Facing the Music

A few nights ago, I watched a film called A Late Quartet. I don't intend to review it here, though I will say I found it consistently interesting, and would recommend it to anyone who wants to see an intelligent film about Western classical music, and what it's like to take part in the work of perpetuating that great tradition. For the purposes of this post, though, I mention the film because it served as the prompt for the thoughts that follow.

The story of A Late Quartet follows the members of a fictional string quartet, called The Fugue, which has been playing together for some twenty-five years, but which finds itself suddenly in the midst of a staffing crisis. Its cellist has just been diagnosed with Parkinson's. His continuing with the group is out of the question; drugs might help him for awhile, but not for long; at most for another season. He wants to leave with dignity and not out of embarrassing necessity, and so he recommends that, before his playing gets any worse, the quartet immediately replace him with a cellist who has substituted for him before, and who he believes would do beautifully. His first desire is to see the life of the group continue on. 

I happen to think that the world is facing a set of circumstances a great deal like the loss of a cellist to a string quartet. We're losing something basic, something fundamental, something that touches on every aspect of our civilization. Something serious enough to stop the music as we know it. We're losing the cheap resource base on which we depend. We're losing easy oil, cheap ores, fertile soil, and clean water. And these are not extras. These are necessities.

Now there's plenty of denial about all of this still, but the truth is that the game of cheap resource extraction was up about ten years ago now, when the general price of commodities (for the first time in a century) began to rise instead of fall. And while it's true that we are a long ways from having extracted all of everything--we'll never get there, thankfully!--we have come to certain limits of expense; we have come to the place where, if we want more of any given resource, we are going to have to pay progressively more for the work of getting it out; and every year, more and more.  

Already an ounce of gold costs more to extract and refine than it can command on the market, even at today's historically high prices. Already groundwater is running dangerously low everywhere from Saudi Arabia to India to the American West (and again the costs of alternatives such as desalination are prohibitive!). Topsoil is blowing away at alarming rates, so that the cost of growing food on less and less fertile soil can only go up. Fisheries are collapsing as well; recently a single Pacific blue-fin tuna sold for more than a million dollars! So. Maybe our present way of life can continue for a season or two. That is, maybe for a time, we can blind ourselves to the facts and manifold facets of decline, and continue to live as though our present pace of consumption can continue forever. Eventually though, a reckoning will come. Eventually we'll have no choice but to change. And we'll have to learn to live with less. And live more lightly on the earth.

Here's a short list of what will strike many people as the downside of change. None of this is predictive; it is diagnostic. All of it is already taking place, at least in the developed world. 

• Rising prices for basic necessities, as measured against people's ability to pay for them, and not necessarily in the official inflation rate.
• Widespread break-down of urban infrastructure. 
• Declining real wages.
• Changing employment patterns: with fewer and fewer people participating in the labor force, and more and more of those who do take part, doing so part-time only.
• A rise in the underground un-taxed economy, say in bartering for skills, or renting out properties informally for vacationers, or living with family. 
• Less travel.

Here are some changes that are more in the embryonic stages, but will probably become much more a part of our lives as time goes on. 

• More gardening and local food production. Not just as a hobby, or because it's green and progressive, but really out of a practical need to feed ourselves.
• Less money spent on research and development, in everything from cancer research to nano-technology.
• In general a greater sense of distance--with geography making a difference again, in world trade, for example.

How will people react to having to make these necessary changes? Well in general, I suppose it makes sense to say that they will not like them. Will resist them. Will continually want to believe that limitless progress and economic growth is right around the corner.

There is an instructive scene in the movie, in which our cellist attends an exercise class for Parkinson's patients. The instructor opens class by saying that, with Parkinson's, everything in the patient's life contracts and bunches up: the shoulders hunch, the handwriting shrinks, the hand can no longer palm the grapefruit. She then leads the class in stretching exercises, the point being, as she says, to take control of the symptoms. To face the facts of contraction, and do your best to deal with them. To take responsibility for the only body you have, shaky as it is, hunched as it is becoming.

The class begins the stretching exercises, with every student taking part except the cellist and another man behind him with a cane. The man with the cane seems oblivious, and our cellist can only look on in horrified disbelief. He stares and stares, unable to get himself to do the stretches. It's a painful scene. And yet later it becomes clear that he's learning to cope, and with a kind of noble humility. In particular we see him in a harness on treadmill. Just walking walking walking--into his new reality.

I see much my work as a householder at Sunnyside as a sort of analogue to the treadmill scene, though I will say I consider my own work a great deal more cheery! Still, it's work! Learning to garden. Learning to preserve food. Learning to do with less. Learning to say "I don't need that," or "I can do that myself," or "instead of this, I'll do this." Part of the trouble with the work I'm describing is that the necessity for it isn't always viscerally clear yet. My family, if it wished, could spend more freely. We could turn the thermostat back up to where it was, say, five years ago in the wintertime! We could drive a lot more. We could decide the garden was just too much work and turn it all back to grass. And to entertain ourselves and maybe to impress the neighbors, we could buy a lot of things that we don't need. 

But all that would be to move backwards, not forwards, into a world in which it's time (at long last) to share with the poor. Time to care about the effects of our lifestyle upon the life systems of the planet. Time to labor to add beauty and life to the world, not consume the same beauty and life. Time to accept the reality of a grand universal contraction, and learn what the new situation, however painful, has to teach us. 

I hope you consider joining me.

HB

Until Saturday the 18th!