Letter 6. Horizon Layer.
we destroy the whole world the great
spreadsheet after the event after the dissolution
of spirit we level disenchantment
starting again from the ground
– Nisha Ramayya, ‘Following the Event’
Why comment on writing when everything is burning, dissolving, sinking? Writing itself is just about justifiable for private persons, given the state of things, as a release valve. But writing about writings seems like rearranging deckchairs.
Of course there is an answer that you can improvise if you’ve spent enough time around such people: we poem about things to help us understand them, there are types of knowledge or experience accessible to or via poetry that aren’t accessible to other kinds of writing, what is life without The Arts, hearts starve as well as bodies, and so on, and so on. They can be attested even if their column of the great spreadsheet is sometimes forgotten.
But the spreadsheet does not have enough columns. Events continue to be announced on the news, anticipated, but their happening bleeds into everything else – was that Before? Will we do this After? I saw it said over and over in the spring and summer that ’the pandemic is practice for climate change’. A dress rehearsal before the eventual event. But there isn’t going to be An event. And now that we’re in the event, all the events have been cancelled anyway. So poetry without events takes up the role of the annals of the non-eventual.
[Image description: firefighting boats spray the oil rig Deepwater Horizon with water as it burns in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana in 2010.]
Whether or not Atlantis ever existed was ambiguous from the start. Plato, chasing the legitimacy of myth, asserts that ancient Athens ran according to his utopian system, and that it went to war with an Atlantis that was its enemy and opposite in every respect – he imagines that its degeneracy ultimately caused the flood. While Aristotle was confident it had been invented as an example, other philosophers of his time were convinced it was true, and that the knowledge of it had, as Plato claimed, been preserved by the Egyptians, the only society which survived the Bronze Age Collapse more or less intact. The Atlantis myth could be a corruption of the true story of civilisations whose development had led them to a point where they could not survive the series of disasters that befell them.
The Atlantis of Jackqueline Frost’s The Third Event is likewise ambiguously real. The text elaborates an admittedly ‘inexistent’ landmass as explored by an archaeologist, who nevertheless is able to speak to the Atlanteans and learn their ways. But the nature or origin of the unreal mass is not clear. Is it the imaginary of ‘America’ (no geological features of those continents are mentioned in the text, although Europe and the Mediterranean are), Plato’s ancient Atlantis somehow moved through time, or an imaginary transatlantic culture featuring the foibles and vulnerabilities of the globalised, capitalist society that imagines itself the World?
The text plays all sides of this unreality, but to take that last element first: Frost’s Atlanteans have a kind of cultural foreknowledge of the destruction of their world which floats out in time, in the past (as evidenced by the ruins they hide in during new disasters), the present (a hoax video circulates of a man trying to save animals in a ‘lesser flood’), and the future (‘Even if your city, the Atlanteans say, is not yet a ruin […] you might see the ruin beneath the present’, Part 1: pp. 14-15). When their world is being destroyed in the present/future, they are, like those living in the capitalist West/world, obsessed with the images of its destruction over the destruction itself.
But the Atlanteans are also conscious that their world does not exist, ‘plagued by the imagescape of their belonging to nothing but the ruin of the ruin’ (2:20). The archaeologist is somehow interacting with the Atlanteans, asking them questions, in her pursuit of ’the project of the humanisation of Atlantean humanity’ (2:28). We might recognise this project as an anthropological one, but that would mean that the (implied to be European) archaeologist’s culture is in a colonial or post-colonial relationship with Atlantis. The Atlantean songs mourn genocide, and are described as ‘a mouth full of blood and cane’ – cane sugar connecting them to the transatlantic slave trade – and Atlanteans know that the developments of their being take place ‘in the unseasonal rottenness of the colony’. (2:31)
More specifically, Atlantis shares many features with North America/the South/Louisiana, which becomes more intense in Part 4's description of a period of ‘Unreconstruction’, mirroring the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, in which sabotage is common – the Atlanteans are trying to ‘sabotage a catastrophe’. Their ‘rulers claimed that it takes patches of crude oil to make a place real’, the most direct reference yet to the Deepwater Horizon disaster (especially when combined with the ‘something real losing shape on the horizon’ of the Atlanteans’ premonitions of ruin).
Whatever we take Atlantis to represent, The Third Event is not simply ‘cli-fi’, an imagining of what life might be like in a drowning world – it is a topography of a collapse. The origin of the disaster is manifold: Atlantis is beset by cults (4:3), conspiracy theories (4:5), ‘burnings and revivals’ (2:23); it suffers industrial, social, and ultimately ontological collapse. The text, particularly at key moments, is full of sentences where terms are given new or unexplained meanings so that the total rests on its own weight, like a bridge that doesn’t need fastening or water and is anchored by its own weight.
[Image description: a cliff face with different coloured layers of rock visible, a strong black band standing out near the top.]
In the final paragraph of the text (so far) an Atlantean assesses the state of things: ’adaptation is barrelling toward the future of disenchantment through the subsumption of extinguished belief’ (4:6). Like many sentences in The Third Event, this is dense, so starting at the end: beliefs are pulled underwater – is that what’s extinguishing them? Or are they sinking because they have burned, like Deepwater Horizon? The positioning of ‘extinguished’ leaves it ambiguous. Likewise, ‘the future of disenchantment’ could be a future characterised by disenchantment, or the future condition of already-existing disenchantment. Disenchantment is never new, because it always exists as an underlayer beneath enchantment. I knew it was too good to be true.
I started this letter with Nisha Ramayya’s ‘Following the Event’, a protest poem arising from a confluence or resonance of different demonstrations, marches, and strikes in early 2018. Although each of the protests is around a different ‘issue’, the poem compacts them into the same geological body, and expresses throughout the will to communicate-connect. The first two stanzas repeat ‘we plan to meet’, which eventually becomes the poem’s last line, the spaces expanded: ‘we plan to meet’. Lacunae throughout the poem indicate the desire to communicate and for protest to be a connection, as well as the gaps that make it difficult: ‘relation is made up / all of the struggles in the world we messages / each other small and big struggles’; ‘every body projecting onto every other / body we’re afraid of losing ourselves’; ‘contemptuous / not for forever’. Sometimes I think back on the protests I’ve been to, meetings and actions I’ve helped organise or stumbled across, and find no real victories – the war, divestment, cuts, strikes, cops. Those lacunae in communication irrupt constantly – other commitments arise, we talk at cross purposes, people disappear. But the various iterations engender a kind of stochastic solidarity that layers like sedimentary rock over geologic time – ‘we level disenchantment / starting again from the ground’.
The Third Event looks to a horizon, not the kind far away where the ground meets the sky, but the geological kind in which a not yet understood present-history is being encoded. Its possible future is never fully foreclosed, being ‘large enough […] to contain things that have not yet been imagined’ (1:12). A deep-water horizon is the geological boundary under the seabed which marks a particular event in deep time, now drowned – ‘a future limit inscribed into the paleoceanographic history’ (1:5). Unmoored as it is from time, Atlantis lets history and future slide against one another like tectonic plates along a faultline. ‘Here, the archaeologist is confronted by the radical and saccharine, unconditional indeterminacy of objects.’ (1:12) The radical and saccharine: revolutionary and utopian hope.