Look at paleodendrology, the study of thin cores of trees, whose annular growth rings speak of the climates of the past. For evidence of earlier environmental apocalypses and shifts, look at limnology, the study of mud cores taken from wetlands the yellow bands of pollen that sink to the bottom of the lake each spring tell the story of what lived there before. The collapse of the textile industry is, for me, a regional economic apocalypse that started in the 1960s and crested in the mid-1990s. That’s how I think of essays.īecause apocalypse is nothing new. Poet David Kirby calls the poem the problem-solving machine. I want to figure something out that I can’t any other way. If to write about apocalypse is to write about history, how do I want to do history at its most seductive as an essayist, not a historian? I love material culture-the dogwood shuttle from the textile mill-and the power that comes from creating context between objects, phrases, and moments. I think of a textile mill in my hometown, in upstate South Carolina, abandoned twenty years, overgrown with briers and Virginia creeper. It’s history-looking at the past through the eyes of the present, and looking reflexively, too, to try and discern what the past has to tell us about now. Friends, thank you for your attention, for sharing these thoughts with me.įor me, writing the apocalypse isn’t fortunetelling.
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