Never Be Bored
14 March 2022
and poems exist; poems, days, death
The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander. Alphabet by Inger Christensen, translated by Susanna Nied; The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi; art by Evan M Cohen.
How do you leave a message for the future, when the future is almost unimaginably far away? How do you craft a warning that can last for 10,000 years? How do you tell a people who may remember nothing of today's world—from its languages to its writing systems to maybe even the fact that we ever existed at all—that this place is not safe, that there is something dangerous here? These are the questions at the heart of nuclear semiotics—how to communicate long term nuclear waste warnings. In The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander, a story about memory and radium girls, scientists propose a possible answer: elephants.
Tying together a cast of characters, each with their own unique voice, I love the way this novella builds a story of scale. One girl, mostly powerless against a system that was only ever built to use her up, never protect her; one scientist, trying to build a movement that can last millennia; a heartbreaking last stand, raging against injustice.
If you enjoyed the whimsical writing of The Only Harmless Great Thing, try Alphabet by Inger Christensen, a poem about the beauty of the world and the horror of the things that can destroy it. Following a rigid structure, each section focuses on a letter of the alphabet and contains a number of lines following the Fibonacci sequence. Gorgeously translated into English by Susanna Nied, it begins simply, delicately, like this: "apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist" and then "bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries;/bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen".
Capitalism will kill you if it can. In The Only Harmless Great Thing, and also in real life in the 1920s, factory workers drew numbers on clocks with radium paint, with terrible consequences to their health. Among other things, The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi is also a story of worker exploitation, but this time set in futuristic Thailand, when most of the world's agricultural industry is held hostage by calorie companies, who sell sterile, genetically modified seeds.
Evan M Cohen is one of my favorite artists right now—I adore the way he uses simple and beautiful prose, halftone dot texture, limited color palettes, and careful composition to create sequential art. In particular check out his Life series; as one panel morphs into the next, figures dissolve into water, hands become flowers, a sun rises and sets and transforms into a bird. "When is the next time I will see you?" asks one work. "I can't wait to finally see you again," says another.