**3.2 What was always true is no longer so**

Seasonal rhythms have endowed human life with structure and meaning over millennia. These patterns denote the calendar of blooms and fruits, sowing and reaping, cold and heat, that gave shape and purpose to agrarian and nomadic life. Although urbanized societies are no longer nomadic or agrarian, modern subjects are heirs to the symbolism that endures from the myths and legends of earlier times as modern citizens, and our lifestyles and economies, also continue to be subject to the vicissitudes of nature for amenity and material needs. Quoting Herman Daly, Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury said, 'the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.'

Modern societies to one side, seasonal regularity was the muse that elicited the visions of death and re-birth, sin and redemption, that animated, as they also shaped and reflected, the human spirit. Over time, legends, even part cosmologies, were passed between cultures. The Adonis myth from Phoenicia was Hellenized as ancient Greece become the dominant power in the Mediterranean; symbolic 'pagan' events,

*Looking for Eros in the Long Hard Rain of Climate Collapse DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106561*

such as the ceremonies celebrated around the spring (vernal) equinox, found their way into early Christian worship. Amongst a far larger suite, Ishtar and Tammuz, Astarte and Adonis, Aphrodite and Jesus' mother Mary, interbred. James Frazer, perhaps the best known of early twentieth century scholars of comparative religion, wrote in *The Golden Bough*: 'in more than one chapel the Cypriote peasants adore the mother of Christ under the title Panaghia Aphroditessa' (as quoted in [9] p. 39).

None greater, this power has been sung to across time, for example, in Kathleen Raine's *The Goddess* [10]:

*Some worship her as queen of angels, Venus of the sea House of gold, palace of ivory Gate of heaven and rose of mystery Inviolate and ever-virgin earth, Daughter of time and mother of Eternity.*

The seasonal calendar associated with fecundity is being disrupted and is on the way to being lost. Climate collapse has demolished 'normality' – the rhythms that have birthed and, until recently, continued to document the cycle of life. More, climate collapse signals that Mother Nature can no longer be relied on. Of course, in the past this deity may have had her occasional whims, her moments of irritation and disregard, but she could be taken for granted to be generally nurturing and benevolent. That her beauty has been spoilt, that her fecundity can no longer be assumed, is too shocking to be countenanced.

## **3.3 In summary**

Contemplation of climate change is aversive. Any genuine engagement with the specter of climate change immediately generates fear, even panic. Isn't it better to only worry about the things I can control? The reflex is to hold the eyes shut rather than be swept into a whirlpool of dangerous feeling.

Even at this point (2022) it is well-known that bud-burst is far earlier in many places, that extreme weather events are much more frequent, that storm surges are more profound. In the next decades deniers, those who have suspended belief in science, will be exposed as the child who has pushed an inflatable ball below the surface of a pond. No matter how much energy goes into this project, eventually the child becomes tired, loses interest, is distracted. Like what is repressed, what is physically suppressed returns. When it does, the coming back is unpredictable. The more control is demanded the more what is feared is charged.

In brief, that climate collapse is an example of a hyper-object means that recognition, really taking in, the concept 'does one's head in conceptually.' What does one's head in holistically is that climate collapse will disturb every aspect of life – now and forever. Taking in this fact is not like swallowing a single pill, however big and bitter this pill might be. Rather, recognition will be an ongoing confrontation that could be likened to swallowing an ornery and unruly hairball – a restless nasty that flexes perennially as it remains stuck in the throat. Deliberately laboring the point, this means there will be a semi-continuous gag reflex, as there will be a feeling of strangulation and suffocation.

It is no wonder climate collapse provokes disbelief. Threatening to impel a jagged new totality, this prospect endangers consciousness with an input that simultaneously sucks the oxygen from the lungs, strangles the throat and poisons the arteries. More than simply a single ominous fur-ball, it is a mutating colossus, a specter that roils digestion. How can one take in the fact that the very conditions of life are metastasizing? It is almost unfathomable that much of what we take as normality is imploding.

The recognition problem is not singly about the quantum and distribution of information. At the psychic level, a complex precondition must be realized: a tumult of primary emotions – grief; horror; anger; despair; disbelief – have to be accessed, and to a significant degree then processed, to allow proper recognition to be countenanced. This is a considerable affective task.
