The Story of Oil

When I was a child, I had a book—a book that was already old, a relic—The Story Of Oil. In the book was a drawing—it must have been a drawing, although in my memory it is as vivid as a photograph: the landscape is rendered in the soothing, alien palette of Pleistocene dioramas—ocher skies and yellow grasses. In the center is a vast lake of tar in which Strange Beasts of the Past (another book—another story) are trapped, struggling against an inescapable destiny—which is to become the engine and essence of this inevitable present. A gentle giant of some sort (a mastodon? a giant sloth?) whose only crime was mistaking death for drinking water, struggles to lift her feet, her eyes filling with a deep pooling sadness as relentless as the tar itself. Riding her back is a tigerbeast, as opportunistic as pickpocket, angry and snarling, trapped by her own greed. The image is a parable, a gazing ball through which the entirety of evolution is revealed, not only pointing to “us” but to the combustion engine. Decoded correctly, any child can see that the reason these prehistoric beings lived and died (and suffered) was to lubricate and propel the future perfect present in which we live.

I am stuck in this image, as surely as the animals depicted in it. I think of it often, as it is a vision of horror, like a lake in hell. This image is a Trojan horse, carrying many agents and messengers. Through this image I am initiated into many “truths”; encoded in the DNA of this image is evidence of the cruel suffering caused by the processes of the natural world. This idea of the Cruel Natural World preempts any discomfort one might feel at the evidence of cruel suffering caused by human intervention in the Natural Order … All beings live, starve, suffer, and die—we are not a disruption but simply a flavor. In fact, look at this image long enough, and swallow it deeply enough, and it is clear that our appropriation of their animal bodies is a form of redemption. These wooly mammoths, like Christ, died so that we might live.

But symbolic orders are unreliable and have a tendency to shift, leaving us stranded and floating. Now I am an adult, and I know we do not get our oil from wooly mammoths but from phytoplankton (so much more difficult to depict microorganisms struggling in lakes of tar—I get that). I also know the bottom is really the top: Perhaps we are the ones who live, whose combustible engines fire, so that the phytoplankton (who, let’s face it, had dominion orders of magnitude longer than it has taken us to evolve from shrew-like peons) can purge the earth? Perhaps we are only the mechanism to bring to fruition the version of the universe that became locked and trapped in these cells, slumbering like a genie in a lamp until our catalytic converters set it free?

The thing about immortality is that you have to take the long view: to give up your attachment to notions of stasis/normality and accept the eternal constant of change that eternity means … Perhaps these ancient animals are simply time bombs, correcting for a planet that has become overrun with mammals—particular mammals: pants-wearing, gun-toting, phanstasmaphilic bipeds full of sentiment and overly sensitive to change.

Seen from far enough away, one has to ask: Why all this sentimental attachment to a blue planet? Thought of as a process of corruption, the translation of molecules in the atmosphere disturbs … but if you think of it as liberation, from the tyranny of chlorophyll and sunlight, what then? Is it possible to imagine an illustration in which we (and by “we” I don’t just mean humans, but polar bears, hippos, frogs, and bees) are suffering/surrendering so that an unimaginable future can struggle into being?

Immortality means there is always time for another roll of the dice—perhaps there are many ways to be consumed by the inevitable, and being stuck in a lake...