The Theory of Deccan Volcanism
Lucas Jacob
Which holds that the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction was caused not by an asteroid, but by thousands of years’ worth of volcanic eruptions in the Deccan Plateau of what is now India
Dinosaurs are what paleontologists call “charismatic megafauna”: sexy, sympathetic beasts whose obliteration transfixes…anyone with a pulse. The nature of their downfall…might offer clues for how we can prevent, or at least delay, our own end.
--Bianca Bosker, in The Atlantic
I.
The textbooks say an asteroid did it. A flash like the simultaneous
illumination of all of the nightlights ever switched on in the long history of waiting, and the dying began.
The Deccan Volcanists disagree.
They are like a punk band with too long a name, and just the right length of sneer. Asteroid, indeed. As if one big space rock could roll back hundreds of millions of years of life stubborn as gravity.
The volcanoes scattered the ashes of millennia. The lowering sky met the scalded, pockmarked land. The kind of ending you can believe in, relentless and unafraid to tell it like it is, again and again, until everyone is listening.
II.
Who wouldn’t want to be a sexy beast? So the price is a long goodbye and the uninvited pity of a clay-faced successor to the throne. The one can’t be helped; the other is millions of years down the carbon-dark road. Enjoy the beginning of the end. Stretch that long, curved neck out toward the still undiminished light of the sun.
III.
The Volcanists’ evidence? A bellwether single-celled organism that began to die off three hundred thousand years before the fabled impact.
We imagine the end of our world in the fall of CGI monuments. The authoritative roar of Dolby SurroundSound. Always, somehow, some of the faithful are saved.
What would Sue the T. Rex think of us if she knew that we refuse to press “pause” on our Armageddon?
Or that we still haven’t figured out what she did with the twiglike hands she could not raise high enough to wipe the accumulating ash from her disbelieving eyes?
IV.
Of course, the asteroid has its attractions. That giant hole in the Yucatàn, for example, a one-hundred-and-eleven-mile concavity shaped to cradle the biggest of ideas. To shush the tremulous cries that would splash up and over the walls of any smaller vessel.
O shelter us from thy relentless changes, Earth our Protector. Deliver us not into the fullness of knowledge. Thy indifference repels. Let us know not the smoke and liquid flame, nor the whispered breath of air on which is fed the fire.
It must have been a one-off. So unlikely that a new calculus is needed to determine the odds of an encore. The Book is sealed that rests upon the altar of Geology. Why break that bond and read the words we dare not speak aloud into the silence we have made a hole in our fears?
V.
The Deccan Volcanists lock their doors at night, just like the rest of us. They, too, mistrust any darkness, however small, that eludes the city’s surfeit of low-pressure-sodium bulbs.
Forces gather there. In recessed doorways. Under overburdened summer trees. The Volcanists draw their blinds without a glance, if not without a thought.
They settle into repose like the rest of us. Complaining of creaking joints. Bouncing a foot once, twice, and again, so as to raise it high enough to grasp a shoe or sock. The setting differs only in the sense of humor displayed with pride on the bedside table.
A lava lamp, switched on to accompany the brushing of teeth, the reading of a murder mystery. Switched off again with a chiding. As the pulsing blotches recede from the walls, a voice in the blackness that could belong to any of us: Oh, no, you don’t. The world doesn’t end tonight, my love.
VI.
But their heightened senses in half-sleep betray them. They are different.
They hear the sloshing of the molten core. Feel the heat through the sheets, mattress, floor, foundation. Taste the iron by touching tongue to hard palate.
They close their eyes, only to see tectonic plates colliding. Where we are weightless in our falling, they are grave. Aware of the descent. Counting layers of consciousness like striations in exposed rock.
Knowing what the rock once was, and will be again.
VII.
I’d like to think like a Deccan Volcanist, my insights on the outside of the accepted wisdom. I would disavow asteroids and comets—all manner of celestial leftovers from when a mere solar nebula collapsed upon itself and became our solar system.
While I was at it, I’d have a thing or two to say about memory, love, longing, and hope.
Anything whose orbit might bring it just a bit too close for comfort.
VIII.
My gaze wanders into the middle distance.
Buildings like a bar graph. The page an acid-free pale afternoon sky.
I lack the patience necessary to painstakingly brush the dust from these bones.
It was a spike in iridium levels that led the asteroid fetishists to their so-called Crater of Doom. A nice touch, that. Neither self-serious nor easily ignored. A sweet spot in the art of naming.
Or the writing of epitaphs.
IX.
How will ours read when it’s all said and done and we have burned everything that will take to flame? Here lies the dream of the eternal, may it rest at last?
We call them fossil fuels. As if it’s what they’re made of, not what they will make of us. We make of ourselves monuments in glass and chrome and line the vaults below with whatever currency. Salt. Bone. Drachma or shilling. Pelt or hide. Krugerrand or skull.
We must remember, always, the necessary cut-outs. An impressive door through which to enter. A hole through which to breathe.
X.
Many of the species that made it through the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction lived below the surface.
The kinds of dens we draw in cross-section in children’s books, ready to be turned around and held up for any number of bedtime readings. Doilies on the arms of little chairs. Grandfather clocks in miniature. In the family portrait on the wall of packed earth, everyone standing erect.
A dining table, well laid, in the foreground.
Nothing to tell us what it is—or who—that threatens the world just beyond the edge of the page.
XI.
When the groaning machines of pre-dawn sweep the streets toward daybreak, the Volcanists arise and feel magnanimous in their waking.
Either way, it was a hell of a show.
The most determined chain reaction of splitting atoms climaxes like a pop-gun by comparison. The volcanoes of the Deccan Plateau beggar any mythology of fire; the asteroid any metaphor for change.
Either way, we still have those impossible bones from which to build the creatures that populate the landscapes of the imagination.
It might just as well have been both.
XII.
The glossy sheen in the wake of the rotating brushes. So many window shades lit up from behind, one after another. Alone, each is merely plausible. Together they define the start of what we call the day.
How it will end is not the morning’s concern.
It will.
The city will come around again into shadow. The sodium lights will blink into life. Cars drained of some portion of the fuel that fired them in their leaving will scurry back behind doors that rise and fall at the touch of a button. The buttons will hum with the battery life that can be felt only by those who hold still enough for long enough.
For now, the Volcanists greet the dawn and re-commit themselves to their work.
Knowing once again and for certain that every dying out, no matter how abrupt it seems, has been a conclusion foretold, if not foregone.
Lucas Jacob is the author of the full-length poetry collection The Seed Vault (Eyewear Publishing, 2019) and the chapbooks A Hole in the Light (Anchor & Plume Press, 2015) and Wishes Wished Just Hard Enough (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019). His poetry and prose have appeared in journals including Southwest Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Hopkins Review, and RHINO. He is a high school teacher whose career has brought him many wonderful things, including the honor of serving as a Fulbright Fellow in Budapest, Hungary.