David Farrier's Reading List

"Indeed! I’m not a geologist, so The Earth After Us and the many articles Zalasiewicz has produced as part of the Anthropocene Working Group were invaluable to me, in giving a material basis for the future fossils I was interested in. He walks the reader through the processes that would lead, for example, to a city leaving a fossil layer, what he calls the “urban stratum,” which an alien visitor could discover 100 millions years from now. It’s a pretty wild read, but hugely informative. It changed the way I see the world and our role in shaping it. Virginia Woolf said, “we live in things,” and Zalasiewicz shows how this will be so long after we’re gone. He coins the term ‘technofossils’ to describe the huge variety and quantities of made things, from Bic pens to metal alloys, that have the potential to leave a lasting impression. As chair of the AWG, Zalasiewicz has been a kind of spokesperson for the emerging concept of the Anthropocene, and I think we’re extremely fortunate to have such a graceful writer perform this role. ‘The Anthropocene’ has attracted a lot of criticism, mostly that it fails to accurately name the problem—is that it isn’t humans per se that cause climate change, it’s certain human societies choosing to organise themselves in a particular way (i.e. it’s capitalism that’s to blame). And this is absolutely true. But I still believe the Anthropocene is a useful concept, because it provokes us to rethink our relationship with deep time. The AWG’s task is to establish whether there will be enough clear and widespread evidence of human civilisations in the geologic record to mark a boundary between stages in Earth history. Previously, these boundaries have been marked by glaciations or extinctions. Which is to say, the Anthropocene identifies us with processes that unfold over very deep time. There’s a radical and vital re-visioning that follows from this, which I hope is a step towards learning to be better ancestors."

"okpik is an Inupiaq poet, from Alaska. Much of the story of our impact on the deep future is being written in the far north, through the extraction of fossil fuels and the warming of the Arctic. But for indigenous communities that future is their past. The indigenous scholar Kyle Powys Whyte says that indigenous populations “already inhabit what our ancestors would have understood as a dystopian future.” The Anthropocene is, after all, a legacy of colonialism. And it perpetuates colonialism too—what else could you call it, when lifestyles in developed nations depend on ravaging the Niger Delta and Alberta’s Tar Sands in search of cheap fuel, and exporting the greatest cost of burning it to Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands, for whom sea level rise is an existential threat? “The Anthropocene is, after all, a legacy of colonialism” For all this, the poems in Corpse Whale are full of the richness of Inupiaq culture and myth, and the rhythms of Arctic life. Perhaps most importantly of all, they challenge the worldview that sets humans apart from the rest of the world. okpik uses a form of split pronoun—“She/I dream/s in flight with falcon / She/I glide/s in an Inuit ice shelf”—which is disorienting at first, but gradually produces this shift in your attention, where the ‘I’ speaking becomes inextricable from the surrounding world. The notion of shared personhood is a core element in much indigenous thinking, including Inupiaq culture. ‘Inupiaq’ means “real people,” and at one point, okpik even observes that “oil is a people,” which transforms it from a simple resource to an entity we share the world with. The poems are also very dynamic, visually—full of breaks between phrases, and sudden changes in register and reference. They offer what the poet Lyn Hejinian calls an ‘open text,’ that is, “open to the world.” okpik’s is a cosmology that non-indigenous readers can’t just step into, but I think we can learn from it. To borrow a phrase from Robin Wall Kimmerer, her poems are “born of long intimacy and attentiveness to a homeland.” She’s immersed in ways of telling time that are the product of thousands of years of continuous culture in a hugely challenging landscape. ( Corpse Whale is arranged as a kind of calendar of the Inupiaq year.) In this way of looking at things, the temporalities of oil extraction or geopolitics seem deeply strange, a kind of temporal ostranenie (defamiliarisation). It’s good, I think, to learn that there are other ways of being in time."

"Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus is essentially about a struggle for “power over tomorrow.” Having spent years wandering in disgrace and near to death, Oedipus—whose “griefs exceed / the griefs of all mankind”—arrives on the outskirts of Athens. What follows is a struggle over his remains between Creon, the king of Thebes who replaced Oedipus, and Theseus, king of Athens. Creon wants to install the tomb outside his city as a kind of talisman which he believes will confer protection. But Oedipus insists that in death he would only bring “vengeance / rooted deep in your soil for all time to come,” and appeals to Theseus to bury him in secret. In return, he says, the power that would curse Thebes will be “the root of all your greatness, everlasting, ever-new.” Get the weekly Five Books newsletter So Oedipus, who represents “the power that age cannot destroy,” becomes a source of fascination. The parallel, for me, is with debates about safe storage of nuclear waste. There’s a real risk that anything we do to signal the danger of spent nuclear fuel will be lost on future generations, and instead be mistaken for treasure (think of the ineffective curses guarding the Pharoah’s tombs). In Footprints , I explore various incredible schemes designed to keep the waste safe from intrusion for 10,000 years. Perhaps the most fantastical was the semiotician Thomas Sebeok’s proposal for a ‘nuclear priesthood,’ responsible for conveying sacred knowledge about nuclear waste to future generations. Sophocles even seems to have anticipated this, when he has Oedipus instruct Theseus to only reveal the secret location of his tomb “to your eldest, dearest son, / and then let him reveal them to his heir / and so on through the generations, forever.” There’s hope of a good future in the play but also a warning against hubris. Oedipus does end up in the care of the Athenians, rather than rapacious Creon. And yet by the time the play was first performed in 401 BCE, five years after Sophocles’ death, Athens had fallen. Well, it’s likely there will be issues of translation. One of the problems of communicating the risks associated with nuclear waste is that all languages have a half-life. 10,000 years from now, perhaps a tenth of English words will still be current (if English is still spoken at all). Still, art has the capacity to communicate in spite of this. I was really enthralled by the announcement, late last year, of the discovery of the world’s oldest narrative art, painted on the wall of a limestone cave in Indonesia nearly 44,000 years ago. It shows thin, red-ochre stick figures hunting dwarf buffalo and wild pig. But some of the figures have animal traits—a bird’s head or a tail—which suggests that it’s a myth rather than the record of a real hunt. Or rather, that it’s a hunt that only took place in the imagination. We’ll never know what the myth was, but perhaps more powerfully we can still read in the painting the strength of the connection the artist felt with the animals she was depicting—so close, some were melded with human forms. That’s a message that ought to transcend time, I think."

"Christian Bök’s Xenotext project is an attempt to write an eternal poem, one that will survive in the DNA of extremophile bacteria when all other life on the planet is extinguished. Christian wrote a pair of mutually-enciphered sonnets, ‘Orpheus’ and ‘Eurydice,’ so that either poem can be translated as the other using a cipher he called ‘ANY-THE’—so, “oh stay / my lyre” in ‘Orpheus’ becomes “in fate / we rely” in Eurydice’s corresponding lament. He then assigned each letter of the alphabet to a codon of DNA (combinations of three of the four nucleobases, adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T)), so that he could encode ‘Orpheus’ in the genome of d.radiodurans , an extremophile that so far scientists have been unable to kill. It can withstand more than 1000 times the lethal dose of gamma radiation for humans. In 2002, NASA sent it into space where it was directly exposed to solar radiation, but the sample returned alive. Christian’s intention was to exploit RNA inscription to produce his eternal poem: once ‘Orpheus’ is encoded in d.radiodurans ’ DNA, the bacterium will produce a protein that can be extracted and decoded to produce ‘Eurydice.’ The idea is that, because it can’t be killed, d.radiodurans will be host to the lament of Orpheus and Eurydice for eternity. I just find it such a compelling idea, that the last trace of human life to exist on the planet would be a pair of poems, recalling one of the world’s greatest love stories, woven into the life of this fearsome microbe. So far as I know, to date Christian has been able to successfully introduce ‘Orpheus’ into the genome of d.radiodurans , but not to retrieve Eurydice. As in the myth, she continues to fall back into darkness. But to be honest, this failure doesn’t matter to me. It’s such a mind-expanding idea, for one thing. But it also makes me feel more hopeful about the deep future. There’s hope in the thought that our last trace is still unmade. The story of our mark on deep time hasn’t yet been fully told. There’s time, still, to decide how we want to be remembered."