Green Linden Press

Little Stars: Roland Barthes Intersects a Timeline

* linked to a detail (to a detonator), an explosion
makes a little star on the pane of the text
—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, translated by Richard Howard

1896 The Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius (the father of climate change science)
concludes that burning coal leads to rising CO₂ levels that warm the planet.

* two children standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge
in a glassed-in conservatory … a Winter Garden

1900–1950 The U.S. becomes a global power. American oil plays a key role in two World Wars.

* what I want to have captured is a delicate moral texture

1957 The U.S. oceanographer Roger Revelle warns that by burning fossil fuels human beings
are conducting a “large scale geophysical experiment.”

* I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel,
hence I notice, I observe, and I think

1970 The first Earth Day is celebrated, beginning the environmental movement.

* Time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do not weep)

1972 The crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft takes a photograph of the earth (the big blue
marble), revealing a lovely, vulnerable world.

* Is one not in love with certain photographs?

1980 The election of President Ronald Reagan prompts a backlash against environmental
legislation. Skepticism about global warming is linked to political conservatism.

* it allows me to compute life, death, the inexorable extinction of the generations

2006 Al Gore’s climate change movie An Inconvenient Truth wins converts to the cause of
slowing climate change.

* the object of three practices (or of three emotions, or of three intentions): to do,
to undergo, to look

2009 The phrase “tipping point” appears in climate reports, suggesting that global warming is
happening quickly, irreversibly.

* consists less in traumatizing than in revealing what was so well hidden

2015 A heat index reading of 165 degrees is reached in Bandar Mahshahr, Iran.

* the corpse’s one bare foot, the sheet carried by the weeping mother … a woman
in the background

2016 This year is the hottest in 140 years according to The National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration.

* the pressure of the unspeakable which wants to be spoken

2023 Paul R. Ehrlich, emeritus professor at Stanford University, and other experts, warn that a
“ghastly future of mass extinction” is already underway.

* the photograph of the missing being … will touch me like the delayed rays
of a star

Barbara Daniels’ Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. She has received four fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Her poetry has appeared in Permafrost, Westchester Review, Philadelphia Stories, Coachella Review, and many other journals.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2023