In Kyoto, the calendar indicates it is middle of December and winter has started. Looking around, red leaves gathering on the ground, it still feels like late autumn. Seasons and schedules increasingly fall out of sync.
Dying not yet done
after all this journey’s nights
the end of autumnshini mo senu / tabine no hate yo / aki no kure
Bashō, autumn 1684
The translators note that ‘aki no kure’ ‘can mean either “autumn evening” or “the end of autumn.”’ Twilight hours and twilight times. The burning peak of autumn has passed, the beauty of the colours fades as the leaves fall. The trees become empty, the cold approaches. Autumn ends, winter is near. ‘Not quite here, but yet at hand’.
Returning to another twilight thinker, Robert Musil. Capturing the mood on the eve of war breaking out in ‘Political Confessions of a Young Man’ (1913):
But still it is quiet, and we sit as if in a glass cage and are afraid even to try to break out, because if we did the whole thing could immediately shatter to pieces.
This sense of fragility was also present in his reflections after the conflict had subsided. In ‘Helpless Europe’ (1922):
Only where everything was ready and longing for an earthquake, a firestorm, and whirlwinds of emotion, could the conflagration spread with such sudden and appalling speed.
From the same essay, he highlighted the pre-war conditions, a time in which pseudoreality prevailed:
The way the world careened into the War evinced above all a debilitating lack of intellectual and spiritual organization: our unwillingness to take the signs seriously, to recognize the uncontrolled forces and counterforces…
To speak of causes takes one only so far. In Musil’s rendition, there was an excess of causes for the war, it was over-determined in so many ways. In his notes for the unwritten conclusion to his masterpiece, The Man without Qualities, Musil sketched:
Overall problem: war.
Pseudorealities lead to war. The Parallel Campaign leads to war! War as: How a great event comes about. All lines lead to the war. Everyone welcomes it in his fashion. The religious element in the outbreak of the war. Deed, emotion, and Other Condition join as one. Someone remarks: that was what the Parallel Campaign had always been looking for. It has found its great idea.
Arises (like crime) from all those things that people ordinarily allow to dissipate in small irregularities.
Continuing with his exposition of volume two:
Note the title of the major portion of the first volume: Pseudoreality Prevails. This means that in general today the personal givens of events are definite and delineated, but that what is general about them, or their significance, is indefinite, faded, and equivocal, and repeats itself unintelligibly. The person awakened to awareness of the current situation has the feeling that the same things are happening to him over and over again, without there being a light to guide him out of this disorderly circle.
Meanwhile, in Dubai / Kakania, Sultan al-Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company and COP28 president, has announced the final summit outcome:
We have set the world in the right direction … We have given it a robust action plan to keep 1.5C within reach. It is a plan that is led by the science.
Consider the science presented in the latest article by James Hansen et al, ‘Global warming in the pipeline’:
…under the present geopolitical approach to GHG emissions, global warming will exceed 1.5°C in the 2020s and 2°C before 2050.
Further consider the updated findings from Richardson et al, ‘Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries’:
This planetary boundaries framework update finds that six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity. Ocean acidification is close to being breached, while aerosol loading regionally exceeds the boundary. Stratospheric ozone levels have slightly recovered. The transgression level has increased for all boundaries earlier identified as overstepped.
Returning to the article from Hansen et al:
Political leaders profess ambitions for dubious net-zero emissions while fossil fuel extraction expands. IPCC scenarios that phase down human-made climate change amount to ‘a miracle will occur’.
The language is more direct in his most recent communication:
Thus, the world has already entered a period of consequences, and, because of climate’s delayed response, we are near a point of no return, a point at which extreme consequences spiral out of humanity’s control. There remains but a narrow window of time to define and take actions to avoid that result.
We need not look for causes, we are not lacking in causes, we have a surfeit of causes.
Once again, pseudoreality prevails.