They say that a slow death is worse than a sudden one, that in those last seconds when your life flashes before your eyes, you are at peace. A meteorite, a car crash, a dream becoming the last place you’re in. They tell you to picture it as if you’re a frog placed inside a pot with water gradually getting hotter — the bubbles growing exponentially bigger, until you’re so immersed in the heat that you no longer feel a thing. Numbed by the stretch of time, blinded by the vagueness with which you swam in the water, you realize, it’s too late.
The gamut of doomsday predictions has always resulted in failure. I recall calling my parents “one last time” on Dec. 12, 2012, from my overcrowded boarding school dorm in Dublin, Ireland. Between sobs was a hardly intelligible “I read about it on the internet,” while they tried to pacify a baby in the body of a preadolescent. The Last Judgment, Halley’s Comet, the evangelists, your crazy neighbor, a book you read, a movie you recently watched starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Irony within truth. A distant future, peering around the corner.
But what if, instead of envisioning the apocalypse as something sudden, a blink of an eye, a last gasp, I told you the apocalypse was here already. Go ahead, turn the other cheek — it’s habitual by now. Picture this: You’re no longer a frog, but yourself, in your college dorm. You notice the empty box of Cheez-Its that has been sitting between the blue recycling and the black garbage bin for days now. In the heat of a snowless November, you realize you neglected the stimuli that told you that danger was coming. The bliss of winters becoming milder and springs becoming warmer. The summer: infernal, perpetual, wilting.
Why wait for a sudden death when you can avoid death altogether, by impeding the world from looking like this, or this or this? Science fiction, alas! Perhaps the following seem more conceivable: Evidence of Hades’ wrath in a wildfire in Madera County, Calif. Remnants of what used to be a seaside neighborhood in Mexico Beach, Fla. ‘Highway River’ AKA a morning commute to Detroit with the wrong means of transportation — boats weren’t on offer that Friday.
Here’s the punch line: You just have to open your eyes. Perhaps you need something to help you do so. I intended to make my take on the apocalypse a simple story about how climate change is depicted through art and how it has become a means to unravel historical turning points. Unfortunately, climate change is not a turning point, but a series of missed exits, reckless lane switching and closed-eye speeding on a wrong way street. Our current apocalypse is, thus, not one single event, but a myriad of ludicrous and thoughtless tribulations. Road rage at its finest, except the ones getting mad are the good guys, and the ones who don’t mind are the bad guys.
In our fight with the environment, silence becomes too costly an expense; the price of words is weighed down by an hourglass that is running out. In the age of information, science, truth, technology and innovation we choose to turn inarticulate, primate, taciturn and ignorant. Because no one wants to accept that if this apocalypse wipes out the human race, the Earth will continue on creating new ecosystems — ones in which there is no place for us. They will speak of us as we speak of the dinosaurs, and they will recall the 21st century with as much brevity as we word “Ice Age.”
In the first lockdown back in 2020, while every single citizen of Barcelona was confined to the four walls of their home, while life was put on hold and it felt like the world stopped spinning, COVID-19 meant nothing to the millions of species we share a planet with. A video of three wild boars meandering in city streets, dolphins spotted on the coasts, virgin sights of the LA mountain skyline… the Earth went through rehab while we fought to find new drugs to cure ourselves.
Even then, I found myself coming back to the works of Alexis Rockman, a New York-based artist who has been depicting pre- and post-human scenarios where common sites such as Central Park or the Brooklyn waterfront take on different meanings with the demise of modern civilization. In Manifest Destiny, a 24-foot long omen, Rockman pictures the East River, 200 feet taller, engulfing the Brooklyn Bridge as jellyfish and eels inhabit the places men used to — a decaying scene in which mankind is now a fable to the evolving species that remain unfazed.
The scenes we will start to see or continue seeing are not all that new. The deluge was predicted in the Old Testament centuries ago. Tales of meteors, pandemics and brush fires have all been heard before. In the end, it was the animals who Noah saved. So, in this fickle game with time, this Russian roulette with life, everything that becomes past weighs down on what becomes future. To appease the apocalypse, no apotropaic apologies will suffice the damage we have done.
I would like to envision a scenario where the frog leaps out of the water when it starts getting hot — where a slow death may result in nurturing every minute of one’s life while ensuring that the ones who come after can do the same. Get mad, grow impatient, demand change — with as much rage as you scream at the car next to you, with as little patience as you wait for your Amazon package, with as much precision as you order your morning coffee.
It takes very little to care, it really does: recycling, refusing single-use plastic containers, supporting local farmers, getting involved with grassroots movements, investing in a bike, endorsing the right politicians! A stone, no matter how small, will always cause a ripple effect. And, by the way, the Cheez-Its box goes in the blue bin.
Daily Arts Writer Cecilia Duran can be reached at ccduran@umich.edu.
Corrections: Links were added on Feb. 21, 2022. A date was fixed that originally read Dec. 12, 2020, to Dec. 12, 2012, and the photo of Manifest Destiny was resized to its original size on Feb. 22, 2022.