Paradise Lost (The Cycle Begins)
That phrase, along with many other vague wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey lines, is eternally recurring in Netflix’s German sci-fi show Dark. The show takes place in three different time periods, 33 years apart from one another, in the small town of Winden, whose distinguishing feature is a giant nuclear power plant.
Oh, and it also has a cave that transports people back and forth through time.
At the end of the first season, someone from 2019 crawls through that cave and arrives in the year 2052. Everything he finds there is grey. Ash blows through the air; trees wither without leaves, their bark scorched black; small bands of rugged, ragged humans scramble in packs through the remains.
You can guess what had happened to the town’s biggest feature.
The show describes the nuclear plant’s explosion as the ‘Apocalypse’, a word that refers to the complete final destruction of the world, as described in the Biblical book of Revelation. In the Bible, it’s the end. But, in the time-travelling world of Dark, it’s also the beginning.
That’s how Kory Honea, County Sheriff of a small town in California named Paradise, described the wildfire that ravaged his town in 2018. That fire was the largest in California’s modern history, killing 86 people, destroying more than 13,900 homes and clearing an area of woodland so large it could be seen from space. It had expanded by the size of one football field every second, practically exploding across the state, propelled by 52 mph winds.
It was an ambush: the fire started on the other side of a mountain from the small town, so most of the residents had no warning at all before the fire descended upon them.
Early that morning, a nurse named Nicole Jolly opened her phone to a text from her husband. It was one word: ‘Fire’. A minute later, he sent a follow-up: ‘Huge.’
By the time Jolly and the other nurses had evacuated all 67 patients from Paradise’s hospital, its human resources building was already ablaze. She looked back on a wall of flames as she pulled out of the parking lot, heading towards Pentz Road, one of the town’s four evacuation routes.
The road was jammed.
It was no use trying any of the other routes, because all of those were also gridlocked. Popping tyres banged above the crackling sound of combustion, over the shouts and screams of the trapped herd; people abandoned their melting vehicles to stumble through the thick orange haze in any direction they thought would lead to safety.
Jolly was still in her car, attempting to drive through it all, with the steering wheel literally melting in her hands. Once her car caught fire, though, she joined the others on foot.
Hundreds of residents were stranded in the middle of the fire, with no exit. Some had stayed in their houses the entire time, while others were forced to shelter in car parks and commercial buildings that had not been designed for such a purpose. The whole event was a disaster of city planning.
In 2005, the state fire management plan for the ridge had warned that canyon winds posed a ‘serious threat’ to Paradise. And yet, 13 years later, those foretold winds met no resistance whatsoever from the town. Those in charge of Paradise had ignored every single warning given to them about the East winds, outright rejecting the idea that something so disastrous could possibly happen in Paradise.
A year after some serious fires in 2008, the Butte County grand jury had warned Paradise’s leaders that the town must address its evacuation route problem, or face disastrous consequences. And yet again, even after large costly fires, these threats were ignored.
A fire specialist named Zeke Lunder says that towns like Paradise are “set up for disaster”. It’s in their “DNA”. Their destruction is encoded right there in their construction. Their beginning is their end…
Adam’s idea of ‘Paradise’ is the same as his idea of the ‘Apocalypse’ (or ‘Apokalypse’ in German). He wants a dead, empty universe. Only a universe that is devoid of life can be devoid of suffering. This is how, for him, the end and the beginning are one and the same. The end of reality is the beginning of Paradise.
Before there was Dark, though, and after the Bible, there was John Milton. Most of us, whether we’ve read it or not, view the tale of Adam and Eve through the lens of Milton’s Bible fan-fiction story, Paradise Lost.
In the poem, Milton takes the tiny but iconic fable of the first two humans ever to exist, and explodes it into a twelve-book epic with psychologically complex characters and scenes where angels and demons chuck mountains at each other in Heaven. It’s a lot of fun.
The main story goes like this: Adam and Eve, ignoring warnings from a higher authority, thinking they couldn’t possibly be punished so horribly for such a minor digression, eat an apple, and then climate change happens. This is widely considered a bad move.
Milton puts that all a little more poetically: for example, in book 10, after Adam eats the forbidden fruit, God gives out his vengeful commands, starting by addressing the star at the centre of our solar system:
The Sun
Had first his precept so to move, so shine,
As might affect the Earth with cold and heat
Scarce tollerable, and from the North to call
Decrepit Winter, from the South to bring
Solstitial summers heat.
Do ‘cold and heat / Scarce tollerable’ sound familiar?
Paradise lost, and all for what? Arrogance. Adam’s arrogance, Eve’s arrogance, that God couldn’t possibly...
‘Nor can I think that God, Creator wise,
Though threatning, will in earnest so destroy
Us his prime Creatures’
If that was the tale of the first humans, it says a lot about our ability to learn from our own mistakes. Perhaps our narcissistic self-destructive tendencies are a part of us, encoded in our DNA.
Perhaps our beginning…
You get where I’m going.
And they really are deadly: every survivor of the tragedy has a story to tell, of witnessing some human-shaped figure on fire in a car, or an old lady dying of a heart attack in the terrifying heat, or corpses appearing on the road ahead.
Nicole Jolly was asked at 10:02 AM to return to the fire; somewhere on the road, a woman was in labour, and fire officials had radioed Jolly to ask her to perform a caesarean section. Jolly returned to the hospital, which was still mostly intact, to fetch supplies and await her patient’s arrival.
The pregnant woman never arrived.
But if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll be aware by now that endings aren’t just endings.
In the third part of this blog, I’m going to explore the notion of the “Eternal recurrence”, the idea that life will continually repeat itself, forcing us to relive the same destructive beginnings and productive endings over and over again.
As if one ending wasn’t enough.
Paradise Regained (The Cycle Continues)
If the beginning is the end, where does that leave the middle?
It’s the in-between, the gap, the looping path that leads from one bang! to the other; the middle is where all instability, all fluctuation, all the churning motions of entropy do their work. It’s where we live, the only place we’ll ever know.
It’s chaos.
***
John Milton’s follow-up to Paradise Lost, a shorter poem called Paradise Regained, doesn’t really live up to its name. Paradise doesn’t make a single appearance in the poem; it’s been lost forever, and not a single character attempts to rebuild it.
The story takes place hundreds of years after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise. It follows a teenage Jesus Christ on his lonely expedition through the desert, during which he meets Satan, who attempts to tempt Jesus into sinning. It’s a much less exciting premise than your average epic poem, but that’s kind of the point: Milton wants to contrast Jesus’ brand of heroism with the kind usually celebrated in warlords and mythical figures.
By saving Doctrine, and from errour lead
To know...
Is yet more Kingly; this attracts the Soul,
Governs the inner man, the nobler part,
That other o'er the body only reigns.
What Milton (via Christ) is saying there, is that the only form of command we should aspire to have is over our own passions, and over the hearts and minds of others. To do this, we’ve got to keep spreading the truth to whoever will listen. That is something more ‘Kingly’ than any war-mongering monarch or Pagan god ever achieved.
But what’s with the title?
Milton’s implication in the whole poem is that ‘Paradise’ has transformed. It no longer exists as a physical location. Never more can humans wander in its evergreen glades, plucking ripe fruits and gambolling naked among the shrubbery.
Instead, thanks to the sacrifices and the truth-telling of Christ, Paradise now exists in the abstract; it exists in the minds, in the souls, of those who follow the teachings of God. And it can be regained, if you simply follow those who are telling the truth, and think hard enough about where you’re going.
***
Cement seemed an obvious choice of building material for the planners of Paradise, as they looked to revive the town from its ashen ruins. After such a devastating fire, surely the only logical thing to do is reconstruct houses from a fireproof material.
Proposals to rebuild the houses with cement, however, were rejected out of hand by the residents. They said 'We're either rebuilding with wood, or we're not coming back to Paradise at all.'
Wood, for as far back as most residents could remember, had been the main building material of houses in Paradise; people were determined that, if they were to move back home, it had to feel like home. It had to look like home. And so, they rebuilt Paradise with wood.
These kinds of disputes between city officials and returning residents defined the reconstruction efforts of Paradise. Jim Broshears, the city’s former fire chief, once promoted the idea that all houses should be surrounded by a ring of brick pavers, to prevent fires from spreading through people’s gardens and into their homes. Much like the cement idea, this proposal was ignored by most residents.
The town’s motto, “In harmony with nature,” seemed to rule out any suggestions of houses surrounded by five feet of bricks. Most returnees, eager to maintain Paradise’s core values, wanted to replant trees around their wooden houses, and knock their wooden fences back into the ground. Again, the people got their wish.
All these disagreements and divisions about what Paradise was supposed to be were only possible thanks to it having been destroyed in the first place. Now that the physical Paradise had ended, all that remained was the idea of Paradise. Paradise in the abstract.
But with enough people returning home, abstraction soon began converting back into reality. Just not in the way that many had hoped it would.
***
There’s a moment in Dark, probably its darkest scene, in which a man called Ulrich travels back in time, only to find someone called Helge, who Ulrich believes has abducted and killed his son. Ulrich decides that if he murders Helge in the past, he’ll never have lost his son in the future. The fact that Helge is merely a child when Ulrich finds him does not deter him; he chases Helge down, and bludgeons him with a rock.
Here we have a mirror of one of the biggest questions in any time-travel conversation: if you had a time machine, would you go back and kill Hitler?
Any attempts to go back and ‘undo’ the bad things that happened in the past are, ultimately, attempts to disrupt the process of cause and effect. If only, we think, we could just do it all over again, with the benefit of the hindsight we have now. None of this would’ve happened.
The creators of Dark have a twisted response to that wish: even if you could go back, you wouldn’t be able to change anything. You could only cause it.
Helge, bloodied and unconscious, is left by Ulrich to die in a bunker. When he eventually wakes, the damage done to his brain is severe enough to change the course of his life. As a result of the attack, he spends the rest of his days taking part in the plot that will eventually lead to the disappearance of Ulrich’s son. Thus, the cycle continues.
If only we could do it all over again, with the benefit of hindsight…
***
The reconstruction of Paradise was underway. The abstract was becoming the concrete (or, more accurately, the wood). More and more people were returning to the town, either due to desperate homesickness, or because they couldn’t afford houses elsewhere, or, for some, because their insurance companies told them it was their only choice.
Paradise quickly became a case-study of time’s hellish spiral of negative cause-and-effect, as their water supply was poisoned by chemicals released in the fire.
Global warming had caused the initial fire; poor planning had caused a high death toll and property damage; property damage had caused Benzene to contaminate the town’s entire water supply; Benzene in the water supply causes cancer in many of those who drink it. Cancerous Benzene in the water supply led many people to drink from potentially unsafe private tanks they’d bought themselves, or to continue drinking cancerous tap water through ineffective filters.
The term for this is ‘Natech’. Short for ‘Natural disasters triggering technological disasters,’ Natech is the sort of phenomenon we should start getting used to, as we progress through our world of unbreakable cause-and-effect chains. Thanks to the interconnected nature of reality, disasters from every different category are always overlapping, each one causing or worsening the next.
***
Trisha Wells, a former Paradise dweller, said in 2019: “I still just want to go home, and not home the place but home a moment in time.”
But the present, the middle, the chaos, is where all of us live. It’s all we’ll ever know. Our entire existence takes place on entropy’s downward escalator. This could be a much smoother descent if we, like the Jesus of Paradise Regained, admit that we cannot return to where we have been in time. Every attempt to ‘redo’ the past merely leads to repetitions of its consequences, each repetition deadlier than the last.
It’s a cycle of eternal recurrence.
***
On February 7th, 2020, the Mayor of Paradise, Greg Bolin, grinned broadly as he cut a red ribbon, declaring Paradise officially reopened. Regained.
By mid-March, though, the town was going quiet again. Shops were shuttered once more. Paradise Town Hall was closed to the public. Staff members of various official buildings started wearing sanitized gloves, in preparation for an outbreak of what scientists were calling ‘COVID-19’.
Months later, in the midst of yet another health disaster, the people of Paradise looked over to the horizon, to see most of California burning, an apocalyptic orange glow rising above it and singeing the sky.
Thus, the cycle continues.
Apocalypse Now (The Cycle Ends)
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