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The advancing into the dark sea corresponds to the pressing forward into the dark problem. The fusing of air and water, the blurring of above and below, might symbolize as with the Mothers (as Mephistopheles describes) that all times and all places fuse together with each other, that there is no boundary between “above” and “below,” and that hence Mephistopheles can say to the traveling Faust: “Descend then”—I could also say: climb!
—Sabine Spielrein, “Destruction As Cause of Becoming”
A week before Hurricane Sandy devastated East Coast suburbs, cities, and psyches, I was invited to participate in a group poetry reading for the 92nd Street Y Tribeca's annual Doomsday Film Festival and Symposium, which promised an exploration of “our collective fascination with Doomsday.” The five participating poets were asked to prepare apocalyptically minded material and to have fun. The Y's PR material promised—along with the requisite blood, gore, thrills, and chills—“Deserted Streets! Blood Red Skies! Total Social Breakdown!” It was going to be a great evening!
So in the spirit of the event, I ordered my “Goodbye World Y” T-shirt to wear for my performance and, as a poet who mainly uses found source material as text, began researching doomsday survivalist literature and the mind-set of disaster preparedness. In a strangely odd turn, I learned that in 2011 the CDC published a “tongue-in-cheek campaign” about surviving the zombie apocalypse, replete with a “Zombie Blog,” as a humorous way to teach emergency preparedness (). Evidently, zombies are the new silent symbol of the “unfamiliar intruder” (Speilrein, 1995) who will shoulder our cast-off resistances, disgust, and anxieties. Fitting too that they eat brains, a graphically perverse take on what we might describe as “attacks on linking” (Bion, 1959).
As I went deeper into my “research” I became fascinated by the convictions of survivalists and their all-in striving toward total self-sufficiency. There