The fragile idea that anything matters
The Weather Station's climate grief album and the question of how much of the world to let in
As if acted upon by planetary forces, Tamara Lindeman’s songs have centers of gravity. Lindeman, who for the past decade has recorded music under the moniker The Weather Station, wrote the songs for her new album, Ignorance, on a keyboard, playing along to rudimentary drum machine beats. For several of them, she’s noted in interviews, she let one note or chord thrum for the length of the song while building revolving parts on top of it. Those pulsing cores aren’t overt on the final pieces, which swoon and yearn and sometimes jab, recalling breezy 70s pop, pastel-smeared heartland rock and abstracted sophisti-pop a la Talk Talk. But the evidence of centrifugality is there in the way the songs push and pull, stretching outward while circling back around on themselves: a hurricane gathering on a doppler radar, a flock of starlings swirling ink blots in the sky, a lighthouse beacon wheeling over pitch-dark waves.
Lindeman’s lyrics on Ignorance also rotate on an axis. It might be called the first major climate grief album. Lindeman, who is in her 30s, grew up acutely aware of the climate crisis; she became obsessed with it anew, and got involved with activism, in the years leading up to Ignorance, and a few of its songs explicitly tackle the subject or intrinsically related ones. It opens with “Robber,” an extended metaphor for the pernicious reach of capitalism. “Nobody taught me nothing was mine,” she sings near its end. This lament looks backward and forward: Our cities and societies are built on stolen land and stolen labor; so too has the hand reached forward in time to pilfer a recognizable future. On the next track, “Atlantic,” Lindeman is caught between marveling at a sunset so vivid she feels she can touch it and understanding that what she’s seeing is not only fleeting but doomed.
As Lindeman told Stereogum recently, she didn’t set out to write an album about the climate crisis — “the theme was just what happened,” she said, and the songs written independently of the theme become imbued with it. “Separated” transforms from a song about social media’s failure as a communication tool into one about the frustration of pressing against embedded denial and lethargy; on “Subdivisions,” a ballad that appears at the end of the album and feels like a sort of epilogue, a plaintive drive through North American sprawl sets the scene for the narrator’s sudden feeling of disconnection from the world built around her, and after the nine songs preceding it, it feels both intimate and epic.
The biggest shapeshifter in this contextual transfiguration is “Tried to Tell You,” which Lindeman has said she wrote about a friend who refused to acknowledge he was in love, and which as a standalone song — it was released as a single — can certainly be read that way. But its ideas are of a piece with the rest of Ignorance, as Lindeman refutes the impulse to retreat inward in the face of a feeling that threatens to overwhelm. In the video for “Tried to Tell You,” and on the album art and in the other videos she directed for the album’s singles, Lindeman wears a suit covered in mirrored plexiglass shards. Being watched on stage by strangers every night was skewing her sense of self, she told the New York Times, and she envisioned the getup as a way to feel invisible. It wound up being too cumbersome to perform in, but it took on new life as a visual motif for Ignorance. In the art pieces that accompany the album, she often looks as if she’s dissolving into the environment. The edges are blurred between her human form and a pond or a forest. It signals a subtle but substantial shift in priority: disappearing not from the world but into it.
One of the central questions that Ignorance begs — how much of the world around you do you let in, both in its beauty and its ever-unfurling catastrophe? — is also at the heart of a couple of recent journalistic pieces that have been rattling around my head for the past few weeks. One of them is a profile, written by ProPublica’s Elizabeth Weil, of Peter Kalmus, a Californian climate scientist who has opened himself entirely to the perpetual emergency and constructed his family’s lifestyle accordingly. The other is a New York Times Magazine essay by Kyle Chayka about the cultural craving for nothingness.
Kalmus, as Weil outlines, was an astrophysics Ph.D student and soon-to-be father in 2005 when he attended a lecture about Earth’s energy imbalance — “here he was hearing, really hearing for the first time, that the planet, his son’s future home, was going to roast” — and became obsessive about the climate crisis and baffled as to how everyone else seemed to care only about getting rid of plastic bags or using more efficient light bulbs, if they cared at all. “WE ARE HAVING AN EMERGENCY” became a refrain in his mind, as it does in Weil’s story. After a few years of failing to accomplish much as an activist, he set about turning his own life into a model of responsible living: He quit flying; he grew his own food, raised chickens and bees; he dumpster-dove; he installed a composting toilet; he converted a 1985 Mercedes to biodiesel, grease coagulating in the cold on family trips to the Midwest.
Kalmus clearly knows that his personal efforts won’t alleviate the climate crisis any more than hocking a loogie will extinguish a house fire — it’s more that, with as much as he knows, he can’t not do these things. The real center of the story is not the idea of Kalmus’ lifestyle as an instructive example (though it could be one) but rather how his willingness to let the crisis fill him up exposes the gulf between himself and those who, like most of us, preserve some mental buffer between ourselves and the wreckage of the world, acknowledging its presence but refusing, if we have the privilege, to feel the fullness of its weight. Weil focuses on the relationships between Kalmus and his wife, Sharon, who “possessed a self-protective mind and heart,” and his adolescent children, one of whom takes up “Greta Thunberg-style climate strikes in front of city hall” while the other plays at nihilism. The tension snaps as a wildfire approaching the family’s home forces them to evacuate:
Sharon finished meditating. Then she started photographing all their stuff, including the insides of closets and drawers, because that’s what insurance adjusters tell you to do: Document your property so you can make a stronger claim. Peter snapped. He didn’t care about the pictures or the insurance. He just wanted to let the house incinerate. He felt done pretending that anything was normal, and he decided that now would be a good time to tell Sharon that he’d felt frustrated and gaslit by her all these years.
“WE NEVER EVEN TALK ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE! DO YOU EVEN CARE ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE?” he said. This did not go well.
She threw a laundry basket. “YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME,” she shouted. “Our entire lives are about climate change.”
There it was, that gap we build around knowing and integrating, to protect our own lives and minds. Yet after the fight, after finally saying aloud what he’d been thinking for almost 15 years, Peter felt better. Not because anything was different. Nothing was different. The situation remained unshakably, cosmically wrong. The only reason to care about insurance, books, paintings, the house, was if you believed that there would be a stable planet on which to enjoy those things in 20 or 40 or 80 years. If you believe there’d be a “planet with seasons, where you can grow food and have water, and you can go outside without dying from heatstroke,” Peter said. “I don’t have that anymore, that sense of stability.”
But he also knew, deep down, that Sharon could not, and should not, give that up. She was a more anxious person than he was. They both knew that. “For me to stay sane, there’s only so much I can take,” Sharon said.
“How do we not flinch and look away?” Weil writes toward the end. “The truth of what is happening shakes the foundations of our sense of self.” Weil admits she can’t make sense of it, a conclusion that strikes me as comforting in its relatability and, more importantly, totally apt to the subject matter. If surviving the climate crisis will require us to recalibrate essentially every mode of living, it stands to reason that we’ll also have to fundamentally rewire the ways we process and internalize information and the ways in which we define ourselves in relation to the world.
Chayka’s essay plays on the same field but approaches from the opposite end, as he unpacks what he calls “a culture-wide quest for self-obliteration,” from sensory deprivation tanks, White Claw and trendy luxury minimalism to the walled-off quarantine lifestyles of those who can afford to stay home, order in and zone out. Void fetishization has something to do with the disintegration of the public sphere, he notes, and the past year especially seems to have exposed how these instincts operate. The mass retreat of the pandemic has been punctured by eruptions of communal action, in the form of widespread mutual-aid projects or the protests in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. But at least for some people, Chayka argues, recognizing the immense scale of systemic flaws simply charges the impulse toward the cocoon, or the mausoleum: “Climate change, technological upheaval, racism, inequality — the churn of history, which shows no signs of stopping — these all make it easy to instead slip into the welcoming void of the content stream. Numbness beckons when life is difficult, when problems seem insurmountable, when there is so much to mourn.”
Chayka and Weil seem to arrive near, if not quite at, a midpoint: Basically, it takes work and want — to keep your head above the surface of the frictionless slipstream, to open yourself up to the crushing glory and devastation that surrounds us, to somehow use all that stimulus in a way that’s not just survivable but actually positive. For someone like me, who overanalyzes, like, what pair of pants would be best to wear to the grocery store, letting the world in like this can inspire fear. What if you let too much in and it destroys you? It makes me think of something I saw on a hike last month: On a trail by the Suwannee River in North Florida, there’s a plaque about a rock, a 20-foot limestone monolith that had been carved by the river over millennia, so that it balanced sentry-like at the water’s edge. But it finally fell into the Suwannee a few years ago. Now you just look kind of helplessly at the spot where it used to be and then at the picture on the plaque and then back at the spot. “Erosion created Balanced Rock,” the Florida State Parks website says, “and erosion caused its demise.”
Unless what flows into you when you blow the dam isn’t a drowning force but instead a buoying one. I think about the many people who immerse themselves in the doom of the climate crisis day after day — people like Kalmus, Heated journalist Emily Atkin and The Uninhabitable Earth writer David Wallace-Wells — and still push back against nihilism. And I think of How to Do Nothing, where author Jenny Odell posits “doing nothing” as an effort, an act of resistance against the attention economy, the thing that has shaped the hollow cultural smoothness Chayka writes about. Look too long at the picture of the rock and you might forget that the river is right there, still running.
Recently I’ve been reading Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for the first time. The second chapter is this remarkable thing called “Seeing,” and it’s almost psychedelic in Dillard’s descriptions of the flashes in which she glimpses the world from an undiscovered vantage. This sort of seeing “involves a letting go,” she writes, and that too is a sort of work — and yet she finds that trying to see this way invites failure. The effort is somewhere deeper: “All I can do is try to gag the commentator, to hush the noise of useless interior babble that keeps me from seeing just as surely as a newspaper dangled before my eyes.” She’s talking about the play-by-play we all carry around, but I wonder if the same can be said for all our other interior hecklers: the doomsayer who predicts that knowledge comes as flood or fire, the soft voice that gestures toward the cold comfort of the void. We put distance between ourselves and the world because opening up can end in a bind of confused feelings, but what if there’s something to grab onto in that thicket, a would-be glimmer in want of light?
“I was still ringing,” Dillard writes of one of these experiences. “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”
A few Fridays ago, the temperature here scraped 70 and I finished work early and left the living room window open while I did yoga and reminded myself how to breathe. Then I ordered takeout from a restaurant a few blocks away and put headphones on so I could listen to Ignorance in full for the first time on my walk.
The weather and the breathing made me feel good, and I locked in with the music, trying to keep myself open to stimulus and observation. I gingerly prodded the tomatoes growing in my little garden; some of them had just started taking shape, evolving from pale bulbs into something like tiny, verdant pumpkins. I walked under the interstate overpass, where hunks of styrofoam and shredded plastic bags and other anonymous detritus huddle against a chain-link fence blocking off an always-almost-empty city parking lot, and I smelled something like baking bread and grilling meat, a smell that had no business wafting under a deserted overpass but there it was. I noted the bright blue paint on a bungalow down the street, the sour-candy pop of it. I kept my phone in my pocket.
At an intersection a few minutes away from my apartment, I half-noticed a guy pacing in front of a house on the other side of the street, talking on the phone. When I started to cross the intersection I saw an ambulance, its lights on, heading toward me from a hundred yards away, and I stepped back onto the sidewalk. It slowed right in front of me and stopped in the intersection. The guy was off his phone now, looking at the ambulance and gesturing toward an SUV parked by the house.
Some minor cyclone of competing impulses started up in my guts: It would be neighborly to stop and ask if they were ok; it would be weird and intrusive to do that, because I don’t know them; it would be egoistic and presumptive to butt in at all when the authorities were already there; it would be callous to pretend like I didn’t even notice. I simultaneously felt guilty for not doing or saying anything, guilty for even considering it could be my place to do or say anything, guilty for not knowing the answer. Someone was having an emergency. This all happened in less than two seconds; my legs carried me forward. I took one last glance at the house, and I could see the guy saying something to the paramedics, could see his mouth moving, but the music was loud in my ears and I couldn’t hear a thing.