Shakespeare appearing in the play he has written in order to say goodbye to his dead son
“You are not saying what you think you are saying” was what Ray Nayler said to the Birmingham Science Fiction Group on Friday night, as part of a wider conversation about the mutual misunderstandings that result from cultural differences. He had landed up with the Peace Corps in Turkmenistan 20 years ago, “The worst place to live in the world”. It ripped away his sense of stability and the fixed nature of life he had developed growing up in San Francisco and made him realise that everything is arbitrary. His new book Palaces of the Crow is out next week, about a group of escapees on the run in a forest trapped between the German and Soviet armies in World War 2, with only a murder of intelligent crows as allies. I will be buying it.
And so to a different forest.
Last night I could not speak for half an hour. My face ached from the effort of holding myself together and tears were running down my face. No I wasn’t in the back of an ambulance on my way to Good Hope Hospital. I had just watched Hamnet for the first time.
I am peculiarly sensitive to father-son depicitions in art. I can’t remember when a film affected me as deeply as Hamnet did, but I do remember the last book that had me in floods of tears (The Road by Cormac McCarthy when (spoiler alert) the father of the boy dies. Suggest you don’t read it on a train like I did). Why should I cry for you by Sting also tends to have me in bits.
However Hamnet was still like nothing I have ever experienced before in a movie. It snuck up on me, this story of the fight to make a family and then keep it alive in a way that certainly didn’t feel over 400 years old before hitting me with the final scene which was, ultimately stagey for goodness’ sake. I felt connected – to the forest, to the plague-beset 16th century characters, to everyone who has ever lost a child, to everyone looking for connection to help them through their day. I have watched so much Shakespeare in my life, but I have never felt the urgency that must have lain behind the plays quite like this before.
This was just great art. Not in a way that impresses you but leaves you cold, but in a way that you realise has expressed the driving forces of life directly at your central nervous system.
And how close the film was to what really happened doesn’t matter. Any more than the plot accuracy of any of Shakespeare’s plays matters. It was emotionally true and believable and mourned the death of a child as every child death should be mourned. It made nearly every other movie I have ever seen seem trite by comparison, including the hugely entertaining but ultimately much less full Oscar rivals this year. This is the movie you stick on the next gold disc sent out on a probe into deep space to explain humanity.
And it immediately started me thinking about how infrequently I experience emotional truth outside my friends and family. Is this the missing component from public life?
Keir Starmer certainly wasn’t passing any auditions this morning. He was not saying what he thought he was saying. He thought he was saying something about training young people, being “at the heart of Europe” and nationalising British Steel. What he was actually saying was that he has no idea why he lost 1,496 English council seats over the weekend but, despite this, was going to hang on until someone removed him forcibly from office. And he is guessing, perhaps rightly, that the Labour Party does not have the determination to do so. It was the precise opposite of emotional truth or, as John Elledge posted:
“You are not saying what you think you are saying” is unfortunately true for nearly all of us nearly all of the time. Until it isn’t. And those moments when it isn’t are moments of enormous power.
And to think I still have Maggie O’Farrell’s novel to read. Or possibly the audiobook read by the great Jessie Buckley, Agnes Hathaway herself. May be hard to resist.
This fig tree is in the cemetery at Mission Santa Barbara. “Fig Tree” by HarshLight is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
I am reading a wonderful book at the moment: The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak. It has allowed me to inhabit the Cyprus of the late 50s and mid 70s and understand a bit more about why my time on the island after my birth in 1962 was so short. It is also the first book I have read where a major character is a fig tree.
And it is the fig tree that makes the most acute observations about humans. My favourite one is this:
Even so, based on personal experience, I can tell you one thing about humans: they will react to the disappearance of a species the way they react to everything else – by putting themselves at the centre of the universe.
Humans care more about the fate of animals they consider cute – pandas, koalas, sea otters and dolphins, too, of which we have many in Cyprus, swimming and frolicking about our shores. There is a romantic idea as to how dolphins perish, washed to the beach with their beak-like snouts and innocent smiles, as if they have come to bid humankind one last farewell. In truth, only a small number do that. When dolphins die, they sink to the bottom of the sea, as heavy as childhood fears; that’s how they depart, away from prying eyes, down into the blue.
Bats are not deemed to be cute. In 1974, when they died in their thousands, I didn’t see many people shedding a tear for them. Humans are strange that way, full of contradictions. It’s as if they need to hate and exclude as much as they need to love and embrace. Their hearts close tightly, then open at full stretch, only to clench again, like an undecided fist.
Humans find mice and rats nasty, but hamsters and gerbils sweet. Doves signify world peace, whereas pigeons are nothing more than carriers of urban filth. They proclaim piglets charming, wild boars barely tolerable. Nutcrackers they admire, even as they avoid their noisy cousins, the crows. Dogs evoke in them a sense of fuzzy warmth, while wolves conjure up tales of horror. Butterflies they look on with favour, moths not at all. They have a soft spot for ladybirds, and yet if they were to see a soldier beetle, they would crush it on sight. Honeybees are favoured in stark contrast to wasps. Although horseshoe crabs are considered delightful, it’s a different story when it comes to their distant relatives, spiders…I have tried to find a logic in all this, but I have come to the conclusion that there is none.
This compulsion of humans to put themselves at the centre of the universe and dominate everything else is being written about by many writers at the moment, all of them giving it different names. Nate Hagens sees our species as part of an economic Superorganism:
This Superorganism is mindless, unplanning, and energy-hungry. It isn’t evil, it doesn’t feel, and it doesn’t care about equity, ecology, or human wellbeing. It solely optimizes for throughput, scale, and for more – even when more becomes the problem. There is no mastermind behind the wheel, only billions of incentives aligned in the same direction toward extraction and consumption.
When the limits to their extraction of resources are exceeded, the parasitic systems must either suffer a crash or must invade and take the energy of a more distant ecology or society.
Luke Kemp refers to the consequent empires we have built as Goliaths, with diminishing returns on extraction ending fairly predictably:
The result is more extractive institutions creating growing instability, internal conflict, a drain of resources away from government, state capture by private elites, and worse decision-making. Society – especially the state – becomes more fragile. Private elites tend to take a larger share of extractive benefits. The state, and many of the power structures it helps prop up, then usually falls apart once a shock hits: for Rome it was climate change, disease, and rebelling Germanic mercenaries; for China it was often floods, droughts, disease and horseback raiders; for the west African kingdoms it was invaders and a loss of trade; for the Maya it was drought and a loss of trade; and for the Bronze Age it was drought, a disruption of trade and an earthquake storm.
And so it should come as no surprise that the latest Planetary Solvency report from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and Anglia Ruskin University – Planetary Solvency: Tipping into the wild unknown – catalogues a terrible toll on the Earth system which supports us, with biodiversity loss, climate shocks and geopolitical conflict disrupting the food system, risking catastrophic impacts for the financial system and for society as a whole.
A few examples from the report:
The world lost 26.8 million hectares of natural forest in 2024 alone. This is larger than the entire UK, which spans 24.9 million hectares. This activity generated 10 gigatons of carbon emissions;
In the UK alone, bees and other pollinating insects have on average lost a quarter of their habitat since 1980. Around 75% of the different crops used in global food production relies on pollinators to some extent, although by weight the dependence is around 35%. Loss of pollinators would reduce yields for most crops but would wipe out some altogether, eg brazil nuts, kiwi, melon and cocoa.
Around the UK, warming seas have already begun shifting fish populations northward, with cod, haddock, and salmon being replaced by species like anchovy, bluefin tuna and squid (the real story behind the catfish sold in fish and chip shops headlines)…If global warming, ocean acidification, overfishing and pollution continue on their current trajectories, the economic and social consequences are likely to be severe. In the event of more extreme tipping points, such as the collapse of the Gulf Stream, the consequences could be even more catastrophic.
Around 70% of emerging infectious diseases originate in animals, with land-use change, deforestation and wildlife trade increasing the risk of future pandemics.
The UK does not have enough land to feed its population and rear livestock: a wholesale change in consumer diets would be required. It would also require greater investment in the agri-food sector so that it is capable of innovating in sustainable food production.
Some technologies exist that could help, but need significant research, development and investment to have a chance of working at scale. Protecting and restoring ecosystems is easier, cheaper and more reliable. The time required to develop and scale technologies is unknown without further research. Both existing (plant pre-breeding, regenerative agriculture) and emerging technologies (AI, lab grown protein, insect protein) offer potential solutions.
The other writers mentioned above all look at the future slightly differently:
Hagens is pessimistic about our chances of stopping the Superorganism, but believes we can start planning now for what comes next. Miller McDonald hopes for the “opening up of possibility for alternative forms of organisation of human life”. Luke Kemp says that collapse has historically benefited the 99% at the expense of the elite 1%, although he does worry that our modern economy makes us more dependent upon global infrastructure and we have much scarier weapons than in the past.
But shocks in the short and medium term – of the climate, of the economy and of our politics – now have a feeling of inevitability about them. I wonder how the fig tree will feel about them.
