The Apoplexy of Apocalyptic Adam

Dear Tamar:

W the F?! I’m overwhelmed. I spent the last week bedridden with maybe the flu, which I haven’t had since I was a kid. My family’s been surviving, I guess, on on mac and cheese and quesadillas. I’ve been eating cereal and drinking Tropicana. I feel better, but getting back into the swing of cooking seems impossible, and kind of…inappropriate? Part of me feels like we should just survive on processed food. Or like Soylent green? It seems like the right diet for the moment. I can’t imagine throwing a dinner party. I assume you don’t agree. Maybe you do?! Please advise.

-Apocalyptic Adam

Dear Apocalyptic Adam,

I spent last week as sick as I’ve ever been. I’m not sure what I’ve been eating—most days, I forgot any wisdom I ever possessed relating to food. I nibbled on stale cookies. I ate popcorn. Too feverish to think, I republished a column from a decade ago with instructions for all sorts of folk remedies. I followed none. I ate some old brownies my mother had dropped off weeks ago. I looked despairingly out the window at the wet grey street. I read the news. As my fever rose—and I shuddered and wound myself with blankets—then fell—causing me to sweat and disrobe, I felt a sense of rightness: the hasty food felt good. So did the chills and sweats, the unease, the wet, grey street.

I happened to be reading the second book in Octavia Butler’s Parable series when I was felled. And I was right there with you, feeling the anguish of illness and the anguish of catastrophe foretold, until I read an essay by Hanif Abdurraqib, called Lessons for the End of the World, that spoke directly to me, and cleared my head. Here’s the part that did it:

People are not incorrect about Octavia Butler predicting the future, but they’re not always clear about what kind of future she was envisioning. It’s not the fires or drug use or tumbling literacy rates that she invented—all of those problems were simply there for her to see. What “Sower” imagines, rather, is a future in which surviving the seemingly unsurvivable requires people to show some emotional dexterity, some ability to surrender whatever selfishness they’ve been harboring and see if they have something that someone else needs.

The italics are mine, there because that’s the section of Abdurraqib’s essay that yanked me out of my spiral. I’d spent my fever-free moments taking snapshots of particularly prescient pages from Butler and sending them to family and friends, with captions like: “She predicted _________, too!” I’d laid on my back, chugging orange juice and eating just enough cookies to stay conscious, getting pummeled by exactly the wrong part of Octavia Butler’s genius.

I’ll spell out what the essay finally splashed me with: Butler’s genius wasn’t to predict that Los Angeles would burn; or the rise of an autocratic leader who coopts religious language to wreak devastation; or the dismantling of public institutions. That just took close observation. Butler’s genius was imagining “emotional dexterity,” and “ability to surrender” selfishness. He goes on:

“Sower” isn’t just about a time and a fire and a place; it’s about people deciding what kind of apocalypse they are going to have, and then deciding how to live in its aftermath.

This, of course, is much harder. Lying on my back last week, I occasionally found myself annoyed at the protagonist of the Parable books. I was defeated by a flu. I was clobbered into exhaustion by the fires, the explosions, the news. Why wasn’t Lauren Oya Olamina?

Because Butler dared imagine it. She dared imagine a reshaping of self in relationship to community that was, genuinely, unique. She envisioned relentless resilience, energy transmuted from the self to the collective, energy in motion, embodiment of change. Being moved by Butler’s daring then, means deciding: What kind of apocalypse are you going to have? How you will live in its aftermath?

When I felt well enough to stand up, I texted neighbors, inviting them over for stew. It felt preposterous—I’d barely been able to bathe myself and now I was throwing a party. But that is not what I was doing. I was deciding. I cared little about making something everyone would like, or thinking through options for children who don’t like stew. I would be serving stew the same day I made it—not ideal, since it’s always better with a night of rest and mingling. I didn’t have anything near enough energy to make salad. I would, I knew already, be a terrible conversationalist, unable to ask the questions I’d like to, or find the right jokes.

There was cubed stew meat in the butcher case, but I requested the large piece of chuck and another of what the butcher called “shoulder clod.” The slicing of the meat at home seemed important. I chose a fat bunch of parsley. My hands shook as I paid, from the unfamiliarity of movement—the strangeness that here I was, out of breath, buying six pounds of good meat, fresh herbs. When I got home, I found a pitcher and arranged the parsley in it like a bouquet.

With the bouquet of parsley gently guiding me, I salted the meat, then sliced it and browned it. I cut it into slightly smaller pieces, added a bruised carrot, a halved onion, celery, half a bottle of wine, stock. Each stage was hard; it was tiring, and it took will to ignore the voices calling this cooking “frivolity.” I boiled thick slices of potato in salty water until just cooked. I did the same with carrots. I quartered and browned mushrooms. I added all to the pot when the meat was tender. Half an hour later, the stew was done. I turned off the oven and left it there until dinner time.

I would love to report that having people around nourished me—that we sat and laughed and felt calm and united. I was absolutely exhausted and didn’t remember how to smile. I felt small, incapable, alone, uninteresting, ineffective. Still, eight people ate at my table. Still, eight people ate stew. Still, there was parsley in a pitcher, which made people smile. Still, the three children devised a silly five-course meal of disgusting inventions to serve me, feigning British accents. Still. Still is the word I was left with: the word that reminded me of what Abdurraqib wrote about Octavia Butler and her protagonist, Lauren Olamina. “Still” is a word of resilience, of adaptation, of dexterity. “Still” is the word I’ll be using as my north star, for this messy moment when I can’t understand the movement of the stars.

Dear cook, put parsley in a vase. Make a stew. Invite your neighbors to share it. You may still feel terrible at the end of the dinner. I did. The point is not to feel good, or to solve the sadness or the badness with a stew. The point is: Still.