World's End: Temporality and the Anthropocene

World’s End: Temporality and the Anthropocene Back to the Future This essay explores ideas about sacred and secular time in western literature. The vastness of the topic is made slightly more manageable by current exigencies. Writing at a time when climate change becomes more perceptible on an almost daily basis, and the global willpower to reduce greenhouse gas emissions appears unequal to the task, I approach this essay with a belief that there is one aspect of literary temporality which currently trumps the others in importance: the question of the future. It is not only by focusing on futurity that our task is limited, but also by the fact that sacred and secular belief systems now seem to agree – in a startling realignment of their past differences –that what lies ahead is transformation at a global scale. Something that looks like an ending looks to be happening, if we agree that by “ending” we mean changes unprecedented in recorded history in the biostability of the Holocene, in the climates and species of life that have remained relatively the same for the last 12,000 years. For supernatural and scientific belief systems alike, there does not seem to be a lot of future left, at least not as a familiar and reliable extension of the same. Sacred and secular time now veer towards an agreement that many earth-bound life forms are framed by an imminent though incalculable finitude. With the current rattling of our belief in a long future of similitude, the temporal imagination upon which progress is based, how does literature adjust? Approaching Infinity Charles Taylor's magisterial A Secular Age affords a good point of entry into our investigation because it provides an erudite overview of the temporal imagination of western cultures from ancient to modern times. Interestingly, it is also relatively silent on notions of end times. As he traces the long historical movement from antiquity's concept of a "limited, ordered, and static" cosmos to modernity's concept of "a universe that is immeasurably vast, and in constant evolution,” Taylor largely omits the roles that futurity plays in either. Instead, the weight of the description of both cosmos and universe falls on their different ideas of scale and origins. This omission is evident in Taylor's description of the paradigmatic subject of secular modernity as one who "must find herself in the immeasurable time of a dark genesis out of the pre-human, without and within." Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 349. An immeasurably vast temporal scale creates the conditions in which Taylor's modern human wrests a rationale for her existence. She calls on the grand interpretive frames of her epoch (evolution theory, sociological history, psychoanalysis), all of which are oriented towards the past, towards origins, and the ways in which origins illuminate laws of development. A Secular Age was published in 2007. One wonders if Taylor would modify his description of the existential predicament of the modern subject now that a mere decade later the environmental exigencies of her life in time demand that she turn her face towards the future. The question is not meant to belittle the tremendous help to our project that Taylor's philosophical history of sacred and secular time provides. Of greatest importance here is the analysis of concepts of temporal scale. Western religious civilizations, those which predominate before the scientific revolution, inhabited a cosmos centered on the earth, with its history – immense to their minds – chronicled in scriptures, primarily in the mythical early chapters of Genesis. "The depths of the past were . . . given shape by the divine-human drama played out in it," a drama which, in all its sublimity, could still be depicted by paintings on cathedral walls. Ibid., 324. If we had to give a number to it, as later-day biblical cosmologists would do, it would top out at about 6,000 years. It's not that pre-moderns lacked an imagination of infinity. Medieval theologians taught that there was more to the cosmos than the human-scale sublimity of sacred history. Above and beyond the sub-lunar narrative of past, present, and future events was God's time, a concept that comes to fruition in the third and fourth centuries through the philosophical inheritance of Neoplatonism. For Taylor, Augustine is the great Christian theorist of God's time. Augustine's method is phenomenological, turning the recitation of songs and prayers into thought experiments on the serial order of human consciousness. Augustine's present moment flows ephemerally along a chain of arrivals and departures; God's present moment encompasses eternity; it is the nunc stans of “extended simultaneity . . . which doesn't abolish time, but gathers it into an instant." Ibid., 56-7. Thus does Augustine arrive at an idea of seriality as a kind of negative analogy for God's time. The divine consciousness is not parceled into a separation between past or future events but rather apprehends all as a present unity. So important is this mystical concept of God's time – even apart from medieval theology – that both Jewish and Christian exegetes have identified it with Ex 3:14, "And God said to Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, 'Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you." King James translation. Robert Alter notes that "rivers of ink" have flowed "in theological reflection on and philosophical analysis of this name." The more plausible translation of the Hebrew phrase ('Ehyeh-'Asher-'Ehyeh), Alter notes, is "I-Will-Be-Who-I-Will-Be." The Five Books of Moses (New York: W. W.Norton & Co., 2004), 321 note 14. The translation history of the phrase is a compact case study in the influence of Platonism on early Christianity and the separate path preserved by Jewish exegesis. Nevertheless, the basic astonishing claim remains the same; "Grammatically, YHWH means 'He who is,' or 'He who will be' or, perhaps most likely, 'He who causes things to be.'" Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler, Eds.The Jewish Studies Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 103 note 3.11-4.17. Asked for his name, God replies by announcing his time. Between this inconceivably eternal God and his cosmic creation is an unbridgeable gap, limits on human knowledge which it is blasphemous to overstep. This much, however, is certain: it is an intentional eternity, encompassing within itself the arc of the earth's story (so vast to us). From a medieval theological perspective, in the mind of God the game has already played out. Theirs is a bounded and morally purposeful cosmos, held in in its creator's consciousness from beginning to end. One of the most enduring methods of scriptural and literary interpretation to emerge from the church that inhabited this bounded cosmos is typology. Typology exemplifies the difference of sacred, cosmological time; where modern, linear time posits causality and seriality, the typological method posits dialogue and verticality. Events separated by thousands of years are intimately connected thorough their mutual revelation of a pattern in the divine scheme. Thus Moses drawing water from the rock in the desert can be understood as prefiguring the water that Christ offers the Samaritan woman which instills “eternal life.” Ex. 17:6; John 4: 13 – 14. In a sense, from the point of view of typology, the two events extricate themselves from linear time in order to speak to each other of their individual encounter with providential possession. Auerbach's famous essay on typology, which he calls figural interpretation, traces the history of the method and works hard to distinguish it from allegory. For Auerbach, the distinction lies in the figura's preservation of its physical particularity, its flesh and blood materiality, which is never replaced or subsumed by an abstract, spiritual understanding. The figura is always sufficient in itself and animated by an "authentic, future, ultimate truth." And here the dependence of typology upon cosmological, divine time becomes clear: the future truth of the figure "is not only future; it is always present in the eye of God . . . which is to say that in transcendence the revealed and true reality is present at all times, or timelessly." Erich Auerbach, "Figura," in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Orig. German, 1944), 72. Typology thus instantiates one way in which a temporal belief system makes available certain constructions of meaning – in this case, vast but bounded, and held together by a teleological design that is always present in the mind of its creator. Taylor proposes that moderns have exchanged this bonded, intentional cosmos for a practical infinity with no real plan. Vastness and sublimity, it turns out, are historically relative. Moderns associate them with Physic’s continuum of spacetime – astonishing and stupefying, and inimical to theological modes of knowledge. Scientific discoveries from the early seventeenth to the mid nineteenth century have expanded the time frame of the galaxy and geotic life by escalating orders of magnitude. Geological and evolutionary epochs operate in parcels of time that are unencompassable to the human imagination except with mathematical notation; -- the earth is 4.5 billion years old; Australopithecus africanus, an early if not the first hominid, appeared 1 – 2 million years ago. By comparison, 6,000 years seems relatively cozy. Moreover, this expanded time frame of earthly existence is not separated by an ontological gap from an intentional eternity in which it abides. Eternity has become infinity: a mathematical problem. The universe is so enormous, its life span so vast, it might as well be infinite for all that human minds can conceive. Thus it can be said that our ideas of the universe "approach infinity;" we "experience the universe as limitless." Taylor, A Secular Age, 347, italics added. It isn’t necessary to describe the size of the universe exactly as an astrological physicist would in order to appreciate the ramifications of this practical infinity for human cultures. The fact that most moderns only understood or even misunderstood it in layperson's terms is of little consequence to Taylor, who steers clear of possible objections to his generalizations by emphasizing that his concern is with "our sense of things" in a socially epistemic sense. Ibid., 325. In their collective imagination, moderns inhabit "a nature of deep time and unfathomable spaces" -- a world that is constantly evolving, albeit at a rate too slow to be perceived, even at the scale of our 5,000 year-old recorded history. Ibid., 347. For Taylor, these epistemic conditions foster two different streams of moral sensibility, one that accepts a bleak determinism by amoral forces (e.g. Nietzsche, Freud) and the other that nurtures filiation with the natural environment and ecological mindedness (in the tradition of Rousseau). Both, however, stage their struggles and accomplishments in open history. Both are oriented towards a future where the clock is not running out. This brings us to the starting point for the question that motivates this essay: what happens to the moral sensibilities of the moderns when they decide that maybe time is running out? The question is not only relevant to the lack of urgency in Taylor’s references to ecological activism, but also to his ideas about the corrections to secularism that religious beliefs in transcendence have to offer. For Taylor's descriptions of transcendence share with secular humanism the premise that, for this world, there is an open future. In Bruno Latour’s words, this premise characterizes life under the aegis of modernity, for which time runs like “an irreversible arrow, as capitalism, as progress.” Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 10. It’s a premise which, until recently, underlay our most cherished commitments to social justice. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards progress.” The quotation, which King used in many sermons and speeches, is inscribed on the King Memorial in Washington, D.C. Claybourne Carson suggests that the quote derives from the Abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker. The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr., Vol. VI (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 486 note 5). Maybe we didn't fully understand Dr. King when we thought this proverb expressed faith in the inevitable victories in this world of the war for social justice. But even if King’s "moral universe" is a transcendence such as Taylor says religion has to offer the fraudulent self-sufficiency of secular humanism, it still sounds like one with a very long future ahead. One challenge of the contemporary predicament is to rearticulate ethics for a generation that has lost its faith in the open human history implied by the long arc of progress. The Time of Realism; or, Illusions of the Anthropocene Contemporary thinkers working on climate change have contended with the vexing ethical challenges it poses. They have called for a remapping of global human alliances or to envision new, non-anthropocentric alliances between humans, animals, and their environments. See, for example, the work of Donna J. Harroway, most recently Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulecene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).lh Most of these statements, I think it is fair to say, adopt political, biological, social, philosophical, or geological frames that do not focus on temporality per se. That is, they do not single out for analysis a role that forms of temporal representation might play in our experience of the changing global climate and its ecosystems. Besides, there is really only one form of temporal representation that commonsense acknowledges. The reigning secular experience of time knows time through matter. Modern (seventeenth – nineteenth century) philosophy bequeathed to us an empire of the senses that mediates between rationalism and empiricism and provides the theoretical principles for the socially-binding baseline that we call realism. Organic and non-organic entities are measurable, repeatable, persistent, and they acquiesce to the knowledge and control of human beings. Their existence is cocooned in a universal envelope of linear, homogeneous time – time that is the same everywhere – which humans perceive as the durations of material bodies, their own included. And while it’s true that there are alternatives to Newtonian time – supernaturalism, subjectivism, quantum physics – none of them have enough social purchase to undermine the fact that it's still the other that commonsense calls “reality.” Thus we do not talk, as a supernaturalist pre-Modern might, of temporal forms in history that warp time, or repeat themselves, or in other ways depart from the linear grid (e.g. typology, discussed above, or allegory, or the arithmetic patterns in biblical literature). In part this is because these forms descend from prophecy, and the only prophecy which most of us grew up with is the one that says the earth will continue to support human life and its cultures indefinitely. No wonder, then, that most major theoretical statements on global warming do not try to separate the representation of time from the temporality of empiricism. Their business is complicated enough: to envision and encourage new human relations with the environment, to do so in ways that preserve all the life-sustaining tools that science offers, and to do so while maintaining a self-interrogating cognizance of the ways in which the scientific method shares ancestry with the hubristic humanism that got us into this problem in the first place. The Cassandras of climate change are in the precarious position of shaming science and philosophy for their anthropocentric heritage while also retooling them and their cultural influence in ways that can aid human survival. Given that, philosophical meditations that break with linear time – a la Augustine’s meditation on God’s time or Einstein’s theories of realativity – seem like luxuries. They do not have the potential to alter the “great acceleration” of climatory crisis which for the inhabitants of this planet is moving like time’s swift arrow. Amitav Ghosh’s incisive investigation of climate change brings these concerns to bear on the history of the novel. As for ecological critics working in history and the philosophy of science, he sees the situation as calling for both a purgation and resuscitation of an originally secular and humanist mode of knowledge – in this instance, the type of storytelling realized in the modern novel. “Serious fiction,” according to Ghosh, is (like science, like philosophy, like all of the flowerings of human knowledge since at least the eighteenth century) has an anthropocentric line of descent and a vital role to play in our hopefully less anthropocentric future. “Probability and the modern novel are in fact twins, born at the same time, among the same people, under a shared star that destined them to work as vessels for the containment of the same kind of experience.” Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 16. To an extent, this is an eloquent recapitulation of Ian Watt’s foundational statement on the mutually reinforcing rise of eighteenth-century empiricism and the realist novel. Ian P. Watt, Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 15-18; 32-33. But Ghosh’s point is that the prestige of that heritage is tarnished by its complicity in the Anthropocenic transformation of the earth. “Midwifed into existence” by the regularity of nineteenth-century bourgeois life, our tradition of “serious fiction” solidifies faith in an earth whose diurnal rhythms flow into perpetuity and provide a stable background against which the dramas of human loves, crimes, and comedies play out. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 17-19. And they do little more than this, despite the great lessons of the Anthropocene theory, which tells us that this inert staging ground of our human dramas has become itself an agent. Where, in the great tradition of novels whose compositions coincided with the post 1784 acceleration of anthropogenic climate change, or in those whose compositions coincided with the “great acceleration” of the twentieth-century, do we find environments given agency, or, in Bruno Latour’s words, invocations of the earth as “an active, local, limited, sensitive, fragile, and easily tickled envelope.?.” Bruno Latour, “Agency at the time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History 45 (2014):4., Ghosh’s chastening conclusion is that we find them all too seldom (he demurs to point out that several of his own novels are exceptions). Lest our descendants wonder aghast at the collective “derangement” that rendered us indifferent and impotent before the transformations wrought by carbon-based emissions, it might be time, he concludes, for writers of fiction to rise to the challenge of new methods of representation. This means breaking with those novelistic conventions that programmatically preclude depictions of the social aggregate and the non-human. To do so may assist the discovery of "new, hybrid forms" that do not conceal or silence our agential earth. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 11; 84. Where does this leave the subject of time? For Ghosh it is clear enough that one of the novelistic conventions that needs revisiting is plotting by linear time, which we have already identified with the baseline realism of modern society— the "idea of a continuous and irreversible forward movement, led by an avant-garde" (i.e. by the pioneers of liberal justice). Ibid., 79. After this, however, his discussion moves into instances of contemporary fiction that engage the social aggregate and the non-human, thus breaking with the other conventions of "individual moral endeavor" and human-crowded canvases. Ibid, 80-84; 77. The novel's dependency on a linear, progressive figuration of time is not explored further. Possibly this is because Ghosh's analysis seems to be itself dependent on a faith in linear time and the future of progress and human survival that linear time capacitates. Although powerfully aware of the natural catastrophes that seem to await us, Ghosh still looks to a future where our descendants will be reading novels and wondering at our "derangement"; this, after all, is the predicate of the book. Ibid, 11. Apocalyptic Embarrassment It could be objected that Ghosh's account of the realist novel is reductive. When faulting a major literary tradition for its unwavering allegiance to a substrate of linear, secular time we do well to consider the exceptions. Remember Frank Kermode's thesis about the literature of high modernism – that it was consumed with apocalyptic fears and desires, and thus constructed its webs of meaning and design from anxieties about "a powerful eschatological element in modern thought." Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 95. In contrast to Ghosh’s (or, for that matter, of Watt’s) focus on a body of literary works smitten by the stolid reliability of their historical contexts, Kermode presents the counter tradition of a twentieth-century culture for which the dominant mood is anxiety. World wars, atom bombs, and geopolitical convulsions: these very real threats feed the temporal imaginations of the writers and artists who Kermode considers with an apocalypticism like that of the early Christian church. And, like, early Christians, they had to contend with the continual disappointment of their apocalyptic expectations. Hence his central thesis: that the defining temporal psychology of modernist literature is one of “eternal transition, perpetual crisis.” And it’s not unique to modernists; the greatly deferred second coming of Christ is the source of what Kermode suggests is a fundamental way of experiencing meaning in western culture. Absent the apocalyptic ending that would reveal all purposes and fates, meaning becomes “immanent rather than imminent.” Ibid, 101. (In effect, this extends to literary history Bultmann’s thesis that Pauline theology translates the idea of an “eschatological event” from an imminent “cosmic catastrophe” to an ongoing encounter with the immanent Christ of faith. Rudolph Bultmann, History and Eschatology: The Presence of Eternity (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 151. ) Ghosh focuses on a tradition of “serious” novelists who are all too reliant on probability and a causal unfolding of meaning. Kermode, in contrast, identifies an important strain of English literature that lacks the security of probability and fears catastrophe instead. They have internalized catastrophic anxiety, which expresses itself in a stylistic predilection for kairiotic moments – sudden, unexpected, quasi-supernatural, and non-linear eruptions of meaning. However, Kermode’s argument that secular literature is possessed of Judeo-Christian soul does not really weigh against Ghosh. For it turns out that Kermode is not on his modernists’ side; he does not unconditionally endorse their “myths” of crisis and transition, but instead views them with “clerical suspicion:” “if we treat them as something other than [useful fictions] we are yielding to irrationalism; we are committing an error against which the intellectual history of our century should warn us.” Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 103. Modernist authors are possessed of a kind of artistic mood disorder that inspires their mythical penetrations of the menacing historical energies of their day (fascism., anti-Semitism), but which must be held in check by the sober rationalism of the critic, less they flip into becoming Fascists and anti-Semites themselves. In other words, Kermode’s literary history of congenital apocalypticism is launched from the same vantage point that Ghosh identifies with “serious” novelists. Both stand on solid ground, on the side of a probability which is the philosophical descendent of secular humanism and western liberalism and which it is the “clerical” duty of Kermode and other realists to protect. Thus, for all that he celebrates an alternative strain of literature which (unlike Ghosh’s realist novelists) imagines itself poised against a terrifying finitude and drawn to magical thinking, Kermode stakes his own critical authority on the same tradition of secular humanism that underwrites literary as well as social realism and whose complicit blindness to climate change we have already identified. Of course he couldn't have known better; that’s not the point. And of course, as a contribution to the study of time in literature, The Sense of an Ending has few peers. The point is that it speaks from a perspective that assumes human continuity into an open future. Its ethical purpose is to preserve that future by enlisting the sober rationalism of humanist scholarship in order to defuse the human-made threats and malignancies with which Kermode's generation was all too familiar – total war, totalitarianism, genocide. The awfulness of these malignancies is not in dispute, nor do we gain anything by starting a bidding war over which catastrophe is worse, the Holocaust or global warning. Instead, this revisitation of Kermode presents us with an opportunity to assess apocalypticism and anti-apocalypticism in light of the new position we occupy in a post-humanist, post-anthropocentric critical moment. The first thing we see is that all of Kermode's literary-historical subject matter is conceived within the tradition of humanist autonomy from "nature" that Chakrabarty identifies with historiography since Vico and which Taubes summarizes as follows: "the history of mankind differs from natural history in that we have made the one but not the other." Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Climate of History: Four Thesis," Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2009), 202. Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology. Trans. David Ratmoko (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Orig. German 1947), 127. The second thing we see is that this instills the necessity of distinguishing himself from mythical or supernatural positions that respond to historical anxiety with end-of-the-world prophecies or expectations (e.g. Yeats write beautifully in "The Second Coming," but we wouldn’t want to follow him into his theory of gyres.) By retreating from such supernatural fantasies, Kermode's primary motive is to skirt their ethical risks, but we might call it his second motive to avoid looking stupid, which is the way every apocalyptic prophet winds up looking on the day after he said the world was going to and the sun comes up same as usual. He has apocalyptic embarrassment. Since Kermode generalizes this modernist predicament as one that is endemic to western culture since the early Christian period, we might follow him by saying that apocalyptic embarrassment has characterized respectable thinking for at least as long. In part, this is merely a recapitulation of Kermode's thesis: the anxiety of awaiting Christ's return becomes permanent; his followers adjust with a theology of immanence, not imminence, and this infects the western temporal imagination ever after. But is also to say something else; that the voice of dignified thought, sacred as well as secular, assumes the apocalypticists are wrong about the world ending. And this is no longer clearly the case. Conclusion The survey of the several writers discussed in this essay leads to the conclusion that the real dividing line between sacred and secular ideas about time is not between believers and agnostics but rather between apocalypticists and non-apocalypticists. Respectable writers of faith, Taylor among them, are deeply inculturated in the long present of the Common Era, for which prophecies of the world's end have been so consistently wrong and disgraced that they are either seen as inconsequential (Taylor does not mention them), or are intellectually tamed in one way or another. The intellectual taming of apocalypticism is the backbone of respectable Christianity since at least the third century; as Taubes writes, with Origen "eschatology moves away from the vision of the end of the world . . . and turns inward to become a great drama of the soul." Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, 75. After that, Chiliasm becomes something rude, an inferior if not a heretical response to scriptures. Chiliasm, millennialism -- these literalist prophecies of the end of human society on earth are the refuge of autodidacts, the poor, revolutionaries, zealots, and (in our day) of a Protestant evangelical fringe. In literature, in philosophy, whether religious or secular, the dominant understanding of the historical time of humanity is that it goes on. Revolutions, cycles, wars, or rebirths may interrupt its longue durée, but these cataclysms do not end its story. Historically, the unthinkability of absolute anthropic finitude and its ethical ramifications has been a cordon sanitaire around important literature and philosophy of the most devout as well as the most emphatically atheistic. The modifiers on which this description depends –- "respectable," "serious" -- are shorthand for a much larger problem. It's not only education levels, social class, and degrees of influence that have historically marginalized apocalyptic writings and beliefs but also their anti-scientific supernaturalism. A refusal to acknowledge scientific expertise necessarily disqualifies much current-day Christian apocalypticism, which further marginalizes itself by denying the climatory changes that are the first-ever evidence that it might have a seat at the table of a larger social conversation. But not all apocalyptic writing hangs itself on principled ignorance. There is also a question of taste, another problematic modifier. When Ghosh dismisses "fantasy, horror, and science-fiction" on the grounds that they are not "serious," he is at once acknowledging the fact that such novels are uniquely equipped to deal with the subject matter of global warming and signaling that the stylistic methods with which they do so violate the aesthetic tastes that have been nurtured by the same realist tradition which he identifies with the cultures of the Anthropocene. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 24. Dipesh Chakrabarty ends his seminal essay on climate change by declaring that the problem points us to the need for “a figure of the universal that escapes our capacity to experience the world. It is more like a universal that arises from a shared sense of catastrophe.” Chakrabarty, "The Climate of History," 222. Apocalyptic literature is one such figure. By consulting it to understand our inherited imagination of catastrophe and the universality that catastrophe imposes on us, we find both dangers and ethical possibilities. A danger: its tendency, plangent in the apocalypse of John, towards infantile vindictiveness. An ethical possibility: a repurposing of figural interpretation, where meaning is discovered by running a narrative up against the wall of finitude, of collective death, so that its energies bounce back and take root, illuminate, all the choices, victories and failures, that lead up to this final consummation. Finally, both danger and possibility come together in the representational extravagances of the Jewish and Christian apocalypses. These have always been understood symbolically, but to our generation they might be more instructive as attempts to imagine a world beyond human history – a world where humans morph and fold into strange forms, combine with animals and things, and cease to be either the object or the subject of the cascading visions that are so driven by a desire for cosmic finality that they refuse to stop. True, the wild beasts and their strange behaviors of Daniel's and John's Apocalypses were originally conceived as elaborate symbols of historical personages. The plasticity of this symbolism has allowed them to be transposed upon generation to generation of subsequent historical personages. But now, what an uncanny adaptive capacity this seems to be – a genre of literature that is programmed to forget its own human history, and yet still survive? What would apocalyptic writing look like if purged of its theological certainty and representational extravagances? It might look like some of the best writing already done on the topic of non-anthropocentric societies -- societies that inhabit landscapes which are off the grid of traditional knowledge: Amy Tsing's work on sites of "contaminated diversity" that are haunted by ghosts, but in which new relations of support and sustenance arise; Eduardo Kohn's book on forests that house "wild living thoughts beyond the human;" Tim Morton's exploration of landscapes of a "dark ecology" that force upon us "the truth of death" until we finally manage to live on the earth non-violently, for as long as we have it. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 33-34; Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 228; Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 161-62. ` None of the three sources referenced here are works of fiction, but that is not because fiction does not offer similar examples. My intention in proposing that such works might be understood as belonging to an emergent body of contemporary apocalyptic literature is two-fold: one, to point out the way in which global warming has caused a tectonic shift in long stable ideas of sacred and secular time; and two, to point out the shifting norms of veridiction that accompany this distinction. A collapse of temporal categories accompanies a collapse in spatial categories: who anymore would draw a line between sacred and secular earth? 4 4 1