Artists must confront the climate crisis – we must write as if these are the last days | Ben Okri

The response to our most urgent threat requires new forms of creativity and human imagination

Faced with the state of the world and the depth of denial, faced with the data that keeps falling on us, faced with the sense that we are on a ship heading towards an abyss while the party on board gets louder and louder, I have found it necessary to develop an attitude and a mode of writing that I refer to as existential creativity. This is the creativity at the end of time.

It is not given to many people to sense the end of time approaching. Maybe some Atlanteans sensed it. Maybe the sages of Pompeii, if there were any, felt it in advance. Maybe those ancient civilisations whose societies were about to be wrecked by invaders from the sea felt it. But I can’t think of any who had the data that it was coming, who had the facts pouring at them every day, and yet who carried on as if everything were normal.

Albert Camus, writing during the second world war, felt the need for a new philosophy to answer the extreme truths of the times. The absurd was born from that. Existentialism was born too from a world in the throes of extreme crisis. But here we are on the edges of the biggest crisis that has ever faced us. We need a new philosophy for these times, for this near-terminal moment in the history of the human.

It is out of this I want to propose an existential creativity. How do I define it? It is the creativity wherein nothing should be wasted. As a writer, it means everything I write should be directed to the immediate end of drawing attention to the dire position we are in as a species. It means that the writing must have no frills. It should speak only truth. In it, the truth must be also beauty. It calls for the highest economy. It means that everything I do must have a singular purpose.

Ben Okri is a novelist and poet. His latest books are Every Leaf a Hallelujah and The Famished Road

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3kQlqA7