On the Climate Rant

or Vent or Rap or Prayer

Good morning.

Are we still able to say that?

One writing tip, often shared, is a version of this from Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth)—

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

What is happening, for a lot of writers I know, even if they are lucky enough to have an hour or room (which Campbell named a bliss station), is that they begin the day not with morning pages or free writing but with a repetitious and despairing climate rant.

Hence The Green Book I’ve been writing, or writing in, or ranting in.

I try not just to rant; I try to get somewhere in arguing with myself.

Here’s a brief sample —

Why has it been so difficult to start thinking this through?

Because it has been made difficult — because it was easy to make it difficult.

To think it through, individually, we must realise these things:

• We can’t think this through individually.

• Others are ahead of us, and have been ahead of us for a long time.

• Individual thinking (the illusion of that) is one of the worst of the causes.

• We can individually contribute to a collective response, but only by giving up many of our deepest vanities.

On this day, some time last April, sitting in my black armchair, I was most likely hoping to write novel-Q.

Character, narration.

Instead, I got myself into the kind of despair-loop where I put down stray sentences like —

It feels as if fewer people are involved in climate protest than play lacrosse.

Or —

If you suddenly face it, don’t you just as suddenly reject it?

In a rant, question marks proliferate. Rhetorical questions rush in to fill the voids they leave behind them. I start writing about they and them. I get angry at the passivity and complicity or venality of this group of them (politicians, billionaires) or that nationality of they (Americans, Russians). And then I get even more angry at us, and our failure to get the necessary message through to them. Again and again, I come back to asking, What could have been done better? What more more can be done?

By this point, I am purely despairing.

And, as today, I have written myself away from any chance of fiction.

Very occasionally, the rant will begin and end as a poem of some sort.

I say rant, but have been trying to think of a more positive way of putting it.

Climate vent, climate rap, climate prayer.

Perhaps the key is that it is an imagined and persuasive speech.

Although silent, it has loudness.

Intended for a big many, it reaches only a solipsistic one.

As I said, from discussions with other writers, I know that they find it very hard to get past this and on to a subject.

There is no other subject, their rant tells them. This is what is most important.

Maybe they are going through a fast-forward version of Kübler-Ross grief. Having got past denial some time ago, they start with anger — you bloody people — and soon it takes the form of bargaining — if we just did this, if they only accepted that — bargaining with the world and soon bargaining with their own depression. But they fail to reach acceptance.

Am I going to give any advice here? I don’t know if I can.

For myself, I’ve started The Green Book.

In the morning, I sit down and begin with my work-in-progress story, and if my or our non-fictional situation comes up, if I start to rant, I move those words across onto the green pages.

Sometimes I get back to my story, but very often I don’t.

Very often I write a couple of hundred despairing words and find myself with no more time.

Maybe I’ll make something of those words later — which is what I’m trying to do now.

Take them from rant to something useful.

Something to begin with.