Ticking Like a Mountain – or the Bezoszoic

Laura op de Beke

Somewhere in Texas a mountain cannot sleep.
In all its years of slowly rising, 20 million give or take,
It hasn’t seen activity like this,
So furious and desperate.

At times there was a pleasant tickle on top
Between the scrub oak and the juniper bush
Which kept the grazers in their place,
Safe from their own too-much.

But the current itch is subterranean
Causing old memories to resurface,
From when the mountain was a reef
Bordering an inland sea.

I am a mass of bones,
The mountain thinks,
Of corals and crustaceans
All adding to the pile.

Nothing not to tolerate,
If only for the sound
Of that incessant ticking noise
Disturbing the grave-like silence of her gut.

A mechanical pulse, a throbbing pain
And in time, a car park and a gift shop.
But all this business cannot last
Not in this heat.

It was a late-Permian dream
When she held hands with her cousins
Carlsbad to the North
and Guadalupe.

A shadowy half-moon, visible from space
Is all that’s left of their embrace of the ancient basin,
That and the carbon in the air
Which were neighboring algae once.

There will be another dying, soon.
For that is how it went before.
We all strive for safety, prosperity,
comfort, long life, and dullness.

The Science

In 2018, The Long Now Foundation started construction on a clock that is supposed to run for 10.000 years, as a monument to long term thinking. The clock means different things to different people. For those most closely involved it serves chiefly as an engineering challenge, rather than a provocation meant to probe short-termism. The clock's building site is inside a mountain in Texas, on property owned by the project’s main sponsors: Jeff Bezos, a man whose commercial empire, Amazon, is famous for exploiting the time of its workers, who labour under extremely precarious circumstances. Without stable employment, they are denied a sense of futurity, forced to account for every second of their shift. “Look we're not in the Anthropocene so much as the Bezoszoic,” quipped Darshana Jayemanne on Twitter (@ShirazHaderach, May 10 2020). An alternative take on deep time comes from Aldo Leopold’s essay “Thinking like a Mountain,” referenced throughout the poem. In this essay, Leopold imagines how a mountain relates to the deer and wolves that live on its flanks. A keen sense of the fragile web of life emerges.

The Poet

Laura op de Beke is Assistant Professor of Interactive Media, Screens, and Interfaces at Utrecht University. Her research looks at games and cultures of play, specifically in the context of climate change. Laura also headed a project called Playing With Deep Time that investigated the use of playful storytelling practices like Nordic larp (live-action role-play) in the exploration of the Long Now. Additionally, she is the founder of the online environmental humanities reading group www.un-earthed.group; and in her spare time, she designs role-playing games. Find out more at https://lauraopdebeke.com/

Next poem: Time dilation by Wilmo Ernesto Francisco Junior