Impossible Griefs: Navigating Loss, Climate Change, and Ben Lerner’s 10:04
January 2020
I begin the new decade dancing. My phone blares “Blinding Lights” by The Weeknd while my friend Alison watches. She is sober; I am not.
Still, I’ve put a lot of thought into the song choice. It’s 2020, after all. I have to start it the right way.
This is totally going to be my year.
***
2020 was not my year.
I had the worst relationship of my life, my final year of undergrad ended in a global pandemic, and both of my grandparents died (one from COVID-19, one from cancer).
My griefs seem so significant and yet so small. I don’t know what it is about loss that invites comparison, but I find myself measuring, hopelessly, against all the other kinds of pain I can see.
There’s certainly no shortage. After all, it’s 2020: the year the world set on fire, both literally and figuratively, with the devastating bushfires in Australia in January and the fresh waves of systemic racism over the summer. The political climate has never been more divided, and the actual climate isn’t doing so hot either — or, rather, it is.
Tennessee Williams famously wrote, “We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.” But the way we experience the climate crisis is often much less dramatic. If our house is on fire, it’s a slow burn; we won’t notice until the flames are at the door.
In his book, “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor,” Rob Nixon describes “slow violence” as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). Slow violence is not a singular event or action, but rather “incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (2). This is the violence that settles on the surface of our everyday experiences — it doesn’t lay dormant, but it doesn’t shatter our ground either. Not all at once. It moves in fissures before earthquakes, breezes before hurricanes.
But for poor communities, slow violence is not invisible. Nixon describes the poor as “the principal casualties of slow violence,” kept out of sight and in the margins, “[t]heir unseen poverty is compounded by the invisibility of slow violence that permeates so many of their lives” (4). He notes that “the poor” as a term also intersects with ethnicity, gender, class, race, and other significant markers that lead to further marginalization.
These intersections, particularly race, became especially significant during 2020. COVID-19 may not be a form of slow violence; in fact, Claire Colbrook calls it a “fast and intolerable violence” (495). But the speed at which COVID-19 caused rising deaths, unemployment, and sudden economic and ecological changes was “made possible by centuries of slow violence: like the 1918 pandemic to which it is so often compared, the spread of COVID-19 was highly racialized” (496). Non-white Americans died at a significantly higher rate than those with “a long history of greater access to healthcare, insurance, decent working conditions, clean water, exercise, and healthy diets,” while the president of the United States called COVID-19 the “China virus” and “Kung flu,” effectively demonizing Asian populations (496). Yet it wasn’t just one form of slow violence at work. COVID-19 was enabled by both “the transformation of the earth as a living system but also the ongoing exclusion of poor and minority Americans from healthcare, clean water, and decent living conditions” (496).
When it comes to representing the magnitude of these systemic issues, what tools do we have at our disposal? Or, as Nixon asks, “How do we bring home—and bring emotionally to life—threats that take time to wreak their havoc, threats that never materialize in one spectacular, explosive, cinematic scene? … How do we both make slow violence visible yet also challenge the privileging of the visible?” (14-15).
Climate fiction is a diverse genre that includes several different approaches to these concerns. Some works, like Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, make climate change integral to the plot and do the work of witnessing that Nixon envisions. Protagonist Lauren Olamina is a Black woman who belongs to a marginalized community directly affected by the slow violence of economic instability and systemic racism, including a form of debt slavery.
Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel 10:04 takes a much different approach. Lerner’s protagonist — whom I’ll refer to as Ben — is a version of Lerner himself, with plenty of metatextual references to blur the lines between reality and fiction. Where Lauren is marginalized, Ben is privileged as a white, upper middle-class man. Where climate change is central to her life, it is sidelined in his. It appears as a menacing backdrop, with seemingly menial details eventually escalating into the climactic (yet anti-climactic) arrival of Hurricane Sandy. While the novel is certainly limited in its privileged perspective, it still provides the opportunity to explore slow violence as it actually appears to the privileged: peripheral but ever-present.
That’s how grief feels too. Reading Nixon, I can’t help but twist it into a metaphor for loss. Although the inciting incident can be a spectacle, grief haunts you just like slow violence does. It’s not a one-time event. It unfolds slowly over the body, over time. It leaves nothing untouched.
***
March 2020
There are many ways to tell this story.
Two versions of it appear in every major Canadian news outlet, courtesy of a reporter from the Canadian Press. A few weeks after the interview — a few weeks after her death — my Oma becomes the face of COVID-19 in Canada. When I search her name, it racks up hundreds of hits. She’s the thumbnail for two different articles: one is about the use of ventilators, the other is a memorial for victims of COVID-19.
As time goes on, new versions of the story appear.
There’s the ten-second version for strangers and small talk. Tested positive, went on the vent a few days later, lasted for a week. She had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) too. She was 75.
There’s the prologue, which makes me angrier every time I recount it. They had coffee with people who’d just come back from Portugal. It was before masks and social distancing. They didn’t know.
Then there’s the story I lived through. A narrative in split screen: my mom staying with her siblings and her dad in Sarnia, and me at home in Strathroy, trying to carry on with meetings and schoolwork.
I didn’t even want to see her that day. That last day. I was scared of the virus and annoyed at the risk.
I knew she was sick, but at the time it only seemed like her COPD was acting up. It had sent her to the hospital just a couple weeks before. When we arrived, she was lying down, huddled in blankets. My mom and I dropped off the groceries and said our goodbyes. It was perfectly normal, because in just a few days it became monumental, and that only ever happens when you don’t see it coming.
I have made stories of everything, for as long as I can remember. But this year, I discovered the failure of language. I don’t have words for what this year became.
I don’t have words to tell you what my Oma meant to me. I don’t know how to explain that she wasn’t just my grandma. Saying that she was like a second mother means nothing. It’s an expression that feels grey compared to the colour of her life, the way she shared it with me more generously than anyone I’ve ever known.
I can tell you that she wasn’t supposed to die first. I can tell you that her husband, my Opa, was diagnosed with stage four cancer in 2016. There was remission a year later, but it didn’t last long. It came back in 2018. They said he wouldn’t make it to the new year. But he did, all the way into 2019, and then 2020, and then into March, when the doctors called and my mom had to tell him that his wife of 52 years was going on a ventilator.
My mom tells me months later about the way he stood at the kitchen table when he heard the news. The way he hunched over, already so weak from the tumour in his liver. The way he sobbed like a broken man.
He died four months and 22 days later.
I don’t have words for that either.
***
Storytelling has always been a survival strategy. Sometimes it’s the only one we have in the face of crises that threaten to swallow us whole. Sometimes words are all we can give, even for the griefs that defy language altogether.
10:04 understands this intrinsically. Through the tradition of autofiction, Lerner intentionally draws from his personal experiences. Autobiography becomes a narrative tool. But through such a personal lens, he grapples with something far beyond his personal scope: climate change. It’s through the narrowness and specificity of the narrator’s perspective that we gain a realistic take on our current and most pressing crisis—not through the dramatic play-by-play of a tsunami or the spectacle of a drowned world, but through mostly marginal details that quietly haunt the narrator at every turn.
Climate change is a largely quiet but pervasive force in the novel, surfacing most explicitly through small moments of recognition. Ben frequently takes note of the December weather being “unseasonably warm” (Lerner 32, 107, 157, 231), though these observations are secondary to the more immediate personal crises, such as the news of his old mentor being hospitalized (32). At other points, his engagement with the reality of the climate crisis is only hypothetical. A pressing concern of Ben’s is futurity, as his friend Alex has asked him to help her have a child. When he imagines a conversation with this future child, they ask him why he would procreate if he believes the world is ending, to which he replies, “‘Because the world is always ending for each of us and if one begins to withdraw from the possibilities of experience, then no one would take any of the risks involved with love. And love has to be harnessed by the political. Ultimately what’s ending is a mode’” (94).
Initially this appears to be an empty platitude, a means of self-soothing. After all, if it is a mode that’s ending and not the world itself, then there is markedly less cause for concern. However, Ben’s emphasis on love and the connection it entails is actually key to not only the effectiveness of the narrative — as one that is invested in personal relationships and the events of everyday life — but also in presenting a solution to the crisis of climate change.
The most evident instance of climate change is, of course, the superstorm forewarned within the first section of the novel. When Ben looks at water-stained paintings, it spurs a vision of New York underwater (132), a hypothetical encounter with climate change that actually comes true, if briefly, at the end of the novel. Previous to the storm arriving in New York, Ben joins in preparation for a lockdown and even tracks its path; he notes, “Around the time the storm struck Cuba, devastating Santiago, the box of books arrived at my apartment” (220). This juxtaposition reinforces his relative privilege while also maintaining a distance between him and the environmental catastrophe, which appears to be furthered when, in a somewhat anticlimactic twist, the storm misses Ben’s neighbourhood and leaves him and Alex unaffected. He reflects, “Another historical storm had failed to arrive … Except it had arrived, just not for us” (230).
Yet while Lerner avoids a direct representation of the storm, he still uses it as a site of community. When the storm is announced, it becomes a shared topic of conversation, such that it evolves into “one common conversation you could join, removing the conventional partitions from social space”; Ben finds himself “swapping surge level predictions with a Hasidic Jew and a West Indian nurse in purple scrubs” (17). This sense of camaraderie elevates their experience of a mariachi band’s performance, such that there is “an unusual quantity of pathos in the song, applause, then an unusual quantity of currency in the hat” (17). The impending storm not only unites people from different walks of life but also suggests that social connections may be what weathers them through it, as it enhances their experience of life itself.
When Ben reflects on the storm’s impact, it’s not just another imagined encounter. It’s paying attention to the community around him, and imagining himself inside their experiences. It’s an act of empathy and connection, because in the face of the monumental loss the storm has caused, that’s all there is to do. After the storm, although Ben and Alex are “unable to feel” the “urgency of the situation,” they buy food to donate (231). They may remain personally unaffected, with their friends and acquaintances all safe, but they still maintain a responsibility to others who aren’t as fortunate.
Yet as Ben and Alex move through the city, observing a few details of the aftermath, it feels like “a day like any other” (232). Life goes on. The climate crisis recedes to a safe distance. The sense of shared solidarity, of community, passes away into the mundane business of things. But sometimes it’s enough to envision it, to see it play out, however short-lived. To hope that next time, and the time after that, it will be the anchor that holds us through the storm.
***
July 2020
After my Opa dies, my aunt and I sit on the couch in the living room. Incidentally, this is where my Oma was the last time I saw her alive.
“How are you doing?” I ask my aunt.
“I’m okay,” she says.
Part of me still can’t believe that this is real. When someone takes four years to die, you start thinking that it’ll never happen. The fact of their death grows more and more improbable. It feels more and more distant. Until it is suddenly, startlingly, inescapably present.
In the bedroom, when he stopped breathing, everyone was crying but me. Then my Opa’s chest rose again. Another breath rattled out. Another and another and another. I don’t know how many passed before the last one.
The nurse was the first to speak.
“Well, thank you, Frank,” she said. “Thank you for waiting for me.”
The adults laughed a little. Everything thrown into the worst relief. It’s so him, my mom says later. That he waited until the nurse was there, so she could handle all the arrangements after.
My uncle took note of the time. 11:13.
On the day of the joint funeral a few weeks later, he lowers his parents’ ashes into two identical holes in the ground. This is what makes me cry, after stubborn resistance throughout the rest of the service. I use up the one tissue I have, drying my eyes with both sides.
My aunt has a large shed for her motorhome, practically a small house, that fifty people can fit into while social distancing. After the service, we eat catered sandwiches and listen to a few speeches. My uncle tells everyone to come up to the grandkids and share stories about Oma and Opa.
To my disappointment, no one does. Losing someone makes you long for stories. That’s all you have left.
After dinner, a new group of guests arrive. It’s mostly the parents’ friends. The cousins and I sit around a table. Someone brings out jars of moonshine. We get drunk — including the minors — and take a Snapchat selfie captioned #funeralvibes. We’ve always been like this. It’s how we get through it.
At the end of the night, when it’s just the immediate family left, we connect my cousin’s phone to the speaker and dance to 80s songs. We spin in circles, breaking into a sweat. We sing at the top of our lungs because we know the neighbours won’t complain. We help clean up the tables, stack the borrowed plates in boxes as “Come On Eileen” blares.
We walk to our respective cars. We say goodnights and goodbyes. Life goes on.
***
Some may find Lerner’s narrator nothing but self-indulgent. A self-insert, and a pretentious one at that. But Lerner isn’t as preoccupied with himself as one might assume.
Rather than centering the individual voice, he envisions a collective consciousness in the tradition of Walt Whitman. Though the autobiographical aspects may appear to resist universality, Lerner persists in forging connections — between himself and Whitman, between himself and the reader — as he blurs the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, the past and the future. Through these connections and deconstructions, Lerner dissolves the individualistic narrative into a more abstract space that enables communal thought and experience, thus modelling a possible solution to the crisis of climate change.
While on a date with Alanna, a woman he’s been seeing casually, Ben describes his consciousness being “overwhelmed by her physical proximity, every atom belonging to her as well belonged to [him], all senses fused into a general supersensitivity” (Lerner 26). By referencing Whitman’s atom line from “Song of Myself,” Lerner enacts two connections: one literary, one personal as he conveys the boundary-blending sway of attraction.
Indeed, most of Ben’s projections draw upon the symbolic powers of literature. To him, poetry is the key to transcendence, to subverting the bounds of time and space. He’s in awe of poetry’s ability “to circulate among bodies and temporalities, to transcend the contingencies of its authorship” (113). Lerner models this ability for the reader when Ben imagines Whitman standing on one side of the East River, “believing he was looking across time, emptying himself out so he could be filled by readers in the future” (193). Ben then chooses to accept Whitman’s “repeated invitations to correspond, however trivial a correspondent [he] might be” (194). Then, Ben dissolves the boundary between the author and reader in a direct address:
Say that it was standing there that I decided to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’re reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them; I resolved to dilate my story not into a novel about literary fraudulence, about fabricating the past, but into an actual present alive with multiple futures (194).
In a book that could have very well been about the end of the world, Lerner chooses to emphasize the future. The very last passage of the book is in the future tense, as Ben attempts to wrap up his story while projecting one last time in an address “to the schoolchildren of America” (239). Maybe this is the other key to envisioning climate change: believing in a future, no matter what storms come.
On the worst days of my grief, I try to do the same. I try to imagine what this will look like as a movie scene. As part of a personal essay. I try to imagine the future like Lerner does, as a project of collective identity and care. I try to think of my family and the way we carry a new weight with us. I try to think of the ways that grief erases boundaries, of the way my uncle looked at me with the soft and terrible knowledge of how that moment was breaking us.
Here, in the year the world set on fire, I try to believe that the books I read are important and that the books I write one day will be too. I try to believe that it matters to believe in a collective consciousness, that an invitation from a dead, old, white man being accepted by a living middle-aged white man means something, that it models a cure to a future of hurricanes.
I try to believe that stories matter; I try to feel the fiction of the world rearrange itself around me.
I keep writing. I keep trying to find the words that will not be found, that will not measure what it’s like to disappear from a Zoom class to cry because on your mom’s birthday, both of her parents are dead.
I keep reading. I keep returning to Nixon, to Butler, to great minds who find words for the invisible, for the catastrophic, for the future.
Here, at the end of 2020, I return to Lerner. His words read so differently to me now. Here, in this moment of impossible grief, they somehow speak the unspeakable.
I know it’s hard to understand / I am with you, and I know how it is (240).
Works Cited
Baskin, Jon. “Always Already Alienated: Ben Lerner and the novel of detachment.” The Nation, The Nation Company, L.P., 11 February 2015. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/always-already-alienated/
Colbrook, Claire. “Fast Violence, Revolutionary Violence: Black Lives Matter and the 2020 Pandemic.” Bioethical Inquiry, issue 17, 2020, pp. 495–499, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-020-10024-9
Kunkel, Benjamin. “Inventing Climate Change Literature.” The New Yorker, Condé Nast, 24 October 2014. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/problem-climate-change-novel
Lerner, Ben. 10:04. McLelland & Stewart, 2014.
Lichtig, Toby. “Manspreading: The sociopolitics of Ben Lerner’s autofiction.” Times Literary Supplement, News UK, 22 November 2019. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/manspreading-lerner-autofiction/
Nixon, Rob. “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.” Harvard University Press, 2011.
Ryanne Kap is a Chinese-Canadian writer from Strathroy, Ontario. Her work has been featured in Grain Magazine, carte blanche, long con, and elsewhere. Ryanne studied English and creative writing at the University of Toronto Scarborough and is currently pursuing an MA in English at Western University. You can find her online at www.ryannekap.com or on Twitter and Instagram @ryannekap.