Maria Matthias / La Vida De La Dona

Maria & Matthias

Part I = La Vida De La Dona


comparte el amor

I will take flight as I grow with my wings of great integrity to share all I’ve learned with the world…

“Si querida.”

“Que Papi?” Maria, laying on the grass, looked up toward Father…

“What will I learn, Papi?”

“Todo querida. Con Todo el cuerpo…”

For how long?

“Siempre. Por siempre…”

“And who will I share it with?”

She wonders and looks at Matthias.

So often she wondered of him, Matthias and their change…

He stood at the dock and

Wondered at the shore line of the coast that

Looked out into the great sea

Wondering of his home…

“Your greatest love.”


And she longed for…

All that she left and was…

All she had known, wanted and who?

Alone…she longed for all she promised herself, those she dreamed of and still dream of…

Maria…Maria was her name, Maria Agatha… the Latin form of Mary taken from the Hebrew Miryām, a name under much  debate. Many believe it to mean “sea of bitterness” or “sea of sorrow”, sources cite the alternative definitions of “rebellion,” “wished-for child,” and “mistress or lady of the sea.” The name is borne in the Bible by the mother of Jesus, the son of God. It is not what she imagined and would not imagine the thought for years. Maria was just a young girl and the only male presence in her life was her father who could never entertain any sexual urge or thought to satisfy Maria. She was not even a woman yet but the presence of Matthias would begin to change those thoughts, make her see, make her aware of the woman present and call it to attention, call her to appear and wonder of her needs, desires and questions that would have been answered with the help of a mother who was never in her life.

Matthias… his name was Matthias, “gift from God,” typically given to the much desired first born son of a Christian family. Matthias therefore usually has a healthy sense of self-worth, strong, independent and self-assured. Matthias’ mother had become a Christian while her husband, The King, would lead his people in the war against Portugal, as she became the traitor, embraced Christianity, converting herself and the child and naming him as such to earn and satisfy her weaker religious needs.

Maria, born upon the death of her Mother, Don Lilo’s wife, Agatha ..Maria never had the chance to caress her mothers breast. Suckle a toast to life from her mothers nipples, salute the abundance a child should expect, instead she found her own way. Loving her Father but needing a mother. Agatha died at the violent hands of strangers, pale white men invaders in Africa during the Portuguese occupation of Mombasa. Mombasa, where Matthias’ Father, The King Ruled. It is where they both promised each other to care for the others current child. And it is why Lilo is recognizing Matthias’ arrival. For Matthias would become King after his Father, the King of his home, a just man who was deceived by the Portuguese into giving away his peoples land.


“Tell me again Father where he will be coming from?”



“In a city deep in Africa. along with his people, he battles the Portuguese for control of the land he is king of.”

“But if it’s his land why are the Portuguese fighting for it.”

“Because the Portuguese believe they can manage it better.”

Maria looked back at her Father. “Matthias’ Father must submit or battle for control. I’ve known the king many years.”

“The world would in times of strife, help with the cost of influence whether invasive or persuasive changing your home because the world can and truly believes their way is the right way, and they violently force their way, insisting… out of fear that their way may not be the singular right way, their way enslaves you.”



“Yes feed. People who believe and feed off the weakness of others as nourishing…There are those who believe the guidance without question.

“The world angers me, Maria.”

“Why Papi?”


Don Lilo was often heard commenting with other statesman about the Portuguese interest in Africa, “we battle the white man to influence and control all of the other black influence.

Their friendship was established quickly, soon after Matthias’ arrival from the near Mediterranean shores of Africa soon after they were introduced. Matthias traveled with his Mother away from what would become Kenya after the colonial period, his father a tribal King fighting the Portuguese.

Don Lilo’s house sat along the river, so quiet a visitor would barely notice that it was occupied.

Old, unkempt, so loved and lived in, the house, a young woman given to laying about in the sun, by the pool waiting for her lover to be free. Maria and Matthias became the best of friends until they aged to include the thoughts of lovers… a matter of time until those thoughts bore fruit, set root and sprout quickly to become lovers.



I will learn so much from you…I will learn so much from you likewise and we both will learn so much from each other…

“Maria, baba yangu amekufa.”

“I’m sorry Matthias? Did you say? Your father – ”

“Yes, my father has died.”



“When did he die?” Said Maria.

“A communique your father handed me, from my mother.”

“Your mother?”


“Really, your mother? She’s been found?”



“Then your father as a Somali Warrior must’ve had a warrior name. What is your warrior name?”

“My father did and I do. My father divulged it to me when I was very young, long before I understood the purpose and it’s meaning. A small piece of paper he entrusted me not to show to anyone, even my mother but I want to show it to you.”


“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Of you? Yes.”

“You will keep my secret.”

“I will.”

“My Father called me Simaloi.”


“What does it mean, Simaloi?”


“I don’t know much about my Mother, she died soon after I was born. My mother, Consuela was a distant cousin of your Father’s.” The weight of her sadness came washed over her again as it had so often before but knowing of Matthias’ happiness…

“Matthias?” Maria looked up….

She had been laying on her blanket on the grass  and looked at Matthias…

“My father has died.” His voice had lowered to a whisper…In the few short years they knew each other, in those few short years.



“It isn’t so but I always imagined this was your home, I feel we came to be as…one.”

“I will miss you Matthias.”“I will miss you too Maria.”

…she longed for…

Her father, Don Lilo…the day before his death upon which he left her a trinket and a thought of defiance, “Dando y dando, palomita volando”…he sang as she danced roundabout his guidance…once he was everything to her but she never really knew him. And now there was only darkness…then Lilo gave way Matthias and they danced about in looming desire…




This is something both expected and dread.

Maria, she watched Matthias walk away, a kiss unkissed, a touch untouched, a desire or undesired…Matthias looked back as mother tugged…

Matthias was raised in the house of a Spaniard, in the arms of their love, he walked away from her, feeling her release she watched him as he walked, along the river bank away from the bridge and… as if he missed the crossing then walked up to the foot of the bridge, looked the length then looked back at Maria. She was going to be different, grow different, become important and it was time and though they didn’t hear a call, it seemed they were, as if they were.

“Matthias, do you believe in God,” she asked.




Have you been there, to God’s Caverns?


Tell me about the Caverns of God.


But the Cavern’s?

God lives no where but is all over, to behold, to have a presence

For a moment she tried to imagine his thoughts.

I have been there Maria. Gods Caverns. How? But you say it can not be categorize, God has no home. But I have seen it. Not in a dream but not asleep but and expanse of being I don’t understand but that I don’t clearly.

Matthias, I didn’t know that you were so aware of God.

He looked confused by her query.

True, you and I have never spoke of this but I have thought of God often. I spent many years as a child. I don’t know when I started. One day I was aware of these thoughts. I talked to the Catholic priests and the Priests and wise men of our Tribe not so much to follow but to learn why. To know the purpose.

Come Matthias his mother called. It is time to go.



“I will miss him father.”

“I will miss him also, Maria.”

“Why does he have to go.”

“His mother needs a man for the house. For Matthias it is that time. He has become a man, that man needed to assume the duties of a man, a King, to carry on his father’s wishes at which his mother will be come disappointed when he becomes a man and that King he must and not son she can’t have.”

“And why do you not need a woman?”


“What way will that be, Father.”

“Ese es el futuro, mi Palomita, no puedo decírtelo.”


Conversation among soldiers about the growing world… Not enough of the world no matter the shape for every animal, man, woman or child…


Viejo Mundo / La Vida De La Dona

Viejo Mundo

Part 1


“Hurakan…”spoke El Cacique. “I can smell the water of the great sea burning”… said El Cacique…

“The dead…”

“To speak of the dead is wrong…”

“Men of no color?”

“Men of any color?”

Canimao and his men gathered the remains of the men of no color, the men of no color, who suffered the storm…

“They are dead and deserve rituals of their dead…”

“They are dead, Cacique,” said Canimao… “We do not know their ways…

“Nor do we know their intent… They consume without the intent of nourishment…

Canimao…since you will explore where they come from… It is your choice…

We will…gather their remains from the beach and ready them for transport…It is a long journey and I fear we will know what we fear to know…

The fear of where these men come from…

Return them to rest…

I fear they will come back…”Cacique shooed them away….and to himself he spoke.

“We arrived to this world too late and the world will return us too soon…

They’re hunger is like the heat of an angry fire…

The fear is they are seekers of desires, of lonely people who never stop looking for they know not what they seek…

Their desire, their urge is insurmountable… a mountain never to be looked upon or climbed upon…”

Canimao and his men gathered the bodies…

They had been laying dead for days after the storm and Canimao and his men found their bodies while gathering supplies for their own expected journey across the great sea…

The great sea was tormented…inundating them with a great wash…

Canimao climbed out of the boat and let the cold of the great water wash over his legs. Looking back across the sea where so much of their lives had been spent in the recent months of their voyage. Here they arrived to find and explore the land of men with no color that would bring them to the land of the men they sought, the men who died in a terrible storm that lashed the shores of Canimao’s home land. Saddened by the lost men and their failed quest…Cinimao’s quest succeeded with his warriors quest to bring them home.

Canimao gathered his warrior’s and searched for the items of the lost men. They were pale men challenging what is known by the people’s bohiques, surmising the dead man’s origin and considered adding the found men to return them to their people and their land…

Canimao’s spear, tethered to his waist, a shield held in his arm, six warrior’s, all exhausted from there long trip, still healthy and fit but thinking of rest and hunger. They found a place to camp among in the tree, hidden from view of any natives. Finding their bodies laid about the beach, Canimao asked his people for volunteers, to help gather their bodies and things then try and transport them all back to their homes, a dangerous and great distance away…The dead men were sailors from a land over the horizon. A consult with the chiefs and bohiques led them to understand where the pale men were from.

Canimao once heard of people like them who’s color was pale compared to him and his people. Their home, a journey long and far away on the great water and much preparation would be involved.

Canimao, I have heard of these men but have never seen them, they are explorers of riches and only riches, they seek wealth from others to add to their wealth as their own. Your quest is your own but know their lust stains them as blood. But know the consequences of your journey.

In the year 1491, inhabitants of a land far across the Atlantic, arrived on the shores of Portugal. Canimao and his crew arrived in a large seaworthy vessel with the personal belongings of the men they found after having succumbed to a terrible storm off the shore of Canimao’s land. Each, equipped with survival pouches, and information describing the men whose lives they tried to save; men who arrived across the ocean in a land they believed was in Portugal

“Canimao, how will we find those who knew those men?”

Shaking his head side to side, “I don’t know yet, we don’t know the language, who the men were, I don’t know how but we shall try with their goods of trade.”

Canimao and his crew disembark from their sailing ships and scan the forests perimeter, looking for signs of life while dragging their boats up from the waves onto the shore. They quickly unloaded the boats of their goods and packed the remains of the men of no color, the items that were theirs and lay them beside the their own and the lay down to relax and rest and ponder their journey. They had After some thought they will walk along the edge of the forest without delving too far from shore prowl along the forests in search of someone who might help them find the origins of the men they helped. They do this without calling attention to themselves. Skirting along the edge of villages they judge who they will try and communicate with… They watch the daily lives of the inhabitants of this new land and they wonder…

His name was Lilo, by age, young but much older in spirit so much so they all noticed… Canimao especially took not of his will and his demeanor though and they didn’t know each other’s language and seemed to talk easily..

Canimao knew to show Lilo the items he brought to represent the men who he returned across with them…

Lilo one of them and understood them to be the men testing the waters for a great voyage…

They meet a boy during the effort to find food, a boy Lilo from Portugal was curious and very helpful helping..Lilo is able to help the men escape from near capture of the colonialists who were gathering funds and supplies for the Kings mission to find more of the world and it’s riches…

Lilo helped gather the few goods needed by the visitors to start their return journey across the waters to their lands.

What is left is still to be had… To be taken and will be the claim of the northern European over the original black men

Six other able men and six able men who died as a terrible storm lashed the shores of Canimao’s home.

The world is finite despite the belief of many…




Maria & Lilo / Padre

La Vida de La Dona y El Cuerpo del Cacique



Dando y dando, palomita volando/ remember that you have to die

Don Lilo, long delayed a much needed journey back home to Genoa… “Dando y dando, palomita volando”… he recalled the days of life together with his daughter before the dilemma of wealth and the cold indifferent world that had come between them…”you were a free bird once and yet, you chose jewels of iron to bejewel yourself in tarnished glamour.”

Don Lilo had come into money, after selling off his small but successful shipping concern in Genoa to Baldo and The Church. Moving to Málaga, with his daughter Maria, Don Lilo continued to manage shipping details of the business while he set his daughter free who then turned against him, broke his heart to be an elitist socialite. Don Lilo unhappy with the wealth bestowed upon him sought to give Maria the rich life he felt she deserved…the life that would eventually drive her away from him…and to Baldo.

Don Lilo was openly against Maria’s relationship with Baldo, who was more than fifteen years her senior, too old it seemed, to pique the interest of such a young and innocent girl, but the glimmer of wealth in a big city became the draw and her comfort. Though in doubt, she longed for the hope she imagined upon agreeing to marry Baldo…despite her father…and the awareness that her self-imposed ignorance resulted in Father’s death.

The sound of duende filled the air as he walked alone in the streets of Málaga after drink and celebration then sadness, the cries and sound of anguish and tragedy from an open window came the sound of a gypsy song… death in the guise of familiar faces from the darkness of la cantina. A night of misery that caressed him in fear, the two men came to him as he drank and as festive as they were they wondered who he was, where he came from, why he was here in Malaga… “you sound Genovese, si, why are you here?”

“My daughter…”

“Su hija, si, bella, si….

“Es bella.”

“Let us drink with you, liven your misery, jest with us until then, until your misery is gone.”

And they did, their familiar faces became darkness without jest, death was their friend to introduce to Don Lilo…The men hovered and laughed over Don Lilo’s bloodied body, his eyes and body deflated of its soul, the shell collapsed of structure but longing for Maria…the two men walked away with death having spoken it’s orders and carried out.

Don Lilo dragged his limp and beaten body back to the Last Cantina he visited; by the time The Crowns soldiers noticed and identified the body and his importance, he had died from the assault. An inquest ordered by the court found no suspect… before Maria left for the new world and had lost interest…


remember that you have to die

To see the darkness…

after the light

haunts the light and remains always there…

Even in the light there is darkness without expectation…

There is never only light…

But when there is no light there is darkness…

Before the light there was always and only darkness…

Light must rest from questions of the darkness…

Darkness by default questions existence itself…

Darkness is why…

It is assumed that only the light consumes energy but darkness is the energy…

It is a side that seems to deceive…

But in truth is honest, almost to a fault…

Its feared because it represents as unknown as the truth really is…

What we perceive as the truth is an assumption and accepted without question while darkness is questioned and preferred but humankind doesn’t ask but more often questions the light assuming the answer and fears the darkness because it’s questions answered…

Darkness has its consequences as all do, always ask a question or be taken a fool…

Alone on the ship Maria travelled and pondered all she left behind and the fear she sailed into, so much of it hers but the fear of others…. They were upon the Lord’s bounty the Lord’s beauty… Have we been offered enough?

Balbo had insisted she bathe herself in a complex skin bath to lighten her complexion… Her skin was too dark her mixed heritage was showing through.. She would have to change to fit by his side, otherwise…

Maria speaks to traveling holy man of the military…The world is finite despite the belief of many throughout… What is left is still to be had… To be taken and will be the claim of the northern European over the black men



US should return stolen land to Indian tribes, says United Nations



Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Black Hill

In 1930 Pedro Albizu Campos investigates rumors…

Boricuas Distinguidos 2.0










College classmate says Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at Yale party

















The Philippines Genocide 3 million Filipinos Killed






Figures do not add up





Census figures and the Philippines Genocide






The slaughter








On 15th of October 1900 Twain wrote the New York Times.






A soldier from New York wrote



British eye witness in the Philippines said:


Why the Philippines Genocide happened

It all happened because of a prayer to god.












El Viejo / La Vida de La Dona y El Cuerpo del Cacique

“The dead…”
“To speak of the dead is wrong…”
“Men of no color?”
“Men of any color?”
“They are dead and deserve rituals of their dead…”
The fear of where these men come from…
Return them to rest…
They’re hunger is like the heat of an angry fire…

The End Of Our Innocence

The Facts:

Reflect On:
The destruction of the World Trade Towers on 9/11 is an event that continues to spark our awakening to the malice contained at the heart of several governments. These governments are dangled from a string by the corporations who sit above them, who are in turn dangled by the financial elite who sit above them.
This is important to know. Prominent politicians have referenced this ‘secret government’ for decades, but when a topic like the ‘deep state‘ is presented on mainstream media, it’s pushed as a conspiracy theory. While this can get frustrating, a growing number of people are seeing through the veil more than ever.

The End Of Our Innocence

Prior to 9/11, many global citizens, especially American citizens, could not fathom that their government could do anything so barbaric, so unethical, and so destructive. It’s quite ironic that for years, Western media has falsely accused several politicians of other nations of murdering their own people, the latest example being the chemical gas attacks blamed on Syrian president Bashar al Assad. But many people are seeing through this, and coming to understand how false flag terrorism has been used a lot throughout history, both prior to and post 9/11. That said,  no event has had the awakening effect that 9/11 had and continues to have.

Donald Trump Weighs In

U. S. Politicians and others within government have not really questioned what happening on 9/11–except for Donald Trump. One of his engineers was the architect of the building. Here’s what he had to say, taken from this interview:
It wasn’t architectural defect…The World Trade Center was always known as a very very strong building…Don’t forget that building took a bomb in the basement (1993). Now the basement is the most vulnerable place because that’s your foundation, and it withstood that…I got to see that area, about three or four days after it too place because one of my structural engineers actually took me for a tour, because he did the building and I said “I can’t believe it.” The building was standing solid and half of the columns were blown out…So, this was an unbelievably powerful building.
How could a plane, even a 767 or a 747 or whatever it might have been, how could it possibly go through the steel? I happen to think they had not only a plane but they had bombs that exploded almost simultaneously because I just can’t imagine anything being able to go through that wall….I just think that there was a plane with more than just fuel. Obviously they were very big planes, they were going very rapidly…You’re talking about taking out steel, the heaviest caliber steel that was used on the building. These buildings were rock solid.
Trump also stated the fact that the US government had knowledge before the attack before it happened, and they still did not stop it. He also mentioned that he saw a big hole some of the steel, hinting to explosions.
Trump has been quite outspoken regarding corporate control over the government,  as well as all of the deceit that goes on as to how our government has been hijacked by rogue groups within the government. It’s easy to see why he was and is completely vilified. It had nothing to do with racism or sexism, and if you think this, you’re simply regurgitating what you get from television programming, and have no understanding of how politics works. We go into it deeper here:

Other Commentators On The Deep State

The American empire has had a history of infiltrating and destroying other countries through unethical means (terrorism) and then stepping in to be a ‘savior,’ imposing their will on others. This has been done through the most savage means, with 9/11 being one small example compared to what they’ve done overseas.
Steve R. Pieczenik is one of many people from ‘within’ these ranks who is currently speaking about this. He’s a former United States Department of State official and has been involved with the intelligence community for years. He’s been through and worked within multiple administrations. He has been providing updates on what is happening, the deep state that exists within the American government and how there is currently a ‘battle’ between the Trump administration and the deep state. You can find those interviews online everywhere, he conducted most of them with Alex Jones. He’s also been outspoken and addressed that Trump has already commented on 9/11, and referenced the interview below.

Trump Survived The Attacks

For sure, the power elite closed ranks and did everything possible to ensure a victory for Clinton. This included not only the Democratic party (which previously played dirty pool against Bernie Sanders), but the entire mainstream media machine, the financial community, the EU, and even the Republican party itself. If nothing else, I had concluded that the media alone had done a sufficient job of demonizing Trump – multiple negative headlines daily for more than a year – to make him unelectable to the American people.
There are many reasons to believe that Trump’s survival is a sign that the deep state is losing its power, and that the battle that Steve Pieczenik talks about is going in favor of the Trump administration and their allies. If so, 2018 might be the last year we have to pass through 9/11 without the full and incontestable knowledge about what actually happened.

The Most Honest Book About Climate Change Yet


Authors like to flatter themselves by imagining for their work an “ideal reader,” a cherubic presence endowed with bottomless generosity, the sympathy of a parent, and the wisdom of, well, the authors themselves. In Carbon Ideologies, William T. Vollmann imagines for himself the opposite: a murderously hostile reader who sneers at his arguments, ridicules his feeblemindedness, scorns his pathetic attempts at ingratiation. Vollmann can’t blame this reader, whom he addresses regularly throughout Carbon Ideologies, because she lives in the future, under radically different circumstances—inhabiting a “hotter, more dangerous and biologically diminished planet.” He envisions her turning the pages of his climate-change opus within the darkened recesses of an underground cave in which she has sought shelter from the unendurable heat; the plagues, droughts, and floods; the methane fireballs racing across boiling oceans. Because the soil is radioactive, she subsists on insects and recycled urine, and regards with implacable contempt her ancestors, who, as Vollmann tells her, “enjoyed the world we possessed, and deserved the world we left you.
Carbon Ideologies is a single work published in two parts, No Immediate Danger and No Good Alternative, the bifurcation due to the insistence of Vollmann’s weary publisher and the limitations of modern bookbinding. Of all the writers working today, Vollmann must be the most free: He writes fiction, essays, monographs, criticism, memoir, and history, usually merging several forms at once, taking on subjects as diverse as Japanese Noh theater, train hopping, and the Nez Perce War, all the while dilating to whatever length suits him. (After 25 books, his career word count now rivals Zane Grey’s.)
No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies
By William T. Vollman
As is often the case with Vollmann, his decades-long war of attrition with his editors spills over into the pages of the finished book. Carbon Ideologies begins with the confession that the original manuscript was “several times longer than its contractually stipulated maximum”; after “anxious negotiations,” his publisher “finally agreed to indulge me once more.” Not, mind you, his nonfiction publisher—which he walked away from after it proposed an advance that was less than the amount of money he had already spent on research—but his fiction publisher. (“I sincerely hope that someday all this will be worth it to you,” he writes in a loving acknowledgment.) Viking did hold the line when it came to the endnotes, which run to 129,000 words and can be examined online or in Vollmann’s archive at Ohio State University.
No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies
By William T. Vollmann
The 1,268 pages that remain are as gloriously and maddeningly unclassifiable as most of Vollmann’s work. The closest analogue is Rising Up and Rising Down, his seven-volume, 3,300-page treatise on violence, which Vollmann calls a companion text. Carbon Ideologies is about another kind of violence, the violence inflicted by the production of coal, natural gas, oil, and nuclear energy. The victims of these carbon ideologies are not only the species of fauna and flora that are going extinct, the fragile ecosystems that will collapse, and the future generations of humans who will have to subsist on insects. The victims are us—we who are now living and who deny, to varying extents, the degree of damage we are inflicting upon ourselves. Carbon Ideologies is a chronicle of self-harm.
It is also a deeply idiosyncratic project: Vollmann’s idiolect is obsessive, punctilious, twitchy, hyperobservational, and proudly amateurish. The data he presents are at times revelatory. A homeless person in America uses twice as much energy as the average global citizen; 61 percent of the energy generated in the United States in 2012 “accomplished no useful work whatsoever”; from 1980 to 2011, global energy use nearly tripled. Elsewhere the data are impossibly arcane (“Power Wastage by Group-Driven Machine Tools, ca. 1945 [Deducting Idle Machines]”) or defiantly unscientific (“I am sorry that I could not make my table simple, complete or accurate”). His insatiable appetite for detail yields both irrelevant trivia (“Embarking on the Super Limited Hitachi Express, which was also known as the Super Hitachi 23 Limited Express”) and magisterial portraits of landscapes befouled by poking and prodding and, in the case of West Virginia’s mountains, decapitating.
The Fukushima section is especially uncanny in its evocation of a sublime coastal landscape vibrating with gamma rays. Vollmann breathes a cool wind “whose degree of particulate contamination was of course unknown,” hears on a silent street at night the grunting of a radioactive wild boar, and walks on broken glass through an abandoned clothing store advertising a 50 percent–off sale and peopled by headless mannequins. Though nuclear fission does not produce greenhouse-gas emissions, its horrors come to stand for those of climate change, a vast terror invisible to those victimized by it—at least in the short term. Though Vollmann refers to the Fukushima chapters when he writes that his project is sustained on “little more than blindness, uneasiness, helplessness and ignorance,” he is describing all of Carbon Ideologies.
These qualities reach their fullest expression in the statements made by government and industry officials against charges of environmental menace. In Fukushima, objects in the fallout zone are not radiated but “contaminated.” In West Virginia, mountains do not have their summits chopped off but are granted “removal of overburden.” Fracking “is safer and has less environmental impact than driving a car,” a marketing director from Shale Crescent USA claims, while coal miners, according to the president of the West Virginia Coal Association, “are the greatest practicing environmentalists in the world.” Vollmann records such inanities alongside observations from figures such as Buddha (“People are ignorant and selfish”), Edmund Spenser (“Worse is the danger hidden than descried”), and Loren Eiseley (“Just as instincts may fail an animal under some shift of environmental conditions, so man’s cultural beliefs may prove inadequate to meet a new situation”). Vollmann longs to prove Buddha, Spenser, and Eiseley wrong, and submits softball questions to every industry executive he encounters; but outside of Japan, almost nobody in a position of authority agrees to comment.
Most of the extensive interviews that dominate Carbon Ideologies are thus conducted with men who work in caves or pits to produce the energy we waste. If “nothing is more frightful than to see ignorance in action” (Goethe), these encounters are a waking nightmare. Oil-refinery workers in Mexico, coal miners in Bangladesh, and fracking commissioners in Colorado are united in their shaky apprehension of the environmental damage they do, not to mention the basic facts of climate change and its ramifications. “Mostly their replies came out calm and bland,” Vollmann reports, though this doesn’t prevent him from recording them at length, nearly verbatim. On occasion his questions do elicit a gem of accidental lyricism, as when an Indian steelworker at a UAE oil company, asked for his views on climate change, replies, “Now a little bit okay, but in future it’s very danger.” It’s hard to improve on that.
Vollmann doesn’t blame the migrant steelworker for his complacency or ignorance, of course. He blames himself—often and profusely. He takes special delight in quantifying, in painstaking detail, the energy he burns in such activities as writing a draft of Carbon Ideologies, walking around the corner from his Tokyo hotel to buy a tray of convenience-store tonkatsu, and making a milkshake for his daughter. These passages are as instructive as they are tedious. They dramatize not only the tenacity of our reliance on fossil fuels, but the impossibility of truly comprehending our own culpability in our planet’s fate. How often do you pause to think about the amount of coal burned every time you take an elevator, charge your phone, or operate your blender? Even extravagant acts of self-denial are powerless in the face of such profligate consumption. Vollmann likens our most ambitious energy-conservation efforts to “a dieter who keeps eating his daily fill of cheese, pastries and ice cream … despite the laudable fact that he put broccoli on his lunch plate last Thursday.”
The global hunger for pastries grows more ravenous each year. Whatever Good Samaritan savings we can make by improving infrastructure or bicycling to work will be dwarfed by the billions who will leap onto the grid in the coming decades. About a third of the human population cooks meals over biomass—wood, charcoal, farm scraps, and animal dung. Nearly 1 billion people have no access to electricity. It will not take all of India’s adopting “the American way of life” to trigger gargantuan increases in global emissions. India’s ascending to the Namibian way of life will be enough.
The demand problem, the growth problem, the complexity problem, the cost-benefit problem, the industry problem, the political problem, the generational-delay problem, the denial problem—Vollmann scrupulously catalogs all the major unsolved problems that contribute to the colossus of climate change. “Whatever ‘solution’ I could have proposed in 2017,” he writes, “would have been found wanting before the oceans rose even one more inch!” (The title of a late chapter, “A Ray of Hope,” is to be read sarcastically.) Nor have his six years of traveling the world, tabulating data, and interviewing experts changed his mind about any major aspect of the issue. The reader who begins Carbon Ideologies hopeless will finish it hopeless. So will the hopeful reader.
But there exist other kinds of readers—those who do not read for advice or encouragement or comfort. Those who are sick of dishonesty crusading as optimism. Those who seek to understand human nature, and themselves. Because human nature is Vollmann’s true subject—as it must be. The story of climate change hangs on human behavior, not geophysics. Vollmann seeks to understand how “we could not only sustain, but accelerate the rise of atmospheric carbon levels, all the while expressing confusion, powerlessness and resentment.” Why did we take such insane risks? Could we have behaved any other way? Can we behave any other way? If not, what conclusions must we draw about our lives and our futures? Vollmann admits that even he has shied away from fully comprehending the damage we’ve done. “I had never loathed myself sufficiently to craft the punishment of full understanding,” he writes. “How could I? No one person could.” He’s right, though books like Carbon Ideologies will bring us closer.
The planet’s atmosphere will change but human nature won’t. Vollmann’s meager wish is for future readers to appreciate that they would have made the same mistakes we have. This might seem a humble ambition for a project of this scope, but only if you mistake Carbon Ideologies for a work of activism. Vollmann’s project is nothing so conventional. His “letter to the future” is a suicide note. He does not seek an intervention—only acceptance. If not forgiveness, then at least acceptance.

This article appears in the October 2018 print edition with the headline “The Brutal Truth About Climate Change.”