Where Love, there the World
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“The only poems that count are those that can be read aloud in front of the sea or whispered in the ear of a dying human being. If it does not meet these requirements, it is not poetry”, argues the great Chilean poet Raúl Zurita (interview in ABC cultural, 19 June 2021).
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Raúl Zurita’s criteria is very demanding, but probably true. Once again, I have been reminded of his words, in this summer of 2022, words that evoke the beautiful elderly faces of several sick friends that face what will probably be the last stretch of their lives: Silvia, Luis, Camino. When we look from milestone to milestone in the face of death, what can we say about our values?
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The friends I evoke have, throughout their lives, been campaigners who have fought against injustice, oppression and harm inflicted on living beings and on nature. And as lucid people, what they face is not only the prospect of their personal fate, but something we can only call the death of a world. It is not the end of the world – it is not the death of Gaia, it is not the end of life on planet Earth – but it is the end of our world: the Holocene conditions that made it possible for humanity as we know it to live and thrive have now been fatally unbalanced, and the planet is heading towards other regimes of climate (perhaps incompatible with human survival).
For those who are aware, the idea of calling the coming period the Anthropocene seems more like the incantation of a frightened animal than a prudent geological decision. Anthropocene: The age of human extinction?
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The automobile, the great industrial promise of freedom, is leading us towards an uninhabitable planet (climate disaster). The Internet, the great promise of collective intelligence, leads us adrift in triviality and inattention. Prometheus did not know what to do with himself…
The problem, this system tells us, is not overreach: it is that there is a lack of infrastructure; but by building more infrastructure, we amplify overreach. Examples of this kind of counter-productiveness can be numerous. Fossil fuels, over the last century and a half, have meant an excess of resources without a refinement of aims: and that is how we have ended up. We fail to see that the adjective fossilist, as applied to capitalism, is probably more important than any of the other adjectives we tend to apply to the system (heteropatriarchal, neoliberal, predatory, etc.).
Out our own ignorance of ourselves and our inability to accept the human condition, that we are mortal and self-aware, we give free rein to our excesses. We start by taming an aurochs and end up with runaway climate change.
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A German journalist named Sara Schurman collapses on Twitter (23 July 2022): “Two years ago I realised what climate catastrophe really meant and how close
we are to ecological collapse. Since then I have felt like I am living in a nightmare: shouting for people to come and help, but they don’t understand what I am saying. Or they don’t believe me…”
It is clear that when we open our eyes to the unfolding eco-social catastrophe, it changes our lives: it is hard to focus on anything else. Our interests become narrower, our sensitivity becomes poorer, our temperament more rigid. We barely manage to get these tragic enormities out of our heads; and defending our vital joys becomes a kind of agonising struggle. It is not surprising that so many people prefer to close their eyes and cocoon themselves in wilful ignorance.
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In the same interview I quoted earlier, Zurita recommended Whitman as a first reading in our great and terrible world. “Hope overcomes all denials of reality, and that is what Walt Whitman is, a hope stronger than all denials of reality”. (Something like this is what I have conceptualised in various texts as counterfactual hope, most notably in chapter 8 of my book ¿Vivir como buenos huérfanos? Ensayos sobre el sentido de la vida en el Siglo de la Gran Prueba). I return to the question I posed earlier: faced with death, individual and, even worse, social death, what can we say about our values?
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I am not talking about metaphysical ideals but about immanent values, from the ground up, anchored in practices that depend on commitments that have to be constantly renewed: human dignity, solidarity, mutual support, beauty in everyday life, poetry, nurture, community. Values that we have received from a vast history of struggles against domination that spans five millennia. The idea of the human family is expressed poignantly by Graça Machel, not as a cliché in the bureaucratic language of the United Nations, but as a synthesis of decades of tragic struggles for liberation in 20th century Africa, experienced first-hand.
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Our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, has existed for more than 150,000 years. Until around five thousand years ago, we first lived in groups of hunter-gatherers, and then in villages of farmers and herders, with almost no social inequalities. ( Only some sexual division of labour; nothing comparable to the patriarchy that was to follow). We can call it “primitive communism”, or whatever you prefer.
Subsequently, around five thousand years ago, the phenomenon of inequality appeared: patriarchy, cities, state structures, standing armies, elites who took control of the surplus produced by those at the bottom, etc. One case in point is the El Argar culture, which developed between 2200 and 1550 BCE (the beginning of the Bronze Age in Europe), located in what is now the region of Murcia. Archaeologists agree that this was the first ever class-divided society on the Iberian Peninsula, identifying three strata: the ruling class, approximately 10% of the population; 50% of individuals with certain political and social rights; and 40% of people living in servitude or slavery.
The walled cities of El Argar disappeared without leaving any traces other than those of an archaeological nature, either “due to a depletion of the natural resources that sustained it (…) or because of a gigantic popular revolution that razed all its cities to the ground due to the unbearable yoke of the ruling class, the holders of weapons, resources and lives” (writes the journalist Vicente G. Olaya).
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Whether it was ecological overreach or social revolution, these millennia-old conflicts bring us face to face with our responsibilities today, and bring us face to face with the face of death. And we must be able to affirm: our values, of social equality and reconciliation with Nature, count. We can hold on to them, if they appear in a poem, in front of the sea or whispered in the ear of a dying person. They endure the gaze of death: they remain valid even when we succumb.
It’s not that we won’t succumb. We succumb (and it is not just a matter of individual finality, as I recalled earlier, but of the end of our world), but those values are the ones that were worth fighting for, dying for, and above all living for.
For we do not examine our values by imagining ourselves firstly as hypothetical rebellious slaves of El Argar, or as defeated Berlin Spartacists in 1919 (without forgetting the long history of the struggles of our elders, five millennia, and with which we still identify). We think, rather, of the hopeful message that Francia Márquez spread in the electoral campaign that led her to the vice-presidency of the Republic of Colombia (accompanying Gustavo Petro as president): live tastefully.
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Indeed, let us look to Latin America. There is a well-known and terrible passage in Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”, in the fight against European fascism and Nazism: “Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he conquers; and this enemy has not ceased to conquer”. Well, this is precisely what changes with the anti-colonial and de-colonial perspective whose precious elaboration we (from Spain) can glean, above all, from five centuries of struggles in Latin America (as, for example, the comrades of the La Vorágine collective from Santander, remind us). Any Mapuche, Lenca or Mayan grandmother would take the hands of the suicidal Benjamin and tell him with smiling pity: but my son, of course that enemy has ceased to win (despite all the massacres, all the torments, all the plundering). You only have to think of Bartolomé de las Casas and Toussaint Louverture 1It can also be seen with the prophetic poet Caístulo (Wichí from a peri-urban community in Tartagal, Argentina) in terms of the life that does not fail, in words picked up by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara: “How does life go on after the end of the world? I don’t know. I know that after one or more ends of the world, a poet, a prophet, known as Caistulo and also as Juan de Dios López, leans against a tree to listen and to say: do you see this? / what do you call it? / fungus? / we / call it a torch, / when we bury / a person / who is dying / it comes out / and gives light, / do you see that tree? / is one of the last / survivors / beautiful trees were here / man did a lot of damage / they see wood and they cut / they see Schinus molle and they cut / they see peach and they cut / they see cebil and they cut / I don’t know when it will end / there is no way / to bring history to the authorities, / these are the mothers / they are the ones who share / with seeds / life / that never fails. He is speaking to the poet Dani Zelko, who transcribes it, in the north of the province of Salta, on the Argentinian border with Bolivia and Paraguay…” Gabriela Cabezón Cámara: “La vida que no fracasa”, El País, 21 August 2022.
On the participation of Dani Zelko and Caístulo in Listening and the winds. Stories and inscriptions of the Gran Chaco, the Bienalsur 2021 exhibition at the Lola Mora Museum of Fine Arts, see March Mazzei, “Salta, lo ancestral sirve a la denuncia urgente”, Clarín, 30 July 2021; https://www.clarin.com/revista-enie/arte/salta-wichi-ancestral-bienalsur_0_WvMndzSXK.html
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Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote: “It is necessary to dream the reality of tomorrow” (one of the aphorisms in his great compilation Ideolojía). Perhaps better, master: it is necessary to remember (by dreaming, glimpsing, living) the reality of yesterday, so that another reality of tomorrow will be possible. If tomorrow has been closed down, yesterday must be reopened. Just as Francia Márquez proposes, against all historical odds, “to live tastefully” as a slogan for a programme of sustainability, de-growth and social equality in her tormented Colombia.
Nayra-pacha is (in the cosmovision of the Andean peoples) the past-as-future, pregnant with possibilities that contradict time-locked colonial Modernity. According to Armando Muyolema, “in the Andean world, this concept unites what in Western theories has come to mean memory and utopia. The past pregnant with the present and the future. The past that holds the promise of transformations in the order of life. With Gustavo Gutiérrez, one could say that it is a “prophetic memory” that predisposes the spirit towards the struggle”.
The immense poet from Moguer in Spain, also wrote: “There is a moment when the past is the future. That’s my moment. May it also be ours, our nayra-pacha, as Europeans trying to reopen their past under conditions of civilisational death.
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Krenak – the surname of Brazilian Amazonian indigenous leader and thinker Ailton Krenak, which is also the name of his tribe, which lives on the banks of the Doce river, means “head on the earth”. Explains the author of Ideas para posponer el fin del mundo: “Every culture has its own way of praying. In our case, we kneel down and put our heads on the earth so that we can connect with it, making contact with this wonderful planet. This is how we must go on. And elsewhere: “When you feel that the sky is getting too low, you have to push it back up and breathe”.
Head on the ground. Body hugging the tree. Eyes on the clouds. Will Walter Benjamin and Davi Kopenawa meet in some other world?
Push hard and breathe deeply.
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William Blake, our endearing and exalted relative, exclaims at the end of Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793): “The sea-fowl takes the wintry blast for a covering to her limbs / and the wild snake the pestilence to adorn him with gems and gold; And trees, and birds, and men behold their eternal joy. Arise, you little glancing wings, and sing your infant joy! Arise, and drink your bliss, for everything that lives is holy!‟
Every thing that lives is holy: the basic principle of Gaian ecoethics was enunciated with this clarity, at the end of the 18th century, in that Europe shaken by the French Revolution and to which Blake was so sympathetic.
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Juan Marsé (in a 2011 interview) maintained that the search for happiness is a human obligation. “The father of a friend of mine said he wanted to write a memoir and call it Hem vingut a aquest monest a passar l’estiu (We’ve come to this world to spend the summer), and I’ve always liked that idea”. And we too: we can consider it a good Mediterranean version of living tastefully (as long as we do not forget that we need to reduce our energy and material consumption by nine tenths, eliminate individual motorised transport, drastically reduce our consumption of meat and fish, stop flying… revolutionise our way of producing, consuming and occupying the land).
Resisting in the face of death while we still can, and maintaining that our values are worth upholding: that they stand up to that fierce confrontation. Where there is love, there is the world – let us always remember this from Juan Ramón Jiménez. The best and highest utopian vision I can think of is that of a world of hugs: and at the same time it is but a humble reminder of our simian nature (chimpanzees cuddling, touching and hugging each other). Hope cannot come from any kind of ill-informed confidence about the future, but from the strength of bodies embracing each other in the now.
August 2022, camping La Nava (Peguerinos)
Jorge Riechmann – Biography
Jorge Riechmann (Madrid, 1962) lives in Cercedilla. Essayist, writes poetry, is active in social ecology and teaches Ethics and Political Philosophy in Madrid (UAM). He is a member of the GHECO research group and co-directs two postgraduate degrees in Ecological Humanities, the DESEEEA (Specialist Diploma in Sustainability, Ecological Ethics and Environmental Education) and the MHESTE (MA in Ecological Humanities, Sustainability and Ecosocial Transition) (UAM-UPV). Sections of his poetry can be found in Futuralgia (poetry 1979-2000) and Entreser (poesía 1993-2016) (Calambur, 2011 y 2021). Recent essays: ¿Derrotó el smartphone al movimiento ecologista? (Catarata, 2016), Ética extramuros (UAM Editions, 2016), ¿Vivir como buenos huérfanos? (Catarata, 2017), Ecosocialismo descalzo (Icaria, 2018), Otro fin del mundo es posible (MRA Editions, 2019), Informe para la Subcomisión de Cuaternario (Árdora, 2021) o Simbioética (Plaza y Valdés, 2022).
