[Recent poem based on: K. Connolly, ‘Gulag survivors given voice at Venice Biennale’, The Guardian Weekly 5/4/2024, p. 19. Photo of Ogoyski's memorial tower in the village of Chepintsi, Bulgaria, by Lubov Cheresh. ]
The Poet of Silence i.m. Petko Ogoyski (d. 2019)
I wrote a poem where Stalin was the Devil sitting at the dead centre of this blood-red web twitching with torture lies informants’ eyes His Camp squatted over the indifferent mirror of the Danube’s eternal waters
I simply wanted to stay poet or Muslim or Roma or gay
When I got out nobody remembered
Only surviving prisoners’ homes had small spaces of memory sad vernacular museums while back in my village clocks continued but words had stopped
I built a White Tower silently pointing its finger at an absent god
Six storeys in each:
two daily chunks of stale bread wooden clogs with hidden hollow heel cloth harness to drag quarry stones whip iron bar
[Wrote this poem exactly thirty three years ago in May 1991.]
How the Great Palaver began
The sky was falling down boiling ripping the seas rising
the Great Crab eating our lungs livers stomachs souls our skin falling off hardening
our children slowly suffocating our lifelessness overwhelming us in simulcast waves of images
we ran to the boss but he was in his bunker counting out his money
we ran to the expert but he’d left for Mars
we ran to God who said ‘Even now do I love ye so much I shall kick away your last crutch and blinders’
and dissolved in a glorious Fire of Unknowing
we knocked on doors and people watched screens
we knocked on doors and people said ‘How do we know it’s really happening
and whether there’ll be another place as cosy as this?’ even as the waters lapped their knees flames singed their eyebrows bands played on from their media rooms
but one said ‘It’s the moment I’ve always been waiting for’ and another ‘Free at last God almighty free at last’
and walls were falling doors opening all over some gingerly some fast
and we said ‘It’s here what shall we do now together?’
and eyes met hands touched excitement grew
and the world was within us life was embracing death
[A fairly recent cafe poem. 'Firies' in Australia is the diminutive name given to fire-fighters, 'cap' is short for cappuccino. ]
Freight trains, jet engines, chansons
Now and again he’s out of his small-farm seclusion of breeze and birdcall into café whirlbustle, humans enjoying their 300,000-year-old exchange gossip, germs, worries holiday and kid pics, patterbuzz fused with faux-French muzak soupçon of chanson subliminally enjoying their enjoyment tapping away at lines on his phone, he knows no one, unobserved (self-)observer for the duration of a large decaff cap he’s partial to this space for its virus-reduced airiness indoor plants, multiculti staff the ceiling-high wall of once-read books a warm room of memory from another age before screens, before
the Fires. He reads firies battle blazes seven am to nine pm. Twelve days straight. Australian wildfires sound like freight trains. The Canadian like jet engines. Roaring in for the kill we’ve caused.
[Recent double haiku. Another name for 'small sartori' in Zen is 'kensho'. Took the shot of sunset in a nearby forest regenerating from the Black Summer fires of 2019/20.]
Small sartori
revealed by wildfire now lost in dense undergrowth – the monk’s hut
shotgun blast, now a meditating assassin- fly on barrel’s tip
[Recent poem about local history in my village. Photo courtesy of the Bundanoon Local History Group. 47 kids, girls and boys separated, two female Sunday school teachers. This original 1871 church no longer stands, but the subsequent 1880s one is Bundanoon's oldest building. The beginning of the poem is situated in England in the early 1800s. Bundanoon was originally called Jordan's Crossing.]
Bundanoon Primitive Methodists
We stood reborn in spring’s thawing fields, transported. Our preacher-man or -woman spoke in our suppressed tongues. Listening, swaying, our ragged boots
rooted down into rich ploughed soil we worked but would never own. Dark clouds opened under the mighty power of high invincible winds.
Our preachers’ words were invisible larks of the Holy Ghost released to settle like soft flakes of peace in hearts heavy with toil and dispossession.
Our Bible was the spoken word. We called ourselves primitive, believing our faith − female preaching itinerants, meetings of thousands
unroofed, unwalled, open to sky and the unruly fire of spirit − the original message Wesley taught. He said it was not, and disowned us.
Our disbelieving brothers were wrecking looms, burning haystacks, sending landlords threatening letters signed Ned Ludd. The soldiers swarmed our restive shires,
red hornets out for the kill. Our old, imperfect England was dying to greed, Satan, the Moloch of grim new mills that ate our women and children.
In exodus and rat-infested steerage we fled across the endless ocean to New South Wales and hope. Sydney stank of debauchery and grog.
At Jordan’s Crossing we inhaled the strange new scent of eucalypt like a promise of something we could not name. Cheap land,
mountain air, vast sky filled our souls with a wideness we had not known (though its many mists felt like home). We cleared ground and wombat burrow
to found our simple church. Sam Tooth felled and sawed the wood. Summers, the timbers creaked louder than sermon and song, a ship tossed on cicada-riven waves of heat.
Christmas, Carlisle lent his open truck and laden with piano and perilously clinging choir, we spread our primitive cheer from house to house. Winters,
we buried ourselves in overcoat, hat and mittens, imagining some other topsy-turvy Christmas in June. After the Boer War we returned
to the old Methodist fold, respectable, primitive no more. For sixty-six years our Lillian Calverley provided flowers from her garden, played through
three wheezing organs and many a member’s funeral, wedding, birth.
[Last instalment of this four-year chronicle 2020-2023].
The Chronicle of Turbulent Times: 2023 (Continued)
The March 2023 IPPC update issues a ‘final warning’. It finds many climate-related risks are higher than previously assessed, that greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 if the 1.5C limit is to be maintained (a window that is rapidly closing with that goal appearing virtually out of reach), that any new fossil fuel developments are utterly incompatible with the net zero emissions required, that warming of 3.2C by 2100 is projected and is the ‘highway to hell’, and that ‘the climate emergency cannot end without addressing the inequalities of income and gender’ with 10% of households emitting 34-45% of global consumption-based emissions while the bottom 50% emit only 13-15%. It also finds that that 3bn people live in areas officially ‘highly vulnerable’ to climate breakdown and 50% of the world’s population is already experiencing periods of severe water scarcity. Pope Francis issues an update of his 2015 encyclical warning that ‘the world in which we live is collapsing’ and calling for ‘irresponsible’ western lifestyles to change.
Heat Records. In 2023, with global CO2 emissions at around 420.3 ppm and annual global forest loss at 4.1m ha (2022), and with another El Niño, nearly every climate record in modern history is broken and making 2023 another hottest year on record: global temperatures are 1.4 C warmer than the pre-industrial basline (up from 1.15C in 2022), total carbon emissions are c. 40.9 gigatonnes (over 1% higher than in 2022), sea level rise is at a record high (the rate in past decade more than double that between 1993-2002), and Antarctic sea ice is the lowest on record. July is the hottest month ever recorded over last 100,000 years, while September beats the previous record for that month by 0.5C, the largest jump in temperature ever seen. World oceans absorb 287 zettajoules of heat, an additional 15 zettajoules of heat compared with 2022 (the entire world economy uses only 0.5 zettajoules a year). In July ocean temperature in Florida Bay is 38.4 C, possibly a world record, while Tunis hits 49C and a two-week heatwave in Greece is the longest in its recorded history. Places in Chile and Paraguay experience winter temperature records of 38.7 and 39.7 C. Cholera cases soar globally in 2023 to 667,000 cases and 4,000 deaths, and the WHO declares a grade 3 emergency, its highest internal emergency level.
Flame Age. Canada’s megafires destroying 18.5m ha are the biggest in its recorded history and even larger than the Australian megafires in 2019/20 (with CO2 emissions of c. 2.4bn t, about four times Canada’s total emissions in 2021, equalling 5th largest emitter Japan’s annual emissions, and c. 6% of all global emissions this year); burned boreal forest and peatlands need at least 50-250 years to recover. Global wildfires added c. 7-8bn t of CO2 to the atmosphere in 2023. There are also large wildfires in Hawaii and southern Europe, extreme heatwaves in Japan, also severe flooding in China and India etc. Fire seasons are becoming ever longer (100 days longer in SE Australia) and overlapping in north and south hemispheres. Global wildfires are now the world’s fourth largest source of CO2 emissions, and vast forest tracts like the Amazon are thus turning from carbon sinks to sources and becoming a positive-feedback loop with climate disruption or triggerpoint to a new ‘flame age: with less time for regrowth between fire cycles, more CO2 remains in the atmosphere.
Megamelt. New research in 2023 finds that on the current global emissions trajectory, Antarctic melt will cause a 40% slowdown of a major global deep ocean current by 2050 that could alter the global climate for centuries, accelerate sea level rise and starve marine life of vital nutrients. Another report finds that Greenland’s melting glaciers are losing 30m tonnes of ice an hour, 20% more than previously thought, and that 5000 km2 of ice has been lost since 1985; this additional freshwater (not included in current oceanographic models) might mean the collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), possibly already by 2025 in the worst-case scenario, disrupting global weather patterns, ecosystems and global food security (Amoc is already at its weakest in 1,600 years).
Time is Up. A 2023 report says we one species are monopolising 26% of the biomass produced by land plants (or 30% of pre-industrial levels), while only 10% of pre-industrial levels would be the sustainable limit. A 2023 scientific update of a 2019 report endorsed by 15,000 scientists states that 20 of 35 vital signs used to track the climate crisis are at ‘record extremes’ and in danger of triggering irreversible tipping points, that despite decades of warnings ‘unfortunately time is up’ and we are on our way to the ‘potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems and a world with unbearable heat and shortages of food and freshwater’, a world in which as many as 3 to 6 billion may find themselves outside Earth’s livable regions by 2100; the scientists urge a transition to a global economy that prioritises human wellbeing and cuts the overconsumption and excessive emissions of the rich, with the rich top 10% of emitters responsible for almost 50% of global emissions in 2019.
Climate Inaction and Toxic Subsidies. In 2023 the UN General Assembly adopts a resolution to seek a legal opinion from the International Court of Justice to clarify all states’ legal obligations to tackle the climate emergency and specify consequences countries should face for inaction. According to the World Bank, governments in 2023 are spending $ 1.25 trillion a year on explicit subsidies for fossil fuels, farming and fishing causing ‘environmental havoc’, and at least $ 6 trillion a year on implicit subsidies like waived taxes or the cost of damage caused by worsening air pollution and global heating; many spend more on these ‘toxic’ subsidies than they do on health, education or poverty reduction while the greatest beneficiaries tend to be the rich and powerful.
Perhaps kicking off ‘net zero’, ‘green-renewable’ industrialisation of remnant nature and the last relatively pristine ecosystems, in 2023 the UN International Seabed Authority gives the go-ahead for the first tests of a deep-sea mining operation aiming to exploit metal-rich rocky nodules on the abyssal sea floor; scientists and conservationist call for a deep-sea mining moratorium. Lunar industrialisation begins: NASA provides $2.6bn to survey the moon for resources enabling the building of habitable bases, while many private space companies also plan dozens of probes to survey the moon for resources in the next few years. In 2024 a UN report foresees an increase of global raw materials extraction of 60% by 2060 (on top of the 400% increase since 1970); this extraction already causes 60% of global heating effects and 90% of global water stress; it counsels reduced demand, circular economy, just transition and notes our relation to nature “will be resolved either with collective wisdom and effort or in a hard and very painful way with conflicts, pandemics, migration.” The UK government hands out 24 new oil and gas licences in the North Sea, while Norway is the first nation to allow deep-sea mineral exploration.
AI and Social Media. In 2023 more than 1,000 industry experts sign an open letter urging a pause in the development of AI, saying that if researchers and companies do not pull back, governments should step in. Generative or LLS AI is seen as a threat to hundreds of millions of jobs, education systems and to democracy by its potential for increased mass disinformation via avalanches of fake images, videos and texts. The social media-loneliness positive feedback loop is increasing: studies in 2020-21 report around 35% have smartphone addiction while a 2023 Pew Research Centre survey finds almost 50% of teenagers now report they are online ‘almost constantly’, up from 24% nearly a decade ago; in 2023 US surgeon-general Vivek Murthy issues advisory on social media’s harms to young people’s mental health, while Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke calls smartphones and their dopamine hits ‘digital heroin’, and UCLA psychiatrist Hansen suggests ‘manufacturer-induced compulsive behaviour’ rather than ‘addiction’ as a descriptor for compulsive phone or videogaming behaviour. UK police use facial recognition to scan for criminals at the coronation of King Charles in 2023. The capitalist social media ‘influencer’ industry is now worth c. $ 250 billion.
Synthetic Biology. 2023 sees the first creation of human ‘synthetic embryos’ or stem-cell-based embryo models to a stage at which a real embryo would implant into the uterus (side-stepping the need for sperm and eggs, these could also lead to the ability to grow organs for transplants). In a big step towards creating the first complex cell with an entirely synthetic genome, in 2023 scientists create a yeast strain in which 8 of its 16 chromosomes are synthetic, then make changes to prevent the possibility of the synthetic yeast outcompeting wild ones.
War breaks out in October 2023 between Israel and Hamas after the latter’s terrorist attack killing 1200 Israelis (almost all of them civilians) and taking about 250 hostages; Israel massively bombs Gaza (with the support of the US and the West) including civilian infrastructure, in collective punishment, putting Gaza under siege and perpetrating a crime against humanity, reducing Gaza to ruins, killing tens of thousands (mainly women and children), and forcibly displacing almost the whole population. Israeli nationalist far-right public figures call for the obliteration of Gaza. By the end of the year 83 media workers have been killed, 76 of them Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes on Gaza; there is evidence that the Israeli military has targeted journalists and their families and 19 journalists have been jailed (putting Israel alongside Russia, China, Myanmar and Iran as the worst jailers of journalists). Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen attack Red Sea merchant shipping. South Africa launches an accusation of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice, which does not order a ceasefire but accepts that there might be case and orders Israel to gather any evidence of possible genocidal acts and not impede humanitarian aid.
The US, Russia and China prepare for the resumption of nuclear weapons testing despite the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1996 (unratified by the US, Israel, China, Iran, unsigned by India, Pakistan, North Korea).
memengineering 