OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Post-Post-Apocalyptic

April 29th, 2009

So I made it through the last reading of the un’s post-apocalyptic feminist literature course (cheating slightly and not re-reading McCarthy’s The Road because it’s still fairly fresh from last fall’s reading; on the other hand, I could count two extracurricular readings in Doris Lessing’s Mara and Dann and Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress which would have happily coexisted with the rest of the reading list.)

It’s a semi-serious joke that I’m homeschooling myself towards the MFA that I won’t go into debt for (and this makes me wonder what value it would have) while Raven’s trying to get a new business going, but I am not required to write a term paper (nor for that matter, to grade it!) Still. Watching the world go a little nuts over swine flu this week (maybe not the world, so much as the social media that are my portal to the world most days) I am still sorting my response to a semester of imagining the end of the world.

Honestly, the feminist writings threw my kilter just a little more, becoming lenses for examining my own choices, the compromises that have re-shaped my world view since the last time I read a lot of feminist theory fourteen years ago. And part of me wishes I did have to write a term paper just to get my responses all sorted out. I think the thing I find most frightening is thinking I have made decisions out of honest consideration of our circumstances, of what is in my children’s best interests as well as my own, only to find out I was frightened of trying for something bigger, or that it was the path of least resistance in the face of institutional sexism so deep that I was merely reinforcing it. I have an unwritten blog post on not being defined by reproductive status that I am afraid remains unwritten while my children and their schools consume a good part of my energy for thinking, for writing.

What about the end of the world? The lens I haven’t been able to set aside is the Bahà’í promise that we are part of an ever-advancing civilization. I worry this sounds completely implausible in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, the sense of environmental, economic, or medical doom looming. Honestly, I love living in a community where sustainability is on everyone’s lips, where ideas of peak oil and reducing your carbon footprint are given serious consideration, especially if it’s the only alternative to living as if the world were created for our rapacious consumption. But I also try to balance that against the ease with which I could slip into fear and hopelessness.

The most recent copy of the parenting zine hip Mama had an article, “The Year of Living Fearfully,” by Erica Etelson that broke my heart, about having spent a year of her young son’s life experiencing such anxiety about peak oil that she couldn’t be the parent to him that she had promised herself she would be, that she experienced the pain of seeing her kindergarten-aged son worrying about her.

It resonated with a conversation with my father about the reversal in the expectation of each generation that the next will somehow have a higher standard of living. I suppose I don’t feel capable of calculating which generation has had it best; I might envy some of the freedoms my parents or grandparents had, but I also am impressed at all of the knowledge that lies at my children’s fingertips and their skills at accessing it.

But even if we were to bomb ourselves back to the stone age next week, I think what I feel is a responsibility to improve my children’s ’spiritual’ standard of living, by which I suppose I mean a degree of self-awareness in interacting with others, a rootedness in how deeply loved they are, a degree of reverence for the mystery around them, and a host of qualities like compassion, kindness, generosity, patience, perseverance, and an ability to think for themselves balanced by the expression of respect for authority. And while my valuing of all of these things are rooted in my own Bahà’í identity, seeing those values reflected in most of my parenting cohort does give me hope. My reading of the Bahà’í notion of an ever-advancing civilization is that material progress has to be balanced by spiritual progress, and that the two together will enable us to solve the problems that we face as a global community. More, that the equality of men and women (and the eradication of racism, and the elimination of the extremes wealth and poverty) is seen as part of the spiritual advancement of our civilization helps me throw my belief behind it.

And I have veered away from the specifics of the post-apocalyptic readings, the way that Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland immediately threw me into skepticism of any utopian project and whether the Bahà’í project is a utopian one, to musing on Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker’s storytelling as an unreliable transmission of culture. Skipping entirely Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and questions of sincerity of belief in one’s own utopian project not protecting one at all from its aftershocks. Or the two Californian books, Carolyn See’s Golden Days and Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest which were both so perfectly set in California that they reinforced my hypothesis that we like the apocalypse as the last remaining frontier when one can go west no longer, not to mention both having qualities of the Lifetime movie vicarious experience of the unthinkable that we watch and cling to as if they were evidence that we would be among the select to survive. It was Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men read right before Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress that convinced me that I lap up the post-apocalyptic eagerly as metaphor for feelings of inexplicable desolation and isolation, sometimes finding the fresh start and sometimes mere survival of hopelessness.

So no term paper, but a quiet celebration that I have made it through all of the readings, often with no one to talk about how it was all affecting me (for example, cleaning out the pantry in a battle against pantry moths, I would look at a can of food with an expiration date last summer and think that after the apocalypse I wouldn’t give a damn about expiration dates.) But noticing friends’ Facebook statuses reflecting real anxiety about swine flu, I think I have gotten something else contemplating the end of the world as we know it, a reinforced sense of how I can consciously choose hope, and also compassion, not out of naive optimism but because that choice matters. Very little in the post apo reading was more horrifying than Dave Egger’s account of the Sudanese war refugee experience in What is the What. We sort of know that the world cannot continue indefinitely as we have known it, but the unknown aspect of how it will change is frightening. The fact that a car accident is more likely to kill one than the swine flu is small reassurance, given all of the different ways that human beings inflict suffering on one another. But the only way I know to fight against the horror is to try and bring my children up with kindness and compassion.

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