In the time after, when industrial civilization is a bitter and too-slowly-fading memory, a memory of a nightmare too atrocious to be believed by those who were not alive in the time before and so did not experience it and its destructiveness, birds will begin to come back, and whip-poor-wills will sing, and bobwhites will sing, and murrelets will fly to oceans no longer being murdered and will return with their bellies full of fish to feed their young. In the time after, frogs will sing and nights will be as full of their songs as it is possible to be. Nights will be even more full than that, until the nights burst from their fullness.
Early in the time after, many of those who survive will barely believe their fate. There will, of course, be those—a small minority (they were always a small minority, even before the fall of civilization, no matter what they pretended, no matter what they made believe)—who look longingly back to before and wish they were still dead; who wish they were still killing all others so they could cling to the comforts or elegancies that made life, to their way of thinking and not-thinking, worth living; that made life bearable, even if sometimes only barely. But they are, truly, an insignificant minority.
For many of the others, for the overwhelming majority, the first feelings were perhaps a shocked and disbelieving relief, the emotional collapse that so often comes after a terrible tragedy is narrowly averted and you no longer have to be quite so strong—a sudden crumbling of the prison where you waited for the unjust death sentence to be imposed. After that came a cautious optimism: the relief might be real, the threat gone. Then later, when the enormity of what had happened—and even more, what could have happened but did not—finds its way fully into their bodies, these others will feel a joy deep and profound enough to soften at least a little of their sorrow for those who were lost, those who did not make it: passenger pigeon, great auk, dodo, shoal sprite, chestnut ermine moth, Round Island burrowing boa, golden toad, Snake River sucker, Central Valley grasshopper, Falklands Islands wolf, quagga, Lake Pedder earthworm, Cape Verde giant skink, silver trout, Galapagos amaranth.
In the time after, cars will no longer hurtle down roads—free-fire zones for these massive metal projectiles—killing everything in their path. Machines will no longer hum. Chainsaws will no longer whine. Humans will eventually no longer value pseudo creation—production—more than they value real creation—real life, their own and others’. In the time long after, humans will no longer sell or buy time, their own or others’. They will no longer sell or buy any of the other things—beings—who cannot truly be sold or bought; things—beings—like land, like trees, like fish or frogs or birds, like other humans, like ideas, like art. In the time after, life will be more important than machines, production, commerce, power.
In the time after, wounds will scab over, begin to heal. Dams will fail and rivers will again run free, will again live. In the time after, skyscrapers will fall in on themselves. Roots will buckle concrete and tear up asphalt. Forests will begin to expand, to reclaim what was once and forever theirs.
In the time after, flocks of birds will grow, not dwindle. Schools of fish will grow, not dwindle. The same is true for herds of bison, packs of wolves, communities of prairie dogs, runs of salmon, lamprey, grayling.
In the time after, humans will remember how to be human, and will again listen to the voices of those we, the civilized, have so long silenced. Humans will again hear the voices of stars, soil, rocks, fire, ice, rivers, seas, forests, grasslands, deserts, and so many others, and all who live in them. Humans will, individually and collectively, give back more than they—we—receive.
In the time after, there will be no more time as we now understand it (or rather, as we make believe we understand it). There will be days and nights, and springs and summers, falls and winters. There will be markings of seasons: the singing of frogs, the blooming of trillium, the return of geese, the play fighting of baby bears who use any startling excuse to scamper up trees, the flowering and fruiting of so many plants, the yellowing of leaves, the return of rains, the return of salmon, the fruiting of fungi, and the singing of frogs to begin it all again.
In the time after, there will be all of these and so many more that we could not possibly know them all, no matter how closely we paid attention, no matter how long we lived in and with a place, no matter how well we listened and learned. There will be all of this, but there will be no time, no ticktock of clocks, no artificial constraints, not only on our time, but on time itself. In the time after, reality will determine time, and not the other way around.
But it will take a long time to return to this time of no time: the people during and immediately after will still be as they are now, which means they will still attempt to silence all others, will still exploit and consume all others. They will still attempt to enslave all others that they perceive as below themselves, and will still enslave themselves to those they perceive as above them, who will in turn enslave themselves to those they perceive as higher still, and so on, with all of them enslaving themselves most of all to the whole system of enslavement. And in the time after, the humans still living will still allow themselves to be enslaved to separation.
After a time—after a very long time—these humans (or rather their many-greats-grandchildren)—will unlearn their relentless need to be enslaved and to enslave, and they will also unlearn their enslavement to their notion of time. They will even unlearn their enslavement to separation.
In that distant time after, people will no longer believe they are separate. Nor, of course, will they believe they are one. Both beliefs will be perceived as being as unrealistic as in all reality they are. If you and I were both alive in that distant time after, you would still be you, and I would still be me (as we are now). But we would recognize that we are neither separate, nor are we one. We would perceive that we are as we are: permeable.
And we would perceive that time, too, is permeable, porous; that time is no more linear than a river, that it rushes, slows, eddies, twists, floods, pools, soaks into soil, and permeates air; that time is complex, like a forest, like a prairie, like a desert, like a slough or lake or ocean trench; that it doesn’t progress so much as it grows, becomes tangled; that it flowers and bears fruit, and dies back and regenerates. Time. Not just the effects of time. But time itself.
People—of course, including nonhuman people—will understand all this in the time after.
In the time after, time will not be something to be measured and controlled, confined and subordinated, something to enslave and at the same time be enslaved to. Instead, time will be a cave to be entered and explored (or not); or a lake into which you dive and swim (or not). Time will be food you eat, water you drink, air you breathe. Time will be where you live and who you are. Or not.
In the time after, time will be what it always has been—no matter what we have so frantically made believe—which is life, as solid as the flesh of rocks, as gracious as the flesh of clouds, as graceful as the spaces between ocean waves. In the time after, we will remember how and why to fall back into these spaces, and we will remember grace and graciousness and solidity, and once again and at long last we will realize that we are no longer and have never been separate, and once again and at long last we will rejoin the living.
That will all come, and will all be, in the time after.
“In the Time After” originally appeared in The Time After (Front 40 Press). Read our interview with Doug Fogelson about the new book of photography and essays.
