On The End
It feels good to imagine the end. It’s certainly easier. When you imagine the end, when you calculate how things will die, it can feel like you are soothsaying. But of course, it is no great power to declare things will end. That is the nature of life on earth. It is much, much harder to imagine how things begin again. How things live on. How things exist beyond and outside of and despite of the natural decay of the material.
About five or ten years ago, it felt like fantasies of the end were all over our popular culture. It felt like people were playing with ideas of the end of the world—books and movies and songs all imagining it. Whether it came through a zombie plague or through climate change or through good old fashioned divine intervention, it felt like people were actually thrillingly calling for it, daring it, thinking it. would be for a laugh. In all those dystopian fantasies of the end, no one seemed very interested in what would come after.
Forgive this digression if you were born post 1990 and reading this (also, hello Youth!) but I remember when the trailer for Independence Day came out and how shocking it was. They blew up the White House! They pointed a beam from on high and blew up the White House! It was so deeply unsettling. And secretly thrilling? When, in mainstream popular culture, had we been allowed to fantasize about the destruction of the symbol of American hegemony? And there it was, for laughs. Perhaps there is a whole nother essay to be written on the liberation politics and critique of American Empire and colonization in Independence Day , but for now, I will focus on that image of the end and the fact that that movie imagined an after. Michael Bay has more imagination than many of us out here, is all I’m saying.
Or. To put it another way. My cousin often tells a story of watching a Run DMC video at our grandparents’ house. It was the first time my grandfather had ever seen a music video and he stood in front of the screen, watching those boys as they kicked in a fake plywood door to begin their song, and he sniffed, as only a Very Tired Black man of a certain age can. “All that singing bout breaking down a door. That’s easy. They should make a song about building a door. About how you build a door. Now that’s a song.”
Toni Cade Bambara said what we give voice to becomes reality. What we utter and allow ourselves to imagine becomes real. We have the blueprint for imagining destruction and devastation and death. What if we paid more attention to those stories and metaphors and images and animals and parts of nature that tell us what happens beyond that?