An old mentor of mine used to compare to me to a late friend of hers, George Trow. Since then I’ve had some phantasm of him as company, and an apocryphal version of a famous quote of his has been something I’ve returned to time and time again. As my old mentor would say it, “the ongoingness of things is quite frankly a problem.”

There’s a reading of the statement that’s obvious and first seems like a shallow platitude. Just think “all good things must come to an end” or that deceptively anodyne line of Frost’s that people like to quote. But we have lots of expressions for that kind of experience for a reason, and that kind of language is especially important when it comes to rope. Scenes end. You have figure out how to integrate the experience and move on. That, I think is the hardest part of tying, and it’s the thing we talk the least about. I dwell on it not because I have some particularly melancholic disposition, but because I understand one of the most important parts of a scene experientially happens after the scene itself, how it gets inscribed and reinscribed in memory.

Yet, while all that is worth dwelling on, it’s not what that really strikes me now. I find Trow’s sticky little maxim coming up every time I think of catastrophe. And these days, that’s a common occurrence. And it’s not just because of the circles I find myself in. I have to wonder at what to do with how I’ve dedicated my life to rope while in the midst of a great and terrible political flattening and impending ecological collapse.

When I was last in Vancouver, @barkas turned me on to a saying in French, après nous, le déluge (after us, the flood). It’s a phrase that’s maybe gotten a bit funnier in the context of our understanding of climate change. It’s also got all the things one might look for in a maxim of its type. For those that put stock in such things, it boasts some rarefied classical lineage. But it also has an interesting history. But the best part of a seductive ambiguity at its core that makes it pretty sticky as well. It’s in a part prediction of something grave. It’s also a blustery assertion of a devil-may-care attitude. How much each is involved can vary. There’s a lot of potential psychological texture there.

One of the things it does is assert that the dead not need not worry what comes after. But I ask what of those not washed way, what happens after the flood? Survival, here, isn’t an unambiguous good thing. It’s a denial of relief. Some don’t get to enjoy the succor of abandon, of the fantasy of it not needing to your problem anymore.

I recall a turn in Donne’s anniversaries. On the occasion of the death of the person the poem mourns, the speaker notes that it’s not just her that’s dead; it’s the world. Isn’t that the feeling of mourning? Or perhaps what mourning should feel like. But here’s the painful rupture: that’s not how all that works, not for those who survive. The world continues. It’s not the dead who mourn. It’s the living.

The ongoingness of it is, quite frankly, a problem. We can rend at cloth and beat our breasts and sit in sack and ash and all the same we live, even if in ruin, even after disaster. There is no total consummation of sadness we get to experience, no utter shattering while alive. Intensities ebb. Eventually we breathe amongst the aftermath. Utter catastrophe is often just a fantasy that’s a vision of relief. It’s also often an abdication. I wonder how much climate catastrophism is due to the fact that, to use a quotation that’s multiply attributed, “it is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.” The former often feels like it involves a lot less work and obligation.

But my reading of fantasies of catastrophe is a little bit less grim. I think there’s value in trying to think through the time we have left, of the odd suture of past and future we can’t help but think through when we think of impending catastrophe. That which has been present, in some ways already decided, even if we can’t see it. It encourages an accounting, not only of of who we are and what we’ve been, but also on the limits of our knowledge, of how we are always constructing a chronological time we can’t fully understand. I’ve a draft of something kicking around trying to use a bit of Agamben, talking about rope time as a mode of operational time. Maybe I’ll finish it one day. But I should probably understand Agamben a bit better before I put it out there.

But for now I’m doing something a bit more simple. I’m reflecting on how hard it is to hold open a moment. How hard it is it move past or through, or to have moved past or through. In the midst of a break-up or a realignment of some kind, I’m feeling like my experience of time is pretty out-of-joint. It’s exciting and terrifying and sad. Especially because I’m used to pretty hard and permanent breaks with people, and that’s not what I necessarily what I think is best here. But that involves thinking through something that’s a lot harder, and finding a way to hold open the space that’s been prized open by the shift, of not flattening and collapsing everything either in an anxious (and wrong) feeling of knowledge of what is to come, or a fear at knowing that one can’t ever know.

The ongoingness of things is quite a frankly a problem. But that’s at least partially because it beats the alternative.