It’s (fourteen minutes past) October 26th 2020, and today was the day of Saskatchewan’s Provincial election. For this week’s exploration of non-material art-making, I chose to read a chapter of Roy Scranton’s We’re Doomed. Now What? across from the Legislative Building across Wascana Lake.

This chapter is titled “Raising a Daughter in a Doomed World,” and it spoke to me when I read it a few weeks ago. Scranton articulates a lot of what I’d like to say in this moment, on this day when the people I live among are locking in another term with the Sask Party, complete with their near Trump-like dismissal of climate change.

I also feel like reading a book like this is itself a performance these days; Rob Nixon puts it concisely in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor:

one of the most pressing challenges of our age is how to adjust our rapidly eroding attention spans to the slow erosions of environmental injustice (8)

Who reads a book like Scranton’s today? Is anyone reading it who isn’t already converted? Would my reading this chapter out loud here in Regina actually invoke an interest in this topic in anyone who isn’t already interested? I doubt it. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking, the people are voting (literally as I read out loud) and honestly, it’s hard not to focus on the “we’re doomed” rather than the “now what?”

Once again, today was cold, and Wascana Park was sparsely populated. A few people went by. No one said anything to me, which was actually what I was expecting. I didn’t make eye contact, as I kept focused on reading the text; all I know is people passed in my peripheral view of the area in front of me. What they took from seeing me there will remain a mystery to me, but I know for certain that I didn’t invoke an urge in anyone to go to the polls and vote Green. The geese in the lake behind me got more out of this show than anyone else.

David asked me in class last Friday: “What are my goals? If my goals are to solve climate change, I’ll fail. If my goals are to engage participation…?”

What were my goals with today’s performance? (It wasn’t participatory, so there goes that goal). They weren’t really to convert anybody — I knew I wouldn’t. My goal was just to express how I was feeling today and in the lead-up to this election, and really, I knew ahead of time that this was a pointless objective.

I’m starting to feel a real crisis set in; I’m not enjoying what I’m doing, I don’t see much purpose in it, and I don’t know how to change these facts. Today was the third time I’ve tried to create non-material art for my work in this semester of my MFA, and I’m not very happy with any of these attempts. While I don’t feel I have the means to assess their success or failure, I know “in my gut” that they aren’t doing what I want them to be doing.

I’m grateful to Esperanza for documenting this attempt at doing something. She’s sent me the video she took of the entire 33+ minutes I stood there reading, and I’ll need to figure out if or what I’ll do with it. Is there any point in uploading it to the cyber-world? I don’t know if the one or two views it would get would be worth its carbon footprint, honestly. Should I turn the video into a documentary “film” of sorts? Esperanza and I wandered around the lake, and she photographed and videoed scenery, birds, a bunch of ducks telling a few good jokes. She’s offered to produce a short film using this material. I just don’t know at this point.

I have a lot of figuring out to do.

Now what?