This apocalypse is a slow burn. A Lynchian end in length and conveyance. Apocalypse, from the ancient Greek word for a reveal, the act of uncovering. It’s difficult to know where that meaning should be coming from with the world ending at the same pace as anyone’s last half hour on the clock. The absurdity of the current century is masterfully obscuring all that should be revealed to us as our oceans and temperatures rise. As a creative and an environmentalist, it’s difficult sometimes for me to justify spending time making art as the world ends around and within me. Especially when I know the end result won’t go farther than a wall in my house or a box in my basement, and the plastic wrapped around the canvas goes into the garbage. Doing something such as making art or writing that feels personally fulfilling is made much more difficult when the personal gets invaded by the inevitable.
So I’ve been painting over old canvases, covering phases in unbleached titanium and starting fresh. I’ve recycled phrases from poems that will never see the light of day and all along the way I’ve denied that it’s because I can’t make anything new when everything and everyone is dying around me. It’s making me want to return to the fantasy that I’ve constructed around the past. With a global pandemic, climate change, and countless other life threatening issues, some cherry picking should be allowed. Time to look to our past and think about what made us feel good, what that still present inner child did when they were upset. For many it was putting crayon to page, making sigils in the dirt, screaming a lyric. Pure expression, pure creation.
When everything crumbles, it often serves our best interest to return to what we know. We, as humans and as former children, know how to create. From cave paintings to lyric storytelling, from play-doh sculptures to mud tinctures, humans have always had a drive to create. This is evident in museums, ruins, and the Mycelium submission inbox. We were able to design and curate an issue dedicated to ideas of sustainability, a concept that seems all too abstract in the current moment, with the dedication and creativity of writers who have not given up. Issue two narrowed the scope for me, showed me that the core of sustainability is in the self. I can’t sustain you if I am not sustained. The poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and beyond that I had the pleasure of reading for issue two showed me with clear absolution that the act of writing is an act of self-sustainability. It feeds the writer soul and clears the clogged brain. In short, creating makes me feel good and if the world is dying then I want my last moments to feel good.
When a tree in a forest is lacking in nutrients, the mycelium that connects its roots to the roots of the rest of the forest acts as a conduit for aid. Nutrients, love, and anything else that might be needed is transported using the mycelial threads that span the underworld beneath our feet. Mycelium keeps the trees happy. Their connection to each other keeps the trees happy. My connection to my roots as a creative, and thus to the community that I have worked to curate and build here, have kept me happy. As an act of self-sustainability, I will not give up on creativity. I will paint on recycled cardboard, I will draw on scrap paper, I will write lyrics on fallen birch bark. Sustaining the human spirit, that’s what it’s all about.
When the ocean is up to my neck, I will recite a haiku about the shape of the waves.
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