159. Geological time

My friend Ellen is a geologist. When times get tough in the present—politicly, socially, personally—she thinks it useful to think in geological time, in which our moment is small. I’m not a geologist, cannot keep one “zine” apart from another in my mind, but I have read some amount of history, and tough times in the present get me thinking about the rise and fall of nations and empires. 

I went to Turkey in 1965, less than 50 years after the Ottoman Empire, long dubbed the “sick man of Europe,” collapsed in the course of the First World War. At the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, European powers sought to pick the skeleton of the old Empire, which had in the course of that War included what we now call Lebanon and Syria and parts or wholes of other current nations. Italy wanted this, France that, and Greece another bit of the centuries-old body. That old body, in the 1500s and 1600s, had stretched across the Middle East and well into Europe. It had grown and shrunk at its edges over centuries, and during the first War Lawrence of Arabia was leading Arab revolutionaries on its southern flanks, and the north—up against Russia—and central Anatolia were blaming Armenians for their woes.

Still, at the Dardanelles, the narrow straits that linked the Black Sea and the Aegean, a young Turkish general named Mustafa Kemal held of British and Australian troops at the Battle of Gallipoli. A British head of the Navy named Churchill lost his job over it; Mustafa Kemal fashioned a new country, Turkey, and became known as Ataturk.

I think of this now because it seems that we are in the middle of great movements—the Pandemic; drought, hunger, and refugees; rising seas and melting icecaps—and that we’re not sure where the edges are. Climate change had something to do with the industrial revolution, but pick your starting point. 

And the Pandemic? Do we go back to the battle with Ebola or AIDS? To the 1918 Influenza? Or to Europe’s bringing smallpox to the “new” world? 

I find some comfort in being in “the middle of things.” It’s not the end of the world—nor the beginning of a new age. We do what we can, not knowing where or what the far end of it is, but history, and the gift of curiosity, keep me looking for the signs, as my friend Ellen searches the markings on rocks for clues to understanding the past and the present. 

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