Facing the Climate Crisis and Human Mortality (w/ Eiren Caffall) | The Chris Hedges Report

Author Eiren Caffall joins Chris Hedges to discuss her novel and memoir, and the consequences of a society unable to accept its own mortality.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

In a world gripped by daily catastrophes, there is one that affects all but lacks the attention it deserves. The climate crisis — pervaded by ecological collapse, war, endless resource accumulation fueled by capitalism — is the issue of our time. The warning signs are there but as author Eiren Caffall tells host Chris Hedges, people are not able to handle the facts regarding the “fragility of our ecosystem, and [they] just don't really have a great way of managing the emotional impact of that.”

Caffall joins Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to discuss her novel, All the Water in the World, and her memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary. She explains that climate talk is often a tough pill to swallow because it deals with ideas of impermanence: “I think we are struggling to talk about our climate grief, our experience with the eco-collapse as a collective, as a planet who are all confronted with the evidence of our mortality.”

As someone who has dealt with loss and trauma her whole life as a result of inheriting polycystic kidney disease, a genetic illness that has plagued her family for over 150 years, Caffall employs a unique perspective when it comes to preserving her family’s stories and art.

“That sense of it is vital to protect whatever stories we can in the face of great loss is kind of baked into my background, my childhood, my understanding of my role as an adult to tell the stories of the dead, to hold on to the culture of those folks, to make sure that there's a continuance,” she tells Hedges.

Caffall understands the need for stories like hers to create the empathy that is lacking in a world that continually sees violence as an answer to problems. “I just think actually it's that vulnerability and that presence that's the real tool that we need to be able to move carefully through the world that we're being confronted with at this moment and in a possible bleaker future.”

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Host

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

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Transcript

Chris Hedges

We must turn to our novelists and artists, well as our climate scientists, to imagine the world ahead of us, one where the ecosystem disintegrates and with it our social, cultural, political and economic structures. The writer Eiren Caffall in her novel All the Water in the World, as well as her memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary, grapples with this looming catastrophe, one the global ruling elites, hostage to the fossil fuel industry and ceaseless capitalist expansion, have refused to confront.

“Mother told me it was slow at first, the way the world changed,” her 13-year-old protagonist says in the novel. “You could forget about it. People talked like you could fix it. A storm would pass, and they’d put things back together. Or one day there was no gas, and you learned to live without your car. “You learned to live without bananas, without airplanes,” that’s how Mother said it. She said it like losing taught you lessons you needed, until you were happy to have a day with fresh water in your apartment and a bath.”

“Things fell in slow motion,” she goes on in All the Water in the World. “Rolling blackouts, waves of refugees heading north and west, army everywhere, gas rationed, food scarce, the president in a huge ship offshore. In the Old City they built floodgates that kept the sea outside, blocked the ocean getting up the river, made the city an island we lived inside, a bowl that flooded up from the sewers when the storms came. In the Old City, weather was a gamble. It was hot nearly all year. Dry when you needed water. Flooding so it couldn’t be managed. Cold snaps would come and plunge you into ice, then melt and flood again. All the time everyone hoping it might turn around, until they knew it wouldn’t, until the world warmed up so fast you couldn’t catch your breath. Every year the storms were bigger – moving the ocean up into the streets.”

Joining me to discuss her novel, All the Water in the World and her memoir, The Mourners Bestiary, is Eiren Caffall whose writing on loss and nature, oceans and extinction, has appeared in Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, The Rumpus and other publications.

So I just have to say you're a beautiful writer before I begin.

Eiren Caffall

Thank you.

Chris Hedges

So all of us who strive for beauty don't like other beautiful writers. Damn. [Laughing]

Eiren Caffall

I'm sorry. [Laughing]

Chris Hedges

Okay, well, since you've apologized, I'm going to begin, I mean, both these books are great. I'm going to begin just a little bit with your memoir before we go into the novel, because you do something, I think, quite brilliant in your memoir.

It's a memoir, I'll let you explain it, but your family has a genetic disease that has taken out, I mean, a lot of your relatives, very young, including your father, of course. And the two things that I thought were brilliant is you tie that fragility and that looming sense of mortality to how we cope with a climate crisis.

And you quote from this study, and I should have written it down, where people who have your condition are asked about how they cope, how they... And again, that reminded me so much of our, let's call it our inability to deal with what is now right in front of us. So I'll let you go from there.

Eiren Caffall

Yeah, I mean, my family has a genetic disease called polycystic kidney disease. There's about 12 million people in the world that have it, so it's relatively rare. But in my family, our history with it goes back at least 150 years. So we've had successive generations that have contracted it, and the way that it works is that your kidneys slowly fill with these fluid-filled cysts until you go into kidney failure. So until my father's generation, almost everyone died before they reached 50.

And we've also been able to track the history of the disease through all of the incredible innovations in the care of kidney patients over that same 150 years. And I tried really hard to write this book without talking much about the disease. My initial forays into it really, I just wanted to talk about the ecosystems that I was interested in as a science writer.

I wanted to talk a little bit about the emotional life that we have in relation to collapse. And mostly I wanted to talk about fish. But as I tried writing a book that was just about those subjects, I realized that my perspective on those subjects was inextricable from my family history and from what I had learned about mortality, my own and those of the people around me, because of the disease.

So going against generations of hiding our illness, because we have an illness where you can pass pretty easily as not disabled, not chronically ill, I started exploring it and one of the first things that I found when I was doing research was the study that you're referencing which was from the University of Vermont in the 70s, when I was a kid and my parents were just grappling with my father's diagnosis for the first time.

And what was eerie about it was just looking at how these folks being interviewed, you know, so many decades before I was writing were talking about their disease in exactly the same way that my family talked about it but also we're talking about it in the same way that I think we are struggling to talk about our climate grief, our experience with the eco-collapse as a collective, as a planet who are all confronted with the evidence of our mortality, of the fragility of our ecosystem, and just don't really have a great way of managing the emotional impact of that.

Chris Hedges

Well, there are all sorts of psychological subterfuges that people use both to, in essence, deny the reality, deny the disease, and deny the breakdown of the ecosystem, which we watch. I mean, it doesn't matter whether it's in California or the migrants fleeing ecologically ravaged areas in Africa. And talk about that and talk about the similarity. I mean, exactly what is it that people do?

Eiren Caffall

Yeah. Well, I feel like there's a huge amount of literature about the question of denial and climate denial, where people will be confronted with the evidence of collapse and not be able to sort of integrate it into their day to day experience.

I was actually interested in this phrase that I don't think gets used very often and it's in the memoir, which is anosognosia, which is a type of a type of denial that's actually sort of medical in its nature. Denial, I think, implies that we have this ability to choose a different path, which is we have an ability to recognize what's going on and make different decisions. And so if we just drop our denial, we can actually see what's going on with clear eye.

And if we do that, then we're going to make changes. But I actually think what's happening is pathologically different than that. And that this idea of denial by itself is kind of rooted in this way that environmental movements have talked about what we need to do in the crisis, which is to sort of wake up to our own complicity and our own inability to see.

And I actually think anosognosia became really interesting to me because what that is is a diagnosable condition where the patient actually cannot recognize that they are ill at all and in any way. It happens often with stroke patients, people who are going through memory issues where diagnostically they are definitely ill, but they will not actually take their medicine, they won't respond to care, and I think that that's actually a lot more like what we're dealing with right now, which is being so impacted, so emotionally crippled by the enormity of what's happening, by just the sheer scale of it, that what we do is fall even farther away from reality, the denial into this place where we won't take the medicine not because we choose not to take the medicine, but because we actually just don't think it's necessary because we've been pushed so far into separation from reality that we can't actually act.

Chris Hedges

And yet your father, your aunt, who lives much of her life on dialysis, they do act. I mean, your father has three kidneys at one point, is that right? I mean, because of transplants.

Eiren Caffall

Yeah, I found a lot of hope in the way in which my family really did in the end try to confront what was happening to them and face it and to greater or lesser degrees of success. You know, there were four siblings in my father's generation. Three of them had the disease. One of them contracted HIV.

All of them were dealing with these incredibly long-term health crises. Depending on what their sort of emotional relationship to the story of their illness was, you saw these wildly different outcomes of my father having two kidney transplants. He did have three kidneys all the way until the end of his life. He was on dialysis for a time. He lived longer than anyone else.

And I think a lot of that was, he did have moments of denial or even sort of like more anasognosia-ish responses, but he also was pragmatic about confronting the fact that he was ill and then turning towards the other things that brought him a lot of joy.

He was a real risk taker and he kind of had this ability to flip back and forth between, I have to go to dialysis now and also, this is this new thing that I'm going to pursue or this book that I'm going to read or this way of being in the world or I'm going to go out and go hunting or fishing that he managed to do.

And I think that was one of the tricks that I've really tried to use in my own life, which is being able to recognize the moment of overwhelm when you decide some part of you is disconnected from reality and you find a way back to kind of a smaller pleasure or a smaller joy that reconnects you with why it's important to stay alive, to processing the emotions of your own mortality or of eco-collapse.

Chris Hedges

Just before we go into the, I want to ask one more question about the memoir. Before you are diagnosed, if I remember, as a young woman, you lead a kind of frenetic existence. Is that the best way to put it?

Eiren Caffall

I think that's accurate. And kind. [Laughing]

Chris Hedges

Frenetic, but I got a sense that it was in a way, it was kind of seizing the moment in anticipation of what you suspected was coming.

Eiren Caffall

Yeah, and I think that was absolutely true that there was a… well, but right before diagnosis, I think I would have said that I was frenetic because I was told as a potential inheritor of the disease by my family a lot that it couldn't possibly happen to me.

There was a lot of magical thinking around. You won't have it, you're sort of the golden child who's gonna get away from all of this and be able to live to tell the story.

And so I had a lot of frenetic energy around making up for all of these lives that I'd seen be deeply interrupted by their chronic illness and by the collapses of folks' health and the early deaths. And then right after diagnosis, I think that the frenetic and maybe chaotic existence that I lived really got ramped up because I really wanted to hold on to everything that I could achieve during the period of time where I was well and healthy.

When I was diagnosed, I was told by my nephrologist that I had five years before my kidneys began to collapse and that I would never have children and that I would go through early menopause and all of these sort of catastrophic health effects. And my response was not “oh good, I need to get health insurance.”

My response was, “maybe I should try doing music and moving to a city I've never lived in before and pursuing the things that I think are the ultimate goal of what I want to do while I'm alive. And let's see how that works out.” It did not work out with a lot of safety, but I don't think I would change it.

Chris Hedges

You have a child.

Eiren Caffall

I do.

Chris Hedges

And you have, I read that passage where the doctor said that he could end this disease. And I looked up at Eunice and said, well, this guy, what is he a Nazi?

Eiren Caffall

Yeah, there's a strong eugenics thread in terms of what happens, potentially, not every clinician that works with our disease, but I think, he said, I know what I can do to end PKD in one generation. People like you should never have children.

And, you know, we have a robust history of eugenics in this country. And it's one of the reasons that I think my family was so secretive about our illness was that the impacts of coming out as someone who carried this potential to work, life, economics, potential partnerships, families, were so dire because that's an inborn attitude, I think, in American culture of like, well, that's a weakness and we need to root it out.

Chris Hedges

Well, as if the longevity of a life determines its worth.

Eiren Caffall

Yeah, absolutely. And as if, we can...

Chris Hedges

I went to seminary, Jesus was 33, let's not forget when he was crucified.

Eiren Caffall

Yeah, exactly. And also I think there's this economic story that goes along with kidney disease, which is many, many chronic health conditions are extremely expensive to manage, but kidney patients are often on dialysis for decades.

And we really do have a hangover from the invention of dialysis when there was a real resource guarding around who had access to this kind of life-saving technology. I mean, a portion of the book is about the panels that were put into all of the hospitals that were first getting new dialysis technology to decide who would rate the care of the dialysis that they had to offer.

Chris Hedges

I think you said it was one in 50, is that right? I.e. of the 50 people who are eligible, only one would get it.

Eiren Caffall

Yeah, exactly. And it was a huge scandal. In 1962, there was a huge Life magazine article about this and about the rationing of care. And then there were hearings on Capitol Hill. And eventually a decade later, we had what is often called socialized medicine for a single organ, which is the laws that we may be losing that protect dialysis patients from the incredible expense of that care.

And kidney transplant patients from the incredible expense of that care. That's a section of the Social Security Act. But that conversation about what is resource intensive care, who deserves it, who gets it, I think plays into that conversation about, well, maybe people like you shouldn't have children. It's a real knee-jerk reaction with American culture, I think.

Chris Hedges

Let's talk about your novel. I love that you set it in the Natural History Museum. It reminded me, I did a book called Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt with the great cartoonist Joe Sacco. He illustrated 50 pages of it. And we were in southern West Virginia, which is a wasteland. I mean, billion gallon impoundment pond, it's full of toxic materials. Cancer is an epidemic. For some reason, gallbladder disease is an epidemic.

And at one point, it's what the rest of the world is going to look like. It's coming. It's just one of the first sacrifice zones, we're all a sacrifice zone now. And I remember Joe turning to me and said, okay, we're finished, but what about Shakespeare? And that, your book reminded me of that moment because, and that's why I found it so poignant.

I mean, it's not just the story of coping in this, you know, apocalyptic world that we're all about to enter, but it's about the importance of culture and memory.

Eiren Caffall

Yeah, I mean, I think you can probably pick up from the nature of the memoir work that I do that, as a person who inherits a family story, family lore, family objects from the previous generation, very young, we're often handing the baton off to each other before we really have a chance to kind of develop into our adult lives.

And I think that that sense of it is vital to protect whatever stories we can in the face of great loss is kind of baked into my background, my childhood, my understanding of my role as an adult to tell the stories of the dead, to hold on to the culture of those folks, to make sure that there's a continuance.

And because of that, probably, and also because my great aunt was a medievalist and gave me all sorts of books and lectures about the way that medieval monastic life protected the glories of human understanding from the ancient world and from the Islamic world. I grew up with those stories.

I felt like this was an incredibly important part of human existence was that we can't control whether we go through collapses, but what we can do in the face of collapse is make sure that we hold onto the things that are the most precious. And in the collapse of my family, that was our stories, that was these people, these characters that I write about in the memoir.

And in terms of the novel, it's really about what are people who are curators and archivists and librarians and scientists doing as information that they've spent their lives gathering and protecting begins to be destroyed or collapsed or lost in great crises. In the case of the book, it's obviously a huge storm, but I think it's extremely relevant even in the moment that we're in today where we're watching information be pulled off of federal websites and people trying to protect archives as they're being closed.

It's vital work no matter what the collapse is and it felt important to write about that and to write into the incredible duty that people feel to the future that is part of that gesture of protection.

Chris Hedges

Well, the world bifurcates. I mean, I saw it in war, between those who protect and nurture and those who extinguish. Really, there's not much middle ground. It reminds me of Emanuel Ringelblum, the great historian in the Warsaw ghetto, who, as he realized that the ghetto was going to be liquidated, hired poets and artists. He didn't really like academics, right, because they can't write.

And he buried this trove of material about the life that did disappear in the ghetto in big tin cans, not all of which were found after the war. But one of the things he did, which you do in your memoir, which is why I think it's, not your memoir, your novel, which is so great, is that he said, we're not writing a hagiography. We're writing about existence.

We're writing about the prostitutes. We're writing about the black marketeers, we’re writing about… and you do that. I mean, the novel ends, I think, on a very moving…it's hope, but it's hope grounded in the darkness around us. It doesn't deny the darkness. I mean, I think that's quite successful, what you do. But let's talk a little bit about the log book, the museum, but that, effort by Ringelblum reminded me of what you were really trying to do here.

Because you write the museum log book was to keep understanding alive. It's why for me Ringelblum is such a historic figure. When I went to Warsaw, it's not even marked there's no marker, but I went to where they dug up those big cans that had the material but that's what you're essentially writing about.

Eiren Caffall

Yeah, absolutely. I felt like it was really important to have a physical object, a piece of material culture that the scientists and the curators who were trying to preserve the collections would use to record the history of the collections, where they were, what was there, and their understanding of them in all its complexity.

And also that the main character would also feel a duty to write down her observations and what she understood about the way that the world worked and the way that water and weather worked in that world, because they were saving it for a potential future that they couldn't imagine.

As I was writing it, and this is in the book, I got completely obsessed with what happened in the protections of the collections in Leningrad during the siege, and not only in the hermitage, but also in the archives that were next door.

And I actually just heard a fantastic story which was slightly new to me, at least the details of it, about the first seed bank, which was also in Leningrad at the time and was protected by the folks who were trying to preserve all this different seeds that they wanted to ensure would be there to rebuild the Russian harvest after the war was over. And, you know, we have examples of that, obviously, in the Iraq war and it's ongoing in Ukraine.

Chris Hedges

Gaza too.

Eiren Caffall

And we have its opposite, where it's not happening in Gaza, right? Gaza's been just so much destruction there that there's fewer stories of what's being saved because it's just been targeted. But it's targeted for a reason and it's targeted for the same reason that you want to save it, which is that, and I love that you said that it's hope, but it's hope that's grounded.

I really feel like the kind of hope that we need in this moment is this really muscular, fierce hope, right? That's like absolutely clear-eyed about what's going on and refuses to be ground down by the seeming impossibility of preserving the things that we want to preserve.

Chris Hedges

I just want to read that little passage about Leningrad.

“We were like the people in Leningrad, Father said, in the war, the second one, when the Hermitage, a museum bigger than ours even, was left for dead in a dying city, but the curator stayed. There wasn't much left, but in Leningrad, in the siege, in the war, the curator stayed and ate Restorer Paste to stay alive and wrap the dead and laid them in the basement until the thaw and chipped the ice off the paintings while the siege went on outside. All that mattered was that the art remained. Even if they could have run away, across Lake Ladoga, into the edges of the Taiga Forest, and hidden with what they knew, they wouldn't have left. They belonged to the art, and the art belonged to them, and it was a sacred duty.”

It is a sacred duty.

Eiren Caffall

It is a sacred duty. Yeah. And I've met plenty of scientists and curators and historians over the course of researching both of these books that have expressed that exact same duty. You know, I've interviewed a really brilliant right whale researcher who has been watching the cratering of the population of right whales in the North Atlantic around Maine and Canada.

And it's the bearing witness, it's the holding on to information, he can identify each of the individual whales in the pod that he studies by the kerosites on their bodies just by sight. And his information, his connection is a sacred duty to him and he describes it that way.

And I think that people who feel called to that work of preservation and unity and community protection in the face of what's going on would describe it that way. We talk about it like that.

Chris Hedges

Why did you decide to, I mean it works perfectly, but why did you decide to tell this story through the eyes of a 13 year old girl?

Eiren Caffall

I mean the glib author answer is that she's the one who showed up. But the larger answer is that I felt like this was a story that I wanted people to connect to and engage with in a space of recognizing and sitting with their own vulnerability and so a deeply vulnerable voice of a complicated young person, young woman who had never known anything but traumatic events was actually a really important voice for us to follow through the process of fighting for her own life, fighting for her history, fighting for the people that she loved, and fighting towards a future that she really believed in.

I think the more that we make space for those kinds of stories of empathy where, you know, we have a lot of post-apocalyptic stories where there's like heroism and it's very intense or violent or that it's held in the bodies of people who are thought of as having a lot of strength and I just think actually it's that vulnerability and that presence that's the real tool that we need to be able to move carefully through the world that we're being confronted with at this moment and in a possible bleaker future.

Holding on to that vulnerability and that humanity and being able to speak and think through that story is really important because strength looks like a lot of different things, right? It sometimes looks like a complex, slightly shut down young woman who doesn't talk a lot in the book.

There's not a lot of dialogue between her and the people that she loves. And her coming into understanding and seeing her own strength was a really important story that I thought was not missing from the canon, but is underrepresented in the kind of books that I like to read and that I think about writing.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, you're talking about Cormac McCarthy, of course.

Eiren Caffall

Yeah, a little bit. Who I love, but…

Chris Hedges

He's a great writer, but it's hypermasculine. He's hypermasculine. But the power of the... I forget the novel. It's the one where the guy gets the money. But he dies protecting a young girl, which they cut out of the movie because it had to be a hypermasculine feast.

Eiren Caffall

Yeah, of course. But there's a lot of gentleness in Cormac McCarthy too.

Chris Hedges

There is, but it's different. It's different. The hyper-masculine figures are central. So I want to talk a little bit about the violence. There is violence in your book. I think there has to be violence, having been in disintegrating societies, the world gets divided between the all-powerful, those who have the weapons.

You have this very chilling figure, Giles, in your book, who is tyrannical. But there is violence, and there is not just violence perpetrated. And at one point, there's an attempted rape. But it's not just violence perpetrated on the vulnerable, but there are acts of violence by the vulnerable to protect themselves.

And I don't like it, but I've seen it and you were right to chronicle it and I want you to talk about why.

Eiren Caffall

Well, I tried really hard to write this book without any of that because I, again, in terms of trying to form other types of narratives within this genre where vulnerability gets to lead, I did a whole draft where there were no guns at all. And I did a whole draft where the violence was softer and not enacted by the vulnerable at all. And there wasn't a lot of agency.

And I really tried writing into that narrative as a way to say that we could even further step back from this sort of hyper-masculine storyline that we're all used to, but it didn't in the end feel like it was accurate to any piece of history I've ever read about collapsing societies and wars and also the way that people create and disintegrate utopias, right?

My father was a really beautiful craftsman and he made shaker furniture for 30 years and he had a huge wall of books on various utopian communities and the complexities of trying to organize people were fully realized in those pages.

So I had a great friend read the book at some juncture and she said, you're such a good mother and you're such a kind one, but you can't be that way with your characters. And I think she was picking up on what you're picking up on, which is that it needs to be represented, that there is a lot of risk and there is a lot of violence inherent in this kind of decentralized, deformed, reforming society that happens after a series of disasters when there's no centralized government.

And it would have been inaccurate and ultimately I think it would have taken the reader out of the rhythm of the story if those things weren't there. But I worked really hard to make sure that when it was in the book that it wasn't gratuitous, that it was readable even for people who'd been exposed to trauma, that it could be something that you could share with a teenager if you wanted to or teach in an early college course and it wouldn't be this sort of sensationalizing, romanticizing the violence but rather treating it with the gravity that it has and the specificity that it has and also with what it looks like when people are trying to avoid that at all costs.

Chris Hedges

That Cormac McCarthy novel was No Country for Old Men, the one I was trying to think about. No, I think you did that. mean, having been around violence and at times even having had bodyguards, it's the environment or the disintegration of the environment around you that forces you to essentially have to employ mechanisms by which you protect yourself from violence and from those who would carry out violent acts against you.

But I think you do a good job of not romanticizing it because it's not romantic, it's awful. And I want to talk about the utopian community in your book because isn't that how most utopian communities end up?

Eiren Caffall

Yeah, I mean, I think, again, being raised by who I was raised by, one of my father's favorite phrases, and it made its way into the novel is utopias fail.

Chris Hedges

They don't just fail, they become demonic. Which that one, in your book, it does, it's demonic.

Eiren Caffall

Demonic and completely destructive. And I think there's a way in which part of the coming of age story that's happening to Noni throughout the book is recognizing that she has thought of the home that she and her family made on the roof as a utopia and begins to recognize the ways in which they were not practicing some of the values that they said they were practicing in terms of like keeping out other refugees and keeping locked doors.

The moral complexity of trying to make these beloved communities and then recognizing that they ultimately will fall towards worst impulses or control tactics, it was really important to me to have that be there and to make sure that it wasn't just like a blanket story about a dystopic reformation post-collapse, but it was a complex and specific, this is how people, you know, make the decisions internally, that they're just following a set of ethics that they believe are going to protect them.

And then it's the runaway conclusions to those really specific ethics that can get people into trouble and can create these nightmarish circumstances. No, we're just making sure that people pay off their debts, it's fine, as in the last community. But no, that actually becomes the structure of control and coercion and state-sponsored violence, even though the state is very small. It's just a little community.

Chris Hedges

Let’s talk about race because that's also part of your book. So this disintegration comes and there's a breakdown on racial lines. In fact the characters are only allowed into the community because they're white.

Eiren Caffall

Yeah, I wanted that to be something that was really part of, again, reflecting what the refugee experience is across the world, right? We see waves of climate refugees all the time. They're happening even now. And we see that in those moments, they fracture along religious lines, ethnic lines, along racial lines, and in America, which is a country that is so divided racially and so complex racially, of course that would be the way that we would break.

It felt lovely to have the representation of this community of people who are all doing science together and doing history together, which reflects what I think those communities look like now, which is very diverse and people from all over the world. But like what happens to those people when they're set into a country that has decided that it's easier to categorize by racial lines?

Chris Hedges

Well, what's the term? I'm just trying to find it. What do you call them? The Lost?

Eiren Caffall

Yeah, The Lost.

Chris Hedges

Are you part of The Lost? Okay, we have to bring up Moby Dick. The greatest American novel ever written.

Eiren Caffall

Okay. The greatest American novel. My favorite book.

Chris Hedges

And I could tell that because Moby Dick comes up more than once. [Laughing]

Eiren Caffall

I know. Self-indulgent, but I couldn't help it.

Chris Hedges

But as [historian Cyril Lionel Robert] James says, Moby Dick is about the collapse of a civilization.

Eiren Caffall

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I mean, I'm obsessed with Nathaniel Philbrick’s terrific book, Why Read Moby Dick. I recommend Moby Dick to everybody I ever talked to and all my students.

Chris Hedges

Okay, I interviewed him about that book. I interviewed Philbrick about Moby Dick. I also did a show on the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ulysses with the Joyce scholar at Trinity College Dublin. I'm sure both of those shows got about five views, but I loved them.

Eiren Caffall

Well, now I'm going to go back and find them because I didn't find them when I was looking at your old shows. Now I'm going to go searching. Nathaniel Philbrick is such a hero of mine.

Yeah, I think it's a quintessential... I mean, it's funny because the next novel that I'm writing has got a lot of themes around labor in it. And I just keep thinking I'm still thinking about all of the lessons from that book in terms of the way that we talk about utopias failed, utopias collapse, race and politics of work, the destruction of the natural environment.

And it's a book that I was, it's so funny. I hadn't thought about this until I was doing the companion essays for these two books to come out, but I realized that one of the first things that happened to me after I was diagnosed with my kidney disease was that my friend who's a brilliant scholar of indigenous history, teaches at Bryn Mawr, but then we were just, you know, college friends, high school friends. She handed me Moby Dick. I had never read it.

And it was the first thing I read after this catastrophic experience in my own life. And probably is the reason I read nothing but disaster novels for fun or disaster books, mostly nonfiction, for fun. But everything that I needed to understand in terms of the way that Americans respond to the collapse of a culture is baked into that book. And I'm just in love with it still.

Chris Hedges

Well, it's all there, including Ahab, driving us towards extinction. Certainly Starbuck, there's a consciousness that he's driving them towards extinction. And yet they can't extract themselves from it.

Eiren Caffall

No, and I think that that is so much more resonant every day that we are all in that same circumstance where there are people in power who are driving us towards things and our agency feels very small and we're all just sort of along for this white knuckle Nantucket sleigh ride kind of experience of being driven towards a conclusion that isn't inevitable, but that we're all choosing because we're not pushing back against the maniacal power at the center of the story.

Chris Hedges

I think that's a fundamental issue in Moby Dick.

Eiren Caffall

Yep. Yep.

Chris Hedges

And why don't we push back? Why? I mean, but I'm asking you why. Why do you think?

Eiren Caffall

I mean, I think that it's… the only thing I can think of at the moment is just what we're experiencing right now in American culture, right? We're not pushing back because we're trying to work around it. We're hoping for the best outcome. We're hoping that appeasement of the mania will work to slow the collapse or that if it doesn't, it'll only affect just those of us on the boat.

You know, if we get the white whale, we'll be okay. And then things can go back to normal. There's a real, well let's just get this one catastrophe out of the way and then we'll be all right kind of attitude that's part of the way that all of the characters rotate around that mania at the center of the book. I think living in America right now really feels like that, right?

We're all sort of rotating around a mania that we just don't know how to get out of the way of, right? How to affect it. We push back in small ways in our daily lives, we understand the complexity of what's happening.

Chris Hedges

But do we? Do we really understand?

Eiren Caffall

Parts of it, you know? And I think that's what's so great about the book is that I feel like each of the characters holds a portion of the complexity of the story. That's part of why I love it so much is that it's this spiderweb thinking way of looking at American life and American people.

And I think that that would probably be true now. Each of us is holding a small part of it, but the larger picture is unfolding around us until, yeah, we're in the sea looking at the sinking ship.

Chris Hedges

Do you embrace [Herman] Melville's belief that the deity is malevolent?

Eiren Caffall

Oh no. I don't. I don't. I was raised probably too much around utopian thinkers and also I believe in the... maybe it's only 51% instead of 50% of the energy and power of nature and human experience tending towards good. And I think of that as the divinity as well. The divinity is complex but it's lightly weighted towards justice.

Chris Hedges

I don't know if you know Marek Edelman’s book, Shielding the Flame. You know Marek? He was one of the deputy commanders of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the only one who survived. And he was interviewed by a journalist named Hanna Krall.

And he said he became a cardiologist after the war. And after his experience in the uprising, he felt like Melville, that the deity was malevolent and shielding the flame. He said he became a doctor because he would cup his hand to shield the flame, our life, our life, as long as he could before it was snuffed out.

You write that about greed. You know, having gone to some of these elite schools where, you know, they tout such superior education. Once these people enter the power elite, it is greed. They never have enough. Greed like that didn't start out bad. What alters wanting is what's behind it. Greed and hope aren't opposites. Greed and hope are twins grabbing for the same thing, one in fear and one in faith. Explain what you mean by that.

Eiren Caffall

Yeah. I think that there's a baseline desire for protection, for resources, for enoughness that's part of the human experience. And I don't think that it necessarily breaks towards the good every time. But I think it's more prone to breaking towards the good if people aren't afraid.

And I feel like I write towards that all the time in that part of writing stories about death is that I think that people are more prone to being afraid of death and that this anti-death cult that we've built here in America, this idea of immortality through money or through life extensions or through perpetual youth is bound up with an inability to tell a story about death that doesn't terrify folks.

And I have been in proximity to it for so long and so intimate with it in my own family and in my own body that I don't have that same narrative baked in. I've had to question it and think about it and to become comfortable talking and feeling through death. And I think the more stories that we tell that help people move away from that fear, the more that we're going to reduce that sense of greed for the self, for the small family, for the small corporation, right?

For the thing that isn't collective, for the thing where, you know, I'm terrified that I'm going to die, so I have to make sure that I have everything I personally need. And if we can do that, if we can have more narratives that help soothe that fear, I think we're more protected.

We move away from greed. We move towards hope in a more consistent way. Again, it only needs to be 51%. I'm not saying we could eradicate it, but I think that we need to be able to create those stories for the people who are open to them.

Chris Hedges

Doesn't that proximity to death teach you what is precious?

Eiren Caffall

Yeah, absolutely. And for me, much to my detriment, this has never been about anything material. It's mostly about time. And it's about family and the people that I love.

Chris Hedges

Well it’s about your son, I mean, that's from your book, your memoir.

Eiren Caffall

Yep. Yep. It is. Deciding to have a child when you're told that you have a chance of them inheriting your disease and the disease that you watched kill your father. It gets you pretty clear pretty quickly about whether you believe that life and connection and love matters more than the possibility of loss.

Chris Hedges

Well, that's the beauty of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. And of course, I think it's a point you tend to make is that inability to cope with our own mortality, that struggle, of course consumer society pushes us to this, to build monuments to ourselves, which blinds us from what's important. And that's why I'm not gonna… people have to go buy the book. So I'm not going to read the ending of the book.

But you do that beautifully, I think exactly that point.

Eiren Caffall

Thank you.

Chris Hedges

So, yeah, and you can hear my wife, Eunice, narrate All the Water in the World, and you can hear Eiren do a pretty good job, I have to say, audiobook and The Mourner's Bestiary, they're both beautiful. Thank you very much. And I want to thank Max [Jones] and Thomas [Hedges] and Sofia [Menemenlis] who's studying climate science at Princeton, getting her doctorate. And Diego [Ramos], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

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