Sick leave (again)

The Age of Plague, Extinction, Disaster & Ethnic Cleansing

… unfortunately also involves that most minor and unpleasant of things, the common cold. In fact, my patheticness suggests that, gender and sex be damned, I am suffering from a serious, perhaps deadly man cold.

Thus paid subscribers will have noticed that your Friday Live More Lives has been postponed, and the piece in the works for all of you tomorrow will also be postponed by a week. Along with that essay, which focuses on the body, I’m scheming a new one that is almost its opposite, looking at the limits of language. Lots in store when I no longer feel like my head is in a fishbowl.

Meanwhile, I invite you to dip into some of the 80-odd Live More Lives essays you haven’t read yet (let me know if you’d like me to unlock a particular piece if you haven’t become a full-access patron yet. This week only!). Or better yet, get yourself into one of the many, many works of fiction discussed there.

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And I’ll repeat my very pleased announcement last week of a new way to ‘read’ my second book, On Opium: Pain, Pleasure, and Other Matters of Substance, which is now available on Spotify in its audiobook version. I’d be so happy to see my under-the-radar labour of love about pain, drugs, capitalism, solidarity and much else get around. Please read (or listen, or both—contact me (carly_z@hotmail.com) if you’re having trouble finding a copy of the gorgeous print version and want to avoid the giant warrior woman online marketplace, or if you want to buy a signed copy). Please argue, enjoy, and share. On Opium makes a superb Chanukah gift, among other things.

Your advocacy of my work makes all the difference in the world to its continued existence, and to my ability to keep publishing.

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And also please don’t take your eyes off the real world, where terrible things are happening right now in the petro-state capital of the United Arab Emirates, Dubai—where hypocrisy and greenwashing continue to dominate climate politics as the Antarctic falls into the sea and the Amazon burns and COP28 is hosted by the chief executive of the UAE’s national oil company. The minority of the very wealthy and very ‘pragmatic’ and very powerful are, by quarter-measures disconnected from the immovable requirements of physics and biology, by fake initiatives and spurious announcements and endless backroom deals, avoiding massive but not impossible changes required in how we get and use energy and manage the resources of the planet and distribute wealth.

All because of greed and self-interest and a system responsive to shareholders rather than the interests of most humans and members of the other kingdoms of life—consigning the life of the entire planet, human and not, to an unspeakable fate that we are already experiencing, that affects the poor and least powerful vastly more quickly and seriously than the powerful and wealthy, and that will grow worse and worse in an uneven, unpredictable, cascading-damage way through our lifetimes and our children’s lifetimes. It’s (just barely) not too late to change course at least somewhat, and it will always be possible to choose less harm over more harm. But that fundamental change in course, or even something meaningfully close to it, doesn’t appear to be happening, making us all witnesses to and victims of ecocide.

And then (among other places) there is the catastrophe of the resumption of bombing of the ever-smaller remotely-habitable area of Gaza, where all I can do is repeat Primo Levi’s words that I shared with you last week:

And there is another, vaster shame, the shame of the world. It has been memorably pronounced by John Donne, and quoted innumerable times, pertinently or not, that "no man is an island," and that every bell tolls for everyone. And yet there are those who, faced by the crime of others or their own, turn their backs so as not to see it and not feel touched by it.

And note that we have arrived at mechanized killing (see that link, and here) in Gaza, mechanized beyond of course incredible and incredibly profitable constant ‘advances’ in weaponry (note that Canada’s Scotiabank is a major shareholder in Elbit Systems, mentioned in the linked article about weaponry tested in Gaza and sold worldwide). Again, here is Primo Levi on the possibility of the set of factors that led to Auschwitz—not ‘simply’ an atrocity, but the government-led, systematic, ‘contempt’-legitimized destruction of an innocent and relatively defenceless people—repeating themselves in a new but recognizable form:

other slaughters will take place, unilateral, systematic, mechanized, willed, at a governmental level, perpetrated upon innocent and defenseless populations and legitimized by the doctrine of contempt.

Read fiction, both for pleasure and escape, and for challenge and brutal truths. But don’t look away.

See you next week.

Carlyn