What We Can Know - 15

O n the suggestion of my wife and my old tutor’s stabbing finger, I became the biographer of the reputation of an unread poem. Perhaps I was never anything else. Here is a summary. The Corona was recited by its author at a dinner 107 years ago in October 2014. From then until 2021, an important year in my research, the following happened. Harry Kitchener wrote a letter in which he referred to the first ‘immortal dinner’ and announced a masterpiece. In 2016, he died. A year later, an unattributed blog quoted him and spoke of the ‘Second Immortal Dinner’. I have shown that there was nothing immortal about it. The company mostly daydreamed tipsily while Blundy read. An article by ‘Jane Smith’ spoke of ‘Blundy’s “precious gift”’. Harriet Gage’s 2017 Guardian article saw the poem through her own Derangement concerns and asked why it had not been published. Francis Blundy died soon after. Rumours spread on social media of fossil-fuel interests paying him to suppress his poem. The conspiracies were dismissed in mainstream quarters. Vivien Blundy was upset by what she thought was a misleading portrayal of her marriage to the poet and was determined to keep the Corona out of circulation.

2021 was the notable year in the Corona odyssey. My discovery was accidental. A year ago, our students were developing a distorted and negative notion of the past as it related to our 90–30 seminars. It was mostly due to Rose’s influence, for she was forceful and persuasive in class. I believed the students needed to find out for themselves that people of those times were not all greedy fools. Not only climate scientists, but millions, even hundreds of millions of ordinary people understood the processes of the Derangement. I persuaded Rose to let me set our students a project on the opposition to fossil-fuel interests.

The kids’ contempt for the past could be challenged by the activities of long-ago young protesters. People just like themselves with a serious mission. Since this was my idea, I marked the projects. The work was above average, decently presented with photographs, videos, charts and diagrams. The essays were semi-literate but adequate by the low standards imposed from above – it would not help our funding if too many students were to fail. The kids were doing their best with what they knew. One shy young woman, Michelle, who had never spoken up in the seminars, had written about an international Derangement conference in Glasgow in 2021. Interspersed through her essay were photographs of protest marches. My attention happened to settle on a photograph of a teenage boy. He held up a placard in a forest of placards. BLUNDY SPOKE TRUE. I zoomed in on the face. Of course, it told me nothing.

Here was evidence of the Corona drifting free of the page, the scroll, and trickling through the interstices of the internet and through to the Derangement movement. I began searching for Blundy’s name in the activist sites. Within seconds I had this from an American e-zine, Joshua Tree . The dateline was August 2020. ‘Blundy’s poem, suppressed by Dark Oil, was a masterpiece, reputedly the greatest work ever achieved on the need to change our ways through love.’ I found 107 mentions of Blundy’s name between 2018 and 2020. Then 678 between 2021 and 2025. The sites were obscure, needing password access. The German site Final People , which encouraged sabotage, was encrypted and required extra software that was hard to locate, but I succeeded. In 2030, a Danish e-zine in several languages published its first issue. Its name was Blundy . Across many of these outlets, the oil conspiracy theory was routinely cited, merely to emphasise the importance of the poem. Some early mentions of Blundy came during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, when attempts were made to link the poem to a disease. By 2035 it was possible to buy a T-shirt with the poet’s face printed on it in black and white.

‘Blundy corona’ also took me to relationship sites. Here the connection was to ‘deep love’, the marriage or love affair that lasts forty or fifty years. How the lover loved only his lass, how the ravages of the decades could not breach the calm of the inner keep. A glance in one of the many Blundy biographies would have shown that his marriage lasted thirteen years, until his death. That was not relevant. People in the developed world were living longer. The old were getting older. Seventy, even eighty years of marriage was becoming possible, a perfect encapsulation of hell to some, to others a noble goal. To a wide online community, the Corona was the revered manifesto, the long poem to celebrate a long love. ‘We are a Blundy couple of sixty-one years …’ one posting began. The poet’s name and his poem were evoked with minimal knowledge of the source. A parallel might be ‘Shangri-la’, used as a synonym for a paradise on earth with no awareness of its origins in a largely forgotten bestselling novel of the 1930s.

Many reasons have been given for the decline of the climate-change movement in the twenty-first century. I would propose Derangement itself. The planet, with almost 200 jostling nations, was already tense. Some historians have marked the beginning of the new dark age with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and that is where quite a few history books begin or end. I would propose the first climate war in 2036, one in a sequence, between two nuclear states, India and Pakistan, traditional enemies. One issue was water, once plentiful in the form of Himalayan glacier-fed ice-melt. Now, as long predicted, drying up. The two states were prepared to obliterate one another. The world, as the cliché ran, held its breath, and it is not easy to organise or attend mass protests in favour of decarbonising civilisation or write books about it when you are holding your breath. While the slaughter began in the traditional way, with infantry, artillery and drone units fully engaged, the missiles and their launchers stood ready. Nationalist and religious fury merged in both states. Merciful Allah on one side, diverse gods, some with elephant trunks, on the other, inflamed and blessed their separate constituencies. The tension lasted months. The armies clashed, there were gains here, losses there, and then, prompted by hair-trigger artificial intelligence choosing the pre-emptive option, missiles were launched, two from each side. They were of ‘limited’ yield, but with over a million killed instantly, they were enough to cause each side to draw back in horror and diplomatic peace missions to rush in to take advantage of the lull.

Meanwhile, two other crises were developing to the west and east. Against such catastrophe and general global frailty, people clung to notions of survival, of making bunkers, of fleeing cities and of writing peace plans. When Saudi Arabia joined cause with Israel to invade Iran and deny it possession of nuclear weapons, they discovered that it already had some. In that chaos, six ‘battlefield’ nuclear weapons were exploded over the heads of the respective armies. Again, AI on both sides, hungrily and blindly seeking advantage, decided that attack was the best form of defence. It was not known how many tens of thousands died. In the Taiwan Straits, there was an exchange of fire between Chinese and US navies. A year passed before the notorious sinking of an American aircraft carrier and the death of 2,500 sailors. Little hope now of encouraging governments around the world to resist Derangement. Francis Blundy, by way of his Corona, ceased to be the high priest of altered climate or undying love and became instead the prophet of the biosphere.

As the world economy broke apart and nature rose against us, ideas of progress or even change slowly vanished. Survival was the thing. People wanted to cling to what they could rescue. In our times, we have grown used to nothing much being different across the generations. We are approaching the stasis of pre-modern days, when children could expect to live the lives of their parents and grandparents. Our relative isolation has enforced a form of peace, which some like me take to be stagnation. We cannot imagine how it was a hundred years ago, to experience the vertigo of accelerating change imposed by new technologies, by novel belief systems and by wars. People were blinded by the pace of events. They could not think clearly, even when there rose out of adversity some obvious benefits. It was repugnant to accept that the savagery of war had offered the possibility of a reprieve, a chance to correct the errors of the past. Nuclear explosions in the deserts of the Middle East and the hard-baked earth of the subcontinent disgorged into the upper atmosphere gigatons of dust and sand, much of it fine gypsum that lingered and filtered the sun’s harsh light. Over the graves of millions, the earth began to cool. What came now was not the nuclear winter that scientists had once predicted, for this was not an all-out global exchange. In five years, average global temperatures dropped by almost two degrees and did not rise for many years. There were other small wars distracting attention. Acknowledgement of a ‘climate opportunity’ came slowly to a dazed world.

This was because of a catastrophic distraction, the Inundation of 2042. The long-predicted war between Russia and the West began with yet another pre-emptive strike, this one aimed most likely at US military installations in New Mexico. Faulty engineering caused the missile to drop 4,000 miles short. The outsized hydrogen bomb hurled seventy-metre-high waves towards Europe, West Africa and North America. Too deadly to be the accident the Russian authorities claimed? That question was never resolved. There were only a few hours of warning. The survivors were those who trusted their governments sufficiently to act, had transport and were not trapped in traffic jams and knew the routes to higher ground. Three-quarters of the Atlantic-facing populations were not so lucky or well resourced. Even cities on sheltered coasts were swamped. Lagos, London, Rotterdam, Hamburg and most of Paris did not emerge from under the counter-surges that raced up estuaries, or from the savage storms that followed. In revenge assaults, Russia lost Petersburg before international diplomacy prevailed. The list of vanished cities is long. More than 200 million died. Britain became an archipelago, its population halved. However, none of the twenty-first century’s nuclear exchanges led to total war and humanity’s extinction. There was our morsel of consolation. We were not so irrational after all.

Against all expectations, within twenty years of the Inundation, the post-nuclear global cooling was encouraging a new spirit of optimism. The trauma and mourning were beginning to fade. Initiatives to decarbonise were returning, boosted by a collapse in industrial production and global trade. Public demands to save vanishing flora and fauna, sometimes unrealistic or sentimental, were growing. By then, the destruction of the biosphere was beyond the worst of earlier fears. Unrestrained corporations, reluctant governments, poverty and armed struggle made the early twenty-first century look species-rich. Now, old romantic yearnings for thriving nature – or biophilia, a term once made current by the great biologist E. O. Wilson – were unstoppable. By the time of the Inundation the knowledge base had mostly been digitalised and distributed. Thousands of years of cultural expression were swept away, but multiple copies survived in zeros and ones. Scientific insight was regaining confidence. Rapidly reconstructed institutes headed for the highest ground in case of future waves. With old dreams revived came renewed interest in the lost ecology of animals and plants within the fifteen sonnets of the Corona. The Second Immortal Dinner of 2014 seemed as remote as the court of King Alfred. To those who loved poetry, it was irresistible to put the poem, or their idea of the poem, to contemporary use. It was a hymn to the glories of nature.

It is a wonder that a poem, let alone an unread poem, could have such a vigorous life in the culture – and its story still had decades to run before the present day. In the late twenty-first century, even as wars broke out in the Pacific (China against South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines and others), vanished poem and vanished opportunities coalesced into a numinous passion for what could not be had, a sweet nostalgia that did not need a resolution. This was demonstrated in the various poetry competitions to reimagine and write Blundy’s poem. There was little public interest in the winner. When Mabel Fisk wrote fifteen sonnets in corona form to recreate Blundy’s work, her adoring critics dismissed the result. A novelist, however important, had no business flaunting herself in the clothes of a great poet.

The Corona was more beautiful for not being known. Like the play of light and shadow on the walls of Plato’s cave, it presented to posterity the pure form, the ideal of all poetry. Any upstart version was a relegation to the abject humdrum real. My guess is that if ever the one true scroll were to be found, the excitement would not spread far beyond academia. Compressed diction, challenging imagery, the ‘artful braiding within its pentameters of iambs and trochees’ – H. Kitchener – and all the other demands of serious poetry would ensure the Corona’s death before a larger public.

The imagined lords it over the actual – no paradox or mystery there. Many religious believers do not want their God depicted or described. Happiness is ours if we do not have to learn how our electronic machines work. The characters we cherish in fiction do not exist. As individuals or nations we embellish our own histories to make ourselves seem better than we are. Living out our lives within unexamined or contradictory assumptions, we inhabit a fog of dreams and seem to need them.

I write here of global tragedies purely in the context of Blundy’s Corona. That period of ‘Climate Opportunity’ and ecological longing lasted no more than thirty years. The long-delayed Third Sino-American War broke out as the inevitable overspill of the Pacific chaos. Though ‘contained’ by improved AI to conventional exchanges, many famous cities were turned to ashes. Worldwide disease, famine, drought, unprecedented mass migrations – no one had time for poetry or any other cultural endeavour. Survival was the only dream, which many did not fulfil. Between then and now, our numbers fell from nine to four billion, but still, in our calmer, or moribund, twenty-second century, ‘A Corona for Vivien’ remains precious for those who care, a talisman to the survivors and a promise of a better future. A poem has served history well by remaining a blank sheet.