impermanence

I’ve been doing a lot of surfing on the peak oil related websites I mentioned in the previous post. In just a couple of days, I can honestly say that my worldview has shifted and is still shifting. The ground beneath my feet feels insubstantial and rubbery. It wouldn’t be far off the mark to describe the shift as a conversion experience.

I’ve had two previous conversion experiences, if you count coming out of the closet (to myself) as one of them. The first I mentioned yesterday – it was a relatively short-lived conversion to Christian fundamentalism. I felt I’d been yanked out of the stream of life and placed back into it an awkward and immobile angle. If I’d been something of a fish before, swimming along with the currents, I was now more of a rock. Somehow, my world was no longer my own.

Learning about peak oil theory feels a lot like that first one. Maybe I should take this fact as a warning to back off of the topic for awhile. Or maybe the feelings the first conversion awoke, having remained dormant for years, are finally finding something real to attach themselves to. Is this what one calls a “return of the repressed”? Or maybe what I'm feeling is a perfectly normal reaction to taking seriously the notion that we'll be extremely fortunate to have running water, electricity, medicine, and a civil infrastructure by the time I reach old age.

At any rate, I've been wondering what it could possibly mean to (attempt to) produce art in light of the possibility peak oil theory is correct. There's always the marxist social realism model, the artist as educator and propagandist. Or art as a form of distraction and escape. But neither of these strike me as cases of authentic art. Art opens onto or composes the infinite real (sorry, Thomas). As infinite or related to infinity, art is "spiritual" and not empirical and therefore can't be reduced to a role of broadcasting messages or one sort or another; similarly, as real or related to the real, art offers not escape but a pathway straight into the beating heart of it all.

Moreover, art and the artist can no longer strive for permanence or hope to be remembered by future generations. The best we can hope for is that the most significant of the achievements of the past 2500 years or so aren't completely lost and forgotten. And even if we're not spiraling toward the new dark ages as I'm predicting, the fact remains that the proliferation of objects artistic production as we know it today is sustained, ultimately, by the availability of cheap energy. There will be no small poetry presses in our relocalized and low-energy worlds (I say worlds for the very concept of "the world" will surely become a quasi-mystical limit meaning "as far beyond the reaches of 'here' imaginable"); with rare exception, poets will circulate their poetry among friends, neighbors, local communities, and no one else.

So we need a genuine art that "goes the distance" to the infinite real but which does so without pretensions of permanence or immortality or even global (as in beyond-local) recognition. In that scary essay, The Long Emergency, that I mentioned in the previous post, James Howard Kunstler writes that that "the survivors [of the upcoming changes to our way of life] will have to cultivate a religion of hope -- that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on." I'd add that art, if it exists at all, will have to show that this belief is justified.

I know I've been bringing up Burning Man a lot lately, but that's one place where I think that such an artistic project has already begun. Not Burning Man as a whole, but the art that's produced for it and that it inspires. Much of the art at Burning Man is destroyed or set on fire at the end of the festival, so impermanence is, so to speak, "built-in" to the essence of the work of art itself. For a large-scale example of such art, David Best builds an enormous and unique temple each year which is burned to the ground the night after the Man is burned. Here's a picture of last year's temple (used here without permission, courtesy of a photographer by the name of Rick Egan). Click here for many more images.



I'm also thinking of the more intimate and temporary installations/sculptures of San Francisco artist named Joe Mangrum.

Does a poetic analog of this sort of thing exist? If not, what might it look/read like?