Marvel-apoca-unpoca-stutter-lypse
The most recent version of the apocalypse that seeped into public consciousness was Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War. Instead of saving the world (sorry, universe) before it ended, the Avengers had to wait a whole sequel to re-pocalyp/unpocalyp (or just repopulate) the universe. Keep in mind, this is just the universe of Marvel, where gods, superheroes, mythical beasts, tech-heroes and Americans are all equal in the eyes of their Creator. In some strange democratic impulse, everything has equal value, except for that part of humanity that is not a Marvel hero, anti-hero or god – i.e. humanity itself.
Anyway, for whatever reason, Marvel is an authority now. Maybe it’s because they conflate marketing with film-making, character-forming with brand-building, insane story-arcing with size and scope. Maybe it’s because of their capacity for ruthless, relentless self-replication. Or maybe there’s a much simpler reason, like having more money, or something.
So Marvel made an apocalypse. It came with an exciting catch-moment – a large purple dude called Thanos snapped his fingers. Imagine the pop-culture-ad-culture references for years to come! So, Thanos snapped his fingers, and half or more of the Marvel-universe died. I’m not sure if stars supernovaed spontaneously, if planets imploded, if random meteors attacked large beasts who weren’t bothering anyone. As far as I know, many humans and humanoids of different colours were killed. And enough were left behind to, well, reverse the apocalypse? Revert? Relypse? Relapse? Re-script? Re-script the same damn film?
Nevermind. What is important is that something ended, and an apocalypse was made. We will ignore the sequel. Interestingly, the finger-snapping film is also part of a chain of sequels/Marvelevents, one of which was Thor: Ragnarok, where also a world was supposed to end (but was averted because Hulk came to help the gods and apparently wrestled Fenrir). They took Ragnarok a lot less seriously in terms of apocalyptic gravitas – maybe because Captain America wasn’t a part of this world-saving, and they assumed that without some clearly visible American flag-waving there was neither a world worth saving nor a saving worth world-building.
Ragnarok
For the longest time, I wasn’t interested in Ragnarok either. The Norse gods looked like a petty, squabbling group of infantile alter-humans to me, and it didn’t seem at all unlikely that they would destroy the world with their venality and stupidity. They were just about annoying enough to be painfully familiar.
That was until I read AS Byatt’s Ragnarok: The End of the Gods, which was a story told within a semi-autobiographical story of being a child in wartime Britain, going into seclusion in the countryside, being terrified of The End, and actively seeking out an ending. She said, a real ending. It had to be an end of everything, not a speck of life to remain. Because anything else would be a sham. The great fearful truth had to be told, anything that would comfort or resurrect the world would be an untruth. So she didn’t bother with the sequel, the post-apocalypse re-birth.
She finished the story without looking for saving graces or compromises. I felt a little more connected to the gods as they appeared here, in this version. They weren’t tiresome humans so much as painful expansions of humanity in its extremes, life the universe and everything in its untouchable bigness.
I also understood how the idea of an ending was coded into the story. Baldur was the springtime of the world. When Baldur died, something essential would be lost. The capacity to regenerate, the hope of life growing somewhere underground, the light in the dark. It was also obvious that Baldur would die. It was unpleasant but not impossible to accept this as a part of a big story. In smaller worlds, in more perceptible environments, this loss would be unbearable.
Image: Priyadarshini John
For Marvel-style apocalypses, on the other hand, where you can save the world before, in between and after the world ends, they should probably have each character clone his/herself at the start of every film. That way they don’t have to keep hopping back and forth in time, and the franchise doesn’t have to lose the money they spent building that whole character-brand-actor-hybrid creature.
Troublemakers
Loki was not so much a troublemaker as an agent of chaos who was almost helpless in his incapacity to be contained and placed within the order. Jormungandr, one of Loki’s monster-children, was a great serpent who started off just enjoying water and light, swimming with her father. Then she got hungry. Then this hunger turned into a great, all-encompassing greed. She got bigger and bigger. She ate without stopping, without knowing, without seeing, until she felt a terrible pain that took a long time to wind round to her brain, until she finally realized that she had bitten her own tail. Wound round the world, she sank to the bottom of the sea, waiting for the end. The hunger that finally cannibalized itself.
And Fenrir was not so much an oversized animal, but a monster-child of rage. Unstoppable anger. Again, a thing that cannot be contained, that cannot be diverted, not even by the prospect of total annihilation. Chained until the end of the world, when his task is to eat the moon.
Because, the tragedy of Loki, Jormungandr, and even Fenrir, is that when everything ends, they will also end. Since we’re children, we’re told that the bad guys are the ones who cause harm, hurt or suffering, but we’re also taught that they do it for personal gain, for power or wealth. By the standards of childhood morality, Loki, Jormungandr and Fenrir are not evil. They gain in size, but their real stage is the end of the world, and however they play it, they will not survive it.
Marvel resolved this problem by having Thanos kill only a percentage of the population of its universe, and being one of the survivors. Though even that didn’t look so gainful, what with having killed his daughter, wearing a gauntlet that continued to look ridiculous even after it had done its dire deeds, and discovering that the universe looks as meaningless in halves as it did in wholes. But maybe Thanos was too stupid to think very deeply about what he’d done or undone.
Will you be here next week?
I spent many years in a relationship with someone who couldn’t answer a single question with a straight answer. Who could, just about, barely commit to being in the same country tomorrow, or for a week-and-a-quarter-and-a-spare. When I asked specific questions, like, have you booked your ticket, when will you leave, how long will you be here, he’d say something different each time. And if I pressed for certainty, he’d say, I don’t know, what if the apocalypse comes? Interestingly, he never said this when we were apart, only when we were both in the same city, country, place, house. Like the apocalypse was something that could only be imagined or spoken of in togetherness.
This response did strange, contradictory things to my mind. Firstly, it made uncertainty a given. I couldn’t verify that the world would not end next week, so I didn’t bother to ask for further confirmations from him. Secondly, it made the apocalypse a living, present thing, like a beast, a part of our daily lives and a participant in our relationship, forever moving closer or further away, depending on the question asked. Thirdly, it made togetherness itself, somehow, seem safer, warmer, more cuddly. A little bubble of brightness, constantly tossed around by the winds of impending apocalypses. A fragile thing, a warm thing, a candlelit thing, but also a blanket, a pillow, a cave to hide from a world that was always on the verge of ending.
Watching the skies
I always imagined that the end of the world would be something like rain, or thunder, or lightning, that it would come out of the skies, that at the moment when it happened, we’d all be looking up.
A little while back, here in India, we saw a great black fog coming over us, spreading across the country, in the dead of winter. It didn’t come from the skies, it came, like everything does these days, in news articles, in announcements, in pronouncements. Things I try to avoid in general, but which have a way of sneaking into your consciousness, sometimes, just like Marvel.
Yet, for some reason, I felt that we were watching the skies. Because, really, the sky seemed to have darkened. The apocalypse doesn’t start at the heavens, no matter how stupid the gods are. I really think that humans have enough stupidity, greed and rage to end almost anything without outside help. But maybe we have the power to impact the gods, the skies, the heavens, or at least one or two of them. Because, for one month, the sky was dark, and we seemed to be watching it.
Image: Priyadarshini John
All through that month, as I thought about the things we were losing – humanity, identity, hope, a sense of things being liable to get better not worse – I also thought about the many times I had felt this before, in the past decade.
That this was not a loss of the moment. That many deaths had happened before it. When I was a child, I read an extract from a story called Iron Man (L’Homme de Fer). It was not a comic. The iron man in this story is someone who cannot be killed, a demonic figure, but for some reason I was on his side. Children can be idiosyncratic in their choice of heroes. At the end of a scene of mortal combat, he is finally killed, and it is unclear whether he is a demon, an old man, or a beautiful young man. The thing I remember most clearly though, is that this ending, though dramatic, was not The End. As someone insisted, or some insisted, the Iron Man had died already, before the great battle, at the hands of a woman.
The exact location and time of the death of this man that for some reason I had decided to adopt as hero – maybe because it was so certain that he would die, just like Baldur – is not the point. The point is that it had occurred to me, for the first time, that a person or a thing could die more than once.
The problem of persisting
Ursula Le Guin, in her introduction to The Birthday of the World, talked about the sixties, when, as she says, they were obsessed with The End of the World as We Know It. At the time of writing, she said, the world as I knew it has already ended several times. It didn’t mean, she said, that the great, absolute concerns of the sixties were unfounded. Those fears remained. But the world could and did end, in a thousand other ways. I thought that it took something, both strength and stamina, to acknowledge that.
Because, as we all discovered, as the decade ended, the year ended, the earth started its new turn and the world turned black, the problem is not just the world ending. It’s what you do after that, with yourself, because so many of us persist, continue, live, past the end of everything we knew and hoped for.
In those times in the relationship when we had a week or two left before a separation i.e. an apocalypse, there was a comforting huddle, a warmth that was almost magnetic. The period after, when the separation actually happened, was dully real, mundane. Everyday bullshit. The apocalyptic bullshit seemed better.
So after watching the world end, you find yourself living, and watching a process of disintegration that you’re not even sure will finish in your lifetime.
What it means to live
Byatt wanted an ending. At the end of Ragnarok, there is nothing. No field of destruction, no pile of bodies, no smoke, no critters, not even a mushroom cloud. Nothing but silence, an inky black pool. I can see it so clearly, this pool that emphasizes the nothingness rather than populating it.
Image: Priyadarshini John
Thanos wanted some bullshit. A little like that bullshit-apocalypse that avoids some truth. Maybe he was avoiding the truth of his lack of imagination. He killed a bunch of people, kept himself alive and wore a tacky gauntlet. He didn’t live up to his name so much as be half-assed about it.
I imagine that most real-world world-enders are like Thanos. Half-assed wearers of tacky clothing.
I don’t know if Loki wanted the world to end, so much as to run along some misguided path of destruction. But the problem with that idea is who’d you blame? Who made that path? You need to have someone to blame for the end of the world. I have someone to blame for the end of all my worlds. I don’t want to imagine a spiritual, cyclical season of destruction. I want to know that we’re all responsible for our capacity for evil, and our containment of it, much more than Loki, who is after all just a god.
But even that is just a mental exercise. At the end of it, I still find myself, in spite of it all, persisting. How does one do that?
Many years ago, at the end of a relationship (apocalyptic), I wrote this to myself: to not die is to keep learning how to live, over and over again. Ironically, the time when I wrote this, I was deeply suspicious of survival. I thought of it as a desensitized, semi-vegetative state of disconnection from the world and everything in it.
Photo: Priyadarshini John
I learnt, since, that there are many ways of not dying that don’t involve more subtle deaths. One of them is this:
In apocalyptic times, don’t look away, don’t disconnect. Let the black rain fall, allow yourself to be swallowed by the fog, let the darkness overwhelm you, until it feels like you’re walking blindfolded. Let your spirit be eaten, be killed, be buried, and then, eventually, let yourself be resurrected.
