flood (n.)

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I hope you are surviving, perhaps even thriving, out of spite, amid the Horrors. Enjoy today’s essay.

The idea of apocalypse seems more and more to be the guiding, structuring lens through which I understand my lifetime. When I look back on my life, I can see it as a series of episodes divided by apocalyptic transitions—some small, some earthshaking—in my own life or in the wider world.

In its original sense of revelation or unfolding, apocalypse purports to show us something true about this world, the cosmos, what lies behind it (or in front). In its contemporary, cinematic, sense, apocalypse conjures a fundamental breakdown of the way things are (thanks for that, Apocalypse of John). As a tarotist, I think about The Tower, lightning toppling the self-assured crown from its battlement in a clarifying, climactic upheaval of the status quo. I can think of more than a few crowns that could use a good toppling.

The US government is of course undergoing a chaotic fascist coup right now. Among the new regime’s opening salvos, as inane as they are terrifying, was the directive to render trans life—my life—illegible in the eyes of the state. The events of the past few weeks have cast in stark relief the lurching, monstrous trail legislators and techno-fascists have tilled to prepare the ground for their racist, eugenicist, misogynist, genocidal projects. What’s been more disheartening even than the executive orders themselves—nonlegal, in many cases illegal—has been seeing people comply without being compelled. I’m angry. On the edge of despair. But mostly scared.

Apocalypse shows you something about the world, about the skin you live in. Shows you something about yourself. Such revelations ask you to reinterpret everything that came before. They hurt. They expose. They frighten.

Amid the present apocalypse I found myself reading Here (2014), an experimental graphic novel by Richard McGuire that takes up a fixed view of one small slice of Earth across time, most of it dwelling on one particular corner of a house between 1907, when it is built across the street from the old colonial mansion, and 2111, when the rising sea erases it from the landscape.

But the story of this corner of the world does not pass linearly. Each spread is overlaid with rectangular cutouts that look upon this same horizon from different times. Transitioning from domestic scenes, you turn the page to see this corner of the American northeast as a refractory mass of primordial pink gases and sludge labeled “3,000,500,000 BCE.” On the left, a snippet from 1870 shows a painter and his muse picnicking on the lawn of the colonial estate. On the right, an arrow flies through a snippet from 1402, its mark unknown.

Here is not so much a story as it is a way of seeing, of revealing. It is a book of apocalypse, opening windows large and small on the (speculative) histories of a single place and juxtaposing these views together meaningfully. These miniatures do not flow in a straight line. There are some windows that, here and there, looping back or jumping forward in the book, follow longer narrative threads—the painter and his muse in 1870, the Native American lovers telling stories in the woods of 1609, the man preparing to host his post-op father after hip surgery in 2005—but most pages juxtapose mere snapshots of similarity and interconnected themes from across the book’s temporal scope.

My favorite among these is the widely shared spread of the dawn-purple room in 1915, elegantly decorated, in the middle of which a huge bison from 10,000 BCE lies in the grass. A teen girl from 1970 is sprawled in the bison’s cross-temporal shadow reading a paperback on the shag rug.

I especially like the pages in which the forest breaks into the suburban home of the 20th and 21st centuries because the wilderness returns on both “sides,” as it were, of this middle era. This corner is, for most of the book’s timeline, unbuilt upon. Hell, for most of the book’s timeline, this corner isn’t even dry land. In one stark spread, the view of 1,000,000 BCE shows a placid expanse of gray water lit by a dim sun setting on the thin horizon. Toward the end of the book, the man speaks up to his convalescing father on the pullout bed in 2005 while beneath them, as if rising up to swallow everything, a window on 2111 foams with nothing but the indifferent chop of the coming flood.

Beyond its revelatory structure, Here is appropriately apocalyptic in its subject matter. A view of 2313 shows people in hazmat suits taking radiation readings across the swampy, foggy wasteland. Off to the side, a man practices his putting swing on the carpet in 1958. The ending sequence of spreads includes a group of girls holding hands on the lawn before the 19th-century mansion and chanting “ASHES! ASHES! WE ALL FALL DOWN!!!” Beside them, in 1957, the woman who opened the book with “Hmm… Now why did I come in here again?” wanders across the page, wading through the eons, until, on the last page, she leans over to the side table and declares, “now I remember.”

Typically, apocalyptic literature takes a linear view of time, representing an accumulation of causes precipitating a final, catastrophic if illuminating effect. This kind of apocalypse is tragic, fatalistic, playing into the hands of religious and political purists and incentivizing all-or-nothing thinking. But Here demonstrates a nonlinear apocalyptic, an apocalyptic of simultaneity and juxtaposition. The book defies the idea of a narrative present, timelines abutting and intruding on each other like little living things of their own: strange creatures living together, attracting and repelling each other in turn. There is even a kind of care these displaced memories demonstrate for one another by way of their juxtaposition. In one spread, we see couples in various moments of embrace across time: in 1972, the old woman hugging the man beside her says, “He’s been that way for years” while behind and beside this timeline, another woman, older, facing away in 1998 (the same woman perhaps?) says, “It’s always like this. This is how it is.” I like thinking of moments in time not merely echoing each other but embracing each other, commenting upon and caring for each other in a kind of temporal poetics.

This simultaneity, in contrast to linearity, invokes the contingency and fragility and mortality of this life, the things that make it meaningful at all, that make it susceptible to change, amenable to our desires, open—if sometimes only slightly—to our imagined visions of what it could be.

In 2213, an audience of young people stands on a meandering walkway suspended over the flooded landscape. They are tuned into an artificial tour guide recounting an anthropology of the pre-apocalyptic life lived in the house that no longer exists. “In the twentieth century everyone carried a few essential items,” she explains, projecting a watch, a wallet, and a door key (items invoked in snippets from the 1950s and 1960s: “Watch, wallet, keys?” “Check.”)

The society of this future (not the future, a future) looking upon the technologies embodying our property relations as anachronistic and foreign reads like a reverse apocalyptic, an expression of a potential that is legible in the here and now even though it may be driven underground—the survival of a life-sharing rather than a life-taking form of social and environmental relationship. In Here, time isn’t only lived forward.

I initially found myself dwelling on Here because of its view of the longue durée of history, its depiction of a place that persists through multiple apocalypses large and small and looms larger than any single life, thereby making those individual lives and their individual struggles and cares trite and tiny and insignificant. There is one spread in which some kids are watching an educational show on TV in 1999. The TV is describing the death of the sun in eight billion years, its bloated body eventually “engulfing the orbits of Mercury, Venus, and our Earth” (original emphasis). One of the kids says, “Glad I won’t be around for that!” On a first read, I initially thought this was a statement by the “speaker” of the book (maybe better, the “curator”?) that things don’t ultimately signify, that the spiraling window-stories imply that everything is equalized by its relativity, its ephemerality. I think, however, that the structure of this book, its apocalyptic of simultaneity, its ethic of juxtaposition, is actually asking me to care not less but more deeply for the events and ephemera of this life, large and small. “Our Earth.”

These windows across time, these threads of which I am a strand, signify something, not nothing, because we are here to enliven, contemplate, and own rather than disown them. They are not merely interchangeable. They have a kind of autonomy. Specificity. Affinity. This apocalyptic asks me to look. Listen. Pay attention. Speak. Love. Share. Fight. Build. Live. Play a part in the powerful play. The sound and the fury are up to our interpretation. I am around for this apocalypse, here, now. And I want to survive the flood.

Thanks to my good friend Steve Baxi for gifting me Here. Cheers. :)