In Praise of Dourness

The following is an edited excerpt from Joshua Wodak’s monograph, Petrified: Living During a Rupture of Life on Earth, published open-access by De Gruyter. 

Turtles All The Way Down…          

In Vedic cosmology, the World Turtle expresses how only partial knowledge may ever be acquired from an infinite regression, in fields as diverse as metaphysics and epistemology. As Johann Fichte surmised: ‘We build our houses on the earth, the earth rests on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, the tortoise again – who knows on what? – and so on ad infinitum.’ Contrary to the veneer of stability proffered by the concrete and steel beneath our feet, this stage is more intrinsically volatile and precarious than discourse on the topic would like to concede.

The formation of the Isthmus of Panama makes for a telling illustration of the radical asymmetry and contingency on which our houses are perched. Before this isthmus, North and South America were not connected, such that oceans on either side of the Americas mixed. Over some 5 million years, volcanic eruptions, born of tectonic rifts between both continents, created the isthmus that connected North to South America, but in so doing separated Pacific from Atlantic Oceans. When the landbridge fully closed the seaway 3 million years ago, it profoundly changed global ocean circulation. The difference of salinity between the newly separated oceans, as well as their new convection pathways, moved heat around the planet with telling repercussions. Namely, the isthmus formation effectively catalysed the origins of the Quaternary Period, beginning with Northern Hemisphere Glaciation, arguably precipitated by oceanic heat transferral to the Artic, now that the isthmus had closed the seaway. Such are the proverbial origins of the geological period Earth still resides within, distinctly marked, as it were, by the Quaternary’s incessant shifts between glacial and inter-glacial periods.

As always, such simple sketches belie the extent to which this planet is capable of, and prone toward, reconfiguration that borders on the wholesale. For instance, in 1914, the same year the Panama Canal was completed, Serbian geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milankovitch published his landmark study, ‘About The Issue Of The Astronomical Theory Of Ice Ages’, postulating that there is a correlation between the eccentricity, obliquity, and precession of Earth’s orbit, and incessant oscillations between glacial and inter-glacial periods. These correlations, termed Milankovitch cycles, have been linked to climatic changes over the past 200 million years, but the cycles appear to exert more pronounced climatic changes in the Quaternary Period. The Isthmus of Panama, Northern Hemisphere Glaciation, and the Milankovitch cycles appear to relate to one another, albeit these are relations composed of radical asymmetry and contingency. 

Such are the forces, scales, modes, and tempos at play in the unfolding rupture of life on earth. Similarly, no longer are these tall tales mere backdrop to concerns that are the acumen of the humanities and social sciences. As Dipesh Chakrabarty reasons, ‘for humanists living in such times and contemplating the Anthropocene, questions about histories of volcanoes, mountains, oceans, and plate tectonics – the history of the planet, in short – have become as routine in the life of critical thought as questions about global capital and the necessary inequities of the world that it made’. However, any such critical thought must contend with the limits of knowability as to the climate crisis, which incurs not only the history of this planet with its idiosyncratic forces, scales, modes, and tempos, but of the future too. As Weber lamented, back in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism of 1905:

The Limited Sunset          

If volcanoes bring earth’s fiery belly to its surface, and the sun brings gravitational centrifuge to earth’s shifting climates, then other stars bring both warmth and cold comfort to their captive planets. For though all that lies above and beyond incarceration may overshadow worldly predicaments, this cosmic purview does not so much break the cage free for escape, as obliterate it and its captives. Literature is for the living, just as obliterature is for those endlings who observe stars not just for the cold comfort of cosmology, but also in search of demeanours appropriate to living during a rupture of life on earth. The Dour is a demeanour premised on how stars cast perspective over a worldview that restricts itself to the world, and hypocritical societies that imagine themselves to be the world, rather than merely of the cosmos.

Oscar Wilde brought this demeanour into his 1895 play Lady Windermere’s Fan when he declared that ‘we’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’ Given that ‘we live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air’, in the words of seventeenth-century mathematician Evangelista Torricelli, as does all terrestrially-bound life, it may appear that we have always been in the gutter. However, Wilde captured the something new under the sun of his time: the human condition of a body horizontal in a guttural predicament, but with mind breaking free of this constraint: to look at the stars is to receive wave particles of light that have travelled across the cosmos, into your retina, to be decoded into the picture play that is your mind. This is what it means to live within the insufferable cage that imprisons the body by escaping it with the mind, because the mind is vulnerable and open to the cosmos to which it is hitched.

However, as with all romantic quests, a sleight of hand or a decoupling of mind from body makes only a fleeting escape from prison. Three years after Wilde wrote this adage, his guttural predicament became literal, imprisoned as he was for his homosexuality. Like Milankovitch, Wilde looked at the stars from behind a heavy iron door, though his sentence lasted much longer than just one night. Over a century later, sight-lines to the stars are bygone, at least for most guttural vantage points. Those venerable light particles no longer penetrate retinas because they are blocked by pollution: light pollution to heavy pollution and everything in between.

Over a century ago, geologist and biologist Eduard Suess decried how: 

Now, he could add a literal dimension of restriction, as concrete as Milankovitch’s or Wilde’s impoverished sightlines from their respective prisons. Should the electric lights be extinguished, and the sky cleared, these sightlines would become visible again. But from the human ‘gutter’, the only way this renewed vision might obviate imprisonment is if we follow Suess’s precondition, to see further and ‘no longer to view the world from the base, self–centred perspective’. Only therein does ‘the cosmos [reveal] to us an image of unspeakable grandeur.’ 

So, against such delusions of civilisation, progress, and human exceptionalism, the Dour is the prophetic voice that throws a spanner into Weber’s ‘mechanised petrification’ by acquiescing to Suess’s ‘naked facts’ of a cosmos such as it is. In so doing the Dour eviscerates any notion of positive ‘development’, whether of ‘entirely new prophets’ or ‘a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals.’ Instead, the Dour declares that this ‘mechanised petrification’ is the thing that broke the spanner, and not the other way around. But what does this acquiescence gain? The cosmos gives cold comfort, even if minuscule portions of the infinitive void radiate gifts that keep on giving. Starlight, stellar heat, the elements, molecules and atoms – born in furnaces burning at millions of degrees. Only to implode or explode when their thermonuclear reactions pass a critical threshold. Our own sun is itself a third-generation star, meaning even it has a ghost in its shell – harking back to origins of being born from the twice re-incarnated ashes of exploded stars. If the cosmos is regarded as the world, rather than this third rock from this sun, in this solar system, in this galaxy, at this moment in time, then it begs a worldview as empty as the void between stars.

The question remains as to how we are supposed to live in the resulting void, illuminated only by the clarity of a dour demeanour. Novelist Cormac McCarthy probes Weber’s speculation that ‘no one knows who will live in this cage in the future’ by responding with two candidates trapped within his novel The Sunset Limited. For White, one of the two characters, world-as-idea and world-as-cosmos coalesce because:

The Dour chimes in on all these notes, proclaiming that as a demeanour, it is neither pessimism, nihilism, or cynicism, but rather unified in fidelity with ‘the world itself’. In short, it is a state of mind that is completely at one with the world itself. The Dour personified would make one riposte to White, however: while futility reigns supreme in this ‘awareness of one thing above all else’, given a universe slated to end in either a cosmic crunch or universal heat death, a dour demeanour advocates fidelity to the vicissitudes of the cosmos precisely as an insurrection against any all-encompassing futility.

In matters closer to home, and nearer in time than the end of the universe, White espouses his dour worldview to Black – the only other character in the novel – in a back–and–forth exchange that takes place in one room of a small sparse tenement apartment in New York City. Black provides a counterpoint worldview that finds life worth living, in contrast to White, whom Black has just prevented from jumping in front of the Sunset Limited train. Black is now holding White in his apartment until he can be assured that the former will not attempt suicide again. To which White asks: ‘So what am I, a prisoner here?’, only to be told: ‘You know bettern that. Anyway, you was a prisoner fore you got here. Death Row prisoner.’ The prison is not the room, the cage is not the mind. Rather the restraint is mortality, which no manner of mind-over-matter can circumvent.

In the larger sense, beyond the sole claustrophobic apartment setting, both characters are further imprisoned in a society that thinks the world of itself, rather than thinking of the world itself. White remains trapped in Weber’s ‘cage in the future’ and Wilde’s ‘gutter’, because he has closed himself off from ‘looking at the stars’ and their perennial ‘image of unspeakable grandeur’. The vision is as ultimately futile as the universe’s grandeur is fleeting, but the Dour maintains that fidelity makes a mockery of any notion of morality, and that once noted, any such pessimism, nihilism, or cynicism are rendered mute.

McCarthy’s own demeanour appears to heavily inform White’s monism that the world-as-idea is the world-as-cosmos. The philosophy that comes forth in his novels is premised on ‘admit[ing] the facts in their naked truth’, both of cosmic vicissitudes and of how humanity fails to live with commensurate fidelity to those vicissitudes. In an interview about his post-apocalyptic novel The Road, published in September 2006, one month before The Sunset Limited, McCarthy was questioned as to the cause of the civilisational and biosphere collapse described in the book. In The Sunset Limited, the reader is informed of the suicide attempt that catalysed the novel’s events, but in The Road the reader is never told what kind of catastrophe cast the two protagonists, a father and his son, along that road.

The fact that McCarthy’s reply refuses to answer the question only serves to further imbibe another core quality of a dour demeanour: the limits of knowability in literary and scientific worldviews. McCarthy replied to The Washington Post that:

In our journey down The Road we are not meant to know when it terminates, just as we can never know which umpteenth layer of the World Turtle will yield an answer to whether Yellowstone’s next supervolcano eruption is a few days or a few millennia away. 

McCarthy captures how the Dour is a demeanour that embraces, rather than braces, for impact. It is about how to live during a rupture of life on earth, because ‘the whole thing now is, what do you do?’ Which is to say that the Dour does not embrace the impact, but rather embraces for impact. Just as there is no revelry in the sheer horror of a supervolcano eruption ‘on Thursday’, or a nuclear war, the Dour does not embrace any such end of this world. What it does embrace is a premise of an altogether different register: that all life has always been at the behest of cosmic vicissitudes, and that these are now coupled with the human capacity to unleash a rupture of life on earth.

How then can a stance of fidelity to such vicissitudes accommodate the inescapable moral abyss of human-caused ecocide? Volcanoes raining earth’s fiery belly down on its surface make no calls upon morality, but humans raining down thermonuclear bombs on one another or directly causing mass extinction cries out for the same. The Dour acquiesces to just how inescapably part and parcel of the cosmos, and of the chaos therein, we are. Human violence – whether in the form of the wars through which Suess lived, the inhumane imprisonment that Wilde endured, or the collective destruction of the planet that McCarthy imagines – are deplorable and unconscionable in our own terms because they originate from intention.

This time round there is no Chicxulub asteroid or Panama Isthmus to castigate. Though our capacity for destruction is not unique, just as homo sapiens are not unique. To believe otherwise is to uphold the tyranny of human exceptionalism and self-importance. The Dour enfolds humans into history as just another disaster, in a cosmos where there is no moral to the story, and no rhyme or reason to what ends one world or heralds a New World Coming.

Above, below, within, and without, the cosmos is prone to going up in smoke, whether exploding novae above, erupting volcanoes below, irrupting pathogens within, or the inexorable passage of time without. We do not know when Yellowstone’s next ‘whenever’ might be. The question is whether we resist the ‘whenever’ handed to us, at the cost of our fidelity. Fidelity by way of the dour demeanour requires humility that recognises all mortal beings are sentenced to death by their mortality. Trying to outrun this is to live in a sheltered worldview. Or do we acquiesce, and accept that ‘whenever’ has come, remaining level-headed, open-eyed and faithful to a reality in which our continued existence was always at the behest of the vicissitudes of the cosmos?

If cosmologies bequeath demeanours laying claim to be one and the same as the cosmos itself, then a dour demeanour is comfort both cold and warm. To accept the Dour’s invitation ‘to seek fidelity to a story that puts the cataclysm upstream of our humanity, and not simply downstream where we can still dream of diversion’, borrowing Nigel Clark’s words in Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2010), is to become one-and-the-same with the world-as-it-is. Where the reward for answering ‘yes’ to Clark’s question about whether we are ‘ready to be ‘true’’ to this sombre dream is an ambivalent one. 

But such rewards are highly ambivalent, given the comfort both cold and warm that they impart. When the tyrannical King Lear invites his daughter Cordelia to ‘Come, let’s away to prison / We two alone will sing like birds I’ th’ cage’ in Act V Scene 3, he tells her that they will: 

The moonlight cannot convey the sun’s warmth to their cell, but it can convey its reflected light, even in the dark of night. Then again, viewing the cosmos from this guttural vantage point, it was never really an invitation, given Cordelia was already imprisoned before Lear invited her, and our humanity was already hitched to the vicissitudes of the cosmos before there was such a thing as humans.

How then to break free of the cage within which we live? By no longer conflating myopic worldview for cosmic purview, as in Schopenhauer’s lament that ‘every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.’ No longer expecting predictability or periodicity, rhyme or reason. No longer abhorring the ‘cataclysm upstream’, but warming to its embrace. No longer conflating the morale of a story with the moral of a story. No longer rejoicing in civilisation so-called, but warming to its ever-tenuous and ever-contingent enmeshment in cosmic forces impervious to prisons, no matter how impenetrable a tyrant’s rampart. Whether viewed through a literary or scientific worldview, a civilisation unmasked as a hollow conceit against cosmic vicissitudes reveals something arising in its stead: a meek purview for equanimity between being and becoming petrified. And, therein, a re-worlded worldview, premised not only in being alive during a rupture of life on earth, but actually being alive to rupture itself.