Sunday, February 9, 2014

"The Broken-Hearted Hallelujah"


From Kathleen Dean Moore, a compelling call for more "broken hearted hallelujahs":


Arches National Park, Moab, Utah (2013) 
"As the true fury of global warming begins to kick in—forests flash to ashes, storms tear away coastal villages, cities swelter in record-breaking heat, drought singes the Southwest, the Arctic melts—we come face to face with the full meaning of the environmental emergency: If climate change continues unchecked, scientists tell us, the world’s life-support systems will be irretrievably damaged by the time our children reach middle-age. The need for action is urgent and unprecedented.
We here issue a call to writers, who have been given the gift of powerful voices that can change the world. For the sake of all the plants and animals on the planet, for the sake of inter-generational justice, for the sake of the children, we call on writers to set aside their ordinary work and step up to do the work of the moment, which is to stop the reckless and profligate fossil fuel economy that is causing climate chaos.
Some kinds of writing are morally impossible in a state of emergency: Anything written solely for tenure. Anything written solely for promotion. Any solipsistic project. Anything, in short, that isn’t the most significant use of a writer’s life and talents. Otherwise, how could it ever be forgiven by the ones who follow us, who will expect us finally to have escaped the narrow self-interest of our economy and our age?"

Arches National Park
Moab, Utah (2013)
My response: "On What We Bury" 
 ISLE (Winter 2014)

"We slip behind a sandstone dome, smooth like a church bell, and sit on the edge of the rim, its walls striated, and each striation a chapter in its history. To look down into the canyon is to look back through time. My friends lie with their bodies sinking into the contours of the warm, rust-colored rock. I drop to my knees. We do not speak. The tourists murmur. Two ravens call. The wind chants through the canyon below. I unfold the pamphlet the ranger handed us when we entered the park. It explains how everything we see was once buried beneath an ocean, and how the ocean deposited the sand and salt that surrounds us now as exposed sandstone, as red rock. Is there a more humbling experience—kneeling in a desert where an ocean rose and receded, and where humans have roamed for 10,000 years?"


Arches National Park, Moab, Utah (2013)



Arches National Park, Moab, Utah (2013)



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