December 2019: The Sydney Harbour Bridge disappears into a pall of smoke. The usual measurements for air quality seem almost absurdly useless for knowing how to act or how to make sense of this crisis: 10 times, 11 times hazardous levels. Beaches are darkened by ash in the water. Our house in the inner west smells of burning, even after being closed all day. The smoke alarm sounds periodically, piercing the night, waking the children. Fragments of burnt forest fall in the city, bringing to mind the black flowers imagined by Emma Craven, the murdered daughter in the 1985 nuclear noir BBC series Edge of Darkness.
I watched Edge of Darkness as an anxious teenager on the verge of political awakening, worried about nuclear war. My scepticism was already formed, but it was given new contours, new imaginative extent, by this story – a political narrative underwritten by mythic force.
Rewatching the show recently, much of it felt painfully relevant. It is a story about how humans are wrecking the world, and this alone explains why it returns to me so insistently. Edge of Darkness is a doomsday tale, but it is also, crucially, a narrative about grief. The death of the planet told as a story about personal mourning: this, I suspect, is what brings to mind images of the stricken face of Detective Ronald Craven, played by a grim Bob Peck; the dark, toxic caves; the crackle of the Geiger counter; the laugh of the cynical, mad American agent. At the beginning of the series, Craven’s daughter Emma is shot to death on their front doorstep. He uncovers a giant conspiracy as he doggedly investigates her death. Emma turns out to have been involved with an activist group trying to bring attention to the dangers of nuclear power. Her death was a political assassination.
Emma appears as a chatty ghost from time to time. In one conversation with her father she explains that the Earth will protect itself against the threat that humans pose, and that the consequences for humans will be bad. She calls this philosophy “Gaia”, the name of the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth. The screenwriter, Troy Kennedy Martin, seems to have been influenced by the thinking of climate scientist James Lovelock, who proposed a similar theory of Earth as a single, interconnected organism.
Once upon a time, Emma says, millions of years ago, life was threatened by a long ice age, and the planet brought forth black flowers to cover the surface of the world. These dark petals absorbed the sun’s warmth, allowing life to reemerge. “That is the power of Gaia,” she claims. Those black flowers will bloom again, Emma predicts, soaking up the increasing heat from the atmosphere, hastening the warming of the planet, melting the ice caps and devastating the human population. “If man is the enemy, it will destroy him,” she tells her father.
At the end of the series, Craven stands alone on a cold hill. He does not turn into a tree, which Martin envisaged in his original version of the screenplay, but he is tree-like. Black flowers bloom against the snow, perfect round petals shivering in the wind.
I think of these flowers when I read about the phenomenon of dark snow, where particles of pollution fall on the arctic tundra, reducing the landscape’s albedo, which is the ability of the snow to reflect light and heat back into the atmosphere. I think of them when I read about forms of toxic algae that thrive in warmer waters. And again when I learn about Gamba grass, an invasive species that burns hotter and faster than any native flora, and also grows far more quickly, upending the traditional cycles of fire and native regrowth in the landscape of Australia’s Northern Territory. And again when the massive blazes to the south generate thunderstorms over the dry Earth, storms of lightning that bring no rain, just more fire.
***
One December afternoon in Sydney’s inner west the sun appears as a neon disc, electric orange-pink against the greyish-brown smoke that covers the sky. The haze flattens the sun’s rays so that we walk through an eerie false twilight, empty of shadows.
“You can see the sun!” my four-year-old son exclaims.
I quickly cover his eyes and explain that even though it doesn’t hurt to look at the sun like this, it still hurts your eyes on the inside, where you can’t feel it.
Later, I stand in the front yard in the sinister evening light, trying not to look at the sun as it sets. A white flake drifts past, uncannily like snow. But it is not snow. It is the opposite of snow, snow’s horrifying evil twin. It is a piece of ash, I realise, in a long, awful moment of recognition. More of them spiral downwards, so light that gravity struggles to bring them to Earth. They have been blown here from the fires many miles away.
Another association bothers the edges of memory. I remember standing on Second Avenue in New York’s East Village on 11 September, 2001, after watching the twin towers burn from my corner of First Street and First Avenue. The parade of shell-shocked people – men in their suits, women in their sensible office heels – making their way uptown from Ground Zero, all dusted with ghostly white. Their shambling gaits, their blank survivors’ faces.
As the days passed in New York, we learned more about the composition of this white dust: toxic chemicals and concrete and paper and cremated people. Our apartment was right on the border of the area where you could request a free air purifier from the city administration. We didn’t ever apply for ours.
The fragments of disaster that fell on New York ranged from microscopic particles to dust to snowflake-sized scraps to bits of paper, charred around the edges, the writing on documents still legible. Everything could be made into pieces, this event announced, dissolved into its constitutive elements one way or another. One of my friends emerged from the World Trade Center subway station that morning to find a section of aircraft fuselage partly blocking the exit. There was a piece of an aeroplane there, he said to me. But no one was looking at the piece of aeroplane; they were all looking up, he said, and when he looked up too he saw the metal on the sides of the towers melting, turning into liquid.
***
Where is it from, I wonder, the ash falling on Marrickville? Which of the many fires that dot the map, shifting closer together every time I refresh the screen?
The gravity-defying ash seems to have travelled not simply through space but also through time, challenging not only geographic scale but temporal scale, too. This ash is the remains of ancient rainforests that have never been burned: some version of this remark has become commonplace, repeated by friends. It is tinged with fantasy, I know, this idea of the untouched forest, the place of innocent nature defiled by human action. And yet it is hard to escape the feeling that the ash has come to us from some primordial era, from a forest and a time before human industry, before the Anthropocene itself. We existed before you, the ash seems to say. With these fires we will displace you.
In the anguished performance of public mourning for the forests, for the koalas and marsupials and baby bats, the unimaginable number of a billion animals, I begin to sense the displacement of a vast inarticulate sorrow at what colonial settlement has wrought for these past 200 years and more. Grief for all those trees and forests cleared, that habitat destroyed, those animals hunted to extinction. The people murdered. The genocide.
Climate scientists voice their concern that some forests have been devastated beyond recovery, leaving a destructive carbon deficit. How long can these fires go on, we all wonder? Soon there will be nothing left to burn, friends joke, half-joke. But there is so much left to burn.
***
The morning after the first December ash fall, the courtyard is covered in fine fragments: white, grey and charcoal black. My son left a plastic toy knife on the ground and when I pick it up there is a dirty penumbra around its shape, a pixelated shadow of ash, like the chalk outline around a murdered body.
Traces, cinders. I think of Jacques Derrida, who valued these figures above all others in his thinking about the problem of presence and absence, but Derrida is no help.
A leaf rests in my hand, a pale grey ghost transformed by extreme heat, impossibly fragile. It is like an inverse fossil: organic matter turned to ash, one touch away from dust. Miraculously, it retained this form as it travelled. It seems to gather to itself metaphors, similes, measures of comparison that might help to contain the unthinkable enormity, the giant present and future catastrophe it represents.
On the concrete there is another leaf, which has tightly rolled as it burned. A piece of bark coming apart into fibres, like some delicate woven textile on the verge of coming undone. A shiny blackened crisp of something, dotted with tiny bubbles. It breaks when I lift it, and the disintegration of these things, the perfect leaf, the unidentifiable charred piece of forest, makes the raw tide of grief rise.
I feel a compulsion to gather these fragments, to keep them intact, a blind ritual of mourning. A collection of relics builds on our wooden sideboard.
I want to document these objects, to photograph them, to craft an image from light and shadow that will preserve them. My husband pulls out his big camera with the good lens, able to capture the startling, distinct textures of the pieces. The piece of bright, glassy rounded bark, so shiny it almost looks wet with lacquer. Beside it, the dry matte-grey leaf. The depthless black of the fibrous bark, marred by a smear of white ash.
What will we do with this reliquary of charred leaves and bark, I wonder, when we move in four weeks’ time, preparing to return to the United States? It is difficult to imagine transporting these things safely, these objects the wind has carried to us from such a distance. They encode survival and extinction all at once, death masks of the forest. They look so beautiful on the camera’s bright little screen, and I am ashamed of my impulse to make them into pictures. It seems to betray or belittle the tragedy they represent, the sheer brutal choking violence of it. What happens to that violence when their material form is made aesthetic? The anger, the injustice, the fury? What is the role of such mourning within the sphere of action that must be taken in order to make any impact on the climate catastrophe?
I treat the fragments with tenderness, with caution, understanding that I am acting like a person in shock, performing mindless comforting actions. The habitus of grief. I hope there will be no more of them to collect. I understand that this hope is baseless.
We wait for the southerly, for the cool change, but the wind is hot and carries the smell of burning. Smoke speeds across the face of the orange moon.
I think of Emma Craven’s sad, enigmatic smile as she watches her father destroy himself in the course of his search for answers, his passionate sense of purpose in a world that is already dead for him without her. What makes Emma’s fatalism so morbidly appealing? I suspect it is almost the only form of hope left to me, a depressive soul at the best of times, disillusioned politically, agreeing in a dejected way with Frederic Jameson or whoever said that it is easier for most people to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And, yet I know that belief in the power of imagination is the closest thing I have to faith or hope.
Recently a friend posted a link to an article about a list of novels in a genre affiliated with climate fiction described as “HopePunk”, a term that made me snort with scorn. What could be less punk? But then I listened again to the Sex Pistols’ punk anthem “God Save the Queen” and heard anew its stark brutal sense of possibility amid destruction. Now I think maybe Emma’s black flowers are its perfect floral emblem. Toxic, powerful, darkly incandescent as the rage that animates this grief.
The song is famous for its statement that there is no future, but there’s more to it. The future is over for the fascist regime, but not everyone else. “We’re the flowers in the dustbin,” Johnny Rotten sings, “the poison” that will annihilate the machine. “We’re the future.”
Poisonous garbage flowers of the future. That might be an image of hope I can get behind.
Let the reliquary crumble, I tell myself. Lay down the blackened wreath. “Grief breaks the heart and yet the grief comes next,” wrote the poet Martin Johnston. It is relentless. Perhaps that drive is where the answer will be found to the question of what to do next, what force will shape the step away from the grave.
“Some lemon morning in a wash of rain,” Johnston’s poem continues, “a brand-new horror comes to call again/ and write a footnote to expunge the text”.
Months later, at the start of fire season in California, the early morning reeks of smoke. Fine white flecks of ash dust the railing and planks of the deck, the plastic swimming pool, the falling-apart wooden chairs in the yard. It’s just past dawn, so early I could almost try to convince myself that this is all a dream, a memory of Sydney. But the ash is different: fire-bleached and powder-fine, offering no after-image of whatever it was that burned. Fires surround us, yet more unprecedented fires. A wall of pale grey obstructs our view of San Francisco, across the water; the next day it is impossible to see farther than a few blocks in any direction through the haze and dirty yellowish light. We were here for the fires that shut down the Bay in 2018, and it is like that, but now we are in Covid-land, on day one hundred and forty-something of the official shelter-in-place order, and the libraries and indoor play gyms I visited back then with the bouncing small child are all closed. We unbox the air filter. The feeling of concrete settles in my lungs. I can’t tell any more if it is panic or ash sediment.
I think of the electric tension between Emma’s message of doom and her father’s unstoppable determination, the craggy tree that faces down the black flowers. I want to know: what will take root on this scorched Earth?
• This essay will be part of the anthology Fire, Flood and Plague, edited by Sophie Cunningham and published by Penguin Random House in December
