Café Books is very good to me. When they see books in catalogues that they think might interest me, they order them in and then put them aside for me to consider them. One such book is the translation from Icelandic of a new book by Andri Snaer Magnuson entitled On Time and Water. I first came upon Magnuson, who is held to be one of the country’s greatest living writers, on my first trip to Iceland where colleagues insisted I read Magnuson’s Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation if I wanted to understand contemporary politics and culture in that country. The book is critical of the Icelandic government’s decision to dam the country’s most spectacular rivers to produce cheap power so that foreign-owned companies could increase aluminum production.
In important ways, On Time and Water starts where Dreamland left off, but does so in a powerfully personal and thoughtful way. It is a meditation on the history, nature and culture of Iceland as it reflects upon the reality of climate change and offers hope in the face of a very uncertain global future.
The book begins with a meditation on what happens when human systems collapse. When systems are disrupted, Snaer notes, language is loosed from its moorings. Words meant to encapsulate reality no longer have meaning. Textbooks are rendered obsolete overnight and complex hierarchies that served a reality that no longer exists are rendered irrelevant and fade away. System disruption quickly impoverishes every day language. People suddenly find it difficult to find the right words to describe what is happening or to express their feelings about their altered circumstances. They can’t hit on the right phrasing to articulate their uncertain relationship to their new and therefore troubling reality. Snaer offers is that is exactly what is beginning to happen in terms of societal reaction to changes in the global climate that are happening too fast to grasp and foreshadow consequences for humanity that are too big for the human mind to comprehend. These changes will affect everyone we know and everyone we love. But, hopefully, not until we can at least get through the pandemic.
Of Time and Water was published in Icelandic in 2019 before COVID-19 erupted into human consciousness. The pandemic has given us all a taste of what Snaer is talking about in terms of the failure of language to keep up with unexpected global disruption and system interruption that will accompany accelerating climate change. It has also demonstrated how quickly new words have to come into use to explain and accommodate responses to new urgencies and realities and the rapidly changing concepts and constructs that attend them. By putting the weaknesses and failures of our existing system into clear relief, the pandemic has put humanity on notice that there are a lot of things that have to change, a lot of institutions that have to be strengthened and much that is no longer relevant in the way we think about our ways of life that we have to leave behind if we are to imagine a better future, or even contemplate a future at all.
Snaer understands how difficult it is to get our heads around what is happening with respect to the climate threat. What we are facing are changes of a range and scale that do not register in the human mind, changes that will affect all life on Earth, the very foundations of all human thought and everything we believe in. The metaphor he puts forward is that of the black hole in astrophysics. No scientist, he notes, has ever actually seen a black hole, which can have a mass of millions of suns and can completely absorb light. The way scientists detect black holes is to look past them, to look at nearby nebulae and stars. Discussions of impacts that affect all the water on Earth, the entire Earth’s surface, and the very composition of the planet’s atmosphere create a black hole in and of themselves. Like a black hole, the enormity absorbs all the meaning.
Snaer offers that the only way to think about our situation – and to write about it – “is to go past it, to the side and below it, into the past and into the future, to be personal but also scientific” and to use mythological language with the hope that in going backward it is possible to move forward in understanding and articulating humanity’s current circumstances. Snaer is convinced that by employing this strategy, as he does in this book, it may be possible to engender a new inter-generational way to extend humanity’s reach into the future.
Snaer also acknowledges that creating new language that will allow us to comprehend and respond to our rapidly changing planetary reality will not be easy. Almost all human discourse presently has been appropriated by the language of economics and money. It is difficult to know what words we should use to describe the systems disruption that has begun. What words might we use to describe the changes we are making in the very composition of the atmosphere all of us breath? What words should we us for the Earth’s rainforests given they are nothing less than the lungs of the planet? What words might we use to comprehend what the global ocean means to life on Earth? What words are there? Even Snaer admits it took him a long time to overcome writer’s block in the face of so much diminishment, potential loss and change.
He was helped through prolonged writer’s block by climate scientists who explained that people don’t understand the numbers and graphs they generate to explain the climate threat, but they do understand stories. Scientists can’t do it alone; they need storytellers to help them make their science intelligible to others. It was then that it occurred to Snaer that perhaps we do not understand the world as individuals; that perhaps we only understand the world collectively and that we are experiencing the antithesis of mass hysteria in the form of some kind of mass apathy which would explain why the climate threat is treated in political and social circles as if it was on par with something like agricultural tariffs. It would also explain why it was impossible to get across never-before-experienced sensations that arose in him from a knowledge of the impending death or diminishment of everything he loved. Observing the matter-of-fact manner in which scientists had come put forward their terrifying prognoses at conferences, it further occurred to Snaer that perhaps even scientists don’t fully understand what they are saying until others outside of their circles understand what they are saying also.
Harkening back to mythology, Snaer came to the view that if people actually knew what “global warming” actually meant, they might respond to it in the manner children respond to threats in fairy tales: they would feel the terror. This led Snaer to wonder if it might be possible to employ storytelling as a means of using old ways of thinking to understand new ways of thinking. The problem we face in doing so, Snaer discovered, is that it can take decades, even centuries, to understand new words and concepts. Snaer tells a story to explain why that is so.
Jorgen Jorgensen came to Iceland in 1809 as an interpreter for a British soap merchant who was planning to buy tallow and lamb fat from Icelanders. Because Denmark, which controlled Iceland, was at war with England, Danish governor-general tried to obstruct the transaction. In the dispute that followed, the governor-general was imprisoned in a cabin on board the merchant’s ship. Meanwhile Jorgen temporarily seized control of the country, declared it independent of Denmark, declared it was at peace with and free to trade with all nations, and even created and hoisted a national flag appropriately with three saltfish on it.
Jorgen undertook to govern the country until the people elected a parliamentary assembly and established a republic, promising to step down the moment democratically elected representatives were assembled. There was one problem. The foundational writings that defined terms like “freedom,” “equality,” and “independence” had not been translated or published in Iceland. Icelanders literally did not have the words in their vocabulary, or the concepts in their minds, that would permit them to transcend the brutal and unjust feudal conditions in which they had come to expect to live and embrace democracy. So, it didn’t happen.
Jorgen Jorgensen was far ahead of his time. The people who would achieve the ideals of freedom, equality and independence hadn’t even been born yet. The lesson here: it takes a long time for people and history to catch up with revolutionary ideas and events. What happened in Iceland in 1809 is what is happening now with respect to the threat of global climate disruption.
Snaer notes that the term “ocean acidification” was only coined in 2003, by the atmospheric scientist Ken Caldiera. It first appeared in print in Iceland in 2006. After that it appeared once in 2007, not at all in 2008, and twice in 2009. In the meantime, the term profit appeared 1170 times in 2006 and 540 times in 2009. By 2011, the debate on climate had only advanced so far as to warrant five print occurrences of the term “ocean acidification,” In contrast “Kardashian” appeared 180 times. Snaer’s point: We are in the midst of an Anthropocene explosion. We have very little time to find the words we need to describe our new circumstances, and even less time for those words to have their effect and for the new concepts these words define to stimulate action.