I think I’m trying to think through what writing often isn’t but might just be. If writing isn’t writing-towards-being-published, and it’s not Notes to Self, what is it?
If you for a moment take climate collapse seriously, then writing – while you know it will continue – appears a minor activity. A passtime. (Why not protest? Why not get arrested?) Details may be picked from the waste, a hundred years later. (This entry may be digital sludge.) But will there be anything like a literary culture?
Probably I am exaggerating, and what will continue – as with the ambulance service, or universities – is a shell housing an angry hollow. From outside, it will look like what it used to be, and some of the shell-dwellers will continue to style it out as beneficiaries, but it won’t have a core to provide the gravitational pull.
I think about an alternative to books. If I were to have to tell stories around a campfire, or sing praises to the warlord of Lambeth, would I get enough food? Roasted turnips. At this point, when I think of making words that might last beyond printed pages, I think of all those chanting Homer-transmitting memory-men and of Dante pacing out his terseness. It is the built-in mnemonic of rhythm, rhyme, narrative, list, that is portable. After a complete societal collapse, people would sing Bob Dylan and rap Jay-Z. For a while. More likely than this is a degraded command economy, something like the Soviet Union in 1974. Change of government deemed destabilizing, and a waste of resources. No change of government. There will be an elite, still pursuing the values of Instagram, and a nomenklatura, eating veal in private villas. But the majority will be provided a jolly subsistence in return for being jolly. Within this, writers may again be important because excess, poetry, adventure, futurity – these will have devolved to words. Only those within hearing distance will listen, but they will listen with their lives in their ears.