This is the second post of the Finding Humour in the Environmental History of the Climate Crisis series edited by Nuala Proinnseas Caomhánach.
Most writing that attempts to address environmental themes with a degree of levity likely veers to the dark side of humor. It can go very dark, too, when considering the apparent collusion of powerful forces and trends in consumer capitalism, so-called smart and green technologies, and urban development, to name just a few. We have become very good at sustaining circular economies that are likewise so pervasive as well as efficient when creating byproducts, waste, and pollution. All of which hits home for me when I pass a construction site for a new commercial property whose foundation rests on a demolished residential one, when I send a voice-to-text message and wonder how many old phones I’ve gone through in the last fifteen years, or when I eat shellfish or drink the tap water and ask whose toxic legacies do I taste—and are any my own? Speaking of the circular, it’s curious to me how the two works included here began with such short lines on my phone’s narrow screen before later yielding an illustration created mostly from manipulated Microsoft Word clipart then another version as a prose poem. Whether in satire, wordplay, or visual art, that any such creativity or humor can still be mined from our persistent crisis hopefully offers at least a shred of optimism about the future.
It’s easy to get lost in the city when visiting from the country. Take dictation, for example. Route planning with voice-to-text can lead even the most mindful of mouths astray. Thus route becomes wrote. How at every street corner a pagoda disappears for each bodega standing. Or the unsuspecting out-of-towner who inquires, “What’s the best tortoise spot for oysters?” Tourists. Ugh! At least happy hour on the half shell comes with cold water’s lesser evils of mercury or crude versus the chromium(VI) of riverbeds.
Did you know that one (1) tourist goes missing in the asphalt wilds every nine (9) minutes? Among the most hazardous terrains: sidewalk sheds and scaffolding.
Sans shells, tourists envy residents (and residents, tourists). Rent control gives way to short-term landlords. Whether economy or estuary, erosion spreads across the banks. Just in time here come the new oligarchs of urban development! Buying up land for big condos, buying out governments for small countries. As for the detours around endless construction, note the approaching concrete. See how it rushes up in a free fall with all of its gravity longing.
Put another way: for every pizza rat spotting, so passeth another six and a half (6.5) sight-seeing pedestrians.
Were I a turtle you’d notice me even less so than now. What if I went analog, say, a bomb. Ticking, climbing a high-end high-rise whilst looking for a place to skydive. Hey down there! Funny what it takes for pigeons or news media vans to stop and pay attention, to take a different point of view of pending disaster. And don’t worry; none of this is a threat. (Please don’t be threatened.) My only munitions are in nonsense, sense, and meaning.
When ten (10) nobodies busy in business suits talk to their bluetooths, somebody (1) is speaking with their depression.
Meaning cows. Cows is everywhere, and cows is coming for me and for you. Cows raining down like oysters dripping from oyster trees spawned in mercury then dipped in flaming oil spills. Cows like turtles climbing upside down, walking backwards, somersaulting off ledges of buildings. Observe a leap of another kind when somebody sits down alone, at a desk, to say anything—much less tries to stand up and tell a joke to a darkened room full of drunks, full of cows. An anecdote goes that Derrida once gave a lecture on cows, before somebody at last corrected him. Told him it was pronounced “chaos.”
Subway mosaic or sidewalk chalk: for every lost soul who gets pushed into the oncoming future, two (2) already jumped.
Yes. Disaster is all around us. Can’t you feel it in your fingers, feel it in your toes? Through your reptile bones? Meanwhile the shadows of privatization lean inch upon inch over scant public spaces. Green. They try so hard at it. Greenness, greenery.
Ah-ha! Curbside a riot of ivy climbs with ease from tree to building, reclaims the dawn with dew, unmoved by all the new material.
Feature image courtesy of M.G. Moscato.
Matthew Moscato
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