Sisyphus’s pesky rival Asifyphus

Having been abandoned to a boarding school with energetic cult tendencies by parents with barely-there parental tendencies, I took in both environments uncritically – at first. Neither the ravings of our headmaster, who held up a timeline of our six-thousand-year-old planet while the student body ate dinner and the science teachers sat in docile submission, nor the shiny, consumerist delights of the world I came from were explained to me. I didn’t know it but I was waiting for humans of character and wisdom to tell me what was good. Until then I would reserve judgement. And because I hadn’t known anything else – my parents didn’t fraternize with the outside world, and at my school it was expressly disallowed – I couldn’t quite detect my stupendously bad luck at having been shunted from one topsy-turvy world to another.

It was 2007 when the school went down in an inglorious flurry of revisionism, online trolling, front-page coverage and church investigations, but it could have been ten years earlier or ten years later. Among the face-scrunchingly bad externalities of running a rural Canadian school under pain of a southern US evangelical whip, the tiny marriage pool that strangled the staff seemed particularly dark to me. Sometimes they let that creationist lunatic tell them who God wanted them to marry. (He had a direct line in, which is convenient.) Cults, don’t you know, necessarily seal their environments hermetically; the more twisted tenets of their orthodoxies can’t be sustained if mixed with the grosser air or, you know, sitcoms. The outside world may be mad too, of course, but it never, ever shores up historically to think your community has got it right to the exclusion of everyone else.

Merely one unnecessary life skill these unhappy crucibles armed me with was a facility to move through highly religious and ardently secular circles without any fuss. I don’t mind what people believe until it dovetails with wanton human suffering or, these days, climate inaction, and then I get petty. Right! I think to myself bitterly, Watch and despair as your god comes neither to save you, your children, nor the hordes of climate refugees that will suffer in ways you’ve not had to consider.

You’ll forgive me, and I can’t sustain that outrage for longer than it took me to type it out just then. Allow me to write, instead, in gentle, non-incendiary roman type: I love you, whoever you are, but God really isn’t coming to save you from this, and if you also care about what happens in this world, then you need to consider what the ongoing environmental depredations mean for how this century is unfolding, for you, your inner circle, and all the people you’ll never meet but may still care about.

Back on solid ground, the mid-July train I took to Bath was diverted to Bristol. As if! Except I’ve lived here too long to know that a drop-off at the wrong town twenty kilometres away is a thing that happens. Still, I was filled with the pique of a city dweller and the worry of a try-hard who hates being late. Arriving in the Somerset village where the wedding was, with less than an hour to find my hotel, shower, adjust for the vagaries of my rather tight morning suit (when did that happen?), and get my bearings, the innkeeper exclaimed that a car of guests was leaving just now for the same event, which started in about eleven minutes, and maybe they had an empty seat.

Ugh. Bothering strangers for a favour is an unnecessary life skill I hadn’t picked up, but needs must, and I ended up in a car with a cadre of reliable congregationists from the groom’s progressive, sort-of-crumbling high street church in Camden that is so accustomed to struggling neighbourhood characters walking in off the pavement that they tell the stories with a combination of blasé city knowingness and Christian love.

Pious my ride-saviours were not, however. I can’t speak to their hearts, but the comments section of their brains was active, profane, witty, on-trend, world-weary, London-centric, and catty, though half the ad hominem stuff was followed up by an apology or a mollifying comment from another crew member. Their read on the wedding party, the church service, the drive from London, and the absurdity of just about everything came so fast and furious that I had to stifle my laughter lest I looked too eager to be part of the crowd. I’d known them for eight minutes and thought, Okay, this wedding may be marginally more fun than I anticipated.

No one had waited for the ice to be broken. I sat shyly in the rear outside seat listening to the torrent of church-related but highly worldly chat. Hmmmm … torrent? Maybe it was a litany since we’re getting all church-y.

The Camden church had transplanted its ecclesiastical machine all the way west to the village. The crew’s situational expertise was thus intact, and they chattered cheerfully and bawdily on church matters, church protocol, church hymns and the little dramas and misadventures that play out during wedding services without uninitiated friends and family clocking them.

Taking my place a few pews behind the crew, I recognized the recurring themes: the halting hums and half-formed lyrics during a particularly difficult hymn; budding processions, unsure which aisle to choose, causing minor traffic jams; the nearly imperceptible smirks on the clergy and attendants as they make eye contact; and the adjustments made by those in the know as they raise their call-and-response voices and enunciate on cue to help the rest of us.

With a nineteen-page wedding programme and plenty of heathens, there was a lot of room for error. (It was a looong service, but hey, groom’s privilege, and I would’ve sat there for another hour if he’d asked us to.)

Filing back into the car after the service, the meal and the speeches, I thanked the crew again for ferrying me, a stranger, around, when a fellow stag attendee from the week before approached the car park with his wife and baby. Pouncing, if only verbally, the crew exclaimed that he fit the bill for a common label, which here I will name as a ‘PILM’. Phwoar, there’s a parent I’d like to meet and so on. I was only slightly scandalized, if you follow me, and pleasantly amused; this is how the church crew rolls.

Call it the blush of new, temporary acquaintance, but I was a little excited to join my wedding friends the next morning as we sat down for a cozy breakfast at the charming-unless-you-scratch-the-surface eighteenth-century inn. Their own friendships and rhythms having been long cemented, no responsibility fell to me to say much of anything. They sat down and were off to the races.

The church. The wedding hall (a barn). The best man’s wobbly speech. The mood of the vicar and the likely disarray of Camden home base on a Sunday with most of the A-team four counties away. As a classical introvert who doesn’t struggle with confidence, I listened contentedly, nodding at the expectations for British manners in all things and laughing at the jocular asides. (The crew was big on jocular asides, 40 per cent of which I could see coming a mile a way, but no matter.)

And then, making this conversation about me in a way, I saw my way in, though I wasn’t looking for one. After an adulthood characterized by an aggressively live-and-let-live ideology, I’m now practising – and this is entirely real-world and current – how to speak to people about the climate crisis. I necessarily force myself every time, though it’s devolved into jokes with the people who know me well: ‘Problems at home? It’s climate change’ and that sort of thing. To influence my inner and outer circles in a productive way is my aim, and at the moment I’m flailing, trying things on for size and seeing how they go.

Inserting myself into the rhythm of the crew, here’s how it went (in paraphrase):

‘Right,’ I offered, ‘I joined Extinction Rebellion and it’s interesting how that sort of reluctance maps onto the climate emergency. Because it’s not an issue you can hand over to the next generation if you have children. I mean … you can, but you’d really have to shut off your instincts.’

‘Oh, yeah, those Extinction Rebellion people.’ (I hadn’t mentioned the people.)

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s like, I get it, but …’

‘My problem with them is … you know, when you see them on television or whatever …’

‘Like, I get it, but …’

‘It’s a sea of middle-class kids from Highbury, and that’s fine, but …’

‘… they all look the same …’

‘… you can protest because your life allows you to, but where’s everyone else? It’s not like everyone can protest.’

‘I’m just not comfortable with the look of them … I mean, I don’t mean that, but you know what I mean.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Anyway …’

As. If. I stewed. AS IF! The world is on fire, and you’re spouting the prevailing narrative by denigrating the make-up of the protesters? Aaaargh. I folded my arms on the table and sunk my head in them.

The task before us, my fellow Earth-sharers, is not Sisyphean; the work of groups who put people before profit such as Extinction Rebellion is contributing to a shift. Now 85 per cent of the UK populace registers global warming as a concern. It’s late, but it’s something.

Having opted for action over incrementalism, one considered journalist described the experience of defending herself to the court for participating in Extinction Rebellion’s April disruption in Central London. I’m built differently and so remain honestly confused when people point to humans like her as a problem. (As if.) But there in the LinkedIn climate emergency thread was an illustration of how there will always be people willing to roll pebbles down into the path of those hefting the boulder, even when getting that boulder to the top of the hill is a matter of human survival: ‘The protracted action caused misery for many thousands of law-abiding citizens trying to make their way to work,’ complained one commenter. ‘Not to mention the millions wasted on police costs.’ Here I invoke the mythical myth of Asifyphus: the survival of the Greeks depends on Sisyphus reaching the summit this time, and yet Asifyphus impedes his ascent by lobbing pebbles onto the path even though uphill progress redounds to Asifyphus’s very existence.

That chap wasn’t wrong about the sharp inconvenience to commuters or the use of police resources, but to my eyes it’s an example of the confused, the misled and the bitter – these myriad Asifypheans – gainsaying the necessary work, the change that has to take place or else. I felt better reading further down the thread: ‘We are heading for extinction and people are still angry that they couldn’t get to work! Madness.’

Back at the breakfast table, the expressiveness of my new church buddies was bleeding into my laconic manner a little, and my head was still down on the table in showy disbelief. I wanted to stay there with my eyes closed for longer than decorum allowed – a rest, please, from that familiar burden I feel when reasonable, decent people jump on board the crazy train for just one stop. I didn’t want to judge them, or abandon them, or even really change them, but the Earth is on fire, and they were complaining that the firefighters are rather white-bread.

I sat back up, my frustration going largely unnoticed, and I moved on. The crew had proven themselves to be alternately caring, forgiving, woke, profane, dutiful in church, polite, a little bitchy, and very funny. That day would not be the day I changed any minds, but I can write about it now, and connect with you. I was pretty sure I would never see the crew again, despite polite goodbyes and a LinkedIn invitation.

I can’t argue with their bid for inclusivity, and what do I know about effective protests? But when it comes to talking about the climate emergency, I’m practising, and I just got shut down by the cool kids. Or the church kids. Something like that.

While they threw Asifyphean stones at glass houses, or down the hill, or up the hill or whatever mixed metaphor describes my situational despair as the identities of my XR compatriots were dismissed, I saved a thought for my uncle. He’s one of many lead authors on the IPCC reports, and while I don’t know that he suffers the distinct burden of being a climate scientist, he’s been studying the science and sociology of the environment since the 1970s. And here I only called him up to ask questions in 2019. Because now that I’m flipping out everyone else should be too, right?!

It’s embarrassing. You can imagine my uncle answering my johnny-come-lately climate questions over the phone from his office at the University of Toronto, metres away from where I used to be in residence, and then folding his arms on the desk and sinking his head in them. ‘Oh, are you worried now, Robin? Thanks for coming out.’

He didn’t, however, think or say any of that. After I wrung my hands over the matter for a while, he offered some colour: ‘I also recognize a kind of existential angst common to the various sustainability-oriented communities I associate with. I think this angst, which often seems to shade into despair, is increasingly common in our culture at large these days. I suppose it is a sign of a much more general awakening to the plight we find ourselves in.’

Fie, Asifyphus, fie! Your pebbles are light and stupid, but I am new to this, and very late, and you’re messing up my climate-emergency practice rounds. I can’t even be that angry with you, possessed as I am of the foresight and doom of the Titans, which is that all of us will finally push the boulder up the hill this time. Or we won’t, and Sisyphus will cry out for one last try that never comes.