our apocalypse
BY MARCUS B. YOUNG
This is a piece inspired by Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s M Archive: After the End of the World (Duke). Specifically, this is one in a series that constitutes a group project from a graduate seminar called ‘Total Collapse’, led by Mél Hogan at the University of Calgary. The assignment asked students to read an excerpt from M Archive and try to embody Gumbs’s affect and style, thinking reflexively about a near future from the distant future. In doing so, they created speculative critiques and imaginaries focused on ability, location, gender and race, environmental media, climate catastrophe and non-human life, grief, and death. This piece now serves as an excerpt in its own right, with a group project forthcoming...
***
our apocalypse
it was like the crisis in the 80’s – the inverts, as they were – coupled with it, married to it, indispensable. life was bridled, in despair, they were. the flits found no escape – eschatological, prophetic, unwise. there was no exodus. the wise men found no antidote, no omnipotent to deliver. to the service of himeros they submit, such corpus overwhelming. touch thee not, for they cause death.
no means of survival, no cure. damned to their governments, their religions, their own kin. lepers to humanity, ignored, outcast, pigs. our forebearers foreplayed, flagellated by a plague no one foresaw. to you, i write. to you, i exhort. such crisis was but one, to humanity’s own antiquity you must look. symbols. texts. intellect. to the language of the judicious, pay attention. to the language of the witless, ignore. they will clue you to darkness, to kenney. unlike that crisis, there is cure. though not many paid homage to.
stop them. erect it. that wall. trump unbelievers with their own ignorance. their misogyny towards science, let it not occur. save their lives, and yield not to the distrust they instil against the geniuses of society. spaces there will be to distort. discourses, false. oral. paper. digital. ephemeral or infinite, rhetoric traverses over time, and not all may adhere. unlike that crisis, there is cure.
there is hope.
the apocalypse, it is upon us. his horsemen, ever present. who is he? he who is popular, he who has denounced the lepers of the crises of old. you see, these lepers, they weren’t just the victims – the inverts – they were also the wise, and those who followed them. for what have we become, such orphans of apollo. in communicating we failed, for our exigence was that of lie and deceit, of an unmasked reality, trolls of spaces in which we converged. we misguided, misinterpreted, and misbelieved. our ecological and ethical debates were commandeered by such populist concerns. at its helm: narcissus. you’re probably asking why the hell this treatise is riddled, and why the hell should one listen. to that, i say: we’re bound for hell, goddamnit! there is no time to pause, i cannot mince my words. we’ve been through so much of these epi-, end-, and pan- demics for you to be at ease. stand at attention. be on guard, for the seals are breaking open, and our demise is at the hands of the uninformed, and in such forums, they congregate.
our collapse, it’s caving in. and it’s all because of our impotence. our failure to critique what we think, teach, say, and spread. though i must say, there is beauty in apocalypse. for perhaps if we dissipate, we erase the cause of this purgatory: us.
References
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World (Duke University Press), March 2018 https://www.dukeupress.edu/m-archive
Marcus B. Young (he/him) is a queer media scholar whose research is centred on aesthetics and visual culture. He is also an MA candidate in the Department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary.
