Controlling a sentence—controlling this sentence, as I type—is for me the best, most pleasurable work there is. I build the paragraph, tagged by its thematic first word: control. In crafting this sentence, this paragraph, this essay, I get to be both architect and construction worker, and both jobs offer equally pleasing aspects of control. The former involves creative design and abstract thought; the latter brings the visceral, simultaneously logical and intuitive pleasure of finding the right word, moving it around, putting it in just the right place. Having written that sentence, I know I must reverse myself and concede that the idea of there being “just the right place” is illusory—that even this work is, in its essence, as arbitrary as anything else. This is true, but nonetheless as I write, I shut out the world, other responsibilities, Twitter, the news, everything.
Although obsessive-compulsion may offer a special, somewhat unusual version of this kind of relief, I don’t believe I’m that different from most people. Most people in these chaotic times, are engaged in some form of obsessive control: sixty-hour work weeks, relentless curation of social media personas, helicopter parenting, and the regulation of mood via opiates, increasingly legal marijuana, and that old standby, alcohol. OCD’s manifestation is aberrant (and often ridiculous) enough that it largely can’t be integrated into normal life, and in some ways this is useful. At the very least, I cannot fool myself into thinking my compulsions are anything other than what they are: a warding away of death via the primitive magic of routine.
There are two questions surrounding artists and their archives. Why do artists keep them? And what is worth keeping? Legacy and ego certainly play a part in answering the first question, as does an acute awareness of one’s mortality. But in the last century alone there has also developed a clear distrust of institutional integrity, an overall unhappiness with what white cube galleries and museums can offer. A creative desire has arisen — as the sculptor Isamu Noguchi experienced when he opened his own museum in 1985 — to preserve the context of an artwork alongside the work itself. In 1977, Donald Judd, who saw the paintings of a previous generation of artists scattered across collections or neglected, with little effort toward genuine conservation, wrote, “My work and that of my contemporaries that I acquired was not made to be property. It’s simply art. I want the work I have to remain that way. It is not on the market, not for sale, not subject to the ignorance of the public, not open to perversion.”
To put it another way: Why try so hard to be realistic when, in many cases, fakery is part of the fun? Movies have always had to walk a fine line between the magical and the real. Cinema is built around the suspension of disbelief, but each era seems to have its own idea of what that entails.
As ideas go, human extinction is a comparatively new one. It emerged first during the 18th and 19th centuries. Though understudied, the idea has an important history because it teaches us lessons on what it means to be human in the first place, in the sense of what is demanded of us by such a calling. For to be a rational actor is to be a responsible actor, which involves acknowledging the risks one faces, and this allows us to see today’s growing responsiveness to existential risks as being of a piece with an ongoing and as-yet-unfinished project that we first began to set for ourselves during the Enlightenment. Recollecting the story of how we came to care about our own extinction helps to establish precisely why we must continue to care; and care now, as never before, insofar as the oncoming century is to be the riskiest thus far.
Indeed, despite the tone of Leopardi’s or Odoevsky’s forecasts, this story is not at all one of doom and gloom. Around the same time that the first mentions of the risk of our extinction began to emerge throughout the 1700s, so too did the first projections of plausible mitigations. These range from Lord Byron’s 1824 vision of humanity averting incoming comets by means of planetary ballistic-defence systems, to Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s 1805 notion of gigantic geoengineering ‘machines’ working to extract diminishing nutrition from a collapsing biosphere by levelling mountain ranges and shifting seas, to Benoît de Maillet’s anticipation, as early as the 1720s, of planetary-scale terraforming and irrigation efforts designed to offset the desiccating heat of an expanding Sun and stave off the ‘total Extinction of Mankind’.
I can’t remember being found in my apartment, overdosed on antifreeze, by two senior editors at the Globe and Mail, the newspaper where I worked at the time. Mortification overwhelms me each time I imagine the scene, and I still wish I’d died rather than be found that way.
That, in 2011, was my first suicide attempt, my first post-attempt hospitalization, and my entry point into a labyrinthine psychiatric-care system via the trap door of botched self-obliteration. For me, it was an inexorable resolution—the only possible culmination of a conviction I’d had for months but kept putting off.
We were young then, but the feeling was that we weren’t getting any younger. And yet trying something new felt risky, felt heavy and momentous. We were 23 and 27 at the time, and something big had to happen. Something good. We really didn’t know anything, then. The way that life can move so slowly, and the way that one object on a table shifted slightly to meet the sun can be enough.
I took the photos to be developed; a painting was made. And then it was exhibited in his next solo exhibition where it sold to the Canadian Embassy in Beijing. As far as I know, it’s still hanging there. We were dating then, but eventually, I became the wife of the artist.
“The most dangerous thing a society can do is to deny a voice to the individuals that live in it,” writes Claire Armitstead in her introduction to the anthology Tales of Two Londons: Stories from a Fractured City, the third in an international series dedicated to investigating “the history, symptoms and consequences of inequality.” Described in this way, the project may sound to some readers like a subject better left to sociologists, but the scope of the collection reaches far beyond the academy to provide a humanistic map of a city, with its complex textures and layers of experience—in this case, reaching all the way back to Roman times—that together make up a sense of place.
All this gothic horror is drawn in deliciously lurid tones, but what’s even more satisfying is how effectively Macneal integrates the disparate elements of her story.
In a frequently quoted passage, the American professor of medicine Jon Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as “a way of being in a wise and purposeful relationship with one’s experience… cultivated by systematically exercising one’s capacity for paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally”. It sounds harmless enough. But San Francisco-based academic Ronald Purser thinks not. He has written a strident polemic attacking the secular mindfulness movement.