Reflections on Aniara: Everything will not be OK and we can live with that

Earth is in trouble. Or rather, we as beings living on the surface of planet Earth have gotten ourselves into real trouble, a slow disaster we might not be able to rectify. 

This past weekend I was experiencing doom and the tragic fate of humanity during Gothenburg International Film Festival. I visited the Swedish premiere of Aniara, a film based on a poem from the 1950’s by the Nobel laureate Harry Martinsson. It was written at a time when human annihilation through nuclear war was a persistent scare in peoples mind. In Martinssons story the spaceship Aniara is loaded with people fleeing the dying Earth, but an accident sets Aniara adrift on an endless voyage in space, a bubble in the vast nothingness. 

The film depicts the spaceship as a modern day cruise ship, where the passengers initially try to hang on to normality but gradually become more desperate and succumbs to sects or suicide. There is no Hollywood hopeful ending, when the spaceship finally reaches a habitable planet, the passengers have been dead for many millennia. 

While nuclear extinction was the backdrop for the poem, Harry Martinsson was already in the early 1960’s pointing to environmental destruction as a rising threat to humanity. For Roy Scranton, author of two books with the uplifting titels “Learning to die in the Anthropocene” and “We’re doomed - now what” the impending climate catastrophe is a reality we can not avoid. There are many things that I take to my heart from Roy's texts and the talk he gave during the film festival. I am deeply impressed by the journey that Roy Scranton has traveled moving out from the war in Iraq to writing about the fate of humanity in the Anthropocene. There’s a deep sorrow in his description of what we are inevitably going to loose. And I agree with his notion that we need to slow down, reflect and meditate on what’s really happening with our climate and our societies; do less instead of keep on running. Humans have the ability to make meaning under the worst of circumstances, says Scranton, what we need to do is to organise locally because the cavalry will not be coming to save us. 

But the road that his total acceptance of this situation leads him to is not mine. Roy Scranton is disavowing those who like our most recent climate activist in Sweden, Greta Thunberg choses to fight for a liveable climate. We are lost and resistance to our fate is futile says Scranton. But his reactions rings with both bitterness and even envy towards those who continue to struggle despite the odds of real success being infinitesimally small. Some of the reactions in Swedish press to Roy Scrantons visit encourage this perception, maybe as a token gift to those who fear action more than the future. 

Perhaps we should not view Scranton as a truth sayer, but as the poet he is and wants to be. We can read him as a Baudelaire or Rimbaud of our time, writing about the beauty of death and decay in times of war and conflict. Like in the final verse of Rimbauds poem “Le Dormeur du Val”:

He sleeps in the sun, his hands on his breastAt peace. There are two red holes in his right side

So what to do if we abandon hope? Maybe it is no hope but courage that may save our humanity if not our world and nature as we have come to know it. To cite from a recent article in Washington Post by Dan Zak: 

To grasp the problem, we have to slow down. To respond to it, we have to act fast. We have both no time and more time.“We want there to be a really simple story: You do this, and then everything will be okay,” says Kate Marvel, who works for NASA in New York. “And everything is not going to be okay.”There is opportunity in this acceptance. Marvel thinks we need courage, not hope. We must know what’s coming, we must realize it will hurt, and we must be very strong together.

So we need to accept that the times are a-changing and there are no easy paths forward. We need to strive not for control but to find a way to flow like the waves and grass. 

Hold the problem in your mind. Freak out, but don’t put it down. Give it a quarter-turn. See it like a scientist, and as a poet. As a descendant. As an ancestor.

Finally, what seems to be lacking in Scrantons narrative is the willingness to speak truth to power. "We" are not equally complicit for the climate crisis. Therefore, the light on the super rich gathering in Davos that Greta Thunberg was shining is important. If the super rich, half a percent of the worlds population are responsible for 13% of the worlds consumption related emissions, then solving the climate crisis is a question of both moral and equity. It is not a done deal and we can alter our fate.