I found this quote from Schrödinger in a recent entry from The Marginalian. It reminded me of the day I drove four hours each way from Reykjavik to Jokulsaron and stood at the foot of a glacier, watching small icebergs float out to the black sea. I’ve been working on an essay that has me thinking lately about deep time, so sometimes when I’m walking up a hill, I think, ‘20 million years ago, the Laurentide glacier made this.’ It puts the day’s problems into perspective to be reminded I’m so small a thing in time, and when I stumbled upon this quote, it seemed like Schrödinger also found awe in this fact.
Facing you, soaring up from the depths of the valley, is the mighty, glacier-tipped peak, its smooth snowfields and hard-edged rock-faces touched at this moment with soft rose-colour by the last rays of the departing sun, all marvellously sharp against the clear, pale, transparent blue of the sky.
According to our usual way of looking at it, everything that you are seeing has, apart from small changes, been there for thousands of years before you. After a while — not long — you will no longer exist, and the woods and rocks and sky will continue, unchanged, for thousands of years after you.
What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? - Schrödinger, My View of the World
I belong to a niche of people who are both audience and creators an aesthetic of contemporary environmental art and writing. And if you’re in that niche, Camille Seaman’s Last Iceberg series is a bellwether in the same way that certain albums you listened to in college are for your personal and intellectual development. There’s beauty in this bleakness.
She looks unwaveringly at the vastness of a future under climate change. You can’t look at this work and not feel your own smallness or personal grief at this tragedy for our planet.
I wish I could capture light in my writing the way she does in her photographs.
Negative
By Wisława Szymborska
In the dun-colored sky
A cloud even more dun-colored
With the black outline of the sun.
To the left, that is, to the right
A white cherry branch with black flowers.
On your dark face, light shadows.
You have sat down at a small table
And laid your grayed hands on it.
You give the impression of a ghost
Who attempts to summon the living.
(Because I'm still counted among them,
I should appear and knock:
Good night, that is, good morning,
Farewell, that is, hello.
Not being stingy with questions to any answer
If they concern life,
That is, the storm before the calm.)
—translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak
For me, this poem is beautiful until the last three lines. Then, it’s stunning. And I mean that in the word’s full sense of breathlessness. With Szymborska’s inversions, a small moment—a photograph, a person seated next to a cherry tree—becomes enormous, a lifetime of more questions than anwers about the “storm before the calm.” What an incredible way to characterize human existence!
Ooooh, I absolutely love Public Domain Review. Somebody has kindly collected a chronology of depictions of comets. Here are some of my favorites:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. … Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. - Carl Sagan
I remember reading this quote on a poster of the Pale Blue Dot while waiting around for some ordinary reason and being so struck by it that I forgot where I was and real life took me by surprise for a second. I rediscovered this quote in a recentish Slate article by Jaime Green, in which she explains the work of astronomers trying to frame the Earth as an exoplanet, or just another planet in the cosmos.
Lisa Katenegger’s work contextualizes Earth by detecting other planets revolving around and eclipsing their own stars. “By spying a star’s light filtered through an exoplanet’s atmosphere, astronomers hope to be able to deduce the atmosphere’s composition, which could mean finding potential biomarkers—signs of life.” Katenegger says,
When I was doing this work, I was thinking that if there’s life out there, I really hope that somebody’s rooting for us.” Maybe, she mused, someone saw the Earth 2 billion years ago, when oxygen started building up in our atmosphere, and they kept an eye on us. More recently they would have seen us begin to destroy the ozone layer, and then fix it, and then begin to wreak havoc with climate change. She imagined them cheering us on, “Come on, come on, fix it! Hopelfully, there’s some nice thoughts out there.”
Adam Frank, an astronomer with a similar project to Katenegger, contextualizes our planet by looking at models of civilizations that have overused their resources and stressed their environment, a technological “come-to-Jesus moment”:
…the likes of which we hope we may be in on Earth, where a civilization realizes it’s fucking up big time and switches to a lower-impact energy source. Frank found that depending on the timing and significance of the adjustments, and the environment’s sensitivity to stress, some civilizations continued their collapse, some leveled out for a while before failing, and, crucially, some were OK.
Frank hoped to help us see our current crisis not as a moral failing but as a problem to be solved. And a problem that could be.
In other words, both of these astronomers are using data and cool science to reframe our narrative of our existence. If we understand our small, briefness in the grand schema of the cosmos, see ourselves as other life forms would from space, then maybe our imaginations could see the part we (humanity) must play in changing the course of our own collective destruction. It’s amazing how powerful narrative perspective is.
If you’re in the aforementioned niche aesthetic of contemporary environmental art and writing, then you read whatever Elizabeth Kolbert publishes. In a recent New Yorker article, she talks to the entomologists looking at the littlest creatures (insects) to understand big phenomena (climate change). As it turns out, you can learn a lot by measuring the spread of an invasive insect like the fire ant, and you should be very worried when you see insects disappearing at the rate they currently are. Kolbert explains,
Through logging and mining and generalized sprawl, the world was increasingly being cut up into “islands” of habitat. The smaller and more isolated these islands, be they patches of forest or tundra or grassland, the fewer species they would ultimately contain.
Measuring the insect biomass of these habitat islands that are destined to lose species, we see the rate of change. In just the past decade some of the habitat islands have lost a third of their insect species and two thirds of their insect biomass.
In a past newsletter, I wrote about my friend Nora Caplan-Bricker’s beautiful essay on the disappearing monarchs, so I’m sorry if I keep carrying on about bugs. But Kolbert’s piece was powerful, and a reminder that, as a collective, we are not more important or more powerful than insects.
Insects are, of course, also vital. They’re by far the largest class of animals on Earth, with roughly a million named species and probably four times that many awaiting identification. (Robert May, an Australian scientist who helped develop the field of theoretical ecology, once noted, “To a first approximation, all species are insects.”) They support most terrestrial food chains, serve as the planet’s chief pollinators, and act as crucial decomposers. Goulson quotes Wilson’s observation: “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed 10,000 years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”
The images I’ve included with this sampling of Kolbert’s piece were again found in Public Domain Review (Follow their Instagram for quality content in the environmental art aesthetic), and are from the Model Book of Caligraphy made in a decades-long collaboration between a “master scribe, the Croatian-born Georg Bocskay, and Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel” in the 1560’s.
Tin
By Jane Hirshfield
I studied much and remembered little.
But the world is generous, it kept offering figs and cheeses.
Never mind that soon I’ll have to give it all back,
the world, the figs.
To be a train station of existence is no small matter.
It doesn’t need to be Grand Central or Haydarpaşa Station.
The engine shed could be low, windowed with coal dust
under a slat-shingled roof. It could be tin.
Another mystery bandaged with rivets and rubies.
Leaking cold and heat in both directions, as the earth does.
I love this poem. I hope this issue of Notions & Notes has left you with something to ponder about your time in this train station of existence.