Everything is far

and long gone by.

I think that the star

glittering above me

has been dead for a million years.

I think there were tears

in the car I heard pass

and something terrible was said.

A clock has stopped striking in the house

across the road …When did it start? …

Rainer Maria Rilke, Lament, 1902

Indeed, when did it start? And where do I begin? I didn’t have to check Timothy Morton’s blog to know he’d name the current pandemic a hyperobject. Although, in the big scheme of things (to call up an apt cliché) it just makes the cut, COVID19 is demonstrating its potential to momentarily reveal the ecological web. It is, I suspect, simply another eruption along the bumpy but inexorable evidential path of what Rob Nixon has called ‘slow violence’. Slow violence – the ‘delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space’ – is perpetrated on the Earth by human action. Its most obvious – or newsworthy – outcome is tagged as ‘climate change’, manifested through increasingly biblical floods, fires and famines. Now, and not for the first time, there is pandemic. Suddenly, even the most obviously ‘climate change events’ have been displaced in the media’s affections by this latest sensationalised politicisation of something apparently unnatural (or at least unwelcome about) nature. 

Hyperobjects are those entities that can be named but are too large to be conceptualised or envisioned by those who are affected by them. They cannot be viewed. It is not possible to see the pandemic in its entirety. Morton developed his concept from literary studies, specifically the late 18^th- early 19^th century English Romantic poets: those who threw up the pastoral as an already nostalgic barricade against the rising industrialisation that some identify as the start of the Anthropocene. (I’m wary of the naming of eras of which I may be a part; it’s an accident-prone, prematurely-historicising activity: hands up who recalls the Formalesque). The influence of human/animal actions on Earth starts much earlier, of course; but what changes at that point is the relative positioning of humans to their non-built environments. Essentially, the Romantics’ writings about ‘nature’ took the writer’s view and so was more about the poet than his/her subject. Nature was looked at, described, contained, anthropomorphised (a position maintained today by news media and a lot of popular art). The culmination of the separation of nature-as-object from the rest of the planet, most notably the human residents, has informed the thinking of our worlds ever since. This makes the understanding and articulating of the total active ecological web of the Earth as hyperobject, while it remains ‘over there’, particularly difficult. The grieving for its slow demise is reduced to lamentation. (Note: world is not Earth).

I make the distinction here between ritualised lamentation (or the similar but temporally-attenuated mourning) and grief precisely because of that split between nature and humans that now dominates the media and a considerable amount of academic and literary output, including ‘nature writing’. As Morton has observed, ‘We cannot mourn for the environment because we are so deeply attached to it – we are it’. (Morton’s italics). 

The loss of things identified cumulatively as ‘nature’ (forests; icebergs; endangered species, including other humans) through human action or destruction in climate-driven catastrophic events is something to lament. Nature-as-spectacle has encouraged the bucket list, the impetus for strategically-targeted traveling. Bucket-listers take cruises (and pandemic) to what they have already seen imaged on a screen somewhere and now wish to produce and disseminate for themselves, before it disappears. To capture the moment of disappearance, of death, ticks another box on the list of experiences, an ambivalence evident in Marybeth Holleman’s 2019 poem, How to grieve a glacier. 

Almost conversely, isolation encourages the persistence of melancholy (Jacky Bowring places this as a process of memorialising in landscape): mortality becomes personal, a part of the consideration of one’s own being, and in persistent tension with transience and its related temporal patterns, impermanence and ephemerality. There remains the possibility of real, physically-disabling ecological grief, but it requires a self-awareness that permits the transposition of vicariously-ingested information about the deaths of others and other places into one’s own world. The sports stadiums filling with coffins, the allocation of a respirator, the sound of an ambulance, cannot remain ‘over there’. This is an ecology of transient moments with extended durations and multiple velocities, rather than the something-watched: the landscape, the screen, the news report, the (in)visible. Watching is not a working through, a thinking out, but simply an enduring mourning, with no way through to ‘the other side’ (in quote marks because it is a term/ concept currently in favour with politicians giving pandemic updates. It is also used by Morton, who sees it as ‘illusory’ – which, of course, it is, given it is not possible to escape temporal regulation and the mobility of cultural activity that is part of existence). The transience of objects, including humans, does not curtail grief but does proscribe the more public rituals of mourning and particularly of lamentation (cue black-veiled, wailing women in a Life of Brian moment; a dip into Jessica Mitford’s The American way of death for an exposé of the funeral industry;  an indiscreet post on Facebook; a selection on Spotify).  

Humans know Earth from space courtesy of images generated through advanced data collection. They believe they see Earth itself, although its image is viewed, like most landscapes, as an arrangement of surfaces without any insight into its deep or extended ecology. Many publicly lament the visible evidence of pollution over its industrial conurbations while celebrating the reported improved air quality over these same areas during COVID19 lockdowns. Simultaneously, and while faced with this indicator of the transient nature of atmosphere, humans expect their own home environment to simply continue over an indeterminate forever. There is little understanding (and a lot of denial) that there will be no ‘coming out the other side’ to an unproblematically restored earlier moment where humans can pick up perpetuating slow violence on the planet.  Looking at the NASA-generated image of Earth, most don’t understand why we don’t fall off … or, as Rilke once lamented, when this long moment started.