Another Southern California heat wave has come and gone. More days of record temperatures broken. Another string of heat-related deaths – the very old, the unhoused and exposed – dutifully related to us in journalism’s most withdrawn tones.
At the back of your throat, the taste of smog – once so bad that public school days would be regularly canceled, more recently near-eliminated due to stricter emission standards. But now it’s back, albeit briefly, clinging to and thriving in the high temps. Wildfires, always inevitable this time of year, are aided by the dry heat. They are surrounding Los Angeles and San Diego.
These emphasize the extreme danger inherent in just stepping out your front door during these events. We hear a lot about “wet bulbs,” the temperature at which your body loses its ability to cool itself. But most of us must go outside, even in these conditions, at least for a little bit. Work, the ability to keep ourselves in housing, depends on it for most of us.
On the way to work, at work, and on the way back, all we can think about is returning home, escaping inward. Those of us with air conditioning (recent ordinances mandating Los Angeles landlords provide it to tenants are slow to be enforced) will crank up our window units as high as they can reasonably go when we walk in the door. We’ll do quick math in our heads, considering which future purchases we’ll have to forego to pay next month’s inflated electric bill.
We’ve gotten used to this, if not coping with the heat then at least coping with the news of it. Just as we have the wildfires, the floods, the mudslides and droughts. It is easier to picture and compartmentalize than it is to imagine its amelioration. Though some have had an easier time of it than others. “Getting used to” is easy when all you have to experience is through your screen, which is already the preferred mode of experience for the denizens of the Hollywood Hills, Brentwood, and Malibu.
The myth of a middle-class America was to a great degree built on the postwar proliferation of consumer goods (including air conditioning). No place where people needlessly struggle could have so many creature comforts. When the consumer boom proved fleeting, when the postwar boom finally came to an end, people were shocked, though it was always a severely myopic belief. The prosperity was supposed to last forever, but commodities are, by their nature, fleeting, designed to last a blink in time. All the more likely you’ll need to buy another one.
We know that the cold freezes things in place, but it’s heat that stops time. Terms like “heat dome” are apt, capturing the way extreme temps seem to seal us off from the rest of existence. In the Inland Empire, temperatures are consistently ten degrees hotter than in Downtown Los Angeles. Pull over on the road somewhere between San Bernardino and Redlands, or between Victorville and Palm Springs, and you can see what I mean.
Out here, several sideroads in, it’s not difficult to find the kind of space that removes you from civilization, from cities, from any oncoming cars; just you and a dirt road, surrounded on all sides by rocks, sand, and heat. The stillness, the quiet, the unrelenting weight of the air. You can easily feel how inconsequential this spinning rock is to the cosmos. It’s like watching the abyss imagine us.
But then, the abyss has always been in control. The flora and fauna of these regions have survived and evolved over millions of years not through craft and guile, but through slow, unmoving persistence. Even quick lizards know to spend most of any given day motionless on their rock. The lizards, the snakes, the cacti and succulents, the ancient soils; these understand deep time in a way we can only conceptualize.
Recent events have shown how futile it is to carry on as normal in all this. The basic functions of society – government, religion, culture – can’t push forward in time in such unrelenting heat. This year’s Hajj became a death march, with dozens of pilgrims to Mecca succumbing to heat stroke. The same happened to poll workers in India’s elections.
This summer was the hottest on record. Just like the one before that, and before that, and the one before that. We should expect next summer, and the one after, to be even worse. And so on and so on. More days searching for shelter inside, cut off from everyone. More days trudging through the sweat and hoping nobody touches you or talks to you, gets between you and the shelter where you don’t have to acknowledge them either. Most of our walls are relatively thin, though. Collapse can’t be kept out forever.
In JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, characters theorize how humans might adapt to inhuman temperatures. In Ballard’s story, the icecaps have melted, most cities have been reduced to a series of wild lagoons, and what’s left of civilization has retreated to the poles.
Robert Kerans, an army scientist cataloging the environmental changes of what used to be London, is increasingly drawn to the surrounding ecosystem. Air conditioning is unable to cool the regular temps of 120 degrees down to anything less than 80 or 90, but no matter. More and more, Kerans prefers the heat. He’ll stand for hours in its atemporal glare. When he sleeps, he dreams of running toward the sun. Another soldier has already made this escape, dashing into the swamps and toward the equator.
“That wasn’t a true dream, but an ancient organic memory millions of years old” says the expedition’s Dr. Bodkin. “The innate releasing mechanisms laid down in your cytoplasm have been awakened. The expanding sun and rising temperatures are driving you back down to the spinal levels into the drowned seas of the lowest layers of your unconscious, into the entirely new zone of the neuronic psyche. This is the lumbar transfer, total psychic recall. We really remember these swamps and lagoons.”
It is a bizarre, fascinating notion, exemplary of Ballard’s work. Like most of his books, The Drowned World is – in both its strengths and its notable flaws – a portrait of bourgeois neurosis. That he pictures the middle class evolving – or perhaps, more accurately, devolving, re-metabolizing themselves into the sways of evolutionary time – is brilliantly in character. While the piratical underclasses busy themselves with looting the treasures of an extinct society, the “civilized” become truly primitive.
It may yet prove prophetic. Amidst a mass die-off, the most sheltered and resourced shuffle through the ruins of the high-rises and gated communities. They’ve spent all of their sultry energies stocking their townhomes and condos with their wet bars and leather-bound books, evening wear and jewelry. But they don’t provide much comfort anymore, and finery starts to look like just another form of cloth, the gems like useless trinkets. A new-old habitat beckons: the swamps and sands of a newly primordial planet.
Is this what our extinction will look like? It will be some time until we find out, though not as much as we hope.
Header image is a house in a 1950s nuclear test village.