Macrocene by Roz Sullivan-Lovett

MACROCENE by Roz Sullivan-Lovett

"Macrocene. n. An epoch in which the size of human impact on the earth outscales human understanding to such a degree that change becomes impossible to visualize."

"The aspect of our studies so far that’s been most telling to me is the difficulty that we have in creating any meaningful model on which to accurately and positively think about the anthropocene—we seem able to break down arguments chiefly by the points at which they fail, and are much less comfortable speaking about what should be the terms we use, the goals we set, the action we take. I find myself thinking in a process of elimination—don’t do this, don’t think of this, don’t try this. I mention this not to suggest we aren’t finding a meaningful discussion, since we certainly are, but rather to bring up what I think defines my concept of the anthropocene far more than my original word, avarocene, did—macrocene.

"In rereading the assignment sheet, I remembered that this is a name for our current moment specifically, and does not need a sense of start or end (and in fact, shouldn’t have one, probably) so I created a term based on precisely our moment, in which we are increasingly aware of what we are doing and are now scrambling to understand what we see. We are so overwhelmed by the level to which human impact has affected our ecosystems that we struggle to talk in our small languages about what it is that has happened; we lack the longevity to create meaningful change in legislature, we lack the perspective to understand precisely how individual people's’ actions affect the world when compared to the large-scale corporations we keep mentioning in class.

"I’ve therefore drawn on John Donne as more of an image than an actual person for the sake of his metaphysical poetry—specifically, his use of microcosms to speak about God and macrocosms to talk about love. I also thought of the bird’s-eye view photographs that we saw the other week in class, and the way that they actually sort of meant nothing to me, much like air travel means nothing to me—the enormity of landscape is not actually something I’m equipped to understand, no matter how much I might like to. I am more affected by the tiny dissolving shell, but often I feel like the reigning idea is that it is a moral failing to use microcosms to talk about the anthropocene as it is. We fall to quickly in the 'look at this sad sea turtle and donate to clean up the beaches' territory. This only adds to our despair once we realize that small actions also fail to address the whole. We can see faces in everything, give empathy to everything, but watching the faces leaves us too distracted to organize, create new laws and legislature. It’s a wicked game."

MicroMacro

Here’s John Donne, sitting on a swivel chair at nine years old, socked feet dangling,

zooming in and out of a google maps image of his own house on his parents’ desktop computer.

He sees a face in his dresser. He sees a face in his shoelaces.

He sees a face on his coat, hanging from a chair, in his socks, lying on the floor,

and in his hand throwing up shadows on the wall.

He sees a face on his mother.

He sees a face in the mirror.

Here’s Hanuman, throwing rocks at birds.

Here’s a female bonobo scaling the highest tree

in her enclosure to release a sparrow into the air.

He cannot see them, but he reads The Ramayana as a bedtime story.

He can’t see them, but he lies on the floor of the living room in a patch

of sunlight on slow Tuesday afternoons

and looks at the pictures in National Geographic,

and thinks that the bonobos look sort of like his grandma.

He doesn’t read the articles; they’re too long.

Like most bright children, he has nightmares.

His nightmares are about the world ending, and they make him wake shaking in the middle

of the night and flee down the of hall to his mother’s bedroom,

but she doesn’t know how to comfort him.

She just doesn’t have the same images hanging around in her head;

hers were all nuclear bombs and drop-and-cover and radiation and skin sloughing off.

She doesn’t have the burning rainforests on her list of problems,

and SUV’s don’t make her cry angry tears.

She tells him, eat your dinner. There are starving children in Africa.

He sees pictures of them in National Geographic, too,

and wonders what their nightmares are about.

But mostly he doesn’t wonder about them at all.

He spends one recess playing rainforest with two girls in his class.

They both want to be jungle cats—a panther and an ocelot. He chooses

a beetle, and they sneer at him and tell him he has to pick a mammal,

because bugs don’t have feelings.

They don’t even have faces.

A lunch lady finds him an hour later crouched under the exterior stairs,

still angry, sleeves soaked in snot and tears.

He was trying to catch spiders, he tells the principal,

and prove they were people.

Or rather,

Smaller versions of people

Or maybe just other versions

Or not people but why are people people anyway?

He can’t really explain.

Next week he plays superheros with two other boys,

Because he’s decided girls are mean and he won’t ever see his own face in theirs.

They pretend about punching buildings so hard they fall down.

It makes him think of the Pacific Crest earthquake, and that makes him cry too.

At six in the morning one Saturday, John Donne’s father wakes him up

to go fishing.

He bites his lip, hard, as his father guts a trout three hours later,

because he’s watched TV and read stories and written his own sometimes in his journal and so he knows that one life is all lives, because there is only one fish in the world, and that’s the fish in front of you.

And he’s also watched TV, and knows that he shouldn’t cry in front of dad.

There’s never more than one animal of each kind in stories,

except for the ones in which there are two and they are in love.

He feels sick on the car ride home,

then sick and guilty once he catches a glimpse of his father’s face in the rearview mirror.

His nightmares become about fish.

When he is older, they become about his father.

When he is older still, they become about his son, whose name is John the Younger.

In this midlife nightmare, his son is riding a fine horse down a back road somewhere cold and damp, and almost falls from the saddle as a child bursts out from the long river grasses.

He weeps omnipotent tears as his son strikes the child five times about the head with his riding-crop.

In his holy-ghostliness he screams to see the child’s death, the child’s life, the child’s-might-have-been.

It makes him think about The Children in Africa.

Are they still starving?

He doesn’t hear about them so much anymore.

He excuses himself for this sin by saying aloud to the foggy road with its child on the ground and its son on a horse:

Well, I never saw their faces.

Hard to think of someone when you don’t have a face to put to the name.

But he knows that isn’t true, because he did see them,

flipped through their photos in National Geographic on slow Tuesday afternoons,

but that flipping only melded them in his mind into one single,

skeletal child

and abandoned her except in nightmares like this.

When he wakes, he remembers that he doesn’t have any sons, only a daughter,

named Kayleigh,

whose cheeks are always flushed pink-red,

and that she has soccer practice at nine.

He thinks,

it’s good she’s getting the exercise.

1. He tries talking to God about it, but God is too big.

2. He tries joining Greenpeace, but they are too noisy.

3. He tries reading up, but he disagrees with everything he reads, quibbles with his scholar’s brain and wonders if he shouldn’t go back to school.

He tries writing poems, one Sunday afternoon, but he gives up because he has work tomorrow and he can’t waste freetime like this.

When he is eighty-five he realizes he will be dying very soon and panics,

because suddenly it’s clear to him he hasn’t done anything at all

and he doesn’t have anyone to carry on for him,

only an idiot son who wrote just a single volume of any note and its subtitle was so embarrassingly long, how did it go, it was

containing a short map of Mundane Vanity, a cabinet of Merry Conceits, certain pleasant propositions and questions, with their merry solutions and answers.

Yes?

No,

he has

a daughter called Kayleigh,

and her daughter is called Jane.

She has been all children to him, ever since she was born.

Her tears all tears, her joy all joy.

Or perhaps the only joy,

that my-kids-eat-first-think-of-the-children-what-about-the-future-may-God-bless-my-line joy.

Fear, actually, now he looks at it, and covetousness

and selfishness

and cowardice

Small-mindedness. Your child is not every child, however much