What do you do when you realize the world has gone wrong? To whom do you turn? There is no absolution for such crime, no accolade that matters after such knowledge, no escape except by useless suicide. You are trapped in that bright moment. In a way it is a polymorphously perverse reversal of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. Instead of the development of an individual organism mirroring the development of the species, it is how the extinction of species mirrors the extinction of our own hopes and dreams.
Once upon a time I thought there was a way. For one wild high season anything seemed possible, but something happened – the weather turned, the dream fell down, a crack in the armour of dawn let burst the blinding light and the whole world turned to stone. All the old categories, the hierarchies of despair, fell back into place, grinding out their relentless tune. The sleepwalkers stride resolutely towards a glorious future, and everywhere ‘the ceremony of innocence is drowned’, and everywhere the land lies in ruins, more desolate as more species die.
Come. Let us sing of the deaths of worlds.