In the middle of the second millennium B.C., a dark cloud of noxious falling ash and a tsunami wave spread across the Mediterranean. It was enough to leave Minoan civilization—that of the Minotaur, of the bare-breasted snake goddess, of the palace at Knossos—in ruins. Some say the event might also have had some connection with the ten plagues Pharaoh endured in the book of Exodus. It now seems pretty clear that the epicenter of this cataclysm was none other than the Greek island of Santorini—the land mass of which, as I learned this past week during a sojourn there, looks like and is the rim of the crater around a gigantic sunken volcano.

The excuse for my trip was the Caldera (=“crater”) Arts & Literature Festival?hosted by Atlantis Books, one of the best bookshops in the world. (Atlantis’s name refers to the rather dubious theory that Santorini is also the legendary island nation mentioned by Plato. The size of Libya and Asia combined? Beyond the Strait of Gibraltar? Yeah, right.) The couple dozen of us in attendance enjoyed readings, musical improvisations, a lesson in taking non-sappy photos on a picturesque Greek island, and hors d’oeuvres prepared before our eyes by?Vefa Alexiadou, the kinder and more law-abiding Martha Stewart of Greece. The festival’s climax was the launch of another magnificent issue of?Five Dials?magazine.?Five Dials?editor Craig Taylor (who meanwhile released?a new book of his own) wrote to his readers about all this private revelry at the little bookshop collective the only way he could: “I know; I’m sorry.”

A short flight up and over the crater brought me back to Athens, the epicenter of another great Greek volcano of sorts, which I write about in a new post at Waging Nonviolence:

From a glance at a recent front page of The New York Times, you might guess that a political meeting in Athens this week would be full of talk about the resigning prime minister, bailout deals, and the Euro. The land that gave birth to European civilization now seems on the brink of sinking the whole continent’s economy. But, among those gathered on Monday in a basement in the neighborhood of Exarcheia—a kind of Haight-Ashbury for Greek anarchists—the agenda was completely different. They talked instead about parks, public kitchens, and barter bazaars. They even seemed pretty hopeful.

The lack of concern for political figureheads, in retrospect, was to be expected. Greek anarchists see no more reason to care about whether George Papandreou goes or stays than those at Occupy Wall Street are agonizing over Herman Cain’s sexual foibles. They have another kind of politics in mind.

The artistic collectivity of Atlantis Books turned, for me, into the political collectivity of Exarcheia. Despite all the signs past and present that the end is near, that week in Greece made it seem like everything is going to be fine.

About a decade ago, during a period of late-adolescent, almost apocalyptic urgency, with a sudden conversion to Roman Catholicism only a short time away, I discovered an unusual way to relax. At home, in my basement bedroom, I’d play Quake, a violent computer game. It was fairly typical teenage-boy stuff. But instead of listening to some kind of death metal while I played, I turned to an unlikely soundtrack: the Bible call-in show “Open Forum” — specifically, the soupy baritone of Harold Camping, the octogenarian radio evangelist.

At the time, I had no idea why this combination worked so well. But thinking back on it now, the shoot-’em-up video game actually dramatized the condition of total depravity at the center of Camping’s theology. He kept reminding me that we’re really, really bad — just like the demons (or whatever they were) I was battling on the screen — and only saved by God’s supercharging grace. I could sense that a change was just around the corner, and maybe this odd activity helped free me from my old world and shepherd me into a new one.

Now, Camping is the man behind the predicted Rapture on May 21st—this coming Saturday. For the rest of the essay, I reflect on that, and on what The Daily‘s DEK describes as “what end-timers can teach the rest of us.”

He brought back a sack full of Afghan scarves, and offered me my pick of them. The one I chose, the yellow one, is what I’m wearing now. What the picture doesn’t show, but which was the first thing I noticed when I put it on, is the smell. One scarf smells strongly; the smell of Eric’s sack of them is tremendous. He didn’t notice it when he was in Kabul, because everything smells this way there. With my scarf on, I’m carrying that city with me today, into the new year. I’m breathing the city that my country has occupied for nearly a decade now.

I can try to describe it, but I’ll never succeed. It’s a bit like the smell of a wood fire, but there’s much more too. There’s also the trace of burning trash, which people use to supplement their insufficient wood and coal, for heat and cooking. There’s smog in it too, from a city where people can’t afford anything but the lowest-grade gasoline in cars, and where the snow-capped mountains all around trap it in. There’s also dust, because the cars are driving over mostly unpaved roads. And there’s the hint of unnamable filth, from the scattered sewers that run along the roads, open to the air. This would be just unsanitary in a city of thousands. But Kabul has swelled to four million, thanks to impoverished refugees pouring in from the war-ravaged countryside, their ancestral land lost and trading good, clean air for what I’m smelling now.

In late 2001, I met a woman who worked at the Pentagon. When she learned I had been protesting the invasion, she argued with me. She said, as we parted, that someday I’d understand that this was right. I’d get over it. Well, I still don’t. I haven’t.

The year to come will only really be new if we make it that way. Let our mere prayers for peace be made acceptable by our actions, by our willingness to shed the pride and importunity that keeps us trying to have our way with drone strikes and night raids. They will fail. There is no victory from making widows and orphans. In a new year made truly new, we will no longer accept the waste and horror of war as the policy of normalcy. We will stop trying to take what isn’t ours. We will starve the bottomless hunger for revenge, and sit down with our enemies, and eat together.

Let God be the first to know, and Congress second: it’s a new year. War, the demon-mother of poverty, is no good in our sight, and we are the ones who can stop it. This year, may the four million human beings in Kabul breathe clean air again. Amen; let this be done.

I am in no position to end with prognostication, to predict how all this business will turn out, or to recommend particular policy directives and consumer rules-of-thumb. The companies will have their way, of course; as the filmmaker Chris Marker once put it, I bow to the economic miracle. But I can end with a vision, and it can point to a posture.

Picture a library, in flames, overlooking the city in ruins below—the Library of Alexandria under Caesar’s assault all over again. Books by the thousands audibly crinkle as they incinerate, disappearing for all time, never to be read again and, in a generation or two, never to be remembered. They are all irreplaceable; their loss is exactly incalculable. They are now good only to fuel the fire. As bystanders, we’re consumed by horror. We imagine ourselves as the books, the books as ourselves. Everything is lost with them. Right?

Or, on the other hand, might we instead laugh and cheer? It wouldn’t be the first time at a book-burning. Why not? Isn’t there also comedy—a divine comedy—in what freedom would follow the immolation of civilization’s material memory? We have only ourselves again, ourselves and our God. Perhaps these flames might go by the name of progress.

Thank you so much to all of you who took the time to comment and encourage. Fleshing this piece out, in particular, and putting it before readers means a lot to me.

Though the word “apocalypse” now is usually taken to mean a world-ending calamity, the original Greek word strictly translates as “revelation.” This meaning is as relevant today as when the New Testament’s last book was promulgated with the word as its title. The havoc wrought matters less than what it reveals. Because there’s only our one world, predicting its end is the ultimate jackpot in the contest for Truth. Whoever is right about how the world ends is probably right about other important things as well. Foretelling the apocalypse is an audacious attempt to assert the universality of a particular tradition and its beliefs.

I’ve found this stuff more and more worth thinking about lately as a way of exploring the imaginary dimensions of the climate crisis. What kinds of ends of the worlds have cultures imagined previously? What will the end of our world really be like?

Vice

As we stood together in the backyard, he revealed to me that his deterioration isn’t entirely because of natural causes. The people in town have turned against him, spreading terrible rumors, and worse. A self-taught “Christian Pastor,” Carl insists he has done nothing wrong. There is a bullet hole in a second floor window. But he can’t tell me any more for a few months yet.

“Lately I’ve been reading a lot from the last weeks of Jesus’s life,” he told me. “You have to admit there are a lot of parallels.”

It’s a good start, and there’ll be more to come on Carl, as well as, hopefully, more adventures in Viceland.

A part of me, though, has a fantasy. You see, the Times is in huge trouble. Stock value is down, the shimmering new building is mortgaged, subscriptions are dropping, and the website isn’t remotely paying for itself. And they’re not alone. The Tribune is in big trouble. So is trying to sell news on paper. A new business model is necessary. My fantasy is to go back there and make it my mission to save the institution. Come up with a new plan, implement it, and rescue the precious newspaper somehow with my youthful ingenuity. But… I guess I’m just going to sit around and write articles about stuff instead.

Regardless of what I do, all this anxiety has got some really interesting articles about publishing into the Times lately. Yesterday, there was a solution-minded op-ed, “News You Can Endow.” The author, the chief investment officer at Yale, suggests that newspapers should take a hint from universities: go non-profit, get an endowment, drop the political endorsements, and play the august cultural institution. It might just work.

The next one’s a quickie from a Times blog. A video of “How the Future of Online News Looked in 1981.” Gives us a sense of how dinosaur-like everything in media is gonna look in 30 years.

And another sign of systemic demise: the Washington Post Book World, an old standby for me in my Arlington days, will no longer appear in a separate section. Makes sense—nobody’s reading books, nobody’s buying newspapers, so nobody needs a newspaper section about books. Too bad book reviews are where some of the most exciting intellectual exchanges happen.

Finally, speaking of books, there was a front page article yesterday on print-on-demand book publishing. I’ve been a big proponent of this since my own Small’s Clone Press switched from hand-made crafts to PoD. It is an incredibly exciting phenomenon that puts book publishing within reach of people without big investment capital. The sad casualty of PoD, however, is design. Almost without exception (I like to think that my books lean toward the exception), these things are ugly. And, as the head of PoD company Lulu.com admits,

“We have easily published the largest collection of bad poetry in the history of mankind,” Mr. Young said.

As my fantasy suggests, I really hope that we can take these trials and troubles as an opportunity. Don’t wait for Rupert Murdoch to buy everything up, but work to develop new, economically-sound ways to keep intellectual and civic discussion alive. I’m not staying at the Times, but I am testing out the pamphlet as a new/old medium for exchanging crazy ideas. Not to mention some websites here and there and other, secret things not yet unleashed. This is a plea. Let’s think hard about this and exchange our ideas. Who knows, maybe we’ll even make a buck or two in the process.

*

P.S. Another goodie not from the Times but the Review, “Google and the Future of Books.” A reminder that these are critical times:

Yet this is also a tipping point in the development of what we call the information society. If we get the balance wrong at this moment, private interests may outweigh the public good for the foreseeable future, and the Enlightenment dream may be as elusive as ever.

Herzog, complete with haunting German accent, talks a lot in this meandering film, yet its subject is mainly still and unspeakable. It came to be because of a grant from the National Science Foundation, which brings artists to the continent’s scientific bases in order to return some record of them to civilization. My aunt, Lita Albuquerque, was there at the same time as Herzog for artistic purposes of her own. The mission might seem impossible, or at least it should: bring inexact beauty to a scientific penal colony.

The sounds Herzog puts the images to, often, are religious—Russian Orthodox chanting was my guess. Thus the frozen landscapes and underwater, under-ice expanses become cathedrals. He calls them that outright. The people we meet in the film each bring their own interpretations. A vehicle-driving mystic quotes the Buddhist teacher Alan Watts. One morose scientist feeds off of classic sci-fi. And a physicist speaks of neutrinos as invisible gods.

Apocalypticism unites most among them, breathed in whichever flavor. Driving it is the obvious impermanence of human habitation there, the one great mass of earth where even our ingenuity can’t sustain us, unaided, for long. Antarctica, also, is ground zero for global climate change, and the researchers watch it unfold daily. How long before that certain transience envelops the whole world?

As one inhabitant after another talks with Herzog about these things, another pattern arises: the silence is so deep in Antarctica (or is it the only continent so alien we should say “on”?) that it can wake you up at night.

Herzog claims more for the film than it accomplishes, but the co-incidence of the penguin and the people is enough. How different is the hobbling bird’s “disorientation” from the systems of belief that drive us to the planet’s bottom? In this first colony of artificiality onto a natural world, it becomes clear how perfectly natural our artifice is.

As a special for readers of The Row Boat, I’m pleased to present a hand-written “transcript” of my “interview” with the great ancient astronaut theorist Zecharia Sitchin: the notes he scribbled at the bottom of the questions I mailed him. I’m very grateful for his response, though unfortunately it didn’t provide me with enough to merit a mention in the article. To view the full-size .jpg, click here or on the thumbnail.

In the article I explore how such great hopes are being put in Obama in a neighborhood not quite able to believe that a black man might actually be president. The unanswered question is whether he will ever deliver on what he represents there. Take a look at Obama Territory.