"Plummet Sound" might not seem at first sight to belong to a site dedicated to practical suggestions about dealing with our environmental crisis in all its ramifications.
However, I would suggest that creative ways to deal with the impact humanity continues to have on the world have to include material constructions and art installations that are directed at helping us deal with our own thoughts and feelings, including our guilt and our need to expiate our sins. Can a dump also be a grand monument? I believe so, and that it can be a powerful symbol of human impact on the Anthropocene epoch. I also mean it to be a practical suggestion! Other works could include models and examples of visions of the future - I hope to investigate some ideas there too.
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"Plummet Sound"
Once upon a time
Folly, excess and downright sin
Floated, whirled in the air, spiraled in the sea,
Pounded their dirty war against the beauty of the world
Unrepentant, relentless.
Meanwhile, most of us had a little luck,
Were not down with the poor in the filth sorting the trash
For pennies on gigantic dumps with our eight year-olds -
Just kept our heads down and worked to keep ourselves afloat
While the rich took ship to Antarctica
The super-rich to inner space
The places where the heat and clamor still died down
Meanwhile we got sick and the bugs were weeding us out
The heat rose inexorably, the map was stained with uninhabitability
Drought and floods intensified -
We began to lose our nerve.
What to do?
Much - overwhelmingly simultaneous,
Hard to keep our heads above water
No time to feel sorry for ourselves
But some magical acts allowed,
Acts of expiation
As the guilt rose with the seas:
We needed our eyewitnesses
Our heroes and villains
Who were all us.
We needed the counter-intuitive
The not strictly necessary
Haven 't we always trailed that?
A monument of shame
Huge but hidden
Unseen from space
Building slowly
Year by year
Abyssal, abysmal, bathyal
At plummet sound
In deepening silence
Layers of darkness
Thousanding tons
Deepening waste
The colossus of neglect
Gigantic blocks strewn across the ocean floor.
The lines of barges slowly hauled by wind and sun
Head from the ends of the Earth
To the circle of coordinates
The human gyre in the great Pacific
To tip their multi-wrapped containers
Made to lie unbroken for ten thousand years
At least a start
As the mountain accumulates
The understated imprint of disaster
Rises to the surface
It will never break if all goes well
Or if not well then well enough
The well of broken promises and tears
Too big for planet A
Resources plundered from the Earth
Pummeled in the battered crucible
Toxic to the last
Returned to sender in the drama of the end
Where every day is judgment day
The trumpets unceasing
The hippo god tireless
Weighing our darkened saturated hearts
The stage mercilessly lit, shadowless
A green screen of hyper reality.
You might imagine the perversity of it
A buried pyramid
Laid down higgledy piggledy
Held together by gravity, pressure and friction
No gleaming sides polished by patient hands
Sunlight quickly diminishing
Darkness triumphant
We had to plumb the depths,
Bury our staff, one kind of knowledge,
The curse of Prospero.
We have bedimmed the noontide sun,
The catharsis capacious,
Big enough to swallow our regrets.
The great rollers pass over this boneyard of dreams -
We know what’s down there
Pacing its cage like a mutant tiger
Its growls of memory
As deep and as wide as the sea.
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