I am reading books and watching TV from the BeforeTimes for succor. I am halfway through Twin Peaks: The Return, which is very different from the previous seasons, but still enjoyable. I like David Lynch’s surreal Douglas Sirk take on America, a bizarre place of violence and kitsch. We have always lived in a mythology of our own invention, and we are now seeing it crumble, revealing the ugly truth we’ve hidden and ignored for centuries.
Mythology is real and has informed human culture for millennia, and we ignore its grip on modern humanity at our own peril.1
The Bestiary by Nicholas Christopher, whose work I discovered when we we both had stories in Lawrence Block’s anthology, Alive in Shape and Color: 17 Paintings by Great Artists and the Stories They Inspired. His story had fantastic elements, as did mine; his had more of a magic realism feel to it, while mine was folk horror. (You can read my story here.) I enjoyed his story very much, and he follows this same tone in The Bestiary, about a boy whose father is a Greek sailor and his Italian grandmother may be descended from a witch, or a dryad; her great-grandmother could call to the animals and “speak to them in their own language.” This leads him on a search for a book that detailed all the animals that were refused entry to Noah’s Ark after the Great Flood, and we follow him to college, the Vietnam War, and his scholarly pursuit of the book on both sides of the Mediterranean.
My story was about archaeologists finding evidence of a matriarchal neolithic society, the infighting that results as assumptions and mythologies are challenged, and a dark answer to their questions about why few or none survived. Paid subscribers can read it below; you can get a free trial and read it for free. Or you can buy the ebook of the anthology, as the print book is back-ordered.
I started Dawn by Octavia E. Butler after this. She’s one of my favorite writers. This is the first book in the Lilith’s Brood series, which begins after humans destroy ourselves in a nuclear conflict, and the few survivors are saved by a strange alien race. Butler’s work is full of a rich empathy—even her disturbing last novel, Fledgling, about a vampire trapped in a young body—which managed to not disgust me, where Interview with the Vampire gave me the ick.
The Night Country by Loren Eiseley feels like a lesser work of an old man who does not like the world he will soon die in. I understand the feeling, and I hope I’m not there in thirty or forty years. He’s in the madness of the Cold War, the space race, the Madison Avenue embrace of technology, and the environmental devastation that spawned Earth Day, which made irascible would-be dictator Nixon hastily create the EPA. Some of his reminiscing captures the lyrical writing of his earlier years, so I won’t discount it entirely, but if you are not familiar with his work, I would begin with the stunning The Unexpected Universe.
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer is small, but mightly, like the berry itself. She uses this unassuming tree and its bounty of berries to explain the gift economy of nature, how many of us already use such economies, and how to create, or become part of more of them. I wish I could give everyone a copy of this book. She made me think of how my neighbor often clears my sidewalk with his snowblower, and how in return, I will sweep or shovel his walk when the snow is sleety and too heavy for the machine. Every summer, he hands me tomatoes over the fence, because he has too many to use without waste. We will need these “economies” all the more, in the future.
When you’re done reading The Serviceberry, pick up Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer’s masterpiece. (There is also a version for young adults.)
This review is what led me to the book, and it is a joy to read:
We watched Anora, about an exotic dancer from Brooklyn who marries the son of a Russian oligarch. The acting was good enough that I forgot they were actors, and I knew Mikey Madison from “Better Things.” The movie is by Sean Baker, who wrote and directed Tangerine and The Florida Project, and is as great as they are. I kept expecting the film to descend into a “romp,” but it never breaks from reality. It is a Cinderella story for late-stage capitalism, with an ending that suits.
Fantasy has been more my thing lately. If you need a break, the new Wallace and Gromit claymation film by Aardman Animation, Vengeance Most Fowl, is a wonderful escape for a little over an hour. All of these films have been masterpieces of human comedy, and the newest is no exception. I’ve followed eccentric inventor Wallace and his well-grounded dog-pal Gromit for since The Wrong Trousers, and this one brought me great joy.
Another Oscar-nominated animated film is Flow, which was made with the open source Blender app. The story has no dialogue, and follows a timid gray cat after a sudden flood covers, seemingly, the entire planet. The cat escapes on an abandoned sailboat—humans seem long gone already—with a capybara, a dog, a lemur, and large strutting bird that seems like the offspring of a heron and an eagle. They help each other survive. The background is quite beautiful; they encounter an undersea leviathan, storms, and other hazards, but the animation of the characters was primitive and distracting, and made me wonder why they didn’t just use hand-drawn animation.
Oh, we also watched A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg’s film about two Jewish cousins who go to Poland after their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, dies and leaves them money specifically to do so. It was a good picture of secondary grief and trauma, and what it is like to visit the death camp sites now. (I’ve been to Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, because I don’t let myself visit the Eagle’s Nest or Rothenburg ob der Tauber without also visiting one of these sites.) I needed Flow after this one.
Next up? The Nickel Boys, based on Colson Whitehead’s excellent novel about the true horrors that young black men endured in a Florida detention home, and The Wild Robot, another animated feature.
You’ve got to balance out the dread somehow!
I’ve been using “at our peril” often lately, because we are in peril.
I have Braiding Sweetgrass and still haven't read it. I'm curious about Flow now and have added it to my list. I hope it doesn't stress me out. As you said, after a certain amount of time noticing the World, we need palette cleansers or we won't survive.