Is this a joke or is this serious?
You are right to challenge me; Am I (are we) affirming meaning in the experience of either tragic loss or comic hope. Because you are right, there is a lot of talk around (as 'millenial rhetoric' there always has been), and there is an apparant ethical duty to make up our minds. Either doomladen mass extinction. Or one last hurrah for science.
Climactic despair, I can't decide.
Last night I went to the ENO to see Simon Mcburney's production of A Dog's Heart. It is a Russian satire based on the 1924 novella by Mikhail Bulgakov, the title would translate better as 'Heart of a Cur-bitch', and the story tells of how a stray dog metamorphoses into a man after having the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead man transplanted into him. The dead man's name is 'Pig-Iron', which was close enough to 'Steel' (=Stalin) for the soviet commissars to confiscate the manuscript so that it was only published in the 1960's, and Bulgakov lived out a life of internal literary exile in Russia therafter. Stalin retained a soft spot for him however, it is recorded that Bulgakov's epic The White Guard was one of his constant bed-side favourites, and the Great Leader is said to have telephoned him to offer… encouragement.
A Dog's Heart was an opera with the music having been composed by Alexander Raskatov. Yes, I hadn't heard of him before either, and the musical component was disturbing, one of the solo voices singing through a megaphone, others (according to the programme notes) asked to provide rauco (hoarse) or scollato (shaky) effects, and so on so that I could not describe of having experienced a single dominant form, balance, or measure in the music. The composition seemed to encompass many without allegiance to any.
Satire: a story of tragic loss…. and comic hope because in the end the dog, finally returned to doggy form by a further surgical operation, survives. And tomorrow. Tomorrow, who knows, albeit worse for wear from the surgeon's knife, the dog may, with wagging tale hanging on to its precarious perch in the Moscow household in which the evening's entertainment has been told, continue to lick the soft hand which offers it fresh sausage to eat.