Breathing Dead Hippo – No Place Left To Bury The Stuff
Where I’m At On Climate
[Update: 12/1/21 – I am not alone. Even Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor deployed the “stench” metaphor (oral argument at page 15):
Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?
Update: 11/14/21 – Chris Hedges’ talk American Sadism explains exactly what I was driving at in his discussion of Conrad – listen to the whole thing, but the Conrad analysis starts just after minute 20. End update]
Update: 4/26/20 – A fine writer at The Atlantic just used a similar metaphor of stench:
Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot. ~~~ end updates]
I spent a sweltering Saturday afternoon – December 12th! – on the porch reading Conrad’s classic “Heart of Darkness”.
It’s a timely read, given our various current crises of a collapsing Empire – from ISIS, to the rise of an outright Fascist anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant politics, and climate chaos and collapse in Paris (including the police state tactics, which included pre-emptive arrests of activists and banning of protests, marches and demonstrations. So much for that French commitment to “liberte'”)
While the deranged and murderous Kurtz and his infamous dying gasp “the horror!, the horror!” tend to define the perception of that book, I was particularly struck by a passage in the voice of Marlow, and a different metaphor: to breath dead hippo.
(During his trip upriver, Marlow experiences the putrid sickening odor of the decaying flesh of dead hippo – the rotting meat relied on by his native enslaved crew, who happen to be cannibals.)
The passage that hit a nerve comes as Marlow is heading upriver, into the heart of darkness, in search of Kurtz’s compound.
Narrator Marlow speculates about what Kurtz must have experienced and imagines his likely madness. He reflects on the various aspects of darkness and solitude he himself is immersed in as he heads into the heart of darkness.
Metaphorically speaking to his readers, involved in daily life back in European civilization, Marlow asks:
You can’t understand. How could you? – with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbors ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums -how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammeled feet may take him into by the way of solitude – utter solitude without a policeman – by the way of silence – utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbor can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness. …
After noting that there are two extreme types of people: at one end of the spectrum, “fools” too dull to know that they are being “assaulted by the powers of darkness” and at the other “exalted creatures” that are “altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds“.
Marlow surmises that most of us are somewhere in between the blind fools and the exalted ones:
The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove! – breathe dead hippos so to speak, and not be contaminated. And there don’t you see? your strength comes in, the faith in your ability for the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in – your power of devotion, not to yourself, but to an obscure, backbreaking business.
Well, I’ve about lost patience – or strength – to dig the holes to bury all the dead hippo I’ve been smelling lately. I’ve got no more devotion to that backbreaking business.
I’ve been smelling the rotting flesh of a dying Empire (consider this and this, * and especially this for starters)
Chris Hedges’ captures my spirit in his column today:
It would have been far, far better for the thousands of activists who descended on Paris for the climate summit to instead go to a sacrifice zone such as Parras’ neighborhood and, in waves of 50 or 100, day after day, block the rail lines and service roads to shut down refineries before being taken to jail. That is the only form of mass mobilization with any chance of success.
[…]
The 21 international climate summits that have been held over the decades have produced nothing but empty rhetoric, false promises and rising carbon emissions. Paris was no different. We must physically obstruct the extraction, transportation and refining of fossil fuels or face extinction. Those who worship before the idols of profit will use every tool at their disposal, including violence, to crush us. This is a war waged between the forces of life and the forces of death. It is a war that requires us, in every way possible, to deny to these industries the profits used to justify gaiacide. It is a war we must not lose.
Sign me up.
The holes to bury the dead hippo are all filled up. And my back is broken from digging those holes.