Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of ben tapeworm’s almanac. I am not entirely sure what I expected from this project, but I’m glad to be doing it and grateful for all of you, who have been encouraging and thoughtful in your attention and feedback. My hope when I started was to be “wide-ranging and at least somewhat useful.” I am not sure that has been the case: readers have pointed out that I often end up writing about climate change and New York City sidewalk rubble. I guess this is true.
Others have noted that this almanac seems concerned with endings. After all, the practice has marked the end of a year, the end of months, the not-end of a global pandemic, the end of birds on a sidewalk or an oilslicked beach. I began this almanac in December of 2020, a housebound winter of global health crisis and political turmoil, the slow havoc of climate change already well underway. I am continuing it with none of these things resolved.
An almanac is a fundamentally futureward thing. The oldest almanacs were predictive, charts of data called ephemerides that logged the future positions of the sun, moon, and other celestial bodies. Only later did they gather folk wisdom and horoscopes, long term weather forecasts and advertisements. Before they were pamphletry, they were prophecy.
With prophecy comes power. In 1504, his ships beached on the shores of Jamaica, Christopher Columbus used the Almanach Perpetuum to predict a lunar eclipse, tricking the native people into thinking he had oversized powers. Such almanacs were ancient, and not particular to Europe. One Mayan codex from the 11th or 12th century contains Venus and lunar tables. It is one of only four Mayan codices that survived the Spanish, who burned the pagan texts in great heaps.
Centuries later, our ephemerides are incredibly accurate thanks to modern computing, which, in a sense, was after the same goal: militaristic weather control. In 1950, John von Neumann, a mathematician and computer scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, gave a talk at Princeton. According to one of his colleagues,
Most of the people that he hired for his computer project in the early days were meteorologists. […] He said, as soon as we have good computers, we shall be able to divide the phenomena of meteorology cleanly into two categories, the stable and the unstable. […] All processes that are stable we shall predict. All processes that are unstable we shall control.
Von Neumann’s hope was that
A central committee of computer experts and meteorologists would tell the airplanes where to go in order to make sure that no rain would fall on the Fourth of July picnic. This was John von Neumann's dream. This, and the hydrogen bomb, were the main practical benefits which he saw arising from the development of computers.
The better we can predict things, the more we might take action to avoid them—perhaps ironically, this has not been the case with the climate crisis. I read recently about grim predictions for Antarctic ice, how “the recent acceleration of mass loss may mark the beginning of a prolonged period of ice sheet retreat and substantial global sea level rise.” With climate change events, prediction is not a source of power but of impotence: as the madmen burn coal and oil and old-growth forests, knowing full well the consequences, we are left with worsening scenarios, margins of error, points of no return.
To live with climate change is to live in a vast system of ineluctability and grief. If I seem to be concerned with endings, it is not because I think apocalypse is nigh but because planetary crisis has corrupted my own personal sense of meaning—and in ways I still don’t really understand. Small losses are freighted with unseen extinction, slight uncertainties and doubts seem like perils and precipices. Guilt and mournfulness gather everywhere like dark, mercuric pools.
But it is better to live with it than to keep pretending it is not here. In Hyperobjects, Timothy Morton notes that “By postponing doom into some hypothetical future, these narratives inoculate us against the very real object that has intruded into ecological, social, and psychic space.” And so while I know climate change may seem like a drone of deathward grandeur in this newsletter, I do not count myself among the doomsayers. Just the mournful, the angry, the cataclysmically sad.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
from the discourse
Žižek on Chinese tennis. The best review so far of Harrow. Some men just want to watch the world burn. National conservatism on the rise. First Look: Omicron!
weekly wiki
The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction
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