Tag: end times

Intertwined?

Days 4-7 of Inktober 2021, a cultural practice by Rita de Heer

Just how intertwined are we, with Nature?

Here, in this cultural practice of applying pigments to paper, pasting scraps to paper bound in book-form, and drawing over the top with an ink pen made of petrol-based polymer filled with petrol-based ink?

Not much at all. Because cultural practices are part of what we do in the World, right?

Pigments are powdered clays, lichens and mosses, madders and goldenrods, rust, verdigris, pewter and gold. Some of Nature’s bounty.

Bound with gums, latex, and oils.

En-tubed, slopped into pots, or dried in patties.

[Sold, which is a whole other story.]

Livened with water … the best is straight from the deep ground, unadulterated with unnatural chemicals such as chlorine and fluorides.

Applied to papers linens, canvas, parchments; wood panels, bone, and teeth; applied to stone.

Using brushes made of bunching the tail hairs of a myriad of different furry animals, as well as threads drawn from petroleum products such as nylon, rayon, polyesters: all of them products of the sun’s action on eon-old vegetation when you go right to the origin.

Air drying is preferable but takes a long time, so people who can’t wait use hair-dryers that often use a variation on the theme, electricity stoked with coal.

[If framed, that’s another story]

We are intertwined.

End Times: Societal Collapse

Volcano, Watercolour by Rita de Heer

Yes. Pretty serious title. It’s the mood I’m in. After a twelve week euphoria about still being alive, first in hospital and then for six weeks in a respite community, learning to be a normal person again, the other day I got back to reading some of my favorite commentators on the state of the world.

Michael Mobbs, of Sustainable House fame, writing a Spinifex column in Fifth Estate, told the story of how he looked for a bolt-hole for when what’s coming arrives … this is the end time we’re talking about. The societal collapse. He’s convinced we have no more than ten years!

He couldn’t find a good bolt-hole. The whole east coast of Australia was burned in the 2019 bush fires and most of the creeks he looked at were either dry or running at about ten percent of what they once were. There’s no safety, or security in the bush. He went home, back to the city, where he’s thrown himself into food gardening, and modelling that.

Me? I was in shock. Here I am … went my thinking … going through the gnarliest treatment on Earth in the hope that I last ten more years and see my grandchildren on the way to growing up, and my society is going to fall over around my ears? Ending is such a final thing.

I’m aware of course that the average length of time for surviving cancer is five years, and I aim to step off my mortal coil with grace when the time comes. But only if I’ve given my descendants the best possible chance at surviving what’s coming.

In my mind I ran around like a Henny-Penny complaining about the sky falling in, me trying to think of solutions. Imagining how I’m going to spend the next five years.

Some time later I remembered that I’d known the 2030 deadline already. That I had accepted it already and had become nihilistic in my attitudes toward the end-time events, being a long-time environmentalist …

——

The above was all written a few weeks ago. Treatment is on-going. I feel sicker and less able to get involved in any damn thing with every turn of the cycle. Two to go. Maybe in six weeks … two more chemos, one more lumbar puncture with chemo … and when I’ve been able to address the near constant oral thrush in my mouth … I’ll be able to think again.Maybe then I can get excited again.

Too tired right now.