Cut Preface and Afterword for a novel tentatively entitled: Amateur Kittens Dreaming Solar Energy

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Preface

I’ve been thinking about how I don’t write about sex anymore. It has something to do with my gender. I am reading a book written by a woman that contains plenty of sex. I think: if I wrote this exact same sex in the exact same way it would still be different. It would read as male fantasy. It would be written with patriarchy sitting on my shoulder, egging me on. It goes without saying that I most often try to write in a manner that feels opposite to this. Which is perhaps only one of the factors that has resulted in my current practice ending up a bit sexless. But all the other factors have considerably more to do with my actual life.

I hated the idea that there can be such a thing as a masterpiece and I hated the fact that I wanted to try to write one. I also hated the idea that there can be no such a thing as a masterpiece. The world I’m writing about and within is more or less this world, but with one significant detail shifted, in that it is a world in which the only sex we know is cuddling. (However, there might also be a few other ways this written world differs from our unwritten one.) When you want to have sex with someone who doesn’t necessarily want to have sex with you – meaning, at least in this story, when you want to cuddle with someone who doesn’t necessarily want to cuddle with you – there is of course a certain understandable degree of disappointment. Learning how to gracefully breathe through such disappointment is another question I hope we might eventually get around to.

There is a cartoon I saw on the internet. A corporate executive sitting behind a large wooden desk. In the first panel he says: “You want coal? We own the mines.” In the second and third panels he says: “You want oil and gas? We own the wells.” Fourth and fifth panels: “You want nuclear energy? We own the uranium.” Sixth panel: “You want solar power?” Seventh: “We own the… eh… ah…” And in the final panel: “Solar power isn’t feasible.” (No one owns the sun.)

In his book The Accursed Share, Georges Bataille writes about how everything on earth, all the growth and energy, originates from the sun. And there is always an extra part, beyond what is needed for human survival, that he designates with the French expression the devil’s share (or the accursed share.) We can use this extra energy to make art or we can use it to make war. How we use it says so much about what we value as a culture. I am writing all this from memory. I read the book so long ago. I will have to look at it all again to verify. Books one read so long ago are so explicitly faded in our memories of them.

I have been thinking so much about solar energy, about how much of what I read, especially from a mainstream perspective, seems misplaced. When I read that we will not be able to generate enough energy using solar and wind, I feel they are completely missing the point. The points are: 1) That these new, sustainable technologies will force us to use less, will demonstrate – on a real, lived, experiential basis – that resources are renewable but not infinite. 2) That there is more autonomy, and less greedy profit, in a decentralized power grid. 3) That the many exorbitant expenses of polluting the air and water are simply not being factored into the standard calculations. Environmental devastation is expensive on every level.

But it is mainly the first point I obsess over. Let’s say you have solar panels on the roof of your house. Each day, you will use only as much energy as these panels generate. When it runs out you go to sleep and wait for the sun to come up tomorrow. The energy is not infinite, not available twenty-four hours a day. There are limits and you learn, out of necessity, how to live within them.

This, for me, is the main lesson of sustainable technologies. They would force us to live differently, to be aware of daily limits, to find solutions that acknowledge real limitations. They do not make life easier in every way. They make life harder in some ways, ways that force a fundamental shift in how we see the world and our place within it. I also suspect that working within a series of concrete, reasonable limitations would bring along with it a kind of reality and even joy.

There is a novel I have never read about talking human ears. The reason I have never read it is that it has yet to be translated into English. It was written in Danish by Per Hojholt and is entitled Auricula. I often think about it. If someone could write a novel about talking human ears perhaps I am not letting my own writerly imagination roam freely enough. If I can write about absolutely anything, I ask myself, why exactly am I writing about this. Whatever the this might be in any particular instance. (I frequently ask myself a similar question about the world.) As I’ve read online, the premise of Auricula is that “time very briefly came to a stop 7 September 1915, which led to the birth of a great many ears (yes, ears) which floated around and got involved in especially the arts of the time.” On Goodreads, Nicolai’s review of Auricula is brief and to the point: “Not a very good novel, but an outstanding book.”

When I see a picture on the internet of miles and miles of solar panels – for example a solar farm in the desert – I think to myself: no, that’s completely wrong, they have it completely wrong, that’s completely the wrong model. I have no particular expertise or experience upon which to base this opinion. It’s simply a hunch. To me it looks like the old model and we need a new model. I of course feel the same way about the novel. Which I suppose is why I’m finding it so difficult to let the actual narrative begin. I prefer characters without names, perhaps for similar reasons that I prefer cuddling to sex, though sometimes I still have sex, or at least I used to. But there is an obvious problem with a character that doesn’t have a name. You have to find a way to refer to them which doesn’t create any further confusion in the reader than strictly necessary. When a character is speaking about themselves in the first person it feels natural that they would rarely refer to themselves by name, so in this mode the difficulty rarely arises. But I would hate to limit myself to first person for only this reason.

The story hasn’t started yet but it will. Since I keep telling myself that I am writing a novel and not an essay. (Though I have always liked the novels best that at times verge on becoming essays. Or at least I used to.) The world needs to change. Therefore, the novel also needs to change. But perhaps what is required of the novel is not that it change but that it disappear. That it become something else. The energy contained in fossil fuels once came from sunlight. The energy contained in literature once came from songs and rituals and stories and fables. Songs and stories once helped us understand how we should live. I do not see how the novel currently does any such thing. In a sense, we already know from which direction we came and therefore, coming full circle, in which direction we should return. But now I feel I’m becoming preachy and moralistic and, since I continue to write this novel, also very much a hypocrite. What kind of knowledge can be fully lived and in this way travel from generation to generation? What kind of knowledge will this novel not contain?

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Afterword

The first chapter of this book is entitled “The moment I no longer wanted to be famous” and, for me, the implication is that once one truly understands the science and the full situation of our current ecological collapse, all other concerns should somehow fall away and one should dedicate oneself only to deep political change. But, strangely, it doesn’t quite work that way. This feeling that the planet we live on and with, our home, is rapidly becoming uninhabitable, and that many (but not all) of us are the perpetrators of this situation—this feeling is both everywhere and nowhere, it is too diffuse. I continue to do all of the things I’ve always done while at the same time feeling that instead I should be doing something else. If everyone stopped everything they were presently doing and engaged in 24/7 civil disobedience until the problems were solved, I assume it wouldn’t take long. It wouldn’t take long until we found a completely different way to organize society and our lives. But not only can “everyone” not seem to do this, I can’t even seem to bring myself to do so, bring myself to believe that to do so would do any good. It might be said that a good part of my paralysis exists because I benefit far too much from the systems I would also like to see dismantled. I constantly ask myself to what degree do I actually want to see these systems dismantled? In my lack of convincing answers I fear I am not alone.

“The moment I no longer wanted to be famous” was the title of the first chapter and now we have arrived at the end. After the end. We are always after the end since, for many peoples of the world the apocalypse happened a long time ago in the violent years following their first brutal contact with colonialism. We all have blood on our hands. But definitely not in equal amounts. In some way I wanted the ending of this book to offer up a solution, or the closest I can come to something resembling a solution, which I have to admit will not take us very far. Permaculture. Indigenous forms of agriculture. (Indigenous agriculture led by indigenous people and not by white people, an endeavor that must also always been centered around the concrete action of giving Land Back.) Mutual aid. Prison and police abolition. Transformative justice. Undoing patriarchy. Undoing whiteness. Getting rid of capitalism by whatever means necessary. I’m not the best person to write about any of these necessities and yet feel some of the best solutions might lie in such directions (and others like them.) I’m just a kitten, just an artist, not a crystal ball. Writing this book I have felt, over and over again, a kind of low level pain over how little a book can do when up against all the overwhelming injustices of the world.

Books will not save us. But books are what I know how to do. Maybe this is part of the problem: we continue to do what we know how to do, instead of starting to do what we don’t yet know how to do. I am an author so, more often than not, I see the world through the lens of books and writing. Therefore in this book, books are part of the solution, while in reality books are just as often part of the problem. Helpless Laughter is passed from hand to hand and, to a certain extent, makes useful things happen. Makes an older person realize their earlier behavior was questionable and a younger person realize, not with any certainty, that another world is possible. At various times in my life books have also changed my thinking to a startling degree. We all have a tendency to see the world through the lens of our own preoccupations. When I write that I don’t know the answers I also mean that you need to begin to figure them out yourself. Yet, as I have written before, there are no individual solutions to collective problems. Reading is such a deeply personal, individual act and yet books are meant to be shared, passed covertly from hand to hand, discussed, questioned and remade.

I was at a dinner party a few years ago. Everyone there is an artist of some sort. And all the conversations are about TV series. And every time a new series is mentioned someone asks me if I’ve seen it and I say I haven’t. And, at some point, someone asks me: if I don’t watch any television then what do I do? And I say that I mostly read. And they then go around the table and everyone says that they can’t remember the last time they read a book. And I say: that’s what every writer loves to hear and everyone laughs. Such laughter is also a part of these questions. I don’t believe I will ever learn to farm or to grow food but it seems likely someone in my position in some future generation will have no choice. In the future I imagine, someday, there will no longer be any television. (Perhaps television or radio will be the last to go.) We will find the brakes on this runaway train or we will be forced to. I over and over again imagine the worst and – also over and over again – tell myself that people make society and make the future and therefore it must be possible to make it differently. So many things are possible and yet never done. What is impossible is that we continue in this manner and still survive.

I’m now having more sex than I was back when I started writing this book. (Slightly more.) It takes a long time to write a book and, in the process, so many things can change. The crisis we are currently facing, the crisis of ecological collapse, is increasing so rapidly that I worry, by the time this book eventually comes out, what I have written will no longer be relevant. Since we are receiving a signal from the future and it is telling us that everything must change.


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[Today is March 22, 2023. I haven't told anyone yet, but a few days ago I finished a first draft of Amateur Kittens Dreaming Solar Energy, which I'm now realizing might be the second part of a planned trilogy based loosely around questions concerning the desire for utopia. I started writing Amateur Kittens Dreaming Solar Energy on on March 28, 2019.]



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