Grief

Heinberg suggests that in our age of peak oil and climate change, we also need to consider the idea of eco-grief, the feelings of loss connected to ecological devastation and the threatened loss of a whole way of life, which, one way or another, is about to come to an end in what he calls pre-traumatic stress disorder related in ways to Freud’s anticipatory mourning. (89)
Jospeh Dodds. Psychoanalysis at the Edge of Chaos.

Of course, we are living within madness. Not of our own but of that which is foist upon us. Madness that we participate in, often willingly:

Madness of desires extracted.
Madness of the pain of lost promise.
Madness of an air-conditioned nightmare.
Madness of methane.
Madness of psychic structures dominated by destructive instinct.
Madness of narcissistic fixations.
Madness of denial of projections.
Madness is a pathological consumption.
Madness of the eco-disaster film we pay to see.
Madness of Thanatos become Eros.
Madness of ‘green’ economics.
Madness of theatre as entertainment.
Madness of performance as a lubricant to cultural capital.

How to leave the madness? How to affirm breaks and difference, ruptures and fresh potentials.

You don’t do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very fine file… Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and threshold, passages and distributions of intensity, and territories and deterritorialization … You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn… you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don’t reach the body without organs, and its plane consistency, by wildly destratifying. (160-161)
Deleuze & Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II.

(We Broke This City, Milo the Prophet, Los Angeles, 2019)

(Delivered with droll and cosmic insouciance.... An ironic incantatory drawl)

But enough of anger and enough of rage
We all want the comfort of the place beyond the place
That might just be the place where we can settle
Might be the place where I met you or will meet you
My past and future love
Love that escapes to other latitudes
Love that burns my hand like a torturer with a cigar
In some dank prison somewhere:
Off site, black site, black ops, black heart
Love that soothes my gut like aloe vera juice in a brown glass bottle from the health food store Lily of my desert, you are my soother, my savior, my soothsavior
Teller and healer of the future of my vivisected heart

And the time of junk mail is over
And the time of inboxes is over
And the age of walks on the beach is long gone
And the time of certain doom is still now, with a chuckle
And we’re still dreaming the end of the world
Like we have been for millennia now
Can’t we please have a new fever dream?
Something to put ice on the blue balls of the body politic
Hard for the end for so long they’re now tender and sore
Never having come to crisis
What do I take for that?
If not the blue pill or the red pill, or even the rainbow pill: all already branded, Maybe a different colour, a different hue?
Will Pfizer make something for that? Will Moderna make something for that? Everything I take from them just takes off the edge
And nails in the coffin instead
Like Hercules cleaning the stables
From the shit of 50,000 imperial horses
I’ve got your dust and guts up my nose
Where by all rights the blow should be