Make Ecology Sweet Again: On love and ecological existentialism

This month’s columnist asks how love and ecology relate to one another

Feature by Maria Sledmere | 01 Nov 2019
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‘Whenever I have a day with my love,’ writes Hélène Cixous, ‘I rise in the morning with the day inside me.’ What does it mean to get back the day, when everything screams an ending? Time is running out for the ice, the corals, the trees. Other histories teem with upset. They fill up the day with their daze.

Sweet, streaming days. Depression compresses time to immediate future-pasts. I did this, I’ll do that. Why repeat what is doomed to loop? I wake over-sugared, ecstatic in the feed. Denying the day with my love, the love of my day.

The fire is spreading. There is a wild love bright red like a stamp. 

When I claim the day, it is not to say this is mine but to say, we are in this. Inside and several. We are ecological by dint of living in multiplicity. When I chew Styrofoam, I abrade my tongue on material fallout, archival snow. Tomorrow is a distance receding; elsewhere a song.

Greta Thunberg: ‘You say that you love your children above everything else. And yet you are stealing their future.’

We are descended from the days; darkening scarlets of shepherd’s delight. Humankind is destructive and yet I can love. To love is to open up, prolong. A handsome, paintable face; a sunset. The good parts of a teenage apocalypse; as though in all hormones I streamed data, delicious, beginning. 

A tracery of snowdrifts. The trailing cats.

I name them to love them. Pumpkin, Luna, Fuzzy. Adopted life of a proximate being. Ecology says, every nip and bite is play and joy. We are just tasting, testing. 

‘Whenever’ is the conjunction of a day-to-come. Holding the poem like a glowstick.

And yet. 

The salt-sweet sea.

Depressive elegia of daylight is always fading. That is its precious, diarised condition.

Love clicks likeable image.

Luna lies on my belly to heal this. To love above all else, just here.

This is almost embarrassing. Colin Herd: ‘We forgot for a while how to be sweet and funny’. 

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You say that you love and you open the day.