What If | Tomorrow: In one of the many moving essays from your nonfiction project, Mothership, you write that “Compassion for my future planet keeps me writing.” While “words don’t suck carbon from the atmosphere,” they are your “offering.” What does this form of compassion offer the future? What does it offer the present?
Greg Wrenn: Your question has me thinking about what compassion really means. The definition I return to is “the quivering of the heart in response to suffering.” The quivering is not intellectual. It’s in the body, in the moment.
I felt that quivering when I had a dream about my great-niece in the 23rd century and when I’ve snorkeled dead reefs. You and I likely feel it when we see a photo of an emaciated polar bear. You can feel it reading Octavia Butler’s dystopian novel Parable of the Sower, imagining our own children and nephews as climate refugees trudging north for a cooler place to call home.
What that kind of compassion offers is a thimbleful of connectedness. A moment of rewiring of the brain away from panicky selfishness and toward selfless care and maybe even cooperation. If we’re going to survive, we must swim against the TikTok current, train ourselves to care again, to stick together and mobilize. Compassion is going to help sustain us as we race to keep our planet habitable. And in the process, trite as it may sound, we will have to return to loving our neighbor as ourselves.
WIT: Hybridity, you write in your meditation on Anne Carson, “seeks new solutions to old, urgent problems.” At the same time, as you write elsewhere, “Within my lifetime, coral reefs will be gone.” What helpful shapes might hybridity yet take?
GW: I think the collective realization that we’re already hybrids could be helpful. With the digital cocaine of our phones, we are cyborg primates—remembering that once again can get me unplugging and more available for the compassion I just spoke about. With our microbiomes—microbiota?—we are each a mammalian terrarium for bacteria more numerous than the human cells in our bodies. It’s good and productive to be estranged from who you thought you were.
And on the evolutionary tree, orangutans and humans, which share 97% of their DNA, have a common ancestor from 15 million years ago. We and mushrooms—and scorpions and elephants—have a common ancestor. As hybrids of a sort, we draw upon that evolutionary heritage, whether we like it or not, and look at what we’ve become! Self-aggrandizing, suicidal cockroaches. And yet to wake up to the fact of our mysterious hybridity, our Mr. Potato Head-like complexity, is also to know our interconnectedness. If we can viscerally acknowledge the creatures of our planet as kin, perhaps we will choose a different path.
Can enough of us do that in time? Probably not—this is where artificial intelligence, if it doesn’t destroy us first, could be useful. Once it’s integrated into the human brain—this is not far off at all—perhaps A.I. will nudge us toward kindness and sustainability, like a hive-minded guru implanted in our pre-frontal cortex. Hatred and climate denialism are illogical if your end game is happiness. If you destroy your only home, what then?
WIT: In your recent work, wonder and presence seem to function almost as antidotes to “future-tripping.” But you also seem to suggest there are limits to these tools. What lies on the other side of wonder? Is there a presence beyond presence?
GW: Wonder, from my vantage point, is a gateway to Absolute Mystery. What that is, or isn’t, I can’t say. “God” as a word is too burdened with bearded, judgy connotations. I think the Tibetan word rigpa is useful here—you can’t perfectly translate it, but it’s something like the pristine, utterly unfettered, empty essence of the mind. Wonder could take us there. Intensive meditation paired with psychedelics like DMT might also be a way in, but be careful!
WIT: What are you doing tomorrow? And, perhaps more importantly, what do you wish you were doing?
GW: Tomorrow, the first day of our Spring Break, I hope to read a book in the sunshine and eat a couple corn dogs.
What I wish I were doing tomorrow is scuba diving! And flying on the back of a pterodactyl!
A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Greg Wrenn is the author of Mothership, a forthcoming memoir about turning to coral reefs and psychedelic medicine to heal from childhood trauma, and the poetry collection Centaur. His work has appeared in The New Republic, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. Wrenn teaches at James Madison University, where he weaves climate change science into the study of literature. You can find him at gregwrenn.com.