Prometheus wept
myth, grief, and all we carry
I’m writing this correspondence from the grey tempest center of an end-of-year storm surge. What was once Ohio’s cold dormancy is now the season of rain, freezing and thawing at the whim of a destabilized climate system. How fitting to end a year of breaking in such a strange and irregular way.
I came to write this piece months ago at the onset of southern Appalachia’s undoing in the wake of Hurricane Helene. A storm of biblical proportions ripped through the continent, leaving thousands of people stranded without home or hearth. Entire cities were cut off from the world in mere hours. Today, small mountain communities no longer exist. Fuel, food, and water are all scarce. What was once considered a climate haven is now desolate, scarred, rebuilding from the rubble. We are all vulnerable.
Age of myth
How do we continue? For the last 200 years we’ve worshipped the idols of industry and growth. Fire in our hands, we’ve built & destroyed in the most fantastically horrifying ways. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, every modern “advancement” can be attributed to the burning of fossil fuels and their byproducts. Our Promethean inheritance, the industrious flame, has brought us to the brink of extinction.
The collapsing world we inhabit was built by the myth of infinite progress; and as with any myth, the impenetrable truth cannot be avoided. The thread cannot hold, the comfortable lies can no longer carry the weight of ecological collapse. Hurricane Helene intensified faster than any other storm in recorded history, warmed by Gulf waters pockmarked with oil drilling facilities and pipelines. Wound after wound, compounded to the point of no return.
Some theorize we’re approaching a mirror, a decline in negative proportion to the meteoric rise of our species’ last two centuries. The age of peak oil; an irreversible decline in global oil reserves, unable to be replenished for millions of years. Even if we could drill every coast on the continent, as some oil executives suggest, the damage is done. There is no return in our lifetimes to a pre-industrial state. The permafrost has permanently thawed. Extinction-level warming is locked into self-feeding cycles. We’re being terrorized by highly organized, intentionally obtuse fossil fuel conglomerates willing to sacrifice everything good and loving for profit and power.
We’ve entered an age beyond reason, an age of collapsed time, ancient archetypes, and hubristic devastation. Billions of years burned in a matter of decades. Deadening forces at the helm of incomprehensible structures of power. Seemingly insurmountable odds. The myth of our day is infinite industry, wealth, and growth. The myth of tomorrow is unborn. What will come of this loss?
No living human has known anything but this energy boom. Every “modern” social, economic, and political structure existing today is propped up by a finite resource, and the party must end eventually. What becomes of a world that’s built itself on the sand grains of decomposed time? Collapse is here.
Fossil fuel companies have seen this coming for decades — this is evident in the intentional obfuscation and denial of climate science by ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies since the 80s. Not to mention the embrace of fracking in shale oil deposits as an alternative to crude oil extraction. In this context, fracking can be seen as a last-ditch effort to grip power; the dying gasps of a cult of combustion.
Just recently, the state of Ohio opened its largest state park, the Salt Fork Nature Preserve, to industrial fracking. Led by dogmatic zealots in the statehouse, these policies serve to enrich corporate donors and further entrench power in the hands of fossil fuel companies. I spoke and protested last fall at the public meeting approving these fracking leases — I will never forget the cold and lifeless expressions of the commissioners tasked with this approval. Do they know they are lapdogs to power? Can they see beyond themselves into the ashen tomorrow?
And now, staring down the barrel of a corporate coup with the inauguration of a second Trump term, the contradictions are intensifying. So-called Western democracy has shed its mask and revealed its rotten core. The titans are in control, with means of surveillance, influence, and militarized force that would make even the most powerful king envious. The tools of colonization have come home.
The first flame
Many mark the development of nuclear weapons as the pivotal point in our infatuation with explosive power. But we have always danced with this mythical force, allured by the flickering warmth in a cold, harsh world. As Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason says in an Emergence Magazine podcast episode titled On Time and Water:
Now we know that it wasn’t Oppenheimer; it was Prometheus, because it’s the fires. It’s the fire that is causing global warming, all this oil that we’re burning, and we have hidden the fires so we don’t see any fire on a daily basis. We don’t see the fire culture that we are, how everything is burning—in our cars, the fire in our cars, the fire in our planes, the fire behind everything. So I calculated, how much fire have we created? And that is actually mythological, and the gods were right when they punished Prometheus, because they knew that we could not handle the fire.
The task of our time is uncovering the hidden furnaces of our fire culture, the underbellies of our blue-lit techno-fascinations, the lifeblood of our fossil-fueled comforts. And perhaps in that great undoing, we’ll be invited to weep with Prometheus at the sight of our burning creations, to find tender forgiveness in the ash of grief.
What we carry
All is not lost; only what can no longer be held. To choose our suffering is our sole privilege. To suffer, in old Latin, means ‘to carry’. What will we carry forward? What will we pass on to the next sufferers? These questions are inherently mythical and beyond reason; they belong to the realm of the poet, the storyteller, the seer. Our only salvation is intangible mystery. The clearest answer is unclear paradox.
What we carry in human time extends approximately 250 years simultaneously into the past and future. As Magnason goes on to say:
The time that you connect with, personally—that you can touch with your bare hands—is almost 250 years. My daughter can touch 1924 with her bare hands and 2170. That’s almost 250 years. That’s the arm’s length. That’s the personal connection to people, the intimate time of my daughter.
Through our relations to our elders and our children, we are tethered to a time beyond our own. This idea follows in the tradition of the Iroquois and their 7th Generation Principle. Essentially, this is the idea that we should act with the consideration of seven generations into the future, always thinking of our reverberating impact through time. What world are we leaving for our seventh-fold ancestors? This is the question we must live. As Wendell Berry writes:
I am speaking of the life of a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children; who has undertaken to cherish it and do it no damage, not because he is duty-bound, but because he loves the world and loves his children. (The Unforeseen Wilderness: An Essay on Kentucky’s Red River Gorge)
This world is not inherited, but merely borrowed from the lot of our future kin. At this ruined place we find ourselves in today, we must root, gather, dance, play, share; all we have is all we give.
For now, I'm sitting with the sorrow, embracing the loving dark, being in community with my neighbors, human and otherwise. The work ahead is not solitary. We are not alone. The earth conspires toward greater understanding, with you as its vessel. And in that shared uncertainty, we carry on.
I’ll leave you for now with this piece by Ohio’s very own Mary Oliver. Be well.
The Poet with His Face in His Hands
Mary Oliver
You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need anymore of that sound.
So if you’re going to do it and can’t
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
hold it in, at least go by yourself across
the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets
like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you
want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched
by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.