Dispatches from a Northern Town

Mountaintop removal mining. Photo from Mines & Fracking (www.pinterest.com/timothycase/mines-fracking/)

Solastalgia: the emotional and mental distress of a person living in a deteriorating natural environment, an existential anxiety about and grief for a vanishing landscape and its biota; a neologism coined by Glenn Albrecht (b. 1953), philosopher and retired professor of sustainability at Murdoch University in Western Australia.

Solastalgia

The collapse of the natural world happened so quickly, the greater part of it during our own lifetime. Caught in a cataclysm of environmental destruction of our own making that has proliferated beyond our power to control or even regulate, we have become a worldwide civilization of 7.5 billion people who are virtually all tormented by solastalgia.

Historically, indigenous peoples around the world have for hundreds of years witnessed the devastation of their homelands and ecosystems with a sense of solastalgia, ever since Western civilization metastasized out of Europe with its the myth-shattering religion of science empowered by the moral certainty and prerogative of Christianity. Although it is true that warfare and conquest are as ancient as the first prehistoric tribal battles over rights to a hunting ground or a salt lick, the subjugation and exploitation of land and its resources and people have accelerated at a terrifying pace since the dawn of the Industrial Age under the banners of “progress” and “higher civilization.”

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Not for human consumption

An oft-told bird hunter’s joke, but worth retelling.

Old bird hunter Bill comes home from a long day afield and finds his wife is out for the evening. He opens the refrigerator and discovers she has left a bowl of stew for him to eat. He heats it in the microwave and hogs it down with a couple hard rolls.

His wife comes home and he tells her, “The stew you left in the fridge for me was excellent.”

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We all live on death row in cells of our own devising.
– from The Ancient Minstrel by Jim Harrison (1937-2016), American writer of poetry, novels, novellas, essays and screenplays

The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity.
– William Faulkner (1895-1962), American writer of novels, short stories, and screenplays

All-in

You’re not a writer unless you’re all-in.

Not a real writer. A writer of great fiction.

To become a real writer you must gather up your heart and mind and soul in your arms and making the leap into the fiery chasm. You have to go all-in. Your art has to be everything.

Yes, you can make a living with your writing ability without going all-in.You can grind out respectable and even superior expository prose, journalism, academic treatises, essays, television scripts, or any of a dozen other crafts that require skillful use of the written word. But before you can look into the mirror in the morning and see the reflection of a true writer you must, with honesty and objectivity, judge your work in comparison with that of a Hemingway, Faulkner, Harrison, Vonnegut or other great novelist.

The writers of fiction who were all-in.

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