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In the Middle
peace love & the middle ages

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by J J Cohen
a medieval studies group blog
Below you'll find an essay in progress on Noah's Flood and the stories we tell about climate change. It's a draft,
and already too long for the forum in which it will appear (a massive anti-keywords in ecotheory project that I
will blog about eventually, and in which it will likely bear the title "Drown"). I have delivered various bits and
pieces of the essay this spring at GWU, Washington and Jefferson College, and Emory University, and I'm
grateful for the audience feedback at each of these forums. I realize this could easily become a book project, and I
am attempting to resist that siren's call.

Let me know what you think.

We are experts at imagining end times [1]. After four millennia of practice, crafting narratives of worldly

obliteration comes easily. The Epic of Gilgamesh is (in Dan Brayton's wet words) “a text haunted by rising waters
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and disaster” [2]. The Book of Revelation promises sudden global warming, a flood of flame. Millenarianism
springs eternal, from the long enduring “Fifteen Signs Before Doomsday” tradition to the “Left Behind” series.[3] Search

Never out of print since its publication in 1960, Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz is only one of
It's not easy to see things in the
many imaginings of the long aftermath of nuclear winter. A genre recently dubbed CliFi envisions the drenched
middle, rather than looking
vagaries of life in the Anthropocene. Venerable in its plotline and conventions, apocalypse is familiar, almost down on them from above or up
at them from below, or from left
comforting. If the world must terminate in fire or flood, the ecological devastation we foster through every car
to right or right to left: try it,
trip, meal and vacation ceases to trouble. But whereas catastrophe used to arrive in the thunder of heavenly you'll see that everything
changes.
revelation, the radiant unveiling of a divine plan for human destiny, the ruin of the Earth is now typically born of

anthropogenic climate change, ice melt, greenhouse heat, tempest, sea rise. Secular apocalypse is, in the words of -- Deleuze and Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus
Lawrence Buell, “the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has

at its disposal.”[4] We cannot not think in catastrophic terms. But as we brace for denouement in storm and
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tempest, what does our apocalyptic imagination unveil about the limits of our environmental frames, the limits of
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the stories that we tell?
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Noah's Arkive
To imagine future catastrophe’s unfolding we deploy familiar frames, especially those provided by the "It is unethical."
story of Noah’s Flood. This chapter contributes to a long history of meditating upon the world left behind when NCS 2016 CFP, and thinking
about the future of the...
we suppose a watery end inevitable, when we preserve the world for small community – a tradition that crosses
Elemental Ecocriticism: We
centuries and might be called, in homage to Timothy Findley, Not Wanted on the Voyage. We exclude mightily Have a Cover
when we build an ark, or erect a gated community, or construct a wall along a nation’s border, three versions of MLA Ecocriticism and
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the same story, as if we could like Noah construct a protective chest in which to dwell, some arkitecture of shelter Humanities Foru...
and exclusion to hold against waves of water or of climate refugees, against violence swift or slow.[5] We imagine What You Can Do To Help:
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promised never to send again, surges anew. We know already the contours of this narrative’s unfolding: the
Deluge is coming, get ready to drown. Yet in that resignation to submergence, to biblical replay in a proleptic yet Contributors

scientific mode, we lose sight of the actual complexity of the Noah story in Genesis as well as its vigorous Cord J. Whitaker
afterlife. Climate change requires more and better stories than the ones we have been telling. The Genesis account JH
of Noah and its retellings in the long centuries that followed offer a diverse and enduring arkive, a source for Jeffrey Cohen
counter-narratives that do not make of a coming Flood untroubled waters. We typically take from Genesis the Leila K. Norako

narrative’s barest elements (command, ark, animals, dove, rainbow) and its most dangerous affect, an Mary Kate Hurley

acquiescence to sinking things below the waters, a resignation that sometimes threatens to become a joy. We Unknown

submit too easily to imagining a world in which global warming will render the view from St Paul’s in London

difficult to tell from the vistas of its former colonies, as Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones envision in an
image (“St Paul’s Monkeys”) from their climate change awareness project “Postcards from the Future.” Simians

perch serenely at the top of the church, surveying flooded streets, as if England were India or Gibraltar. As the
oceans rise, a global connectedness that already binds us becomes materially palpable. In other pictures from the

same series, Graves and Madoc-Jones place rice paddies in front of the houses of Parliament, and shanties around
Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square. But think for a minute about point of view in such images. Who is the
assumed viewer of this world in which monkeys, beasts of burden, laborers in rice paddies, shanty and souk
dwellers are decorative signifiers of climate indifference, of a world altered environmentally and offered as

marvel? Monkeys, oxen, rice pickers and the global poor go about doing what they do, only they are here now, in
London, in our space. But pause for a moment over that first person plural possessive. In the wake of catastrophe

suffering is unequally distributed. The flood makes evident a lack of affective connection already present, the
everyday inability of sympathy to cross boundaries of nation, race, species, class.
in medias res

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All the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the flood gates of heaven were open. It’s

irresistible: projecting ourselves into the future, imagining we can view below us the topography of cities drowned
in rising seas. The blogger Burrito Justice famously created such a map for San Francisco, detailing the

transformation of its hills into islands, streets in ocean floor. Inspired by this post-deluge cartography, the urban
planner Jeffrey Linn fashioned a series of beautiful maps that with seeming accuracy demonstrate the inundation

of familiar metropolises in the wake of ice sheet melt. Linn’s Manhattan suffers one hundred feet of searise:
Brooklyn Heights become Brooklyn Depths, Midtown rendered Middrown. Nearby are Central Shark, Hell’s
Quicksand, and the Upper East Tide. And the waters increased. At 240 feet of sea level change, Seattle becomes

an archipelago. On Linn’s map the outlines of submerged streets are discernable beneath vivid blue ocean, a
reminder of what is lost as the Emerald City becomes Atlantis. And the waters prevailed beyond measure upon the

earth: and all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered. Portland illustrates 250 feet of flood, the
city is transformed into a series of artisanally molded islands, with the Columbia Gorge an inlet and the

Willamette River a new sea. Think of all the hand crafted blueberry basil bourbon doughnuts floating like tiny life
rings. And he destroyed all the substance that was upon the earth, from man to beast, and the creeping things and

fowls of the air: and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained, and they that were with him in
the ark.
 Thomas Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth

To return once more to point of view: these maps of sinking cities enact what Donna Harawayhas called
“the god trick,” assuming a perspective that serenely floats about observed facts. At such critical distance truth
(disembodied, viewable only from an outside) appears. Catastrophe becomes conceptual and foregone, something

we witness approach as we peer down from the clouds. But what about on the ground, entangled knowledge?
Distant perspective abstracts us from forging (in Stacy Alaimo’s words) “more complex epistemological,
ontological, ethical and political perspectives in which the human can no longer retreat into separation and denial
or proceed as if it were possible to secure an inert, discrete, externalized this or that.”[6] In the midst of things

knowing the world is muddy, messy and uncomfortable. You’ll get soaked. You might get stuck. You may even
drown. But environmentality is a mode of material and ethical saturation, promising no dry heaven from which to
view in safety what unfolds during cataclysm. When we imagine that we can behold the world from a distance, we
render ourselves divine. As in the famous illustration of Noah’s ark afloat upon an inundated globe that Thomas
Burnet created for his Sacred Theory of the Earth (1690), perspective recedes so far from anything palpable, from

anything sensible, that submerged expanses cease to trouble. As peaceful as it may be to imagine ourselves the
spirit of God moving over the waters, this perspective deprives us of community not just with fellow humans, but
with the nonhuman world.

To create their “Postcards from the Future,” Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones digitally manipulate
images to portray what climate change brings: everything from drought and tropical incursion to the return of

Frost Fairs on a frozen Thames. Many of their pictures portray a sinking metropolis. In the most breathtaking, the
Thames barrier has failed and London becomes Venice: the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey radiant
in the sunset, encircling streets now shimmering water; the London Eye barely above flood; Southwark yearning
for boats. Graves and Madoc-Jones participate in a long history of submerging the city. J. G. Ballard’s Drowned

World (1962), a forerunner of CliFi, imagines a tropical London in which only skyscrapers remain above the
waves after massive ice melt. The London Magazine in 1899 printed an altered photograph of the city in which
the streets are canals, gondolas gliding their serene expanses. Entitled “If London Were Like Venice: Oh! That It
Were,”the image was created in the days when drowning a city could seem fun. Or maybe it still is. The following

descriptive text appears on the “Postcards from the Future” website, describing the “London as Venice” image:

Like a modern day Canaletto, this disturbing yet strangely peaceful aerial view of a flooded Thames was
inspired by shots of New Orleans submerged under the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina. Curious to
know how London would appear under similar conditions, Graves and Madoc-Jones transposed

projection of a 7.2 metre flooded river on to their digital 3D model of London and aligned with a
photograph of the Thames shot by Jason Hawkes. 7.2 metres is the level at which flood waters would
breach the Thames Barrier. The low light of the photograph creates an evocative sense of dimension to
the view, forming the impression that we are looking at a partially submerged stage-set.
Graves and Madoc-Jones sink London to render the city at once troubling, placid and alluring, an aesthetic
masterpiece, a stage-set, a painting. Yet when hurricane Katrina overwhelmed the levees protecting New Orleans,

beneath the surging waters of the Mississippi were people who lost their lives, people left to drown. In the wake
of catastrophe suffering is unequally distributed. Do you remember how tourists boarded buses to view in air
conditioned comfort the devastation of that hurricane? Do you remember that Katrina revealed the swift violence
of ecological catastrophe as well as the slow violence of persistent, racialized inequality? What would watery
London look like if beheld not through the god trick of celestial and disembodied view, not through the windows

of a tall bus or some other ark that floats over suffering, but from the midst of the sea swell, through the eyes of
those in peril in the waters, those left to suffocate in the surge of the sea?

Noah’s Arkive

Most of us know the story of Noah and the engulfing flood not from Genesis, where the narrative is complicated,

at times impenetrable, but from simplified retellings, such as children’s bibles. A righteous Noah builds a large
boat during sinful times. Animals happily enter two by two, lions mingling with zebras. Rain falls and Noah’s
family is snug against the storm. The story ends with a raven, a dove, an olive branch and a rainbow, celebration
of a cleansed world. Omitted from this version of the Flood is the strange reference to giants (Nephilim) dwelling
on the earth and the oblique suggestion of a primal miscegenation behind their arrival. In Genesis only unclean

beasts were taken in pairs into the ark. The waters prevail for 150 days and then only gradually recede, ensuring
that Noah is arkbound for more than a year. When the family emerges after long sojourn, they sacrifice some
animals and eat others. After Noah and his kin become the first carnivores and devour what had been their ark-
mates, animals and humans henceforth struggle against each other. The rainbow in the sky as sign against future

cataclysm is an actual bow, a weapon that shoots a lethal arrow, a suspended promise-threat. Shortly after he
reclaims the world Noah becomes so drunk on wine that he passes out. When Cham laughs at his father’s
nakedness, Noah curses his descendants to eternal slavery.

Etymologically related to the root that also gives us archive, an ark is not a ship but a chest (a place for

keeping records and stories safe, and a source of authority). Not all of the stories collected in Noah’s arkive
cohere: sons of God and daughters of men, giants, inebriated nudity, a threat within a promise, a patriarch who
does not argue, a movement from cross-species companionship to animal sacrifice and consumption. Nor is
Noah’s vessel necessarily the gated community it becomes through translation into Latin arca. The Hebrew word

‫[ תֵּ בָ ה‬tebah] seems to mean a box, boat or basket. It is used only in one other time in Torah, to describe the floating
reeds upon which Moses as a baby is conveyed from death. Noah’s arkive is a whirlpool of heterogeneous
narratives, filled with dissonance and counter-stories, a word or chest or basket preserving all kinds of forgotten
tales and alterna-stories. My crazy idea is that if we realized better the complexity of the Noah narrative and its
long history of augmentation and reinvention, we might not be so resigned to climate change, o allowing the

world to drown: an ark not as container but generative spur, arkiving as story-forging and future-making.
 Noah was obedient to God. Commanded to build an ark, he constructed the vessel to precise
specifications. Medieval Christian tradition for the most part praises his obedience and speaks of his perfection.

Islamic and Jewish interpreters could be more ambivalent. Rashi, for example, held that “in relation to his
generation [Noah] was righteous, but had he been in Abraham's generation, he wouldn't have been regarded as
anything” and the Zohar suggests that Noah is culpable for the flood because “because he did not appeal for
mercy on the world's behalf.”[7] When God declares the impending destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in a
flood of fire, Abraham demands: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” Recalling the promises

made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Moses on Mount Sinai refuses to allow an angry deity to destroy the wayward
Israelites and start again. Yet Noah is told to build an ark against flood and complies, leaving the earth to drown.

BL Harley 4381 f. 12

Medieval depictions of Noah and the ark surface the intricacies and possibilities of the Genesis narrative.
In Hebrew and Christian manuscripts as well as sculpture, theark is rendered in so many ways that its status as
ship on the waters is not always certain. Some medieval arks are castles or cathedrals, while others might be a
longboat, house, rectangular box, or floating orb with portals. Animals and people often share facial expressions,
and even fish might have the same look of oceanic peace as they swim below the ark. Survival is for the

determined, and those on board are in it together, a community of men, women, horses, owls, deer, and the
occasional unicorn. The ark itself is often lively, with a zoomorphic prow or rudder. Such lush depiction gets at
the vibrancy of objects in medieval art.[8] Noah’s ark was often read as an allegory, a prefiguring of Christ’s
resurrection and the founding of a new order, with the Flood a kind of universal baptism. A thirteenth century
English manuscript of Peter ofPoitiers’ Compendium Historiae in Genealogia Christi features an ark that looks to
be a gothic cathedral of the sea. But even as allegory burgeons the natural world continues to exert its material
presence. The dark green waters beneath the cathedral-ark are nearly opaque, but an observer can glimpse fish
below the boat: a dynamic world rather than a sea of death, submarine life going on as it always has. The
illustration stresses the intimacy of humans and animals, their shared affect as ark-mates.
 BL Royal 14 B IX

Stories remain alive by mutating into new forms, drawing to themselves roiling subplots and strange

characters, taking unexpected detours. An illustration of Noah’s ark from the Queen Mary Psalter features
transparent waters that reveal the devil making a secret escape from the boat’s bottom. He pulls the tail of the
snake behind him to close the small hole he has bored through the its planks. Above him humans and animals
swim, founder, die. Intent on his business with the dove, Noah does not look at the water -- just as in the upper left
corner a raven is intent on its business with the flesh of a dead horse. Noah thinks that through obedience to God
he has cleansed the world, but the devil’s underwater flight suggests otherwise.

BL Royal 2 B VII f. 7 Noah and the Ark

A possibility this illustration raises is that Noah might have come to fuller and more sober knowledge of

the postdiluvian world were he only to look down, were he to behold the devil he has himself sheltered, were he to
witness the men, women and animals excluded from the ark and about to perish in the sea.
 BL Add MS 47682

The Holkham Bible is a manual for instructing priests how to teach biblical stories. The manuscript
depicts Noah in his ark releasing a raven and dove (ff. 7v.8). Below him swirl aquamarine waves, beautifully
transparent. The corpses of a man, woman, and ox are suspended in the waters, while a dead horse rests upon a
protruding rock – food for the raven. The human and animal bodies drifting through the ocean are in positions
never possible on land, a gravity-less underwater dance. When through the sea drift sensually entwined corpses,
elegant in their aqueous suspension, while Noah looks resolutely forward, enraptured in avian business, what

exactly does the image teach priests to teach their parishioners? In the wake of catastrophe suffering is unequally
distributed. Noah is serene as he tends the birds and assesses the livability of the flooded world for those he has
preserved. But we are forced to look below the waters, to linger on the submerged. Think for a moment of the
words of Abraham to God at the promised destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, “Will you sweep away the
righteous with the wicked?” Was everyone at the bottom of the sea wicked? The ox? The horse? Are we allowed
to tarry over such questions? We could bear in mind that in both Jewish tradition and the Chester Play of Noah’s
Flood, Noah takes one hundred and twenty years to complete the ark, hoping that if he stretches the labor over so
long a period some of the doomed might repent.[9] The Chester Play’s Noah reveals a sympathy not often seen in
the figure, a man usually content to dream of olive branches while the vault of heaven and the abyss pour forth

their waters.
 BNF, Manuscrits, français 28, f. 66v

In a fifteenth century manuscript of Augustine’s Decivitate dei from Rouen, the ark offers room enough
for Noah’s peaceful family, some devils, and a unicorn. The boat is at the front of the picture, the oceanic
background vast and vibrantly blue. Behind the ark a water wheel spins uselessly. Swimmers seek security in
home, church and castle, sinking structures once built against the elements, architectures that used to preserve.

The water is full of detritus: a floating corpse is fresh, another has gone grey. An uprooted tree possesses leaves,
another is a kind of arboreal cadaver. An ox swims; a dog drowns. Yet within this mesh of shared immiseration
crows, ducks, and swans swim as they always do. Blunt rocks indifferently protrude. The deep blues of the scene
are stunning. It is hard to say if we are supposed to feel the peace within the ark, the frustration of the swimmers
who seek a place of rest, the inevitability of bodies and trees becoming flotsam. Something changes, perhaps,
when we notice that just above Noah’s boat and to the left is a cradle that floats like a little ark, empty of its
occupant. Is it possible to see that cradle and not fill it with a story of loss?

Flood, William de Brailes

My punishment is greater than I can bear. These are the words of Cain, the first in a long line of
complainers against God’s justice. Cain’s declaration might also translate as “My sin is greater than I can bear” –
and maybe he means both, that killing his highly favored brother and being exiled from community are

unbearable. Either way he protests his state to God and receives in return a mark that will preserve him. Cain is
the first builder of cities, of those homes and churches and castles that in this illustration are overwhelmed by the
waters on which Noah, his kin, and the animals float in peace. Drown. That would seem the command hurled
against those not wanted on the ark, an imperative that Noah does not protest when directed at those who are not
his family. It is an injunction we repeat ritualistically as we envision climate change. A lively world is stilled into
death, corpses below churning sea, while an ark of the saved floats in safety. In a lush and harrowing thirteenth-
century illustration of the deluge by William de Brailes, however, no ark appears and thereby not much hope
(Walters Art Museum W.106). Scalding waters pour from the heavens. Layers of the dead accumulate like
sediments: the land animals, the beasts of the air, men and women. The exterminated demand examination: piles

of faces, human and animal, layered but not separate. No god trick here. This illustration makes insistently visible
what happens when we surrender the world to submergence. It refuses to hide what unfolds beneath that blue-
green sea. No escape to a transcendent point of view, just immersion in waters that do not cease to flood. William
provides no peace, no refuge, no floating vessel. Anarky. He provides what’s missing from those pictures of a
submerged London, Seattle, New York as seen from the sky. In the wake of catastrophe suffering is unequally
distributed. This suffering binds humans to hares, falcons, pigs, ravens, dogs. The figures on top reach for those
below, their bodies aligned in a downward vector, a postmortem embrace that is strangely touching, difficult to
receive as mere allegory, difficult not to feel. Something here crosses the ages.
 John Wilkins, An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668)

Truth can be a little colder when viewed from above the ark – or even from within. Accepting the literal
factuality of the Bible, John Wilkins in 1668 attempted to map how so much animal diversity could have been
preserved inside a single boat. Wilkins converted every animal collected by Noah into an equivalent number of
cows (beasts feeding on hay), sheep (beasts feeding on fruit, roots, insects) or wolves (carnivores). Humans are
not part of his tally, but it is interesting to note that if they were they would enter the ark as sheep and depart as
wolves. To accomplish his animal calculus, Wilkins thought through the effects of both fair accommodation (in
which each animal is lodged comfortably) versus granting animals only the minimal space required to sustain life

during the voyage. He created a massive floor plan for the ark to demonstrate scientifically how Noah preserved
the animals during the Flood. Wilkins does not wonder about those left outside. He could not have known that his
ark also offered (as LaurieShannon has argued) the blueprint for ships in which humans are reduced to livestock,
enabling a trans-Atlantic slave trade in which some of those on board hurled themselves into the sea rather than
remain in confinement. Another future for this arkitecture is a landlocked one, the factory farm.

Vienna Genesis, ark

We like to think that people in the Middle Ages or before the Enlightenment were nothing like us. As an
inheritance of the flood story we want strong moments of demarcation, secure punctuation of change.
Entanglement is difficult. Despite an abiding love in literary and cultural history for sharp periodizations and

catastrophism, an affective relationship of viewer to the drowned has always been possible. Inthe first illustrated

bible we possess (6th C), those who have not been admitted to a pyramid-shaped ark struggle against the rising
waters and cling to what stone has not yet been swallowed. We cannot always be sure if we are supposed to feel a
sympathetic inclination towards those who struggle against the waters, or take pleasure in the divine justice
enacted. Maybe both. But what matters about such immersive illustrations is that a potential for compassion, of

suffering-with, exists – even if as affective misreading. Sympathy is connection that overleaps resignation to loss,
affirming other futures to forge. A bulwark against fatalism, sympathy renders grim and reflexive bracing for
catastrophe difficult to take seriously in its endless iterations. Apocalypse begins to operate (as Greg Garrard has
shown) in a comic mode, in a mode that exults in the fact that even cataclysm fails to offer an obliterating totality,
an imperative without exception, a story not to be modified. Complacency and resignation are discarded for
endurance, struggle, strange community, the surfacing of hope.
 Noah was obedient to God. He built the ark and never questioned that the waters must arrive, that all
outside must drown. He believed that the world unfolds in a downward turning, a drownward turning, better
things arriving only after a foundational apocalypse wipes away what has been. Catastrophe is, quite literally, that

downward turn (kata- ‘down’ + strophē ‘turning,’ from strephein ‘to turn’). But can we turn catastrophe down?
Or can we at least not be resigned to stories about small communities safe inside their arks? We must embrace the
fact that we have become post-sustainable. No doubt we must desist in attempting to abstract ourselves or float
above the drowning world – must learn immersion, must learn (as Steve Mentz has argued) how to swim. That’s
life in the waterlogged Anthropocene. But swimming can seem too heroic, masculine: (it’s how Beowulf proves
himself in youth worthy of great destiny) – as well as too solitary an endeavor, every man for himself, an embrace
of a waterworld in which it is impossible to keep anyone but yourself afloat. It’s possible even to love that
inundation as a kind of rebirth, the Anthropocene as return to swampy, amniotic prehistory. J. G. Ballard’s
Drowned World, the first work of science fiction to imagine climate catastrophe driven by ice melt, delights in

obliterative individualism. But Beowulf was heroic not for swimming best, nor for being at sea alone, but because
he refused to abandon his competitor to drown during a storm. Only rough waters could part them.

What about those who cannot swim? What about those barred from the ark? What about a community of
the unrelated, or at least affinities that exceed near family? In the Chester Play of Noah’s Flood, a late medieval
drama that re-enacts the Flood story for a city audience, Noah’s wife refuses to board the boat and imagines an
affective gathering of those about to drown. She knows that what is demanded of women in the ark is not
necessarily a way of life to be preserved. She remains with her drinking buddies, the good gossips, as the waters
rise. The song of these women as the waves engulf them resounds as powerfully as the holy hymn sung later on

the ark as it lifts above their drowned bodies. Sinken or swimmen. We might take some solace from the fact that
swim in Middle English means to float and to glide the waves. Swim describes what boats, humans, dolphins and
ducks do in the water. If they all swim in fellowship, in unexpected togetherness, what communities might then
arise?

Geneva Bible, ark

I don’t know what the future holds, but I suspect the frameworks we have internalized from our meager

version of the biblical Flood are not serving us well in imagining the contours of life – all life -- in the
Anthropocene. Let’s open the arkive. Let’s cease to be resigned to allowing people or animals or even olive trees
and rocks to drown. Let’s keep in mind that a future of submerged cities is a future of unequally distributed
suffering, of environmental injustice. Katrina and New Orleans taught us that. So does the Noah story in its
fullness. By not embracing resignation we can turn down catastrophe -- even if we cannot escape watery
perturbations. An ark’s value may not in in its walls so much as in their breaching, in their ability even as flotsam

to enable as wide a collective as possible not to drown. So, build an ark if you must, but keep in mind that its
fellowship will gather a community of humans and nonhumans alike, an arkive of the diverse that offers little
stability. Let your ark have many windows. Let its occupants go for the occasional swim, mingle with the sea.
And if a giant riding a unicorn decides to join you – hey, that’s OK too. The world is always wider than we expect.

Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends, 1919

[1] On the long history of dreaming the apocalypse in the West, see Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism 2nd ed. (London:
Routledge, 93-116). Garrad writes perceptively of what he calls the “secular apocalypse.”

[2] Dan Brayton, “Writ in Water: Far Tortuga and the Crisis of the Marine Environment,” PMLA 127.3 (2012):
565-71 (at 570). For a consideration of the long history of imagining the world ending in flood, see Norman Cohn,
Noah’s Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), especially 1-21.

[3] On the enduring tradition of the signs that will betray the world’s end (most of which are environmental
changes such as earthquakes, fore and flood), see William W. Heist’s classic study The Fifteen Signs Before
Doomsday (East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1952). A portal to the Left Behind media industry may
be found at http://www.leftbehind.com/

[4] The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995) 285.

[5] Cf. Rob Nixon: “Neoliberalism’s proliferating walls concretize a short-term psychology of denial: the delusion
that we can survive long term in a world whose resources are increasingly unshared. The wall, read in terms of
neoliberalism and environmental slow justice, materializes temporal as well as spatial denial through a literal
concretizing of out of sight out of mind” (Slow Violence 20). Cf. 265, on walled communities.

[6] “Sustainable This, Sustainable That: New Materialisms, Posthumanism, and Unknown Futures,” PMLA 127.3
(2012):558-64, at 563.

[7] For a convenient collation of sources see http://www.chabad.org/parshah/in-depth/plainBody_cdo/AID/2599

and
http://www.hebrew4christians.com/Scripture/Parashah/Summaries/Noach/Noah_and_Tradition/noah_and_traditio
n.html

[8] See Anne F. Harris and Karen Eileen Overbey on Lush Ethics (“Field Change / Discipline
Change”) http://punctumbooks.com/titles/burn-after-reading/
[9] That Noah warned of the Flood for 120 years, hoping some would repent, is a story also told in Midrash. See
Norman Cohn, Noah’s Flood: The Genesis Story in Western Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press 1996)
33.

Posted by Jeffrey Cohen at 10:11 AM

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