The beginning is the end, and the end is the beginning.
How can this be true?
Allow me to properly introduce Nietzsche’s “Eternal Recurrence”. In his book The Gay Science, Nietzsche asks: ‘What if a demon were to say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you?”’ Nietzsche thought that was the most terrifying prospect in all philosophy.
Dark is constructed around this idea. Every 33 years, the same tragedy happens in the town of Winden: children disappear. For a small town like that, where everyone knows everyone else, such an incident can cause immense grief, and indeed, for one of the relatives, it could spark enough rage to make them attempt to murder a child with a rock.
If reality was cyclical, then tragedy would be unavoidable. Every ending would simply be the beginning of a new process leading back to the same end. Infinite tragedy, infinite chaos, infinite grief.
That is, if reality was cyclical…
***
“We are still deep, deep in recovery from the fire. We’re still in emergency mode. We considered that an unprecedented disaster, and now we have another unprecedented disaster? ... It’s like, really, when are the locusts showing up?”
Colette Curtis, a town spokesperson for Paradise, was in disbelief this year, as the Coronavirus put a stop to efforts to revive community spirit in the town. “Rebuilding is an emotional thing,” she said, “people are overwhelmed. We wanted to be able to sit down and literally and figuratively hold their hand during the process. Now, this makes that impossible.”
The town is a replica of those across the world: shuttered shops, empty schools and isolated elders. Children are asking their teachers “What’s next?”, having been through two years in a row of online learning.
“We are a very resilient community, and we’ve proven that,” said Paradise Schools Support worker Tom Taylor, “But how many times can you recover?”
As I write these words, the air in Paradise is darkening with smoke. There have been warnings in the past week that the whole town might have to evacuate. So far, no evacuation has been ordered, but the painful memories of losing their homes are resurfacing even more vividly for the people of Paradise.
“A lot of people are hurting. I think people thought the fires were behind us,” said resident Barbara Manson.
“It’s not gonna burn here again,” her husband, Rick, said. “It can’t.”
***
In book 11 of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve get kicked out of Paradise. Eve’s not happy about it.
Must I thus leave thee Paradise? thus leave
Thee native soil, these happy Walks and Shades,
Fit haunt of Gods? where I had hope to spend,
Quiet though sad, the respite of that day
That must be mortal to us both.
Nothing Adam or Eve can imagine could compare with the grief of losing their home.
That is, until Angel Raphael comes down from heaven to talk to Adam. He asks the weeping Adam to come with him to the top of a hill, and when the two arrive at the top, Raphael shows him visions of the future. ‘Adam, now ope thine eyes, and first behold / Th’ effects which thy original crime hath wrought.’
Adam looks out and sees a field. Two brothers walk together through the wheat, one carrying some random fruits he’s picked up off the ground, the other cradling a freshly-slain lamb. They both lay their offerings down, but only the lamb is taken up into heaven.
The first man, turning away from his rejected fruit, picks up a rock and bludgeons his brother to death.
That more or less sets the tone for Raphael’s following visions: like a biblical Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, Raphael presents Adam with a haunting vision of what his life choices will lead to; but, unlike Ebenezer Scrooge, there’s no choice for Adam to reform himself and change the future. Raphael shows Adam ‘all diseas’d, all maladies / Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture,’ he shows Adam a raging battle, tells him of famines and of hostility and rape.
And then, after touring Adam through hundreds of years of bloody human future-history, Raphael shows Adam the Flood.
Like a dark Ceiling stood; down rush’d the Rain
Impetuous, and continu’d till the Earth
No more was seen
***
California’s fire season hasn’t even properly started yet; the worst of the fires are expected every year around the October-December period; already, though, large portions of the state have become entirely black and orange.
Midday, even in towns that haven’t yet been touched by the fires, looks like midnight. Helicopters looking to drop water on the blazes can’t see where the fire lines are, because thick billowing clouds of hot smoke block their vision. The same obstacle confronts fire teams fighting on the ground. In some places, roads have been closed by fire departments because drivers could barely see ten feet in front of their vehicles.
Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon described the situation in California this week: “It is apocalyptic.”
Any resident of California, witnessing an entire state choked and burned, hearing news of more than 20 deaths in the last few weeks, feeling the heat from more than four million acres of land up in flames, unable to see in front of themselves, trapped in perpetual night, breathing in the ashes and the carbon that used to make up their neighbour’s house, hearing nought but sirens and crackling, might be forgiven for believing they were standing at the end of the world.
Based on everything I’ve seen while researching for this blog, I would not be able to disagree with such a person. California may never recover from such devastating fires. The world may never fully recover from the economic devastation of the Coronavirus. How we’ll cope with the even larger disasters yet to come is incomprehensible. We’re at the beginning of the end.
In the first half of this year alone, under president Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil has burned down 4,700 square kilometres of the Amazon rainforest. On the very morning I finished writing this blog post, 110 square kilometres of ice snapped away from Greenland and drifted into the ocean. Humanity is showing no sign of learning from its mistakes.
***
California is on fire, and all for what?
Well, partially, for a gender reveal party. More than 14,000 acres of woodland has so far been destroyed after a couple launched illegal pyrotechnics at a party to celebrate the genitalia of their child. Because, in our fragile, disaster-weakened world, this is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with “It’s a boy!”
It’s the reason fires have spread so rapidly throughout California this year: a period of drought, exacerbated by climate change, dried out all the state’s forests, from 2011 to 2019. The forests were so dry that all it took was one small mistake, one small transgression, to bring about apocalyptic fires.
Philip B. Duffy, president of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, says many people do not understand the dynamics of a warming world: “People are always asking, ‘Is this the new normal?’
“I always say no. It’s going to get worse."
***
The only way to break this cycle is to break our obsession with time-travel. Let the grim logic of Dark prove to us that going back won’t solve anything. Let the logic of Paradise Regained show us that Paradise no longer exists, and to try and rebuild it would be utterly futile. We’re not going to get back to the good old days, we’re not going to return to “home a moment in time”; we’re not going to make America great again.
If we return to where we started, we simply restart the process that leads us back to the same end. We’re like the townspeople of Paradise, rebuilding the same wooden houses we lost in the fire.
***
Right at the end of Dark, Adam causes the 'Apokalypse’.
As soon as he does so, a woman comes to visit him, and she explains that he’s lived his entire life an infinite number of times before. His entire world is caught in a loop, a cycle, being recreated and then destroyed in the same ways forever. He’s caused the Apokalypse every time.
But, she says, now is the time for him to break the cycle. Only in the chaos he’s left behind from the Apokalypse will he be able to stop the recurrence of the pattern.
The Coronavirus lockdown ended society as we knew it. In that middle, in that gap, we should have used the chaos to debate what the world should look like when we started to rebuild it. I fear we’ve missed our chance; but not everything about society has come back from the abstract yet. There’s still a little time left for us, after the end and before the beginning, where we can break free from the Eternal Recurrence.
***
The Flood is coming. We can either cling to nostalgia, to the life we used to have, or we can build an Ark, and hope it’s strong enough to face the waves.
So, the next time you catch yourself saying "I wish it would all just go back to the way it was before", think twice. 'Cause it's another day for you and me in paradise.
Think twice, 'cause it's another day for you and me in paradise.
The end.
Comments
Post a Comment