark and Backward Abysm of My Youth This happened some forty or so years ago. I must have been a freshman in college, and I had gone with a friend to see the movie Gandhi. This, as you may remember, was one of the last of the great Hollywood epics. Think of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, and you get a sense of the majestic cinematic sweep of this film. Only Gandhi, contra Lawrence, brought about world-historical change with neither guns nor Arabian stallions; instead, Gandhi deployed a very simple concept: Satyagraha (nonviolent resistance). It was with this one improbable principle that he liberated all of India from the tyrannous yoke of British colonial rule. One would be hard-pressed to find a story better built to change the hearts and minds of its audience, as well as garner a few little golden statues along the way; which, in point of fact, it did, winning numerous academy awards, including best picture and best actor for the remarkable Ben Kingsley in a miraculous break-out performance as Gandhi. We saw the film at our favorite cineplex in Century City, renowned for its enormous projection screen and labyrinthian underground parking structure. The latter was a grand subterranean affair, a kind of architectural cross between a buried Egyptian pyramid and a vast, multistoried fallout shelter. I remember leaving the theater and riding down an endless escalator to the bowels of this parking complex. It seemed to have as many underground floors as letters in our English alphabet. On the way down, I couldn’t help but overhear various observations from other cinema-goers who, like me, had just seen Gandhi. They all seemed to be in a state of blissful transformation. They spoke in hushed and reverential

Introduction

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tones about how “I’ve never been so moved by a film,” “I’ll never be the same, thanks to this picture,” “This movie has changed my life,” “From now on, I want to dedicate myself to the path of Satyagraha.” It was as if I was witnessing some extraordinary mass conversion. This amazing experience lasted just long enough for everyone to get into their respective cars and attempt to leave the underground parking garage; discovering, in the process, that they were now — unwittingly — trapped within some sort of vehicular form of Dantesque gridlock, a circle of hell that the Italian poet had somehow forgotten to mention. Car horns began to blare, shouts of road rage could be heard echoing throughout the underground corridors, curses ensued, followed by threats, fender benders, and even a fist fight between two enraged motorists. My friend turned to me and said, “Wow, I guess the message of this movie lasted a whole ten minutes.” I think about those ten minutes a lot. Is that the actual shelf life of a work of political art? Six hundred meager seconds? That’s it? After that, we just revert to our former, fallen selves? But what did I expect? At the time, I had a feeling for what I wanted to have happen, but no name to put to this need. Much later, in my graduate school days, I stumbled upon the word I was looking for. It was from the ancient Greek and was made up of eight little letters that spelled out:

Metanoia, which Rhymes with Paranoia, but the Comparison Ends there Some readers may know this word from its rather consequential appearance in the New Testament; it’s one of the first words uttered by Jesus in the Gospel according to Mark. It is there that the prophet from Galilee announces the kingdom of God and asks all to join him in metanoia. Although, in actuality, he wouldn’t have uttered this word in Greek since, as we know, Jesus knew no Greek, only Aramaic (an easy-going Semitic language that is to biblical Hebrew what Italian is to Latin). So the actual word he most likely used would have been tubah, which meant “Come back.” This word was based on the Hebrew shub, which meant “turn around” or “return.” Shub began as quite a literal verb and, very quickly, in the hands of the Hebrew prophets, became a metaphor for turning away from “the bad” and toward “the good.” And so, when the authors of the New Testament were casting about for a Greek equivalent to this word, they ingeniously settled on the Greek term metanoia. The word literally means “afterthought” (where meta = “after” or “beyond” and nous = “mind”), but it came to be the name for any fundamental turn/change of thought or heart. In the case

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of these ancient Greeks, this was pretty much the same thing, since both heart and mind were believed to be located in their chests. For the early Christians, metanoia was thought of solely in religious terms, as a kind of spiritual conversion representing not only a change of heart but also a repudiation of one’s current path, a turn toward atonement. The King James Bible makes all this very simple and straightforward; the word from now on will mean: Repent. End of Story. But not exactly. Currently, metanoia has become the plaything of contemporary philosophers such as Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig. They have reclaimed this word’s lexical roots, returning it to its pre-Christian meaning. This enables them to better discuss certain fundamental moments of individual and cultural transformations, which forever alter the existential core of our thinking. In their hands, metanoia now speaks of the change that can happen with the relationship between our minds and the world. Such a formidable kind of cultural metanoia occurs, according to them, perhaps once in a lifetime, and is able to bring with it certain far-reaching relocations in the thinking of human relations, radical/ epochal changes in culture, and the potential collapse of previously prevailing points of view. It is a thinking that changes our very way of thinking. Metanoia, for these philosophers, doesn’t just bring about change, it institutes a whole new reality.1 This is what I was hoping for as I rode down that escalator after the movie Gandhi; this is what I pray for in terms of our meeting the demands of our current climate crisis. But how to bring such a metanoia about on a collective scale? That is the issue, particularly during:

The Age of Denial The novelist Amitav Ghosh is perhaps one of the most astute critics of our cultural inability to think the unthinkable. He minces no words when it comes to the cataclysmic reality of climate change and says, in no uncertain terms, that “if certain literary forms are unable to negotiate these torrents, then they have failed — and their failures will have to be counted as an aspect of a broader imaginative and cultural failure that lies at the heart of the climate crisis.”2 We all seem to understand that finding the “right forms” to address this dire situation is of utmost urgency and yet they continue to elude us. Why? For Ghosh this is “perhaps the most important question ever to confront culture in the broadest sense.”3 Because of this simple brute fact, “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.”4 The lack of such imagination speaks volumes about ourselves and our times. Ghosh asks:

Introduction

5

In a substantially altered world, when the sea-level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York, and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museum goers 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 modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight? Quite possibly, then, this era, which so congratulates itself on self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.5

This last haunting turn of phrase becomes the title of Ghosh’s seminal treatise, which goes on to diagnose the root causes of such a general derangement. He begins with a brief historical etiology, encompassing capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and globalism. Then he discusses how these “isms” have become the four horsemen of our climate apocalypse. Having explored how we have gotten to this crisis point, he soberly assesses how his chosen aesthetic calling, the novel, seems incapable of effectively tackling the coming climate crisis. What Ghosh has to say here is particularly intriguing, not only for what it tells us about the limitations of the contemporary novel but also what it suggests about the possibilities of theater in addressing this issue. Ghosh believes that part of the contemporary novel’s failure to deal with these issues has to do with a fundamental shift in the emphasis of the novel from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. For Ghosh, the contemporary novel has become more and more narcissistically centered on the individual psyche while the collective, what he calls “men in the aggregate” (think the works of Tolstoy and Dickens), has receded, in both the cultural and fictional imagination.6 This simple shift has tremendous repercussions. Modernism, which is always in pursuit of “the new,” has relegated the collective novel to an antiquated past. God forbid we should ever turn backward. We must always look, according to our Western aesthetics, to the future and its favorite plaything, “the new.” And, as if on cue, the twentieth-century novel of the individual is “in” and the nineteenth-century novel of the collective is “out.” The problem with such a turn is that global warming demands a collective response that the novel has forgotten how to address. For Ghosh, as long as contemporary fiction remains in the thrall of the individual at the expense of the idea of the collective, we will remain incapable of truly meeting the myriad challenges that are wrapped up in the phenomenon of global warming. This, of course, is not specific to the novel, and relates to the novel’s sister arts as well, including:

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Our Current Theater; Its Problematics and Possibilities A similar turn from the collective to the cult of the individual can certainly be found in our contemporary American theater where the vast majority of our plays have retreated from the public sphere to the private comfort of our living rooms. There, in this safely sequestered existence, we can forget the world at large (i.e., the collective plight of others) and focus on our own private interpersonal issues. It is a dramaturgical gambit that seems to go beyond an aesthetic preference and begins to bespeak a deeper kind of all-pervasive pathology. One begins to wonder if American theater is suffering from a kind of aesthetic agoraphobia, afraid to venture beyond its own well-appointed four walls for fear of what it might encounter in the great outside world; or, in the case of Edward Albee’s prescient A Delicate Balance, what might invade our homes should we, God forbid, open our doors and admit any outsider. In this pre-COVID-19 play, such others could be carrying within them some unnamed and yet highly infectious existential virus. I’ve always suspected this metaphoric virus of Albee’s to be guilt over those we’ve turned our backs on. It is a kind of political version of Freud’s “the return of the repressed,” only in this case, it should really be thought of as “the return of the oppressed.” Such dramatic tendencies as these are not the roots of our theater; rather they are just a strange nineteenth-century mutation that has maintained its grip on our drama well into the beginnings of our own twenty-first century. It is not that dissimilar from the advent and unrelenting rise of capitalism. In many ways this “theater of the living room,” also known as bourgeois theater, can be seen as a by-product or —should we say? — an aesthetic side effect of capitalism itself. Western theater, as we know, had a very different point of origin. It began with the Greeks and the invention of tragedy, which in many ways, dealt with the fundamental tensions between the individual and the collective. This was made manifest at theater’s very inception. It happened when the actor Thespis allegedly stepped out from a choral competition and asserted himself as a central character of what the chorus had just been singing about. From that point on, Greek tragedy interrogated the rift between this chorus/collective and the emergent hero/individual. All of theater, on a certain fundamental level, can be thought of in terms of this tension. Part of the basic phenomenology of the theater is, in many ways, to return us from the individual back to the collective. Think about this for a moment. We enter the theatrical experience as a singular “I” lost in our own ego-related issues and, if theater does its job correctly, that “I” slowly dissolves as

Introduction

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we are watching a story about another individual or set of individuals; but just as important as what is happening beyond the footlights, is what is happening on either side of us. There are always all those annoying people seated just to our right and left, not to mention the ones in front and behind as well. Try as we might to forget about them and return to the play and our hermetic relation to it, we find ourselves constantly thwarted by the presence of these other individuals. The person to the left laughs when we laugh and the person to our right sighs when we sigh. The same is true with people in front and behind. They gasp as we gasp and are even inclined to shuffle in their seat just when we do. At the end of a play, when the lights come up, we often notice that everyone in the audience has, like us, the same tears in their eyes. The evening may have started out with us as an isolated “I” but, by the end of the play, that “I” has mysteriously morphed into a sense of being part of a collective “we.” This is theater’s essential job, it’s supposed to work this alchemy on a nightly basis. In the process, it gives us that momentary reconnection with others; a shared sense of belonging together. It would therefore seem to be the perfect platform to bring about the kind of return to the communal that Ghosh is asking for; but then there’s what we could call the Century-City-Cineplex-Effect where the message of a movie like Gandhi seems to last in its audiences’ collective consciousness for little more than ten minutes; after that, they are lured back to the more quotidian concerns of their individual everyday lives. This returns us to the troubling question of whether theater, or the arts in general, are actually capable of effecting any true and lasting change. I’ve come to believe that this sort of question is founded on a major temporal misconception, which is due, in part, to:

Modernity’s Impatience This has always been a problem. But perhaps it has been further exacerbated in the age of Amazon where we have grown accustomed to pushing a button and having whatever we desire arrive at our doorstep within two days! As a result, we sometimes forget that change, particularly world-historical change, does not exactly happen on such an accelerated timetable. At least not on a collective/global level. Yes, St. Paul can have his own private conversion on the road to Damascus. Such a metanoia can be instantaneous for an individual, but remember that the worldwide acceptance of Christianity was the result of the long hard work of a group of deeply dedicated believers. It was a mass transformation that was several hundred years in the making. In our modern

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times, even Gandhi’s own Satyagraha was a lifetime’s work, the fruit of sixtyplus years where he and his followers endeavored to prove that something as immense as India’s independence could be achieved through simple acts of nonviolent protest. Or take Greek tragedy, which was part of a yearly festival for Athenians. This tradition lasted about a century. Over this swath of time it introduced and developed an appetite for a critical cast of mind that could then be applied to the problems of creating and maintaining a democracy. In the case of the Greeks, did one play create this frame of mind? Certainly not. It was a sustained sharing of such like-minded plays in concert with other cultural and social endeavors that, over time, helped create this very particular way of looking at and dealing with the world. Thanks to all these combined efforts, the democratic temperament of fifth-century Athens was forged. So, on a very basic level, it is unfair to think of any one work of art initiating an instantaneous change in world affairs all on its own; but history has shown us many examples where a sustained commitment, often manifested through the production of a body of cultural works and social acts can, over time, create a slow cultural metanoia necessary to help change the way we look at things and from there to changing the things themselves. And so, when I hear certain pundits say that humankind’s brains are not wired for the challenges of dealing with so monumental a notion as global warming, I do not think that is particularly helpful or necessarily true. The above examples have shown us that any massive change in our collective thinking takes time and the sustained effort of many hands. In short, it takes such a combination of time and work to change what Cornelius Castoriadis calls:

The Social Imaginary (and Its Potential for Re-Scripting Our Reality) The social imaginary is what gives a specific orientation to each historical period; it is the singular agreed-upon manner of living, of seeing, and of conducting ourselves as we move through the world around us, and maintain our relations within it. It is “the source of that which presents itself in every instance as an indisputable and undisputed meaning, the basis for articulating what does matter and what does not, whether individual or collective. This is what constitutes the imaginary of the society or the period considered.”7 Such a social imaginary always grows out of a re-scripting of the preceding symbolic structures of a given society. Castoriadis uses the history of religion

Introduction

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as an example of this process, noting that the genesis of all new religions grows out of a transformation from a previous set of organized religious beliefs. If any new social imaginary is to come into being, there must be a constellation of available signifiers to work with, but there must also be new signifieds that do not yet exist that must be thought, imagined, and given purpose. This would be the inner working of what we have called metanoia, the transformation from one social imaginary to another that speaks to the needs of a new historical moment. We could call such in-between moments the interregnum. This was a term first coined by Antonio Gramsci to define a period of time where the old ways of doing something no longer work, but the new ways have not yet been invented. This seems to be very much the situation we currently find ourselves in at the beginning of this already beleaguered twenty-first century! Art is one of the forces that steps in during such historical interregnums and helps with the transformation. This is the work that all artists are tasked with as we face the new challenges of global warming. Theater, from its very inception in ancient Greece, seems to have been invented to do just this sort of thing. I became acutely aware of this when I was tasked with running a theater of my own. Suddenly, I found myself speaking on a regular basis to a committed audience that returned to us time and time again. The regulated reoccurrence of these communal gatherings reconfirmed what my teachers had been saying all along: that those of us in the theater were, in many ways, engaged in a secular form of ritual. Many such rituals have become a kind of endangered species thanks to the advent of modernity, but their structuring and regulation of time can be highly instructive, especially in terms of our concepts of metanoia and the forging and maintaining of any social imaginary. Such structuring and regulation of time can grow and consolidate a community of like-minded individuals. This newly formed group can, through these periodic gatherings, develop, share, and preserve a set of common values, beliefs, and behaviors. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han reminds us that we are essentially collective beings who regularly feel the need to unite for these very reasons. One such way is through the innocent-enough idea of festival. He quotes the anthropologist Emile Durkheim who wrote about the essential cyclical nature of such rituals, explaining that, “Society is able to revivify the sentiment it has of itself only by assembling. But it cannot be assembled all the time. The exigencies of life do not allow it to remain in congregation indefinitely; so it scatters, to assemble anew when it again feels the need of this.”8 This is the rhythm of ritual, but it is also very much the rhythm of theater. Our profession invites an audience to come together four or five times over the course of a year to

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experience certain issues. As a result, the theater becomes a space where people can periodically return and reconnect with the unique and powerful sensation of unity that is born from certain forms of assembly. They also re-experience how this communal sense can lift them to another degree of attentiveness, especially in terms of the issues that are put before them. The collective pressure of such unified attention can also lead to seeing the issue-at-hand with far greater acuity; with each return to the theater, the audience has the potential to deepen this collective attentiveness, which further connects them to one another as a group. Now, I know what you are going to say to all this. “Yes, yes, yes … that’s all well and good, Brian, but isn’t this alleged theater of yours already preaching to the converted? Hasn’t this audience already self-selected? Isn’t it of a certain age? A certain socioeconomic background? Isn’t it basically liberal-leaning by nature? Isn’t it already predisposed to the message you want to send? What about those of a different age? Background? Political orientation?” Surely there is much more work to do on this front, beginning with making theater affordable to all and perhaps instead of asking communities to come to us, we must embrace a much more vigorous model of going to them. We can see this already at work with such engaged institutions as The Public Theater’s Public Works Program lead by Lear deBessonet or Brian Doerries’ Theater of War Project. These and other maverick organizations across America are currently redefining the very means of theatrical production and consumption for the twenty-first century. I have very little doubt, given these new modalities of presentation and the imagination of this next generation of theater makers, that a genuine impact will be made over time. There’s that word again: time. It is the essential ingredient in this kind of transformation. Unfortunately, in the case of global warming, time is not something we have in great abundance. The work must be done now, and this little book is a modest attempt to contribute to this sustained effort of social re-imagining. But before it was a book, it was something of an unofficial project for me and my son.

A Slight Biographical Tangent that Eventually Leads to the Raison d’Être behind This Project Our son, Noah, was born some two decades ago. Like many parents, we wondered whether it was right to bring a child into this world, if there would be a world for him to inherit when he came of age; and if so, would that world even vaguely resemble the relatively hospitable one that we had grown up in? What

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had we done? What were we thinking? How could we have brought a child into such terrible times? Such questions began to overwhelm my nights and days and leaked into my own work as a theater director. The plays I was making at the time seemed profoundly inconsequential when compared to the worldwide crisis that was facing us. Suddenly, these two issues, my son and my work, merged in my mind into one central project. I thought, if I was going to continue to make theater, then it would have to be a theater for my son, to educate him and prepare him for the hostile future that I had inadvertently participated in helping bring about. The plays I would put on would have to, in one way or another, speak to his future needs, provide him with the proper moral/ethical outlook necessary to make his way in this uncertain and increasingly problematic world. Fortunately this plan coincided with my obtaining the artistic directorship of a little theater in New York called the Classic Stage Company. This gave me a platform to mount several of these plays. I never told anyone on the Board of CSC about this agenda; it was my little secret, a way to have this ongoing dialogue with my growing son. I just snuck one of these plays into each of CSC’s seasons for the next fourteen years. This book grows out of exploring this body of work. It allowed me to draw a straight line all the way back to the ancients who, even at the birth of the civilization, were already concerned with our imminent demise. From there, it was just a hop-skip-and-a-jump to the medieval mystery plays and their depictions of doomsdays and floods. After that came Shakespeare, Bouilly, Pushkin, Ibsen, Chekhov, Brecht, Beckett, Bond, Churchill, Rivera, and Kushner. All of this seemed to reach a kind of natural terminus in Anne Washburn’s sui generis Mr. Burns Post Electric Play. In tandem with this theatrical journey, I found my bookshelves groaning under the weight of more and more contemporary books on the end of the world. These works came from activists, ecologists, environmentalists, ethicists, philosophers, nihilists, and scientists; all discussing how we got to this terrible place and how we might possibly reverse our perilous course. This book has become a fusion of these two parallel investigations, one theatrical and the other theoretical. Each chapter takes a particular play and matches it with a particular thinker, putting the two in conversation with one another. And so Basha, the great Sanskrit dramatist, is put in dialogue with authors Joseph Tainter (The Collapse of Complex Societies) and Jonathan Schell (The Fate of the Earth); Euripides with political thinker Hannah Arendt and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman; the Doomsday Plays of the Middle Ages with novelist Jonathan Franzen and philosopher Catriona McKinnon; Shakespeare with ecologist Arne Naess and Amazonian activist Ailton Krenak; librettist

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Staging the End of the World

Jean-Nicolas Bouilly with writer/activist Sabu Kosho; Pushkin with such nihilists as Peter Wessel Zapffe; Ibsen with environmentalist Rachel Carson; Chekhov with author George Marshall (Don’t Even Think About It; Why Our Brains Are Wired To Ignore Climate Change); Brecht with philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and historian Dipesh Chakrabarty; Beckett and Bond with Chernobyl chronicler Svetlana Alexievich; and the fraught tomorrows of Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner, Jose Rivera, and Anne Washburn with the philosopher Hans Jonas. It seems somehow fitting that my son, who was the impetus for all this, would grow up to help me with the research and editing of this book, thus bringing this twenty-three-year dialogue with him to something of a conclusion.

How to Read this Book As with most books, the reader can certainly benefit from reading this work in a continuous fashion from beginning to end. Indeed, much painstaking labor has gone into crafting such a readerly experience. As you can see from a quick glance at the Table of Contents, this project is governed by what some might call the tyranny of chronology, but the reader may rebel against such a traditional temporal unfolding. Even though this book is constructed in this manner, it does not mean that it must be read that way. There is no injunction to dutifully follow my argument, play by surveyed play, all the way to the end. The reader is free to graze, gravitating toward whatever playwright or theme captures their fancy. If one is obsessed with Chekhov and curious about how his The Cherry Orchard might help us change our Anthropocene ways, then one can start there. After that, one can move onto whatever play next pricks one’s interest. In short, the reader is welcome to construct their own book out of the twelve ensuing chapters. For instance, if you’re interested in the debate over whether or not we can overcome our collective inability to halt global warming, you could look at chapters one (Bharati’s Andha Yug and Brook’s Mahābhārata), four (Noah’s Ark), and eleven (Bond’s War Plays); if you’re concerned about climate change and denial, then you might want to focus on chapters nine (Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard), eleven (Beckett’s Happy Days), and twelve (Churchill’s Far Away); if you’re curious about climate change and philosophy, you might gravitate toward chapters five (Shakespeare’s The Tempest), six (Bouilly’s Disaster of Lisbon), and seven (Pushkin’s A Feast in Time of Plague); if you care more about the ethics of climate change, then you can spend time with chapters three (Euripides’ The Children of Herakles), ten (Brecht’s He Who Says Yes, He Who Says No), and

Introduction

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twelve (Kushner’s Slavs); if politics is more your cup of tea, then please turn to chapters one (Basha’s Dūtavākya), eight (Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People), and eleven (Bond’s War Plays). Another path through the book would be to begin with the chapter on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This play, by its very nature, encompasses almost all the themes of this study. From there, one can easily venture backward to the Bhasa and Euripides or forward toward Churchill and Kushner. As for those readers who have an appetite for a story that unfolds over the span of 2,000 or so years, then there is absolutely no shame in moving chapter by designated chapter, from here to the end of this book, just as it was intended to be read. The choice, dear reader, is yours.

A Final Note on Nomenclature; Anthropocene vs. Capitalocene and World vs. Earth What should we call this strange and disturbing age that we now find ourselves in? This was the first in a long list of questions that confronted me as I began thinking about this book. Up until very recently most climatologists would tell us that we were the fortunate beneficiaries of being alive during the Holocene age. This has been a remarkable period in the earth’s long history where for nearly 11,700 years we and the planet have experienced a certain degree of climatic stability. This is particularly true when we compare this with the preceding Pleistocene age, which dominated the earth for 2.6 million years prior to the halcyon days of the Holocene. The climate of this earlier period was particularly brutal and often referred to as “The Great Ice Age,” since it was ice — more than anything — that defined the harsh living conditions of the planet during this immense swath of geological time. If ice dominated that particular period, what dominates the earth now? At the beginning of this century, two scientists, Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, put forward the following hypothesis: Anthropos (i.e., humankind). And with this the Anthropocene age was coined to characterize this new and unprecedented epoch where humankind is the major force on the day-to-day life of our planet. This — unfortunately — has not been for the better. Nature writer Robert Macfarlane tells us that the careless and disfiguring signature of our species can now be seen all across the face of the earth: We remove whole mountain tops to plunder the coal they contain. The oceans dance with hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic waste, slowly settling into sea-floor sediments. Weaponry tests have dispersed artificial radionuclides globally. The burning of the rainforests for monoculture production sends

14

Staging the End of the World out smog-palls that settle into the soils of nations. A nitrogen spike, indicated in ice-cores and sediments, will be one of the key chemical insignias of the Anthropocene caused by mass global use of synthetic nitrogen-rich fertilizers and by fossil-fuel burning. Biodiversity levels are crashing world-wide as we hasten into the sixth greatest extinction event, while the soaring number of a small number of livestock species ensures the geological posterity in the fossil record of sheep, cows, and pigs. We have become titanic world-makers, our legacy legible for epochs to come.9

And what is the primary cause for this planet-wide disruption and destruction? For many, the answer is relatively straightforward: capitalism. This understanding of the root causes for our current planetary crisis has led many to coin a rival term for our times: the Capitalocene Age. Those who favor this moniker for our epoch argue that a term like the Anthropocene depoliticizes climate change and thereby distracts us from the crucial issue of responsibility—what historian Dipesh Chakrabarty enunciates as “the role of capitalism, empires, uneven development, and the drive for capitalist accumulation.”10 I wholeheartedly agree with this critique and yet I still find myself favoring the term Anthropocene over Capitalocene. I suppose this has to do with the sad fact that, whether we like it or not, this is no longer just capitalism’s problem but the problem of humankind/Anthropos and it will take all of us to solve it. It means getting over our differences and developing a new way of thinking and being that embraces the necessity of planetary sustainability. Along with the above issue of nomenclature you will find two other words that appear and reappear with the regularity one might associate with the rhythm of the tides. They are: Earth and World. Many think of these words as simply synonyms for one another and, in these more lexically lenient days, they are often deployed that way, allowing both to be infinitely interchangeable. For our purposes, I would like to return both nouns to their more rigidly defined etymological roots so that they might once again represent distinct domains of our human experience. This allows the earth to find its way back to its first primordial stirrings in Old English as erthe; a word that has a lexical lineage which hails from the Old Saxon ertha, moves through the Middle Dutch of aerde, and returns to the High German erda. All of these derivations signify the very tangible reality of the ground beneath our feet, or the soil that we might clasp in our hand. This should not be confused with the Old English woruld or worold whose etymology begins with the Old Saxon werold, works its way past the Icelandic verold, and arrives at the German werald. In all these ancient soundings, we move from the terrestrial to the conceptual. The more abstracted

Introduction

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nature of werald is made all the clearer in its conjoining of roots. Break this word in two and you have wer, which equals “man,” and ald, which equals “age.” Now put them back together and you have the literal and ungainly “man-age” or, with a little more finessing, “the age of man.” And so a given world pertains to humanity’s singular sense of self, society, and surroundings. These discreet moments of social-imagineering have, during our brief time on this Earth, transmogrified from one historical juncture to the next. As a result, the earth has witnessed the rise and fall of many worlds. In this respect, such worlds have been ending — in one way or another — ever since our very beginnings and each of these endings has something important to tell us about our continuance. This is particularly pertinent to today, since the potential end of our current world might just take the entire earth with it!

16

Part One

This is the way the world ends in ancient times

18

1

Lessons among the ruins; or what survives and why How the cultural detritus of the ancients can be a kind of first philosophy

A Thought Experiment that We’d Rather Not Think About Let’s imagine, as Lewis Dartnell does at the beginning of his book The Knowledge, that the world as we know it has ended. Now what? This is his first and overriding concern: The most profound problem facing survivors is that human knowledge is collective, distributed across the population. No one individual knows enough to keep the vital processes of society going … Much of the academic literature would itself be lost, perhaps to fires ripping unchecked through empty cities … Can you imagine a group of survivors who had access to only the selection of books stocked in an average store? How far would civilization get trying to rebuild itself from the wisdom contained in the pages of self-help guides? … In short, the vast majority of our collective wisdom would not be accessible — at least in a usable form — to the survivors of a cataclysm.1

This would not be the first time civilization had faced such a blow to our collective knowledge. The history of humankind is the history of such losses, over and over again. I often worry that we have a false sense of security when it comes to our culture and its alleged resilience. We forget how fragile culture actually is; how long it takes for us to forge it and yet how quickly it can all vanish. Think of the Greeks. Think how much of this golden moment in human history is lost to us. The Iliad and The Odyssey were actually part of a larger corpus of works known as the Epic Cycle that told the entire history of the sack of Troy from beginning to end. This included The Cypria, The Aethiopis, The

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Illiupersis, The Nosti, and The Telegony. All of these other epic poems are now lost, except for a stray line or two that have been dutifully preserved by some ancient Alexandrian grammarian. And what about Greek tragedy? Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were believed to have penned 100 plays each. What do we actually have? Seven by Aeschylus, the same amount from Sophocles, and nineteen by Euripides. And what about their other rivals? What about the works of Ion, Achaeus, Neophon, Aristarchus, Theognis, Diogenes of Athens, Critias, and the great Agathon? What remains? A soliloquy or two, half of an intact choral ode, and a handful of evocative lines. The loss is staggering. This is often briefly and duly noted in lecture halls throughout the world. A forgotten name is evoked, a lost work cited, and then we move onto the glorious exceptions to the rule, the lucky surviving few of Greek literature: The Iliad, The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, or The Trojan Women. And why not? These are, after all, major works of art that already require much more time than we usually allocate for them in our various introductory courses. Why begrudge these works even less time? And for what? So that our students might pick their way, for a day or two, through the detritus of Greek literature? Don’t we have, in the limited time given to us, better things to share with our students than a sampling of these mere scraps? Perhaps. But I worry that, by quickly glossing over what has been lost, we continue to give generation after generation of students a false sense of cultural security. I wonder what would happen if we and our students sat with this loss just a little bit longer. Such a pedagogical lingering feels all the more necessary as we find ourselves on the precipice of another potential and irrevocable dark ages; a future where what we hold dearest in our culture might, once again, be lost forever. Perhaps by living in the loss of the ancients, we might better internalize the fundamental fragility of culture, which is always one step away from oblivion. Such a study might result in a greater appreciation for what has survived and, perhaps most importantly, impress upon us how essential it is to take care of what we hold dear. Perhaps such a pursuit could humble us into the better preservation of what matters most to us. If this were the case, how might such a course actually begin? I suppose with a brief history of:

Greek Culture’s Near Demise and Subsequent Rebirth The death blows to Greek literature were numerous and near fatal. Where to begin? I suppose one could start with the fires that eventually destroyed the libraries of Alexandria. The first by accident and the second thanks to the willful indifference

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of early Christians who had little love of pagan culture. This antipathy would eventually grow into outright animosity and lead to the banning of Greek thought and literature by the all powerful Emperor Justinian. These decisive blows should have put an end to Greek culture and yet, miraculously, it managed to survive. Much of this was due to the interest and care of Arab culture. It was they who preserved these works until the time was right to return them to the West. Popular belief wants us to also thank the monks of the Middle Ages for maintaining many Greek manuscripts; although, upon closer examination, such claims seem to be somewhat exaggerated. Benvenuto Ramboldi, a pupil of the great Boccaccio, tells us about his Master’s visit to the library of a monastery where he discovered: The treasure-house of learning destitute of door or any kind of fastening, while the grass was growing on the window sills and the dust reposing on the books and bookshelves. Turning over the manuscripts, he found many rare and ancient works, with whole sheets torn out, or with the margins ruthlessly clipped. As he left the room, he burst into tears, and, on asking a monk, whom he met in the cloister, to explain the neglect, was told that some of the inmates of the monastery, wishing to gain a few soldi, had torn out whole handfuls of leaves and made them into psalters, which they sold to boys, and cut off strips of parchment, which they turned to amulets, to sell to women.2

In fairness to the Church, there were those who did indeed work tirelessly for the preservation of what remained of Greek culture. Such was the case of Pope Nicholas V who reigned from 1447 to 1455. Nicholas was an insatiable bibliophile, responsible for founding the Vatican’s collection of classical Greek manuscripts. He dispatched papal agents to all ends of the earth in search of lost classical manuscripts, threatening to excommunicate those who refused to hand over whatever they might have. The result was a library made up of some 800 Latin works and 400 Greek manuscripts. But it is to the tireless efforts of another unsung group of bibliophiles that we owe our deepest debt of gratitude. These saviors of Greek culture were neither monks, popes, kings, nor scholars; but, rather, simple Greek refugees who were seeking asylum from the ever encroaching Ottoman Empire. Robert Garland in his revelatory Surviving Greek Tragedy tells us, “The importance of these refugees for the transmission of Greek literature can hardly be exaggerated: they not only taught the language but also compiled the grammars and copied the manuscripts.”3 These unsung heroes did the “heavy lifting” when it came to introducing, maintaining, and disseminating what remained of the fruits of antiquity, thereby ensuring its continuance for future generations. But there were other, even older methods of transmission than these; methods tied to the bards of pre-literate societies whose poetic practices could be passed

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orally from generation to generation, ensuring their culture’s continuance. What if things became so dire, that we once again needed to rely on such archaic techniques? Let’s imagine, for a moment, that the worst has come to pass. Let’s say that Lewis Darnell’s post-apocalyptic scenario has come true. The vast knowledge of humanity has been lost. Without the benefit of electricity, our computers and other electronic devices have become mute, incapable of sharing the collective wisdom that was stored within their now inoperative circuits. Books, which were the previous repository of what we knew, have suffered an even worse fate and have been consumed in the innumerable fires that now rage unabated in this new and unforgiving world. Two or three hundred years have passed, enough time for a deep forgetting to settle in. Writing itself is forgotten. What is humanity to do without the digital or printed word? How will it hold onto what little it can remember? This is a question we have not had to think about since ancient times, and so, let’s look to the ancients to see how, in a world before the use of books and computers, they held and passed on their knowledge to one another. This will require us to investigate three key mnemonic mechanisms of our pre-literate and early-literate societies.

The Uses of Rhythm, Gnómai, and Catastrophe By studying these three dynamics of the ancients, we might begin to understand how to build works that would better survive the vicissitudes of an indifferent and perhaps hostile future. Each of these mnemonic devices has a way of easily burrowing themselves into our minds so that certain aspects, images, meanings, and feelings can be stored and subsequently shared from one generation to the next. The first, and perhaps reigning, monarch of such mnemonics is:

Rhythm All poets will tell you that rhythm is everything. Ezra Pound writes, “Rhythm – I believe in an ‘absolute rhythm.’”4 Virginia Woolf agreed that the mystery of rhythm proceeds and goes deeper than words: “A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind long before it makes words felt.”5 The centrality of rhythm is as true for us moderns, as it was to the ancients. Rhythm is at the very inception of the Indian sage Valmiki’s epic poem The Ramayana. At the beginning of this monumental work we are introduced to Valmiki himself who is meditating in

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the forest. It is there he hears the whistle of an arrow, which fells an innocent krauncha bird. Furious over this act of heedless violence, he curses the hunter with the following words: Ma Nisada pratishtam tvamaganah Shasvatih Samah Yatkaruncha mithunade kama vadhih Kam amohitam6

Valmiki is immediately struck by the hypnotic rhythm of his anger. The power of this meter haunts his subsequent days and nights. Finally, one evening, he is visited by the god Brahma who tells him, “It was I who put the slots on your tongue with which you cursed the hunter. I want you to compose the life of Rama in the meter of this curse. It will be the first poem of the earth. As long as Rama is remembered in the world of men, so shall you be. The epic you are going to compose will make you immortal.”7 Valmiki obeys and composes the entire epic in a meter that would come be known as śloka. It is such meters that make certain poems capable of being passed from one bard to the next. Recent neurocognitive research by Rachel Atchley and Mary L. Hare suggests that “there is an enduring memory for form in the context of poetry and that poetic sound structures are learned schematically. Memory for form is retained in poetry more than meaning.”8 Valmiki’s Ramayana is written in such a “poetic form.” Another such form would be dactylic hexameter. This particular meter is believed to be part of our Indo-European roots and perhaps precedes both Vedic and Homeric verse. It becomes the rhythmic glue for both The Iliad and The Odyssey. Classicist Mark Edwards defines this unique organization of sound, rhythm, and sense as a succession of six metrical feet, made up of heavy and light syllables. These are arranged in dactyls (DUM DE DE) and spondees (DUM DUM). Edwards thinks this particular rhythmic organization can be best characterized in the following fashion: DUM DE DE DUM (word break) DE DE DUM DE (word break) DE DUM DE DE (word break) DUM DE DE DUM DUM (verse end).9

Or in Homeric tranlsation: But you — you shameless thing — we followed you — to do you a favor.10

This basically constitutes a line of song on which a Homeric bard could build their performance. Milman Parry, who studied Yugoslavian Bards of the early twentieth century, found that they used the same formula, which had been handed

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Staging the End of the World

down from generation to generation. He believed that this distinct song structure aided their process of memorization. A young bard had “to remember the words, the expression, the sentences he had heard from other bards who had taught him the traditional style of heroic poetry. He had to remember the place or places which traditional words and expressions occupied in the complex mould of the hexameter.”11 Albert B. Lord, Parry’s assistant and disciple, gives an example of one early twentieth-century bard by the name of Sulejman Makić who said that he could repeat a song that he had heard only once, provided that he heard it to the gusle (a particular stringed instrument of the region).12 This, for Lord, was “a significant clue. The story in the poet-singer’s mind is a story in song … the story must have the particular form which it has only when it is told in verse.”13 A similar kind of longevity can be found in the choruses of Greek tragedy. So intoxicating were these songs that there are tales where Greek prisoners were promised freedom by their foreign captors if they would sing a choral ode from Euripides. This was an ability that most Greek warriors seemed more than capable of rendering on the spot. Margaret Alexiou, in her landmark The Ritual Lament in the Greek Tradition, is able to draw a relatively straight line from the ancient threnos found in Homer, through the kommós of ancient Greek tragedy, all the way to the mourners’ laments in the contemporary villages of modern Greece. The poet Joseph Brodsky chalks this all up to the power of classical metrics, which becomes what he calls a repository of time. In his essay Letter to Horace, Brodsky writes to the long deceased Roman poet, “Who knows I may summon you here … for all I know dactyls beat any old séance as a means of conjuring … once the beat of a classic enters one’s system, its spirit moves too.”14 Such, it would seem, is the time-defying power of certain rhythms. Here, the metrics of poetry makes for a kind of resurrection machine, bringing the past back to life.

Gnómai As we noted above, a small handful of Greek tragedies have come down to us somewhat intact. Other fragments have gurgled up from the Egyptian desert whose dry climate is more hospitable to papyrus, giving us a taste of lost works like what is thought to be a fragment from Euripides’ Erectheus. Here, time has nibbled away at the text, leaving only the beginning and ends of verse lines: … Demeter. … not to be uttered … … who is to become … toil … … marrying … from holy …

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… and one … from Hermes … … and the … Kerykes … … for the Hyades … But restrain … … stars … piteous … cry out … … of Deo … and the things … Euripides F102–11715

Time’s voracious appetite for papyrus creates an intriguing collaboration, a veritable new work, coauthored by Euripides and Time. Reading such passages might bring tears of frustration to one’s eyes, but Fragment 557 of Sophocles tells us that such weeping is ultimately a waste of energy: “Why, if it were possible to heal the troubles by weeping, and to raise up the dead by tears, gold would be less precious than lamentation!”16 This sort of fragment is often designated as gnómai. Gnome, a cognate of gnosis (knowledge), was a shard of wisdom that could be shared with others. It is the great granddaddy of proverbs, maxims, precepts, epigrams, slogans, one-liners, and Twitter accounts. This short bitesized insight was first deployed by such pre-Socratics as Heraclitus who told us such pithy profundities as “nature loves to hide,” “character is fate,” and “we never step in the same river twice.” Greek tragedies were peppered with such micro-musings. They may be devoid of the rhythm of poetry, but something about their brisk turn of phrase stuck in the mind and made them memorable. The common traits of such gnómai are brevity, precision, and the intimation of a hard-won and often elusive truth. Thanks to their compactness they can be easily carried in the hippocampus of our brain. Andrew Hui, in his lively A Theory of Aphorisms, tells us that these short-forms are “transhistorical and transcultural, a resistant strain of thinking that has evolved and adapted to its environment for millennia. Across deep time, they are vessels that travel everywhere, laden with freight, yet buoyant.”17 For these reasons Nietzsche called gnômai the children of eternity, too hard for “the tooth of time” to easily consume. Many tragic gnómai often went on to have an independent existence from the tragedies that first housed them. Like certain choral odes, they were instrumental to the unfolding of the tragedy, but also enjoyed a life beyond the work; lingering just like those melodies. They lived on the lips of audiences long after much of the rest of the play had receded from their memory. They were repeated when the appropriate occasion arose; passed from generation to generation, until they found their final resting place in the books of Greek scholars such as the lexicographer Pausanias or the anthologist Anthenaeus, both of whom collected a variety of phrases, running the gamut from the

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sublime to the ridiculous. Many immediately leap off these surviving pages and into our imaginations; take these following fragments from our three surviving tragedians: A fable from Africa tells of an eagle that was felled from the sky by an archer’s arrow. The hunter’s eye was drawn by the eagle’s rich plumage. As the majestic bird fell to the earth, it thought: “When we are vanquished, it is not by others, but rather by our own bright colors.” Aeschylus F13918 When a man prospers one should never call this good fortune. Not until his life has run its course. For the gift of adverse fortune can come in the blink of the eye, without lifting a finger, and bring ruin. For the gods decree: things change. Sophocles F64619 He was blessed with good fortune, but a god hid it away. Life sways, fortune sways; both are subject to the wind. Euripides F15620

And what about the fellow competitors of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides? What little remains of their efforts has come down to us in similar bits and pieces of wisdom, such as Dionysius’ F6, which enjoins its reader to “Either say something better than silence, or keep silent.”21 These remaining fragments comply with Dionysus’ injunction; they still thrum over the din of silence with something to say, remind, warn, console, or puzzle over. Take this fragment from the highly regarded Agathon who tells us, “The gods are prevented from doing just one thing: undoing that which has already been done.”22 Let us hope, in this case, that Agathon is wrong and, some day, the gods will resurrect one of his lost masterpieces. While we wait for this to happen, we can feast on the gnómia of other dramatists such as Seneca, Shakespeare, and Brecht. All of these authors are also known for such bite-sized bits of wisdom that have had a life beyond the plays that first housed them. Think of Shakespeare. Not everyone may know the plot of Hamlet, but most know the phrase, “To be or not to be.” The scientist James Lovelock tells us that “Organisms that face desiccation often encapsulate their genes in spores so that the information for their renewal is carried through a drought.”23 In many ways, gnómia function like such spores, allowing a bit of the past to blossom into the future.

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Catastrophe Let’s begin with the word itself. Break it in two and you have kata (down) and strophe (turn). Put them back together and you get “downturn.” Our ever industrious lexicons tell us that the word can also be thought of as an “overturning” or a “turning upside down.” This is perhaps the oldest of its usages. The first surviving mention relates to “overturning a cup”; but the word also comes to suggest the telos of things. This is how Aeschylus employs it in The Persians where a character asks his interlocutor, “to what end (catastrophe) do you turn your words?”24 Eventually these two potential meanings are fused into one and catastrophe is now associated with the “coming to an end” that is, in one way or another, an “overturning.” Thanks to this lexical fusion, we can speak of the fall of a cup, a warrior, or an entire civilization; each, in differing degrees, is a variation on the theme of catastrophe. It is what comes to be expected at the end of every Greek tragedy. But catastrophe is not just a plaything of tragedians, it was also a key component in the arts of memory as allegedly invented by the ancient Greek poet Simonides. It is his particular use of catastrophe that aids in his mnemonic endeavors and can help us better understand the unique and lasting effects that this phenomenon can have on our imagination. The story behind Simonides’ conflation of memory and catastrophe is captured in a legendary anecdote of his early days as a roaming poet. This was when he, like many bards of antiquity, made his bread and butter by going from Symposium to Symposium. You remember these late-night gatherings of the rich and famous. Think of Plato’s dialogue where Socrates and company stay up all night, drinking and talking about eros. This sort of affair was where Simonides would, quite literally, sing for his supper. He would perform a poem or two and then be expected to further enliven the proceedings with an occasional sardonic aside. One night, Simonides had been hired to perform a poem in honor of his host, a certain Thessalian nobleman by the name of Scopus of Crannon. The recitation took place within the nobleman’s banquet hall. Simonides’ poem evoked the story of Castor and Pollux and was mixed with praise of his host. When the poem was finished, Scopus declared that since Simonides had only dedicated half a poem to him, he would only pay Simonides half of what was originally promised. Simonides, being Simonides, was not afraid to challenge the nobleman. The nobleman, being a nobleman, disregarded Simonides’ claims and said if he wanted further recompense, he should look to Castor and Pollux for help. At that moment a servant entered to tell Simonides that two fine young men were outside

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asking for him. When Simonides went out into the street, he found, much to his consternation, that no one was there. Before he could curse this ruse, he heard a loud and terrible noise. For what happens next, I turn to Cicero who tells us: The roof of the hall where Scopus was giving the banquet fell in, crushing Scopus himself and his relations underneath the ruins and killing them; and when their friends wanted to bury them but were altogether unable to know them apart as they had been completely crushed, the story goes that Simonides was enabled by his recollection of the place in which each of them had been reclining at table to identify them for separate interment.25

How exactly did Simonides execute this feat of memory? It seems, Cicero tells us, “the circumstances suggested to him that one of the best aids to memory consists in orderly arrangement.” In other words, placing things in space helps us to remember them. This would lead to the elaborate memory palaces of the Middle Ages. Once these imaginary citadels were erected, they could be filled, room by room, with all manner of objects, concepts, or images. To remember any of these elements, all one had to do was take an imaginary stroll to the appropriate room in the palace and retrieve the desired element that had been lodged there. But space was not the only mnemonic tool that Simonides discovered. He also found that the dread event of that evening had remained vividly alive in his memory due to its catastrophic nature. This lead Simonides to conclude that certain memories could be kept alive by imaginatively disfiguring them with blood, or soiling them with mud. This story is — no doubt — apocryphal, but also telling. It is surely not by accident that, of all the poets to choose from, it is Simonides who is credited with creating the art of memory. Why Simonides? Prior to this anecdote, Simonides was famous as a composer of epitaphs. He was paid handsomely to memorialize the deeds of the dead. It makes a certain poetic sense that this memorializer of the dearly departed would also become the inventor of a new method of mnemonics; after all, both endeavors relate to the fine art of remembrance. Death, which is life’s great negation, also becomes an inadvertent handmaiden to creation. It engenders the necessity for memory, art, and the very art of memory. Simonides’ second rule of disfigurement is especially interesting in terms of the art of tragedy, which traffics in stories of death and catastrophe. Is this penchant for the tragic some sort of mnemonic ploy? A way to ensure that certain themes embedded in these plays live on? Is that part of the trick of tragedy? Death and misfortune as the ultimate mnemonic devices? Perhaps fear and pity are invoked not so that we might be, as Aristotle believed, “purged,” but so that we might remember.

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Slouching toward Kurukshetra A brief look at the Mahābhāratas of Bhāsa, Bharati, and Brook

Picture This Stand back and from a certain distance the painting before you is just a kaleidoscope of colors: red, blue, green, yellow, orange, all jostling to capture the attention of your eye. There seems to be no design, no rhyme or reason, just a riot of color run amok. Now, step a little closer and the colors become people, horses, elephants, and chariots. All these disparate elements are entangled in such a way that they almost completely eclipse the landscape that supposedly supports them. The human contingent is displayed in every conceivable position: standing, running, stumbling, lunging, leaping, or falling to the ground, their limbs forever akimbo. These fearsome figures can be divided into two distinct camps: those who brandish bows and arrows and those who have been felled by the self-same antique weapons. It is clear that these are warriors, but not the well-behaved combatants that we might find in a Renaissance painting by Paolo Uccello, a painter with a particular penchant for depicting opposing armies who politely observed the rigorous rules of perspective. Such exacting spatial organization is not for the warriors now before us; they couldn’t care less about respecting the intricacies of painterly geometry. There is no discernible pictorial order here, just an explosion of color, bodies, and motion that reminds us that war is nothing more than chaos incarnate. Such are many of the anonymous illustrations that make up the great Mughal emperor Akbar’s Razmnama (The Book of War), a Persian translation of The Mahābhārata, India’s great epic poem. This magisterial book begins with a handful of images where we find two opposing armies neatly assembled on either side of the picture frame. The empty battlefield of Kurukshetra stands

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between them, waiting patiently for their deadly engagement. Soon men, horses, elephants, and chariots will morph into a new and forbidding creature that goes by the name of total war and gives this ancient civilization its first glimpse of what a human-made apocalypse might look like. Mother Nature and the gods are no longer the only ones who can bring about the end of the world; humans prove that they are just as capable of such cataclysmic endeavors. It may have taken the God of the Hebrews just six days to create the world, but the combatants of the Mahābhārata are able to bring it to the brink of annihilation in triple that time. All of this is aided and abetted by the use of what our ancient warriors called astras. These were civilization’s first mythical weapons of mass destruction; they derived their power from secret incantations and rarefied hymns that were shared from master to prized disciple. Say the right words, in the right combination, and a warrior could summon up the power of the gods, enabling him to deploy such primal elements as fire, wind, rain, or the dust of the sun; with these powers at his disposal, a warrior could wreak havoc on his foes. There was the Agniastra, the Indraastra, the Pashupatastra, the Vayuastra, and the most powerful of all: the Brahmaastra, which if unleashed, could destroy the very solar system itself. But we are getting ahead of our story. Let us start with how the ancients thought about:

The Beginning of the End Even back at the very beginnings of civilization, our ancestors were already thinking about its end. Ancient Hindu cosmology takes a cyclical view of such things. Their world ends over and over, ad infinitum. This ceaseless turning from creation to cessation and back again is no more than a day and a night in the immortal life of the great god Brahma; but to us mere mortals, such a dissolution spans eons. In short, Hindu eschatology doesn’t concern itself with sudden irreparable conflagrations that bring about the immediate end of things; rather, it traffics in discreet stages of entropy that patiently unspool over millennia. Here, time is divided into cycles with each cycle consisting of four ages (yuga). Each of these ages is named after a specific throw of the dice and each of these dice throws becomes a kind of fatal countdown to the end. The first throw is krta (four), followed by treta (three), and then dvapara (two), until we finally come to the dreaded ka (one). Once we reach this end, also known as Kali Yuga, the world is destroyed. This destruction goes by the name of pralaya, which conjures up visions of a worldwide dissolution. It is

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followed by a long period of quiescence, after which the entire process reboots itself and a new cycle ensues. The first age is known as Krita Yuga. It is the golden age, or time of perfection. This is the age where dharma flourishes. We will attempt to unpack the full meaning of this particularly polyvalent word in the next section of this chapter; but for now, just think of dharma as a kind of universal balance that is maintained through the right actions and observances of humankind. In the time of Krita Yuga we are told that dharma stands resolutely on all four feet like a majestic lion. The last Krita Yuga is believed to have lasted some 1,728,000 years. We are currently in the fourth age, the dreaded Kali Yuga. This is a fallen period, which in our cycle, began in 3102 BCE and is supposed to last some 432,000 years. According to our modern calendar, that gives us until 2025 before the world, as we know it, is supposed to end. The time of Kali Yuga is thought of as a morally depleted age where dharma is now one-footed, like a lame beggar. And so, from Krita Yuga to Kali Yuga, we watch the slow winnowing of dharma until it becomes its polar opposite: adharma. This is when the world, as Hamlet so aptly put it, is “out of joint”; only at such junctures, there is no mortal who can “set it right.”

Dharma and the Mahābhārata This one word, dharma, goes by many meanings: law, justice, custom, morality, religion, duty, virtue, and — perhaps most all-encompassing — nature itself. Sanskrit scholars yoke dharma to the much more ancient word dhārman, which appears in India’s oldest religious text, the Reg Vida. Key to both words is their shared root, dhr, which means to “uphold,” “support,” or give “foundation to.” Thanks to this root, many scholars see the word as suggesting the undergirding or foundation of the world, which rests on certain fundamental rituals and shared truths. When those rituals or truths are broken, the world itself runs the risk of falling into adharma, which is dharma’s binary opposite. This becomes one of the major themes of the great Indian epic the Mahābhārata, which clocks in at over 1.8 million words and is made up of some 200,000 lines of verse. Add all that up and you have an epic that is ten times the length of The Iliad and The Odyssey combined! The Mahābhārata is believed to have been created, gathered, and edited over a 900-year period, beginning somewhere in 500 BCE and ending in about 400 CE. When you compare this with the countless theatrical adaptations that have emerged over the centuries, you begin to understand

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why certain scholars think of the Mahābhārata as a vast forest or some sort of labyrinthian library out of a story by Borges. The work itself chronicles the struggle between two branches of Bharata’s dynastic line: The Pāndavas and the Kauravas. Both Yudhishthira (the eldest of the Pāndavas) and the younger Duryódhana (the eldest of the Kauravas) claim to be the rightful heir to the throne of Hastinapura. It is the vengeful Duryódhana and his jockeying to remain in power that will ultimately plunge the world into adharma. It is due to this entropic turn that another crucial character enters into the drama of the Mahābhārata. This is the legendary Krsna who, along with Rāma, was believed to be one of the avatāras of the great god Vishnu. Arjuna calls Krsna “the imperishable guard of eternal dharma.”1 Krsna himself elaborates on this further in the Bhagavad Gita, which is embedded in the sixth book of the Mahābhārata. Here, just moments before the war will begin, he tells Arjuna: From time to time, when dharma Drops exhausted, Arjuna, And when adharma is insurgent: It’s then that I create myself. To protect the righteous, To destroy wrongdoers, With a mission to establish dharma I come to be in era after era.2

Krsna will continue to council Arjuna and his brothers throughout this bloody eighteen-day war that brings the world to the very brink of annihilation. This extraordinary epic tale will become the source of countless theatrical adaptations that will be found on stages throughout all of India. It is a production history that most likely begins in the fourth century (CE) and continues all the way to today. Let’s turn our attention to some of the earliest known adaptations of the Mahābhārata that have been attributed to Bhāsa, one of India’s earliest and most celebrated playwrights.

Bhāsa, Lost and (Perhaps) Found The works of Bhāsha, India’s great dramatist of the fourth century, had been thought lost. All that remained were two verses, which had been preserved in an ancient anthology dedicated to the finer points of Sanskrit grammar. This sad state of affairs was to change in 1910 when thirteen lost plays of Bhāsa were

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discovered in South India by the late Pandit Ganapati Śstri. Four of these plays dramatize episodes from just before, during, and at the conclusion of the great battle in the Mahābhārata. Some scholars categorize these works as stand-alone one-acts, while other scholars believe that these might be the dramatic shards of a much larger dramatic work that encompassed the final episodes of this most famous epic. This debate, though, pales in comparison with the larger scholarly issue of whether any of these works are indeed from Bhāsa’s own hand. For A. C. Woolner and Lakshman Sarup, editors of the most recent English edition of these works, the real issue is “no longer a matter of voting pro-Bhāsa or antiBhāsa once and for all. It becomes a question of distinguishing the true Bhāsa from the pseudo-Bhāsa, not merely play by play, but scene by scene and even verse by verse.”3 And so the “idea” of Bhāsa is not all that different from the “idea” of Homer. Bhāsa’s alleged Mahābhārata plays, like the works of Homer, may very well be the product of multiple hands, working over time, fashioning and refashioning these stories to meet the demands of their ever expanding audiences. Bhāsa’s brief cycle begins with Krsna attempting to avert the war between the Pāndavas and the Kurus and ends with the near destruction of the world and the death of Duryódhana. All of this is distilled to its quintessence in these four gem-like plays, taking us step by fateful step to the brink of extinction, beginning with:

Bhāsa’s Primal Scene This occurs in The Dūtavākya (The Embassy), a theatrical adaptation of the Udyoga Parva (The Book of Effort), which is book five of the Mahābhārata. Here we find Krsna arriving at the kingdom of the Kurus to seek justice for the Pāndavas. The diplomatic ask is simple enough: the recognition of the Pāndavas’ rights to their ancestral kingdom. The Kauravas refuse this request, which sets both clans on a collision course toward war. The Krsna of the Udyoga Parva warns the Kuru court that this “Inappropriate behavior is not fitting here in an assembly of men who understand dharma. The courtiers who watch while dharma is destroyed by illegality and truth by deception, are also destroyed.”4 As a result of this, Krsna maintains that there will be “an awesomely horrifying catastrophe impending for the Kurus” that will “destroy the earth.”5 He pleads with Prince Duryódhana to “prevent mankind from being destroyed.”6 He is not alone in this dire estimation, Grandhári, the mother of Duryódhana, warns her son: “Don’t let this whole earth reach its destruction at your hands.”7

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Bhāsa’s Dūtavākya distills the Udyoga Parva and subtly shifts the focus from Krsna’s diplomatic pleas to Duryódhana’s inability to listen to reason. The Duryódhana of the Udyoga Parva pretty much huffs and puffs, hisses like a snake, and abruptly leaves the assembly hall in fits of intemperate rage. Bhāsa’s Duryódhana, by contrast, is anything but a hot head. This invites the question: Why does Duryódhana not heed the warnings of Krsna? Or, put more broadly: Why do people, when confronted with the very real possibility that their action or inaction will result in catastrophe, not heed such warnings and change their ways? In this respect, the dramatic tableaux before us could be thought of as the primal scene for this entire book. The question we are asking here is one that will haunt these pages from chapter to chapter, and play to play. Perhaps it is the perennial question for our own troubling times. There are, as we shall see, a myriad of reasons for this inability to properly respond to demands of the moment. They can include tradition, convention, habit, lassitude, cowardice, ignorance, incomprehension, inattention, distraction, disinterest, disbelief, or just plain denial. When you get right down to it, the list is tragically endless. When it comes to Duryódhana, he displays one of the more pernicious reasons: a deep-seated cynicism that views every action as nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to maintain one’s self-interest. Such corrosive doubt renders all other beliefs and actions suspect. This is the way of Bhāsa’s Duryódhana. It is this cynicism, more than anything else, that makes it impossible for Duryódhana to accept Krsna’s wise council. To Duryódhana, the Pāndavas are far from honorable; from his jaundiced point of view, they are a family of reprobates who had the audacity to literally gamble away their entire kingdom in a game of dice (which he rigged). Why should anyone entrust their lives and lands to such irresponsible leaders? But it is for Krsna himself that Duryódhana reserves his harshest criticism. Duryódhana dismisses Krsna as no more than a petty cow-thief and a serial seducer of young country girls. Duryódhana cannot see beyond these stories of Krsna’s reckless youth. It conveniently stops him from having to acknowledge the enlightened sage that now stands before him. He looks at Krsna and thinks: “Who is Krsna to speak to me of moderation and control when his own life is that of a questionable rogue?” How does one combat such all-pervasive cynicism? Krsna has a last trick up his sleeve, one not mentioned in any of the Hindu books of statecraft. Bhāsa describes this last tactic with the following straight-faced stage direction where Krsna “[a]ssumes his universal form.”8 What must that have looked like on the stage? Bhāsa remains mum on the matter. We must return to the Udyoga Parva for further imaginative assistance. There we find the following description: “(Krsna)

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laughed loudly as all thirty thumb-sized gods were released from his body … Great terrifying flames of smoky fire shot all around from his eyes, nose, and ears, and rays of light, like those of the sun, burst from the pores of his skin … divine kettledrums boomed, and a rain of flowers fell.”9 Even this does not move Duryódhana! Whenever I read this passage I am reminded of a comment made by the philosopher Martin Heidegger in his last published interview. Toward the end of this long and winding conversation, he was asked if he thought there was any hope for humankind. His famous response to this question was, “Only a god can save us.” Here, in Bhāsa’s Dūtavākya, we learn that not even the gods can curb the mad adharmic desires of humankind. Eighteen days and two plays later, we find ourselves almost at the end of the ensuing war. We have arrived at Bhāsa’s masterpiece of the cycle, The Ürubhanga (The Shattered Thighs). It is here that Duryódhana is given his full tragic due. The play begins with two surviving soldiers describing the vast and bloody landscape before them in vivid cinematic detail: “A tract of ground awash with the blood of the wounded and dead elephants, horses and men; crowded with scattered armor, shields, sun shields, throwing axes, arrows, lances … pikes, spears, axes, slingshots, pestles, battle hammers, arrows, iron bars, lances, darts, and terrifying maces.”10 Amid this bloodied wasteland one can also see “Torsos flail around from habit though their heads are severed”11 and every bird of prey known to man, whose beaks were wet “with gobs of flesh,” pecking away at “the insignias from the bodies of chieftains.”12 As these two soldiers continue to journey through this sea of fallen soldiers, they come upon the final and most terrible duel between Bhima and Duryódhana. They describe the battle between these two warriors, blow by blow, right up to the shocking moment where Bhima: Abandoning fellow feeling and dharma, discarding convention, on Krsna’s sign That son of Pandu flings the mace against the thighs of Gandhári’s son.13

The initial audience of this play would remember Krsna’s conversation with Arjuna in book nine of the Mahābhārata. Here, Krsna confesses that Bhima will only be able to kill Duryódhana “if he fights by unlawful (adharmic) means” and follows this with the proto-Machiavellian observation, “Let him use deceit to cut down this king who is himself deceitful.”14 In scene two of the play, we finally meet the fallen Duryódhana who, having his thighs shattered by Bhima’s mighty mace, must now use both his arms to drag his half-dead body across the

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ground. And yet this Duryódhana is curiously at peace. He tells those who have witnessed his sad fate to remain calm: This, the head of a fallen man, falls to the ground at your feet. Today, forthwith, let go your fury. Let the clouds of funeral oblations of the Kuru clan live long. The enmity is over, the rhetoric of conflict is over; we are over.15

He sees, but he sees too late. This final re-scripting of Duryódhana feels almost Shakespearean in its belief that each of us, no matter how fallen, possesses the capacity for inner transformation. That said, Bhāsa remains true to his source material and knows that this story is not as easily resolved as one might like. For every repentant Duryódhana who is humbled by adversity, there is an Aśhvatthāman who is maddened by it. It is Aśhvatthāman who cannot abide the breaches of the warrior code that have transpired on the battlefield. He cries out, “I shall cast Krsna and the children of Pandu/ down in the fight.”16 Duryódhana, having now rejected his warrior ways, responds: No, not this. An entire clan of consecrated rulers lies in the lap of mother earth. … My hundred brothers have been killed before me in the maw of battle, And I am reduced to this state. Son of my teacher, let go of your bow!17

But Aśhvatthāman refuses to be swayed by Duryódhana’s words of reason. Instead he vows: To you and to myself and to the world of heroes I swear I will lead a night raid and I will burn up the Pāndavas in combat.18

This is the inevitable continuation of the ever escalating breaches in the warrior code. Now Aśhvatthāman is planning the next outrage: attacking those who are asleep. This sort of adharmic “tit for tat” brings to mind Gandhi’s famous

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warning that “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Aśhvatthāman is clearly blinded by wrath and can only see vengeance. Bhāsa’s Mahābhārata cycle ends here. If Bhāsa wrote about Aśhvatthāman’s infamous night raid, this play has not come down to us. I would like to think that Bhāsa stopped his cycle here with these two warriors at an existential crossroads. One has learned his lesson, the other has lost his reason; one suddenly sees, the other is blind. The question for the audience becomes: Which one of these figures are you? To pick up the thread of Aśhvatthāman’s story, let us jump some 2,000 years, to dramatist Dharamvir Bharati and his twentieth-century masterpiece:

Andha Yug; or The Age of Darkness Dharamvir Bharati’s play was written in the wake of the bloody partition between India and Pakistan in 1947. The partition displaced some 10 to 20 million people along religious lines and led to large-scale violence that took countless lives. Estimates of those who died in this conflict vary between 200,000 to a staggering 2 million victims. On the heels of this humanitarian catastrophe was the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by the Hindu nationalist Nathuram Vinayak Godse who believed that Gandhi had made too many concessions to India’s Muslims during and after the 1947 partition. These tragic events find their analog in Bharati’s play, which uses the last day of the war in the Mahābhārata to speak to these modern-day ills. The play was an immediate success and gained further relevance over the next twenty years as both India and Pakistan raced to acquire their own nuclear arsenals. The play begins ominously at the gates of the Kuru palace where two guards wonder what has caused the sudden disappearance of the noonday sun. Its absence has thrown the world into complete and total darkness. At first they think this might be the beginnings of a thunderstorm, but soon they realize that the sky is overcast with “thousands and thousands of vultures with their wings outspread.”19 Along with the vultures will come news of the Kauravas’ massive defeat, and the arrival of Aśhvatthāman who has a plan for revenge. He tells us in a soliloquy: I shall live like a blind and ruthless beast Let both my hands turn into claws

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Staging the End of the World Let these eyes sharp like the teeth of a carnivore tear the body of anyone I see! From now on my only dharma is: “Kill, kill, kill and kill again.” Let that be the final purpose of my existence.20

To this end, Aśhvatthāman and his two remaining accomplices head to the Pāndava camp at night. Once there, they plan to break the most sacrosanct rule of the warrior code and slaughter much of the unsuspecting Pandu army while they sleep. This brings us to the climactic battle between Arjuna and Aśhvatthāman in which Aśhvatthāman unleashes the dreaded brahmastra. Bharati’s stage directions tell us: “He releases the brahmastra. Lightning, brighter than the sun, flashes across the stage. There is a roar followed by complete darkness.”21 Vyasa, the author of the Mahābhārata, appears, shocked at what has transpired, and confronts Aśhvatthāman with these words: For centuries to come nothing will grow on earth. Newborn children shall be deformed. Men shall become grotesque. All the wisdom men gathered in Satya, Treta, and Dvapara Yugs shall be lost forever.22

Vyasa continues to appeal to both Aśhvatthāman and Arjuna to recall their brahmastras before it is too late. Arjuna does as he is commanded but Aśhvatthāman simply laughs and confesses that he only knows how to release the brahmastra — his father had never taught him how to recall it. And so the weapon will continue with its destruction of not only the Pandu army but all the unborn children in their mothers’ wombs, including that of Uttara who carries the child that was to grow and become the next great king of the Pāndavas. This prompts Vyasa to condemn Aśhvatthāman as a beast and for Aśhvatthāman to counter with, “I was not born a beast/ Yudhishthira made me one.”23 In the end, we are told that Krsna intercedes on behalf of the Pāndava clan and blocks the

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brahmastra from striking the unborn child in Uttara’s womb. Upon hearing of Krsna’s intervention, Gandhari, the mother of the Kauravas, curses him. The Chorus tells us: From the moment Krsna accepted Gandhari’s curse the stars began to grow dim. The word “honor” which had gathered meaning over the ages lost all value for the living. Disenchanted poets forgot to measure and scan their lines. Everyone heard the curse but no one had the courage to speak to Gandhari. Its corrosive shadow spread from age to age and strained every heart and every soul.24

One might assume that the play would be over after this choral summation. But Bharati has several points left to touch upon. The first is the reminder that when it comes to war, there are no victors; everyone loses in one way or another. It is the new king, Yudhishthira, who in Act Five of Andha Yug, is most painfully aware of this sobering truth: “Though I won the war/ a ferocious war/ full of treachery/ and bloodshed/ and slaughter/ I am alone/ defeated.”25 Krsna’s death in the epilogue completes this transformation, or as the Chorus tells us: “The moment Krsna was killed/ Dvapara Yug came to an end/ and on the godforsaken earth/ Kali Yug took its first step.”26 This brings us back to Yudhisthira, who asks: How does one rule a kingdom in the age of Kali Yug? The same question troubled Peter Brook in his own theatrical encounters with the Mahābhārata.

Peter Brook and the Mahābhārata It makes a certain sense that Peter Brook would take a keen interest in a work like the Mahābhārata, first as part of his ongoing theatrical anthropology, which desires to return theater to its essential storytelling roots and also as it fits into Brook’s larger Weltanschauung. Remember, this is the director who gave us such seminal productions as the Beckettian King Lear, the unflinching film

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adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and the theatrical adaptation of anthropologist Colin Turnbull’s harrowing Mountain People, which described the generational dehumanization of an African tribe called the Ik. Brook used this anthropological source material to create yet another cautionary allegory on the breakdown of our own modern-day society. For Brook and his longtime collaborator Jean-Claude Carrier, the Mahābharata is a clear continuation of these concerns. Carrier noted to an interviewer, “We are already seeing an increasingly radical and increasingly evident decline in the whole idea of civilization” and how one can find the perfect parallel in the Kali Yuga depicted in the Mahābhārata. Brook himself elaborated on this in 1985: “Today it’s impossible to pretend that we are not in an age when the destruction of the world exists incessantly around us. It’s not up to me to suddenly point out to people that the world is in danger; it’s all too obvious … This is why the Mahābhārata is something to be heard today.”27 From here Brook returns to a long-held position that has brought him much criticism from progressive thinkers and artists. After he has analyzed our current plight and found the Mahābhārata to be its perfect theatrical analog, he goes on to tell us: “Today nobody can do a thing to stop or influence the course of events. It’s an illusion to think that marches, speeches, books, art can change an immense movement that’s sweeping the world. You can struggle on and fight, but it must be freed of the illusory belief that it will in any way block the relentless mechanism.”28 So how does Brook’s use of the Mahābhārata help us Westerners? Here, Brook turns to what he calls the Mahabharata’s “positive attitude.” He acknowledges that the book tells a dark and tragic tale, as terrifying as our own modern prospects, but he discerns a path that allows us to continue in this catastrophic world without losing what enables us to live in a positive way. Anticipating our next question, he asks: “But what does ‘positive’ mean? … It’s a word that takes us to the epicenter of the Bhagavad Gita: should you reject and withdraw from the confrontation, should you act, or what? That question ‘or what?’ is on everyone’s lips today, and although the Mahābhārata provides no answer, it gives immense food for thought.”29 At this point in Brook’s argument, he seems to be merging two of his lifelong obsessions — blanket fatalism and personal transformation — into one larger argument. Put simply: all we can do is change ourselves, not our actual world. In this respect, Brook gravitates toward what the ancient Greeks called idios kosmos (the private world) over koinos kosmos (the shared world). Transformation in Brook’s theater and philosophy is almost always of an individual nature and — ironically for a theater maker — rarely collective. The collective only becomes a

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dominant factor for Brook when he is depicting the decline or destruction of a given world. This book, respectfully, rejects such easy fatalism and suspects that Brook, on some level, does too. This is perhaps why he revisited the Mahābhārata some thirty years after its first production with a short companion piece entitled The Battlefield. Brook writes in his introduction to the published play text: “Now feeling the need to bring the epic into today’s world where its questions are passionately alive, we felt that the ending had to be explored in a different manner from the way it had been explored thirty years before. The question of how to reign when a terrible war is finished … how can the future king accept his mission to be king?” 30 What, we might ask, does Brook think was wrong with his first pass at this monumental work? It was a landmark production that presented this extraordinary story over three installments, making up nine hours of masterful stagecraft, delivering Brook’s special blend of blanket fatalism (the world is coming to an end) and uplifting personal transformation (but you can come to terms with this and accept it with the sagacious smile of one of the enlightened). Audiences from across the planet rose to their feet, myself included, and gave this hugely ambitious undertaking one sustained standing ovation after another. It was a theatrical triumph; but for some, a triumph of spectacle over the more philosophical aspects of the epic. This is, no doubt, part of what drove Brook back to the Mahābhārata. It would seem that Brook “the philosopher” wanted to self-correct Brook “the entertainer.” The Battlefield, developed some thirty years later, attempts the opposite approach to his first encounter with the Mahābhārata and tries to put more of the epic’s philosophy on stage by relating a series of simple parables drawn from the Shanti Parva (The Book of Peace) and the Anushasana Parva (The Book of Instruction). The results are unfortunately of middling success; perhaps Brook’s initial inkling was correct and it is the theatrical gesture and not the philosophical insight that works best on stage. Perhaps more problematically, this is a work that promises to be about how Yudhishtihira should rule his kingdom in a fallen age, but inevitably reverts to Brook’s favorite theme of obtaining inner peace and tranquility. Again, as hard as Brook attempts to deal with the larger idea of the social (koinos kosmos), he cannot help but fall back on his almost singular obsession with individual enlightenment (idios kosmos). Much of the first part of the Shanti Parva, on which The Battlefield is based, deals with the interworking of the polis; these instructions are passed from Bhīsma to Yudhishthira and include the rules of kings, the fortification of cities, economics, taxation, war, and discerning the actual reality behind the surface appearance of things. In fairness, these topics are next to impossible to dramatize, so it is understandable

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that Brook should forgo all this and focus on the thematics of Yudhishthira’s personal development. The only problem with such an adaptational strategy is that it gives a somewhat false impression that Yudhishthira’s education is more personally oriented than politically minded. As a result, the possibilities for the social betterment of all are somewhat lost in this dramatization. At the very end of The Battlefield, one of the characters says, “Now I will tell you who I am and all you wish to know …”31 This ellipsis is followed by a stage direction that reads, “The MUSICIAN plays on his djembe and all the actors listen. The End.”32 Such an ending might put one in mind of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, where Wittgenstein famously writes, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent;” but one might also wonder if, beyond this silence, there might be more to say that goes beyond Brook’s penchant for the private.

Back to Bharati’s Andha Yug Bharati’s Yudhishthira, as we noted earlier, goes through a similar search for answers over how to rule in the age of Kali Yug and, like Brook’s Yudhishthira, his questions and subsequent lessons are drawn from the Shanti Parva (The Book of Peace) and the Anushasana Parva (The Book of Instruction). Where Brook ends with silence, Bharati ends with this humble statement from the Chorus: That day the world descended into the age of darkness which has no end, and repeats itself over and over again. … And yet it is also true that like a small seed buried somewhere in the mind of man there is courage and a longing for freedom and the imagination to create something new.

The opening of this Chorus is, on the surface, not all that different from JeanClaude Carrier’s observation that, “There’s only one thing left for us to do in these dramatic times: maintain our dharma in circumstances which will make it harder and harder to do so.”33 The speech may begin in this same modest zip code of the individual (idios kosmos), which Brook and Carrier inhabit, but almost immediately it begins to transcend this stance:

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The seed is buried without exception in each of us and it grows day to day in our lives as duty as honor as freedom as virtuous conduct.

The seed grows beyond the self and toward others (koinos kosmos) in its sense of duty and virtuous conduct. This presupposes the necessity of being-for-others rather than just being-for-oneself. Such an other-directed impulse continues to grow until it reaches a concern for others consumed by war, and finally — and most expansively— the very future of humanity. It is this small seed that makes us fear half-truths and great wars and always saves the future of mankind from blind doubt, slavery and defeat.34

Bharati’s seed begins to resemble a pebble thrown into still water, creating a ripple effect that expands ever-outward from its original center. It is this impulse of moving beyond the center of one’s self to the circumference of others that distinguishes the outlook of Bharati from that of Brook. A piece of humble wisdom to carry with us, as we continue to make our way through the pages of this book.

Why Things Fall Apart; or Toward an Ontology of Collapse A perennial question: What brings about the collapse of a world? Is it a total war? Natural disasters? Depletion of resources? Insufficient response to grave circumstances? Economic instability? Mismanagement? Social fragmentation? Chance? Can it be reduced to one simple thing? Or a combination of things?

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For the authors of the Mahābhārata there was a very straightforward answer: The collapse of dharma makes their world susceptible to all these other threats. When dharma is firmly adhered to, then the culture can withstand such unanticipated blows to its continuance; without this belief and adherence, the culture becomes weak and therefore vulnerable to these destructive forces. Perhaps it can withstand one such disruption, but after two or three it collapses. In the case of the Mahābhārata, the diminution of dharma results in total war and this creates the conditions of adharma for both the vanquished and the victor. In this instance, the Pāndavas may have won the war; but, in the process, they have lost the world to the reign of Kali Yuga. Joseph A. Tainter, the author of The Collapse of Complex Societies, does not think in the sacred terms of dharma, but rather in the more technocratic aspects of a civilization’s problem-solving capabilities. For Tainter there are four basic premises that come into play when discussing the stability or collapse of any given society. He believes: 1. Human societies are problem-solving organizations. 2. Sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance. 3. Increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita; and 4. Investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns.35 And so, when a society begins to lose its edge or faith in its own problem-solving capabilities, or does not work to maintain and advance new solutions, it risks the onset of deterioration. Tainter charts these trajectories with examples from the fall of Roman, Mesopotamian, Mayan, and Native American societies. We can see the same dynamic at work in the former Soviet Union and, to a sobering extent, now in the United States, where Congress seems incapable of working across the aisle to solve the myriad concerns that threaten the future of the nation. Tainter tells us, “The problems with which the universe can confront a society are, for practical purposes, infinite in number and endless in variety. As stresses necessarily arise, new organizational and economic solutions must be developed, typically at increasing cost and declining marginal return. The marginal return on investment in complexity accordingly deteriorates, at first gradually, then with accelerated force.”36 In other words, complex societies often reach an inflection point where the effort necessary to solve a given set of problems exceeds any immediate rewards (economic or otherwise). At such junctures, a society can lose its incentive to continue searching for a solution to

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said problems. Often such societies fall back on prior solutions that worked in the past, believing that these will continue to serve them in the future. One could argue that such a dynamic is operating now in our modern world where we continue to put more and more money and resources into our military might as a way to solve our international problems; and yet war continues to prove to be a less and less effective way of actually achieving something like lasting peace. Just look at the United States’ twenty-year debacle in Afghanistan as a case in point. It is sobering to note that the United States has spent over $6 trillion in military spending since 9/11. Now compare this to US spending on global warming. As I write this book, Congress is attempting to pass its largest investment in protecting the nation from climate change. The price tag: $47 billion. The problem solving to combat climate change seems somehow too daunting for the United States to deal with and so it falls back on the idea of maintaining its vast military as a way to protect and insure its interests on a planet of ever diminishing natural resources. In the meantime it is becoming clearer and clearer that war is becoming another insidious means for putting us, our planet, and its resources in greater jeopardy; perpetuating a long history of increasingly brutal ecocide. This reaches its dark apotheosis with our modern-day nuclear arsenals; only in this scenario, the threat is not limited to just one targeted group or enemy, but the earth as we know it. Such a cataclysm was, as we have seen, first intuited by the ancient authors of the Mahābhārata with the advent of the brahmastra. It is hard not to think of Aśhvatthāman’s weapon as the precursor to today’s nuclear warheads. Robert J. Oppenheimer, the famous physicist and father of the atomic bomb, would be the first to make such a connection, quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, “Kaalo asme loka kshaya kritpraviddho,” or:

“I am Death, the Destroyer of Worlds;” The Brahmastra and the Bomb The deployment of the brahmastra happens deep into the Sauptikaparavan, which is book ten of the Mahābhārata. Aśhvatthāman draws his mighty bow and exclaims, “Destroy the race of Pandu,” and with this he releases the brahmastra. “At that, the missile set a tornado in motion, engulfing the three realms of the world in flames, like Yama, god of death, ushering in the end of time.”37 Arjuna shoots a counter astra to circumvent Aśhvatthāman’s equally deadly weapon.

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The one strikes the other, resulting in “a massive halo of brilliant heat. Countless tornados were whipped up and burning meteors fell everywhere. Every living being was filled with immense dread. The sky filled with fire as violent noise filled the air, and the whole earth quaked down to every mountain, forest and tree.”38 At the last moment, two celestial sages intervene to allay the impact of the missiles, thus saving the universe from total annihilation. Let’s compare this ancient end with another, as imagined by the contemporary author Jonathan Schell in his seminal The Fate of the Earth. Forty pages into this groundbreaking work of anti-nuclear argumentation, Schell describes the fictive destruction of New York City. This nightmarish flight of fancy is based on the very real accounts of the nuclear devastation inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: If it were possible (as it would not be) for someone to stand at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-second Street (about two miles from ground zero) without being instantly killed, he would see the following sequence of events. A blinding white light from the fireball would illumine the scene, continuing for perhaps thirty seconds. Simultaneously, searing heat would ignite everything flammable and start to melt windows, cars, buses, lampposts, and everything made of metal and glass. People in the street would immediately catch fire and shortly be reduced to heavily charred corpses. About five seconds after the light appeared, the blast wave would strike, laden with the debris of a now nonexistent midtown.39

When Schell wrote these words in 1982, such a depiction was already seared into the imaginations of many modern citizens; it was a scenario they found in countless bestsellers, magazines, movies, and their own private nightmares. What was revolutionary about Schell’s work was that it focused on what happens on the other side of this catastrophic event. In 1985 there were still two lingering misassumptions in regard to a nuclear war: (1) that such an atomic altercation was winnable and (2) that we could, in time, recover with little lasting damage to our immediate environment. Schell, in 215 brisk pages of crystalline prose, would decimate both assumptions. He did this by reminding everyone of the mass stockpile of nuclear arms that had been accumulating ever since 1945 and imagining what would happen if even half of this arsenal was deployed by one side or the other. From here, Schell focused on four aspects of a post-nuclear holocaust that had not yet been fully processed by the general public. One could think of these as the four horseman of a nuclear apocalypse: 1. Delayed or Worldwide Fallout. “In detonations greater than one hundred kilotons, part of the fallout does not fall to the ground in the vicinity of the explosion but rises high into the troposphere and into the stratosphere,

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circulates around the earth, and then, over months or years, descends, contaminating the whole surface of the globe.”40 2. Lofting. This is a result of the ground bursts, of the millions of tons of dust into the stratosphere; this is likely to plunge the world into a frigid darkness for several months due to the failure of the sun’s rays to penetrate the smoke-filled atmosphere. People and animals either freeze or starve, and much of the flora and fauna of the Northern Hemisphere would either be irrevocably damaged or possibly destroyed.41 3. Destruction of the Ozone Layer. The ozone layer, as you may remember from your high-school science class, protects the earth from lethal levels of ultraviolet radiation. “Without the ozone shield, sunlight, the life giver would become a life extinguisher.”42 4. The Cumulative Impact of all the Above. Schell then goes on to show how, over the decades, “not only would the survivors of a limited attack face a contaminated and degraded environment but they themselves — their flesh, bones, and genetic endowment — would be contaminated: the generations that would be trying to rebuild a human life would be sick and possibly deformed for generations … whether a human community could survive bearing this burden of illness and mutation is at best questionable.”43 Schell concludes that anyone who thinks of winning or recovering from such a war is dreaming. His argument was first printed in three successive issues of The New Yorker (February 1, 8, 15, 1982) and then published, two months later, by Alfred A. Knopf. The book galvanized the nation and remained on the bestseller list for the remainder of the year. It prompted wide and vigorous debate, was translated into multiple languages across the globe, and helped fuel the nascent anti-nuclear movement, which five months later, culminated in a mass protest in Central Park of 500,000 protesters who called for a nuclear arms freeze. This was one of the first rhetorical salvos against the efficacy of nuclear war. In contrast to the blanket fatalism of Peter Brook, the book led to a sea change in the political consciousness of the American nuclear zeitgeist and was further amplified in the following year by a television movie entitled The Day After. This fictional tale chronicled the devastating effects of an imagined nuclear strike on American soil and used much of the same science that was the backbone of Schell’s The Fate of the Earth. All of this would eventually lead to talks by the Reagan administration with the Soviet Union to explore the reduction of each nation’s nuclear arsenal. Reagan and Gorbachev eventually concluded a landmark Intermediate-Range

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Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement and established the foundation for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which was concluded in 1991. The playwright David Hare, after news of Schell’s death wrote, “How many people in my lifetime have published books that permanently change the terms of debate on the subject they address?”44 His answer: Rachel Carson with Silent Spring (which we will discuss in chapter eight of this book), Simone de Beauvoir with The Second Sex, and Jonathan Schell. Schell presents us with one of our first palpable examples of how something as seeming inconsequential as a 215-page book can have a profound impact on the social imaginary of a nation and become a template for further political intervention.

And Yet According to the Arms Control Association, the world’s nuclear arsenals are estimated to possess a combined total of 19,000 warheads. Many political pundits believe that the threat of nuclear annihilation is even more pressing than it was during the height of the Cold War. On January 27, 2021, the Doomsday Clock, a symbol created by scientists to represent the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe, moved us ever closer to annihilation, warning that we are now a 100 seconds to midnight. And still, every passing year, the world continues to add to its nuclear stockpiles and expand its military might. This perpetual militarization is perhaps one of our most ecologically destructive endeavors. Amitav Ghosh reminds us in his sweeping The Nutmeg’s Curse, that in the 1990s the three branches of the US military consumed approximately 25 million tons of fuel per year.45 These activities come with other environmental costs that include 500,000 tons of toxic waste annually, more than all of the top five US chemical companies combined. Finally, it is believed that the militaries of the major world powers produce the greatest amount of hazardous waste in the world. Currently, it seems as though we are caught in a vicious cycle where we maintain our militaries to stave off a war over limited natural resources, but these growing militaries require more and more of these very resources, further depleting them to the point where we have no other option but to go to war over what little remains. Ghosh tells us that, “As far back as 1992, the Union of Concerned Scientists warned that humanity faced a stark choice between spending its resources on war and violence, or on preventing catastrophic environmental damage.”46 This begs the question: Are we preparing for the wrong armageddon? Rather than readying ourselves for a deadly encounter between rival geo-political powers, perhaps

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the next total war will be between humanity and the planet itself. We’ve already begun to see the earth fight back with increasingly destructive fires, floods, and droughts. But this is a war that we can only win by putting down our arms. Such circumstances remind me of Kafka’s 52nd Zarau Aphorism, which, in my somewhat free-form paraphrase, becomes: “In a battle between humanity and the earth. Bet on the earth.”

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Diasporas old and new What Euripides’ Children of Herakles can teach us about the coming climate wars and resulting refugee crisis

The Age of Iron and the Pursuit of Arkhé Kakón Where ancient India thought of the ages of humankind as a series of dice throws, the ancient Greeks turned to precious metals for their symbolic assistance. This is how they chose to capture their sense of world-historical decline. It was Hesiod who first wed the metallic to the entropic. He presented us with five ages, four of which use metal as their metaphor: Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron. Sitting between the Bronze and the Iron Age, we find an Age of Heroes. I suppose one could say that the heroic temperament is a kind of metal of its own. We still have a vestige of this idea with such sayings as “so-and-so proved their mettle.” Mettle was originally a variant spelling of metal. This lexical doubling dates back to the 1300s, but by the sixteenth century the word had found its own specialized meaning. Webster’s dictionary tells us that it now refers to a person’s ability “to cope well with difficulties or to face a demanding situation in a spirited and resilient way.” This would be an apt description of the Age of Heroes, which coincides with those brave warriors who fought beneath the walls of Troy. And so, Hesiod bequeaths to us these five ages, each being a diminution of the one that preceded it. Such a trajectory is not all that dissimilar from the eschatology of India; nor is the Greek notion that these epochs are cyclical, doomed to repeat themselves for all eternity. We, in case you are curious, are still — technically — the children of this final and fallen Age of Iron. Ovid opined that Jupiter had lost his patience with the violence and immorality of our age and decided to end the reign of humans. Fortunately, we humans stopped believing in Jupiter before he could put his plan in motion.

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Jupiter may have receded into the shadows of our collective memory but the idea of a slow and indiscernible diminution of the goodness of things is still very much alive and well in our modern imaginations. We remain predisposed to such an entropic sensibility. But the Greeks bequeathed to us another conceptual paradigm, one that was slightly more precise in teasing out the interstitial points of civilizational decline. They even had a name for these decisive moments. They called them arkhé kakón. This is a simple term for a terrible chain of events. Breaking this term into etymologically digestible bits, we have arkhê, which runs the lexical gamut of “ancient” to “first,” and kakón, which simply means “bad.” Together they warn us of “the beginning of bad things.” It is a term employed by ancient Greek historians when they needed to deal with the genealogy of disasters. That is how Herodotus spoke of the Greek and Persian war that took place in 499 BCE and how Thucydides thought of the Peloponnesian War of 431 BCE. For Euripides this latter war was the quintessence of arkhé kakón, although he could not say so directly, for fear of censure. He would have to resort to metaphor: Troy or the plight of the children of Herakles would become ways of addressing:

The Final Days of Athenian Hegemony (and How This Relates to Our Own Current Climate Wars) The long and protracted Peloponnesian War would lead to the same sort of mass slaughter, ecocide, and dislocation of entire populations that we encountered in the previous chapter. Athens, at that time, was known throughout the region as a country open to and protective of refugees. This idea of hospitality ran deep in the culture. The foundational myths of Athens celebrated the city as a sanctuary for all those fleeing from the oppression of other lands. This historical hospitality was put to the test during the Peloponnesian War. According to Thucydides, much of the rural population of Attica had to abandon their homes in fear of the ever encroaching Spartan army. They flocked to Athens where they encountered tens of thousands of other displaced persons all seeking asylum. A second city of lean-to shacks began to grow outside the walls of Athens. The outskirts of the city became one immense refugee camp. This, of course, is not all that different from the vast refugee camps that we now find sprouting throughout Greece and parts of Europe. Harald Welzer, in his comprehensive and sobering Climate Wars: What People Will Be Killed For in

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the 21st Century, tells us that the consequences of much of the mass migration we are seeing from such areas as Somalia, the Sudan, and the Middle East are not like migrations of the past. Those were the result of conflicts between states or threats to territorial sovereignty, whereas modern migration is now caused by shortages of drinking water, declining food production, increased health risks, land degradation, and floods that have led to new waves of territorial unrest and warfare over resources. All of these conflicts can be seen as a response to the reduced living space of the inhabitants of various regions. Welzer tells us that the violent conflicts that erupt and the subsequent mass migrations that ensue are finally being linked to the dire changes of our climate, particularly as it is being disproportionately felt throughout the developing world; hence Welzer’s new designation of these recent conflicts as a series of climate wars. He goes on to explain: Although violent conflicts are always a product of several parallel, uneven developments, the structural causes of violence, such as state collapse, the emergence of “violence markets” and the exclusion or extermination of population groups, are reinforced and accelerated by ecological problems and the disappearance of soil, water, and other resources. Salinization adds to the problem by reducing areas of farmland and triggering migration flows. It is then the search for new pastures or agricultural land, rather than ecological decline per se, which may directly unleash conflicts with other groups. The same applies to the border conflicts that will become more frequent as waterways that used to constitute natural frontiers run dry. Internal migration triggered by environmental changes also leads to major conflicts and may be understood as an indirect consequence of climate change. It is estimated that there are currently 24 million internal refugees around the world.1

This was written in 2012. Currently, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees puts the total number of forcibly displaced persons at a staggering 80 million people.2 Of those, 45.7 million are internally displaced, 26.3 million are refugees, and 4.2 million are asylum seekers.3 This is an unbelievable rate of increase, all the more so when compared to the displaced persons of the 1950s which, according the official statistics, counted at a mere 2 million refugees.4 If we jump to the future, say 2050, the current estimate of displaced persons is estimated to exceed a billion individuals.5 The question before us in this chapter is: How can Greek tragedy help us understand what is at stake, especially when we talk about the rights of those who have been displaced by the advent of global warming?

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Euripides’ Children of Herakles There are several notable examples of displaced characters seeking asylum in the corpus of extant Greek tragedies. This begins with Aeschylus’ The Supplicants, runs through Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, and works such as Euripides’ Children of Herakles. This last work, like many of Euripides’ plays, has had to wait until the late twentieth century to find a more receptive and understanding audience. For past generations, it was thought to be a botched affair; but now, in light of our current refugee crisis, it has garnered much more critical attention and is seen as an astute study in the ever shifting status of refugees. The play shows us that this situation can be as precarious for the displaced person as it is for the host country. It goes on to suggest that the survival of both refugee and host is actually at stake. This survival is on two very different timetables. The faster track is the immediate plight of the refugee; but another, far slower and yet no less disastrous fate is reserved for those host communities that do not heed the refugee’s call for sanctuary. Euripides suggests that such a disengagement from the plight of the refugee can lead to a rip in the ethical fabric of the host society, leaving it vulnerable to further moral fraying. But we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves. First, let’s quickly review the plot of this lesser-known Greek tragedy. The play begins near the eastern coast of Attica where we find an old man, Iolaos, praying for sanctuary at the altar of Zeus. He is surrounded by the children of the late great Herakles. These are twenty or so young boys and girls who are all on the run from the wicked King Eurystheus. Those of you who were actually paying attention in your Greek mythology class might vaguely remember the name of this Eurystheus. He was the fellow responsible for forcing Herakles into those twelve seemingly impossible labors that make up so much of this hero’s CV. Unfortunately, Herakles’ subsequent success in these tasks has not, in any way, placated this nemesis of his. Iolaos explains: After Herakles had left this world, Eurystheus wanted us dead, so we ran away. We lost our country, but we saved our lives. Now we wander like fugitives, hounded from town to town. Outrage after outrage: After all our suffering, he still pursues us.6

A messenger from the evil Eurystheus appears. Being part of Eurystheus’ retinue, he can’t just simply deliver a message from his master. He must first scoff at Iolaos’ hope of sanctuary (“No sane man would choose your helplessness when he might choose the power of Eurystheus”) and then forcibly wrenches the old

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man from the altar and throws him to the ground.7 The chorus, made up of the citizens of Athens, sees this violent action and is appalled. They immediately intervene on the old man’s behalf, reminding the messenger that “the rights of suppliants must be respected … Here justice rules and violence is forbidden.”8 Just in case this messenger still does not understand this culture of hospitality, Demophon, the king of Athens, arrives to further back up Athens’ historic stance with a long jingoistic speech. He dismisses the messenger and takes his own leave so that he might mobilize his citizens to give sanctuary to Ioslos and the children of Herakles. This is followed by a brief interlude where the chorus sings, dances, and generally brags about Athens’ singularity. If one did not know this was a play by Euripides, one might easily think that everything up to this point has been a piece of blatant propaganda, written by some hack who was in the service of the state and tasked with reminding everyone of yet another aspect of Athenian exceptionalism. But this is, after all, a play by Euripides. He is a writer who, try as he might, simply cannot resist the gravitational pull of irony. And so, after this brief choral interlude, he has Demophon return, terribly chagrined. It turns out that Eurystheus is indeed going to attack Athens, and Demophon’s professional oracles have informed him that, for Athens to win, they must sacrifice a young virgin girl of noble birth to the goddess Persephone. This, it seems, is a sort of celestial deal breaker. Demophon confesses: “You know the good will I bear you, Iolaos, but this new/ requirement is too much. I will not kill my own daughter/ nor will I compel any Athenian to such an act/ against his will.”9 Fortunately, Makaria, one of Herakles’ daughters, steps forward and says that she will sacrifice herself so that the gods will grant Athens victory against Eurystheus. All of this might strike the reader/ audience as a bit much; but the young girl’s speech is so beautifully written that many forgo their dramaturgical reservations and continue to give this tragedy the benefit of the doubt. With Makaria dispatched to be sacrificed, Demophon sets off to rally his troops. Iolaos insists, despite his advanced age, that he fight alongside his Athenian protectors. The two head off, leaving the chorus to perform another interlude where they chide Eurystheus for his waging war and pray to Athena that she will once again protect their city. Now, here’s where things get really interesting. On the heels of this brief choral ode, an Athenian messenger arrives to inform us that a miracle has transpired: Iolaos was transformed from a feeble old man and back into a young and mighty warrior whose new-found prowess not only brought about victory but also resulted in the capture of the evil Eurystheus who has become a prisoner of the Athenians. Before we can process — or even question —this

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dramaturgical turn of events, Eurystheus is thrown onstage in chains. It is here that the entire tenor of the play changes; what seemed to be a tonguein-cheek piece of agitprop theatre has transformed into a new and perplexing problem play. The problem being: What do we do with Eurystheus? Alkmene, Herakles’ mother, knows exactly what needs to be done: kill the son of a bitch (I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea). A servant of Hyllos, one of Herakles’ sons, reminds her: Servant  But you can’t put him to death. Not now. Alkmene  Why else take him prisoner? What law prevents me from putting this man to death? Servant  The Athenian authorities. They won’t allow it. Alkmene  Won’t allow it? Since when is it wrong to kill your enemies? Servant  When your enemies are prisoners of war.10

This is Athenian law. The servant tells Alkmene that “You won’t find anyone to execute him now.”11 This does not deter Alkmene who tells the servant, “I’m not your anyone. I’ll kill him.”12 But before she can, Eurystheus interrupts her and gives his own self-serving defense. In terms of his feud with Herakles, as far as he is concerned, he is not to blame. Hera is. In short: The goddess made him do it. He had no choice. She compelled him. And when Herakles, his foe, had died, what was he to do? Now Herakles’ children will grow up to kill him. He tells Alkmene that if she had been in his place, she would have done the same to save herself. The chorus leader, who has been listening attentively to all this, intervenes and advises Alkmene to let it be. “Athens,” he says, “has spared him. Respect this decision.”13 But Eurystheus is content to die and reveals that he has one final card up his sleeve. The entirety of his speech is worth sharing so that the reader might fully fathom the depth and nuance of this man’s malignant hatred: Eurystheus  Kill me. I don’t want mercy. But since Athens spared me, rightly and humanely refusing to kill a prisoner, I now offer this city my gift, an ancient oracle of Apollo, which in time to come will prove a far greater blessing than anyone now dreams. Bury my body in the place decreed

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The insidious efficiency of these twenty-two lines is staggering. First and foremost, Eurystheus’ prophecy speaks to every host country’s secret fear, that those they take in for sanctuary will one day turn on them. But, on a more maniacal level, it puts Athens in an impossible situation. For the future of Athens to survive, it must kill Eurystheus, thereby insuring that he will become the city’s supernatural protectorate; but by killing Eurystheus, Athens risks irrevocably damaging its own ethical foundations. Such a blow could, in and of itself, hasten the demise of the city’s democratic standing, long before Eurystheus’ prophecy becomes a reality. Interestingly, Alkmene thinks nothing of the future of her children’s children and rallies the chorus to go ahead and do Eurystheus’ bidding, This will not only assuage her thirst for vengeance but also assures Athens’ safety. For that alone, they should — according to her — kill him now and feed his remains to the dogs. And so we are faced with a choice: To kill or not to kill. The ancient Greeks loved such moments; they built their tragedies just to bring us to such ethical forks in the road. What to do? What would you do? That is their question. Perhaps, you don’t know. Perhaps you are at a complete and total loss. What then? Don’t worry. Someone on stage will make the choice for you. You can simply sit back and watch the consequences of someone else’s choosing. And so, in this case, we turn to the chorus who have listened to Alkmene’s rallying cry. What do they do? What do they say? Here is their response:

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Chorus  We agree. Guards, take him away. By our actions here, our kings are innocent.15

End of play. Yes, you read right: End. Of. Play. That’s it. That’s all Euripides had to write. There is no counter argument to further uphold the necessity of the law. No one steps forward and enjoins the Athenians to protect all outsiders in need. Nor is there any last-minute deus ex machina; no slightly distracted god who descends and decrees that these mere mortals rethink the consequences of their actions. There is no argument, no god, nothing that stops the chorus from following Alkmene in her blind hatred and bringing an end to Eurystheus’ life. An end that could very easily precipitate the end of Athenian democracy as we know it. How did we get to this place? How did we go from a country that honors and protects outcasts to one that kills them out of fear and calculation? What are we to make of this stunning ethical reversal and its ramifications? To begin to answer all this, we must start with another, somewhat humbler, question:

Just Who Is the Main Character of Children of Herakles? Is it Iolaos? He certainly seems like a worthy candidate except he disappears mid-way through the play. So do our next potential candidates: Demophon and Makaria. I think all of us can agree that it is certainly not Eurystheus. So who does that leave? Alkmene? But shouldn’t a central character go through the kind of overarching change that we have come to expect in Greek tragedy? Does anyone change in this play of Euripides? I would argue that the only one that goes through any semblance of transformation is the chorus. It is they who are faced with the choice of what to do with Eurystheus. A choice that takes them from a group of individuals who begin the play espousing “the rights of suppliants must be respected/ there can be no violence toward them,” and end — some thirty pages later — marching Eurystheus off to his death!16 It is also worth noting that the chorus of Children of Herakles is the perfect mirror for its original audience. Remember that a tragic chorus was made up of the polis not professionals. Such dramatic choruses were always chosen from the Athenian citizenry as opposed to the choruses of dithyrambic competitions, which tended to be based on tribal affiliation. The Chorēgos who was in charge of financing and organizing the

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chorus was given a great deal of authority and, with the help of Athenian law, was able to impose a financial penalty on those who refused to perform. And so, that original audience of Children of Herakles would have looked at the chorus and seen themselves: a tableaux of full-blooded Athenians mirroring their own ideology and fears. With this in mind, we can move on to our next question:

Why This Change of Heart from the Chorus? And What Did It Mean to an Athenian Audience? If the chorus of the play was indeed an extension of fifth-century Athenian concerns, then the question they were faced with was far from abstract; it directly related to the problem just beyond the very gates of Athens: what to do with the huge and sudden influx of refugees who had been displaced by the Peloponnesian War? The vast collateral damage from this conflict was both literal and ethical. It began to put a significant strain on the very foundations of Athenian democracy. For instance, in 430 BCE the Athenians captured the Peloponnesian ambassadors to the king of Thrace and murdered them. This act went against a crucial custom that considered all ambassadors and heralds sacred and deserving of judicial consideration. Retaliation to this act came with the murder of Athenian merchants caught in the Peloponnese. All of this reaches a moral/ethical crisis in 427 with the civil war in Kerkyra, where Thucydides tells us: Death … raged in every shape, and, as usually happens at such times, there was no length to which violence did not go; sons were killed by fathers, and suppliants were dragged from the altar or slain upon it; while some were even walled up in the temple of Dionysos and died there … The ancient simplicity into which honor so largely entered was laughed down and disappeared; and society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow.17

The same erosion of values now threatened Athens itself. The older, prewar, way asked the polis to think morally when it came to considering something like the plight of refugees. This was a frame of mind that Kant would later characterize as being “guileless as doves.”18 During and after the Peloponnesian War, this mentality shifts. Now the polis is weary of all foreigners. Kant would characterize this sort of response as being “wise as serpents.”19 This seems to be the dichotomy we find at the heart of Euripides’ play. It breaks into the following dialectically opposed camps:

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 “BE GUILELESS AS DOVES.” “BE YE WISE AS SERPENTS.”   IOLAO ALKMENE   DEMOPHON EURYSTHEUS   MAKARIA

The question becomes which way will the chorus tilt? In the end, the chorus chooses to forgo the moral high ground of the doves and embraces the “realpolitik” of serpents. Thucydides, as we have quoted, shows us the consequences of such a shift. Kant, who is a student of Thucydides, agrees and puts forth the following thoughts on this subject matter in his Third Definitive Article for Perpetual Peace where he asserts, “The Law of World Citizenship Shall Be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality”: [This] is not a question of philanthropy but of right. Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another. One may refuse to receive him when this can be done without causing his destruction; but, so long as he peacefully occupies his place, one may not treat him with hostility. It is not the right to be a permanent visitor that one may demand. A special beneficent agreement would be needed in order to give the outsider a right to become a fellow inhabitant for a certain length of time. It is only the right of temporary sojourn, a right to associate, which men have. They have it by virtue of their common possession of the surface of the earth, where as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other. Originally, no one had more right than another to a particular part of the earth.20

This is all well and good but what about the specter of the “dangerous” refugee? Such is Alkmene’s argument. What does one do with the Eurystheuses of the world? What, indeed? Alkmene’s point of view is persuasive. It hails from the wisdom of serpents. It says don’t be guileless like those doves; because, if you do, the Eurystheuses of the world will destroy you. And yet, Alkmene’s argument is so rabid and fanatical that it should give us pause. Here, caution needs to be exercised and her venom questioned. Alas, the chorus does not pause to deliberate and takes Eurystheus off to be stoned without the benefit of any legal adjudication. Well, you might say, that was then, this is now. But what about our now?

Our Current Refugee Crisis Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, writing on this unnerving twenty-first-century phenomenon, notes, “Hundreds of thousands of people are chased out of their houses, murdered or expelled from their countries. Perhaps the only flourishing

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industry in the so-called developing countries, the countries of these latecomers to modernity, is the mass production of refugees.”21 Having succumbed to this new world-historical status, Bauman tells us that the forcibly displaced person of the twenty-first century becomes an inmate of a refugee camp, which: Means eviction from the world of humanity. Refugees are not only surplus, but also superfluous. The path back to their lost homeland is forever barred. The occupants of the camps are robbed all features of identity, with one exception: the fact that they are refugees. Without a state, without a home, without a function, without papers. Permanently marginalized, they also stand outside the law. As the French anthropologist Michael Agier notes in his study on refugees in the era of globalization, they are not outside this or that law in this country or another, but outside law all together.22

This leads to a series of questions that we are grappling with now — what Hannah Arendt called “The right to have rights.” Arendt reminds us what has historically happened to people in a such a situation: The calamity of the right-less is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion — formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities — but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them; not that they are oppressed but that nobody wants even to oppress them. 23

It is at this point, according to Arendt, that a dispossessed people are at their most vulnerable. If they remain “superfluous,” if no one can be found to “claim” them, then they might find their very lives in peril. Arendt reminds us of the Jews under Nazi rule: How the first steps toward extermination was in depriving the Jews of all legal status; next the Nazis were able to cut off the Jews from the rest of humanity by herding them into ghettos and camps, and from there it was only a few short steps toward various forms of extermination. The Nazis, according to Arendt, had carefully tested the ground and found that no country would rise up to claim or protect the Jews. As a result, we can see a direct line emerging from the loss of rights to the loss of the very right to life itself. For Arendt the issue is not just the rights of the individual but of that individual’s entire community. Such a state of affairs allows for the Alkmenes of the world to deploy the rhetoric of serpents. Bauman points out that, when this becomes permissible, the displaced person can be given “features that besmirch and defame their image, of re-presenting such categories of humans as unworthy of regard and respect, and justifying our disregard and lack of care as deserved

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punishment for the incurable vices or vicious intentions of those whom we have discarded and ignored, harshly treated or callously neglected.”24 We see this sort of approach taken daily with unproven claims that suchand-such refugees are secretly in the service of Al-Qaeda simply because they are from the Middle East, or certain refugees harbor infectious diseases, or that the majority of refugees are miscreants who plan to sponge off the generosity of their host country. Bauman encapsulates all of these unsupported fears in the following story of a Texas agricultural commissioner who posted pictures of rattlesnakes and recent Syrian refugees on his social media with a caption that read: “Can you tell me which of these rattlers won’t bite you?”25 The post was subsequently defended by the Governor of Texas who was quoted as saying, “We cannot allow the charity for some to compromise the safety for all.”26 Bauman concludes that such dehumanization paves the way for their [the refugee’s] exclusion from the category of legitimate human rights holder and leads, with dire consequences, to the shifting of the migration issue from the sphere of ethics to security, crime prevention and punishment, defense of law and order, and, all in all, the state of emergency usually associated with the threat of military aggression and hostilities. 27

And so the argument of the doves has been almost completely silenced by the scare tactics of serpents; all to the detriment of human beings in need. So what are we to do? To categorically deny that there might — on rare occasions — be a legitimate risk would be unwise; but to use this concern as a blanket policy to reject an entire community in need seems equally wrong-headed.

Back to Kant Kant tells us in On Opposition Between Morality and Politics with Respect to Perpetual Peace that we do indeed live in a world caught between the politics of doves and serpents. He muses, “If these two injunctions are incompatible in a single command, then politics and morality are really in conflict; but if these two qualities ought always to be wanted, the thought of contrariety is absurd, and the question as to how the conflict between morals and politics is resolved cannot even be posed as a problem.”28 I suspect that it is sentences like these that put many off from the study of German philosophy, or perhaps philosophy in general. Just what is Kant saying in the preceding passage? I suppose on

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the simplest, perhaps most reductive, level we are being asked to move from a mentality of “either/or” and toward an outlook that embraces “and/both.” In the case of being doves or serpents, Kant seems to be asking us to create a third category of being that is neither dove nor serpent, but rather a hybrid creature, a DoveSerpent. Such a creature might be better suited to seeing both sides of the argument and therefore capable of deliberating on a case-by-case basis. The problem with our Athenian chorus is that they leapt to judgment without any proper adjudicative process to test out Alkmene’s claims. It sounds simple enough, but —again — in moments of crisis, such balance and deliberation are often the first things to go.

And So Euripides’ Children of Herakles has the ability to help us discuss our own refugee crisis through the lens of another much older democracy struggling with the same issues. Perhaps the most important aspect of this play is that there is no moral at the end, just a set of uncomfortable questions. What do we make of this change of heart in the chorus? They are faced with an almost impossible choice. Are they right? Wrong? Euripides does not tell us. He simply ends the play and leaves it to the audience to decide. This is very much the strategy of Greek tragedy, especially the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides where the goal tilts toward not giving the audience a nice and easy answer; but, rather to pose a difficult question that they must puzzle out on their own, at home, in the marketplace, or on the very floor of the Parthenon. In this respect, the audience is presented with what the ancient Greeks would have called an aporia, which in English, can be thought of as grappling with a “difficulty,” “perplexity,” or simply “being at a loss.” This is the same state that Socrates’ interlocutors were often left in, having to grapple with the problem on their own, without the aid of Socrates. This, to me, is the best way to engage an audience. The result is that they must go through their own process to answer the impossible question of tragedy; this moves them from a passive to an active relationship with the problem of the play, giving them agency in attempting to address it. In short, it asks the audience to step up and take part in the solving of what seems insoluble. This is the kind of engaged audience that Greek tragedy wanted to forge. A dramatic strategy that many of the authors in this study will follow.

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Reality Check I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “That’s all well and good for an ancient Greek audience, but what about an audience of today? Is a modern audience going to watch Euripides’ 2,000-plus-year-old play and be instantaneously galvanized to engage in the rights of some abstract group of refugees? Talk about being as ‘guileless as a dove!’” You’re right. You are absolutely right. I wager that if I put Children of Herakles on the stage right now and invited an audience to see it, the responses — while watching— would range from: — This is why I hate Greek plays. — The best parts of the story happen offstage. — Can’t Herakles’ children take care of themselves? Don’t they have superpowers? — Why does everybody have to make a speech? — Just kill Eurystheus and be done with it. — Damn it, I forgot to buy half-and-half at the grocery store today. — Sorry, what just happened? I must have nodded off for a moment. — Is there an intermission or what?

I too, have been known to think such thoughts — we all have at one time or another. Well, theater is, in many ways, an almost impossible art. The operative word here is art and not entertainment — not that I’m necessarily pitting one against the other. Certainly there is artful entertainment and entertaining art. Unfortunately in this day and age, art is often considered a synonym for entertainment. Bottom line: Art was never expected to be too easy (remember Moby Dick?). A work of art should take a little work. Unfortunately, the modern American audience, from my vantage point, is a little out of shape when it comes to the classical repertory; especially since these plays play by a slightly different set of rules than what we might find on Netflix or at our local cineplex. Certainly the audience can be helped by a series of:

Paratheatrical Practices Peter Sellars attempted to combat the traditional disconnect between the Greeks and us by engaging the audience on an extensive extra-contextual level. His 2002 Harvard production of Children of Herakles created a kind of living, breathing incarnation of a study guide with panel discussions with policymakers

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before the play and talk-backs with refugees and relief workers afterward. Also programmed around the run of the play were films and other artistic works from refugee communities. In a nod to the idea that the chorus represented the audience, Sellars decided to distribute the lines of the chorus to each night’s audience. They were instructed to read these choral interludes at appropriate moments throughout the evening. This gave the audience a sense of the play’s civic side. Sellars continued to develop these ideas when the play went on its European tours in 2003 and 2004. Here the play was turned into a multilingual event. The actors performed in English with subtitles, but the chorus was now delivered in the language of the nation that the troupe was visiting. Another innovation was to have teenage refugees play the silent children of Herakles. These young refugees even went into the audience to shake the hands of the audience in thanks after their supplication had been accepted.29 The director Bryan Doerries takes these performative ideas a bit further in his Theater of War Project, which he began in 2008. If Sellars was interested in making Greek tragedy relatable to a modern-day audience, Doerries was convinced that there was one audience that would not only relate to these works, but desperately needed to see them. This targeted audience was made up of current and decommissioned soldiers of the US Military. The initial success of this project led to the US Military commissioning Doerries to take these Greek plays to military installations throughout the world. In their first “tour of duty” they did one hundred performances over a twelve-month period, reaching thousands who were serving in the military. For the next decade he would go onto direct readings of Greek tragedies and other ancient texts for communities made up of cancer patients and their caregivers, homeless folks, and victims of a variety of natural disasters. He notes: In the beginning, I went searching for audiences that, by virtue of their life experiences, would respond directly and powerfully to these ancient plays, but in recent years new audiences have begun seeking me out — and my theater company — to ask, “Do you know of a play that could help our community deal with what we’ve been through?” Each performance has led to the next, and each community has opened doors to others, expanding the reach of the work, like an infinite series of concentric circles all rippling out from the same point of impact.30

Doerries often jokes that it sometimes feels as though he were now running a fire department instead of a theater company. “A call comes in,” he writes, “we design a new project, and then we deploy our actors to the community in need.”31

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Theater makers like Bill Rauch (the founder of Cornerstone Theater) and Lear deBessonet (creator of the Public Theater’s Public Works Project) take this idea of reaching out to communities one step further by asking and assisting communities to rehearse and perform productions that speak to their own issues. In the case of Cornerstone this has often led to the community creating their own play and performing it in conjunction with their company of artists; in the case of the Public Works, communities that might not even know one another are asked to join together to perform a play of Shakespeare’s with a core group of professional artists. This impulse has its roots in the extraordinary and unjustly unknown theater pedagogy of Asja Lācis. It was her groundbreaking work that had a huge influence on Brecht, Erwin Piscator, and Walter Benjamin. The remainder of this chapter turns its attention to this remarkable and unsung theatrical visionary who put forward an idea of a truly revolutionary theater.

Asja Lācis and the Communal Theater of the Future This extraordinarily progressive artist, thinker, and educator was instrumental in leading several Latvian proletarian theater groups in the first decades of the twentieth century. Like many revolutionaries, she found herself drawn to the newly formed Soviet Union where she was particularly taken with two major tendencies in the Russian theater of that time. The first was with the experimental laboratory theaters of Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, and Tairov, the second with the mass demonstrations, festivals, and spontaneous celebrations of the people that were happening in the streets. Lācis’s desire was to wed these two seemingly contrary impulses into a new kind of theatrical expression, where the rigor of an avant-garde laboratory theater could meet the spontaneity of a mass demonstration. In other words, she wanted a laboratory for the masses. She wrote: What would such theater workshops look like? These workshops must unite people who share common interests. The main value should be assigned to the collective action in order to establish a solid bond, which would then serve the common cause: to inspire the need for creative self-expression in the pupils, to locate their creative instincts, and to allow their personalities to blossom. This work must be conducted in freely accessible workshops, and the masses should be encouraged to participate, even if only as observers and critics.32

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In 1918, Lācis went to Orel where she had been encouraged to take a more traditional theatrical path as a director in the municipal theater, but things turned out differently for the young Lācis. Upon arrival, she discovered a city of war orphans, who “looked at you like old people, with sad, tired eyes. Nothing interested them. Children without a childhood.”33 It was impossible for her to ignore these poor souls. Later she would write in her memoir: I felt I had to do something, and I knew that children’s songs and nursery rhymes would not be enough here. In order to get them to break out of their lethargy, a task was needed which would completely take hold of them and set their traumatized abilities free. I knew how great the power of making theater was and what it might do for these children. I was convinced that we could wake the children and develop them through play. It would have been easy just to select a suitable children’s play, distribute the roles, rehearse with the children, and prepare for a performance.34

Soon she found herself forming a school where all learning was done not through books or lectures, but by making plays. One day, while the children were rehearsing, they were visited by “the Besprisorniki.” These were other young victims of the civil war who had formed gangs and survived through a variety of petty thefts. The Soviet government had attempted to find homes and work for these children, but they would continually run away. Now these very same students were rapt, watching other students portraying young street urchins. At one point, the leader of the Besprisorniki stepped forward and said, “That’s not the way it is at all.”35 And then he and his gang began to show the other students the way to pick a person’s pocket. At that moment, Lācis writes, “According to all the rules of children’s education, I should have interrupted their wild and shameless speeches — but I wanted to gain some influence over them. And I actually won the game: the Besprisorniki returned and became active members of our theater.”36 Together the Besprisorniki and other students continued to work on their performance until “the demand for collective action arose — moral-political education in a socialist sense — and they wanted to present the play to the other children of the city. The public performance became a festival. The children of our studio went to the city’s open-air theater in a kind of Mardi Gras parade … Big and little spectators joined in.”37 Many, it turned out, followed them back to their makeshift school where they continued their education through making art. Lācis concludes: Our method had proven itself. We demonstrated that it was correct for adult leaders to keep themselves entirely in the background. The children believed that

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they had done everything themselves — and they did it through play. Ideology was not forced upon them, nor was it drilled into them. They appropriated all that corresponded to their experience. We, too, the educators, learned and saw many new things: how easy it is for children to adapt to situations, how inventive they are, and how sensitively they react. Even children who seemed, at first, untalented and limited demonstrated unexpected abilities and talents. At the performance tensions were surprisingly released, and this made the wild imagination of their inventions visible.38

When Brecht heard about these adventures in theatrical pedagogy, he too began to wonder if such a process could be extended to adults. What if the line that separated the worker/actor from the consumer/audience member was erased and they became one and the same? The result was his intriguing Lehrstücke phase (we will explore this period in more depth when we reach chapter 10 of this book). It should be noted that this kind of theatrical integration is as old as the Greek chorus, which was made up of the polis itself. A similar communal engagement can also be found in our next chapter when we move to the medieval mystery plays, where entire towns participated in the financing, building, and performing of religiously themed plays for their own entertainment and edification. Such social interaction engendered a further and deeper sense of community for both the ancient Greeks and medieval townsfolk. In many ways, such contemporary work by our modern theater makers is an unconscious return to this communal aspect, which has been at the very foundation of theatrical experience since its inception. This is one of theater’s many “delivery systems” — a term coined by director Seema Sueko to remind us of theater’s continual Proteus-like ability to rethink its relation to its audiences. We, in America, have been used to one centralized form of theatrical expression where audiences come to us. From the ancient Greeks, through Asja Lācis, all the way to Lear deBessonet, we can see that there are many other delivery systems and methodologies to reach and engage a larger audience.

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Part Two

This is the way the world ends in the age of faith

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4

Noahs, arks, and floods Why medieval mystery plays still have something to say about our own modern-day end of days

From the Time of Adamah to the Pale Horse of the Apocalypse Both the ancient Greeks and Hebrews drew their metaphors for time’s passage from the bowels of the earth. For the Greeks this was a matter of metals, but for the Israelites it was made from much more mutable material. This was adamah (red clay). Adam came from adamah and eventually returned to it. So do we all. Imagine a clump of soil dribbling through the fingers of your clenched fist. This, for the Jews, became the very stuff of time. It was there at the beginning in Genesis and it reappears, much later, in the Book of Daniel. King Nebuchadnezzar dreams of a man with a head of gold, breast and arms of silver, legs of iron, and feet of adamah. Daniel, one of our first professional dream interpreters, understood this nocturnal vision as a portent for a ruinous future. The Hebrews of the Hellenistic period had cornered the market in such speculative doom-casting; they loved to traffic in all manner of stories dealing with what they called “the End Times.” The genre became so popular that even the Early Christians tried their hand at it, giving the world the still obsessively read Book of Apokálypsis, or what we now call Revelation. This work incorporates two favorite preoccupations of the ancient Hebrews: the first being the inner workings of the heavens and the second showing how all of this was tied to the intricacies of our final reckoning. Nowadays our profane understanding of the word apocalypse has less to do with the the idea of revelation and more to do with the fact that things end, but back then the idea of something like time coming to an actual conclusion was indeed a revelation to civilization. Time had always been thought of as a cyclical affair,

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but from now on it would be forever associated with the vectorial, hurtling us toward some now known end-point. Thanks to the Judeo-Christian tradition, the world would have a distinct beginning and an equally definitive finish. The appetite for such apocalyptic thinking continued and reached its apotheosis in the Middle Ages. This can be seen in the manic proliferation of illuminated manuscripts that put the words of John and his Apokálypsis into one arresting image after another. Eventually such striking illustrations were brought to life with the invention of:

The Medieval Mystery Cycles; Or, from that First Day to the End of Days Let’s cast ourselves backward in time for a brief moment. Imagine yourself out and about on a bright and beautiful Thursday morning after Trinity Sunday; this is the first Sunday after Whitsun. Now imagine yourself living in the town of York, or Coventry, or Chester. And finally, let’s make this any Corpus Christi celebration between the signing of the Magna Carta in the early 1300s and the dreaded famine years of the mid-1590s. On any of those bright and beautiful Thursday mornings something strange and wonderful would occur: There, in the very street you walked every day to work, would be Adam and Eve, Noah, or the Jesus of the Via Dolorosa carrying his cross to Golgotha. Only — and this was the strange and wonderful thing about it all — Eve looked vaguely like your next-door neighbor’s wife, and Noah was none other than Nate the local shipwright, and our savior Jesus Christ has been transformed into that handsome young fellow whose name you can never quite remember. And perhaps even more unnerving, instead of speaking the ancient Hebrew of the Israelites, or the Aramaic of Jesus, or even the Latin of the parish priests, they all talk just like you. “What,” you ask, “is going on?” Have you gone back in time? Simply lost your mind? Or are you celebrating the festival of Corpus Christi? If you chose the latter answer, you would be correct. What you have been witnessing is the medieval mystery pageants that became part of the tradition of this day. In thirteen brisk hours these city centers would re-enact the high points of the Old and New Testaments: from creation, through the flood, all the way to Judgment Day. It was made for and by the townsfolk for their own general edification and entertainment. And so, it was left to the shipwrights to construct Noah’s Ark, the pinners (those who made nails) to realize the Crucifixion of Christ, and the

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carpenters (who were known as “the guild of Resurrection”) to assist in Christ’s return. It is intriguing, some might go so far as to say ironic, that the medieval sponsors and primary performers of the York Doomsday Play were the mercers. This was not so much a craft guild (like the shipbuilders who were responsible for Noah’s Ark) as a social economic confraternity that was made up of merchants, wholesalers, traders, and general retailers. Their wealth, property, and social status made them the equivalent of the landed gentry of the time. In other words, these were the very people who needed to pay the most heed to the lessons of a doomsday play, especially since they were the ones with the most means to actually do some concrete good and, if not, would be judged accordingly. A description of the 1415 Doomsday pageant tells us that several of these mercers essayed the roles of Jesus, Maria, angel cum tubes, cum corona lance, flagellis, spiritus boni, spiritus magligni, and diaboli. We also learn from the related documents of 1463 that there were regular repairs to the doomsday pageant wagon, particularly the wheels, which needed to be constantly overhauled or replaced. Who knew the sins of the fathers were so heavy? There was also a certain amount of “dental work” for the upkeep of Hell’s actual mouth.1 No doubt, the whole effect instilled a certain fear and trembling in its initial audiences. This is reflected in the speech of their onstage human representative who — no doubt — gave voice to his audience’s own interior monologue: Allas, allas, that we were borne! So may we synfull kaytiffis say. I hear well be this hydrous Horne Itt drawes full here to doomsday. Allas, we wrenches that are forlorne, That never serued God to paye, Allas, allas, and welaway. What shall we wrecchis do for drede Or whedir for ferdnes may we flee, When we may bring forthe no goode dede Before hi that our juge schall be? …. Allas, for drede sore may we quake, Oure dedis beis our dampnacioune. For oure mys mening mon we make, Helpe may none exusacioune.

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Sarah Beckwith discusses this passage in her authoritative Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays.3 Beckwith alerts us to the unnerving indeterminacy inherent in the York iteration of Doomsday. This is due to the difficulty of differentiating those who are to be damned and those who are to be saved. Such ambiguity is missing in the Towneley version. The damned of that variant are immediately identifiable since they are already consigned to the part of the stage that represents hell. In this respect, the judgment of those in the York play has been temporally suspended. This relates directly to the audience who, like those onstage, are not yet definitively damned, they still have time to —technically — save themselves. Their future remains open, thanks to the possibility of their present actions. This is part of the unique and profound tension that is found in the Doomsday of the York cycle. Philosophers like Bruno Latour encourage readers and activists to return to such apocalyptic imaginings. Latour tells us that, to be heard in these distracting times, “we have to position ourselves through a set of totally artificial steps, as though we were at the End of Time” (his italics).4 He goes on to quote the unduly neglected German philosopher Günther Anders, who wrote, We have the opportunity to play the role of apocalypticians of a new type, namely “prophylactic apocalypticians.” If we distinguish ourselves from the classic Judeo-Christian apocalypticians, it is not because we fear the end (which they hoped for) but especially because our apocalyptic passion has no goal but to prevent the apocalypse. We are apocalypticians only in order to be wrong. Only to enjoy every day anew the opportunity to be here, ridiculous but still standing.5

That said, I personally find such apocalyptic language to be ultimately problematic. In this respect I feel much like Andrei Rublëv, the titular character in Andrei Tarkovsky’s monumental film. Rublëv was one of Russia’s great medieval icon painters. In Tarkovsky’s film there is a section where Rublëv has been commissioned to paint the interior walls of a church with images of the Last Judgment. Every day Rublëv arrives with his apprentices, every day they prepare the pigments of his paints, and every day the walls remain untouched by Rublëv’s brush. Days turn into weeks, weeks into months, and still Rublëv has not touched the walls of the church. Danil — Rublëv’s fellow artist, monk, and occasional confidant — finally confronts his friend. He wants to understand

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why Rublëv cannot fulfill his contractual obligation. Rublëv demurs, Danil continues to speak wistfully of the artistic possibilities that the Day of Judgment affords artists. He muses, “On the right (I see) the sinners boiling in pitch, painted to make your flesh crawl. I have thought of a great devil with smoke from his nose and eyes.” But Rublëv will have none of this and bursts out, “I can’t. I can’t paint all that. It disgusts me. I don’t want to terrify people.”6 Rublëv’s relationship to the apocalypse is similar to my feelings about certain works that evoke our modern human-made apocalypses. These works, like Danil’s images, evoke terror. They are, if we asked many of their creators, supposed to terrify us into right action; but instead, I worry that these apocalyptic scenarios often end up doing something far more frightening by creating an overwhelming feeling of fatalism. A profound sense that there is simply nothing we can do to stop the onward march of global warming. That said, Latour and Anders are right – global warming has the feel of the apocalyptic and is certainly filled with:

Climate Sinners; Or, the Fatalistic Strain in our Modern-day End of Days This outlook is perhaps best articulated by novelist Jonathan Franzen in his controversial New Yorker essay entitled “Carbon Capture”. It is here that he notes, “Climate change has given us an eschatology for reckoning with our guilt: coming soon, some hellishly overheated tomorrow, is Judgment Day. Unless we repent and mend our ways, we’ll all be sinners in the hands of an angry Earth.”7 As a result, Franzen finds it hard to escape this neo-puritanical view. He confesses, “Rarely do I board an airplane or drive to the grocery store without considering my carbon footprint and feeling guilty about it.”8 With such an outlook, we are all damned since, by Franzen’s calculation — after just two weeks of maintaining a typical American single-family home — we have already exceeded the average carbon quota required to limit global warming. Such statistics lead Franzen to the conclusion that there is little we can do about this dire reality and, as far as he is concerned, “it’s important to acknowledge that drastic planetary overheating is a done deal.”9 Roy Scranton, in his much discussed Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, takes this idea of climate sinner one step further by reminding us that, “The global information and communications ecosystem that (we) are plugged into is now estimated to use about 10 percent of the world’s electricity. That ecosystem relies on coal. Every time you check your email, you’re heating up the planet. We do it every day. We can’t stop. We won’t stop.”10

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All of this leads both men to conclude the worst for humankind. Franzen tells us in his recent 2021 pamphlet What if We Stopped Pretending, “We failed to solve it. End of Story.”11 The “it” being global warming. When it comes to this, “The game is over. Petroconsumerism won.”12 Scranton agrees, telling us, “The odds of civilization surviving are negligible. The odds of our species surviving are slim. The trouble we find ourselves in will likely prove too intractable for us to manage well, if we can manage it at all.”13 And, in case we harbor any hopes for a yet unforeseen solution, we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that “The time for a speculative, miraculous, last-minute, long-shot techno fix is well over.”14 For both, there is little to nothing that we can do. Franzen wants us to focus on smaller, more immediate, realistic aims of conservation to make our current moment as livable as possible. Scranton wants us to develop a stoic frame of mind to prepare ourselves and future generations for the worst. Both harbor particular umbrage over large-scale, grassroots activism that takes to the streets and engages in mass demonstrations. They dismiss such displays as futile, counterproductive, and ultimately suspect. Scranton is particularly scathing on this account, writing: The People’s Climate March was little more than an orgy of democratic emotion, an activist-themed street fair, a real-world analogue to Twitter hostage campaigns: something that gives you a nice feeling, says you belong in a certain group, and is completely divorced from actual legislation and governance. Given the march’s tremendous built-in weaknesses, the best we might have hoped for is that it accomplished nothing. What’s more likely though is that it siphoned off organizing energy that could have been more useful elsewhere, made a public display of climate activism’s political impotence, and soothed hundreds of thousands of people with a false sense of hope.15

But then, Scranton is equally dismissive of the UN Climate Summit, which took place two days afterward, writing, “One after another (world leaders) stood at the podium mouthing vacuities, boldly committing to toothless, voluntary emissions reductions that are too little, too late.”16 In both cases, neither demonstrators or politicians have “the tools, clout, or conceptual framework we need to fix this, or even come up with a plan to protect ourselves from the greatest dangers. There’s no ‘re-set’ button for civilization, and no viable plan for transforming global info-structure, agriculture, and energy networks in the next ten to twenty years.”17 Here we seem to have an unnerving example of Jospeh Tainter’s failure to problem-solve. Both Franzen and Scranton refer to global warming as a “wicked problem,” which at the end of the day, is simply too

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complex for us to figure out. Scranton gives a prose-like shrug of his shoulders and concludes, “The problem is that the problem is too big. The problem is that different people want different things. The problem is that nobody has real answers. The problem is that the problem is us.”18 Andreas Malm, in his bracing manifesto How to Blow Up a Pipeline, begs to differ with Scranton and Franzen. He rejects their wholesale climate fatalism, agreeing with environmental philosopher Catriona McKinnon that this becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: that which is repeatedly asserted as impossible, becomes impossible. In other words, the more people tell us that a radical reorientation is scarcely imaginable, the more unimaginable it becomes. Ultimately for Malm, all Scranton and Franzen’s despair amounts to is: “I can make no difference because I am unwilling to make a difference.”19 In place of the Climate Fatalist, Malm calls for a new kind of Extinction Rebel. He cites the storming of the Schwarze Pump, an enormous power plant in the eastern region of Lusatia, as a blueprint for a climate activist’s future.20 This action was led by Ende Gelände in 2016 and resulted in hundreds of protesters tearing down a perimeter fence, overpowering the small band of private guards, and entering the power plant itself, where they suddenly found themselves unsure how to exactly shut it all down. Before they could figure this out, they were thwarted by the police. Malm notes his own exhilaration, “During my years in the climate movement, I have never felt a greater rush of exhilaration: for the throbbing, mind-expanding moment, we had a slice of the infrastructure that was wrecking this planet in our hands.”21 This reminds him of a line from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth where Fanon speaks of the “cleansing force” of violence, when one is freed from the despair of inaction and regains a modicum of selfrespect in the process of revolt.22 Malm concludes, “There has been a time for a Gandhian climate movement, perhaps there might come a time for a Fanonian one.”23 I, with all due respect to Malm, am not sure I agree with him on this point. I am all for activism, but stop at the dividing line where protest crosses over to violence. I believe that somewhere between the Climate Fatalist and the Extinction Rebel is an intermediate figure. What I would call an Environmental Realist. Just what would constitute an Environmental Realist? Perhaps the people who populate Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. In this book Kolbert spoke to: Engineers and genetic engineers, biologists, and microbiologists, atmospheric scientists and atmospheric entrepreneurs. Without exception, they were enthusiastic about their work. But as a rule, this enthusiasm was tempered by

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I think the world’s first Environmental Realist was none other than:

The Noah of the Medieval Mystery Cycles Noah is perhaps one of the most popular characters in the entire medieval mystery cycle. His tale is also extremely timely. David Wallace-Wells warns in The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming that the prospect of a near-future world with rapidly rising oceans should be as unnerving to us as the idea of extended nuclear war, because “that is the scale of devastation the rising oceans will unleash.” He continues with this dire litany of catastrophe: whole cultures — that will be transformed into underwater relics, like sunken ships, this century: any beach you’ve ever visited; Facebook’s headquarters, the Kennedy Space Center, and the United States largest naval base, in Norfolk, Virginia; the entire nations of the Maldives and the Marshall Islands; most of Bangladesh, including all the mangrove forests that have been kingdom of the Bengal tigers for millennia; all of Miami Beach and much of the South Florida paradise engineered out of marsh and swamp and sandbar by rabid real-estate speculators less than a century ago; Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice, today nearly a thousand years old; Venice Beach and Santa Monica in Los Angeles; the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as well as Trump’s “Winter White House” at Mar-a-Lago, Richard Nixon’s in Key Biscayne, and the original Harry Truman’s, in Key West. This is just a partial list.25

Such concerns are not new to human kind. Many ancient cultures believed that floods would accompany the end of the world. According to the ancient Egyptian Book of Going Forth by Day, our world is predicted to vanish in the Nun. This is the divine water that formed the first god. Then there is the Babylonian version of the Flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh (700 BCE) where the god Enki warns Utnapishtim (aka the Faraway) of the coming watery destruction and provides him with detailed instructions for building a boat so that he and his loved ones might survive. In Hindu mythology the Satapatha Brahmana and the Purnas contain stories of a similar worldwide flood. In this iteration of flood lore, the

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Matsya Avatar of the Vishnu warns the first man, Manu, of the impending flood and advises him on the building of yet another giant boat. Even Plato has a version of the flood where Zeus, exasperated with humankind’s insistent warring, decides to wash away the whole lot. Prometheus gets wind of Zeus’ nefarious plot and tells Deucalion to build an ark to save himself, his family, and his cattle. I could go on, but I think you get the point about how powerful the myth of the flood is to so many ancient cultures. The preponderance of these stories has led historians and geographers to suspect that there was some sort of actual historical analog that inspired such tales. I think it is safe to say that, of all of these ancient survivors of the flood, it is Noah and his version of the tale that have taken pride of place in the imagination of the West. But the Noah I am most taken with is not the Noah of the Bible, but the Noah of the medieval Wakefield Cycle. This rendering of Noah’s adventures adheres to the broad outlines of its biblical origin, with a few wonderful surprises along the way. The Wakefield version starts with a humble and reverential Noah who speaks very much in the language of his medieval audience. None of that highfalutin’ Latin of priests, but rather the everyday words that you would hear in the market square or around the dinner table after a hearty meal. We first meet this most common of men in prayer; let’s listen in: Noah  Myghtfull God veray Maker of all that is, Thre persons withoutten nay, One God in endles blis, Thou maide both nyght and day, Beest, fowle, and Fysh; All creatures that lif may Wroght thou at thi wish, As thou wel myght.26

He goes on to extol God’s creation and then turns to what has been going on here on Earth. Noah gives his God a brief update, just in case God has been too busy with other celestial matters and unable to take note of what’s been happening down below. “Syn,” Noah reports, “is now alod.” It is too much for this gentle soul who is: Noah  Six hundredth yeris and od Haue I, without distance, In earth, as any sod,

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Yes, you heard right, Noah is 600 years old. Biblical people, you may remember, lived a lot longer back then. And so poor Noah has had 600 years to watch the world he loves decline, and yet he very much wants his God to know “Bot yit will I cry/ For mercy and call/ ‘Noe, thi seruant, am I/ Lord our all!’”28 God hears this and arrives in the form of a commanding voice that forgets to properly introduce Himself. One assumes He’s just too flummoxed by humankind’s sinful antics to maintain such simple niceties as a proper introduction; besides, if a booming voice from above starts speaking, shouldn’t you know who it might belong to? Here is the Wakefield God in mid-rant: God  I repente full sore That ever maide I man; Bi me he settys no store, And I am his soferan. I will destroy therefor Both beast, man, and woman: All shall perish, les and more. With floodys that shall flo And run with hidous rerd. I haue good cause therto; For no man is ferd. As I say shal I do — Of veniance draw my swerd And make end Of all that beers life, Sayf Noe and his wife.29

He goes on to tell Noah what we all learned in Sunday school. Noah must build an ark, gather two of each animal (male and female), put them on the ark, and sail for forty days and forty nights. Noah takes all this in and then, ever so politely, inquires to know who this majestic voice belongs to. One can sense a bit of impatience from God, as he informs Noah that “I am God most myghty/ Oone God in Trynyty/ Made and ich man to be/ To luf me well

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thou awe.”30 Noah bows, thanks his God, and gets to work just as the Bible tells us. But, unlike in the Bible, Noah’s Wife enters with the rich specificity of homespun medieval domesticity, speaking in the vibrant village-vernacular of her audience. She seems to have stepped out of a kitchen painted by Bruegel. Noah’s Wife  Do tell me belife, Where has thou thus long be? To dede may we dry, Or lif, for the want. When we sweat or swank, Thou dos what thou thynk; Yit of mete and of drynk Have we very skant. Noah  Wife, we are hard sted With tythyngys new.31

Noah’s wife will have none of this, she’s heard it all before. Noah, we learn, is “always adred/ be it false or true.”32 The original Noah’s wife of Genesis is barely mentioned in the Bible or early literature. She is rather timid when it comes to her earliest depictions in medieval art and drama. Here she is usually thought of as a stand-in for Mary. This is very much how she behaves in the earlier N-Town cycle. Soon another more problematic tradition grows around Noah’s wife. In these next iterations she is influenced by the Devil (much like Eve was by the Serpent) and this, rather than simple disbelief, is what causes her to attempt to dissuade her husband from carrying on with God’s divine plan. But in the Wakefield Master’s version, Noah’s Wife represents a more earthy, rough-and-tumble depiction of a spouse; someone that the women in that initial audience could laugh with and relate to; a formidable woman who is not afraid to go toe-to-toe with her husband. Such a marital partner provokes the Noah we first met in Sunday school to behave in a truly unNoah-like fashion: Noah  We! Hold thi tong, ram-skyt, Or I shall thee still. Noah’s Wife  By my thrift, if thou smyte, I shal turne thee vntil.

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Noah  We shall assay as tyte. Haue at thee, Gill! … Noah’s Wife  Take that there a langett To tye vp thi hose! (She kicks him in the behind) Noah  A! Wilt thou so? Mary, that is mine!33

This is a truly marvelous moment of medieval haggling between a married couple. They are a kind of precursor to Punch and Judy or The Honeymooners, which pitted bus driver Ralph Kramden against his wonderfully taciturn wife Alice. The Wakefield Noah is perhaps the most vociferous of his medieval mystery play variations. His behavior reaffirms our earlier suspicion that this particular Noah is not some hallowed biblical figure that you might find in a stained-glass window, but a living, breathing, sweating everyman. In this respect, the Wakefield author shares a basic understanding with later agitprop works: If you want to reach “the people,” you need to speak to them in their language. This is part of a larger strategy by the Wakefield Master and the York Mystery Plays. Both cycles tell their audiences that Noah is resolutely one of them and if he can build an ark and carry on in the face of cataclysmic adversity then so could they. This is the brilliance of this dramatic gambit — it allows us to imagine having a similar kind of agency. It is at this point that we can begin to see Noah as the prototype for the Environmental Realist. In the next quick and comic sequence, Noah tries his best to go about building the ark. There are immediate problems: Noah  A! My bak, I traw, will brast! This is a sory note! Hit is wonder that I act, Such an old dote, All dold, To begyn sich a wark. My bonys are so stark: No wonder if they wark, For I am full old.34

But, lo and behold, bit by bit, the ark is built. Noah’s Wife thinks, throughout all this, that her poor husband has gone mad. This continues another key motif

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that is found in many of the medieval mystery plays — each of these stories seems to contain one character who believes and one character who doubts. We discover this pattern right at the start with the Angels in Heaven — there are those who remain loyal to God and those who rebel. Then there is Adam who tries to stay the course and Eve who momentarily strays. This is followed by Abel who believes and Cain who cannot. Noah and his Wife recapitulate this belief/ non-belief dialectic. This pattern reaches its apotheosis in Abraham where, in a late iteration of this story, it is Isaac who believes more than Abraham and helps his father muster up the strength to follow God’s will and sacrifice his own child. And so, Noah’s Wife fulfills an important function in this ongoing story of faith and doubt. She is doubt writ large. To her, her husband’s endeavor seems to be the height of insanity.

Let It Rain Well, you know the story: it rains, and rains, and rains until it is clear that the world as we know it is about to be washed away. Noah’s Wife remains resolute, seated contently on a hill convinced that the rising waters will not reach her. At this moment she seems to be a dramatic precursor to Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days. She remains wonderfully, willfully oblivious to the growing catastrophe around her. It is only when the water is inches from her toes that she relents, “Yei, water nyghys so nere/ That I sit not dry/ Into the ship with a byr/ Therfor, will I hy/ For dread that I drone here.”35 And with that, she joins her husband, children, and a vast menagerie of animals that make up the passengers of Noah’s Ark. Here is how the Wakefield Noah describes the flood: Noah  Behold to the heuen! The cateractes all, Thai are open full euen, Grete and small, And the plannettys seuen Left has three stall. This thoners and levyn Downe gar fall Full stout Both halles and bowers, Castels and towres. Full sharp ar thise showers That renys about.36

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Once the deluge has subsided, the tone of the play shifts. Noah and his family now find themselves in the midst of an endless sea. The rough-hewn humor recedes, replaced with a dawning awareness of the immensity of what has transpired. This humbles Noah and his Wife. Fear has given way to awe and awe to a state of wide-eyed wonder. It is at this point that we are reminded of the play’s deeper allegorical meanings: here the flood becomes a type of baptism, the ark a kind of church, and Noah and his Wife two well-meaning sinners on their way to redemption.

Humor as the Reluctant Handmaiden to Transcendence. A Brief but Necessary Tangent It is important to recognize that we have arrived at this moment of transcendence through the strategic deployment of humor. There is a key lesson to be learned here about the uses of laughter to win over an audience. T. S. Eliot, in his seminal essay Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern, notes that, “Theatre satisfies one form of the desire of human beings to achieve a greater dignity and significance than they seem to do in their private or indeed public lives.”37 But he also confesses that such seriousness always benefits from being leavened by what he calls “amusement.” He goes on to tell us, We must remember that there is an important aspect in which the lowest things are necessary. The element of amusement is indispensable; if a play does not amuse people it can do nothing for them. I am obviously using the word “amuse” in a wide sense, and one in which the notion of merriment need not enter. I include distraction, and the holding of people’s attention without any effort on their part. A great tragedy can be a very great strain upon the spectator — but it must be a strain that he feels only after it is all over, not while it is going on.38

And so, it was permissible for the characters in these medieval plays to joke and play pranks, or in the case of Noah and his Wife, “to brawl and drink ale.”39 This is something that our Wakefield author seems to share with Euripides, Shakespeare, Brecht, and Caryl Churchill. Each of these remarkable writers possesses an innate understanding of how humor is one of the best ways to break down an audience’s initial defenses. There are, of course, many types of humor and an equally abundant variety of responses, but — with a little effort — we can begin to assemble a kind of genealogy of laughter. One of the first recorded laughs in the history of humankind comes from the Egyptian god Ra whose laughter was supposed to have created the universe.

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The next significant laugh in human history comes from Sarah in the Old Testament. This occurs when Sarah is in her nineties and is told by God that she will bear a child. Her response is the dry laugh of someone intimately acquainted with the infinite ironies of life. Translate her laughter into words and it would say, “Yeah, right, just what I need.” Following on the heels of this laugh is the one heard by Thersites in Homer’s Iliad; his laugh is one of derision and it is aimed at his king, the not-so-mighty Agamemnon. Laughter, by the time we reach the Middle Ages, has coarsened a bit. It’s not afraid to celebrate the scatology found in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. It also has a healthy appetite for all manner of comeuppance, that insatiable desire to see those on high have a great fall, the better to muddy their fine garments. This impishness curdles into a kind of quasi-cruelty when we reach Don Quixote, or at least that is Nabokov’s controversial contention. The great Russian Master insists that those original readers of Cervantes enjoyed watching the repeated beatings of the dim-witted Knight of La Mancha. Forget Quixote’s chivalric nostalgia, those early readers loved seeing him break his pate, lose a tooth, or bruise his behind. The Wakefield Noah is a veritable encyclopedia of all these types of laughs, including perhaps the most important and, in many ways, the most modern: laughter as a mirror. This is when the audience sees itself in the unfolding of a joke. How the squabbling of Noah and his Wife is not all that different from our own marital machinations. It is humor as a form of recognition, when laughter becomes a loud “yes.” It is the audience saying, “That’s me!” Or: “I know someone just like that!” It is that moment when we, like Shakespeare, realize “What fools these mortals be.” The ensuing laughter both draws us in and opens us up. We collectively let down our guard when we laugh. At that point, the author can now speak of more serious matters. This is part of the art of the Wakefield Master. He knows that laughter is like a bowl of cream, it has the power to draw a fickle cat-like audience into its house of meaning. This is what happens to us. Laugh by laugh we find ourselves drawn deeper and deeper into the dramatic situation until we are on the ark with Noah and his Wife, about to experience:

A New Beginning Forty days and forty nights have passed. The ark has survived the deluge and those on it have become a true family unit. The waters have waned, the tops of hills can now be seen. Noah notes that the water is so bright and the air full

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of mercy. He asks his Wife for counsel: “what fowll best myght/ With flight of wyng/ Bryng, without taryyng/ Of mercy som tokynyng?”40 His Wife suggest a raven; he decides to release a dove as well. They wait. Which will return? The raven or the dove? The symbology here needs no unpacking. And as for the story, you know how it goes. It’s the dove that reappears in the distance. Noah’s Wife is the first to spot it and cries out: Noah’s Wife  She commys, lew, lew! She bryngys in her bill Some novels new. Behald! It is an olif-tre A branch, thynkys me. Noah  It is soth, perdé Right so is it cald. Doufe, byrd full blist, Fayre myght thee befall!41

It is a beautiful moment on the page and on the stage. For those religiously inclined audiences, this is a moment where Noah’s holding the dove prefigures Christ. But one does not need to be a believer to be moved by this scene. The tenderness and sense of wonder that are found in these final moments are passed from actor to audience, giving us the gift of a renewed appreciation for the world, its inherent beauty and sanctity. Something that can be so easily forgotten in the mad rush of our day-to-day existence. If only we could hold onto this wonderment and guard it from the entropic force of habit. Noah was able to do so with the support of his deep and abiding faith, but what do we moderns have to sustain us as we confront the perils of global warming?

Noah’s Belief, McKinnon’s Hope The Wakefield Noah is sustained throughout by his belief, something that is in shorter supply these days. What’s a modern agonistic supposed to do in the face of climate fatalism? Perhaps we could translate Noah’s abiding faith into hope. This is what the philosopher Catriona McKinnon suggests in her immensely influential article, “Climate Change: Against Despair”:

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Hope aims at an objective which exists in the future, is valued by the hoper, and is desired by the hoper in virtue of this evaluation. Hope involves the belief that the future in which its objective exists is logically, conceptually, and nomologically possible. Commitment to the logical possibility of hope’s objective provides a minimal constraint on the content of the belief about the future in which hope’s objective exists, and is rarely violated by non-delusional adult hopers … given what the hoper knows about the world and the agents inhabiting it, she believes that the objective of her hope could come to pass.42

Let’s say we adopt this hopeful frame of mind; now what? What does it actually gain us? Does it make a fundamental difference in our day-to-day praxis? McKinnon does not shy away from how hope can effect change. She uses the very simple analogy of a person at the edge of a precipice who needs to jump to the other side. This image is as old as Kierkegaard (if not older) and yet wonderfully instructive: Consider a person standing at the edge of a crevasse, committed to continuing forward, but unsure whether she can make the jump. If she believes that she can make the jump, the odds of her actually making it are increased. Even though she doesn’t know how likely she actually is to make it, jumping as if she can make it gives her the best possible chance of actually making it.43

McKinnon concludes her article by simply reminding us: “Hope keeps open a space for agency between the impossible and the fantastical; without it, the small window in time remaining for us to tackle climate change is already closed.”44 And so, to merge metaphors: The window is closing, it’s time to summon up our hope, and jump!

T. S. Eliot’s Hope for a Future of Belief Eliot ends his 1937 essay on religious drama with the following hope: There is a dream that I like to indulge. I like to think that at some time in the future every cathedral will have its own permanent company of amateurs and its own cycle of modern religious plays, and that they will rival each other in perfection of production. The pilgrim of drama would travel one year to see the Nativity of one cathedral, and perhaps the next year to see that of another; and connoisseurs would debate hotly the respective merits of the Whitsun of Rochester and that of Wells. 45

He goes on to compare such festivals to the cathedrals that were often the actual backdrop to these dramas and reminds us that the experience of such edifices is

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not easily transported: “A cathedral cannot be packed up and exported in tins; it cannot be communicated on either long or short waves. To experience it you must go to it, to know it you must live with it.”46 This dream of Eliot’s would become a reality some fourteen years later when, in 1951, the city of York decided to revive the idea of the Corpus Christi festival and the medieval pageant plays that were an integral part of this communal experience. And so after a 400year hiatus, the medieval mystery cycle returned to the streets of York. Glynne Wickham, who saw this initial performance, recalled that many came both to gaze and even mock the event; but — much to his surprise and amazement — by the time the performance was over, most stayed afterward to join in communal prayer.47 The success of this initial foray lead to a full-fledged revival of the York Mystery Plays on an annual basis that continues to this day. History has, once again, repeated itself with modern-day guilds taking on much of the financial and administrative arrangements for each section of these works. The resulting festivals would become a collaboration with the communities of York and a rotating roster of professional artists. In 1954 the Lord Mayor of York held a special ceremony to launch Noah’s newly refurbished Ark. The Ark was pulled up in front of the Lord Mayor’s official residence. A herald read a proclamation and the Sheriff ’s lady christened the Ark by breaking a bottle of champagne over its bow, saying: Good ship with fortune free I set thee forth to fare, And Noah’s Ark shall be, The name that you shall bear.48

Since then, the Ark — in one fashion or another — has sailed every year for another generation of audiences, reminding us all of what a little old-fashioned belief or modern-day hope can actually accomplish.

5

Shipwrecks, recursion, and the necessity of deep ecology Surviving Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the breaking of our Anthropocene ways

Ship as Metaphor Noah’s Ark is not the only famous ship in Western drama, there is also the mighty galleon found in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Such sea-faring vessels were freighted not only with goods but also with a certain amount of metaphoric meaning. The philosopher Secundus the Silent, who lived around the time of the Emperor Hadrian, had much to say about ships and their signification. For him they were symbolically fecund, producing all manner of meaning, including: “a bird made of wood, a seagoing horse, the plaything of the winds, uncertain safety, a house without a foundation, a prison in winged flight, fate bound up in a package, death in prospect.”1 And as for the sailors who made such vessels their home, these poor souls were “deserters of land, opponents of the storm, marine gladiators, the ones unsure of their safety, neighbors of death.”2 Jumping innumerable centuries, the poet W. H. Auden tells us that, “If thought of as isolated in the midst of the ocean, a ship can stand for human society moving through time and struggling with destiny.”3 One of the earliest examples of this would be in Plato’s Republic where he speaks of “the Ship of State,” a metaphoric vessel always on the verge of sinking. The ship as metaphor returns at the dawn of the Renaissance, now rechristened “a Ship of Fools.” Michel Foucault describes this newly reforged symbol as “a strange drunken boat that wound its way down the wide, slow-moving rivers of the Rhineland and round the canals of Flanders.”4 Here, once again, “Water brought its own dark symbolic charge, carrying away (the mad), but purifying too.”5 From this image it is just a short

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symbolic hop, skip, and a jump to the equally compelling “Ship in a Storm.” Here, our ever industrious sea vessel becomes, as Auden notes, “a metaphor for society in danger from within and without.”6 This is the image we find at the opening of The Tempest. Let’s listen in: Master Boatswain! Boatswain  Here, master. What Cheer? Master  Good, speak to th’ mariners! Fall to’t yarely, or we run ourselves aground. Bestir, Bestir!7

A boatswain, for those not up on their nautical nomenclature, is an officer in charge of the ship’s equipment and crew. At this moment his expertise trumps everyone else on board, including their illustrious passenger, the King of Naples himself; or, as the Boatswain succinctly puts it to one of his betters, “What cares these roarers for the name of king?8” He now is the monarch of this precarious bark and he has no problem ordering his superiors about, telling them to get to their cabins and leave him to his work. One such courtier warns him to watch his tone and remember who he has on board. To this, our busy Boatswain responds, “You are a councilor; if you can command these elements to silence and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more. Use your authority. If you cannot, give thanks you have lived so long, and make yourself ready in your cabin for the mischance of an hour, if it so hap.”9 The symbol of “the Ship in a Storm” reminds us that, in the midst of catastrophe, all norms are off and all power relations can be turned upside down. We can see a similar reversal happening in various post-apocalyptic scenarios where the whole social order is overturned to favor those with the best survivalist abilities. It reminds us that authority is not necessarily a priori, but rather something that can shift with a change in circumstances; such is the story of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a play that tests the very foundations of our often unquestioned social order. Here, in this scene, Shakespeare plays with our age-old fear that, in a time of crisis, a shake-up of hierarchy can lead to anarchy. A fear that David Pogue warns us of in his How to Prepare for Climate Change: A Practical Guide to Surviving the Chaos: “One study after another has established the link between climate gone wild and human conflict. And once the social order falls apart, all kinds of social systems can fall apart too: police, government, services, food chain, communications, media.”10 Pogue’s go-to analog for such a scenario is the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina where New Orleans’ electricity, gas, water, cell service, street lights, and sewer system were all in a state of disrepair. Here,

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people were flooded out of their homes with no cell service, television, radio, or internet to inform them as to what would happen next. Panic ensued. People, desperate for food and water, broke into stores and foraged for what they needed. Where were the police during this? Right alongside many of the looters themselves, or simply absent from duty. A staggering 248 officers, 17 percent of the entire police force, simply did not show up for work. This leads Pogue to wonder, “If it’s that easy for our authority system to evaporate, exactly how thick is the wall that separates us from chaos?”11 Here he cites Michael Brown, the former director of FEMA, who warns, “The American public needs to learn not to rely on the government to save them when a crisis hits. The larger the disaster, the less likely the government will be capable of helping any given individual. The true first responders are individual citizens who take care of themselves.”12 Shakespeare’s “Ship in a Storm” becomes a sixteenth-century variation of this, a dramatic thought experiment that tests the inherent strength of a given social order during a time of catastrophe. Another potent symbol for this is:

Survival on Shakespeare’s Fictional Island Islands, like ships, are rich in metaphoric implications. They are the perfect space to play out a variety of potential social imaginaries. We could start by representing both geometrically. Think of the ship as a dot in space that is moving in a linear trajectory from point A to point B and from point B to point C. Now, take the ship’s linear directionality and bend it into something more circumscribed, making a circle of sorts, complete in itself, like a single cell. Do this and you have made the outline of an island. These are two powerful images on their own, but when they accidentally intersect, then a third even more powerful symbol is born, that of “The Shipwreck.” The Ship, in such symbolic circumstances, is often associated with the Old World, whereas the uninhabited island comes to signify a kind of geographic tabula rasa where the potential for a New World Order can emerge. The big question with this collision of symbols is: Which will prevail? Or, put another way, it would seem that for every symbolic shipwreck there are at least three potential outcomes: (a) That the survivors will forge a brave new and better world; (b) that the survivors will revert back to the same problematic ways of the old world; or (c) that the survivors will revert further back to the kind of barbaric savagery found in such works as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The island is the perfect size for these exercises in alternate social imaginaries.

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In the history of such island symbology two key images emerged in literature. The first was the Isle of the Blessed where option A occurs and a new and better world emerges. Then there is the the Isle of the Cursed where option C ensues and the survivors devolve into savagery. Intriguingly, the island of The Tempest sits between these two extremes and tells the more prosaic tale of option B, where the survivors — try as they might for a new world order — cannot help but revert back to their old-world ways. In this respect, the island of The Tempest is neither blessed nor cursed, but simply recursive in nature. Put in theological terms, it is neither heaven nor hell, but rather a kind of purgatory. On such an island, a particular set of questions arise: How do we break free from this recursive world? Is such a break ever possible? Or is our idea of progress just an illusion? Each of these questions moves us, step by step, from the realm of the theological and back to that of the material. In this subtle shift, the island becomes a humble symbol of history with its concern for whether or not we are destined to repeat our past over and over again. Such a question is very much on the mind of philosopher Bruno Latour in his Inquiry into Modes of Existence.13 Here, in this seminal work, Latour asks whether we as humans can change from certain relentless economic-modelsof-being and shift toward a newfound ecological mode of existence. Is such a transformation possible, or are we destined to fall back into the powerful gravitational pull of modernity’s techno-capitalistic propensities? And if such a change is possible, what would be its catalyst? Shakespeare’s The Tempest has much to say on this question of our human tendency toward recursion and the hard work of actual change. But before we examine the possibility of such a significant change in humanity’s outlook, we must delve a bit deeper into Shakespeare’s thoughts on the nature of human recursion and how insidious it actually is. And so, without further ado, let us join the survivors of Shakespeare’s shipwrecked crew as they venture onto the shores of what I will call:

The Isle of Eternal Return. Recursion #1; Or, the First Shipwreck Let’s begin with the story of Prospero. At the very beginning of the play he recounts how he and his daughter Miranda came to this undiscovered island. Prospero had been Duke of Milan, a position that he gives over to his brother Antonio so that he may be “transported and rapt in secret studies.”14 This, perhaps

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at first blush, sounds innocent enough on Prospero’s part, but Shakespeare tends to frown upon those characters who shirk their civic responsibilities to pursue their own private affairs, even if that might be something as seemingly innocent as retiring to one’s library in pursuit of further knowledge. This is especially true of later dramatic personages such as Timon, Antony and Cleopatra, and Pericles whose retreat from the world puts it in peril. And so Prospero’s disengagement from his civic duties leads to his brother Antonio’s corrupt usurpation of Prospero’s power. This is done with the help of the King of Naples and leads to the overthrow of Prospero’s rule. Prospero barely escapes with his life in a tiny boat with his daughter and a stash of books that he “prized above his dukedom.”15 Their precarious sea journey takes Prospero and his daughter to this island, far from their former world of politics and intrigue. Prospero, in his early days as a castaway, took a keen interests in his newfound home. He took pity on and freed Ariel, a spirit imprisoned in an oak by the previous ruler of the isle. This was the witch Sycorax who died before Prospero arrived. He even befriends Sycorax’s surviving son Caliban, the rightful heir to the island. Those early days are spoken of in idyllic terms, even by Caliban: “When thou camest first,/ Thou strokedst me and madest much of me, wouldst give me/ Water with berries in’t, and teach me how/ To name the bigger light, and how the less,/ That burn day and night: and then I loved thee/ And show’d thee all the qualities o’ the isle,/ The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile.”16 But then, it would seem, we experience our first recursive turn: Prospero’s studies once again pull him away from attending to the day-to-day life of the island. This negligence coincided with the sexual awakening of Caliban who rightfully believed that he was an equal in all things and therefore a suitable mate for Prospero’s daughter Miranda. Caliban is quickly disabused of this idea and henceforth is unfairly treated as no more than an indentured servant, declaring: “For I am all the subjects that you have,/ Which first was mine own king: and here you sty me/ In this hard rock, whiles you do from keep me/ The rest o’ th’ island.”17 What started with the promise of a new kind of world order between Prospero and Caliban reverts to the old world of master/servant relationships. The result of this brief utopic experiment is, according to Caliban, that Prospero “taught me language, and my profit on’t/ I know how to curse.”18 This will lead to the next recursive turn, Caliban’s plot to overthrow the rule of Prospero with the aid of the recently shipwrecked Trinculo and Stephano. Their subplot will recapitulate the theme of usurpation that began back in

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Venice with Prospero’s brother Antonio. Shakespeare, like Marx, thinks history repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce. This is certainly the tone of Caliban’s attempted coup, thanks to the sheer drunken ineptitude of Trinculo and Stephano, perhaps two of the most easily distracted usurpers in all of Shakespeare.

Recursion #2; Or, the Second Shipwreck The King of Naples, his entourage, and Prospero’s brother Antonio have all washed up upon this strange shore. The king is in mourning, for he believes his son Ferdinand has drowned and that the vast and indifferent ocean is now the boy’s watery grave. The good Gonzalo, councillor to the king, attempts to brighten his liege’s mood with a brief thought experiment: What would happen if Gonzalo himself had “plantation of this island” and were king of it?19 What might he do? This leads to the following variation on a favorite theme of the Renaissance: Utopia. Here is Gonzalo’s version, cribbed from Montaigne: Gonzalo  I’ th’ commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things. For no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all; And women too, but innocent and pure; No sovereignty.20

Antonio and the king’s brother make snide remarks behind Gonzalo’s back, but this does not deter the old man from continuing his dream of a new world order: Gonzalo  All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavor: treason, felony, Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine, Would I not have; but nature should bring forth Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance To feed my innocent people.21

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Thus would be Gonzalo’s new Golden Age. He would go on and on, but sleep overcomes him and our other shipwrecked survivors. All find themselves in a deep slumber, save for the rebellious Antonio and his new pupil Sebastian. Sebastian, you will remember, is the brother to the King of Naples. The two look upon Sebastian’s regal sibling who now sleeps soundly on the ground before them. What should they do? Guard the king as is their charge? Or take advantage of the situation? Gonzalo’s image of a new world order quickly disappears and we revert back to the old ways of Antonio and his dream of yet another usurpation. Once again Antonio leads the charge to undo another innocent brother. Antonio  O, that you bore The mind that I do! What a sleep were this For your advancement! Do you understand me? Sebastian  Methinks I do. Antonio  And how does your content Tender your own good fortune? Sebastian  I remember You did supplant your brother Prospero. Antonio  True: And look how well my garments sit upon me, Much feater than before. My brother’s servants Were then my fellows: now they are my men.22

This is usurpation 101 for Shakespeare, a theme that runs through his histories, tragedies, and romances with a regularity of one well-versed in the tendencies of European history. This being an island of recursion, such a scene makes perfect sense. If Antonio usurped his brother, then Sebastian — following the implacable logic of the island — must usurp his. Sebastian, being Sebastian, has a question or two before following in the footsteps of so many of his fictional cousins; or, as Sebastian concludes, “As thou got’st Milan, I’ll come by Naples.”23 And so, history is about to repeat, but contra Marx, first as tragedy and this second time as a potential nightmare. In this respect, Antonio and Sebastian’s attempted desert-island mass murder anticipates the infamous events surrounding the wreck of the Batavia some nineteen years later. This event was to the seventeenth century what the sinking of the Titanic is to us; but, as with many of history’s myriad catastrophes, it was ultimately eclipsed by ever greater cataclysms and

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subsequently forgotten, save for a few antiquarian naval historians. It was not until 1961, some 300 years later, that the story was brought back to modern memory, thanks to a diver who discovered the sunken wreck of the Batavia. As bits and pieces of the ship were brought back to the light of day, so too was its horrific story.

An Ever So Brief Tangent; Or, Historical Examples of an Isle of the Cursed and an Isle of the (Semi) Blessed The Batavia was originally bound for Australia when it impaled itself on one of the coral ridges of Houtman Abrolhos, a group of tiny coral islands some fifty or so nautical miles from the coast of Australia. Three hundred castaways found refuge on these tiny islands. Three months later, only a hundred would survive by the time a rescue ship arrived from Java. The others did not die from the particular deprivations of island life but rather by the hand of a psychopath and his coterie of acolytes who set about to methodically torture, poison, and massacre every man, woman, and child. The monster behind this brutal extermination was the ship’s apothecary, Jeronimus Cornelisz who, in the abandonment of other ship authorities, became the de facto leader of the castaways. This seemed like the natural choice since Cornelisz was the highest remaining officer of the ship and had a way with words. The combination won over his fellow survivors who had no idea that they were actually dealing with a true madman. Simon Ley, in his brief but incisive The Wreck of the Batavia, tells us that Cornelisz’s “actions became monstrous, but they were not irrational. In fact, they were dictated by an implacable logic: the need to retain and reinforce his absolute control over his little kingdom.”24 Since he and his henchmen were in the minority, he hit upon the radical idea of eliminating the surplus populations. To this end he relocated the survivors to various nearby islets, claiming that such a move would allow everyone to enjoy better living conditions. This separation and dispersal of the castaways made the subsequent massacres both discrete and manageable. Cornelisz’s brief rule came to an end with the arrival of the rescue ship from Java. The captain, seeing the extensive carnage, wasted no time in meting out justice. He hanged Cornelisz and his accomplices almost immediately, on the spot. The brief but detailed transcripts of their trial makes for harrowing reading.

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If certain seventeenth-century philosophers fancied the island as the perfect setting to invent their own future utopias, Cornelisz used the island to anticipate our own modern-day concentration camp. Such a tale sounds like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies on steroids and fits a popular belief that humans, in such cataclysmic circumstances, will end up with such gruesome conclusions. But is this indeed axiomatic? That is a question that plagued author Rutger Bregman until he stumbled upon an account of six shipwrecked boys in 1965 that contradicts William Golding’s fictional musings. Bregman recounts this little-known tale in his much celebrated Humankind: A Hopeful Story.25 It is here that we learn about six young Tongan boys (Luke Veikoso, Fatai Latu, Sione Fataua, Tevita Siola’a, Kolo Fekitoa, and Mano Totau) who were shipwrecked on the island of ‘Ata. The group immediately set up a small commune with a food garden. They hollowed out tree trunks to store rainwater, made chicken pens, and even erected a makeshift badminton court. The young men agreed to work in teams of two and maintained a stringent regimen of duties that included gardening, cooking, and guarding their base camp. All was not perpetual contentment; they invariably argued, but they were able to resolve their differences through their own version of what we would now call “time outs.” They also made sure to begin and end each day in song and prayer. This routine lasted for fifteen months. It was then that the boys were finally discovered by a passing ship and rescued. Bregman notes, While the boys of ‘Ata have been consigned to obscurity, Golding’s book is still widely read. Media historians even credit him as being the unwitting originator of the hit TV series Survivor … [but] the real Lord of the Flies is a tale of friendship and loyalty; one that illustrates how much stronger we are if we can lean on each other.26

Here again we are confronted with the dialectics of islands and shipwrecks which tend to break in two distinct and contradictory directions; either toward the dream of Gonzalo’s new world or the nightmare of Antonio and Sebastian’s infernal curse of historical return. Thankfully, before these would-be assassins can make their deadly desires a reality, Ariel awakes the sleeping king and his entourage, thereby thwarting their nefarious plans. But the lesson has been learned: when it comes to this island, the dream of a new and better world quickly reverts to the reality of the old. There seems to be no change, or at least no change for the better. So how does one go about freeing oneself from Shakespeare’s isle of eternal return?

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The Role of Sympathy as a Catalyst for Change This becomes the secret to escaping from the recursive nature of Shakespeare’s island. It seems that when someone is able to truly sympathize with another, they are ready to be released from this desert island purgatory. The first to show that they are ready to move on (or rather, off the island) is Miranda who exhibits instantaneous sympathy when she first sees the King of Naples’ ship sink at the very beginning of the play. She cries to her father: Miranda  O, I have suffered With those that I saw suffer: a brave vessel, Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her, Dash’d all to pieces! O, the cry did knock Against my very heart. Poor souls, they perish’d. Had I been any god of power, I would Have sunk the sea within the earth or ere It should the good ship so have swallow’d and The fraughting souls within her.27

This is quite a different response from Ariel, our island spirit, who is still not accustomed to the sympathetic ways of her human masters; she describes Ferdinand, who survived the shipwreck, in the following, detached fashion: The king’s son have I landed by himself; Whom I left cooling of the air with sighs In an odd angle of the isle and sitting, His arms in this sad knot.28

This description sounds almost alien-like in its inability to read Ferdinand’s “sighs” as lamentable groans and his “sad knot” as the fetal position of a traumatized and grief-stricken survivor. In many ways, Ariel’s entire journey is one toward acquiring a human sense of sympathy; of recognizing the feelings of others as feelings she too may someday experience. We see this education in action much later in the play when, as she is departing, she suddenly stops and, seemingly out of the blue, asks Prospero, with childlike curiosity, Ariel  Do you love me, Master? No? Prospero  Dearly, my delicate Ariel.29

Note, the extraordinary, tentative,“No?” of Ariel. It suggests an emotional intelligence still unsure of itself. But by the end of the play Ariel, through watching

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the interactions of all these humans, has acquired a sense of other-directedness that is as astute and abiding as Miranda’s. Ariel’s emotive maturation mirrors the audience, who also takes its time learning the rigorous rules of Shakespearean sympathy as the characters and the play itself unfold. It is a process. Listen to Ariel’s final and emotionally masterful description of the shipwrecked court that she has led to Prospero’s cell: Ariel  … The king, His brother and yours, abide all three distracted And the remainder mourning over them, Brimful of sorrow and dismay; but chiefly Him that you term’d, sir, “the good old lord Gonzalo”; His tears run down his beard, like winter’s drops From eaves of reeds.Your charm so strongly works ’em That if you now beheld them, your affections Would become tender. Prospero  Dost thou think so, spirit? Ariel  Mine would, sir, were I human. Prospero  And mine shall. Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling Of their afflictions, and shall not myself, One of their own kind, that relish all as sharply, Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art? 30

Here, the student becomes the teacher, proving it is time to release her from her bond. Through the profound powers of sympathy, Ariel has changed and, in having done so, has transformed Prospero as well. And so, we have seen that the inhabitants of the isle — Miranda, Ariel, Prospero — are able to change; whereas the shipwrecked courtiers, for the most part, fall recursively back into their old ways. But what about:

Caliban and Ferdinand Here, the plot thickens — or, perhaps it is actually the play’s thematics that thicken. Be that as it may, these two characters and their trajectories are essential to our understanding of the full argument of the play. Let’s begin with

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the issue of Caliban. We can sense from the description of Caliban by Miranda that he has changed for the worse. In the early days, they shared everything from the infinite bounty of the island to the fruits of each other’s language; but after Caliban’s sexual advances are rejected, everything has soured. He is, as we noted earlier, no longer part of Prospero’s extended family and unfairly reduced to an indentured servant; yet over the course of the play, Caliban is given a second education that teaches him to stop depending on these various colonizers (whether this be Prospero or Trinculo and Stephano) and to trust in his own agency. We see him realize this when Stephano and Trinculo, on the verge of enacting their coup, are so easily distracted by the various fine fabrics they find in a nearby trunk. Caliban exclaims impatiently: “Let it alone, thou fool! It is but trash!”31 And he is right, their momentary distraction leads to the failure of their assassination attempt. Toward the end of the play, Caliban realizes, “What a thrice-double ass/ Was I to take this drunkard for a god/ And to worship this dull fool.”32 One senses that Caliban, having been twice burned, will now begin to trust in himself and start taking future matters into his own hands. This is his slow transformation/education, an awakening to his own agency. And Ferdinand? Well, Ferdinand is a much trickier fellow to follow. The first thing we learn about him is not particularly flattering. Ariel tells us that, in the midst of the tempest, “The King’s son Ferdinand/ With hair up-staring — then like reeds, not hair —/ Was the first man that leap’d; cried ‘Hell is empty/ And all the devils are here!”33 This does not paint a particularly brave picture of this young man. Our impression does not necessarily improve from here. This is what he says upon hearing Miranda speak for the very first time: Ferdinand  My language? Heavens! I am the best of them that speak this speech. Were I but where ’tis spoken. Prospero  How? The best? What wert thou if the King of Naples heard thee?34

And so, along with cowardice, we can add vanity to Ferdinand’s basic attributes. No wonder Prospero wants to teach this rich kid a lesson or two. He begins with having Ferdinand experience a little manual labor — perhaps this might humble him a bit. The next time we meet Ferdinand he is indeed doing Prospero’s bidding, half-heartedly hauling large logs from one end of the

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stage to the other. He is so out of his element that Miranda has to intervene, “If you sit down/ I’ll bear your logs the while/ Pray give me that/ I’ll carry it to the pile.”35 It seems that Ferdinand has a way of getting the world to do things for him. All of this suggests that poor Ferdinand is not going to easily change his pampered ways. Prospero will give up on the manual labor idea and lets his daughter go ahead and marry the fellow (it is, after all, advantageous to have the King of Naples as his daughter’s father-in-law). And so Prospero sets in motion an island wedding, complete with the performance of a court masque (a bit of nuptial agitprop theater). Perhaps this illusion will help in the education of Ferdinand. At least that is Prospero’s hope. What we discover instead is:

The Limits of Illusion and Prospero’s Ensuing Melancholy We might as well be honest, this masque of Prospero’s is not one of Shakespeare’s finer moments of inspired verse making. It is a rather leaden affair. Perhaps this is why Shakespeare doesn’t seem to have the heart or the patience to finish it. Instead he suddenly has Prospero rather lamely exclaim: I had forgot that foul conspiracy Of the beast Caliban and his confederates Against my life: the minute of their plot Is almost come. (To the Spirits) Well done! Avoid; no more!36

Is Prospero truly just remembering Caliban’s foul conspiracy or does this — perhaps — have something to do with Ferdinand’s inattentiveness? I often wonder if Prospero is aware that his makeshift performance is not reaching his recently anointed son-in-law (or us for that matter) and that is why he disrupts his own illusion. Regardless of the reason behind Prospero’s interruption, Miranda and Ferdinand cannot help but note: Ferdinand  This is strange: your father’s in some passion That works him strongly. Miranda  Never till this day Saw I him touch’d with anger, so distemper’d.37

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And then, finally, the great natural poetry of Shakespeare returns for one of the most famous and beautiful passages in all of Shakespeare. It is as though Prospero were so relieved to escape the unnecessary archness of the masque that he is inspired to reach for new poetic heights: Prospero  Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.38

Prospero’s illusions, like those found in the theater, are all so fragile and near impossible to sustain. The smallest thing — the tilt of the head of the spectator in front of us, our neighbor’s sudden cough, or a dropped cue from an actor — can make the entire illusory event evaporate before us. Just as the reality of theater can easily dissolve, revealing itself to be no more than a mere illusion, so too can the meaning of such social constructs as church and state. No matter how robust or concrete they may seem to be, since they are constructions, they are susceptible to collapse. Shakespeare seems to intimate that our reality is as fragile as our dreams and therefore he demands that we be vigilant in our protection and preservation of both. One gets the sense that Prospero, like his creator, is exhausted from a lifetime of such effort.

The Final Moments of the Play This is the reconciliation scene of Act Five. It is perhaps the least inspired ending of Shakespeare’s four late romances. It is as if he were just going through the motions; he can’t even seem to summon up the impish delight in sending the whole affair up like he did in Cymbeline. Here, all Shakespeare’s

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energy seems focused on not descending into a kind of blanket cynicism. Take, for example, the moment when we discover Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess: Miranda  Sweet lord, you play me false. Ferdinand  No, my dearest love. I would not for the world. Miranda  Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should wrangle, And I would call it fair play.39

What is Shakespeare getting at by showing us Ferdinand cheating? Are we supposed to smile and chalk this up as Ferdinand being Ferdinand, or should we despair that it seems Ferdinand has learned nothing during his time on the island and has quickly reverted to the same snotty/entitled fellow that we met at the beginning of the play? If Prospero somehow succeeded in the transformation of Miranda and Ariel, he seems to have failed with Caliban and Ferdinand. Shakespeare does not linger on this failure but it does feel as though this is the culmination of another thematic line of the play: how some (most?) people are actually incapable of change. Instead of dwelling on this sobering thought, Shakespeare has Miranda see King Alonso and his court. Prospero’s dismay over Ferdinand gives way to Miranda’s wonder, “How many goodly creatures are there here!/ How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,/ That has such people in’t.”40 To which Prospero famously retorts, “’Tis new to thee.”41 What are we to make of this? Is this a gentle reprimand? A slightly cynical puncturing of the wonder that is usually invoked at the end of a Shakespeare romance? It is hard to tease out, as is most of this seemingly half-hearted final act, which seems oddly perfunctory when compared to luminous endings of Pericles, Cymbeline, and particularly The Winter’s Tale. Here Shakespeare seems to be dutifully wrapping up his plot, as if painting by numbers. Prospero forgives Antonio, who remains suggestively mum; the Boatswain appears to inform everyone that their ship is safe, sound, and ready to take them home; Trinculo and Stephano follow on the heels of this revelation with a semi-comic confession of remorse; Prospero ever so quickly apologizes for the discordant note that is Caliban; then everyone exits, save Prospero and Ariel, whom Prospero finally frees to the elements. End of play. Well, almost.

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Prospero’s Last Words Having moved us through the last plot machinations with a certain workmanlike dispatch, Prospero turns to us, the audience, and asks that we “Draw near.”42 He has one last pupil to reach. It is us, the audience. Will we be transformed like Ariel? Untouched like Ferdinand? Or unreachable like Antonio? If the play has been done well, we should be a sea of Mirandas. We began as a disparate assembly of Ferdinand-like strangers whose only sense of mutuality was that we were all sitting in the same direction; but, over the course of the play, we have been transformed into an earthly incarnation of Ariel, slowly learning what it means to be human and on the very cusp of freedom. This is Prospero’s last chance to work his magic, dissolve the differences between courtier and commoner, and engender a new social relation among one another. This is the potential power of Shakespearean sympathy. When it works, both actors and audience are transformed into a harmonious whole, each individual aware that they are vibrating with the same sympathetic resonance; a feeling so profound that the Renaissance believed it held the very heavens together. It has taken tremendous energy on the part of Shakespeare and his company of actors to achieve this and — like Prospero’s earlier illusion — its lifespan is likely to be fleeting, especially since it is left to the mercy of our feeble memories. This means that, in all likelihood, it and all the effort that went into it, may very well be forgotten. And yet Shakespeare, in the guise of Prospero, persists one last time, and says: Prospero  Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own, Which is most faint: now, ’tis true, I must be here confined by you, Or sent to Naples.43

This is true: the actor Prospero, the alleged sovereign, and the other dramatic personages of the play, are — in all actuality — beholden to us, the audience. It is we, not they, who put an end to this thing called the theatrical event. And because of this mutually agreed-upon conceit, the actor must now beseech us: Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell;

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But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands: Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please.44

This is such a fascinating dual request. On one level, the actor who plays Prospero is asking for a very simple thing: For the audience to bring their hands together — the result of this will be the sound of a clap, the repetition of this becomes what we call applause. And so, in contractual terms, this is the end of a certain kind of business transaction where the party of the first part (i.e., the actors) have fulfilled their obligation by enacting their story, and now it is time for the party of the second part (i.e., the audience) to honor this with a sound made by bringing both their hands together; the size and volume of this sound have not been set down by the terms of the contract and are left open to the discretion and satisfaction of said audience. But that’s not all that this actor, who is Shakespeare’s representative, wants. It isn’t just adulation that he is after: Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant; And my ending is despair, Unless I be reliev’d by prayer.45

Prayer. Hmmm. That’s interesting. Let’s go back — for a moment — to our actor’s earlier request, “the help of your good hands.” Let’s once again bring our hands together in that first initial gesture. Now, freeze that gesture. What does it rhyme with? Prayer. One clap of our hands is equivalent to the gesture of prayer. This would mean that a thousand claps from the audience would be the equal of a thousand prayers; now multiply that by however long an ovation and you have a collective request: Which pierces so, that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults.46

Once again freedom is won by making one care; by engendering mercy, which is sympathy’s gentle cousin. We can do this. It is in our communal power to accomplish this: As you from crimes would pardon’d be, Let your indulgence set me free.47

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Free. That’s the last word of this play about recursion. Here theater and the concept of multiple performances of the same story become a metaphor of history repeating itself. But we, as a collective, can end this. Liberate ourselves. Change for the better through this secular form of prayer, which is a clear-eyed acknowledgment and assessment of what has transpired. And in doing so, this collective sound breaks the spell of theater (think history) and releases us. And so, on one level, Shakespeare is talking about the end of a play but also the end of a certain history. And, on another level, Shakespeare is talking about his own desired end. To be released from what seems to be the purgatorial toil of creating illusions that are always destined to disintegrate into air, thin air. It seems to be the speech of a man who is more than ready to retire from the world, which in this case is the wooden O of the Globe. He leaves us, but he also leaves us his plays. Perhaps in our hands they will have more impact. This is Shakespeare’s ultimate challenge: to keep his insubstantial pageant from fading, and perhaps turn his illusion of a better world into an actual and unalterable reality. Each generation takes up the gauntlet and gives it a go. It’s our turn now.

Caliban Alone (?) And then they are all gone. Leaving Caliban alone on the island. What is it like to be free of them all? Of Prospero particularly? What will Caliban now do? I would like to think that Caliban can once again take time to revel in the music of the isle. You remember the famous moment in Act Three, Scene Two where Trinculo and Stephano are unnerved by the other worldly music being played by the invisible Ariel. Caliban assures them there is nothing to worry about and explains: Caliban  Be not afeared; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming, The clues methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked, I cried to dream again.48

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This is a glimpse of Caliban before the advent of Prospero and his tutelage. This is Caliban’s first language, his native tongue, before he learned from Prospero how to curse. Aimé Césaire, the great Martinique poet, develops this “other” Caliban further in his rich and provocative adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, entitled A Tempest. Here Césaire continues to celebrate Caliban’s innate love of his island and shows how it is rooted in traditions where nature and one’s ancestors merge. This engenders an enhanced veneration for the island as a whole. We see this profound relationship between the land and ancestor when Prospero speaks of Caliban’s dead mother Sycorax. Caliban immediately corrects him: Caliban  You only think she’s dead because you think the earth itself is dead … It’s much simpler that way! Dead, you can walk on it, pollute it, you can tread upon it with the steps of a conqueror. I respect the earth, because I know that Sycorax is alive. Sycorax. Mother. Serpent, rain, lightning. And I see thee everywhere! In the eye of the stagnant pool with stares back at me through the rushes in the gesture made by twisted root and its awaiting thrust. In the night, the all-seeing blinded night, the nostril-less all-smelling night.49

This puts me in mind of the kind of conversations found in Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think. Kohn’s goal in this seminal work of anthropology is to reconcile the human in relation to the nonhuman and the world at large. To do so he attempts to put aside such things as language, culture, society, and history, which can block us from seeing and appreciating “the myriad ways in which people are connected to a broader world of life, or how this fundamental connection changes what it might mean to be human. And this is why expanding ethnography to reach beyond the human is so important.”50 Such an approach dethrones humankind, making it just one of the many forms of being that share this planet. For many, such a repositioning of the human might help enable us to change our destructive Anthropocene ways of seeing and doing things. This would be the first crucial step toward possibly saving and properly caring for our injured planet.

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Such a vantage point has been given the name “post-human.” This can sound a tad “in-human,” but its goal is ultra humane. A post-human world dethrones the human, so that we are returned to our proper place in the planetary scheme of things, as one among many living things, whether this is the smallest of microbes or the largest of leviathans. In this light, we are no more privileged or deserving than any other living being. This, of course, goes beyond our longheld belief that we, as a species, are somehow unique or singular, where we congratulate ourselves for our ability to speak and think. But we are not the only species that uses and understands language. Kohn, in his book, goes to great pains to remind us that all species are immersed in the semiosis (meaningmaking) of nature. He tells us: Thanks to this living semiotic dynamic, meaning is a constitutive feature of the world and not just something we humans impose on it. Appreciating life and thought in this manner changes our understanding of what selves are and how they emerge, dissolve, and also merge into new kinds of ways as they interact with the other beings that make the tropical forest. My argument is that we are colonized by certain ways of thinking about relationality.51

For Kohn the tropical forests with their high biomass, unparalleled species diversity, and intricate coevolutionary interactions have much to tell us. All this proliferates with meanings that we “moderns” have lost touch with. In this respect, Caliban represents an older, more patient understanding, one that is immersed in this biodiverse world and speaks its language — something which Caliban has always generously shared with the visitors of the island. Remember he showed Prospero and Miranda “all the qualities o’ the isle,/ The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile.”52 And later makes the same promise to Trinculo and Stephano, “I’ll show thee every fertile inch o’ th’ island.”53 “I’ll show thee the best springs; I’ll pluck thee berries;/ I’ll fish for them, and get thee wood enough.”54 Nature is a book to him and he is one of the most attentive of readers. And so there is as much, if not more, to learn from Caliban as from Prospero and his man-made books. This other type of (natural) knowledge and communication becomes a major theme in David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous where he first coins the term “more-than-human-world.”55 Like Kohn, Abram stresses that it is not just other animals, but also plants, rivers, mountains, and the very air that speak to those who know how to hear. Finally, these cultures understand that nature-scapes are more than just the sum of their many living things and become their own kind of organic totality. Abram cites one example from anthropologist Richard Nelson who studied the Koyukon Indians of north central Alaska and

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reports,“Traditional Koyukon people live in a world that watches, in a forest of eyes. A person moving through nature — however wild, remote, even desolate the place may be — is never truly alone. The surroundings are aware, sensate, personified. They feel. They can be offended. And they must, at every moment, be treated with proper respect.”56 Here the surroundings, the very earth itself, is its own macro-organism, alive and responsive to everything in relationship with it. This is not that far from:

The Gaia Hypothesis This is a modern-day theory by James Lovelock, an independent scientist and environmentalist, who shifted his studies from looking for life on Mars, to looking at life on our own planet. This led him to the following theory, which feels very much in sympathy with the intuitions of various Indigenous peoples. Here’s how Lovelock explains it: The entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as constituting a single living entity, capable of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts. It is a long way from a plausible life-detection experiment to the hypothesis that the Earth’s atmosphere is actively maintained and regulated by life on the surface, that is, by the biosphere.57

What Lovelock is proposing is that this biosphere is not merely a biological product, but actually a biological construction. He equates it to a cat’s fur, a bird’s feathers, or the paper of a wasp’s nest; in other words, an extension of a living system designed to maintain a chosen environment. And so, in Lovelock’s view, we are dealing with a planet-sized entity whose properties could not be predicted from the sum of its parts. That, in short, is the theory. As for the name of the theory, we have William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies to thank. Golding was a neighbor of Lovelock and the two shared many long walks in the country. It was during one of these nature treks that Lovelock told Golding of his grand theory and asked him if he could think of a name for it. Golding suggested it be called Gaia, after the Greek Earth goddess also known as Ge. The name and theory caught the imagination of many; although Lovelock admits, “Scientists are usually condemned to lead urban lives, but I find that country people still living close to the earth often seem puzzled that anyone should need to make a

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formal proposition of anything as obvious as the Gaia hypothesis. For them it is true and always has been.”58 The same could be said for many Indigenous people and their TEK (aka traditional ecological knowledge). Ailton Krenak, the renowned Brazilian activist, would — no doubt — relate to Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis as part of his people’s long ancestral tradition where the earth is their Mother; this is different from the earth of the developed world, which stands “apart from the great big organism of Earth.”59 Krenak believes that “Everything is nature. The cosmos is nature. Everything I can think of is nature. Mother Earth puts us to sleep and wakes us up again with the rising sun; she lets the birds sing, the currents and winds flow. She creates a wonderful world for us to share, and what have we done in return?”60 Krenek characterizes Mother Earth as teaching its child (i.e., us) a lesson: “‘Hush now.’ That is what the Earth is saying to humanity.”61 And yet Krenek does not see the developed world heeding the earth’s message. Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomami Shaman, agrees with this assessment and writes in his remarkable autobiography, The Falling Sky, “All this devastation worries us. The shamans clearly see that the forest is suffering and sick. They fear that it will finally return to chaos and that all the human beings will be crushed … Our xapiri spirits are very worried to see the land become ghost. They return from their distant flights singing songs bemoaning its wounds.”62 This calls for a deep sensitivity and active care for our surroundings, another form of sympathy, similar to that which was discovered by Miranda, Ariel, and Prospero, but further extended by Caliban as a sympathy for the island as a whole. Such an expansive vision moves us away from the singular care-for-theother and toward:

A Care for All Life; Or the Necessity of Deep Ecology Arne Naess, the philosopher who coined the term deep ecology, tells us, “It is not only our attitude to other human beings that reveals our deepest values and highest priorities. It is also our relation to all other living things. I believe that which unites all forms of life is more important than that which divides.”63 Naess believes that such an attitude helps us to become something more than just a well-regulated, self-sustaining ego among other like-minded, well-regulated, self-sustaining egos. By engaging in this sort of relationship with the world of biodiversity and our self, we are bettering not just the world, but our very selves in the process. Put another way: This expansive view of beings expands

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our sense of our very own individual being. Both world and self are enriched in a kind of continual feedback loop. Naess will develop such an attunement into a theory of what he calls deep and shallow ecology.64 Shallow ecology is our default way of being. It is predicated upon an essentially anthropocentric view of things. It assesses the world from a purely human-first value system. This latter relationship can be seen in many of the policies of developed nations, where there is support for a mix of limited ecological interventions that serve the immediate needs of humans while giving passing lip service to the necessity of true biodiversity. In this respect we could think of this sort of ego-based, human-first, shallow ecology as being represented by the world of Prospero, whereas Caliban’s attentive relationship to the island bespeaks a relationship to deep ecology. Naess tells us that deep ecology is based on the principle that every living creature has its own intrinsic worth. From here he goes on to note that, for some people, the word “alive” embraces more than a biological sense alone. This allows him to extend the same feelings toward a mountain or river. To tease this latter idea out, he uses the example of the Alta River in northern Norway, which was the scene of a vigorous protest movement in the 1980s. During this time, the local community was attempting to safeguard the river from encroaching technology. During one of the demonstrations a police officer asked one of the protesters why he was there; the protester responded, “The river is part of myself.”65 This evolved into a motto for the Alta River demonstrations where the crowd began chanting, “Let the river live!”66 It was as if the river had a life of its own. Alton Krenak would agree with Naess. His people have also experienced the despoilment of a river. In this case, the Doce River, which the Krenak nation call Watu — our grandfather — since, for them, it is a person, not a resource. This river that spans some 600 kilometers from Minaas Gerais to Espirito Santo “finds itself today sunk under toxic mud from a burst dam that orphaned our tribes and plunged the river into a coma.”67 The damage done extended beyond one tribe, Krenak explains, When we say that our river is sacred, the response is always the same: “That’s just their folklore.” When we say that the mountain is telling us it is going to rain and that today will be a prosperous day, they say: “Mountains are just mountains. They don’t tell us anything.” When we depersonalize the river, the mountain, when we strip them of their meaning — an attribute we hold to be the preserve of the human being — we relegate these places to the mere resources for industry and extractives. The result of our divorce from our integrations and interactions with

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Mother Earth is that she has left us orphans — not just those termed, to a greater or lesser degree, Indigenous peoples, Natives, Amerindians, but everyone.68

Here, reverence becomes the foundation of all conservation and can be applied to water, plants, soil, fish, reindeer, and humans. Throughout Tich Nhat Hanh’s luminous The World We Have, he returns over and over again to simple natural images such as oranges, flowers, and trees. In each instance, he reminds us that what we are seeing is more than just an orange, or a flower, or a tree. Take a flower — when we look at it deeply, we come to understand that everything in the cosmos is in this one little flower: “sunshine, clouds, earth, gardener, minerals, heat, rivers, and consciousness.”69 Without any of these, a flower ceases to exist. What is true of the flower, is true of the human; we are not independent of the world, but very much a part of it. Not just made up of our human and animal ancestors but also non-living elements, minerals, atoms, and electrons as old as the universe itself. Tich Nhat Hanh notes: In our former lives we were rocks, clouds, and trees … This is not just Buddhist, it is scientific. We humans are a young species. We were plants, we were trees, and now we have become humans. We have to remember our past existences and be humble … We humans think we’re intelligent, but an orchid, for example, knows how to produce symmetrical flowers; a snail knows how to make a beautiful, well proportioned shell. Compared with their knowledge, ours is not worth much at all. We should bow deeply before the orchid and the snail and join our palms reverently before the butterfly and the magnolia tree.70

He believes that by being attentive and respectful to all existence it will help us recognize and cultivate what is noblest in us. The last part of this truly transcendent book gives the reader a series of gathas (meditations) to help remind us that the Earth provides us with so many precious gifts. My personal favorite is called “Touching the Earth.” This is how he explains it: The practice of Touching the Earth is to return to the Earth, to our roots, to our ancestors, and to recognize that we are not alone but connected to a whole stream of spiritual and blood ancestors. We are their continuation, and with them we will continue in future generations. We touch the Earth to let go of the idea that we are separate and to remind us that we are the Earth and part of life.71

With this, the practitioner should take a handful of soil in their hand, feel its materiality, its damp or dryness, let it trickle through their fingers, back to where it belongs and realize, in that very moment, we belong there too and will return someday, becoming mineral again, to sustain another generation so that they might, in turn, do the same thing for their eventual offspring.

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On earthquakes and metaphors Bouilly’s Disaster of Lisbon and the Fukushima variation

A Quiet Sunday Morning in 1775 It lasted less than ten minutes and yet what transpired in those brief 570 seconds would unsettle all of Europe for the next several centuries. It began, according to one witness, with a horrible subterranean noise; another described it as an infernal rattling of carriages; others likened it to the rumble of thunder, or the beating of drums. The cause of this earthly clattering was due to a fault line off the coast of St. Vincent where the shifting tectonic plates of Africa and Eurasia collided, creating what is now referred to as a mega thrust tumbler. The impact of this collision released an explosion that was believed to be nine times more powerful than the largest thermonuclear device that has ever been detonated. The result of this was the infamous Lisbon earthquake. On that Sunday morning, the temperature was a temperate 63.5°F, the sun was out and there was not a cloud in the sky. Many of the city’s inhabitants and about a thousand or so additional visitors were occupying many of Lisbon’s churches since this particular Sunday morning was also the celebration of All Saints’ Day. At 9:45 a.m. the first and most devastating of three tremors struck. It was the first initial shock wave that did most of the damage. There was a 60-second pause, followed by the second tremor and another two minutes of destruction. After that, there was one last 60-second seismic caesura before the final tremor. This last tectonic shudder lasted four minutes and took care of what little was left standing. When the final aftershock ceased, some 60,000 inhabitants would be killed.1 Street after street was filled with the dead and the dying. The earthquake was indiscriminate in its victims; there were rich and poor, young and old, pious and non-believers. All were jostled together in a massive tableau vivant that

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would rival the darkest imaginings of Hieronymus Bosch. For many, November 1, 1775, felt like Judgment Day; or, for those less religiously inclined, it became:

A Sneak Preview of the End of the World The following account is taken from Walter Benjamin’s 1930 radio broadcast for young audiences. Why the radio network gave Benjamin the green light to share his catastrophic obsessions with the children of Berlin has never been adequately explained; be that as it may, Benjamin presented a series of radio shows that covered the Destruction of Pompeii, the Great Fire in Canton, the Mississippi Flood of 1927, and — of course — the Lisbon earthquake. Here is Benjamin’s slightly “enhanced” report from one eye witness of the quake, a visiting Englishman by the name of the Reverend Charles Davy who tells us: “I was sitting at my desk and the table began to move, which was rather surprising as there was no reason at all that it should have … A horrible crackling noise was heard, as if all the buildings in the city were falling down at once.”2 Davy’s own building was so jolted that the upper floors immediately caved in, the walls of his room crumbled away, stones fell, the roof cracked, and the beams that supported it now floated in mid-air. And then, if this were not surreal enough, he tells us: At this time the sky became so dark that people couldn’t make out what was in front of them. Pitch-dark prevailed either as a result of the immense amount of dust caused by the collapsing houses, or because of the volumes of sulfurous vapor escaping from the earth. Finally the night brightened again and the violence of the shocks relented … I quickly threw on some shoes and a coat, rushed outside and headed to St. Paul’s cemetery, where I thought I would be safest given that it sits on a hill … From the hill of the cemetery I was then witness to a horrific spectacle: on the ocean, as far as the eye could see, countless ships surged with the waves, crashing into one another as if a massive storm were raging. All of a sudden the huge seaside pier sank, along with all the people who believed they would be safe there. The boats and vehicles so many people used to rescue fell equal prey to the sea.3

Europeans, at this time, had no real name for this second catastrophe. The Portuguese would use words like inundação (inundation) or fluxo e refluxo (flux and reflux). The Spanish simply called such oceanic occurrences muy extraordinario movimiento del mar (very extraordinary movements of the sea) or soberbias olas (arrogant waves).4 Tsunami is the name we now give such cataclysmic events. This rather ominous-sounding noun from Japan becomes,

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in English translation, the rather benign “harbor-wave” (tsu=harbor and nami=wave). We have no record of what this experience must have been like for those lost souls in 1775. We would have to wait some 240 years for such testimonies. Here is Emmanuel Carrère’s third-person account in his somber Lives Other Than My Own, which deals, in part, with the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka. The following passage recounts the experience of a survivor whom Carrère calls Philippe: At some point, he realized that the crows had vanished and that he no longer heard any birds singing. That’s when the wave hit. A moment earlier the sea was smooth; an instant later it was a wall as high as a skyscraper and it was falling on them. He thought in a flash that he was going to die but would not have time to suffer. He was submerged, swept away, and tossed around for what seemed an eternity in the immense belly of the wave before he surfaced on his back … furniture, animals, people, wooden beams, chunks of concrete raced past; he closed his eyes, expecting to be crushed by some huge hunk of debris, and he kept them closed until the monstrous roaring of the current died down, allowing him to hear other sounds, the cries of wounded men and women. Then he understood that the world had not come to an end, that he was alive, and now the real nightmare would begin.5

But can we get closer? Dare we? The fall from third to first person can be a harrowing affair. To do so, we will turn to Sonali Deraniyagala’s wrenching autobiographical account, entitled Wave. Brace yourself. Here we go: Am I underwater? It didn’t feel like water, but it has to be, I thought. I was being dragged along, and my body was whipping backwards and forwards. I couldn’t stop myself. When at times my eyes opened, I couldn’t see water. Smoky and gray. That was all I could make out. And my chest. It hurt like it was being pummeled by a great stone … This is a dream. It’s one of those dreams where you keep falling and falling, and then you wake up … But I wasn’t waking up. The water was pulling me along with a speed I did not recognize, propelling me forward with a power I could not resist … If I am going to die please hurry up … But I don’t want to die, our life is good, I thought … Yet I had to surrender to this unknown chaos. I could sense that I am going to die, I am nothing against whatever it is that has me in its grip.6

Thankfully Sonali Deraniyagala would survive; tragically, her husband and two little boys would not. Nor would some 225,000 souls from across a dozen countries. The majority of these lives were lost in a matter of minutes. A 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, lasted only 36 seconds and killed 160,000 people. We do not know the exact death toll of those in the Lisbon harbor. What

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we do know is that modern Europe had never experienced such a cataclysmic event and would spend the remainder of the century asking itself about the larger:

Meaning of the Lisbon Earthquake in Philosophy, Literature, and (even) Theater (well, sort of) The Lisbon earthquake arrives, as if on cue, just as European society is debating the question of religion vs. reason. On one side there were the traditional theologians, tying the cause of the earthquake to divine punishment for some alleged moral laxity; on the other side, you had the Enlightenment philosophers demanding to know what kind of divine power allows for such indiscriminate carnage? The Lisbon earthquake was immediately enlisted by both sides of the debate and used to prove their opposing view. Perhaps one of the most highprofile debates was found in a heated exchange between Voltaire and Rousseau. Voltaire would, of course, use the Lisbon earthquake to further prove that there was no God, caring or otherwise; as far as he was concerned there was just indifferent nature. His argument takes the form of a poem entitled The Lisbon Disaster; Or an Inquiry into the Axiom, “All is Well:” As the dying voices call out, will you dare respond To this appalling spectacle of smoldering ashes with: “This is the necessary effect of the eternal laws Freely chosen by God”? Seeing this mass of victims, will you say, “God is avenged. Their death is the price of their crimes”? What crime, what fault had the young committed, Who lie bleeding at their mother’s breast? Did fallen Lisbon indulge in more vices Than London or Paris, which live in pleasure? Lisbon is no more, but they dance in Paris.7

Rousseau will take a different tack from Voltaire; he is less interested in the indifference of nature and more concerned with the culpability of modern man in the making of his own self-inflicted sorrow. He responds to Voltaire in the following fashion: “Most of our physical ills are still our own work … Without departing from your subject of Lisbon, admit for example, that nature did not construct twenty thousand houses of six to seven stories there,

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and that if the inhabitants of this great city were more equally spread out and more lightly lodged, the damage would have been much less and perhaps of no account.”8 Another, younger, philosopher of German extraction will also take a deep interest in the Lisbon earthquake, although these musings will be more scientific than philosophic. The thinker in question was the very young Immanuel Kant and the result of this youthful infatuation with earthquakes would be three earnest essays on the causes of such natural occurrences. Kant would write in the first of his earthquake essays, “We dwell peacefully on ground whose foundations are shaken from time to time. Without concern, we build over cavities whose supports sometimes sway and threaten to collapse.”9 This is true of cities and worldviews. It seems somehow fitting that Kant should take such a keen interest in such seismic affairs, especially since he will go on to create something of an epistemological earthquake of his own with The Critique of Pure Reason. A work that sent its own shock waves throughout all of Europe and toppled the established views of many a young intellectual. Perhaps the most famous victim of Kant’s tectonic thinking was the young dramatist Heinrich von Kleist who succumbed to what is now referred to as his Kanterlebnis or Kant-Experience in March of 1801. This is when Kleist first read Kant. Not the Kant of the earthquake essays but the Kant of The Critique of Pure Reason. The work hits poor Kleist like an earthquake. This would forever alter Kleist as a writer, whose first published story was The Earthquake in Chile. Kleist’s fictional earthquake becomes a radical rupture with the past. The story ends with an adoptive father holding a child born in the midst of cataclysm. Before the earthquake, the child would have been scorned as a bastard for it was born out of wedlock; but now, after the earthquake, he represents a new species: homo-modernicus. We don’t know what will become of this child, but we can dream new dreams through him. This is quite a departure from Shakespeare’s The Tempest with its recursive island and shipwrecked inhabitants who are doomed to repeat the same historical mistakes over and over again in a strange, quasipurgatorial space. The earthquake, in Kleist, is the demarcation point between the old and the new. In this respect, the Lisbon earthquake dispenses with the reign of religion and helps to usher in — for better and for worse — the age of reason and revolution. In the end, the Lisbon earthquake would continue to be a subject for numerous novelists, painters, and even composers such as Telemann. What it didn’t become is the subject of much theater; or at least any theater of real note. There is no great play on the Lisbon earthquake. The event seems to have taxed the imagination of playwrights and set designers. That is with

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one notable exception. It is somewhat ironic that one of the most monumental events of the times would become the most popular subject matter of:

The Miniature Theaters of the Eighteenth Century These little toy theaters went by many names. One of their early inventors, Heinrich Friedrich Müller, called them teleoramas, a pseudo Greek name that signified “a view from a distance” (tele=at a distance and orama=view).10 But the name did not take hold, leading to a whole host of other designations. The Germans coined the term perspektivische ansicht; the French, optiques; the Italians, mondo nuovo. But the name that would finally stick was the English: peepshow. This is how Müller described these mini-theaters: “An optical entertainment consisting of eight cut-out landscapes (the front face, six cut out panels, and a back scene) arranged in a line … representing … in a surprising way, a very deep perspective.”11 Much of this work was inspired by the Baroque theater, which favored the use of such extreme perspectives.12 The toy theater was further perfected and best marketed by Martin Engelbrecht (1684–1756), a printmaker in Augsburg who made these paper peepshows into a popular parlor entertainment.13 Engelbrecht would provide his customers with a set of prints that could be viewed in his specially designed optical box, what he called a gukkasten. The box itself was rectangular with an eyehole at one end, inside of which one could load and reload various miniature theatrical sets in six paper sheets. The first print in each set would be a proscenium arch and was followed with a number of wings that resolved themselves into some sort of backdrop. Jeremias Wachsmuth and Johann David Naessenthaler were his two key designers; they provided rare glimpses into a Jewish synagogue, a Masonic temple, miners at work, a bear hunt, nautical battles, and scenes from the Old and New Testaments.14 But the most popular and best-selling peepshow of all time was none other than the Lisbon earthquake.15 Englebrecht’s version of the Lisbon earthquake was rendered by Johann David Nessenthaler.16 The first of the six nesting sheets shows what looks like a collapsing proscenium arch, suggesting that the viewer is an audience member seated before the stage of a crumbling theater.17 This gives way to a view of the city in a similar falling state. The interior sheets show a series of men and women, each of whom display a variation on the theme of abject human terror.18 One male figure looks up toward the sky, arms outstretched, as if to

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beseech the heavens for some form of celestial intervention.19 Another nearby figure of a woman kneels on the ground reaching out to save her baby who is about to be swallowed by the earth, which has opened up beneath its tiny feet.20 Further figures, equally distraught, populate this apocalyptic landscape, each appropriately scaled to the rigorous laws of perspective that were first formulated by the likes of Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti. Those depicted may diminish in size but not in fear. This seems to grow as they come closer and closer to the invisible vanishing point of the toy theater; like a black hole it has everyone and everything in its thrall, nothing seems capable of escaping the maw of this ongoing catastrophe. If we cast our glance above these poor souls, we see a series of broken columns, archways, blocks of marble, and other parts of buildings, each suspended in mid-air, as if frozen in their final moments of free fall. The overall effect is a caesura of chaos with figures, colors, and broken architecture on the very brink of total collapse. It is an arresting image, to say the least. Most of these miniature paper theaters were constructed for private consumption, either by the aristocracy or the rising bourgeoise. Public usage was more difficult given the fragile nature of the prints and their complicated multilayered arrangement. Eventually, several showmen overcame this problem by inventing a variety of large portable viewing boxes. These housed a loom-like apparatus that allowed the viewer to flip through several miniature theaters at a time. Such portable boxes became a much sought-after attraction at the various fairgrounds of Europe and none was more in demand than Englebrecht’s Lisbon earthquake. The success of such attractions was not just due to their subject matter, but also to the talents of a given presenter and his particular patter. This was further enhanced by a musical accompanist. Most of these public peepshows had limited viewing holes so it was essential that the peepshow presenter sustain a crowd’s interest as they waited in line. R. Balzer quotes this poem about one such consummate peepshow impresario who went by the name of Old Henry: His tinkling bell doth you together call To see his Rory-show, spectators all; That will be pleased before you by him to pass, To pay a Farthing and look through his glass, Where every object that it doth project, Will please your fancy, yield your mind content.21

One wonders what Old Henry would have to say about the Lisbon earthquake? What sort of music might have accompanied his patter? And what was the

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response of his viewers? This has not come down to us. All we know is that Englebrecht’s toy theater was the primary theatrical representation for this cataclysmic event. A frozen image of impending doom set to a carnival barker’s spiel and the sounds of a hurdy-gurdy.

Lisbon Earthquake as Spectacle Jean Nicolas Bouilly and Alexandre Piccinni’s Le Désastre de Lisbonne: drame héroïque, en trois actes, en prose, mêlé de danse et pantomime (Paris, Barba, 1804) dealt with the same nexus of issues as that of Kleist’s short story, although its modus operandi seems to be more about spectacle than any issues of a new world order emerging from the rubble of the Lisbon earthquake. Perhaps this was due to Bouilly’s France having already experienced their own new world birthed from the political earthquake of the French Revolution. This might explain why the emphasis of the libretto, written ten years after the Reign of Terror, focuses on the reclamation of an aristocrat’s reputation — in this case, of Don Alvare, a grandee of Spain who is seeking the hand of Thénaïre, the daughter of the governor of Lisbon. The story, such as it is, concerns Thénaïre’s desire to marry a young sailor named Azémor. He is of humble origin but, thanks to his recent heroics at sea, has now risen to the rank of commodore. This, in Don Alvare’s aristocratic eyes, is still not enough to sanction such a marriage between the governor’s daughter and a commoner. The governor reminds Don Alvare that he only owns his title thanks to his ancestors and that his name will, eventually, be forgotten; whereas Azémor’s name will be blessed by generations to come as a true hero. Ultimately, the governor leaves the decision of marriage up to his daughter who chooses Azémor, the man of lesser rank. He and she head to the country for his father’s blessing. An aggrieved Don Alvare also heads to the country to free his mind of the pain of Thénaïre’s rejection. The lovers receive the blessing of Orsano who is Azémor’s father and an elaborate wedding ensues. The stage directions, which are the best part of this work, tell us that everyone suddenly hears “bleak sounds” (sons lugubres) but they all think it’s just a temporary thunderstorm and continue dancing. But the dance is interrupted by “lightning and horrendous thunder” (des éclairs et des coups de tonnerre épouvantables).22 A rider on horseback arrives to tell the assembled villagers of the disastrous turn of events that has befallen Lisbon and encourages them to flee immediately. Orsano shouts, “Gods! I can feel the earth shaking under my feet.”23 And as if on cue, his house collapses, followed by this stage direction:

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Action ballet and music. Everyone is fleeing in all directions. Many people flee through the hill. Just when the highest number of people are on it, the hill collapses and uncovers the raging sea; several people swim, others throw ropes at them. Some men and women take their children away. Don Alphonse and part of his suite are separated from Thénaïre and Azémor. In the middle of the sea, a volcano rises that vomits a volley of stones and floods of fire. Curtain drops.24

One assumes that those who arrived at this play came particularly to see these effects and, truth to tell, the text only seems to come alive when it recounts what is to happen scenographically. We can sense this same energy and dynamism in the opening stage directions to the third and final act: The theater represents chaos: a hill about 12 feet high. It is cut into two parts by a flood that falls from the summit between two rocks, on the top of which the body of a broken tree is thrown, this forms a narrow and perilous path. The part on the right of the audience must be smaller than the other one and covered with broken monuments and ruins of all kinds. The left part, more spacious, is composed of: a hip of rocks in the background, closer to us are other ruins, the roofs of half-engulfed houses. At the bottom of these ruins there is a deep excavation where several blocks of rocks are rolling in full blast. Up to the brim of the stage, several blocks of architecture, column pieces and other ruins here and there.25

What follows is a series of heroic deeds by Don Alvare, the disregarded aristocrat. First he frees Azémor’s father Orsano from beneath the rubble of a fallen building and then saves Thénaïre from falling into an abyss brought about by the earthquake. In this way, Alvare and his aristocratic class are redeemed by the play. Orsano has the final words of the play, telling the assembled survivors, “It’s by helping each other, it’s by cherishing each other, that mortals may escape from destiny and brave the furor of raging elements.”26 But this brief moment of fellow harmony is undone almost instantaneously by the final stage direction: The rocks that are behind the bridge disappear and they uncover the background painting, which represents Lisbon, half destroyed and emblazed; a great number of inhabitants flee and they form varied groups here and there. Curtain drops.27

This last image seems to suggest that the author either doesn’t really believe Orsano’s words, or he was simply hellbent on giving his audience what they wanted: the disaster that the title promises.

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Fukushima as the True Beginning of the Twenty-First Century The ancient Japanese believed that a giant catfish lived beneath the islands of Nippon; any tremor, major or minor, was linked to the thrashing of its leviathanlike tail. On March 11, 2011, at precisely 2:46 p.m., this legendary catfish thrashed about and the result was an earthquake in the magnitude of 7.9 on the Richter scale. This was the largest earthquake ever recorded by Japan and remains one of the five most powerful earthquakes since humankind began keeping such records at the beginning of the 1900s. Forty-six seconds into the quake, the motion sensor on the Unit 1 reactor in Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station was tripped, Units 2 and 3 followed suit. The earthquake would last some three minutes and, miraculously, all three nuclear reactors would successfully shut down. But nothing quite prepared the folks at Fukushima for what would happen next. The quake, which was some eighteen miles beneath the ocean’s floor, released a tidal wave of epic proportions. Its immense power grew ever stronger as it continued to surge forth toward northeastern Honshu at a speed equivalent to the fastest of jetliners. The ensuing tsunami would come in two swift strikes. The first wave was easily deflected by the plant’s containment wall; but the second wave, some fifty feet in height, washed over this concrete obstruction and into the nuclear facility itself. It destroyed seawater pumps, drowned the electrical panels, disabled the power supplies for all safety devices, and deactivated the crucial AC power to Units 1 through 5 of the nuclear reactors. Such extensive destruction was beyond any of the fall-back procedures that had been put in place. There were no plans or set of protocols for an event of this magnitude. The authors of the densely detailed Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster explain that the “developers of nuclear power historically have regarded such severe events as so unlikely that they needn’t be factored into a nuclear plant’s design. The experts could not imagine that such a cascading failure of safety systems would ever occur. So the regulations required only that the reactors be able to survive conditions occurring during far less severe accidents, known as ‘design-basis’ accidents.”28 And so, with no clear plan in place for the mass system failure that they were facing, the technicians of Fukushima improvised as best they could to avert disaster; unfortunately, the problems they encountered surpassed their solutions and some twenty-four hours later the Unit 1 reactor exploded, tearing off its roof and spreading radioactive debris everywhere. This would be followed by

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two more hydrogen explosions in Units 2 and 3. The results were not as dire as the nuclear reactor failure in Chernobyl (which we will deal with in chapters nine, ten, and eleven) but would still remain classified as a Level 7 accident by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Although Fukushima would not be as deadly as Chernobyl, its occurrence is something of a paradigm shift for the future of humankind and the planet. Certainly there have been natural disasters like the Lisbon earthquake and human-made disasters such as Chernobyl, but Fukushima is an unnerving synthesis of the two. This hybrid catastrophe, what Sabu Kohso calls “the Fukushima event,” ushers in a new and unprecedented era where the natural and the nuclear are now inextricably intertwined with one another.

A Stroll Through Fukushima; Circa 2011 What would it take to go out for a stroll in Fukushima’s Forbidden Zone where one is susceptible to high dosages of radiation? Our potential flâneur must be on the lookout for isotopes such as plutonium-239, which emits alpha particles that are particularly dangerous if inhaled or ingested. They can have a half-life of up to 24,000 years and a particularly pernicious habit of settling into bones, livers, and top soil. Amateur artist Kazuto Tatsuta shares the rather baroque preparatory process necessary to venture out into such a dangerous new world. He should know — he spent six months as part of a clean-up crew for the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant and then went on to create his award-winning manga memoir of his time at “Ichi-F” (the workers’ nickname for this forsaken place). Here is Tatsuta’s morning routine (minus his exacting illustrations). Let’s join him as he prepares to go out for the day:







—First comes underwear. Stash your APD radiation detector and ID in your shirt pocket. —Next is your first TYVEK protective suit, always write your name on everything. —Next, the first pair of gloves. Seal the wrists with tape. —Now comes the full mask. —Careful not to fasten the straps too tight, or your head will hurt after awhile. —Checking for leaks is crucial. Cover the filters. If the mask seals to your face when you breathe in, you’re fine.

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—Sealing around the mask is easier when someone else does it for you. —Then comes the second TYVEK protective suit which goes over the first. —Then the second set of rubber gloves. —When going to the high exposure site, don’t forget the sticker for your back. —If you’ve sealed your suit with tape, they need to feel it under the TYVEK protective suits to make sure you have it. —Now you’re safely outfitted.29

Welcome, to a day out-and-about in Fukushima’s Forbidden Zone.

Fukushima from a Philosopher’s Point of View Fukushima has not only been the subject of scientific reports and manga graphics but also philosophical treatises such as Jean-Luc Nancy’s timely After Fukushima. This tiny little book deals with one of the huge revelations of what Fukushima means to the future of our planet. For Nancy, this is another paradigm shift, as significant as the Lisbon earthquake. In this brief text, Nancy writes on the “equivalence” of catastrophes: the spread or proliferation of repercussions from every kind of disaster hereafter will bear the mark of that paradigm represented by nuclear risk. From now on there is an interconnection, an inter-twining, even a symbiosis of technologies, exchanges, movements, which makes it so that a flood — for instance — wherever it may occur, must necessarily involve relationships with any number of technical, social, economic, political intricacies that keep us from regarding it as simply a misadventure or a misfortune whose consequences can be more or less easily circumscribed. This is even truer for a chemical catastrophe such as the one in Bhopal in 1984, the human, economic, and ecological effects of which are still visible today. The complexity here is singularly characterized by the fact that natural catastrophes are no longer separable from their technological, economic, and political implications or repercussions.30

Nancy goes on to cite Rousseau’s letter to Voltaire in regard to the Lisbon earthquake. For him, Rousseau’s warning is perhaps even more pertinent today than it was in 1755. Humankind has gone even further in its reckless indifference when it comes to achieving its desires for more cities, transportation, or energy. We have put our faith in technology to master our fate, but instead it has — in the wake of events such as Fukushima — put this very fate into question. More

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and more of these ever expanding desires of ours are colliding with nature’s realities, paving the way for newer and even deadlier kinds of future catastrophe. Fukushima is, in many ways, one of the first examples of this new collision course between ourselves and the planet. Such a clash between the natural and the nuclear makes the entire planet one big Lisbon earthquake waiting to happen. The scale of such an entangled catastrophe is mind-numbing in its magnitude. We are no longer talking about 200,000 inhabitants that were impacted by the events of 1755; this would now involve, according to Nancy’s math, the entire world of 7 billion humans and millions and billions of other living beings.

Radioactive and Socio-political Fallout; Fukushima a Decade After the Fact Sabu Kohso gives us an impassioned update on the world of Fukushima in his stirring Radiation and Revolution. He notes that there were three immediate phases of response by the Japanese people to the Fukushima event. The first phase could be characterized as apocalyptic in the true etymological spirit of the word: a profound revelation to the nation. Here, for the first time, the populace became aware of the social, political, economic, technological, and environmental entanglement of their modern-day reality. Kohso notes that this reality had always been there, on the periphery of everyone’s consciousness, but the Fukushima event brought this reality out of the shadows for all to see. Kohso calls this experience “a radical education.”31 Phase two became a spontaneous uprising of the Japanese populace; Kohso defines this interim phase as a “soup of emotions experienced through the disaster — grief (for losses), despair (for the future), rage (against the authorities), anxiety (over the uncertainty), excitement (of volatility), and even aspiration (for the possibility of change).”32 But this public outcry was quickly quelled by the powers that be and their call for “normalization.” The necessary interrogative opening brought about by the Fukushima event was quickly glossed over by the status quo who repurposed the tragedy. In their media-savvy hands, Fukushima was no longer the site of a catastrophe, but now the rallying cry of a national and industrial recovery and solidarity (kizuna) movement that, in Kohso’s eyes, functioned as a way to shortcircuit and control the anger and criticisms of the people. Kohso informs us that Japan is still living through this third phase of response, but notes that popular counter initiatives persist, “despite their marginalization by the narratives of national unity propagated by government

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and media. Thanks to the Fukushima event a growing number of people are now questioning their energy dependent ways and seeking a different way of life.”33 He tells us of people in the Kanagawa Prefecture who have detached themselves from the central system of energy supply and turned to “the singularities of place — environment, terrains, and resources — via self-sufficient energy sources created in a decentralized system.”34 Similar communities have sprung up throughout Japan. Northern Kyushu and Kokkaido have created new forms of life that are as different as possible from those of the “Tokyo-centered capitalist nation-state.”35 Kohso goes on to explain: Some of these evacuees have learned farming, hunting, fishing, and other techniques and wisdoms for survival from local people. Some have been experimenting with gift economy within their new communities through such systems as barter. They identify themselves as “generalists” who practice a hundred means of subsistence (hyak-ushō, as the traditional farmers used to call themselves), rather than as “specialists” who gain success as professionals in a consumerist society.36

Kohso sees these impulses as the beginning of a new revolution that moves humankind from the World (techno-capitalistic nation-states) and back to the Earth (a regained respect for the fragility of the planet that we all share). He describes this new form of revolution as: Less a singular event (regime change) than a series of events (existential metamorphosis) toward a New Earth, even if the latter may inevitably be accompanied by the former at one time or another. More than anything our revolutionary will is to become something else existentially, to metamorphose existence from the national to the planetary, from homo nationalis to homo terrae. In other words, revolution today is nothing but the Copernican turn shifting our tactical and strategic attention from the World to the Earth. We know that the Earth exists as an autonomous entity that has its own dynamic process and movement or, if I may say, subjectivity. Though we cannot touch its whole, we are part of it. We too are the Earth.37

The rallying cry of this new revolution is not, “Another World is possible” but rather, as his fellow philosopher Donna Haraway puts it, “Staying with the trouble.” Why this change in slogans? For Kohso, the powers that be have appropriated the utopian vision of a better tomorrow, which in reality, is a thinly veiled perpetuation of today’s techno-capitalism, a way of life that is leading to the very death of the planet. Kohso believes we cannot turn to the future, until we deal with the present. He insists that we must dare to confront the Fukushima

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event in all its complexity, if we hope to try to progress and make a difference. This means not becoming distracted by the future promises of an ever better tomorrow but keeping our eyes fixed on the radioactive nuclides that continue to travel beyond Japan’s national border, making their deadly way across the Pacific Ocean, toward the Pacific Northwest of America. “Staying with the trouble” may not be the most stirring of revolutionary slogans, but it just might save the planet, and us in the process.

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Plague’s threat to our immune and belief systems A look at Pushkin’s A Feast in Time of Plague

Plague Days: Past, Future, and Present In many ways the Great Plague has become the go-to paradigm when conceiving the end of human life on this planet. This medieval catastrophe has become the de facto historical sneak-preview for almost all future apocalypses, whether these be of a fictional or scientific nature. Take for example the United States Atomic Energy Commission, when they were casting about for an apt analog to the destructive capabilities of thermal nuclear war, the only cataclysmic disaster that came close was our old foe, the Black Death. It alone began to reach the massive scale of worldwide extinction and general devastation that a nuclear holocaust would bring about. John Kelly, in his harrowing The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, writes: The sheer scope of the medieval plague was extraordinary. In a handful of decades in the early and mid-fourteenth century, the plague bacillus, Yersinia pestis, swallowed Eurasia the way a snake swallows a rabbit whole, virtually in one sitting. From China in the east to Greenland in the west, from Siberia in the north to India in the south, the plague blighted everywhere … How many people perished in the Black Death is unknown; for Europe, the most widely accepted mortality rate is 33 percent … in parts of urban Italy, eastern England, and rural France, the loss of human life was far greater, ranging from 40 to 60 percent … Contemporaries were stunned by the scale of death; almost overnight, it seemed, one out of every three faces vanished from the human community.1

That was then, and now? We have entered a new phase where climate change seems to be hastening whole armies of microbial threats, each vying to remove humankind from the global equation. Laurie Garrett, in her sobering The Coming

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Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases In a World Out of Balance, warns us: “Ultimately, humanity will have to change its perspective on its place in Earth’s ecology if the species hopes to stave off and survive the next plague. Rapid globalization of human niches requires that human beings everywhere on the planet go beyond viewing their neighborhoods, provinces, countries, or hemisphere as the sum total of their personal ecospheres.” For whether we like it or not, Garrett reminds us, “Microbes, and their vectors, recognize none of the artificial boundaries erected by human beings. Theirs is the world of natural limitations: temperatures, pH, ultraviolet light, the presence of vulnerable hosts, and mobile vectors.”2 Put another way: twenty-first-century technology has made us, whether we like it or not, a truly interconnected global village; as a result, we need to start acting like one. We can no longer ignore the devastation that we have unleashed throughout the world. This is especially true of what we have wrought on our neighbors in developing countries. It is they who are suffering the most while having done the least to cause the dire ecological conditions now befalling them. In our new global village, their vulnerabilities become our vulnerabilities. This plight is often further exacerbated by the poverty, overcrowding, and often unsanitary living conditions that still bedevil many of these regions. All of this turns such far-off locales into the perfect breeding grounds for an ever advancing pathogenic army of microbes. Meanwhile we, the developed nations of the world, continue blithely on our way, oblivious to the havoc we have unleashed in these increasingly fragile ecospheres. Such collective incuriosity and subsequent inaction toward our ecological future impact us on a macro level (the loss of rainforests, arable land, drinkable water, and homeopathic cures) while also having huge repercussions on a micro level, giving our pathogenic rivals the upper hand. Garret reminds us: While the human race battles itself, fighting over ever more crowded turf and scarcer resources, the advantage moves to the microbes’ court. They are our predators and they will be victorious if we, Homo Sapiens, do not learn how to live in a rational global village that affords microbes few opportunities. It’s either that or we brace ourselves for a coming plague.3 (My italics)

To drive this point home, Garrett concludes her book with the now famous quote from I. F. Stone: “Either we learn to live together or we will die together.”4 Another hundred pages of densely packed endnotes follow for those who might still need further convincing that this is indeed an issue. All of this was written well before the advent of COVID-19, which has now burned its way across the globe, taking over 6 million lives with it. As I write these

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words, humankind is in a race between vaccinating the planet against COVID and COVID’s prodigious ability to mutate into strains that resist our vaccines’ overall effectiveness. Which will win out? At the moment, humankind still holds the advantage. But what about the next mutation or up-and-coming pathogen? COVID has reminded us that we are not as invincible as we would like to think. It has also dismissed any doubt that Garrett’s 750-page warning of our potential demise might be some far-fetched exercise in scientific fearmongering. No, our vulnerability to these microscopic pathogens has become an irrefutable reality. What might have been an abstraction of a historical or science-fictional nature is now made all too palpable. It has also reminded us that the plague attacks on a cellular and psychic level. It not only eats away at our bodies but also at the social imaginaries we have put in place to grant us a sense of psychological security. The phenomenon of the plague puts all this into question. It strikes at the very heart of our belief systems, where our sense of order and purpose gives way to the specter of chaos and randomness. This shock of uncertainty was especially acute in the early days of COVID-19 when the populace — and the experts they relied upon — still did not fully understand the workings of this particular microbial threat. A host of questions emerged: Why do some get sick and some not? Why does that sickness vary radically from person to person? And why do some live and some die? We began to second-guess our assumptions of agency, our institutions, and our reliance on science. Suddenly we found ourselves asking, “Have we been misled? Have our leaders and institutions been hiding from us how the world actually works?” The plague can bring both death and its equally potent companion: doubt. Everything we believe can be threatened. A plague has the unnerving power to destroy both our bodies and our philosophies. It is this “second death” that we are particularly interested in teasing out in this chapter: How the plague attacks the social imaginary of a community, how it foments doubt, and how this can metastasize into doubt’s most vociferous offspring: nihilism. Here the question becomes: How do we survive both deadly fates?

Plague Literature Literature is rife with stories about the plague. One of the earliest and most famous works to incorporate the impact of the Black Death upon humankind’s imagination was Boccaccio’s The Decameron. What little faith Boccaccio might have had in medieval medicine was quickly lost when he saw that the advice

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of physicians and the alleged power of their cures were both profitless and unavailing. From March and July of the year in question, Boccaccio estimates over 100,000 human lives were extinguished within the walls of Florence. Amid all this death and devastation, Boccaccio delineates two divergent paths of behavior on the part of the plague-besieged populace: There were some people who thought that living moderately and avoiding any excess might help a great deal in resisting this disease, and so they gathered in small groups and lived entirely apart from everyone else. They shut themselves up in those houses where there were no sick people and where one could live well by eating the most delicate of foods and drinking the finest of wines (doing so always in moderation), allowing no one to speak about or listen to anything said about the sick and dead outside; these people lived, entertaining themselves with music and other pleasures that they could arrange. Others thought the opposite: they believed that drinking excessively, enjoying life, going about singing and celebrating, satisfying in every way the appetites as best one could, laughing, and making light of everything that happened was the best medicine for such a disease; so they practiced to the fullest what they believed by going from one tavern to another all day and night, drinking to excess; and they would often make merry in private homes, doing everything that pleased or amused them the most. This they were able to do easily, for everyone felt he was doomed to die and, as a result, abandoned his property, so that most of the houses had become common property, and any stranger who came upon them used them as if they were their rightful owner.5

But, as the plague raged on, Boccaccio notes a third phase of communal response began to overwhelm the two previous categories of reaction. He tells us that brother began to abandon brother, wives abandoned husbands, and parents even abandoned their children as if they were not their own. Things had reached such a breaking point that many began to behave like feral animals. Such a trajectory becomes the template for many future tales of plagues. We can see a similar sort of devolution in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, and Camus’ The Plague. For theater, the plague, as a subject matter, has been less central. If it is invoked, it is usually as a curse — “a plague on both your houses” — or as mere background to a story, becoming the dramatic excuse for a group of characters to remain or escape from a city like London (think of the works of Jonson and Middleton). Perhaps one of the most famous dramatic renderings of the plague was penned by the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. It was part of a sequence of dramatic chamber works entitled The

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Little Tragedies. These four dramatic pieces were written while Pushkin was holed up in his estate during an outbreak of cholera in the early 1830s. During this brief interim of enforced stasis he turned his poetic attention to these experiments in the art of drama, all of which had to do with death. The final piece in this dramatic quartet dealt with death in its grandest manifestation and was entitled:

A Feast in Time of Plague This dramatic miniature was based on The City of the Plague, a moderately successful verse melodrama by the English poet John Wilson. Wilson’s work begins with two young naval officers who have returned home to London after a year-long voyage. When we first meet them, they have just disembarked from their ship and discover that the city they call home is in the grip of a deadly plague. The first thing that catches their attention is the unnerving silence that now envelops their surroundings. They both try to tease out the reason for this unearthly quiet: Frankfort  Is it the hour of prayer? Wilmont  The evening service, Methinks, must now be closed. Frankfort  There comes no sound Of organ-peal or choral symphony From yonder vast cathedral. How it stands Amid the silent houses, with a strange Deep silence of its own! I could believe That many a Sabbath had pass’d prayerless on Within its holy solitude. No knee This day, methinks, hath bent before its altar.6

Things are made all the more uncanny since they are happening beneath such a heavenly canopy — what Wilmont calls “The clear blue air of peace.”7 And yet all signs of life seem to have stopped; even the hands of a nearby clock face are frozen in place, as if the plague had brought time’s “winged chariot” to a halt. Frankfort shudders and says: Frankfort  It is most horrible, Speaking of midnight in the face of day.

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During the very dead of night it stopped, Even at the moment when a hundred hearts Paus’d with it suddenly, to beat no more. Yet, wherefore should it run its idle round? There is no need that men should count the hours Of time, thus standing on eternity. It is a death-like image.8

And, as if on cue, the visage of an ancient old man is seen making his way slowly toward them. In his arms is a motionless infant. Alive or dead? That is the question to which the old man gives all his attention. He clutches the lifeless child to his breast and warns Frankfort and Wilmont: Old Man  But list! Sweet youths! Wherever ye go, beware Of those dread dwellings all round Aldgate-church, For to me it seemeth that most dismal pile Is the black Palace of the Plague, and none May pass it by and live.9

This, of course, is where Frankfort must travel. It is there, round Aldgate Church, that his mother resides. And so he begins his own Conrad-like journey into this urban heart of darkness. Along the way he will meet all manner of townsfolk who are either in the grips of the plague or running from it. In one of these episodes our hero discovers a group of revelers, in the middle of a street, partaking in an opulent feast. This is the scene that caught Pushkin’s poetic attention and leads to his masterful adaptation.

Act One, Scene Four of The City Of the Plague Pushkin’s ever so terse stage directions inform us that there is: “A street. A table laid for a feast. Several men and women celebrants.”10 A young man addresses the chairman of this impromptu celebration. Later he will be referred to as the Master of Revels and finally by his actual surname: Walsingham. It takes the entire scene for this elusive figure to return to a vestige of his previous/individuated self. Who needs a name when the plague has taken away your wife, beliefs, and former identity? What once was a loving churchgoing son and husband is now a mere cipher, one step away from becoming another of the numberless, anonymous dead. The ghost of his former self is housed in his surname, a name we will not

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hear sounded until much later. And so, in this opening instance, he is simply a mystery, seated at the head of the table, listening to the request of another unnamed young man. It turns out that one of the celebrants, a fellow by the name of Jackson, is no longer among them. This, we learn, is a great loss since Jackson’s caustic wit and mocking air set the table aroar with laughter. But now Jackson is gone. His chair sits there: empty. One might think poor Jackson is just late to this most recent affair, but everyone knows the chair will go unoccupied. Jackson is dead. He is the latest victim of this uncaring plague. The Young Man, in the spirit of the proceedings, insists that Jackson not be mourned since his sardonic humor lives in the memory of all those assembled. He asks that they all raise their glasses and toast Jackson; not because of his death, but because of his life. A life that was lived fully in the face of finitude. The Master of Revels agrees but asks all those gathered to drink in silent memory. All do, and then the Master of Revels requests that one of their band sing something exceedingly sad so that they might rebel against it with all their might and thereby return, with a vengeance, to their former merriment. A young woman by the name of Mary complies with a ballad from her former village:

“Long Ago Our Land was Blessed”: Mary’s Sad Ballad This is Pushkin’s first major deviation from Wilson’s original play. Wilson’s ballad concerns itself with a young country lass who returns to her native village and learns that during her absence a plague came and laid waste the entire countryside. In Pushkin’s version the plague is not a thing of the past, but very much a part of the ballad’s never-ending present. It is life before the plague that is a distant memory. For Pushkin this tragedy begins in a communal rather than the individual register. His images of life before the plague follow the villagers into the church, schoolyard, and nearby fields where they all were “peaceful, rich, and gay.”11 This past is juxtaposed with a sense of present loss: the church is now deserted, the schoolyard abandoned, the lands overgrown, the village almost empty. The only thing that seems to thrive are graves. The sense of shared loss is continued in the third stanza where we are given a sense of death’s voracious appetite: “Graves like frightened cattle stand/ Crowded close around.”12 It is at this point in the ballad that we move from the communal to the individual. Finally, we are made privy to the singer’s own personal situation.

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Here we find another instance of Pushkin’s moving from the general to the particular. If the plague’s secret agenda is to erase all marks of particularity in the anonymity of death, then the song — like the scene itself — seems to combat such erasure by always returning to the profound singularity of each victim; it does so by restoring their name and story. And so the ballad continues, now bringing the singer and her lover out from the plague’s ever darkening shadows so that we might catch a glimpse of them and learn the particulars of their sad story: If my youth is doomed to go Early into night, — Edmund, whom I treasure so, Edmund, my delight, Don’t approach your Jenny’s bier, Please, I beg, be kind; Do not kiss these lips once dear, Follow far behind.13

The poem, up to this point, had trafficked in the abstract of “the dead,” “corpses,” and “graves.” Now it returns to us two names: Edmund and Jenny. Along with the restoration of these names is the particulars of their allotted fate: Jenny has passed and Edmund is still alive. It is as though this whole poem were a kind of existential archaeology, trying to dig through the top soil of death’s general indifference, to recover the identity of its victims. We have worked our way through the vast legions of the nameless, faceless dead to identify the voice of one Jenny, a country lass, who sings from beyond her grave to her grieving lover Edmund. This is her final message to her beloved: Leave the village then, I pray, Find some place of peace, Dull your pain and go away, Bring your soul release. When the plague has passed, my love, Pay my dust its due; Even, Edmund, up above, Jenny will be true.14

The Master of the Revels compliments Mary on her simple rustic song. Mary thanks him for his kind words but notes that her voice was once sweeter and sang in tones more pure and true. The Master of Revels opines that, regardless

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of Mary’s self criticism, “There’s nought/ Could move us more at this our feast/ Than sounds remembered by the heart.”15

Louisa Begs to Differ Louisa seems immune to the pathos of Mary’s lament. For her such songs are now out of fashion and inappropriate for someone of Mary’s fallen status. It is at this juncture that we learn that Mary, like Louisa, is a prostitute and that her sentiments are — perhaps — suspect. Louisa alleges that Mary traffics in tears; this is her “allure,” and some men still find this attractive. “Our Mary thinks a tearful eye/ Invincible, — but if she thought/ Her laughter so, then be assured/ She’d laugh and laugh.”16 It is here that Louisa invokes, for the first time, the Master of Revels’ own name: “Walsingham.”17 There is no stage direction to tell us how Louisa sounds this name out — is it in camaraderie? Pity? Or perhaps contempt, since the Master of Revels has succumbed to Mary’s song, which is no more than a bit of kitschy sentimentalism. Perhaps Louisa thought he was above or beyond all that, like some precursor to Nietzsche’s Ubermensch. Here, the Master of Revels reveals there is still some vestige of a human heart in him. Louisa, on the other hand, loathes “These Scottish heads of flaxen hair.”18 The Master of Revels silences her, noting that he hears the sound of wagon wheels. The stage directions tell us that “A Cart goes by, laden with corpses and driven by a black man.”19 This causes Louisa to swoon. You would think, after all of Louisa’s tough talk, that the appearance of a plague cart would mean little to this woman of the streets but it does. The Master of Revels notes: “The cruel prove weaker than the soft/ And dread can strike the fiercest soul.”20 When Louisa comes back to her senses, she wants to know if what she saw was a vision or reality. She thought the cart was calling to her in some “strange and unfamiliar tongue.”21 In Wilson’s version of the scene it is clear that the driver of the plague cart is speaking in the words of his far-off country; but in Pushkin’s version, Death seems to have a mysterious language of his own. This makes the image all the more unsettling, contradicting Mary’s romantic ballad where the dead still speak to the living in words that they can comprehend. The Young Man, eager to return to merriment, turns to the Master of Revels and asks that he sing a lively song to dispel the gloom of Mary’s ballad and the passing of the plague cart. For the second time in the scene, the Master of Revels is called by his former surname. If Louisa used it with a trace of contempt, the Young

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Man seems to utter it out of a memory of fraternity. The Master of Revels obliges with this hymn to the plague, which we learn, he wrote himself.

“When the Mighty Winter of the North/ Like A Warrior Chieftain Marches Forth”; Or, the Master of Revels’ Song of Modernity It is here that we are given our first insight into the otherwise mysterious interior life of the Master of Revels. His hymn begins with instructions to lock ourselves away from Mighty Winter and greet the Plague with wine, jest, dance, and dining — all the while praising Empress Pest. From there he goes on to praise such moments of dire adversity as the rapture of the battleground, the raging ocean, the desert hurricane, and — of course — “Plague’s pernicious breath.”22 This sense of rapture in destruction is something radically different from the sentiment expressed in Mary’s ballad. In Mary’s traditional world, the devastation of the plague is met with the culturally normative tools of grief, acceptance, and remembrance; but here in the Master of Revels’ hymn, such grief is being replaced by a sense of elation that emboldens and empowers. Just what is the Master of Revels getting at? He goes on to explain: For all that threatens to destroy Conceals a strange and savage joy — Perhaps for mortal man a glow That promises eternal life; And happy he who comes to know This rapture found in storm and strife.23

This “strange and savage joy” that finds rapture in “storm and strife” belongs to a new impulse that is inspiring young men and women throughout England and Europe. It goes by the name of Romanticism and it rejects the traditions and institutions of the past. This includes such collective efforts as the state, the church, family, and such highly suspicious habits as reason. All these practices, in the eyes of the Romantics, were stopping humanity from truly advancing to a higher state of being. To do so, humankind had to break with the status quo; it had to embrace what previous generations had feared or shunned; it had to engage with the unknown, the untried, and the unthought. Then, and only then, would the individual be set free. The vessel for this liberation was believed to be through bold new experiences and the subsequent feelings that these experiences

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engendered. Goethe, who inadvertently stumbled into Romanticism, gave the cause its rallying cry. It is a line from his Faust who famously exclaims, “Feeling is all, all is feeling.” Whether that feeling is the result of a positive or negative experience means little to the Romantic; as long as the impact is profound, it makes us stronger and ultimately leads to the mastery of our self and our surroundings. Perhaps this helps to explain the final stanza of the Master of Revels’ hymn: So hail to you, repellent Pest! You strike no fear within our breast; We are not crushed by your design; So fill the foaming glasses high, We’ll sip the rosy maiden wine And kiss the lips where plague may lie!24

And so Pushkin has presented us with two responses to the plague. There is Mary’s traditional community-based ballad and then there is the Master of Revels’ much more modern individualistic/romantic hymn. Both, in very different ways, attempt to shield humankind from the pernicious threat of existential helplessness that the plague can engender. Mary’s ballad gives us a certain sense of comfort and continuity, grounding the reactions to the plague by maintaining a culture of care, which is passed from generation to generation and lover to lover. It gains its moral ballast by being other-directed. The Master of Revels has no need for community or a significant other. The Master of Revels is resolutely alone. It is just him and his foe, the plague. This brush with death empowers him. He is above or beyond the plague, as he is above and beyond all things. At first blush this stance sounds rather heroic — but Pushkin will now pose an essential question: Is such an outlook sustainable? And, perhaps more to the point, what is at stake by taking such a stance? Both of these questions will be provoked by the Master of Revels’ subsequent encounter with:

The Aged Priest Who seems to appear right on cue at the very end of the Master of Revels’ performance. The Priest is appalled by the spectacle before him and this hymn of human indifference. He demands, out of respect for the dead, that these revelers disband and return to their homes. The Master of Revels explains to the Priest, “Our homes are sad — youth treasures mirth.”25 It is at this point that the aged

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Priest recognizes the Master of Revels and is the third and final person to call him by his proper name. Our central figure in this scene has gone from being the Councillor, to the Master of Revels, to Walsingham, and finally to the Priest’s “good Walsingham.”26 He reminds Walsingham that only three weeks ago the poor boy was howling over the grave of his mother who had died of the plague. How can that caring young man become this figure of misrule? The Priest pleads with Walsingham to come with him but Walsingham cannot. Neither the Priest nor his mother’s shade will be able to call him back to the cares of the living. He appreciates that the Priest is still struggling to save his soul. But it is too late. “Depart, old man, in peace; But curst be all who follow thee.”27 The Priest has one more gambit to employ. It is another name: Matilda. The utterance of these three syllables sends the otherwise impervious Master of Revels reeling. Master of Revels  Oh, raise your pale, decrepit hand And swear to God to leave unspoken That name entombed forever more! Oh, could I from those deathless eyes Conceal this scene! She thought me once A proud and pure … a noble man, And in my arms she savored joy … Where am I now? My blessèd light! I see you … but my sinful soul Can reach you no more.28

A voice in the crowd cries out, “He’s mad — He babbles of his buried wife.”29 The aged Priest once more beseeches the Master of Revels to come with him but it is of no avail. Pushkin gives the Master these final words, “In Heaven’s name/ Good father, leave.”30 The Priest relents, blesses this lost soul and departs. Wilson’s original version of this scene ends rather melodramatically. The Young Man dismisses the old Priest as being no more than a “churchmountebank.”31 This enrages the Master of Revels who accuses the Young Man of being a godless wretch, but in this topsy-turvy world, to still believe in God has become a new form of hearsay. The Young Man demands that the Master repent on his knees for his blasphemy of belief or “through his heart this sword will find a passage/ Even swifter than the plague.”32 The two men, swords now drawn, charge at one another, intent on dueling to the death. Pushkin’s ending could not be further from Wilson’s melodramatic impulses. In Pushkin, after the departure of the Priest, we are given the following and final stage direction: “The

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Priest leaves. The feast goes on. The Master of Revels remains, lost in thought.”33 I am fascinated by the simplicity, power, and ultimate mystery of Pushkin’s final image; it is almost impossible not to wonder: Just what is this poor man thinking? What indeed? This is the issue, isn’t it? The scene presents two radical ways of dealing with the death and destruction of the plague. There is the traditional/ communal response as represented by Mary’s ballad and the more modern/ individualistic response of the Master of Revels. Which does one choose? This is the existential dilemma that the Master is left to tease out. Either way, no matter how one responds, the dead remain dead. Nothing can change this brute fact, but this brute fact can change us. At least with Mary’s traditional stance there is a sense of community to help with the burden of this deadly facticity. The burden is mitigated by the aid of others who share the weight of these dire circumstances. But what about the Master of Revels’ hymn? On the surface this romantic stance has a certain mad grandeur to it. There is something oddly stirring about his refusal to capitulate to the plague, his determination to meet its solemnity with mockery. But it is a slippery slope. To devalue death is to devalue life. Once this happens, there is not that much distance between romanticism and nihilism. Suddenly we become aware of the very thin border that actually separates these two radical outlooks. We realize how easy it is to trip from the meaningful into the meaningless. Meaninglessness is catching, like the plague. And so we can ever so easily tumble from the traditional, through the romantic, to the nihilistic. This is the trajectory of Wilson’s original scene. A trajectory that is left open in Pushkin. The Master of Revels, in Pushkin’s dramatic gambit, does not reveal his hand. He remains, as the stage directions tell us, lost in thought. Where is that thought taking him? From the romantic back to the traditional? Or from the romantic into what will become the nihilistic? It is hard, in many ways, to maintain a solitary romantic stance, far easier to fall into the traditions of the community or the nihilism of modernity. The longer the plague rages, the more the traditional and romantic stances are worn down until all that is left is:

Nihilism I suppose you could think of nihilism, a term coined by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, as the child of such momentous parents as the Lisbon earthquake and slow death of God in the hands of the Enlightenment. Such events sired this particularly pernicious “ism.” Ray Brassier, in his masterful Nihil Unbound, tells

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us: “The term nihilism has a hackneyed quality. Too much has been written on the topic, and any sense of urgency that the word might once have communicated has been dulled by overexposure. The result is a vocable tainted by dreary over familiarity and nebulous indeterminacy.”34 Or, as Friedrich Nietzsche put it in The Will to Power, “What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; ‘why’ finds no answer.”35 Where other “isms” have, for better or for worse, fallen out of historical favor, nihilism soldiers on into our own beleaguered modern times. Let’s take a brief look at three of its most gifted modern-day purveyors, beginning with:

Zapffe and the Burden of Consciousness Peter Wessel Zapffe was a Norwegian existentialist philosopher, mountaineer, and proto-environmentalist who developed a profoundly unique view of the tragedy of humankind. This philosophy centers around our possession of consciousness. For most philosophers, it is our consciousness that makes us unique as a species and justifies our being the so-called masters of our planet. Zapffe thinks otherwise. For him consciousness is an accidental quirk of evolution, which is more a burden than a blessing. He likens us to a certain species of deer that once walked the earth but were rendered extinct due to a set of antlers that had become far too large.36 This was nothing more than a simple biological mutation. Zapffe believes that humans’ consciousness, which makes us aware of our finitude and the meaninglessness of existence, is like the antlers of those now extinct deer. Both might seem magnificent, but actually end up crushing the bearer to the ground. To combat this, humans have worked hard to suppress their surplus of consciousness with a series of denial mechanisms. This is a continuous affair that occupies much of our waking lives. Humans have become prodigious at diverting themselves with religion, politics, war, and all manner of entertainments. You might look at such alleged denial mechanisms and say, “Well, what’s so wrong with this? Humans are just trying to make the best of a bad situation.” The problem is that the mad energy, according to Zapffe, has taken its toll on the planet. In one of his last interviews, Zapffe explains how such sublimation and denial can be deadly. It often goes by such reassuringsounding names as “development,” which — as far as he is concerned — is nothing more than “an itch of the soul that has to be scratched and clawed at until every stone and every little hill in the country is covered with incurable eczema.”37 In other words, a world made up of “Rows of houses with rows of people; apartment blocks with blocks of people; mass production of efficient

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people.” All this keeps multiplying thanks to the belief in a God, who is none other than the Great Multiplier. It is He who promises that six timse six is thirty-six, “no matter if this amounts to lilies or shit.”38 In this world ruled by mathematics, no one seems to be asking what these numbers will eventually add up to. Zapffe has done this math and the answer is that humankind has sold nature’s innocence to these developmental despots and “made her into a ravaged whore”; when we now look to nature, we no longer see a smiling face, but “a sickly death grin, blackened with swarming flies.”39 Zapffe goes on to warn us, “As long as humankind blunders along under the dire misconception that we are biologically preordained to conquer the earth, no alleviation of our angst for life is possible. As the number of people on the earth grows, the spiritual atmosphere will become tighter, and defense mechanisms will have to become ever more brutal.”40 From this stance, Zapffe conceives a rejoinder to Nietzsche’s Superman: A primitive hunter who, rather than put his will toward power, puts it toward self-annihilation. This Zapffean Anti-Superman is so undone by the meaninglessness of life and the horror of taking the lives of innocent animals that he decides to suicide himself for the good of all. In doing so, he saves himself and others from any further pain. This idea of the ultimate negation of self gives way to Zapffe’s idea of the Last Messiah who tells his followers: “The life on this world is like a stagnant puddle and a backwater. The mark of annihilation is written on thy brow. How long will ye mill about on the edge? But there is one victory and one crown, and one salvation and one answer: Know thy selves; be unfruitful and let there be peace on Earth after thy passing.”41 This idea of unfruitfulness and the passing away of humankind will become the central argument in David Benatar’s controversial:

Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence The title of this unnerving philosophical treatise comes from lines in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, “Never to have been born is best/ But if we must see the light, the next best/ Is quickly returning whence we came.”42 Benatar’s basic contention is that it would be better for ourselves, others, and the entire planet if we became extinct. All things being equal, he believes the sooner this happens, the better for all parties. Such an argument is, for most of us, difficult to accept; but then again, demographers expect the population to rise from 9 to 11 billion people on Earth during this century alone; meanwhile, climate change is making more and more of the planet uninhabitable. More people, less space equals more chance

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for the spread of new and deadlier contagions than our current COVID scare. Suddenly an anti-natal argument like the one that Benatar puts forward in his book does not sound as inhuman as the suffering of a potentially overpopulated and resource-depleted future. For some, bringing a child into such a world would not be an act of love, but rather an act of evil. This puts Benatar in mind of the suffering of future generations, all the way to the inevitable final generation. There will be serious costs for these last people. Either they will be killed, suffer from diminished resources, or eventually experience the consequences of a collapsing social infrastructure. As a result of these dire predictions, Benatar argues for a non-generative extinction or anti-natal form of phased extinction. In such a scenario, the number of people who will suffer the fate of the final generations will be radically reduced from its current billions. And then what? A world without humans. Is this a tragedy in Benatar’s view? No. He simply notes, “If there were no more humans there would also be nobody to regret this state of affairs.”43 Finally, even if we think that such factors as moral agency, rationality, and diversity enhance the world, it is highly implausible that their value outweighs the vast amount of suffering that comes with human life. It strikes me, therefore, that the concern that humans will not exist at some future time is either a symptom of human arrogance that our presence makes the world a better place or is some misplaced sentimentalism.44

This brings us to the shores of our last nihilist:

Ray Brassier and the Balm of Nihilism For Brassier, contra Zapffe, human consciousness is not a problem, but a solution. Nihilism, in Brassier’s thinking, has been a great aid to humankind, helping it to see more clearly, to move away from unfounded beliefs such as “the great chain of being.” He insists that a disenchantment with the human world should be celebrated as an example of humankind’s continued intellectual maturity. A thinking that reminds us of: the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality, which despite the presumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the “values” and “meanings” which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable. Nature is not ours or anyone’s “home,” nor a particularly beneficent progenitor. Philosophers would do well to desist from issuing further

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injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human selfesteem.45

From this perspective, it is humankind’s overvaulting “self-esteem” that has become the problem and is now destroying the planet. It is nihilism’s last job to knock humankind off its high horse. It did this with kings and gods, but humankind has proven to be much more tenacious when it comes to being unseated. Brassier, toward the end of his book, turns toward the concept of extinction with a capital E as a way of going about this dethroning of the human. For Brassier, extinction should not be thought of just in terms of the biological termination of the species, but also as a way of stripping humankind of the levels of transcendence that it ascribes to itself. Let’s watch him at work. Here he is, going one step further than Benatar, giving us a cosmic view of the situation (sub specie aeternitatis). He does so with perhaps one of the most vivid extinction scenarios yet penned by a philosopher, telling us that in a trillion, trillion, trillion years from now the accelerating expansion of the universe will have disintegrated the very fabric of matter: Every star in the universe will have burnt out, plunging the cosmos into a state of absolute darkness and leaving behind nothing but spent husks of collapsed matter. All free matter, whether on planetary surfaces or in installer space, will have decayed, eradicating any remnants of life based in protons and chemistry, and erasing every vestige of sentience — irrespective of its physical basis. Finally, in a state cosmologists call “asymptopia,” the stellar corpses littering the empty universe will evaporate into a hailstorm of elementary particles. Atoms themselves will cease to exist. Only the implacable gravitational expansion will continue, dried by the currently inexplicable force called “dark energy,” which will keep pushing the extinguished universe deeper and deeper into an eternal and unfathomable blackness.46

Now just what does a dire tale like this do? Besides depressing the hell out of us, it does what nihilism does best: It makes everything meaningless. In this case, this meaninglessness includes us humans and our desire for meaning. It also knocks us from the higher end of that great chain of being that we created and puts us back on equal footing with all beings. This is where we belong and it is only hubris that has kept us from seeing this. In the grand scheme of the Anthropocene, this is a good thing. A necessary thing. For Brassier nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity to see better, more

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clearly, and more maturely. This experiment in extinction takes the one thing we think makes us so very special — thinking itself — and turns it inside out, objectifying it as a perishable thing in the world just like any other thing. This is part of the power of what we could call the Total Extinction Gambit. It is a conceptual transposition of our collective reality that undoes our ability to make sense of things. It overturns the hierarchy of a priori assumptions of humankind’s singularity and meaningfulness. At the end of the day, or end of the universe, we’re not that special after all. This humbles us, and perhaps in this humbling, helps save the planet in the process. I believe that overthrowing this hubristic misconception of the human as the center of our terrestrial world is one of the first crucial steps toward insuring we will still have a world to share. This is where we can see how nihilism can be of use, having helped dethrone gods, kings, and now humans. But it can be difficult to control. In this respect, nihilism is like acid, it keeps eating away at whatever is still in its reach; once it gets going, it doesn’t know how to stop.

The Yin and Yang of Zapffe and Naess Believe it or not, Zapffe and Naess were mountain-climbing buddies. You remember Arne Naess from the previous chapter, the philosopher who coined the phrase deep ecology; well, he and Zapffe were the best of friends. Yes, you heard correctly, the most notorious nihilist and the philosopher of possibilism enjoyed one another’s company. Zapffe was much older than Naess and helped set him on the road to philosophy. Late in life, Naess told an interviewer: He got me to understand his central question, “Is life worth living or is it kind of indecent drama with no ultimate meaning?” … He wrote that there were questions that everyone who considered him- or herself to be a reflective person must take into consideration … The human being has a brain such that you can survey life as a whole and ask, “Why? Why life?” And I thought that this, as it is argued by him in his thesis on tragedy, is a great work. You get to know what you stand for and you say yes or no.47

Naess would ultimately say “no” to Zapffe’s viewpoint, which he didn’t call pessimism or nihilism, but rather an acceptance of the inevitability of human fate. Ultimately, for Naess, the question came down to the phenomenon of wonder. That there is wonder in the world and when confronted with the choice

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between wonder and resignation, he chose wonder. “Life is wonder-full, full of wonder.”48 Ultimately, Naess thought of Zapffe as a “life philosopher” who had: Done a major thing with his unveiling of the totality of human tragedy … Everybody who really thinks he or she is deeply engaged in life and death should go through [his work]. Zapffe is not saying that we could have another kind of life without tragedies but he is saying, “No, thank you” to life as such. It was a very good idea for God to make life, but it was a wrong idea to make it in such a way that humans would eventually appear on the surface of the earth. That’s what was wrong. So enough. Goodbye. And, of course, this is an appeal, but it should not be any excuse for pessimism. You either refuse to live or you make a compromise, and you do not get pessimism out of it. You compromise, and you try to get joy out of fishing, out of learning, out of having children, in a responsible way.49

It becomes clear that Zapffe was an essential path in Naess’ philosophical journey. That he could not have arrived at his sense of a philosophy of possibilism or his concept of deep ecology without the challenge of Zapffe’s dark thoughts. Brecht used to say that sometimes a play has to say “NO” so loudly that the audience will stand up and shout back “YES!” Zapffe was the “No” to Naess’s ultimate “Yes.”

8

A canary in the bourgeois coal mine: Part one Pollution and direct critique in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People

Ibsen and the Direct Critique of his Moment Ibsen has been with us for quite some time now. There is something predictable and yet reassuring about the revivals of these well-wrought works. Perhaps this reassurance comes from their very predictability. They’re like a visit from that eccentric uncle who shows up once a year for dinner, drinks a bit too much, pounds the dining-room table with both of his fists, and shouts, “Now, in my day!” We smile, nod our heads in agreement, and when he leaves, think to ourselves, “What a kook!” It is easy to forget the profound shock these plays actually had on their initial audiences. All in all, it remains an impressively sustained critique of Ibsen’s times, beginning with the ever popular A Doll’s House and concluding with the rather formidable When We Dead Awaken, twelve major works in all. This extraordinary dramatic chronicle occupied the last two decades of Ibsen’s life. A new work would appear every other year with a clock-like regularity and the force of a volcano. The aftershocks of these plays could be felt right up until the next seismic eruption from Mount Ibsen. This was not restricted to his native Norway but — almost instantaneously— around what James Joyce described as: The length and breath of two continents, and has provoked more discussion and criticism than any other living man. He has been upheld as a religious reformer, a social reformer, a Semitic lover of righteousness, and as a great dramatist. He has been vigorously denounced as a meddlesome intruder, a defective artist, and incomprehensible mystic, and in the eloquent words of a certain English critic, “a muck-ferreting dog.” Through the perplexities of such diverse criticism, the

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great genius of the man is day by day coming out as a hero comes out amid the earthly trials.1

This leads Joyce to speculate whether any other human has held so firm a grip on the imagination of the modern world. He looks for a comparison: Rousseau? Emerson? Carlyle? He concludes that Ibsen stands alone. Arthur Miller, another great proponent of Ibsen, writes: There is one quality in Ibsen that no serious writer can afford to overlook. It lies at the very center of his force, and I found in it — as I hope others will — a profound source of strength. It is his insistence, his utter conviction, that he is going to say what he has to say, and that the audience, by God, is going to listen. It is the very same quality that makes a star actor, a great public speaker, and a lunatic. Every Ibsen play begins with the unwritten words: “Now listen here!” And these words have shown me a path through the wall of “entertainment,” a path that leads beyond formulas and dried up precepts, the pretense and fraud, of the business of the stage. Whatever else Ibsen has to teach, this is his first and greatest lesson.2

Such is the case with Miller’s own works — just think of All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and his intriguing adaptation of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People. One can draw a clear line from Ibsen, through Miller, to such contemporary writers as Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men and The West Wing). Theirs is a theater of direct confrontation. It never shies away from a good fight and maintains an unwavering belief in the absolute moral force of certain registers of theatrical rhetoric. They contend that such high-minded language, when properly sounded, has the ability to galvanize an audience into right action. This type of theater is in opposition to such writers as Chekhov whose societal critique is no less engaged, but done through a kind of willful indirection. We will look at Chekhov and his “inversion” of Ibsen’s dramatic approach in our next chapter. For now, let us turn our attention to:

Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, its Historical Origins, and Continued Relevance In many ways, Ibsen’s 1882 play is perhaps one of the more timely works to be found in this entire study. Its plot, as most students of modern drama know, concerns Dr. Stockmann who discovers that the waters of his town’s worldrenowned spa are polluted. In light of this scientific revelation the town must

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make a difficult decision: It can either shut down this immensely lucrative business and risk potential economic ruin as it tries to correct the problem, or it can simply withhold any action until it obtains absolute irrefutable proof that the problem is truly life-threatening. This scenario of choosing between the economic health of a society and the actual health of its citizenry may sound unnervingly familiar to a world that, as I write this sentence, is still reeling from the profound repercussions of the COVID-19 crisis. Like Ibsen’s play, many of our leaders have put the economy before the people. In doing so they mirror Ibsen’s civic leaders who go on to ignore, debunk, and vilify Dr. Stockmann’s scientific findings. Many biographers believe that it was the failure of Ibsen’s Ghosts that inspired the writing of An Enemy of the People. In such a reading, Dr. Stockmann becomes a dramatic stand-in for Ibsen himself, and the intransigent townsfolk of An Enemy of the People represent the actual audiences of Ghosts who refused to listen to the play’s inconvenient truths. Evert Sprinchorn, author of Ibsen’s Kingdom; The Man and His Works, points to two other events that also helped inspire An Enemy of the People. The first had to do with Harold Thaulow, an apothecary, who started to make a series of public speeches about corruption in the Christiania Steam Kitchens. This was a much respected charitable organization responsible for feeding the city’s poor. Thaulow claimed it was actually a front for a vast moneylaundering scheme with perpetrators who belonged to the highest echelons of Norwegian society. It was these powers that be who would ultimately use their vast influence to destroy Thaulow’s reputation in the eyes of his fellow citizens. In the end, everyone turned against him. This prompted Thaulow to write, “No one can stand up against the brute mob. I want nothing more to do with you. I will not cast pearls before swine. This is a diabolical misuse of a free people in a free society. Do me the favor of hiding your head in shame. Shame on all of you.”3 Two weeks later he was found dead. The circumstances surrounding his tragic end remain the subject of much speculation. Finally, the play’s inspiration can also be seen in the circumstances surrounding the cholera epidemic of 1831. This had a significant impact on a resort spa in Teplitz, Hungary. It was there that a local doctor attempted to shut down these facilities for the safety of his community. H. G. Kohler, in an article for the British Medical Journal, identifies this doctor as Eduard Meissner.4 Meissner was a highly esteemed physician whose medical practice included caring for the very well-to-do, as well as the most destitute. In the summer of 1831, within the span of a week, he discovered that his patients — from both ends of the social spectrum — were succumbing to

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cholera. Concerned by the sudden spread of the disease, he went to the Mayor to discuss his findings. The Mayor, upon hearing about this unfortunate turn of events, asked Meissner to change his prognosis, suggesting that what the doctor had discovered was merely benign and therefore a nonactive form of cholera. When Meissner refused to agree with this assessment, the Mayor reminded the good doctor that his still unproven scientific hypothesis would have grave economic consequences for the town and suggested he engage in further research before making any hasty public pronouncements. Word eventually got out about the cholera scare, rumors spread, half-truths proliferated, and pretty soon the doctor was accused of willfully trying to destroy the town’s economic welfare. His medical acumen was called into question, as were his political affinities. Almost overnight he became a pariah to the town. All of this culminated in a violent mob storming the good doctor’s house and threatening the very life of Meissner and his family. The Mayor, with the aid of the police, intervened just in the nick of time and it was decided that it was in the best interests of all concerned that the good doctor and his family depart and let the townspeople sort out their own future. The doctor conceded and left the town for good; but, by now, the news of the event had spread beyond the resort town and its reputation was ruined. This is the story that Ibsen would hear from the lips of Meissner’s own son some thirty years after the fact. It becomes the basic outline for An Enemy of the People.

From Dr. Meissner to Dr. Stockmann: Ibsen’s Dramatic Re-elaboration on the Events in Teplitz From all accounts Dr. Meissner sounds like a good, upstanding man of medicine; Ibsen’s Stockmann, on the other hand, is a bit more ambiguous. He certainly hails from a long line of dramatic truth tellers and, like many of this rare breed, finds himself in a society that has little time or patience for something as bothersome as the actual veracity of things. Stockmann’s truth is simple scientific fact: The water that is the economic lifeblood of the town is contaminated. Let’s look at Dr. Stockmann’s final stand before the townspeople in a translation by Eleanor Marx. Yes, you read correctly — Eleanor Marx — Karl Marx’s daughter who was an activist and translator. Both passions meet in her version of An Enemy of the People. She decided to learn Norwegian so that Ibsen’s radical truths could be brought into English.

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Dr. Stockmann begins his speech to the townspeople with a strong rhetorical hook: “I am about to make a great revelation to you, fellow-citizens!”5 He then goes on to tell the assembled crowd that this discovery is infinitely more momentous than the fact that their Hygienic Baths are poisonous. This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The true discovery is, “all our spiritual sources of life are poisoned, and that our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil teeming with the pestilence of lies.”6 It is as if Stockmann has woken from a dream and sees, for the first time, “the extraordinary stupidity of the authorities.”7 He denounces them and their self-interest, which blinds them from what is true. He wants nothing more to do with them. But they are not the “enemy of the people.” What Dr. Stockmann calls “the compact majority” is the true enemy. They rob him of his freedom and forbid him from speaking the truth. This leads Stockmann to his next rhetorical salvo: the majority is never right. Who are these people who make up the majority of a given country? Are they wise men or fools? Stockmann believes “we must agree that the foolish folk are, at present, in a terribly overwhelming majority all around and about us the wide world over.”8 He puts his money on a handful of other individuals, the select few, who are the advance guard, far ahead of the majority who will never catch up to them. It is this minority who fight for the truths that the majority cannot see. Someone in the crowd accuses Dr. Stockmann of being a revolutionary; Stockmann replies: Yes, by Heaven, I am, Mr. Hovstad! For I am going to revolt against the lie that truth resides in the majority. What sort of truths are those that the majority is wont to take up? Truths so full of years that they are decrepit. When a truth is as old as that it is in a fair way to become a lie, gentlemen. Yes, yes, you may believe me or not; but truths are by no means wiry Methusalahs, as some people think. A normally-constituted truth lives — let me say — as a rule, seventeen or eighteen years, at the outside twenty years, seldom longer. But truths so stricken in years are always shockingly thin. And yet it is only then that a majority takes them up and recommends them to society as wholesome food. But I can assure you there is not much nutritious matter in this sort of fare; and as a doctor I know something about it. All these majority-truths are like last year’s salt pork; they are like rancid, moldy ham, producing all the moral scrofula that devastates society.9

He concludes this part of his argument with the conviction that society cannot live upon such lifeless truths that were inherited unthinkingly by our forefathers. He believes these outdated ideas are heedlessly adopted by what he calls “the vulgar herd, the masses … who are ignorant and undeveloped members of society.”10 It is these people who condemn, sanction, and ultimately govern the

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few people of intellectual power. It is here that we reach the most problematic and often redacted part of Dr. Stockman’s speech. This is the section that Arthur Miller decided to excise when doing his own adaptation of the play. We will address Miller’s reasoning behind this cut momentarily, but first let’s look at this controversial passage in its entirety: For now I’ll prove, and on scientific grounds, that the Messenger is leading you all by the nose shamefully, when it tells you that you, that the masses … are nothing but the raw material that must be fashioned into the people. Is it not so with all other living creatures on earth? How great the difference between a cultivated and an uncultivated breed of animals! Only look at a common barn hen. What sort of meat do you get from such a skinny animal? Nothing to boast of! And what sort of eggs does it lay? A fairly decent crow or raven can lay eggs nearly as good. Then take a cultivated Spanish or Japanese hen, or take a fine pheasant or turkey — ah! then you see the difference. And then I take the dog, man’s closest ally. Think first of an ordinary common cur — I mean one of those loathsome, ragged, low mongrels, that haunt the streets, and are a nuisance to everybody. And place such a mongrel by the side of a poodle dog, who for many generations has been bred from a well-known strain, who has lived on delicate food, and has heard harmonious voices and music. Don’t you believe that the brain of a poodle has developed quite differently from that of a mongrel? Yes, you may depend upon that! It is educated poodles like this that jugglers train to perform the most extraordinary tricks. A common peasant-cur could never learn anything of the sort — not if he tried till Doomsday.11

Such musings make most modern audiences a tad squeamish. The same was true for members of Ibsen’s initial audience, like the Workers’ Club who wrote in outrage over this portion of Stockmann’s speech. Ibsen replied, “Of course I do not mean the aristocracy of birth, or of the purse, or even the aristocracy of the intellect. I mean the aristocracy of character, of mind, that alone can free us.”12 He compares this sort of freedom to the proper cleaning and airing out of a house. Stockman worries that, without such periodic “airings,” one can suffer from “a deficiency of oxygen which enervates the conscience. And it would seem there’s precious little oxygen in many a house here in the town, since the whole compact majority is unscrupulous enough to be willing to build up the prosperity of the town upon a quagmire of lies and fraud.”13 The assembled townsfolk reject this argument along with Dr. Stockmann’s findings. This leads to Dr. Stockmann’s final outburst where he tells us he loves his town but would rather destroy it than see it flourishing upon a lie. He concludes, that a lying community is destined to ruin and, “All men who live upon lies must be exterminated like vermin! You’ll

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poison the whole country in time; you’ll bring it to such a pass that the whole country will deserve to perish. And should it come to this, I say, from the bottom of my heart: Perish the country! Perish all its people!”14 What are we to make of this final, some might say extremist, outburst? Or, perhaps put another way:

Just What Is Ibsen Up To? Many readers cannot help but equate Stockmann with Ibsen, as if Stockmann were nothing more than a convenient mouthpiece for Ibsen’s polemics. Ibsen himself, in a letter to a friend, confesses that there is some truth to this interpretation. He writes: “Doctor Stockmann and I got on excellently with each other; we agree on so many subjects. But the doctor’s head is messier than mine.”15 Later when a friend of Ibsen’s tried to attribute one of Stockmann’s lines as an example of Ibsen’s thinking, Ibsen was quick to respond: I can be likened to a chemist, who has familiarity with substances and awaits the result. Often my characters surprise me by doing or saying things I had not expected of them; yes, they can sometimes turn my original plan upside down, those Satans. A writer must listen into his work; you see, it is a complete misunderstanding that he can “command the poetry;” on the contrary, it is the poetry that commands him.16

This observation reminds us that Ibsen was — thankfully — a dramatist first and a polemicist second. He is willing to allow his characters a certain degree of autonomy. They are free to follow their own secret logic, wherever it might take them. Such free-form peregrinations usually end up in the land of contradiction, a domain that is very similar to the one we humans inhabit. Take for example Dr. Stockmann’s greatest strength: His unwavering certitude. In Ibsen’s hands, this also becomes Stockmann’s greatest weakness. This is true for many political activists. Often their much needed zealousness can come across as a kind of unappealing self-righteousness. This can work against them and their otherwise good intentions. We can see this sort of thing happening nowadays with many of our liberal leaders and members of the press who often sound so sanctimonious that it can put off the very constituencies that they are trying so desperately to win over. Look at how huge swaths of middle America dismiss much liberal thinking as being smug, self-congratulatory, and elitist. As a result, these constituencies often reject policies that are in their own best interest! Why? Because tone can get in the way of the message. This certainly seems to be what happens to Dr.

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Stockmann as he tries to win over his fellow townsfolk. This is his Achilles’ heel and there is an important political lesson to be learned here. The scene does not just reflect a failing on the part of the townsfolk to hear Dr. Stockmann’s argument, but also a failing on Dr. Stockmann’s part to hear how the townsfolk are no longer listening to him! Or, to switch senses, he cannot see that he is losing them, due to the overzealous lengths he goes to prove his point. He is an orator without an inner GPS to help guide him when he makes a wrong rhetorical turn. There is no internal voice advising him to “recalibrate.” From a rhetorical point of view the speech is a failure since it does not win over its intended audience; but, from a dramatic point of view, the speech is a stunning success since it does what drama does best by revealing the lessons to be learned from misbegotten or poorly executed actions. This is one of the reasons why I humbly disagree with:

Arthur Miller’s Reworking of Dr. Stockmann’s Speech Arthur Miller, as we noted earlier, was equally uncomfortable with aspects of Dr. Stockmann’s speech. His answer was to rewrite it and rewrite it he does, brilliantly. It is an absolutely beautiful piece of rhetorical writing. Let’s listen in on this marvelously re-crafted part of the argument. We at the point in the scene where Dr. Stockmann is being accused of being a revolutionary; here is Miller’s version: Dr. Stockmann  I am a revolutionist! I am in revolt against the age-old lie that the majority is always right! … And more! I tell you now that the majority is always wrong, and in this way! … Was the majority right when they stood by while Jesus was crucified? Was the majority right when they refused to believe that the earth moved around the sun and let Galileo be driven to his knees like a dog? It takes fifty years for the majority to be right. The majority is never right until it does right … Answer me this! Please, one more moment! A platoon of soldiers is walking down a road toward the enemy. Every one of them is walking down a road toward the enemy. Everyone of them is convinced he is on the right road, the safe road. But two miles ahead stands one lonely man, the outpost. He sees that this road is dangerous, that his comrades are walking into a trap. He runs back, he finds the platoon. Isn’t it clear that this man must have the right to warn the majority, to argue with the majority, to fight with the majority if he believes he has the truth? Before many can know something, one must know it. It’s always the same. Rights are sacred until it hurts for somebody to use them.17

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Beautifully argued, isn’t it? Miller has most definitely improved the quality of the speech; but, in doing so, I worry he has damaged the complexity of the scene. What Miller has done is definitely good for Dr. Stockmann’s argument but ultimately bad for Ibsen’s play. Why? As beautiful as Miller’s speech/argument is, it simplifies the situation of the scene, bending it toward an idealization of political discourse where “our guy” is right and everybody else is just plain stupid. It is — unfortunately — rarely that simple. Ibsen’s version brings us closer to the mess of the matter, where our guy is right and wrong and what he keeps getting wrong (his own high moralizing) is what keeps him from winning over the crowd. Ibsen, consciously or unconsciously, seems to be identifying a very real liberal blindspot that often stops an otherwise reasonable argument from landing with certain audiences. He creates an imaginative space where there is a multitude of reasons why the townsfolk reject Stockmann’s argument. To them he is a sanctimonious blowhard, in it for his own self-aggrandizement, and disconnected from the world of us real people. In short: He’s a f**king elitist prig. Thanks to Miller’s revision of the scene it becomes harder to find a reasonable justification for the townsfolk’s rejection of Stockmann’s speech. The only explanations left are either their complete stupidity or sheer mendacity. This is where Miller’s dramatic gambit becomes somewhat reductive. It may make Stockmann look better, but at the expense of the townsfolk who now look even worse than in Ibsen’s original. At least in Ibsen’s version, when the townsfolk call Stockmann an elitist or self-righteous prig we can understand why they make that assessment; most of us felt the same way when listening to him yammer on. But in Miller’s version, when the townspeople attack his Dr. Stockmann, we can’t help but think, “what are they talking about, he seems pretty reasonable to me and — by the way — that actor is just wonderful! He should win a Tony award!” Suddenly the entire dramatic apparatus feels false, rigged in a way that makes the argument all too easy and, therefore, ultimately dismissible. It is nice and stirring but ultimately little more than a political fairy tale, detached from the rough and tumble world of real politics. Ibsen’s scene is not about how wonderful Stockmann’s argument is, but rather what’s stopping his audience from being won over by it. A big part of what’s stopping them is Stockmann himself! He seems incapable of reading the room and adjusting his message so that it can be heard. For me, Ibsen’s version is closer to how political dysfunction happens: Trust breaks down, signals are crossed, and the polis retreats — or worse — recants. This often leads activists to emphatically double down on their message, which usually results in an even further disconnect from their intended audience.

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Rachel Carson, Our Modern-Day Dr. Stockmann — With One Significant Difference Ms. Carson actually brought about real lasting change with her seminal book Silent Spring. Every writer who writes about the environment hopes and prays that their book might be considered the next Silent Spring, but few have had the immense impact that Rachel Carson’s 1962 masterpiece had. This beautifully crafted work alerted the public to the deadly reality of pesticides and, as a result of the persuasiveness of Carson’s argument, almost single-handedly ushered in our modern-day environmentalist movement. Sixty-plus years after it was first penned, this book is still studied by generation after generation of general readers and serious environmentalists to try to understand the secret of its success. Again, we are not talking about awards (of which there were many) or sales (of which there were even more) but of bringing about significant and lasting historical change. A mere ten years after its publication, Carson’s major villain, a pesticide known as DDT, was outlawed in the United States. On the heels of this, half a dozen other pesticides that made cameo appearances throughout Carson’s pages were also banned from use. But more important than that, Silent Spring would help pave the way to the establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency to ensure the safety of our food and water. Biologist Sandra Steingraber, in her introduction to the American Library Edition of Silent Spring, reminds us that the book’s impact in the political arena did not stop there, but also helped lead to such national environmental legislation as the Clean Air Act (1963), the Wilderness Act (1964), the Clean Water Act (1972), and the Endangered Species Act (1973). Steingraber concludes this list of accomplishments with the 1992 assessment by a panel of twenty-two distinguished Americans who voted Silent Spring the single most influential book of the past fifty years. Steingraber compares the impact of Silent Spring to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and sees both works as having altered the very course of history. But what impresses her even more is the impact the book had on her father. This Second World War veteran, devout Republican, and man of unchangeable ways, read Silent Spring and went on to “lay down his spray gun and go shopping for ladybugs.”18 Carson spent most of the 1940s working for the Fish and Wildlife Service. She was a marine biologist by training and the author of several best-selling books on the sea. Her deep love of nature is evident in all these writings but it is not until the 1950s that we gain a glimpse of the formidable activist she will become, helping

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to move the country from a kind of easygoing Victorian-like conservationist notion of protecting nature to the more politically engaged environmentalist movement, which she, somewhat inadvertently, helped to found. But it took her some time to discover the confidence in herself to lead the charge. In 1958 she writes E. B. White at The New Yorker. They have never met but know of one another through a mutual acquaintance. Carson uses this somewhat tenuous connection to bring to his attention the mass spraying of DDT and other even more dangerous insecticides, which are “a threat to the entire balance of nature and even more immediately to the welfare of the human population.”19 From here she informs White that certain residents off Long Island have brought a suit against the federal government and are seeking an injunction against such DDT spraying. Carson notes, “A large amount of important testimony is certain to be presented. Should the injunction be granted, the results would be far-reaching. It is my hope that you might cover these court hearings for The New Yorker.”20 She then moves on to speak of their mutual friend, the wilds of Maine, and their shared love of its natural surroundings. It is at this point that she lets drop the fact that their beloved state is due for a massive spraying of Dieldrin, which is believed to be twenty times more toxic than DDT. She ends this brief missive with the following lines: “It would delight me beyond measure if you should be moved to take up your own pen against this nonsense — though that is far too mild a word! There is an enormous body of fact waiting to support anyone who will speak out to the public — and I shall be happy to supply the references.”21 Thankfully, for us, E. B. White politely declines Carson’s request and suggests that she be the one to write the article herself. The rest, as they say, is history. The article would turn into a series of three separate installments in The New Yorker and finally be published as Silent Spring. When William Shawn, the then editor of The New Yorker, read Carson’s finished work he said that she had done the impossible, turned science into literature. This is apparent from the famous first sentence of the book: “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.”22 After two luminous paragraphs spent describing this Arcadian bliss, Carson’s prose turns ominous: “Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community … Everywhere was a shadow of of death …”23 Soon hens brood but no chicks hatch, gardens bloom but there are no bees, and — without the bees — no fruit. Vegetation withers, fires ensue, streams are lifeless. But perhaps most unnerving is the strange stillness. Where are the birds? The robins? Catbirds? Doves? Jays? Wrens? And others? So many others. Where had they all gone? It was a spring

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without voices. There was no sound. Only silence. And then comes Carson’s poetic sucker punch: “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves.”24 Carson closes out this brief and unnerving fable with a footnote: this town does not exist, yet every one of the disasters listed in the first two pages of the book had befallen some town across the globe. Carson ends by warning, “A grim specter has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know.”25 From there the book walks the reader through how we had gotten to this particular crisis and then what we must do to ensure that this opening fable does not become our actual future. The book made an immediate impact. President Kennedy mentioned Silent Spring in a press conference and after that the book shot to the top of the bestseller list. It is, of course, difficult to determine just why Rachel Carson’s environmental writing hit such a nerve and led to such historic change. Is this solely a matter of the persuasiveness of her style? Some secret ingredient in the nature of her argumentation? Just the right balance of science and poetry? All this certainly didn’t hurt. More likely, it may just be that Rachel Carson was the right person, with the right rhetoric, at the right time. Remember that her work on pesticides is happening at the very same time we are learning about the equally catastrophic radioactive afterlife from the detonation of nuclear bombs. The potential longterm environmental devastation of this radiation and the equally damning collateral damage of certain pesticides made for a particularly persuasive case in the 1960s and 1970s. The repercussions of these actions were being felt immediately with a science that could draw a clear and direct correlation between these practices and their dire consequences. This is not, as many writers have noted, the case with global warming, the repercussions of which are only now being seen in increased storms, droughts, wildfires, and the waning of our polar ice caps (just to name a few of the troubling patterns that have emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century). Reality and a persuasive body of scientific evidence has now, in many ways, caught up with the earlier predictions of global warming. The time seems ripe for another Rachel Carson to come on the scene and, with the right balance of science and rhetoric, change the world. This is not to say that it will be as easy as it was for Carson. She was met with pushback from special interest groups, but they were caught off guard by the power of her argument and how persuasively it spoke to the nation and the world. Since then, many of these same interest groups have learned their lesson; they’ve been working hard behind the scenes, aggressively lobbying Washington and filling the internet with wave after wave of disinformation,

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sowing confusion and spinning mad conspiracy theories to combat a growing body of hard science that calls for change. Make no mistake, it is harder for our generation’s Rachel Carson to be heard. But not impossible. There is much to be learned from her, Ibsen, and Arthur Miller in terms of reaching the hearts and minds of the world. In this respect, each of these writers is a master of what the fifth-century Athenians called:

The Art of Parrēsia This is an ancient concept that French philosopher Michel Foucault brings back to us in the last years of his life and thought. The word parrēsia is first found in Euripides’ play Ion. It is often translated into English as “free speech,” but a closer approximation of the word would be “to tell the whole truth.”26 Foucault tells us that in etymological terms parrēsiazein or parrēsiazesthai means “to say everything.”27 When one engages in parrēsia, their discourse gives an exact accounting; nothing is left to the interlocutor’s imagination. This is what Foucault calls the first characteristic of parrēsia. It creates a special relationship between the speaker and the listener. There is no doubt the speaker is sharing their opinion, whatever that opinion may be, in parrēsia; they are not afraid to share it. Foucault tells us: “The orator, for instance, who tells the truth to people who are not ready to accept it — to people who may punish him, condemn him to death or to exile — this orator is free to keep silent. Nobody forces him to speak; he feels that it is his duty to do so.”28 Parrēsia’s duty is ultimately related to freedom. The health of a given society is based on its ability to allow the free and unabated flow of parrēsia. When this is curtailed, the society suffers. These characteristics of parrēsia relate to Rachel Carson, Henrik Ibsen, and Arthur Miller, each being unafraid to bare their soul. A beautiful example of this can be found in a speech that Carson gave to the Theta Sigma Phi Matrix Table Dinner in Columbus Ohio in April of 1954. The speech is entitled The Real World Around Us and right at the mid-point of this speech Carson confesses the following (Dr. Stockmann should take some notes, it might help him in his future public-speaking endeavors): I am not afraid of being thought a sentimentalist when I stand here tonight and tell you that I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or society … Life arose many hundreds of millions of years ago … its living protoplasm is built of the same elements as

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air, water, and rock. To these the mysterious spark of life was added. Our origins are of the earth. And so there is a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of humanity.29

This is a beautiful piece of writing, as stirring as Miller’s speech for Dr. Stockmann, but I suspect that it is this next paragraph by Carson that actually won over her audience of young women in Columbus Ohio on that April night in 1954. It has none of the high poetry of Miller, or high-mindedness of Ibsen; it derives its power from its simple, heartfelt honesty: Now why do I introduce such a subject tonight — a serious subject for a night when we are supposed to be having fun? First, because you have asked me to tell you something of myself — and I can’t do that without telling you some of the things I believe so intensely. Also, I mention it because it is not often I have a chance to talk to a thousand women … Women have a greater intuitive understanding of such things. They want for their children not only physical health but mental and spiritual health as well. I bring these things to your attention tonight because I think your awareness of them will help, whether you are practicing journalism, or teachers, or librarians, or housewives and mothers.30

This is a perfect example of modern parrēsia. We need more of it.

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A canary in the bourgeois coal mine: Part two Denial and indirect critique in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard

Chekhov Contra Ibsen; Or the Direct vs. the Indirect Ibsen and Chekhov’s characters may dress similarly, they may even inhabit equally well-appointed living rooms; but when it comes to making meaning, their dramatic worlds could not be further apart. If Ibsen is the master of drama as direct critique, then one could say Chekhov is his polar opposite. In Chekhov’s hands, drama becomes a critique by indirection. This is particularly true of his late work. Tolstoy famously characterized these remarkable plays and stories in the following fashion: Chekhov has his own manner, like the impressionist. You see a man daubing on whatever paint happens to be near at hand, apparently without selection, and it seems as though these paints bear no relation to one another. But if you step back a certain distance and look again, you will get a complete overall impression. Before you there is a vivid, unchallengeable picture of nature.1

In other words, it is often long after the spectator has left the theater that Chekhov’s welter of details coalesce into a dramatic point. This penchant for indirection is due, in part, to Chekhov’s constitutional aversion to easy answers and his preference for hard questions. Littered throughout his letters are observations such as, “Anyone who says the artist’s field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with the imaginary.”2 And this: “It’s only fools and charlatans who know everything and understand everything.”3 And, perhaps most intriguingly, “My only job is to be talented, that is to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant testimony, to place

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my characters in the proper light and speak their language.”4 Something in this arrangement of “testimony” leads to the slow evocation of a problem rather than the hasty explication of its solution. This is not to say that Chekhov couldn’t be direct when he wanted — take Dr. Astrov’s rant in Uncle Vanya. Here the good doctor rails against the rampant deforestation that was happening throughout the wilds of Imperial Russia. Such bald statements exist here and there throughout Chekhov’s writing, but — post Vanya — they recede into the depths of a given character’s subtext. This becomes Chekhov’s default dramaturgy and he takes this new-found art of indirection to the very threshold of abstract expression. In such moments silence may reign but meaning continues to seep to the surface of the drama. One can see this dynamic at work in Three Sisters. Take the famous scene where we find the sisters, their friends, and lovers posing for a photograph. We all know what this is like. We strike a pose and wait. A brief eternity seems to open up between our pose and the actual taking of the photo. Such is the case here. They pose and wait just like us and in this interim we, the audience, suddenly become painfully aware of their palpable mortality. This uncanny feeling of imminent finitude is further enhanced by our own historical hindsight. We know that these smiling well-to-do Russians are about to be swept away in the revolutionary storms of the early twentieth century. This, in pseudo-Darwinian terms, is a class destined for extinction; dinosaurs in black tie and petticoats. It is only a matter of time before they will meet their inevitable end. This is the Chekhov of indirection, talking about the nature of time and how it is always running out. One suspects that these characters sense this as well and have just decided to keep this secret knowledge to themselves. We have arrived at the moment when:

One Senses the End of One’s World; And Yet Feels Incapable of Doing Anything About It This is the great theme of both Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. One could argue that Three Sisters is, in many ways, a trial run for The Cherry Orchard. It is essentially the same story, the only difference being in its assessment of how its characters arrived at the same dire outcome. Let’s begin with a brief look at how Three Sisters sketches the basic thematic trajectory that informs both works. The plot of the play, as you may remember, concerns

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the surviving siblings of the Prozorov family: Olga, Masha, Irina, and their brother Andrei. He, much to his sisters’ dismay, marries Natasha, a woman they feel is beneath their station. Natasha moves in with the family and, over the course of the next three acts, takes incremental steps toward the complete and total control of their home. Natasha, in this respect, is something of a provincial Napoleon and her campaign for domestic dominance is a stunning success. By the end of the play she has managed to oust all three sisters from their family manse. What is most surprising is not so much Natasha’s steady annexation of the Prozorov household; but rather, the three sisters’ inability to do anything about it. Each, in their own unique way, seems completely inept when it comes to taking action. The same is true with their dream of returning to Moscow. A dream they invoke throughout the play, one which they are never able to turn into a reality. I remember, many years ago, having seen a wonderful production of Three Sisters and afterward overhearing an elderly couple discussing the merits of the play as they headed to their car. “I don’t get it,” whined the husband, “three and half hours and they didn’t get to Moscow?” His wife sighed, rolled her eyes, and explained, “Murray, if they got to Moscow, it would have been a musical!” It is clear that Murray’s wife is a born dramaturg, but even though she possesses an innate understanding of genre expectations, we should not completely discount Murray’s beautifully naive question. It is, after all, one of key questions of the play. A question Chekhov wants us to chew on like a dog with its proverbial bone. And so we head home gnawing away at these quandaries: “Why didn’t they get to Moscow? Why do they let Natasha run them out of their home? What is stopping them from taking action?” These are the quintessential questions of the play. Chekhov’s genius is to leave their solutions to his audience. It is up to us to solve the mystery of inaction. For me, this dramatic riddle — in light of global warming — is particularly resonant. Like the three sisters we are aware of the threat, we know it could lead to losing our home (the very planet itself), and yet we seem incapable of concrete action. What is stopping us? This is the question of our age. Let’s turn to Chekhov’s last play to help us begin to tease out the reasons behind our inability to act.

The Cherry Orchard; Or Play Without a Pistol “There are moments when an overwhelming desire comes over me to create a four-act farce or comedy for the Moscow Art Theatre,” wrote the ailing

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Chekhov to his wife, “and I shall write one if nothing prevents me, only I shan’t deliver it to the theatre before the end of 1903.”5 By January of 1902 Chekhov confesses to his wife in another letter that, “The reason I haven’t written you about my forthcoming play is not that I don’t trust you, but I don’t trust the play. It’s just a faint glimmering in the brain, and I don’t yet know myself what it’s like or what will come of it, and it changes shape every day!”6 This shapeshifting quality will haunt Chekhov and his newly titled The Cherry Orchard throughout much of its composition. By September of 1903, Chekhov seems even more bewildered by his ever evolving creation, writing once again to his wife, “The play is finished, I’m already copying it. It’s true that my characters have turned out as living people, but what the play is like as a play I don’t know.”7 This uncertainty has plagued the author, audiences, artists, and critics ever since; be that as it may, Chekhov wrote a friend, “However boring my play may be, I think there’s something new about it. Incidentally, there’s not a single pistol shot in the whole play.”8 Chekhov was particularly proud of finally weening himself from the melodramatic habit of having a gun go off in all his plays. The only “bang” in The Cherry Orchard is of a metaphysical rather than literal variety. This happens toward the end of Act Two. Our central characters are out in the countryside, enjoying the setting sun when the stage direction informs us: “Suddenly a distant sound seems to fall from the sky, a sad sound, like a harp string breaking. It dies away.”9 It is hard to read this and not think of it as some sort of celestial warning, as if whatever cosmic thread that tethered the earth to the heavens had been irrevocably severed. The characters, like the audience, try to domesticate the sound; bringing its origin back down to Earth. There are several theories: a cable breaking, an echo from a mine shaft, a bird, a heron, perhaps an owl. The old servant Firs remembers a sound just like it, long ago, when the “troubles” first started. “What troubles?” someone asks.10 “The day we got our freedom,” he mutters.11 Perhaps the sound is related to the passing of the Angel of Death? Or is it Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History? The sound itself is simultaneously quotidian (most likely a cable breaking in a mine shaft) and symbolic (signifying the end of the world as these people know it). It is both at the same time. Just like the image before us which is a realistic depiction of a group of people, out in the countryside, watching the sun set and simultaneously the symbolic evocation of the end of an era. Out of the chrysalis of the real comes something otherworldly, an uncanny intimation that takes flight in our imagination. We are at the very heart of Chekhov’s magic art. Our new-found aristocratic friends, like those

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who got their picture taken in Chekhov’s previous play, cannot help but feel an apocalyptic shiver from the future. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s return to:

The Nursery: Or, the Flight from the Past and the Fear of the Future This is where the play begins. We are moments away from the much longed-for return of Liubóv Ranyéskaya. We learn that she left her Russian estate several years ago to live in Paris with her lover. The reasons for her earlier departure have to do with the death of her young son Grisha who drowned in the nearby lake. This huge event is never very far from the consciousness of Liubóv and her family. One must be careful around Liubóv, especially since she recently attempted to commit suicide in Paris. Sure enough, it is only a matter of a few pages before the otherwise effervescent Liubóv breaks down and sobs, “Grisha … my little boy. Grisha … my son … My little boy drowned, lost forever … Why? What for? My dear boy, why?”12 This is the first of a series of times where the tragic memory of Grisha will be evoked. It is interesting to note that no one is ever blamed for the boy’s drowning. The details surrounding this death are buried with the boy. The poor child’s passing makes the past off limits. The future is equally problematic for Liubóv and her family since they are moments away from financial ruin. Lopakhin, an up-and-coming businessman and friend of the family, reminds them that they must act soon or their estate will go up for auction. The family is at a loss as to what to do, but Lopakhin has a plan. He proposes that they cut down their beloved cherry orchard and subdivide the land into summer homes for vacationers. The money they make from this investment will more than pay off their substantial debt. The family is politely appalled by this idea. The cherry orchard is their pride and joy, it is even mentioned in the encyclopedia. Lopakhin begs them to just think about it, but they will have nothing to do with his mad schemes. They assure him they will find another way to fend off the sale of their estate. An act passes and we find them with still no feasible plan in place. Lopakhin cannot contain himself any longer and bursts out: Lopakhin  Excuse me, but you people … I have never met anyone so unbusiness- like, so impractical, so … so crazy as the pair of you! Somebody tells you flat out your land is about to be sold, you don’t even seem to understand!

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Liubóv  But what should we do? Just tell us what we should do! Lopakhin  I tell you every day what you should do! Every day I come out here and say the same thing. The cherry orchard and the rest of the land has to be subdivided and developed for leisure homes, and it has to be done right away. The auction date is getting closer!13

But they simply cannot take action. A future that involves the loss of their cherry orchard is as difficult for them to contemplate as the past where they lost their little Grisha. And so, unable to face the past or the future, they divert themselves with the present. The imminent sale of the estate, like the mystery of Grisha’s death, will continue to haunt the periphery of the play. What is about to happen and what has happened will slowly reveal themselves as the play progresses. The fate of the cherry orchard will be resolved in a rather direct fashion by the actions of Lopakhin; but the story of Grisha’s death will be revealed indirectly through the unfolding story of Firs, the family’s ancient butler. Now what, you may ask, does this ancient old man have to do with the loss of Liubóv’s little boy Grisha? To understand this, we have to jump to Act Four where Chekhov takes a page from Karl Marx who famously observed that:

History Repeats Itself: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce The death of Grisha is indeed a tragedy and in it hides Chekhov’s secret social critique of this family and his times. We will learn all this through the ensuing farce of finding Firs. When Act Four begins, the family has, just as Lopakhin predicted, lost the estate. It was sold in auction to none other than Lopakhin who, at the last minute, bought it for himself! Both the estate and its beloved cherry orchard now belong to him. As a result of this, we find the family and their servants in the process of packing. They have twenty-five minutes before they must leave for the train station. Everyone is busy with a variety of loose ends that must be attended to before the manor house is closed up for the remainder of the winter. One of these loose ends is Firs himself who is supposed to be taken to a nearby nursing home. The problem is, no one knows where he is. Anya inquires about this and is told by the unreliable Yasha that he imagines Firs has indeed been taken away. Anna sends Yepikhódohov to search for Firs as everyone else continues packing bags, closing windows, locking doors, and saying their goodbyes. Liubóv appears, announcing to everyone that it is time to go and also inquires after Firs. Anya concludes that Firs, who has not been

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seen by anyone, must have been taken to the nursing home. There are a few more goodbyes, a failed proposal, one last look at the nursery, a flurry of exits, and finally the sound of the front door being locked. There is a pause. A kind of quietude falls upon the nursery, save for the occasional distant sound of an axe that is now felling one of the trees of the soon-to-be demolished cherry orchard. On the heels of this, we hear the aged shuffle of Firs who arrives in his butler’s livery and bedroom slippers. He has been completely forgotten by the family. He goes to the door, tries the handle, discovers it is locked from the outside. “Oh, well.” He mutters. “They’re gone. They forgot about me. That’s alright. I’ll just sit here a bit.”14 This he does as he continues to mumble; after a while he lies down, mumbles some more, and eventually becomes as still as the room itself. As still as death. End of play. It is in these last moments where we realize that what has happened to Firs, is what must have happened to poor little Grisha. Everyone assumed that someone else was looking after him. No one took the time to pull themselves from their own private little dramas to think about the welfare of either the young child or the old man. This suggests a family that may be well intentioned but is too easily distracted. They don’t have time for anything other than themselves. Everything else — little boys, old men, and cherry orchards — recede into the background, out of sight, and therefore out of mind. Until it is too late and what is out of sight and out of mind is now gone forever. This is the world of The Cherry Orchard. Here, history does repeat itself as Marx predicted: first as tragedy (the death of Grisha) and then as farce (the forgetting of Firs). In both cases the entire household, in one way or another, is culpable for the loss of Grisha, Firs, and the cherry orchard. At the end of the day: No one took the time to notice. They simply:

“Didn’t Realize.” That’s what Pishchik says, over and over again, in Paul Schmidt’s masterful translation of the play. Pishchik arrives in the fourth act triumphant, able to pay everyone back the money he has borrowed throughout the play. How did this change in fortune come about? It seems some Englishmen were crossing his property, discovered some white clay and now want to buy up his land. He promises to return the next day with the remainder of what he owes. Liubóv tells him that this won’t be necessary since by tomorrow they will be gone for good. This catches Pishchik by surprise. Up until this moment, he has been in a flurry

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of activity; now he stops, looks about, and sees that they are packing up to leave. Here he is taking everything in for the very first time: Pishchik  What? (Astonished) Leaving town? Oh, my … Oh, of course; the furniture’s gone. And all these trunks. I didn’t realize. (Almost in tears) I didn’t realize. Great thinkers, these English … God bless you all. And be happy. I didn’t realize. Well, all things must come to an end. (Kisses Liubóv’s hand) I’ll come to an end myself one of these days. And when I do, I want you all to say: “SemyónovPishchik … he was a good old horse. God bless him.” Wonderful weather we’re having. Yes … (Starts out, overcome with emotion, stops in the doorway and turns) Oh, by the way, Dáshenka says hello. (Goes out).15

“I didn’t realize” is said three times throughout this quirky little speech. It is a phrase that pretty much sums up the problem with these people. Everyone seems to suffer from a lack of proper perspicuity. They’re all too busy, or too easily distracted by their own trivial affairs to bother noticing what was going on around them. And as a result, they simply don’t realize things. “Paying attention,” Iris Murdoch once wrote, “is a moral act.” This family has failed in the basic ethics of noticing. This has a temporal dimension to it. Most of Chekhov’s characters are trapped in a particular tense past, present, or future. As a result, they simply cannot see (or refuse to see) the trajectory of things. It keeps them from the threshold of realization. Liubóv and her family are, as we noted, so involved in avoiding their terrible past (the death of Grisha) and their dreaded future (the sale of the estate) that they trap themselves in a citadel of the present, thinking that this will protect them, but eventually the force of reality breaks through and by then it is too late to take action. What is done is done. The cherry orchard is lost forever. At this point, perhaps you can sense where the remainder of this chapter is going: The family’s inability to act decisively in saving their cherry orchard becomes an indirect way to talk about our collective inability to deal with climate change. Our scientists, like Lopakhin, have presented us with ample evidence that if we do not act within the next ten to twenty years, the planet as we know it will become more and more uninhabitable. And yet, like Liubóv and her family, we hear this, nod our heads, resolve to do something about it, and then get distracted by one thing or another. And so, with each day, we come closer and closer to losing our cherry orchard of a planet. Why, when we know we are hastening the earth’s end, do we seem to do so little to actually stop this from happening? Not only do we seem to do very little about it, we spend inordinate amounts of time trying not to think or even talk about it. Why isn’t this brute fact

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the topic of every single conversation? Why do we behave like Liubóv’s family? Why do we remain silent or avoid the truth of such consequential things as the death of a child, the loss of the cherry orchard, or — in our case — the issue of climate change? To help us begin to tease this out, I would like to turn briefly to George Marshall and his lively book:

Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change Throughout Marshall’s immensely informative study on the ways people avoid talking and dealing with climate change he discovers an interesting phenomenon: whenever he utters those two words, the response from his interlocutors is almost always an awkward word or two and then silence. He found that, when pressed, two-thirds of people admitted that they rarely or never talked about climate change, even within the circle of close friends and family members. He relates a telling anecdote about this strange phenomenon that sounds as if it might have been penned by Chekhov himself. His friend, Mayer Hillman, a senior fellow at the Policy Studies Institute, was at a dinner party with like-minded liberal professionals. People were talking about their latest vacations and Mayer could not help remind them all how airline flights impact on climate change and the health of future generations. This comment was met with a moment of complete and total silence. Finally, another guest smiled and said, “My word, what a lovely spinach tart.” Everyone agreed and, according to Mayer, they spent the next ten or so minutes talking about the tart, where to purchase the freshest spinach, and other spinach-related recipes. In short, there seemed to be a profoundly concerted effort to not discuss the issue of vacations and climate change.16 Marshall went on to relate this tale to Eviatar Zerubavel, a professor of sociology at Rutgers. Zerubavel calls this sort of behavior an example of disattention. This is significantly different from what usually passes as everyday inattention. What’s the difference between these two terms? Zerubavel notes that, in his conversation with Marshall, neither had talked about zoological gardens. This is not because they were deliberating avoiding it; the subject simply did not come up. Zerubavel calls this an example of inattention since one can easily explain why they have not talked about it. But disattention is a whole other kettle of fish. According to Zerubavel, this “is when we deliberately fail

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to notice something and cannot even explain why. What I look for is a silence about the silence — what I would call meta-silence. The meta-silence is that we don’t talk about the elephant in the room, and we don’t talk about the fact that we don’t talk about it.”17 From here, Marshall moves to Kari Norgaard, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. Norgaard wanted to better understand what people in a remote coastal town in Norway thought of climate change. She found that nine out of ten times this stopped the conversation cold. “People gave an initial reaction of concern, and then we hit a dead zone where there was suddenly not much to be said, ‘nothing to talk about.’”18 This seemed particularly strange since Norwegians’ entire cultural identity has traditionally been centered around the concept of a humble little nation that lives in such a close relationship to nature and prides itself on being global leaders in natural conservation. If this was indeed the case, why were all these townsfolk suddenly so stymied when discussing the impact of climate change on their surroundings? Norgaard attributes this to a basic contradiction that is at work in the social consciousness of Norwegians: they do indeed have a long history of conservation, but also happen to be the fifth largest exporter of crude oil in the world. This uncomfortable truth is further complicated by the fact that everyone in Norway is a beneficiary of the success from their oil-based economy. Norgaard found that this fundamental contradiction led to a kind of cognitive dissonance that created a conflict within the townsfolk she interviewed; as a result of this, people deliberately chose either to know or not know about their country’s complicity in climate change. This led her to conclude, “Knowing or not knowing is itself a political act.”19 Marshall cites the late Stanley Cohen, a sociologist from the London School of Economics, who drew from his own experiences as a Jewish South African to document the process by which entire societies deal with what it is permissible to know. He highlights the difference between three types of not knowing: 1. Ignorance (not knowing) 2. Denial (the refusal to know) 3. Disavowal (the active choice not to notice)20 Cohen concludes: “We are vaguely aware of choosing not to look at the facts, but not quite conscious of just what it is we are evading.”21 This makes it easier when we fail to notice our neighbors disappearing in the middle of the night, or cattle trains that were filled with human beings returning empty. In short, there is indeed a politics behind certain silences. Much

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later in the book, Marshall moves to another, perhaps deeper, reason behind our silence:

Climate Change as Intimation of Mortality; Or, the Fundamental Fear of Our Impending Death It is now almost axiomatic to speak of climate change and extinction in the same breath. Marshall cites the Future of Humanity Institute poll of academic experts on the possibility of human extinction. Nineteen percent believed that the human species would be extinct before the end of this century!22 It is a scenario that has become more and more popular throughout all branches of our entertainment industry, with all manner of future apocalypses. Marshall notes that the imagery of climate change now draws heavily on the iconography of death, employing metaphors of terminal illness or cancer. This prompted Marshall to ask: “Does climate change in its essence trigger our fears of our own death and is our response shaped by those fears?”23 In other words, does the fear of imminent extinction set in motion a series of coping mechanisms that are deeply hardwired in our brains to fight the sense of futility that comes when we contemplate the reality of our own eventual demise? This brings him to the anthropologist Ernest Becker who famously argued that the denial of death is the “vital lie” necessary for us to continue as a species. This fuels various forms of sublimation, often unconsciously compelling us to invest our efforts into our families, work, or service to various institutions or organized religions. All of these engagements give us a sense of permanence, that something of us will survive beyond our own death. This is what Becker called the “immortality project.” It mitigates a bit of the blow that death wields on our psyche. But climate change and the fear of extinction rob us of this important mode of sublimation, making things all the more futile, and threatening our ability to maintain this last illusion of immortal purpose. No wonder climate change becomes so taboo for our imagination. Marshall confesses that he has avoided such arguments that are not supported by strong scientific evidence, but he could not resist including these musings since so many of the thoughtful people that he interviewed suggested that “climate change might be a proxy for death.”24 He also observed that many people who engaged in climate work also experience a deep sense of grief that one usually associates with the loss of a loved one. Journalists such as Ross Gelspan confess to crying inconsolably when they think of the potential loss of the future for young people “who look forward to fulfilling their lives.”25 Marshall also cites environmentalist Bill

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McKibben who thinks of climate change in the same way that he feels about his own death, but with one major caveat: We are grieving for what we are doing and our own inability to deal with it. We all know we are going to die, and we used to be able to cope with the thought that our life was contributing to something larger that would survive us. Now even that has been taken away from us … We are at the end of nature.26

Perhaps this is one of the many reasons why denial and sublimation have been hardwired into our brains. This brings us to another set of concerns, perhaps:

Our Brains May Not Be Evolutionally Suited to Deal with Something Like Climate Change Perhaps the most sobering aspect of Marshall’s book has to do with his interviews with a variety of evolutionary anthropologists and psychologists. From their perspective, the human brain — as miraculous as it is — remains, according to Ian Tattersall, “notably bad at assessing risk. Inside our skulls are fish, reptile, and shrew brains.”27 John Tooby laments that “our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind.”28 This, according to Paul Ehrlich, means that we are supposedly biologically incapable of dealing with climate change since “the forces of genetic and cultural selection were not creating brains capable of looking generations ahead.”29 Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology, agrees that climate change is “a threat that our evolved brains are uniquely unsuited to do a damned thing about.”30 Gilbert argues that over the evolution of our psyches we have been prepared to respond to four basic triggers; he groups these triggers under the ironically apropos acronym PAIN. This stands for: Personal: Our brains are most attuned to identifying friends and enemies, everything else is pretty much secondary. Abrupt: We are most sensitive to sudden changes and tend to ignore slow-moving threats. Immoral: We respond most to things we find to be indecent, impious, or repulsive. Now: Our ability to look into the future is one of our most stunning gifts, but it is “still in the early stages of Research and Development.”31

In Gilbert’s assessment, the big problem with climate change is that, when it comes to our brains, this phenomenon doesn’t really trigger any of the above human responses that would lead to immediate and concrete action. Daniel

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Kahneman, a Nobel prize-winning psychologist, comes to a similar conclusion. “The bottom line,” Kahneman tells Marshall, “is that I’m extremely skeptical that we can cope with climate change. To mobilize people, this has to become an emotional issue. It has to have immediacy and salience. A distant, abstract, and disputed threat just doesn’t have the necessary characteristics for seriously mobilizing public opinion.”32 If you are like me, all this information that Marshall has so meticulously assembled is infinitely fascinating and equally disheartening; yet, one of the wonderful distinctions about this particular work is that it takes all these dire scientific speculations and uses them to develop a program that is mindful of our collective limitations and retrofitted to address these psychological deficits head-on. This leads him to the final chapter where he presents a series of highly personal and admittedly biased ideas for:

Digging Our Way Out of This Hole Marshall concludes his book with what he believes are two indisputable facts. Fact Number One: Climate change is real. Fact Number Two: Our psychological obstacles to climate change are also very real. Neither of these realities are, for Marshall, necessarily insurmountable. He insists, “The large body of rigorous research-based evidence suggest that climate change struggles to overcome numerous biases against threats that appear to be distant in time and place. We need to make these explicit and recognize that many may be subconscious.”33 In crafting a response to the continuing threat of climate change, Marshall puts forth the following reminders to help combat our natural psychological blocks. These include: 1. Emphasize that climate change is happening here and now. 2. Create the Symbolic moment (don’t forget the power of images/slogans/ happenings). 3. Follow narrative rules with recognizable actors, motives, causes, and effects (in other words: TELL STORIES. Stories are the best way to engage and sway people). 4. Ensure that a wide range of solutions is constantly under review. 5. Stress what we have in common. 6. Debate is useful.

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7. Learn from your critics. 8. Invoke the nonnegotiable sacred values. 9. Be prepared to learn from religions. 10. Mourn what is lost, value what remains.34 Now how hard is that?

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10

Ethics during dark times Brecht’s He Who Says Yes and He Who Says No

Writing in Dark Times and the Invention of the Lehrstücke Hannah Arendt called Brecht a writer for “dark times.” It was an unavoidable subject for Brecht; the phrase can be found in many of his diary entries, plays, and poems. In one such poem we find him asking, “In the dark times, will there also be singing?”1 His answer: “Yes, there will be singing.”2 About what? What else? Dark times. But before these dark times descended upon Brecht and his generation, he was doing quite well. The huge success of his The Threepenny Opera allowed him to engage in a series of radical theatrical experiments that would call everything into question: His subject matter, the manner in which it was expressed, and — perhaps most importantly — its very mode of production. This was what is now known as his Lehrstücke (“Learning Plays”) phase. From 1928 to about 1932, Brecht dabbled in this new form of political theater. These works coincided with the last gasps of the Weimar Republic. Many in Germany had hoped that, at this historical juncture, capitalism would finally give way to socialism, but it would be another “ism,” that of the Nazis, that ultimately seized the day and the country. The Lehrstücke made no mention of this threat, which when these works were being written, was still one of several potential paths for the German people. Brecht stayed focused on forging a picture of an alternative socialist future and used these plays to set forth a new ethics for a new era. This meant forgoing one’s ego for the greater good. It was a concept that would become the major leitmotif of the Lehrstücke genre. Brecht used the word “Einverstāndnis” to characterize this sort of subservience. The word literally means “agreement,” or “consent;” but, in its more emphatic register, it can also suggest “obedience.”3 These plays were written under the sign of impending

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catastrophe, they traffic in scenarios of life and death consequences, and test the very limits of one’s ethics. From the perspective of our Anthropocene age, they feel like dress rehearsals for many of the ethical dilemmas that we might face in a not-too-distant future. But before we delve into the content of these works and their uncanny relationship to our times, let’s take note of the unique form and intent that is found in Brecht’s:

Lehrstücktheorie Brecht’s invention of the Lehrstücke was, as we noted in chapter three, greatly influenced by the work of Asja Lācis. Like Lācis, Brecht was convinced that theater could play a major role in preparing audiences for a much-hoped-for socialist future. Brecht believed that this new world order would transform every aspect of one’s daily life, including the traditional ways an audience experienced theater. In point of fact, the Lehrstücke had no need for an audience since, as Brecht would insist, these works “were not written for an audience but exclusively for the instruction of the performers.”4 In other words: The audience became their own actors. One would no longer learn by seeing a performance, but rather by being an integral part of it. This education would happen experientially, through the very rigors of rehearsing and performing a play for a self-selected group and their extended community. These communities could be socialist party members, workers in factories, or children in schools. Brecht would write, “The performance is meant to provoke discussion of the political usefulness of this type of event” and he would encourage these various groups to “not treat the text as self-evident, but should discuss it during rehearsals.”5 He would even include a questioner for the participants to answer at the end of the experience. Here he would ask them: “Do you think an event like this is politically instructive to the performers?”6 Or: “Do you think our choice of form is right for your political objectives? Can you suggest alternatives?”7 Such an approach allowed Brecht to rethink the traditional separation between the production and consumption of works of art. Here, the two were now merged into one. The audience became its own active maker rather than just a passive consumer. Brecht and his collaborators believed that this shift from receiving to making would not only lead to a deeper understanding of the questions embedded in a given work, but also allow its newly minted practitioners to develop an appetite for agency, something that could follow them out of the rehearsal room and into the streets.

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Joy H. Calico, author of Brecht at the Opera, notes how music is also an essential part of the Lehrstücke experience, helping engender a sense of the communal over the individual. Music, for Brecht, becomes one of the most immediate and effective ways of accomplishing this end. It can, as Calico writes, “transform a motley assortment of individuals singing different parts into either a sophisticated organism capable of performing as many as four polyphonic tasks simultaneously or a strong unison which the individuals speak as one.”8 Calico draws a genealogical line from the Lehrstücke to the early oratorios of the Catholic Church. Here a once sacred means of expression is now in the service of a more secular agenda. Brecht will work with three major composers during this period: Carl Hindemith (The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent), Kurt Weill (He Who Says Yes), and Hans Eisler (The Decision). Perhaps the most successful of these collaborations was with Kurt Weill who, like Brecht, was particularly interested in how these works could be taken up by schoolchildren. He made sure that all the parts — chorus, orchestra, solo voices — could be performed by young students. Brecht and Weill also imagined these students building the sets and costumes. As for the final results, both felt that the performance was less important than the education it provided. With all this pedagogical possibility in mind, let’s turn our attention to the Brecht/Hauptman/Weill He Who Says Yes and He Who Says No. A work that has much to tell us about the nature of the Lehrstücke and how this form can help us unpack the ethical dilemmas we may face as we move deeper into the age of the Anthropocene.

He Who Says Yes This play is based on an ancient Japanese Noh play entitled Taniko (The Valley Hurling) by Zenchiku. In the play a Teacher is about to undertake his yearly pilgrimage to the top of a sacred mountain. There he plans to spend several days and nights, praying and fasting. One of his students, a young Boy, wants to join him to pray for the health of his sickly mother. The Teacher advises him against this since the climb is arduous and not for children, but the Boy is indefatigable in his desire to aid his mother’s recovery. The Teacher eventually relents and the Boy joins him on his journey. The second half of the play finds the Teacher and the Boy midway up the mountain with a group of other likeminded pilgrims. The Boy, exhausted by the arduous climb, reveals that he is feeling unwell and uncertain about continuing their ascent. The Teacher suggests that he is just momentarily tired from their climb and should rest, but

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the other worshippers believe that the Boy is ill like his Mother and incapable of reaching the mountaintop. They invoke the “Mighty Custom,” which decrees that those who fail in their climb must be cast down. This custom was no doubt put in place so that one person’s illness or injury would not imperil his fellow climbers. Many might feel the impulse to continue to help this poor incapacitated child, even at the risk of their own injury or even death, but the Great Custom circumvents such ethical tendencies and puts the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the injured party. It demands that the injured party must sacrifice themselves for the good of the group. Here “the one” must never compromise the safety of “the many.” This might sound good in theory, but it can become a much more difficult matter in practice; such is the case for our poor Teacher who is deeply conflicted by the unwavering severity of the Great Custom. Here is Arthur Waley’s translation of what follows in the original version: Teacher  What, you would hurl this child into the valley? Leader  We would. Teacher  It is a Mighty Custom. I cannot gainsay it. But I have great pity in my heart for that creature. I will tell him tenderly of this Great Custom. Leader  Pray do so.9

The Teacher goes to the Boy, and the final wrenching scene ensues: Teacher  Listen carefully to me. It has been the law from ancient times that if any pilgrim falls sick on such journeys as these he should be hurled into the valley — done suddenly to death. If I could take your place, how gladly I would die. But now I cannot help you. Boy  I understand. I knew well that if I came on this journey I might lose my life. Only at the thought of my dear mother, how her tree of sorrow for me must blossom with the flower of weeping — I am heavy-hearted.10

As is the chorus. They solemnly follow the edict of the Great Custom and throw the Boy to his death. Elizabeth Hauptman, Brecht’s chief collaborator during this period, did a German translation of Waley’s English version for Brecht and Weill. The play appealed to the threesome, especially its theme of individual sacrifice for the good of the group. Brecht made a few small changes here and there. The trip to the mountaintop becomes scientific rather than religious, with the Teacher attending a medical conference instead of a sacred ceremony; the Boy joins him not to pray but to obtain a medical cure for his

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sick mother; the fellow pilgrims are now fellow students. In addition to all this, the dilemma at the end of the play is made more explicit. We learn that the next phase of the journey is particularly arduous, requiring both hands to cling to the rock face, thereby making it next to impossible to take the Boy with them. Here is Brecht’s version of the final scene; all of his minor dramaturgical alterations are in bold: The Teacher  Listen to me. There’s been a law here from ancient times that if anyone’s taken sick on such a journey, into the valley’s depths he must be hurled — which means instant death. But the same Custom prescribes that the one with the sickness be asked: should we turn back again for that reason? And moreover the Custom says that the sick man must reply: no, you should not turn back. The Boy  I understand. The Teacher  Do you want us to turn back home for your sake? The Boy  No, you should not turn back. The Teacher  So do you want to be treated just like everyone else? The Boy  Yes. The Teacher (calls up): Come on down here! He says yes to me. It’s what the Custom wants him to reply.11

And with that, his fellow students throw the Boy to his death. This was the ending that was first rehearsed and performed by the children of the Karl Marx School. Their responses to this theatrical experiment were, as we shall see, rather mixed.

A Report of the Discussions about He Who Said Yes at the Karl Marx School for Children and Brecht’s Subsequent He Who Says No Brecht kept copies of the initial responses by these schoolchildren who participated in the making and performing of the play. These included such reactions as, “The play is inappropriate for our school, because the Teacher is very cold-blooded.”12 Another instructed the authors to “put the Boy on a rope and take him along.”13 One eleven-year-old wrote, “two suggestions: (1)

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Give the Boy malt extract (but where does one get it?) and (2) Give the Boy a check-up beforehand.”14 The biggest criticism from the majority of students had to do with the Boy’s blind obedience to the Great Custom, which of course, was the whole point of the play. Brecht himself was not at the premiere, but he was open to speaking with a group of students about their experiences and further thoughts. He invited them over to his flat to hear their ideas about the Boy’s willingness for self-sacrifice. It was during this informal get-together that Brecht put forward the idea of a new version of He Who Said Yes, which would now be called He Who Said No. This new play is pretty much He Who Says Yes, until we reach the end. At that point the Boy is asked, once again, whether he is willing to consent to the Great Custom and this time he simply says, “No.” His fellow students become upset with the Boy who had agreed to the Great Custom at the beginning of their journey. The Boy goes on to explain his change of heart: The Boy  My answer was wrong, but your question was more so. Whoever says A does not have to say B. He can recognize that A was wrong. I wanted to fetch medicine for my mother, but now I have become ill myself and it is no longer possible. And I want immediately to turn back, as the new situation demands. I am asking you too to turn back and take me home. Your research can surely wait. If there is indeed something to be learnt beyond the mountains, as I hope, then it can only be that in a situation like ours one has to turn back. And as for the ancient Custom I see no sense in it. What I need far more is a new Great Custom, which we should bring in at once, the Custom of thinking things out anew in every new situation.15

The students are moved by the Boy’s words, they ask the Teacher what they should do. He tells them they must decide for themselves, but warns that if they do turn back they will be the subject of much derision. The students decide to bring the Boy back to town, no matter how dangerous it may be, or what others may think. Brecht’s chorus informs us that they succeed in their endeavor and their return ushers in a new era where old ways are questioned and new customs forged.

The Final Version When it came to publishing these works, Brecht included both He Who Says Yes and his revised He Who Says No. This created a dramaturgical form of cephalothoracopagus; now the two plays were, like conjoined twins, forever

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inseparable from one another. This allowed future audiences to decide for themselves which answer they preferred. Such an approach is the very quintessence of the Lehrstücke aesthetic. It forces a dialogue among the audiences and pushes them from passive spectators to active coauthors; furthermore, it asks them to interrogate each and every ethical turn in the story, considering the morality of the students, the teacher, and the Great Custom itself. As a result, Brecht’s dramatic gambit puts everything into question. Suddenly the audience is in a critical frame of mind and saying to themselves, “Wait a minute, it doesn’t have to be this way, it could be otherwise.” This was Brecht’s preferred point of view. His was a theater of provocation, which forced the audience and the performer to think for themselves. Here, contrary to some critics, we see Brecht choosing to be a true dialectician rather than a mere doctrinarian. But what would happen if we took this notion of unquestioning obedience and put it back into the real world? What would such a transposition into actual lived experience be like? Would it align with Brecht’s rather straightforward dialectic? Or would it further complicate matters? If we were to create a modern-day “Obedience Play” like those of Brecht, where might we set it? Given the focus of this book, let’s place it in the thick of the Anthropocene age, at a moment late in the twentieth century; a moment we hope never to repeat:

The Chernobyl Catastrophe In this analog: the mountain of He Who Says Yes becomes Nuclear Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station, which exploded on April 26, 1986. We will turn to Svetlana Alexievich’s harrowing Voices from Chernobyl, to develop this attempt at a contemporary “Obedience Play.” In this book we meet an entire chorus of young Soviet men who could audition for the role of the young Boy. They are not just trying to help their mother, but Mother Russia herself. Only these “boys” didn’t always know the full extent of what they were actually getting themselves into and yet, they tell Alexievich, “I wanted to do something heroic.”16 “I’m a soldier. If I’m ordered to do something I do it.”17 “I went. I didn’t have to go. I volunteered.”18 And so most said “yes” to the sacrifice of Chernobyl. But there were those who struggled with this choice. One soldier shares a common excuse among recruits for opting not to serve: “Two paratroopers refused — their wives were young, they hadn’t had any kids yet.”19 But most signed up, not because they were forced but because they believed in their own Soviet variation

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of “the Great Custom.” This is how one young soldier puts it, “Our system, it’s a military system, essentially, and it works great in emergencies. You’re finally free there, and necessary. Freedom! And in those times the Russian shows how great he is. How unique. We’ll never be Dutch or German. And we’ll never have proper asphalt and manicured lawns. But there’ll always be plenty of heroes.”20 Or as another puts it, “You have to serve the motherland! Serving — that’s the deal.”21 Our scenario for a modern-day obedience play begins in the early hours of the Chernobyl crisis when there was the very real threat of an ensuing nuclear explosion. This meant that Kiev, Minsk, and a large part of Europe would have become completely uninhabitable. To stop this from happening, volunteers were required to expose themselves to deadly doses of radioactivity as they tried to get the water out from under the reactor so that a mixture of graphite and uranium wouldn’t get in and lead to a nuclear meltdown. The task was as straightforward as it was lethal: someone was needed to dive in and open the bolt on the proper safety valve. Volunteers were sought and found. One young soldier after another dove, over and over, until one of them was able to finally reach and open the necessary valve, thereby stopping the reactor from reaching critical mass. “In terms of our readiness for self-sacrifice,” says one of Alexievich’s interviewees, “we have no equals.”22 In this analog we have so far accounted for the mountain, which becomes the failed nuclear reactor; the Boy, who could be any one of these brave young soldiers; and the Great Custom, which is replaced by the Myth of Russian Exceptionalism (i.e., selfsacrifice for the motherland). But what about the Students in Brecht’s parable? For me, these figures are represented by the Soviet state officials who will do what they have to, regardless of whether someone agrees or not. This is very much the case of Brecht’s Students in He Who Says Yes; they have decided to throw the Boy off the mountain even if he says, “No.” Both the real-life Soviet officials and the fictional Students of Brecht’s He Who Says Yes are the keepers of the Great Custom and will ensure its rule whether it is agreed upon or not. Many of these officials, according to Alexievich, gave their men no choice whatsoever. One soldier tells of a fellow recruit who began to protest and was told that he would be brought before a military tribunal if he did not follow his orders.23 Another soldier reports that those who did say “No” were “shamed and punished. Their careers were finished.”24 It is these same high-ranking officials who refused to give the soldiers the full information about the dangers of radiation, as well as proper protection, or immediate medical attention. The

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deceit of these leaders is ironically juxtaposed with the soldiers seeing patriotic posters with such slogans as, “Our goal is the happiness of all mankind.”25 “The world proletariat will triumph.”26 “The accomplishments of the people are immortal.”27 These brave young men felt less like heroes and more like “human sand” flung repeatedly onto the reactor to hopefully — eventually — reduce its deadly radioactivity. It is thanks to such circumstances that we can begin to see how Brecht can allow himself to hold two contradictory views on the nature of self-sacrifice. Yes, the self-sacrifice of these young people is indeed laudable; but, often, the leaders who ask for such self-sacrifice are not so interested in the greater good, but in their own self-interest (i.e., to save their own leadership positions). After the horrors of the twentieth century we have become less and less inclined to believe in self-sacrifice for “the greater good.” Often “the greater good” is no more than a smokescreen that obscures the real beneficiaries: the select few. It is easy, thanks to these sorts of revelations, to begin to doubt such things as high ideals, to see them as part of the long con, another way to dupe the masses into doing the bidding of their unseen masters. It makes us ask if there is such a thing as morality. The failure of certain beliefs, systems, and leadership breeds a very particular brand of all-pervasive cynicism. This, unfortunately, is perhaps the least helpful stance for humankind to be taking when faced with the daunting demands of the coming Anthropocene age; a time where we’ll need all the ethical guidance and belief we can muster so that we can navigate the extreme and potentially cataclysmic events that await us. And so, the question emerges, how do we re-ground our ethics for this new era?

Levinas and What We Owe the Other Rushing to our aid in these matters is the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. It is he who pretty much sets the terms for a critical revaluation of ethics for the late twentieth century and beyond. Levinas begins this project with the now famous observation that opens his seminal Totality and Infinity: “Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality.”28 From here he talks about the harsh realities of the twentieth century and its equally harsh object-lessons. He examines how the extreme events of this troubled age have not only led to the death of millions but also interrupted what he calls “the continuity of humankind.” This has forced many to “play roles

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in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action.”29 This, in its most extreme form, has led to unchecked barbarism and even the willful extinction of whole peoples, including Levinas’ own Jewish brethren. Here, in the shadow of the Holocaust, we find humankind’s alleged fruits of reason, science itself, in the service of genocide. What is one to make of such a historical turn as this? Or the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How does one reclaim the concept of the human in the midst of so much inhumanity? This becomes the question for Levinas and many of his contemporaries as they have engaged in an ongoing rethinking of our modern-day ethics. Levinas did not live long enough to hear the coining of the term Anthropocene, but his thinking anticipates the demands of this new and foreboding age. For Levinas, much of this has to do with the idea of obedience, but it differs drastically from the dialectic of obedience that we have found articulated in Brecht. It is not tethered to an ideology, but simply to our responsibility to the human being before us. In the Lehrstücke, obedience is thought of either as obedience-to-the-self, which is a manifestation of capitalism; or obedienceto-a-larger-idea-of-the-group, which for Brecht was socialism. Levinas rejects an obedience to both the “I” and the “We.” He places our ethical obedience directly onto the immediate “You,” which he designates as the “Other.” If the “I” is the favorite plaything of capitalism and the “We” the rallying cry of socialism, then the “You” (aka the Other) belongs to the special province of metaphysics. Levinas’ philosophy starts with this basic primordial premise of experiencing the profound singularity of the Other. His subsequent ethics arises out of the Other as “the incomparable, as emptied of all ‘social role,’ and who thus, in his nudity — his destitution, his mortality — straightway imposes himself upon my responsibility: goodness, mercy, or charity.”30 Levinas tells us that this nudity calls to him both as an appeal and as an imperative, which he names “the face” — le visage — a metaphor for the other’s “nakedness, helplessness, perhaps an exposure to death.”31 As a result there is “a responsibility of obedience.”32 He confesses that such a term as obedience is borrowed from the realm of theology but is not afraid to use it in relation to this essential tenet of his philosophy: “obedience is an imperative in the face of the other.”33 Here, Levinas departs from Heidegger who believes in “Being as an issue for itself.” Levinas believes in another approach that he admits to be mad but essential: “I must care for your being. I cannot allow myself to abandon you to your death.”34 This madness is what Levinas calls being human.

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A Brief Autobiographical Tangent; Or, Levinas on the Beach Levinas’ argument may strike some as terribly abstract; others, as sadly naive. I myself felt both responses until one hot summer day when I was sitting on a beach in Martha’s Vineyard and noticed a dot-like figure in the ocean waving at me. I waved back and returned to the paperback book I was reading. When I looked up again, the figure was still there waving. I waved back and it was only after the figure’s third and frantic wave that I realized he wasn’t waving “hello,” but rather “help.” This figure in the distance was not being friendly, but simply drowning! I turned to my right and to my left, there was no one else on the beach. It was just me. What should I do? Go get help? By the time I did, the poor soul would most likely have drowned. There was only one solution. I must try to save him. But the thought was ridiculous since I am the world’s worst swimmer. If I were to attempt such a feat, I would simply end up drowning alongside this unfortunate fellow. But, even as I was thinking all of this, I found myself standing up and heading toward the water. As I was walking I continued to think to myself, “This is ridiculous, I am going to die.” But, much to my surprise, I kept walking as though some invisible thread were pulling me toward this drowning victim. The next thing I knew I was in the water, swimming toward him, still thinking to myself, “Well, I guess I am going to die today, but I have to do something, I can’t just watch this person perish, I’d rather perish myself then witness that.” And so I made my way to this drowning Other. He threw his arms around me in thanks and we both, as I predicted, began to drown together. Fortunately, by this time, a group of more experienced swimmers had arrived at the beach and were throwing us a life preserver connected to a long hemp robe. We both grabbed onto the buoy as they pulled us safely back to shore. Since then, I’ve become something of a convert to the reality of Levinas’ philosophical outlook.

From the Other to the Planet But that was just one person drowning. Easy enough to confront. What about the plight of, say, the Marshall Islands, which is also drowning? A fact that Phillip Muller, the then ambassador to the United Nations, brought to the attention of the Center for Climate Change and Law at Columbia University in 2009. It was here that he warned: The seas are rising, and some decade — no one knows which country of the twenty-nine coral atolls and five islands, located midway between Hawaii and

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Australia, is going to be under water. When that happens, a number of novel legal questions will arise. If a country is under water, is it still a state? Does it still have a seat at the United Nations? What becomes of its exclusive economic zone, and the fishing rights on which it depends for much of its livelihood? What countries will take its displaced people and what rights will they have when they arrive? Do they have any recourse against those states whose greenhouse gas emissions caused this plight?35

It may be easier to save a drowning man, but how about an entire drowning island?! Or what about developing countries such as Bangladesh? A nation with half the population of the United States and whose contribution to climate change is negligible, yet it is now battered by incessant storms and floods, all thanks to global warming. How do we even begin to imagine an even wider ethical circle of future generations who will become inhabitants of an increasingly inhospitable planet? An inhospitableness that, as we now know, is very much of our own making and still within our own power to circumvent. Finally, do we have the imaginative resources to go beyond caring for the face of the Other to the face of Gaia, the very personification of the planet itself? Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman tells us: We are now daily exposed to the mediated knowledge of distant misery. We all have television; but most of us have no means of tele-action. If the human misery we can not only see but also mitigate or heal casts us in a situation of moral choice that the sovereign expressions of life might find excruciatingly difficult but nevertheless possible to handle — then the gap between what we are (indirectly) made aware of and what we can (directly) influence raises the uncertainty that accompanies all moral choices to the unprecedented heights, at which our ethical endowment is unused, and perhaps even unable, to operate.36

This returns us, once again, to the issues of globalization where we are all so deeply interconnected, no matter how vast our actual geographical distance. We are like Edward Lorenz’s butterfly that flaps its wing in Texas and causes a tornado in China. Even though we are not “face to face,” we might as well be. As it stands now, Bauman tells us: “Five percent of the planet’s population may emit 40 percent of the planet’s pollutants and use or waste half or more of the planet’s resources, and they may resort to military and financial blackmail to defend tooth and nail their right to go on doing so.”37 How do we go about changing this?

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From Ethics to Justice and Justice to Shared Responsibility Levinas concedes that things are not as simple as just the relationship between myself and the other. There is always what he calls “a third,” and along with that third usually follows a fourth, fifth, sixth, and so on, until you now find yourself in the midst of a community. That community can continue to grow until it becomes a nation-state. With this change in scale comes a change in thinking. Some contemporary social theorists believe that, with the advent of the communal, ethics gives way to politics. Levinas explores the impact of this widening circle of involvement primarily through certain societal institutions and their administration of justice. Justice is not ethics, but rather the result of a breach in ethics. It comes into being when ethics have been ignored or transgressed. Justice’s domain is adjudication and punishment. Bauman believes the responsibility to address these ecological wrongs belongs to that 5 percent of the planet that has put the rest in peril, “not just in any abstract philosophical, metaphysical or ethical sense, but in the down-to-earth, mundane, straightforward, casual (ontological if you wish) meaning of the word.”38 The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty agrees that many developing nations are once again under the thumb of this 5 percent, aka “the West.” Not only are they suffering from the many deficits brought on by Western modernization, but they are now being told that they cannot partake in the benefits of the selfsame modernizing impulses. To do so would further imperil the future of the planet. Chakrabarty acknowledges these injustices and calls for due redress, but also reminds us in his incisive The Climate of History in a Planetary Age that: Whether we blame climate change on those who are retrospectively guilty — that is blame the West for its past performance — or those who are prospectively guilty — China has just surpassed the United States as the largest emitter of carbon dioxide though not on a per capita basis — is a question that is tied no doubt to the histories of capitalism and modernization. But scientists’ discovery of the fact that human beings have in the process become a geological agent points to a shared catastrophe that we have all fallen into.”39 (My italics)

In short, whether we like it or not, we are all in this together. Planet earth has become that proverbial metaphor of the lifeboat where any individual’s irresponsible actions could capsize us all. With this in mind, how does one chart a course for the future? Chakrabarty puts forward the following suggestions: Any just vision of a civilized human future, it seems to me, would have to embrace three principles: (a) all human lives would need to be protected and

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their flourishing enabled and ensured; (b) biodiversity — which makes for a habitable planet — would have to be protected; and (c) a process of withdrawal from the current human-dominant order of the earth would need to be initiated and advanced. In other words, the human-centric idea of sustainability will have to speak to the planet-centric idea of habitability.40

And if not, we just might find ourselves:

11

On the other side of the Apocalypse The broken worlds of Beckett and Bond

An Image of the End On the page, the image takes a moment to establish itself. The stage directions read, “Expanse of scorched grass rising centre to low mound. Gentle slopes down to front and either side of stage.”1 Simple enough, right? Nothing necessarily out of the ordinary, except — perhaps — for the grass being “scorched.” On the heels of this comes the reason for this state of affairs. Beckett, like the God of the Old Testament, calls for there to be a “Blazing Light.”2 And in the midst of all this — wait for it — we discover, “Embedded up to above her waist in the exact centre of the mound, WINNIE.”3 There it is. One of the great iconic post-apocalyptic images of the twentieth century. We’re told that Winnie is “fifty, well preserved, blonde for preference, plump, arms and shoulders bare, low bodice, big bosom, pearl necklace. She is discovered sleeping.”4 The genealogy of this image has been the subject of much scholarly speculation. Some point to Beckett’s novel The Unnamable where the narrator has a vision of a character seen from the waist up. Others champion Dalí and Buñuel’s film Un Chien Andalou, which features several figures sprouting from the earth like human vegetation. Biographer James Knowlson suggests that the image might be inspired by a 1938 quasi-surrealist fashion photo of actress Frances Day taken by Angus McBean. It depicts her buried up to her waist and holding a mirror in one hand. Whether Beckett saw this ad in The Daily Sketch is anyone’s guess. Beckett remained his usual circumspect self when it came to discussing such things and was mum on the subject.

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Just as the origin of the image is something of a mystery, so too is its context. Is this the product of a nightmare? A scene from purgatory? Some post-apocalyptic landscape of the future? Our minds will float unmoored, throughout the play’s unfolding, from one scenario to the next and back again. “Perhaps it is x,” we think, “or y, or maybe z.” Beckett refuses to help; the most he will say is that the key word to all his plays is “perhaps.”5 And so we go on floating in a state of perpetual unknowing. The most he ever confided about the secret logic of the play was to Brenda Bruce, one of the first actresses to play Winnie. One day, late in rehearsal, when they were out shopping for props, he told her, “you’re sinking into the ground alive; and the sun is shining endlessly day and night and there is not a tree … there’d be no shade, nothing, and that bell wakes you up all the time and all you’ve got is a little parcel of things to see you through life … And I thought who would cope with that and go down singing? Only a woman.”6 Beckett’s finished play might be coy about whether Winnie’s plight is mental, metaphysical, or nuclear, but his earlier rough drafts are far more forthcoming. S. E. Gontarski reveals this to us in his wonderfully succinct Beckett’s Happy Days: A Manuscript Study. We learn in one of the play’s earliest drafts that the dire landscape is due to some sort of nuclear altercation. This information comes to us through a withered old newspaper that Willy, Winnie’s husband, reads aloud: “Rocket strikes Pomona, seven hundred thousand missing … Rocket strike man, one female lavatory attendant spared … Aberrant rocket strikes Erin.”7 And then comes Beckett’s punchline: An advertisement that reads, “Opening for smart youth.”8 One imagines that, given such dire news, there would now be numerous job openings. We also learn a little later that eighty-three priests survive. “Sixty-three Priests did you say?”9 asks an absent-minded Winnie. “Eighty-three,” insists Willy.10 The numbers of those who live and those who die seem of little import to either of them, nothing more than fodder for their early morning marital small talk. The erasing of such details as these goes right to the heart of Beckett’s aesthetic. He explains, “The difference between Joyce and myself is that Joyce was a synthesizer. He tried to put the whole world into a book, in as much detail as possible, and I am an analyzer, I try to take as much detail away as possible.”11 In doing so, Beckett separates himself from the realists who are interested in the “epidermis” of reality, writers who are content to “describe the surface, the facade.”12 What Beckett wants is to get behind this, to get to the “Idea,” which he feels is often locked up like a prisoner.13 It’s the idea that he wants to liberate. But just what is:

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The Idea Held Prisoner in Happy Days In many ways what lurks beneath the surface image of Winnie encased in her mound is not all that different from Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, or Zapffe’s theories of denial and sublimation. Happy Days simply takes these thematics to their furthest dramatic possibilities; crossing the border of the real and entering the theater of the absurd. Winnie, like the characters in Chekhov, is in denial; only this time the denial is spelled with a capital D. In Act One, she has a repertory of routine habits that occupy her day, habit being her way of keeping certain harsh realities at bay. Why worry about slowly sinking into oblivion when there are so many little things to do? After all, there’s checking the contents of her purse, trimming her nails, maintaining her hair, remembering a longforgotten song, and talk. Winnie loves to talk the day away with her husband Willie, even when he isn’t listening, or even there! She tells Willie, “One keeps putting off – putting up – for fear of putting up too soon – and the day goes by – quite by – without one’s having put up – at all.”14 But on some forsaken days there is “so little to say, so little to do, and the fear so great, certain days, of finding oneself … left, with hours still to run, before the bell for sleep, and nothing more to say, nothing more to do, that the days go by, certain days go by, quite by, the bell goes, and little or nothing said, little or nothing done.”15 God forbid such days should transpire, leaving her with time to actually contemplate her impending doom. By Act Two, the mound has advanced, leaving just her head above ground. Who knows how much longer it will be before the mound has consumed her whole and yet she carries on just as before, seemingly oblivious to her present predicament. She notes, “Yes, something seems to have occurred, something has seemed to occur and nothing has occurred, nothing at all, you are quite right, Willie …”16 Winnie, it seems, remains in the dark — no matter how blazing the light that falls upon her. Beckett would later write, “The only chance for renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess.” And yet, having done this, he confesses, “It is not a mess you can make sense of.”17

When Life Catches Up with Art; Or, Meet the Winnies of Chernobyl Over the sixty years since Happy Days was first presented, the metaphor of nuclear war was just one of its many dramaturgical “perhapses”; but, with the advent of Chernobyl and Fukushima, this reading has become the default way

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of looking at the play. For the survivors of these forsaken places, Winnie is no longer a metaphor but a mirror of their own situation: trying to carry on a normal life amid an unseen radioactive death that continues to imperceptibly eat away at them. Kate Brown, in her unnerving Manual For Survival, reminds us that radiation respects no boundaries and spreads everywhere. She notes that the Soviet inspectors of Chernobyl “quickly learned that almost everything was contaminated — milk, berries, eggs, grain, spinach, mushrooms. Even tea imported all the way from Georgia was over the raised emergency level of permissible limits.”18 This did not stop these food staples from being repurposed and stored for months or years until it was believed that the most pernicious isotopes had decayed; but, as scientists would learn, radioactive isotopes are immensely patient; the shelf-life of their toxicity is measured not in years but in eons. As a result, innocent Soviets — thousands of miles from Chernobyl — were unknowingly consuming their death every morning at the breakfast table. Brown also reports that the insistence on selling radioactive food was not uniquely Soviet. Chernobyl fallout spread across Europe in what she calls a patchwork fashion. One of the hardest-hit countries was Greece. Farmers in Greece harvested grain saturated with Chernobyl radioactivity and exported 300,000 tons to Italy.19 Italy, realizing the contaminated nature of the wheat, refused to distribute it. The European Economic Community stepped in, bought the wheat, mixed it with clean grain (so it met with contaminated quotas), and shipped it off to as far as Africa as “aid” to this continent in need.20 In short: A world of Winnies were carrying on without the slightest knowledge of their impending doom. So many of the inhabitants of Chernobyl and the surrounding regions refused to be relocated, or returned as soon as they could, willfully oblivious to the dangers of long-term exposure to low-grade radiation. Throughout Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl we hear about life going on as if nothing had happened. “It’s impossible to live constantly in fear,” one interviewee tells her, “a person can’t do it, so a little time goes by and normal human life resumes.”21 Another soldier reports, “you weren’t allowed to use anything from your garden in the first year, but people ate it anyway, cooked it and everything. They planted everything so well!”22 The farmers were told that they could not eat what they grew. This was incomprehensible to them. Everything tasted fine, their stomachs were fine, no one’s insides were glowing in the dark. So what could possibly be the problem? In the beginning people dutifully brought their produce to the dosimetrist to check the level of radioactivity. Everything was always beyond the radioactive threshold for safety. Pretty soon the villagers tired of this activity and stopped checking. Better to

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subscribe to the age-old philosophy of see no evil hear no evil; besides, what did these scientists know about farming? The farmers reverted back to their old ways; they turned over the soil, planted, and harvested. The people lived as they had lived before. As far as they were concerned, “Chernobyl isn’t as bad as leaving potatoes in the field.”23 One scientist tells Alexievich that people in many of the outlying farms and villages were absorbing doses of radiation “that were a hundred times those of soldiers who patrol areas where nuclear testing takes place. Nuclear testing grounds. A thousand times! The dosimeter is shaking, it’s gone to the limit, but the collective farm offices have posted signs from the regional radiologist saying that it’s all right to eat salad, lettuce, onions, tomatoes, cucumbers — all of it. Everything’s growing and everyone’s eating it.”24 With each passing decade, Beckett’s literary prophecies become more and more our new-found realities. By the time we arrive at Chernobyl, we feel as though we have indeed ventured into:

Beckett Country “We buried houses, wells, trees. We buried the earth. We’d cut things down, rolled them up into big plastic sheets … We buried the forest. We sawed the trees into meter-and-a-half pieces and packed them in cellophane and threw them into graves.”25 “We buried earth in the earth.”26 That’s what the soldiers told Alexievich. Imagine it. If you can. You arrive on a truck at a far-away place you didn’t even know existed. It once had a name, but now they call it “the Zone of Exclusion.”27 Later, for brevity’s sake, it becomes known as just “the Zone.”28 Civilians are forbidden to enter this heavily guarded area. You disembark and the first thing you notice is the silence. You’re standing in the middle of a vast open field surrounded by a dense forest and yet there is not a bird to be heard. Someone hands you a shovel and you and a thousand other men are commanded to dig. You dig. But not too deep. All they are interested in is the topsoil. You load it onto waiting trucks. These trucks take it to a nearby waste contamination site. There, another thousand men are digging a series of much wider and deeper pits. They will bury your earth into their earth. This includes grass, flowers, roots, bugs, spiders, and worms. Everything is given this vast makeshift set of tombs. And then you repeat this activity: day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, until you lose count of the days, weeks, months, and years. You shovel up earth over here to bury it in earth over there. It is the work of madmen. The few remaining villagers watch this daily spectacle of futility and

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cry out, “Ah, quit this silly work, boys. Have a seat and eat with us.”29 But you just keep digging, burying earth into earth. Then one day the cranes come with concrete plates. The concrete plates are lowered onto the open pits. One after another until everything is covered. It looks like a graveyard for giants. Finally the whole thing is surrounded by barbed wire to keep everyone out. But for how long? A thousand years? Ten thousand? No one seems to know. Welcome to Beckett country.

When the Beckettian Gives Way to the Kafkaesque Actually we do know that the life span of a radioactive burial site is 20,000 years. This poses a series of mind-numbing challenges for humankind; especially since a lot can happen within such a vast timescape. Civilizations can rise and fall, knowledge can be lost and never found, and a deep ignorance can settle in; a new dark ages, darker than any we’ve ever known. How, in such a world, do we protect future generations from potential contamination? Not just from cataclysmic sites like Chernobyl or Fukushima, but also from the quarter of a million tons of high-level nuclear waste that is being haphazardly stored all around the world. This number increases each year by 12,000 additional tons.30 Author Robert Macfarlane, in his darkly luminous Underland: A Deep Time Journey, tells us, “We know how to make electricity from uranium and we know how to make death from it, but we still do not know how best to dispose of it when its work is done.”31 This has led to experiments in what Macfarlane calls “post-human architecture.”32 The goal of such structures is to entomb nuclear waste into gigantic containment crypts, many of which end up rivaling the pyramids of the pharaohs. One such containment experiment is happening off the coast of Finland on the island of Olkiluoto. Macfarlane tells us that this particular nuclear burial site is supposed to not only outlast the people who designed it, but also our very species. It is intended to safeguard the planet for 100,000 years and will be impervious to any future ice age.33 Mcfarlane points out that one of the huge problems with such sites is how to warn future generations of their radioactive contents. What language does one use to communicate with someone 20,000 years from now? The Environmental Protection Agency founded a think tank to attempt to answer this question; it was made up of “anthropologists, architects, archaeologists, historians, graphic artists, ethicists, librarians, sculptors, linguists, as well as geologists, astronomers and biologists.”34 Their collective task was to develop some sort of

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universal signifier that might be able to convey the dangers of nuclear waste to future generations. This would be the equivalent of the ancient custom of marking parts of a map with the warning: “Here be dragons.” But the think tank found it next to impossible to imagine any transcendental signifier that could resist the eventual erosion of meaning that is bound to happen over the passage of eons. They concluded that what was needed was the development of an “active communication system” that could be passed down from generation to generation like those used by ancient bards or priestly orders from our past.35 Unfortunately, the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) in New Mexico doesn’t have time to wait for the creation of a nuclear priesthood. Its 2038 deadline is rapidly approaching. Here the Beckettian gives way to the Kafkaesque. They have decided that this waste repository site will be secretly buried and securely sealed beneath the earth’s surface with a series of architectural deterrents that will be erected to keep the curious at bay. Should some brave soul breach these labyrinthian barricades, they will come to a massive metallic door with the following inscription: “We are going to tell you what lies underground, why you should not disturb this place, and what may happen if you do,” and it concludes with “We urge you to keep the room intact and buried.”36 This might be the perfect warning for the world of:

Edward Bond’s War Plays Edward Bond, the iconoclastic English playwright, came to prominence in the mid-1960s with his extraordinary play Saved. This seminal drama dealt with South London’s working-class youths and how their impoverished social conditions were at the root of a variety of violent acts. It culminated with the shockingly unthinkable stoning of an infant in a pram by its own father. The death of children as a metaphor of capitalism’s voracious appetite for the innocent is a subject that Bond will return to throughout his long and immensely productive career. He has built a body of plays that have come to resemble an intriguing cross between the political dialectics of Brecht and the poetic rigor of Beckett. The result of this fusion can be seen in his great trilogy, The War Plays. Taken together they create a dark triptych of a post-apocalyptic future that has suffered a massive nuclear conflagration. The first play, Red Black and Ignorant, centers around the ghost of a poor deformed boy who is referred to throughout as the Monster. In this wrenching work we watch scene after scene of the life this poor child never had a chance to live. The theme of

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death and children is picked up again in the third and final play of the trilogy, ironically entitled The Great Peace. This harrowing play tells the story of a soldier who is tasked with liquidating children to ensure the protection and prolongation of the world’s ever diminishing resources. The Tin Can People makes up the middle play of the cycle and is its dark beating heart. A world that Bond calls:

The Paradise of Hell The play opens with a chorus telling us, “Years later a dust as white as old people’s hair settled on everything/ The world looked like a drawing in lead on white paper.”37 From here we meet the First Man. Bond deprives almost all of these characters of proper names; instead, they are designated by their gender and chronological appearance in the play. What use is a proper name if you no longer possess any discernible personhood? Such is the case with the First Man whose sense of self seems as broken as his language. He tells us, “I’m a monkey house … Nearer I am to death higher monkey jumps. Laughs in one ear – jumps over face – flash of pink arse – laughs in other ear.”38 After this wreck of a soliloquy, a Woman appears and attempts to lure the First Man with a food tin; it is as if we were watching some post-apocalyptic Eve with an apple from the Tree of Capitalism. First Woman  Don’t be afraid A few of us survived We live behind the slope I saw you from the stones on the top Can you see me? (No response) I fetched some food and then ran to meet you.39

He refuses to approach the woman, suspicious of her and her offering. Keeping her distance, she throws him the tin and assures him that it is not poisoned. He cautiously approaches the tin, opens it, and takes a taste. There is a brief pause before he asks: First Man  … More tins? First Woman  Yes – eat all of it … I’ll show you the other people.40

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In the following scene the Woman brings this feral stranger to her community of fourteen surviving souls. They call themselves the “Tin Can People” on account of having stumbled upon an uncontaminated stockpile of canned goods. If they are frugal, their stockpile will last them an entire lifetime. This, they believe, gives them a bit of a paradise in an otherwise post-apocalyptic hell; but we will see how this stockpile actually sets the conditions for a hell of their own making and keeps them from achieving any semblance of a possible paradise. This is all part of the fine weave of Bond’s Marxist allegory. Here, the stockpile is capital in its purest symbolic state. At the top of this scene, several of the community are burying one of their own. This is the first death they’ve experienced since the rockets fell all those years ago. The First Man and Woman enter into this tableau of collective grief. The group initially welcomes him into their makeshift society, but when another one of their members dies, they begin to suspect that these deaths are somehow linked to the arrival of the First Man. Perhaps, they think, it is he who has brought some unknown contagion to their community. By the next scene, we find them plotting to protect themselves and their stockpile of canned goods. Second Man  We’ll have to kill him Second Woman  How? We can’t get close enough to do it with a knife or hammer – he’d run for it. There aren’t enough of us to stone him. When they stoned people it took a whole town. First Woman  We mustn’t panic — try to think! Second Woman  I feel so helpless. It was easy for the bombs to kill millions! How d’you kill just one?41

Their plans are interrupted by news of yet another death. The body is brought in, stripped, and investigated. Theories abound. Perhaps the dead man was in cahoots with the First Man. They begin to kick and beat the dead body and with each blow they become more convinced that the deceased was a pawn in the First Man’s secret scheme to infect them all. Why would the First Man do such a thing? So that he would have the remaining stockpile of tin cans all to himself. That is what they have come to believe and, in a further fit of irrationality, they decide to gorge themselves on the remaining tin cans. This way no one else will take possession of them. In the next scene The First Man astutely notes:

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“If There Were Gods They Would Come Here to Observe”42 The First Man seems to have regained his sanity while everyone else has been losing theirs. Seven more people have subsequently died and the community has plunged into even more madness, eating all the tin cans they can, making a “ruin of their ruins.”43 They have run the First Man out of their community but he has returned to try to help them. Once they thought he might have been their savior, but now they are convinced he is actually the angel of death come to take them all away. Another member of the community attempts to impale the First Man with a spear but falls dead before he can complete his action. The First Woman thinks, given their mad decline, that they should simply put an end to their lives, but the First Man informs her that during the night, while she was sound asleep, he had made love to her. The scene ends with the possibility that the First Man has indeed brought new life rather than death to the community. This leads to the final section of the play. Time has passed. The stockpile of tin cans are now no more and, thanks to their absence, a strange peace has fallen over the land (I told you this was a Marxist allegory). The First Man is sitting out in the open and is joined by the First and Fourth Women. He tells them: First Man  A tree grows but it doesn’t own its own field. The owner can come along anytime and cut it down and burn it. It’s the same with us. When the things we need to live are owned by someone else, we’re owned — we can be cut down and burned at any time. Now no tins — so we can only own what we make and wear and use ourselves. That’s the only difference — but it means that at last we own ourselves.44

They talk about hope, the future generations who will come here to see the library they have yet to build, and the first field that will eventually bear fruit, thanks to their patient care; but most of all, they will marvel at a new world, where there are no stockpiles of tin cans; where they can appreciate the greatest human invention of all: Justice. The First Woman is willing to entertain such a future: First Woman  Yes if we survive. They’ll look back at us and say we lived in prisons. They’ll live in justice. Justice is a stone woman sitting in a stone room trying to make human gestures. If our children live she’ll learn to make them – and then the stone will be as human as these hands which open tins. Let’s go in before it’s dark.45

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The final stage directions tell us, “As the three go, the others come with a light to welcome them.”46

The Potential for a New Beginning; Or, On a Return to Radical Innocence This is what the Tin Can People hope for. Out of the fall of an antiquated capitalism (i.e., stockpiling of tin cans) rises up a primeval communism. Such a hopeful ending might catch many by surprise, especially given the bleak landscape of the play, which puts one in mind of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies or J. G. Ballard’s novels of disaster and dystopia. In these bleak tales there is always a very thin dividing line that separates civilization from barbarism. Bond rejects such popular doom-casting. He tells us in his notes on the play that such violence is not innate in human nature or nature in general. He is not alone in thinking this. One can turn to the work of the naturalist Konrad Lorenz who spent much of his life disputing the idea that aggression is the natural state of living creatures (see his seminal book On Aggression). Bond notes — tongue firmly in cheek — that, “it takes a great deal of culture to turn people into killers – whether they kill in uniforms, suits, or rags.”47 He believes we are born into what he calls “radical innocence.” He describes this as “the state in which infants discover and interpret the world … [It is] the psyche’s conviction of its right to live, and of its conviction that it is not responsible for the suffering it finds in the world or that such things can be.”48 Because we, as children, are endowed with consciousness, reason, and an innate sense of what will become morality, our first encounters with the world can strike us as nonsensical and unjust. This becomes the first in a series of primal shocks that will put our radical innocence into question. In college, when I first read about Bond’s notion of children and “radical innocence,” I was still very much in the William Golding Lord of the Flies camp and just assumed that the more problematic aspects of humankind were genetically hardwired into us. Many years later, my mind was changed when my wife and I took our son Noah to his first day of nursery school. There we were in a room full of quizzical four year olds, none of them quite sure what was going to happen next. One child named Taisai figured it out. He sensed that he and the rest of these children were about to be abandoned by their parents. For how long was anybody’s guess; even a mere two hours — at this tender age — might as well be an eternity. Suffice to say, Taisai was not happy about this whole

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arrangement and burst out crying. This was not your average four-year-old sobbing, this was actually more like shrieking; an uninterrupted stream of deep, primal screams that had the rather off-putting impact of fingernails on a chalk board. I would have thought the other children would either run away in terror or tell poor Taisai to SHUT UP. They did neither; instead, they all surrounded Taisai and simultaneously reached out to console him with the touch of their hands. They were all there for poor Taisai and they were not going to leave his side until he stopped crying. It was a truly beautiful sight to behold. It began my journey from Golding’s world of the Lord of the Flies to Bond’s concept of radical innocence. This change of heart was further cemented when I later read about Rutger Bregman’s real-life account of shipwrecked adolescents who, contrary to Golding’s fictional prophecy, created their own makeshift utopia. Bond believes that our fundamental weakness is not that “we inherit animality but that we inherit history and the culture of the past … Society, which creates us, deforms us. That is why often, to be good citizens, it requires us to live lives of violence and colossal indifference.”49 For Bond, the major culprit is capitalism, which he, like many artists and thinkers, continued to hope was on its last historical legs. Bond’s War Plays were written in 1985 with that very hope in mind; instead, what actually ended up falling, some six years later, was the Soviet Union. This led to a series of debates among progressives of all backgrounds and persuasions on the future of the communal over the capitalistic. Is such a future community possible? This becomes a question that continues to haunt our contemporary conversation.

The Coming Community Around the very same time that Bond is penning his War Plays, the French thinker Jean-Luc Nancy published La Communauté Désoeuvrée (The Inoperative Community) in which he mused on “the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community.”50 This also included other types of communion and, of course, communism, which in the late 1980s, was on the wane. Several months later, one of the thinkers whom Nancy evoked, Maurice Blanchot, wrote his own response to Nancy’s article entitled La Communauté Inavouable (The Unavowable Community) where Blanchot discussed his own theories on “the possibility or impossibility of a community at a time when even the ability to understand community seems to have been lost.”51 This is a question that, for many, began with the fall of communism and was followed by a series of death

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blows inflicted upon Western democracies. The one-two historical punch of this also led to the rise of new and unnerving forms of fascism cropping up around the world. Why has this latter option begun to be attractive to more and more of the world’s population? Perhaps even more importantly: What exactly has led to this sad state of affairs? Why have communism, socialism, and democracy proven so ineffective in dealing with a vast spectrum of issues, the most pressing being the threat of global warming? The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman chalked this up to the fact that power has migrated out of politics and into three new sectors of influence. These are: (1) the global space where multinational corporations rule, (2) consumer markets that cannot be democratically directed or controlled, and finally, (3) citizens who must now solve their social problems with private means instead of the traditional political means.52 Old-fashioned (pre-twentieth-century) politics were effective on a local level, but now we live in the age of the global and problems that are caused and aggravated by globalization, these issues can no longer be solved at the local level. Bauman notes, “The people deciding your future, and that of your children, do not even live in the same country as you. The powers exerting the greatest influence on human conditions and on the prospects of the future operate globally.”53 These forces exist in the “space of flows” and willfully ignore borders, laws, and any interests other than their own self-interest.54 Cornelius Castoriadis believed that this conundrum was further complicated by what he calls the bureaucratic capitalism of the West and the totalitarian bureaucratic capitalism of the East. This is a way of structuring and executing power that has become the de facto social regime for almost all governments of the world. We tend to think of the state as all-powerful and omniscient, but according to Castoriadis, “Half the time power is blind and mindless, and is essentially, necessarily so.”55 Why is this? Castoriadis explains, “Those in power are not competent technicians and specialists … but people who are skilled in one particular specialty: in climbing the bureaucratic ladder … it isn’t the best engineers who run firms, but those who are best at turning the infighting between cliques and clans to their own advantage.”56 This sad state of affairs is not restricted to organs of the state but has also become the major organizing principle for political parties and even labor unions, rendering them equally incompetent and often inoperable. And so we are faced with a situation where the state, political parties, and unions are no longer agents of actual change. Bauman agrees about this crisis of agency. “When I was young,” he writes, “we argued over what needed to be done. Today, the main question is who would be able to do it.”57 Castoriadis’s answer is: Us. He returns to this simple solution

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again and again in books, essays, lectures, and interviews. He tells anyone who will listen that the new institutions of society must strive toward “collective self-management, self-organization, self-government in every sphere of public life.”58 This also means that such institutions will not be set up once and for all, but subject to continual re-evaluation in relation to changing times and needs. Castoriadis insists that “the main political problem — the only one, perhaps, ultimately — is that of the explicit, conscious self-institution of society. To be solved it requires both new institutions and a new kind of relationship between members of society.”59 Castoriadis, intriguingly, does not subscribe to the pseudorevolutionary belief that one either “makes a total, radical break or you are a 100 percent co-opted by the system.”60 He notes, “Revolution doesn’t mean wanton bloodshed, taking the Winter Palace, and so forth. Revolution means a radical transformation of societal institutions. In that sense I am a revolutionary. But that sort of revolution would require profound changes in the psychosocial structure of people in the Western world, in their attitudes toward life, in short, in their imaginary.”61 Castoriadis sees this sort of dynamic at work in the spontaneous mass movements that rallied for such causes as the rights of workers, women, racial equality, and peace. According to Castoriadis, these movements give us a glimpse of “an autonomous society, taking charge, for the first time, of its own self-government, and setting its own laws. The unifying logic of those movements, and their tie with the project of radically transforming society resides in the fact that they already embody, however partially, fragmentarily, and embryonically, those all important political significations: self-management, self-organization, self-government, and self-institution.”62 David Graeber, the American anthropologist and activist, agrees with Castoriadis’s emphasis on:

The Power and Significance of Spontaneous Mass Movements David Graeber, as many know, was the much-celebrated author of Debt: The First Five Thousand Years and one of the leading lights in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He is also credited with coining the now famous slogan, “We are the 99%.” For some, the Peace movement of the 1960s or the Occupy Wall Street movement ended in failure; Graeber humbly begs to differ in his less known but no less wonderful book The Democracy Project. Here, he notes that these movements may not have actually toppled the powers that be, but they captured the imagination of the people, and this — over time — redefined how the powers that be could actually behave. Graeber notes that contemporary movements

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“transform basic assumptions about what politics is ultimately about.”63 In the wake of such sustained protest, “ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency for debate … They become common sense, the very grounds of political discussion.”64 Graeber uses the 1960s’ Peace movement as his prime example of this: One often hears that a decade of antiwar protests in the late 1960s and early 1970s were ultimately failures, since they did not appreciably speed up the U.S. withdrawal from Indochina. But afterward, those controlling U.S. foreign policy were so anxious about being met with similar popular unrest — and even more, with unrest within the military itself, which was genuinely falling apart in the early 1970s — that they refused to commit U.S. forces to any major ground conflict for almost thirty years. It took 9/11, an attack that led to thousands of civilian deaths on U.S. soil, to fully overcome the notorious “Vietnam syndrome.”65

This is the power — or should we say the pressure — of the people that they can exert on their leaders. Castoriadis reminds us, “There is no omnipotence of instituted States. Their power is nothing but the reverse side of the people’s belief in power.”66 And so, everything begins with changing people’s minds (changing what Castoriadis calls their social imaginary). We can see a similar dynamic thankfully beginning to happen with the Black Lives Matter movement. This is also an essential part of the legacy of Occupy Wall Street. Graeber was reminded of this aspect during a chance encounter with a stranger who thanked him for his activist efforts. Graeber appreciated the support, but wondered how many people the movement actually reached. His interlocutor responded: “Well, the thing is for anyone who has, you can’t really go back to thinking about things the way you did before.”67 This new-found fellowtraveler goes on to explain to Graeber that when one finds themselves back in the “real world” they can’t help thinking, “Wait a minute! This is completely ridiculous.”68 Such feelings are then shared with friends, coworkers, and family. Suddenly this questioning of the world becomes their questioning. Soon everyone is asking, “What else are we collectively taking for granted?”69 Graeber’s interlocutor concludes, “You might be surprised. A lot of people are asking that sort of thing.”70 This is how it all starts. But can it continue to grow? Can it transform from the local to the global? Srećko Horvat, the Yugoslavian philosopher, thinks so. He believes that recent local movements like those of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Greek Spring, and other spontaneous mass protests in Egypt, Guatemala, and Croatia can all be transformed into a semi-unified global movement. For

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him, they all point in the same direction and are already internationalist in their implicit potential. Horvat believes that the first step in this transformation is toward a particular kind of self-consciousness that acknowledges “the most serious disaster humanity faces today — climate change and the threat of world war — are global problems and demand a global response.”71 This global awakening is further supported by technology, personal friendships, and shared struggles with today’s movements, which are already tangentially connected. “But,” he tells us, “there is a lack of decision-making needed to transform this connectedness into a coordinated global resistance and liberation struggle.”72 Such a new movement would not only engage in annual meetings, networking, and declarations but would need to “undertake concrete and coordinated local, national and transnational actions that would be able to tackle and solve the crucial threats to humanity — ecological disasters, migration, subjugation to capitalism and techno-totalitarianism.”73 He reminds us that the truly radical response to our predicament can only reside in the creation of a “third option,” which would liberate us from these two current political options. This brings him to one of his favorite jokes. It was popular in the Eastern bloc during the Cold War and goes like this: “Which tea is better, Chinese or Soviet? The answer comes: ‘Don’t get mixed up in a confrontation between superpowers, drink coffee.’”74 Who knows, perhaps this punchline/third option is indeed the secret, leading to more future communities like the one found in:

Thich Nhat Hanh’s The World We Have This beautiful little book thinks of the coming community through the Buddhist practices found in the Diamond Sutra. This way of life focuses on breaking down the false fortress of the self and opening oneself up to the interconnectedness of all things. Hanh reminds us: “The Second notion of the Diamond Sutra advises us to throw away the notion of a person, a human being. This is not too difficult. When we look into the human being we see human ancestors, animal ancestors, plant ancestors, mineral ancestors. We see that the human is made of non-human elements.”75 Such insight (which is always in sight) reconnects us to the fundamental “inter-being-ness” of existence and, for Thich Nhat Hanh, is essential in transforming a community.76 In the process it engenders a kind of innate compassion, which then further deepens one’s sense of interconnectedness. This is very much the case with his Deer Park Monastery in Escondido, California, where members of the Sangha attempt to live in

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harmony with the land, vegetation, animals, and others. They see themselves as being “children of the Earth” and not separate from the soil, the forests, rivers, or sky. “We inter-are” is how Thich Nhat Hanh characterizes this collective comportment.77 A typical morning in the Sangha begins with several hundred inhabitants “walking leisurely, quietly, peacefully, enjoying each other, enjoying every step … not saying anything, enjoying our in-breath, our out-breath, and our step … Every moment like that is healing, transforming, and nourishing.”78 Sounds idyllic, right? But is such a community possible? Can there be such a Coming Community? Or, are we condemned to:

The Future as Guided Tour What have we learned from the events of Chernobyl? Perhaps a little more about the hubris of us humans, maybe a bit about the long-term effects of low-grade radiation, but mostly we seem to have figured out how to make a couple more rubles from the whole catastrophic affair. What follows is an actual advertisement for: chernobyl-tour.com Eye-opening experience of post apocalyptic world. A breathtaking trip to the place of the world-known nuclear disaster. 4.5 hours inside the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, walk around the ghost town of Prypiat and other sites and locations of the Zone of your choice. Chernobyl is the most famous Ukrainian phenomenon. If you plan to visit Ukraine or are already in the country, don’t miss the most important and unique experience and site. Of course, the Zone in its central part still has places with elevated radiation, and we definitely would NOT recommend you staying at them for a long time. However, if you follow the suggested route and the guides’ directions, your visit to the Chernobyl zone will be absolutely radiation-safe. The price includes: all formal permissions, comfortable auto transportation, professional English-speaking guide, accommodation in Chernobyl hotel, maximally permitted time of stay in the Zone (leaving Kiev at 8.00 a.m., arriving back at 7.30 – 8.30 p.m.), compulsory insurance, route map and personal certificate about visit to the Chernobyl zone.

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Staging the End of the World In order to fully understand and feel the most special matter of the Chernobyl zone – namely, radiation – it is recommended to order a personal dosimeter Terra-P. It will make “visible” a radiation relief you travel at, constantly inform you about the radiation level of your place, and at the end of the trip show you your exact irradiation dose received. As Sergii Mirnyi says, “To go to the Chernobyl zone without a dosimeter is like going to the usual tour with your eyes blindfolded.” You can rent the reliable personal dosimeter Terra-P for $10 per day. Just click on the checkbox “Dosimeter” when you are ordering the tour.79

All of this puts me in mind of the final stanza of T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men, where the world ends not with a bang, or a whimper80 but — in this case — with a guided tour.

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Nostalgia for the future The fraught tomorrows of Rivera, Churchill, Washburn, and Kushner

Millennial Rumblings In the early 1990s two angels descended onto the American stage. The first was Tony Kushner’s Angel of the Americas and the second was José Rivera’s lesser known but nevertheless equally compelling guardian of his eponymous hero, Marisol. Rivera’s angel is also responsible for obstructing “one plane crash, one collapsed elevator, one massacre at the hands of a right wing fanatic with an Uzi, and sixty-six-thousand-and-three separate sexual assaults.”1 Now the angel has come to deliver the following “bad news” — the universal body is sick, “Constellations are wasting away, the nauseous stars are full of blisters and sores, the infected earth is running a temperature, and everywhere the universal mind is wracked with amnesia, boredom, and neurotic obsessions.”2 The reason for this decline, according to Rivera’s angel, is because “God is old and dying and taking the rest of us with him.”3 This is different from Kushner’s God who, it seems, simply abandoned us on April 18, 1906, the day of the Great San Francisco earthquake. On this day, Kushner’s angel explains, “HE left and did not return/ We do not know where HE has gone. HE may never … / And bitter, cast-off, We wait, bewildered/ Our finest houses, our sweetest vineyards/ Made drear and barren, missing Him.”4 As a result, chaos and collapse ensue, “the fabric of the sky unravels” and with it the fear that, “Before Life on Earth becomes merely impossible/ It will for a long time before have become completely unbearable.”5 The slow dissolving of the Great Design, The spiraling apart of the work of Eternity, The World and its beautiful particle logic

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All collapsed. All dead, forever, In starless, moonlorn onyx night. We are failing, failing, The Earth and the Angels. Look up, look up It is Not-to-Be Time.6

Kushner’s angel believes if humankind would just “stop moving” God might come back, or such cessation might, if nothing else, give our beleaguered planet a much needed ecological respite. Rivera’s angel is less obsequious and has decided to take action: Listen well, Marisol: angels are going to kill the King of Heaven and restore the vitality of the universe with His blood. And I’m going to lead them … It could be suicide. A massacre. He’s better armed. Better organized. And, well, a little omniscient. But we have to win. And when we do win … when we crown the new God, and begin the new millennium … the earth will be restored. The moon will return. The degradation of the animal kingdom will end. Men and women will be elevated to a higher order. All children will speak Latin. And Creation will finally be perfect.7

Because of this newfound angelic activism, Rivera’s angel can no longer look after her human ward and warns, “I can’t stay. I can’t protect you anymore … When I drop my wings, all hell’s going to break loose and soon you’re not going to recognize the world …”8 In both Rivera and Kushner’s dramatic worlds, we humans are left to our own devices, the responsibility now falls solely upon us. That said, both worlds remain nostalgic for a future that may no longer be possible. Their characters, thankfully, refuse to throw in the towel and are willing to fight to save ourselves and some semblance of a future for coming generations. This battle for the future becomes one of the central motifs in this final suite of surveyed plays.

Talk About What Is Frightening Early in playwright Caryl Churchill’s astonishing career, she participated in the Royal Court’s Young People’s Theatre Scheme. Twice a week, for an entire term, she met with a group of nine and ten year olds to develop a play through improvisation, games, and discussion. On the first day of the workshop Churchill presented the children with the following five-word prompt: Talk about what is

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frightening.9 This question runs throughout Churchill’s early works. One of her first radio plays is actually entitled, You’ve No Need to Be Frightened, which of course, immediately suggests that is exactly what we probably need to be. A character in another early play tells us, “I do find I’m afraid to go to sleep. Just as I’m going off I get that feeling like in a nightmare but with no content. I’m frightened something is about to happen.”10 This all-pervasive sense of dread reaches its apotheosis in Not … Not … Not … Not … Not … Enough Oxygen, which was written in 1971 but set in a dystopian future of 2010. Here, seeing a bird in the sky is a major event and few humans venture out of their derelict apartments for fear of exposing themselves to some unknown toxin. Vivian, one of the central characters, warns us: “Not enough enough oxygen in this block, why always headache. Spoke caretaker, caretaker says speak manager, manager says local authority won’t give us won’t give us money. Said I said what’s the no point giving us faster — all be dead corpses in the faster lifts if there’s not not not not not enough oxygen.”11 One could argue that Churchill has returned, thirty years later, to this theme of fear in such late plays as Far Away, A Number, and Escaped Alone. Each of these works, in their own unique way, has something very frightening to say about our future. We will focus on the first of these works, Far Away. The play seems aptly titled since the real world, a world of violence and oppression, is kept well hidden from immediate view. It is resolutely elsewhere; and yet, as we will slowly learn, this does not stop it from entering into the imaginations of the characters we meet and impacting upon their actions. The play begins with the simplest of stage directions: “Harper’s house. Night.”12 It is two in the morning and Harper is confronted by her visiting niece, Joan, who cannot sleep. We are in some remote rural region far from the city and all its hustle and bustle. It sounds bucolic, doesn’t it? There’s just one little problem. Joan heard a scream. Harper says it was an owl. That may very well be, but Joan wants to know what her uncle is doing in the nearby shed. Harper says that Joan’s uncle is throwing a little party. Joan wants to know, what kind of party permits her uncle to beat people with a lead pipe? By now this world of simple country pleasures has slowly receded and another reality has asserted itself: a world of shocking brutality. This dynamic of a hidden world slowly revealing itself is repeated again in the following scene. Joan is now a grown woman, fresh out of college and starting her first job at a factory that makes festive party hats for state-sponsored parades. At first the audience, like Joan, is completely captivated by the colorful fabrics and fantastic shapes that make up the various hats she and her colleague Todd are busy constructing. Between their seemingly inconsequential small talk, we

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hear about certain televised trials that occur every night till four. We also learn, through Todd, that “there is a lot wrong with this place,” but such things cannot be talked about openly.13 Finally, it is revealed what the hats, these late-night trials, and state-sponsored parades all have in common. This happens through the following ominous stage direction: “A procession of ragged, beaten, chained prisoners, each wearing a hat, on their way to execution. The finished hats are even more enormous and preposterous than in the previous scene.”14 And so, the quaint world of making party hats is overturned, revealing an elaborate and surreal dystopia. Now we see how this cleverly masked totalitarian state exists on the periphery of our central characters’ lives and how their seemingly innocent artistic endeavor is complicit in this larger state-wide oppression. Finally, in the third and last scene of Far Away, the world of normalcy and the world of brutality are no longer separated from one another; now each coexists in a new and nightmarish symbiosis. The operative word here is nightmarish. It is a total war, not just country against country, but every living creature seems to have been enlisted in this final conflagration. This includes Todd and Joan who are now soldiers. They have returned to Harper’s far-off home for a brief respite. As Joan sleeps, Harper and Todd discuss the planet’s descent into allout chaos. Harper speaks of a cloud of butterflies that eclipses the sun. She tells Todd, “Two of them clung to my arm, I was terrified, one of them got in my hair, I managed to squash them.”15 Todd has had a similar encounter with an even more dangerous variety of insect: “I was passing an orchard, there were horses standing under the trees, and suddenly wasps attacked them out of the plums. There were the horses galloping by screaming with their heads made of wasps.”16 But it is not just insects that are mobilizing. Todd tells us: “I’ve shot cattle and children in Ethiopia. I’ve gassed mixed troops of Spanish, computer programmers and dogs. I’ve torn starlings apart with my bare hands.”17 What are we to make of all this? Our first interpretative impulse might be to simply declare that these poor characters are suffering from:

A Particular Kind of Madness We can take what Harper and Todd say about this new world order as some sort of actual post-apocalyptic reality; or, as a type of psychosis that results from what Freud calls Verleugnung. This term, often translated as denial or disavowal, is used by Freud to describe the “mode of defense which consists in the subject’s refusal to recognize the reality of a traumatic situation.”18

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When the psychic pressure of such denial is sustained over long periods of time it can, according to Freud, cleave the subject’s ego in two. Such a psychic break is called Spaltung (connoting a splitting or basic dissociation), or what Eugene Bleuler will come to call “schizophrenia.”19 Bleuler’s conception of psychosis emphasizes the onset of an incoherence of thought, action, and affectivity that results in degrees of discordance, dissociation, disintegration, and detachment from reality. This can lead to the production of fantasies and delusional activity that are usually unruly, especially in attempts at any type of systemization. Churchill’s work is no stranger to schizophrenia; one of her early works, Schreber’s Nervous Illness, dealt with perhaps one of history’s most famous schizophrenics, Daniel Paul Schreber, a German jurist from the turn of the nineteenth century, who meticulously documented his descent into madness in the 488 pages of his memoirs. Such notions of schizophrenia can extend beyond the individual and, in the works of many post-structuralists, begin to take account of a much larger social/cultural dilemma. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard put forth the theory that every age manifests its own kind of collective psychosis. He posits that melancholy was the major psychic malady of the Renaissance; hysteria, the representative madness of the nineteenth century; and schizophrenia the dominant mental dysfunction of the late twentieth century. Gilles Deleuze, a contemporary of Baudrillard, notes that the phenomenon of delirium extends beyond the individual and the family and overflows into society and history as well. He tells us that such delirium can be “composed of politics and economics” and that there is a whole social field of unconscious determinates that also need to be accounted for.20 He cites Marcel Jaeger who writes, “Despite what the gurus of psychiatry think, the things that mental patients say do not merely express the opacity of their individual psychic disorders. The discourse of madness, in all its articulations, joins up with another discourse, the discourse of history — political, social, religious — which speaks in each of them.”21 Slavoj Žižek, the self-proclaimed bad boy of philosophy, posits a similar view of our collective pathology. He sees this as a kind of expansion of Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death where one’s individually phased responses to the reality of their imminent death have now been conferred onto the death of the entire planet as we know it.22 These stages famously include: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. If we play along with Žižek’s provocative idea, we could argue that many of us are still in Becker’s first stage: Denial. The longer we stay in this stage, the closer we succumb to a kind of collective psychosis or schizophrenic break. Churchill takes this theory to its poetic extreme. Or does she?

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Is there a way to look at the third movement of this play realistically? Could there be a worldwide conflagration between us and all other living things? If so, what might that look like? I am reminded once again of Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl where she tells of how the local dogs and cats had absorbed such heavy doses of radiation in their fur that there was a fear they would wander beyond the “Zone of Exclusion” and infect neighboring villages. Soldiers were brought in specifically to hunt down all manner of domestic animals. One soldier recounts: “We met these crazed dogs and cats on the road. They acted strange: they didn’t recognize us as people, they ran away. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with them until they told us to start shooting at them …”23 Another soldier tells of massive animal graveyards that had been developed by scientists and referred to as bio-cemeteries. One soldier likens these structures to modern-day temples and concludes, “There they lie, thousands of dogs, cats, horses, that were shot. And not a single name.”24 Perhaps Churchill’s Far Away is actually not all that far after all.

New Subjects, New Forms This question of reality vs. fantasy goes to the heart of much of Churchill’s writing. She has always been somewhat allergic to the binary oppositions that restrict modern drama where “everything is at the expense of something else.”25 As a result, we have plots without poetry, naturalism without imagination, and slice of life without form. Churchill insists: “We must find a balance that doesn’t impose form and poetry unrelated to the details of life, nor pile up details without form and poetry. Form is, in itself, a means of expression, and a good play is like music in the reappearance of different themes, changes of pace, conflicts and harmonies; and the fuller use of form should make plays not less but more true to life.”26 Nowhere is this perhaps more true than in Joan’s very last monologue, which ends Far Away. Here, she relates her long journey back to Harper’s house. It constitutes her own journey into the heart of darkness. This is what she tells them: Joan  It wasn’t so much the birds I was frightened of, it was the weather, the weather here’s on the side of the Japanese. There were thunderstorms all through the mountains, I went through towns I hadn’t been before. The rats are bleeding out of their mouths and ears, which is good, and so were the girls by the side of the road. It was tiring there because everything’s been recruited, there were piles

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of bodies and if you stopped to find out there was one killed by coffee or one killed by pins, they were killed by heroin, petrol, chainsaws, hairspray, bleach, foxgloves, the smell of smoke was where we were burning the grass that wouldn’t serve.27

It is at this point that Churchill’s poetry and form begin to indeed tell us something more true to life: that as we destroy our planet the distinction between what we thought was human and what we thought was animal begins to be erased. It no longer matters whether we are a child or a cat, the distance between the two becomes irrelevant. All distance has completely collapsed, we are no longer “far away” from the animal, just as life is no longer far away from death. The two are now intimate bedfellows, taking young and old indiscriminately. Death maintains its role as the great equalizer; only now its dominion knows no bounds. The speech continues, expanding on humankind’s military mobilization of nature: “The Bolivians are working with gravity, that’s a secret so as not to spread alarm. But we’re getting further with noise and there’s thousands dead of light in Madagascar. Who’s going to mobilize darkness and silence? That’s what I wondered in the night.”28 Joan concludes her harrowing speech with an anecdote about whether or not to cross a river and not knowing if it was an ally or an enemy, “I stood on the bank a long time. But I knew it was my only way of getting here so at last I put one foot in the river. It was very cold but so far that was all. When you’ve just stepped in you can’t tell what’s going to happen. The water laps round your ankles in any case.”29 This is the great warning for humanity: Watch your step. In our capitalist, technological age, everything is connected to everything else, everything has consequences, one begins to see the modern world as an elaborate set of dominos — knock one over and all the rest will follow. In the end Churchill leaves it to us to decide whether what is happening in this final section of the play is for real or the by-product of a kind of collective psychosis. In either scenario, it is impossible for her characters to barricade themselves from the brutality and destruction of the world that they have created and relegated to the very periphery of their existence. There is no fortress of domesticity strong enough to withhold the relentless onslaught of this negativity that they have wrought. It will either break through literally in the form of rebellion, or figuratively in the guise of psychosis. No matter how far away we might try to keep the negativity we create, it will ultimately find us. In this respect, a more accurate title for the play would be: NOT Far Away. There is, as the old saying goes, “no spoon long enough to sup with the devil,” especially since that devil is usually us.

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Mr. Burns’ Post-Electric Play; Or, “Every Story Ends on a Dark and Raging River” The above quote is the epitaph that greets the reader as they are about to enter into Anne Washburn’s dramatic funhouse of a play. It makes the perfect segue from Caryl Churchill’s Far Away. This will be the first in a series of intriguing overlaps between these two extraordinary playwrights. Washburn’s Mr. Burns also shares its generative process with many of Churchill’s major works (Cloud Nine and Mad Forest), which grew out of a series of improvisational workshops with actors. Washburn’s exploration was begun in 2008 with the Civilians Theater Company and was very much inspired by the work of the Joint Stock Company where Churchill developed many of her most iconic plays.30 Washburn was exploring the intriguing question, “What would happen to a pop culture narrative pushed past the fall of civilization?”31 She and the Civilians began improvising around this idea. One of the key improv prompts was tasking the actors to remember, as best they could, an entire episode of the perennially popular animated TV series The Simpsons. This exercise would form the basis for much of the first act of Washburn’s play. As with Churchill, we are thrown into the midst of Washburn’s dramatic world and just have to fend for ourselves, trying to play catch-up with characters who have no Ibsen-like interest in giving us any expositional help whatsoever. At the start, we meet a group of friends in the woods around a camp fire. They are trying to remember a favorite episode from The Simpsons. The episode in question is a parody of the Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro movie called Cape Fear, which is a remake of an earlier 1950s’ cinematic potboiler of the same name. Each is taking great delight in this game of memory until they hear a sound in the woods. They freeze. All fun drains away as they listen intently. The stage directions tell us: “Sam reaches behind him and pulls out a rifle. Matt pulls out a revolver and beams the flashlight through the forest offstage. Maria and Jenny have pulled out revolvers … Jenny has also pulled out a bowie knife.”32 Everyone, we are told, is “Absolutely taut, moving not a muscle. Eyes wild, flicking everywhere.”33 Is it a deer? No. Human? They warn the figure in the woods to come out with its hands up. A young man by the name of Gibson emerges from the trees and an interrogation ensues. It is through this questioning that we are finally able to piece together the backstory of the play. Through Gibson we learn that there is a barricade forcing folks to make their way to Interstate 95 where they find Providence Rhode Island “deserted, weirdly, not even a lot of bodies.”34 He wonders if there has been some sort of evacuation, but he doesn’t know. No

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one seems to know much of anything. The entire northeastern power grid seems to be down. The cause? Again, we must make do with snippets of subsequent dialogue that suggest an initial meltdown of a nuclear power plant that led to fires, or perhaps it was the fires that led to the nuclear meltdown. Regardless of the actual causal sequencing of these events, darkness has now consumed the entire northeastern seaboard. As for survivors, all they know is that everything now “Depends on the weather. On the wind.”35 All they can do is to keep moving in the opposite direction of this event, which remains unnamed.

Life in a Post-Electric World Act Two takes place takes place some seven years later in a world still deprived of electricity. We discover that the group of friends plus Gibson have now become a traveling company of theatrical players, not all that different from the roaming troupes of the Middle Ages; although, instead of performing plays from the Bible, they perform old episodes from television shows, their speciality being The Simpsons. It turns out that the life of a traveling theatrical troupe is highly competitive with different companies vying for the same limited audiences. Here, in this new world, memory is everything. The more one can remember of a show or shows, the richer their repertory becomes. Memory is also something that has been compromised as a by-product of continued exposure to low levels of radiation. But more troubling than this is the fact that our theatrical friends are running out of money to “buy lines.”36 It seems that all of these troupes rely on having funds to buy remembered lines from TV shows. These lines are bought from folks they may meet on their way to their next gig, or from audience members who — after the show is over — stay and sell off what remains of their own popculture memory. Without the ability to buy lines our theatrical friends cannot add to their repertory and risk losing out to the competition. A rival troupe keeps buying lines and assembling superior shows. It is at this narrative juncture that one fully begins to appreciate Washburn’s world-building capabilities, which rival the ingenuity of the most nuanced writers of speculative fiction. The scene ends with the group being attacked by either a rival troupe or perhaps mere marauders. After this sudden turn of events we move to Act Three where time has once again jumped. We are now some seventy-five further years into a future. This final act is given over to a performance of what must be some later iteration of the show that Gibson and his friends initially devised a quarter of a century earlier. It is a grand hodgepodge: part Simpsons episode, part Cape Fear riff,

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part musical extravaganza, and even part Greek tragedy, replete with a chorus that comments on the action. It also brings to mind the homespun quality of medieval mystery plays, which we discussed in chapter four. Here the Simpson family rhymes with Noah and his brood, both on leaky boats, speaking in a colloquial verse and dreaming of safe harbors. In this respect Washburn’s play is not only a palimpsest of popular culture but also of other, earlier theatrical forms such as the chorus from a Greek tragedy, or the rough-hewn quality of the medieval pageant plays. The result is a dizzying experience that is both wonderfully zany and oddly moving at the same time. This play within a play begins with the chorus intoning the sound of a siren and the company explaining about a terrible accident at the nearby power plant run by the wicked Mr. Burns. The imagery runs the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous. The night sky is “devil red” and the air is filled with the smell of “humans cookin’.”37 The chorus sings, “You reach for me but I’m broke (-uh-), (the world is made of flame) I twist and choke (-uh-).”38 We are told that we are “on a dark and savage journey/ Runs from catastrophe/ To their final agony/ The Simpsons/ The the the the the Simpsons.”39 From here we segue to the Simpsons’ houseboat. Bart, our young hero, is alone above deck. He tells us in pseudo-verse about his boat on the river and the bodies that float by on the current. What follows is a mash-up of The Simpsons, Cape Fear, and The Night of the Hunter, with a dollop of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. A radioactive Mr. Burns becomes the evil Robert De Niro/Robert Mitchum who crawls up on the ship, menaces the family, murders Homer and other members of the family. They return as ghosts to aid the surviving Bart as he goes toe to toe with the evil Mr. Burns. Their final encounter has Bart and Burns dueling to the death with swords. During this final battle, Mr. Burns taunts Bart to kill him since it won’t stop him, he will return again and again since, as we realize, he is the very embodiment of radiation, or as he ominously intones, “I’m never leaving I don’t go away I’m here for a hundred years/ I’m here for a thousand years a hundred thousand a million/ I will be here Bart Simpson for Forever.”40 Burns slips into the river. Washburn’s stage directions muse “Perhaps there is a brief upsurge of dead piranhas” to finish him off.41 The play concludes with “a Slow Electric Dawn” and the chorus singing triumphantly: “On the horizon is first light/ And the warm wind of morning/ Will dispel this endless night.”42 The stage directions tell us, “Bart rises, comes to stand at the railing, and slowly starts to sing.”43 He acknowledges that he has lost everything and everyone he has loved and yet he feels compelled to go on — where he does not know. All he knows is that a great adventure awaits him. He sings, “The world is new and

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glittery/ I run to meet it hopefully.”44 Washburn sends Bart forward toward a future of hope while also bringing us back:

Full Circle With Washburn’s play, we have returned to many of the themes explored throughout this study, beginning with the idea of the fragility of our cultural inheritance in chapter one. It becomes painfully clear how quickly this can be lost; but also, as importantly, what remains and why. What survives in Washburn’s play within a play is not all that different from what we saw survive in Greek tragedy or Sanskrit literature. In all these cases we find the same three powerful mnemonic devices at work to preserve a story for future generations. The first of these devices, as you may remember, has to do with the power of rhythm. We saw this in Valimika’s Ramayana and Homer’s Iliad where a particular metrical scheme aids future bards in memorizing and performing such complex stories; we can see this both in Washburn’s own mock verse as well as snatches of Gilbert and Sullivan’s melodies from The Mikado that are retrofitted for Washburn’s newly minted lyrics. This brings us back to the poet Joseph Brodsky and his theory of metrics as a resurrection machine that allows future readers to summon up the feelings of ancient poets such as Horace, or, as Brodsky writes,“Who knows I may summon you here … for all I know dactyls beat any old séance as a means of conjuring … once the beat of a classic enters one’s system, its spirit moves too.”45 Such is the time-defying power of rhythm. After this comes the mnemonic device of gnomai, those shards of wisdom that could be shared with others. It is the great granddaddy of proverbs, maxims, precepts, epigrams, slogans, one-liners, and Twitter accounts. In Washburn, such gnomai become “lines” from The Simpsons. Both have the ability to survive long after their initial utterance. William Burroughs insisted that “language is a kind of virus.” He has a point, it can be highly contagious. There is indeed something to putting a certain set of words together that can become viral; depending on the power of their combination, they can spread far and wide, outlasting their author and the work of art that might have first housed them. Finally, there is the mnemonic power that comes from stories of a catastrophe. Here, as we noted in chapter one, catastrophe and memory have been bedfellows since the days of Simonides. He was allegedly the first poet to use the catastrophic as a way to help him literally and figuratively re-member all manner of things. Catastrophe scars the memory and so it should come as no surprise that stories of certain tragic events (even a film like Cape Fear) would have a longer cultural shelf life.

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The Cloud vs. the Bard All of this returns us to the issue of the transmission of our hard-won knowledge in the wake of an apocalypse. We have, perhaps, become all too comfortable with technology being the primary repository of our culture. The Smithsonian Museum maintains an entire wing devoted to every conceivable modern-day data storage and retrieval system known to humans, along with the personnel to operate each device. And yet without that little thing called electricity, all of our technological storage devices — no matter how advanced — will become immediately and irredeemably useless. Our current Cloud could simply evaporate forever. This brings us back to those futurological panels of the previous chapter which concluded that bards and priesthoods would remain the best “active communication system” for passing on vital information from generation to generation in a post-apocalyptic world. To this we could add Washburn’s ad hoc theatrical troupe; beneath Washburn’s abundant humor and great theatrical invention there lies a deep appreciation for the impact of telling stories. It doesn’t matter if these stories are told by Homer or Homer Simpson, they are our cultural glue. This miraculous invention called the story, made out of the remnants of our everyday language, remains one of our most powerful tools for the survival of our culture and our species. It is another form of encoding, as significant as the DNA deposited in our genes. When you stop to think about it, this linguistic bent of ours is nothing short of miraculous, but due to the sheer ubiquity of our stories, we can easily forget their profound originality and necessity. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov warns that when we take our storytelling ability for granted, “we undo the work of ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction” that connects us “from the caveman to Keats,”46 and, God willing, from Keats to some future poet whose rhymes we’ve yet to hear. Stories are the red thread of civilization, they hold us together.

Tales of Denial and Children It is stories that have sustained us and stories that will no doubt help to save us from our current disastrous course. It has led to a kind of genre of modern catastrophe that begins to take focus around the time of Ibsen and develops through isolated works of Chekhov, Brecht, Beckett, Bond, Churchill, and Washburn. Two major motifs emerge in these plays about the end of the world as we know it: Denial and the fate of children. We find the theme of denial over

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the issue of pollution in An Enemy of the People, the loss of the estate in The Cherry Orchard, the needs of the boy in He Who Says Yes, Winnie’s obliviousness to being swallowed alive in Happy Days, the inability to see the corrosiveness of capitalism in The Tin Can People, the violence that is happening just out of sight in Far Away, or the long-term effects of low-level radiation in Mr. Burns. In tandem with this propensity toward denial there is a growing focus on the future of our children. We see this in Dr. Stockmann’s desire to teach children at the end of An Enemy of the People, the death of Grisha in The Cherry Orchard, the Boy’s vulnerability in He Who Says No, the childless Winnie and Willie in Happy Days, the state-sanctioned killing of children in The War Plays, the profound insecurities of young Joan in part one of Far Away, and the young actor playing Bart in Mr. Burns’ Post-Electric Play. The level of denial and the plight of children take on more and more emphasis with each of these plays. What does this tell us about this genre that begins to take shape at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and reaches its apotheosis with our current climate crisis? One need not be a rocket scientist to answer this question. In many ways the twin themes of denial and children best encapsulate both the problem of our times and the unfortunate victims of this problem if it remains unaddressed. But the child may also be part of the solution, since knowledge of the child’s potential suffering can be an immensely powerful epistemological hammer, able to break through the armature of denial and bring about our much needed engagement. In this way, the situation of the child shifts from being a consequence to becoming a catalyst. Children emerge, in these various manifestations, as a kind of objective correlative to mechanisms of societal denial. And so, the importance of the role of the child grows in exponential relation to the world’s proximity to extinction. We can see this made manifest in the plays we have examined from chapter five onward. Here we can watch the child who goes from being off stage in Ibsen and Chekhov to taking center stage by the time we reach Churchill and Washburn. It would seem that the increasing prominence of the child in this genre coincides with our growing concern over the plight of future generations. Perhaps one of the most striking and effective examples of this dramaturgical gambit can be found in Tony Kushner’s:

Slavs! Or, Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness In many ways Kushner sits comfortably between Churchill and Washburn. He was profoundly influenced by Churchill’s iconic work of the mid-1980s and also became one of Washburn’s teachers when she was studying for her master’s

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degree at New York University in the late 1990s. The result is a wonderful dramatic current of political and theatrical concerns that runs through each of these three extraordinary writers. Kushner will, like Churchill and Washburn, pen a work with the same nexus of catastrophe, denial, and its impact on a child in his lesser known — but no less remarkable — short work entitled Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness. The play is made up of bits and pieces of what were originally intended to be the interstitial scenes for Kushner’s Perestroika, the second part of his magnum opus Angels in America. Only one short bit of this material remains in Perestroika. It is a speech given by Aleksi Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov, who is also known as the world’s oldest Bolshevik. Like the companion pieces that will go on to make up Slavs!, this speech simultaneously lampoons and mourns the demise of the Soviet Union and its grand dream of building a more just world through the ideals of Marx and Lenin. The penultimate scene of Slavs! takes us to a remote medical facility in the wilds of Siberia. It is 1992 and Vodya Domik, an expressionless little girl of eight, sits waiting. Time seems to be of little interest to her, she exhibits the patience of a stone. Finally, Assistant Deputy Councillor Yegor Termens Rodent arrives and greets her with a cheerful, “Hello, little girl.”47 She does not answer. Undeterred by this, he greets her again. No response. He tries again. Still no response. Not one to be accused of giving up too easily, he tries some twenty more times. Kushner’s stage directions inform us that “his tone is maddeningly unvaried: mild, cheerful, each attempt exactly the same as the one preceding.”48 In short, Rodent would make a wonderful parrot. Finally Vodya’s mother, Mrs. Domik, is ushered in and frees us from this purgatory of greetings. She informs Rodent that her daughter does not speak. Bonfila, a pediatric oncologist, explains that the little girl has a larynx and tongue but is incapable of expressing herself in words. The reason? Bonfila believes that this is the result of a chromosomal alteration from her parents’ exposure to ionizing radiation. Rodent nods solemnly and intones the word, “Stalin.”49 Bonfila tells him it could be from the time of Stalin or now. This leads her into a harrowing monologue about the former Soviet Union’s rampant nuclear neglect. Kushner based this speech on a series of articles written in the early 1990s by John-Thor Dahlburg for The Los Angeles Times. Here we learn of Russia’s post-Chernobyl woes: There are secret midnight trains with hazardous nuclear waste criss-crossing all of Russia, depositing their radioactive contents in poorly constructed underground storage facilities

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where it is left to leak away, contaminating the unsuspecting inhabitants of nearby villages. There are nuclear plants like the one near Altograd that suffers from cracks in its casing; radioactive steam escapes several times a month and is tied to the rise of thyroid cancer and a lake full of blind fish. There are caves in Chelyabinsk filled with cesium, strontium, and bomb-grade plutonium that has been stockpiled in rusting drums since the 1950s. The plutonium alone from this cave could kill every living thing on the planet three times over. Bonfila concludes, “The whole country’s a radioactive swamp.”50 Hundreds of thousands of inhabitants have been exposed, thanks to these compromised waste dumps, warheads, and malfunctioning reactors. Vodya is one of these victims. She, according to Bonfila, is a mutation. A nuclear mutant. Third generation. And now, after all of this, and all Bonfila has seen, she wants someone to tell her how this came to pass in the first socialist country. Her boss’s response: Rodent (After a little pause) Naiveté. Bonfila  It’s the spiritual genius of Slavic peoples.51

Throughout all of this Vodya and her Mother have sat silently until Mrs. Domik can take it no longer and shouts out, “I want to be compensated. Look at her,” referring to her mutant daughter, “she’ll never be anything.”52 Rodent attempts to apologize but Mrs. Domik does not want his apologies, she wants financial assistance. Rodent speaks of certain austerity measures, Bonfila tries to offer her some tea, to which Mrs. Domik responds: “I DON’T WANT TEA!”53 What she wants is to know what they are going to do for her daughter since, up to this point, they have done nothing except: Mrs. Domik  Tests and tests and tests, you haven’t helped any of the children, and she’s not dying she’s growing, and who’s supposed to mind her if I have to work all day, she doesn’t sit now, she wanders across roads, and … Well? WHAT ABOUT MY DAUGHTER? WHAT ABOUT MY DAUGHTER? WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT MY DAUGHTER? WHO’LL PAY FOR THAT … Take her to Yeltsin! Take her to Gorbachev! Take her to Gaidar! Take her to Clinton! YOU care for her! YOU did this! YOU did this! She’s YOURS.54

Rodent does what all civil servants do at such moments, explains he would so like to help but his hands are tied. Mrs. Domik has heard all these excuses before and leaves, with her daughter, in disgust. The next time we see Vodya she is in heaven (this is, after all, a play written by Tony Kushner) where she meets

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a group of aged high-ranking Russian dignitaries who have died but continue their dialectical debates in the great beyond. Her appearance interrupts their daily polemics. They inquire into her age and the circumstances surrounding her death. Vodya, having found her voice, now calmly explains: “Cancer, a wild profusion of cells; dark flowerings in my lungs, my brain, my blood, my bones; dandelion and morning glory vine seized and overwhelmed the field; life in my body ran riot. And here I am.”55 These last four monosyllabic words bring most audiences to tears — at least the audiences I have had the opportunity to be a part of in New York, Los Angeles, and Providence Rhode Island. On all three occasions, by the time this line was spoken there was not a dry eye in the house. Hans Jonas, one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century, spoke of such moments as reaching the level of the archetypal. In this respect, Kushner’s story of Vodya speaks to the timeless symbol of parental responsibility that we axiomatically feel for the child. Jonas believed that this innate feeling was the ground on which a future ethics could be built.

Hans Jonas and the Parent-Child Relation as the Archetype of Responsibility for the Future For Jonas it is the advent of the child, more than Levinas’ “Face of the Other,” that is the primordial paradigm for all forms of responsibility. This is where, as Jonas says, what “is” (the facticity of the newborn) demands an “ought” (an ethical obligation) from us.56 This has, as we have seen, been one of the perennial problems with an ethics for the future: The abstract “is” of the future does not inspire an immediate “ought” from us. The statesman always has much more pressing concerns than the vague and distant horizon of the future, his “oughts” are reserved for that which needs immediate intervention, but the concept of the child requires a different ethical time signature. When it comes to the newborn we are confronted with a whole host of immediate and long-range responsibilities that, according to Jonas, are “acute, unequivocal, and choiceless.”57 The newborn cries out to us in its helpless “need-to-become.”58 Or, as Jonas puts it: The radical insufficiency of the begotten as such carries with it the mandate to the begetters to avert its sinking back into nothing and to tend to its further becoming. The pledge thereto was implicit in the act of generation. Its observance (even by others) becomes an ineluctable duty toward a being now

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existing in its own authentic right and in total dependence on such observance. The immanent ought-to-be of the suckling, which his every breath proclaims, turns thus into the transitive ought-to-do of others who alone can help.59

And so we become beholden to the child until it can be wholly sufficient. It is, in short, our duty. We have an obligation, it is part of the unspoken commission of the human condition and its omission can have very clear and lethal consequences for the unprotected child. We thus feel an instinctive responsibility for a new life that cannot fend for itself. Jonas reminds us that with every newborn child, humanity begins anew, and with that comes our duty to the continuation of humankind. This is made most tangible and concrete on the level of the parentchild relation. This creates a clear and undeniable “ought” that must perpetuate the “is-ness” of all children. Jonas tells us: Thus the “ought” manifest in the infant enjoys indubitable evidence, concreteness, and urgency. Utmost facticity of “this-ness”’ utmost right thereto, and utmost fragility of being met here, together. In him it is paradigmatically evident that the locus of responsibility is the being that is immersed in becoming, surrounded by mortality, threatened by corruptibility. Not sub specie aeternitatis, rather sub specie temporis, this is how responsibility must look at things; and it can lose its all in the flash of an instant. In the case of continually critical vulnerability of being, as given in our paradigm, responsibility becomes a continuum of such instincts.60

You can, perhaps, begin to see how, out of this continuum, Jonas can easily move from the child before us to the children who will come after us. Our children’s children. It is through the continuum of our children and their children’s children that the concept of working for a sustainable future is no longer an abstraction but something that simply must be addressed. Part of the wisdom of Churchill, Kushner, and Washburn is in their intuitive foregrounding of the child as the concrete manifestation of the future. It is the child’s radical innocence (to borrow a phrase from Bond) that calls out to us and pierces our collective conscious. It is through the image and potential of the child that the argument is perhaps best grounded and articulated. This is the story that seems to have organically emerged slowly from playwright to playwright. There is nothing abstract about the suffering of a child, it goes against our very being, and because of this, it just might be our best chance at stirring the world to action. Despite all our myriad differences, it is the love of our children that we all share. It may very well be the last thing we as a species can agree upon. We may save ourselves through saving them.

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Resign My Life for This Life This, once again, puts me in mind of T. S. Eliot, this time with his luminous 1930 poem Marina, which is based on Shakespeare’s Pericles. The poem is narrated by the eponymous character of this play; it is he who consigns his infant daughter to a tiny boat in the hopes that it might carry her safely back to shore. Death surrounds both, but his fears are allayed by the face of his tiny baby girl. It seems, Eliot tells us, as distant as the stars and yet — miraculously — as near as the eye.61 This “this-ness” must be saved. It is the “is” that has found its “ought” in the father’s paternal protection; having crafted this tiny boat for her so that she might survive. We, like Pericles, are being tasked with tending to the future safety of our children. We must, as Eliot instructs, resign our life for this tiny life62 and cast it off toward a horizon of hope and possibility, allowing both vessel and child to venture ever forward into the great unknown.

Coda

And in the End I find it somewhat ironic that a book about the ending of things should be so very hard for me to finish. I suppose you could say that I have some issues with endings in general. Such narrative closure, from a psychoanalytical point of view, must be too subconsciously close to death for me. Perhaps this is why Scheherazade is my secret patron saint. She knew how to keep a story going. She did this for a celebrated thousand and one nights; a number that, for the Arabs, is a metaphor for infinity. In reality a thousand and one nights is actually two years, eight months, and twenty-eight evenings. This is still, narratively speaking, an impressive swath of temporality; enough time to birth three children, undo Scheherazade’s impending death, and change the murderous mind of King Shahryar. The book you now hold in your hand took roughly the same amount of time to compose, but is hardly as fruitful. There certainly are no children to show for it (!) and as far as changing any minds, that remains to be seen. Because of all this, I’ve decided to call these last pages a coda rather than a conclusion because conclusions sound so … well … damn conclusive. I’m not sure I can meet the expectation that comes with this latter term. What I can do is put forward several suspicions. Where to begin? Why not start with the questions my students inevitably ask, the first of which was briefly touched upon in the introduction of this book:

Aren’t We Just Preaching to the Choir? Yes. To a certain extent we are, but that’s not such a bad thing and — actually — it might be a very necessary thing. Why? Well, the converted can and often do lose faith. They give up or give in. To what? Usually to one of the following four

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isms: Cynicism (“we’re all too selfish to do the work that needs to get done”), pessimism (“It’s just too big a problem and too late to solve”), fatalism (“what difference does it make? It’s all going to end anyway”), or finally — and perhaps most perniciously — indifferentism (“I can’t be bothered with this now, I have other shit I gotta deal with”). On top of this we have the two deadly Ds: Denial (“It’s just too much to think about, so I won’t”) and distraction (“Hey, is that the brand-new Xbox One S model with 1 terabyte of internal memory and the ability to play Minecraft, Sea of Thieves, and Forza Horizon 3?”). So, as you can see, we have a lot of work to do just to make sure our folks keep the faith, don’t stray, and are reminded that they can still make a significant difference. We can do this, but it requires that we stay on message. And so our job as artists is to continue to warn, inform, update, cajole, inspire, and even inflame our base to stay engaged; otherwise they can too easily succumb to the same fatalism of Scranton and Franzen. You remember those two well-meaning authors who shook their heads in chapter four and told us, “Game Over.” The problem for them is simply too problematic. This — in and of itself — is a problem, especially if you are Catriona McKinnon, the environmental philosopher who warned us in the same chapter that what is repeatedly asserted as impossible becomes impossible. We artists must present the other side of the story, not only to the other side, but to ourselves.

And What About the Climate Deniers? Can They Ever be Won Over? I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that we have two great allies in this ongoing campaign to galvanize the world into saving the planet. Our first and perhaps most significant ally is the planet itself. This is a great partner to have on our side. It certainly is not shy when it comes to expressing how it is feeling about our current situation and has a powerful arsenal of persuasive means to make its points. Things like wild fires, flash floods, endless droughts, and other freak weather events. The force of these messages are pretty hard to ignore, especially since they become louder with each passing year. Surely, at some point, this will breach the barricades of even the most resolute of climate deniers; but, by the time this happens, will it be too late? Will we have missed our opportunity to make the changes necessary to right our climate wrongs? This is why we can’t leave the bulk of argument to be made by the planet on its own. The climate clock is ticking and so we have to carry an equal share of the proselytizing load. The

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other ally in this campaign is the children of our opponents who can still be won over. Remember, Edward Bond believes that we are all born into a state of what he calls radical innocence and we maintain this semi-pristine state throughout our early childhood. This is the best time to appeal to our children’s innate sense of right and wrong. This is what Asja Lācis did in the 1920s with orphans of the First World War and what Bertolt Brecht did just before the advent of the Second World War with the children of the Karl Marx School. It is what the protest singer Pete Seeger did in the 1950s. Do you know this story? It is one of my favorite anecdotes. Seeger, as you may know, was blacklisted in the 1950s for his radical leanings. He was banned from participating in any television, radio, or live performances. But the FBI allowed Seeger to do sing-alongs in public elementary schools across the nation. “What harm could that do?” they thought. Well, the answer is a whole lot. Seeger gently radicalized an entire generation of children who came of age in the 1960s and sang his protest songs at future rallies, marches, sit-ins, and other moments of spontaneous uprising. So, get to those kids, and they might eventually be the ones to teach their recalcitrant parents a thing or two about the fragility of our planet. Again, the climate clock keeps ticking, we don’t have time for them to grow up and do our work for them. But we can at least give them the ethical tools necessary to face a potentially compromised tomorrow.

So What You’re Saying Is that It Is Up to Us and a Bunch of Schoolchildren to Combat the Climate Crisis? No. I’m not so sure things are as binary as we are led to think. Certainly, there are those of us who are concerned about climate change and those of us who — for whatever reasons — remain unconvinced; but between these two opposing sides sits a third and very significant constituency. These are people who have yet to form an opinion or who feel impotent in doing anything about the current state of affairs. We may not be able to convince those on the opposite end to this spectrum of concern, but we still have a very good chance of reaching those in the center. We have to continue to alert and galvanize this broad swath of the planet’s populace. They can have a decisive impact in exerting more pressure on our governments and corporations to make good on their promises to truly combat global warming. And then? Well then, I’m with David Graeber (Direct Action and The Democracy Project), Cornelius Castoriadis (Society Adrift), and Srecko Horvat (Poetry From the Future): Think global but start local. Take our

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reduced carbon footprint into the streets. Start marching and stop buying. And while we’re marching and boycotting, don’t forget to engage in our ancient right of parrēsia. If it worked for Euripides and Foucault, it can work for us as well. But how do we get these folks to march in step with us? I think you know my answer:

Tell Stories I mean that’s our job, right? That’s one of the reason you’re reading this book: To find stories that can help inform, inspire, or unnerve us into action. I believe that the story remains one of humankind’s greatest inventions, right up there with fire and the wheel. Storytelling is made all the more glorious and impactful when it happens among other humans. It is as though each body has the ability to not only absorb the story but somehow amplify its potential significance. This puts me in mind of what George Marshall said in his incisive Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change. Toward the end of this book he gives a list of things we can do to make a difference. One of these is to “TELL STORIES. Stories remain the best way to engage and sway people.”1 Why? I suppose we could go down the rabbit hole of neurobiology to try to understand what makes our brains respond to stories, but I’d rather tell you a story about why stories are so effective. This is a true story where I am a peripheral character. These days I’m the chair of a theater program and as the chair of a theater program you end up listening to a lot of commencement speeches. One of the things I have discovered is that no matter how well intentioned these commencement speeches are, most are pretty deadly. They are usually filled with a rhetorical gumbo of advice, platitudes, bromides, factoids, statistics, warnings, half-baked jokes, and slightly off-putting “let me tell you(s).” About mid-way through such speeches you find yourself inevitably zoning out. This is true no matter how applicable the platitude, funny the joke, or dire the warning. At a certain point the words of the speaker become white noise, and one’s private thoughts regain the upper hand in the battle for our ongoing attention. As a result I can’t tell you a damn thing about most of these speeches I’ve heard over the past few years. The only speech I can remember is the one where the speaker decided to tell a story. Suddenly I found myself totally engaged with every word the speaker uttered. I turned to the persons on my left and right and discovered that they too were equally engrossed in the speaker’s tale. It was a story about a life lesson he learned in his youth. Suddenly we were completely won over by the depiction of

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our speaker as a young child. Mid-way through the tale, two potential outcomes appeared on the narrative horizon: One positive, one negative. Which would be the story’s end? The answer remained up for grabs and the tension in the auditorium was palpable, we were all leaning forward, hoping for the best, dreading the worst. In short: We were completely spellbound. This, to me, is the power of stories, they can engage you, change you, stay with you, and guide you for the rest of your life. When you stop to think about it, this propensity to make and receive stories is nothing short of miraculous; but due to the sheer ubiquity of our ever multiplying stories, we can easily forget their actual originality and necessity, yet they remain profound agents of change. Science and facts are persuasive, but when woven into the narrative fabric of a story, such as the opening chapter of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, they have the potential to transform the direction of an entire nation. So, are we all making stories in the hopes of arriving at the climate change equivalent of Carson’s Silent Spring? Sure, if that were to happen that would be amazing, but every story on this issue counts and it is ultimately the cumulative effect of all these stories that can do the trick and win over more of those folks from the center that we talked about. This is what Cornelius Castoriadis meant by impacting our social imaginary. It is changed story by story and if we “stay on story” we have the possibility to achieve a moment of historical metanoia. Such moments, as mentioned back in the intro to this book, are epochal shifts in our worldview; when the old ways of seeing crumble and a new vision of reality emerges. This is where our collective storytelling should be leading us. We need to find and invent stories that deal with this current crisis of ours. We need to share these stories everywhere we can: on our stages, television sets, movie screens, in our books and journals, through the internet, and at the water cooler. We need to tell stories about the end of our world and these stories need to inspire, incite, and console us. This last need for consolation is especially necessary these days. There are so many folks who are at a loss, searching for answers like little Vodya in Tony Kushner’s Slavs. When we last left her, she had wandered into the Soviet sector of heaven where she encountered the long-deceased members of the former PolitBureau. She confesses to them:

“I am Inexpressibly Sad, Grandfathers, Tell Me a Story.” Surely one of these ancient shades has a tale to tell that might help little Vodya with her grief. She looks from one to the next until her eyes fall upon Upgobkin. He confesses, “I have only one story, but I can say only that it happened, and

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not what it means.”2 Little Vodya does not yet understand that these are indeed the best kind of stories; hungry for any words of comfort, she climbs onto his lap to hear his tale. It is about young Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov who will grow up one day to become the great Lenin; but, in this story, he is still a mere boy, only seventeen years of age. We find him mourning the death of his beloved brother. In an attempt to cure his feelings of loss, he decides to read his elder sibling’s favorite book, a novel by the Russian author Chernyshevsky whose book posed: Upgobkin  The immortal question which Lenin asked and in asking stood the world on its head; the question which challenges us to both contemplation and, if we love the world, to action; the question which implies: Something is terribly wrong with the world, and avers: Human beings can change it; the question asked by the living and, apparently, by the fretful dead as well: What is to be done? Vodya (After a little pause) What is to be done? Prelapsarianov  Yes. What is to be done?3

This returns us to Zygmunt Bauman’s observation, “When I was young, we argued over what needed to be done. Today, the main question is who would be able to do it.”4 The answer from such thinkers as Castoriadis, Graeber, and Horvat is an emphatic: Us. We do this with the stories we tell, the actions we take, the leaders we become, the movements we organize, the cynicism we combat, the hopes we engender, and the visions we turn into reality. It is on all this that our future depends. It all begins with the right story. Find it. Share it. Spread it. And start changing the world.

Notes Introduction 1 Armen Avanessian, Anke Hennig, and Levi R. Bryant, Metanoia: A Speculative Ontology of Language, Thinking, and the Brain (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 4. 2 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 8. 3 Ibid., 9. 4 Ibid., 10. 5 Ibid., 11. 6 Ibid., 77–79. 7 Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 145. 8 Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge, UK and Medford, MA: Polity, 2020), 40. 9 Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 76. 10 Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 16.

Chapter 1 Lewis Dartnell, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm, reprint edition (New York: Penguin Books, 2015), 5–6. 2 Robert Garland, Surviving Greek Tragedy, illustrated edition (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2011), 100. 3 Ibid., 95. 4 Ezra Pound, Early Writings, ed. Ira Nadel (London: Penguin Classics, 2005), 259. 5 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume III, 1923–1928 (New York: Mariner Books, 1980), 247. 6 Valmiki, Ramayana Book One: Boyhood, trans. Robert Goldman, bilingual edition (New York: Clay Sanskrit, 2005), 5. 7 Ibid., 6. 1

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8 Rachel M. Atchley and Mary L. Hare, “Memory for Poetry: More than Meaning?” International Journal of Cognitive Linguistics 4, no. 1 (2013): 35–50. 9 Mark W. Edwards, Sound, Sense, and Rhythm: Listening to Greek and Latin Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 2. 10 Ibid., 2. 11 Milman Parry, The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, ed. Adam Parry, 1st edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 195. 12 Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, ed. Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy, 2nd edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 99. 13 Ibid., 99–100. 14 Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason, 1st edition (New York: FSG, 1997), 440. 15 Euripides, Euripides, VII, Fragments: Aegeus-Meleager, trans. Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp, bilingual edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 399–400. 16 Sophocles, Sophocles, III, Fragments, trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones, 1st edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 281. 17 Andrew Hui, A Theory of the Aphorism: From Confucius to Twitter, illustrated edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 6. 18 Aeschylus, Aeschylus, III, Fragments, trans. Alan H. Sommerstein, bilingual edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 149. 19 Sophocles, Sophocles, III, Fragments, 311. 20 Euripides, Euripides, VII, Fragments, 155. 21 Matthew Wright, The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy, Volume 1, Neglected Authors (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 241. 22 Ibid., 223. 23 Dartnell, The Knowledge, 7. 24 Franco Montanari, The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, ed. Madeleine Goh and Chad Schroeder, bilingual edition (Boston, MA: Brill, 2015), 1083. 25 Cicero, Cicero: On the Orator, Books I-II, trans. E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 465–467.

Chapter 2 1 Amit Majmudar, Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with Commentary, translation edition (New York: Knopf, 2018), B. 11.18, 87. 2 Ibid., B. 4.7–8, 37. 3 A. C. Woolner and Lakshman Sarup, preface to Thirteen Plays of Bhasa: Pratinnayaugandharayana, Svapnavasavadatta, Carudatta, Pancaratra, Madhyamavyayoga, Pratima-nataka, Dutavakya, Dutaghatotkaca, Karnabara,

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Urubhanga, Avimaraka, Balacarita, Abhiseka, by Basha, 2nd edition (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2015), vii. 4 Vyasa, Mahabharata Book Five, trans. Kathleen Garbutt, 1st edition (New York: Clay Sanskrit, 2008), 85. 5 Ibid., 77–79. 6 Ibid., 81. 7 Ibid., 259. 8 Bhāsa, “Dutavakyam,” Thirteen Plays of Bhasa, 11. 9 Vyasa, Mahabharata Book Five, 269–271. 10 Harsha and Bhāsa, How the Nagas Were Pleased & The Shattered Thighs, trans. Andrew Skilton (New York: Clay Sanskrit, 2009), 249–251. 11 Ibid., 251. 12 Ibid., 249. 13 Ibid., 261–263. 14 Vyasa, Mahabharata Book Nine, trans. Justin Meiland, illustrated edition (New York: Clay Sanskrit, 2007), 313. 15 Bhāsa, The Shattered Thighs, 271. 16 Ibid., 301. 17 Ibid., 303. 18 Ibid. 19 Dharamvir Bharati, Andha Yug: The Age of Darkness, trans. Alok Bhalla (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2010), 9–10. 20 Ibid., 27. 21 Ibid., 73. 22 Ibid., 74. 23 Ibid., 75. 24 Ibid., 82. 25 Ibid., 84. 26 Ibid., 102. 27 David Williams, ed., Peter Brook and the Mahabharata (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 50. 28 Ibid., 50–51. 29 Ibid., 51. 30 Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne, introduction to Battlefield (London: Nick Hern Books, 2018), 5–6. 31 Brooks and Estienne, Battlefield, 36. 32 Ibid. 33 Bharati, Andha Yug, 110. 34 Stephen Jay Gould et al., Conversations About the End of Time, ed. Cathernie David, Frederic Lenoir, and Jean-Philippe De Tonnac (New York: Fromm Intl, 2000), 102.

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35 Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, 1st paperback edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 194. 36 Ibid., 195. 37 Vyasa, Mahabharata, Books 10–11: Dead of Night & The Women, trans. Kate Crosby, illustrated edition (New York: Clay Sanskrit, 2009), 139. 38 Ibid., 141. 39 Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth, The Abolition, The Unconquerable World, ed. Martin J. Sherwin, combined edition (New York: Library of America, 2020), 47. 40 Ibid., 20. 41 Ibid., 21. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 68–69. 44 David Hare, “My Hero: Jonathan Schell by David Hare,” The Guardian, July 4, 2014, sec. Books, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/04/my-hero-jonathanschell-david-hare. 45 Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, 1st edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 123. 46 Ibid., 124.

Chapter 3 1 Harald Welzer, Climate Wars: What People Will Be Killed For in the 21st Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity, 2017), 76–77. 2 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “Mid-Year Trends 2020,” accessed January 26, 2022, https://www.unhcr.org/statistics/unhcrstats/5fc504d44/ mid-year-trends-2020.html, 2–3. 3 Ibid. 4 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “UNHCR — Refugee Statistics,” UNHCR, accessed February 22, 2022, https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/. 5 Jon Henley, “Climate Crisis Could Displace 1.2bn People by 2050, Report Warns,” The Guardian, September 9, 2020, sec. Environment, https://www.theguardian. com/environment/2020/sep/09/climate-crisis-could-displace-12bn-people-by2050-report-warns. 6 Euripides, Children of Herakles, trans. Henry Taylor and Robert A. Brooks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 29–30. 7 Ibid., 31. 8 Ibid., 33. 9 Ibid., 44. 10 Ibid., 64.

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11 Ibid., 65. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 66. 14 Ibid., 66–67. 15 Ibid., 67. 16 Ibid., 33. 17 Thucydides and Victor Davis Hanson, The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War, ed. Robert B. Strassler, trans. Richard Crawley, Touchstone edition (New York and London: Free Press, 1998), 199–200. 18 Zygmunt Bauman, Strangers at Our Door (Malden, MA: Polity, 2016), 76. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 73. 21 Zygmunt Bauman and Peter Haffner, Making the Familiar Unfamiliar: A Conversation with Peter Haffner, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge, UK and Medford, MA: Polity, 2020), 109. 22 Ibid., 108–109. 23 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 5th edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), 295–296. 24 Bauman, Strangers at Our Door, 84. 25 Ibid., 87. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 86. 28 Ibid., 76. 29 Florence Yoon and Thomas Harrison, Euripides: Children of Heracles (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 109–110. 30 Bryan Doerries, The Theater of War: What Ancient Tragedies Can Teach Us Today, Reprint edition (New York: Vintage, 2016), 7–8. 31 Ibid., 259. 32 Asja Lācis and Walter Benjamin, “Signals from Another World: Proletarian Theater as a Site for Education Texts by Asja Lācis and Walter Benjamin, with an Introduction by Andris Brinkmanis,” accessed January 29, 2022, http://www. documenta14.de/en/south/25225_signals_from_another_world_proletarian_ theater_as_a_site_for_education_texts_by_asja_la_cis_and_walter_benjamin_ with_an_introduction_by_andris_brinkmanis 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid.

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Chapter 4 1 Richard Beadle, The York Plays: A Critical Edition of the York Corpus Christi Play As Recorded in British Library Additional MS 35290, critical edition, vol. 2, 2 vols. (Oxford and New York: Early English Text Society, 2013), 449. 2 Ibid., 445–446. 3 Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 111–117. 4 Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, UK and Medford, MA: Polity, 2017), 213. 5 Ibid., 217. 6 Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrei Rublev (The Criterion Collection, 2018). 7 Jonathan Franzen, “Carbon Capture: Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?” The New Yorker, March 30, 2015, 44. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 52. 10 Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers, 2015), 68. 11 Jonathan Franzen, What If We Stopped Pretending? (New York: HarperCollins, 2021), 50. 12 Ibid., 55. 13 Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 27. 14 Ibid., 51. 15 Ibid., 62. 16 Ibid., 63. 17 Ibid., 67. 18 Ibid., 68. 19 Andreas Malm, How to Blow Up a Pipeline (London and New York: Verso, 2021), 143. 20 Ibid., 158–161. 21 Ibid., 159. 22 Ibid., 161. 23 Ibid. 24 Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future (New York: Crown, 2021), 200. 25 David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019), 60. 26 Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley, eds., The Towneley Plays I: Introduction and Text, revised edition (Oxford and New York: Early English Text Society, 2001), 25–26. 27 Ibid., 28.

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28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 29–30. 30 Ibid., 32. 31 Ibid., 33. 32 Ibid., 34. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 36. 35 Ibid., 40. 36 Ibid., 39. 37 T. S. Eliot, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: Volume 5: Tradition and Orthodoxy 1934–1939, ed. Ronald Schuchard, critical edition (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), 523. 38 Ibid., 523–524. 39 Ibid., 527. 40 Stevens and Cawley, The Towneley Plays I, 44. 41 Ibid., 46. 42 Catriona McKinnon, “Climate Change: Against Despair,” Ethics & the Environment 19, no. 1 (2014), 34. 43 Ibid., 45. 44 Ibid. 45 Eliot, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: Volume 5, 528, 46 Ibid. 47 Margaret Rogerson, Playing a Part in History: The York Mysteries, 1951–2006 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 3. 48 Ibid., 163.

Chapter 5 1 William Hansen, Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 73. 2 Ibid. 3 W. H. Auden, The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, Volume III, Prose: 1949–1955, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 43. 4 Michel Foucault, History of Madness (New York: Routledge, 2006), 8. 5 Ibid., 11. 6 Auden, The Complete Works of W. H. Auden, Volume III, 43. 7 William Shakespeare, “The Tempest,” Arden Shakespeare Third Series Complete Works, ed. Ann Thompson et al. (London and New York: The Arden Shakespeare, 2020), I.1.1–5, 1221.

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8 Ibid., I.1.16–17, 1221. 9 Ibid., I.1.20–26, 1221. 10 David Pogue, How to Prepare for Climate Change: A Practical Guide to Surviving the Chaos (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021), 447. 11 Ibid., 448. 12 Ibid. 13 Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 1–26. 14 Shakespeare, “The Tempest,” I.2.76–77, 1222. 15 Ibid., I.2.167, 1223. 16 Ibid., I.2.333–339, 1225. 17 Ibid., I.2.342–345. 1225. 18 Ibid., I.2.364–365, 1225. 19 Ibid., II.1.145, 1228. 20 Ibid., II.1.149–157, 1228. 21 Ibid., II.1.161–166, 1228. 22 Ibid., II.1.269–277, 1230. 23 Ibid., II.1.294–295, 1230. 24 Simon Leys, The Wreck of the Batavia: A True Story (Melbourne, Vic: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005), 30–31. 25 Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History, trans. Erica Moore and Elizabeth Manton (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 2021), 22–38. 26 Rutger Bregman, “The Real Lord of the Flies: What Happened When Six Boys Were Shipwrecked for 15 Months,” The Guardian, May 9, 2020, sec. Books, https://www. theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happenedwhen-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months. 27 Shakespeare, “The Tempest,” I.2.5–13, 1221. 28 Ibid., I.2.221–224, 1224. 29 Ibid., IV.1.48–49, 1236. 30 Ibid., V.1.11–30, 1239. 31 Ibid., IV.1.224, 1238. 32 Ibid., V.1.296–298, 1242. 33 Ibid., I.2.212–214,1223. 34 Ibid., I.2.429–434, 1226. 35 Ibid., II.2.21–24, 1232. 36 Ibid., IV.1.139–143, 1237. 37 Ibid., IV.1.144–146, 1238. 38 Ibid., IV.1.149–158, 1238. 39 Ibid., V.1.169–174, 1241. 40 Ibid., V.1.182–183, 1241.

Notes 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

245

Ibid., V.1.184, 1241. Ibid., V.1.320, 1242. Ibid., Epilogue.1–5, 1242. Ibid., Epilogue.5–13, 1242. Ibid., Epilogue.13–16, 1242. Ibid., Epilogue.18–17, 1242. Ibid., Epilogue.19–20, 1242. Ibid., 3.2.136–144, 1234. Aimé Césaire, A Tempest: Based on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest;” Adaptation for a Black Theatre, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2002), 18. 50 Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 6. 51 Ibid., 16, 23. 52 Shakespeare, “The Tempest,” I.2.338–339, 1225. 53 Ibid., II.2.146, 1232. 54 Ibid., II.2.158–159, 1232. 55 David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-ThanHuman World (New York: Vintage, 1997), 140–141. 56 Ibid., 69. 57 James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, illustrated edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 9. 58 Ibid., 10. 59 Ailton Krenak, Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, trans. Anthony Doyle (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2020), 5. 60 Ibid., 6. 61 Ibid., 7. 62 Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, trans. Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy, illustrated edition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013), 255–256. 63 Arne Næss, with Per Ingvar Haukeland, Life’s Philosophy: Reason and Feeling in a Deeper World, with a foreword by Bill McKibben, and an introduction by Harold Glasser, trans. Roland Huntford (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 92. 64 Arne Naess, The Ecology of Wisdom: Writings by Arne Naess, ed. Alan Drengson and Bill Devall (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2010), 105–119. 65 Naess, Life’s Philosophy, 113. 66 Ibid., 106. 67 Krenak, Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, 45. 68 Ibid., 50–51. 69 Thich Nhat Hanh and Alan Weisman, The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 2004), 71.

246

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70 Ibid., 84. 71 Ibid., 125.

Chapter 6 1 Walter Benjamin, Radio Benjamin, ed. Lecia Rosenthal, trans. Jonathan Lutes (London and New York: Verso, 2014), 158. 2 Ibid., 161. 3 Ibid., 162. 4 Mark Molesky, This Gulf of Fire: The Great Lisbon Earthquake, or Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason (New York: Vintage, 2016), 126. 5 Emmanuel Carrère, Lives Other than My Own, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Co, 2011), 9. 6 Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 9–11. 7 Voltaire, “Voltaire — Poem on the Lisbon Disaster 2018,” trans. Antony Lyon, n.d., https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55316a91e4b06d7c3b435f17/t/5f0b98212d62 35002623d7dd/1594595362627/Voltaire+-+Poem+on+the+Lisbon+Disaster.pdf. 8 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2015), 22. 9 Immanuel Kant et al., Natural Science, Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 330. 10 Ralph Hyde, Paper Peepshows: The Jacqueline and Jonathan Gestetner Collection (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2015), 10. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 12. 13 Ibid., 14. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 15. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Richard Balzer, Peepshows: A Visual History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 26. 22 Jean Nicolas Bouilly and Alexandre Piccinni, Le Désastre de Lisbonne: Drame Héroïque, En Trois Actes, En Prose, Mêlé de Danse et Pantomime, trans. Laurence Marie (New York: Nabu Press, 2011), 30.

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23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 37. 27 Ibid. 28 David Lochbaum and Edwin Lyman, Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster (New York: New Press, 2015), 13. 29 Kazuto Tatsuta and Stephen Paul, Ichi-F: A Worker’s Graphic Memoir of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant (New York: Kodansha Comics, 2017), 20–21. 30 Jean-Luc Nancy, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 3–4. 31 Iwasaburō Kōso, Radiation and Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 18. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 52. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 53.

Chapter 7 1 John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 11–12. 2 Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 618. 3 Ibid., 620. 4 Ibid. 5 Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, trans. J. G. Nichols (New York: Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 9. 6 John Wilson, The City of the Plague, and Other Poems (Indianapolis: Alpha Editions, 2020), 4. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 5. 9 Ibid., 19. 10 Alexander Pushkin, Boris Godunov and Other Dramatic Works, trans. James E. Falen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 167. 11 Ibid., 168. 12 Ibid.

248

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13 Ibid., 168–169. 14 Ibid., 169. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 170. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 172. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 173. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 174. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 175. 31 Wilson, The City of the Plague, 58. 32 Ibid. 33 Pushkin, Boris Godunov and Other Dramatic Works, 175. 34 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), x. 35 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 9. 36 Peter Reed and David Rothenberg, eds., Wisdom in The Open Air: The Norwegian Roots of Deep Ecology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 43. 37 Ibid., 55. 38 Ibid., 56. 39 Ibid., 57. 40 Ibid., 51. 41 Ibid., 52. 42 David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 18. 43 Ibid., 199. 44 Ibid., 199–200. 45 Brassier, Nihil Unbound, xi. 46 Ibid., 228. 47 Naess, Is it Painful to Think, 86–87. 48 Ibid., 88. 49 Ibid., 89.

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Chapter 8 1 James Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 30. 2 Arthur Miller, An Enemy of the People, reprint edition (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 7. 3 Evert Sprinchorn, Ibsen’s Kingdom: The Man and His Works (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021), 329. 4 H. G. Kohler, “Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People and Eduard Meissner’s Expulsion from Teplitz,” British Medical Journal 300, no. 6732 (April 28, 1990): 1123–1126, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.300.6732.1123 5 Henrik Ibsen, “Women and Marxism: Eleanor Marx — An Enemy of Society — Act 4,” trans. Eleanor Marx-Aveling, accessed February 8, 2022, https://www.marxists. org/archive/eleanor-marx/works/enemy/act04.htm. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Henrik Ibsen, Ibsen on Theatre (London: Nick Hern Books, 2018), 10. 13 Ibsen, “Women and Marxism: Eleanor Marx.” 14 Ibid. 15 Ibsen, Ibsen on Theatre, 11. 16 Ibid., 12. 17 Arthur Miller, An Enemy of the People, Act 2, Scene 2, 94–95. 18 Rachel Carson, Rachel Carson: Silent Spring & Other Writings on the Environment, ed. Sandra Steingraber, illustrated edition (New York: Library of America, 2018), xx. 19 Ibid., 380. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 381. 22 Ibid., 9. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 10. 25 Ibid., 11. 26 Michel Foucault and Frédéric Gros, “Discourse and Truth” and “Parrēsia,” ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini, trans. Nancy Luxon (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 39–40. 27 Ibid., 40.

250

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28 Ibid., 45. 29 Carson, Silent Spring, 346. 30 Ibid., 346–347.

Chapter 9 1 Nicholas Moravcevich, “Chekhov and Naturalism: From Affinity to Divergence,” Comparative Drama 4, no. 4 (1970), 223. 2 Anton Chekhov, How To Write Like Chekhov, ed. Piero Brunello (Boston, MA: Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2008), 127. 3 Ibid. 4 Janet Malcolm, Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (New York: Random House, 2002), 21. 5 Ronald Hingley, appendix iv to Uncle Vanya: Three Sisters. The Cherry Orchard. The Wood-Demon, by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, The Oxford Chekhov, volume. 3 (London: Oxford University Press, 1985), 317. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 320. 9 Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, “The Cherry Orchard,” The Plays of Anton Chekhov, trans. Paul Schmidt (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), 358. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 359. 12 Ibid., 345. 13 Ibid., 353. 14 Ibid., 385. 15 Ibid., 381. 16 George Marshall, Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 82. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 83. 19 Ibid., 84. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 85. 22 Ibid., 207. 23 Ibid., 208. 24 Ibid., 209. 25 Ibid., 210. 26 Ibid.

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27 Ibid., 46. 28 Ibid., 47. 29 Ibid., 46. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 47. 32 Ibid., 57. 33 Ibid., 231. 34 Ibid., 231–238.

Chapter 10 1 Bertolt Brecht, The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, trans. David Constantine and Tom Kuhn (New York: Liveright, 2018), 82. 2 Ibid. 3 Joy H. Calico, Brecht at the Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 180. 4 Bertolt Brecht, Brecht Collected Plays: 3: Lindbergh’s Flight; The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent; He Said Yes/He Said No; The Decision; The Mother; The Exception & the Rule; The Horatians & the Curiatians; St Joan of the Stockyards, ed. John Willett (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 347. 5 Ibid., 345–346. 6 Ibid., 346. 7 Ibid., 346. 8 Calico, Brecht at the Opera, 33. 9 Arthur Waley, “Tanikō (The Valley-Hurling),” Noh Plays of Japan (Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 2011), 172. 10 Ibid., 172–173. 11 Brecht, “He Said Yes/He Said No,” Collected Plays: 3, 53–54. 12 Ibid., 336. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 337. 15 Ibid., 59. 16 Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, trans. Keith Gessen (Normal, IL: Picador, 2006), 34. 17 Ibid., 38. 18 Ibid., 40. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 44. 21 Ibid., 42.

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22 Ibid., 136–137. 23 Ibid., 34. 24 Ibid., 50. 25 Ibid., 35. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 46. 28 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 21. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 114–115. 31 Ibid., 145. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, 95. 36 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 127–128. 37 Ibid., 129. 38 Ibid. 39 Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, 41. 40 Ibid., 204.

Chapter 11 1 Samuel Beckett, “Happy Days,” The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber & Faber, 2006), 138. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 S. E. Gontarski, Beckett’s Happy Days: A Manuscript Study (Columbus: Publications Committee, Ohio State University Libraries, 1977), 50. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 40. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 43. 12 Ibid., 54. 13 Ibid.

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14 Beckett, “Happy Days,” 152. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 154. 17 Gontarski, Beckett’s Happy Days, 50. 18 Kate Brown, Manual for Survival: An Environmental History of the Chernobyl Disaster (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 104. 19 Ibid., 105. 20 Ibid. 21 Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl, 89–90. 22 Ibid., 118. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 203–204. 25 Ibid., 89. 26 Ibid., 92. 27 Ibid., x. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 156. 30 Macfarlane, Underland, 399. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 398. 34 Ibid., 411. 35 Ibid., 412. 36 Ibid., 413. 37 Edward Bond, “The War Plays,” Bond Plays: 6: The War Plays; Choruses from After the Assassinations (London: A&C Black, 2013), 51. 38 Ibid., 52. 39 Ibid., 53. 40 Ibid., 53–54. 41 Ibid., 72. 42 Ibid., 86. 43 Ibid., 88. 44 Ibid., 96. 45 Ibid., 98. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 251. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 253–254. 50 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 1.

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51 Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 2000), 1. 52 Bauman, Making the Familiar Unfamiliar, 73. 53 Ibid., 75. 54 Ibid., 73. 55 Cornelius Castoriadis, A Society Adrift: Interviews and Debates, 1974-1997 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 114. 56 Ibid. 57 Bauman, Making the Familiar Unfamiliar, 74. 58 Castoriadis, A Society Adrift, 122. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 123. 61 Ibid., 199. 62 Ibid., 124. 63 David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (London: Penguin, 2013), 275. 64 Ibid., 275. 65 Ibid., 277. 66 Castoriadis, A Society Adrift, 116. 67 Graeber, The Democracy Project, 273. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 Srećko Horvat, Poetry from the Future (London: Penguin, 2019), 122. 72 Ibid., 123. 73 Ibid., 127–128. 74 Ibid., 128–129. 75 Hanh, The World We Have, 71. 76 Ibid., 72. 77 Ibid., 67. 78 Ibid., 90. 79 “Tours to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant — ChNPP-TOUR » CHERNOBYL TOUR 2020 — Trips to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, to the Pripyat Town, ChNPP. (Ex. CHERNOBYL TOUR),” accessed February 13, 2022, https://www.chernobyl-tour.com/tours_to_chernobyl_nuclear_power_plant_ en.html. 80 T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I (London: Faber & Faber, 2015), 84.

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Chapter 12 1 José Rivera, “Marisol,” Marisol and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997), 15. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Tony Kushner, “Angels in America,” By Tony Kushner — Angels in America, a Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Millennium Approaches/Perestroika (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2003), 177. 5 Ibid., 178. 6 Ibid., 265–266. 7 Rivera, “Marisol,” 16. 8 Ibid., 17. 9 Philip Roberts, About Churchill (London: Faber & Faber, 2008), 168. 10 Caryl Churchill, “Abortive,” Churchill Shorts: Lovesick, Abortive, Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen, Schreber’s Nervous Illness, The Hospital at the Time of the Revolution, The Judge’s Wife, The After-Dinner Joke, Seagulls, Three More Sleepless Nights, Hot Fudge (London: Nick Hern Books, 1992), 41. 11 Churchill, “Not Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen,” 45. 12 Caryl Churchill, Far Away (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001), 3. 13 Ibid., 23. 14 Ibid., 24. 15 Ibid., 28. 16 Ibid., 29. 17 Ibid., 34. 18 J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. by Donald Nicolson-Smith (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973), 118. 19 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Phil Beitchman, Paul Foss, and Paul Patton (New York: Semiotext, 1983). 20 Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, Revised Edition: Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade (New York and Cambridge, MA: Semiotext, 2007), 26. 21 Ibid., 26. 22 Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, Revised, updated edition (London: Verso, 2011). 23 Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl, 35. 24 Ibid., 131. 25 Roberts, About Churchill, xxvi. 26 Ibid. 27 Churchill, Far Away, 36–37.

256

Notes

28 Ibid., 37. 29 Ibid., 38. 30 Anne Washburn, “Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play,” Mr. Burns and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2017), 128. 31 Ibid., 128. 32 Ibid., 141. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 144. 35 Ibid., 152. 36 Ibid., 183. 37 Ibid., 200–201. 38 Ibid., 201. 39 Ibid., 203. 40 Ibid., 226. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 227. 44 Ibid. 45 Brodsky, On Grief and Reason, 440. 46 Vladimir Nabokov, Nabokov: Novels 1955–1962: Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire (New York: Library of America, 1996), 648–649. 47 Tony Kushner, Slavs!: Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1996), 35. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 39. 50 Ibid., 40. 51 Ibid., 42. 52 Ibid., 43. 53 Ibid., 44. 54 Ibid., 45. 55 Ibid., 51. 56 Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 134. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 135. 61 T. S. Eliot, “Marina,” 107–108. 62 Ibid.

Notes

Coda 1 Marshall, Don’t Even Think About It, 233. 2 Kushner, Slavs!, 52. 3 Ibid., 52–53. 4 Bauman, Making the Unfamiliar Familiar, 74.

257

Index Abram, David 108 Aeschylus 26, 27 After Fukushima 124 Alberti, Leon Battista 119 Alexievich, Svetlana 12, 187, 188, 198, 199, 218 Alexiou, Margaret 24 Alta River 111 Anders, Günther 74–5 Andha Yug 37–9 Anthropocene, definition 13–15 Anthropocene age 12, 13–15, 107, 147 ethics 182–3, 187, 189, 190 see also ecology, deep aporia 62 Arendt, Hannah 11, 60, 181 arkhé kakón 51 Arms Control Association 48 Atchley, Rachel 23 Auden, W. H. 89–90 audiences 9–10, 182, 187 ancient times 25, 57–9, 62–4, 67 faith 73–4, 82, 84, 86, 104 young 114 see also townsfolk Avanessian, Armen 4 Ballard, J. G. 205 Balzer, R. 119 Basha 11 Batavia 95–6 Battlefield, The 41–2 Baudrillard, Jean, 217 Bauman, Zygmunt 11, 59–61, 192–3, 207, 236 Beauvoir, Simone de 48 Becker, Ernest 174, 217 Beckett, Samuel 12, 195–6, 199–200, 224 Happy Days 197 Beckett’s Happy Days: A Manuscript Study 196 ­Beckwith, Sarah 74

Benatar, David 145–6 Benjamin, Walter 6 114, 167 Besprisorniki 66 Bharati, Dharamvir 42–3 see also Andha Yug Bhāsa 32–7 biodiversity 194 Black Death 131–5 Black Lives Matter 209 Bleuler, Eugene 217 Boccaccio, Giovanni 133–4 Bond, Edward 12, 195–6, 224, 233 coming community 206–8 new beginnings or radical innocence 205–6 War Plays 201–2 Bouilly, Jean-Nicolas 12, 120 Brassier, Ray 143–4, 146–8 Brecht, Bertolt 12, 67, 181–2, 190, 224 discussions at Karl Marx School 185–6 ethics, justice and shared responsibility 193–4 He Who Says Yes 183–5, 186–7 Lehrstücktheorie 182–3 Brecht at the Opera 183 Bregman, Rutger 97, 206 Brodsky, Joseph 24, 223 Brook, Peter 39–42 Brown, Kate 198 Brown, Michael 91 Bruce, Brenda 196 Brunelleschi, Filippo 119 Burroughs, William 223 Caliban 99–101, 106–9 Calico, Joy H. 183 Camus, Albert 134 capitalism 6, 14, 205–7, 219, 225 Brecht 181, 190 Capitalocene, definition 13–15 caring, for all life 110–12 Carrère, Emmanuel 115

Index Carrier, Jean-Claude 40, 42 Carson, Rachel 12, 48, 159–62, 235 Castoriadis, Cornelius 8–9, 207–8, 209, 233, 236 catastrophe 27–8 Century-City-Cineplex-Effect 7 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 12, 14, 193 change 7–8, 98–9 change, agents of 235 Chekhov, Anton 12, 164–5 ­The Cherry Orchard 166–8 history repeated 169–70 Three Sisters 165–6 Chernobyl 123, 187–9, 197–9, 211–12 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai 236 Cherry Orchard, The 166–8, 197, 225 “Didn’t realise” 170–2 history repeated 169–70 past and future 168–9 Chien Andalou, Un 195 children 224–5, 229–30 see also parent-child relations children (schoolchildren) 233–4 Children of Herakles 53–9 Sellars 63–4 chorus, Greek 56–9, 62 Churchill, Caryl 12, 214–15, 217, 218–20, 224, 229 Cicero 28 citizens 207 City of the Plague, The 135–7 Civilians Theater Company 220 Classic Stage Company 11 climate change Chakrabarty 193 McKinnon 86–7 climate change (crisis) 4, 14, 45, 192, 232–5 Franzen 75 Horvat 209–10 Scranton, Roy 75, 76–7, 232 Welzer 52 Climate of History in a Planetary Age, The 193 climate sinners 75–8 climate wars 52 Climate Wars; What people Will Be Killed For in the 21st Century 51–2 Cloud Nine 220 Cloud technology 224

259

Cohen, Stanley 173 Cold War 48, 210 collapse 43–5 Collapse of Complex Societies, The 44 Columbia University 191 Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases In a World Out of Balance, The 131–2 Communal Theater of the Future 65–7 Communauté Désoeuvrée, La 206 Communauté Inavouable, La 206 communism 205, 206–7 communities 9, 10, 64, 65, 193 Bond 206–8 sense of 67 ­conservation 173 Cornelisz, Jeronimus 96–7 Cornerstone Theater 65 Corpus Christi festival 88 Covid-19 132–3, 146 Critique of Pure Reason, The 117 Crutzen, Paul 13 culture, ancient 19–20, 78–9 catastrophe 27–8 gnómai 24–6 Greek 20–2 rhythm 22–4 cynicism 232, 236 Dartnell, Lewis 19 Davy, Charles 114 Day, Francis 195 Day After, The 47 deBessonet, Lear 65 Debt: The First Five Thousand Years 208 Decameron, The 133 deep ecology 110–12 Deer Park Monastery 210 Defoe, Daniel 134 Deleuze, Gilles 217 Democracy Project, The 208, 233 denial 4–5, 174–5, 216, 224–5, 232 Denial of Death 217 deniers, climate 232–3 Deraniyagala, Sonali 115 Désastre de Lisbon: drame héroïque, entrois actes, en prose, mêlé de danse et pantomime, Le 120 dharma 31–2 diasporas 50–1, 62–3 Children of Herakles 53–9

260

Index

Kant 61–2 refugees 59–61 Direct Action 233 Doerries, Bryan 64 Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change 234 Doomsday Clock 48 Dr. Stockman 153–6 Miller adaptation 157–8 droughts 49, 232 Durkheim, Emile 9 Earth, definition 13–15 Earthquake in Chile, The 117 earthquakes 113–14 fallout, Fukushima a decade on 125–7 Fukushima as true beginning of twenty-first century 122–3 ­Fukushima from philosophers point of view 124–5 Fukushima in 2011 123–4 Lisbon earthquake as spectacle 120–1 Lisbon earthquake in philosophy, literature, and theater 116–18 miniature theaters of eighteenth century 118–20 ecology, deep 110–12 ecosystems, global 75 Edwards Mark 23 Ehrlich, Paul 175 Eisler, Hans 183 Elliot, T.S. 84, 87–8, 212, 230 Enemy of the People, An 150–51, 156–7, 225 historical origins 151–3 Miller adaptation 157–8 Teplitz 153–6 Engelbrecht, Martin 118 Enlightenment 116, 143 Environmental Realists 77, 82 Erectheus 24–5 Escaped Alone 215 ethics 12, 171, 181–2, 186–7, 228 Arendt, Hannah 11, 60, 181 justice and shared responsibility 193–4 Kant, Immanuel 59, 61–2, 117 Levinas 189–91 from Other to Planet 191–2

Euripides 11, 24, 26 see also Children of Herakles Extinction Rebels 77 faith 83, 86, 231–2 Falling Sky, The 110 Fanon, Frantz 77 Far Away 215–16, 218, 220, 225 fatalism 232 Fate of the Earth, The 46, 47 fear 214–16 Feast in Time of Plague, A 135–6 The City of the Plague 135–7 Ferdinand 99–101 fires 22, 49, 232 floods 49, 78–9, 83–4, 232 forests 108 Forests Think 107 Foucault, Michel 89, 162, 234 Franzen, Jonathan 11, 75, 76, 232 French Revolution 120 Freud, Sigmund 216–17 Fukushima 122–7, 197, 200 Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster 122 ­Future of Humanity Institute 174 Gaia hypothesis 109–10, 192 Gandhi 2 Gandhi, Mahatma 36–37 Garland, Robert 21 Garrett, Laurie 131–2, 133 Gelände, Ende 77 Ghosh, Amitav 4–5, 7, 48 Gilbert, Daniel 175 global warming 5, 161, 166, 192, 207, 233 refugees 45, 52 social imaginery 8–10 globalization 132, 192, 207 gnómai 24–6, 223 Godse, Nathuram Vinayak 37 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 141 Golding, William 91, 97, 109, 205, 206 Gontarski, S. E. 196 Graeber, David 208–09, 233, 236 Gramsci, Antonio 9 Great Custom 184, 186, 187, 188 Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, The 131

Index

261

Greek culture 20–2 final days of Athenian hegemony 51–2 Greek Spring 209

Jonas, Hans 12, 228–9 Journal of the Plague Year 134 justice 193–4

Han, Byung-Chul 9 Hanh, Tich Nhat 112, 210–11 happiness 225–8 Happy Days 197, 225 Haraway, Donna 126 Hare, David 48 Hare, Mary L. 23 Hauptman, Elizabeth 184 He Who Says Yes 183–7 Heidegger, Martin 190 Hennig, Anke 4 Henry (Old Henry) 119 Hillman, Mayer 172 Hindemith, Carl 183 Hollow Men, The 212 Homer 223 hope 87, 236 Horvat, Srećko 209–10, 233, 236 hosts (host countries) 53, 56 How to Blow Up a Pipeline 77 How to Prepare for Climate Change: A Pratical Guide to Surviving the Chaos 90 Hui, Andrew 25 human lives 193 Humankind: A Hopeful Story 97 ­humor 84–5 Hurricane Katrina 90 hysteria 217

Kafka, Franz 200–1 Kahneman, Daniel 175–6 Kant, Immanuel 59, 61–2, 117 Karl Marx School for Children 185–6, 233 Kelly, John 131 Kleist, Heinrich von 117 Knowledge, The 19 Knowlson, James 195 Kohn, Eduardo 107–8 Kohso, Sabu 123, 125, 126–7 koinos kosmos 40–1, 43 Kolbert, Elizabeth 77–8 Kopenawa, Davi 110 Kosho, Sabu 12 Krenak, Ailton 11, 110, 111–12 Kurukshetra see Mahābhāratas Kushner, Tony 12, 213–14, 225, 226, 229

Ibsen, Henrik 12, 164, 224 see also Enemy of the People An idios kosmos 40–2 Iliad 223 immortality project 174 Indigenous peoples 109–10 innocence, radical 205–6 Inquiry into Modes of Existence 92 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement 47–8 International Atomic Energy Agency 123 Iron, Age of 50–1 islands 91–2, 97 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich 143 Jaeger, Marcel 217

Lācis, Asja 65–7, 182, 233 Last Man, The 134 Latour, Bruno 74–5, 92 leaders 189 Learning to Die in the Anthropocene 75 Lehrstücke 182–3, 187 see also Brecht, Bertolt Letter to Horace 24 Levinas, Emmanuel 12, 189–91, 193, 228 Ley, Simon 96 Lisbon Disaster; Or an Inquiry into the Axiom, “All is Well,” The 116–17 ­Lisbon earthquake in philosophy, literature and theater 116–18 as spectacle 120–1 literature, plague 133–5 Little Tragedies, The 134–5 Lives Other Than My Own 115 Lord, Alfred 24 Lord of the Flies 91, 97, 109, 205, 206 Lorenz, Konrad 205 Lovelock, James 26, 109 Macfarlane, Robert 13–14, 200 Mad Forest 220 madness 216–18

262 Mahābhāratas 29–30, 48–9 Andha Yug 37–9 beginning of the end 30–1 Bharati 42–3 Bhāsa 32–7 Brook 39–42 dharma 31–2 Malm, Andreas 77 Manual For Survival 198 Marshall, George 12, 172–4, 176–7, 234 Marshall Islands 191 mass movements, spontaneous 208–210 Master of Revels 140–1 McBean, Angus 195 McKibben, Bill 174–5 McKinnon, Catriona 11, 77, 86–87, 232 Medieval Mystery Plays 11, 71–2 climate sinners 75–8 Doomsday Plays 11, 73 Elliot 87–8 humor 84–5 Noah 78–83 Mercers (merchants) 73 metanoia 3–4, 8, 9 meta-silence 173 migration 52 militarization 48 Military, US 64 Miller, Arthur 157–8 morality 61, 62, 189 movements, mass 208–10, 236 Mr Burns Post Electric Play 11, 220–1, 225 Müller, Heinrich Friedrich 118 Muller, Phillip 191 music 183 Naess, Arne 11, 110–11, 148–9 ­Naessenthaler, Johann David 118 Nancy, Jean-Luc 124–5, 206 natural resources see resources, natural Nelson, Richard 108 New Yorker 75, 160 Nicolas V, Pope 21 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 25, 139, 144, 145 Nihil Unbound 143 Nihilism 143–4, 146–8 Noah 78–86 Norgaard, Kari 173

Index Norway 173 Not . . . Not . . . Not . . . Not . . . Not . . . Enough Oxygen 215 nuclear arms 45–8 Number A, 215 Nutmeg’s Curse, The 48 obedience plays 181, 187–8, 190 see also He Who Says Yes Occupy Wall Street 208, 209 Oedipus at Colonus 145 oil industry 173 On Aggression 205 On Opposition Between Morality and Politics with Respect to Perpetual Peace 61 Oppenheimer, Robert J. 45 paratheatrical practices 63–5 parent-child relation 228–9 parrēsia 162–3, 234 Parry, Milman 23–4 pathogens, microscopic 133 peepshows 118, 119 performers 182 philosophy 12, 40–1, 61, 116, 144 Arendt, Hannah 11, 60, 181 Brassier 147 Kant, Immanuel 59, 61–2, 117 Levinas 190 Naess 148 Žižek 217 Piccinni, Alexandre 120 Plague 131–3 Literature 133–5 Medieval 131 Modern 132 Plague, The 134 Plato 89 Poetry From the Future 233 Pogue, David 90–1 politics 13, 61, 93, 207 ­Brecht 193 Deleuze 217 Graeber 209 Pound, Ezra 22 poverty 132 Prospero 104–6 protest movements 111 protest songs 233

Index protesters 77 Public Theater 10, 65 Pushkin, Alexander see Feast in Time of Plague A Radiation and Revolution 125 Ramayana, The 22–3 Ramboldi, Benvenuto 21 Rauch, Bill 65 refugees 21, 51, 52, 53, 59–61 Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern 84 resources, natural 48 responsibility 190 parent-child relation 228–9 shared 193–4 revolutions 208 Ritual Lament in the Greek Tradition, The 24 Rivera, José 12, 213–14 Romanticism 140–1 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 116–17, 124 Satyagraha 2–3 Saved 201 schizophrenia 217 Schmidt, Paul 170 Schnell, Jonathan 11, 46, 47, 48 Schreber, Daniel Paul 217 Schreber’s Nervous Illness 217 science 235 Scranton, Roy 75, 76–7, 232 Schwarze Pump storming 77 Second Sex, The 48 Secundus the Silent 89 Seeger, Pete 233 self-sacrifice 189 Sellars, Peter 63 Shakespeare, William 8, 9, 11, 90–107, 117, 230 shared responsibility 193–4 Shelley, Mary 134 ships, as metaphor 89–91 shipwrecks 92–6, 97 Signifying God: Social Relation and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays 74 Silent Spring 48, 235 ­Simonides 27–8 Simpsons, The 220–2

263

Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness 225–8 social imaginery 8–10 social movements 236 socialism 181, 190, 207 Society Adrift 233 soldiers 188, 198, 199, 218 songs, protest 233 Sophocles 25, 26, 145 Spell of the Sensuous, The 108 spontaneous mass movements 208–10 Stoermer, Eugene 13 Stone, I. E. 132 storytelling 224, 231, 234–6 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) 48 subjects 218–19 sublimation 174–5 Sueko, Seema 67 survival 91–2 Surviving Greek Tragedy 21 sustainability 194 sympathy 98–9 Tainter, Joseph A. 11, 44, 76 Tarkovsky, Andrei 74 Tatsuta, Kazuto 123–4 Tattersall, Ian 175 technology 132, 210, 219, 224 teleoramas 118 Tempest The Caliban 106–9 Caliban and Ferdinand 99–101 deep ecology 110–12 final moments 102–3 first shipwreck 92–4 Gaia hypothesis 109–10 historical examples 96–7 Prospero’s last words 104–6 ships as metaphor 89–91 survival on fictional island 91–2 sympathy as catalyst for change 98–9 Teplitz 153–6 Theater of War Project 64 theaters 9–10 miniature 118–20 Theory of Aphorisms, A 25 Three Penny Opera, The 181 Three Sisters 165–6

264 Tin Can People, The 225 ­Tooby, John 175 Totality and Infinity 189 tours, guided 211–2 townsfolk 72 toy theaters see theaters, miniature tragedy, Greek 6, 24 transcendence 84–5 tsunamis 114–15 uncertainty 133 Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future 77–8 Underland: A Deep Time Journey 200 Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, The 78 Union of Concerned Scientists 48 United Nations (UN) Climate Summit 76 United States of America (United States) 45 Military 64 Unnamable, The 195 Valmiki, Maharishi 22, 223 virtue 225–28 Voices from Chernobyl 187, 198, 218 Voltaire 116 Wachsmuth, Jeremias 118 Wakefield Cycle, medieval 79 Wakefield Noah 82, 86

Index Wallace-Wells, David 78 War Plays, The 225 see also Bond, Edward wars climate 52 nuclear 197 world 210 Washburn, Anne 11, 12, 220, 223, 224, 229 waste, nuclear 200–1 Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) 201 weather events, extreme 232 Weill, Kurt 183 Welzer, Harald 51, 52 What if We Stopped Pretending 76 Wickham, Glynne 88 wild fires 232 Will to Power, the 144 Wilson, John 135, 137, 139, 142, 143 wisdom 26 Woolf, Virginia 22 World 126 definition 13–15 World We Have, The 112 Wreck of the Batavia, The 96 ­Wretched of the Earth, The 77 York Mystery Plays 88 Zapffe, Peter Wessel 12, 144–5, 148–9, 197 Zerubavel, Eviatar 172–3 Žižek, Slavoj 217

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266

267

268

269

270