On doodling and other modes of engagement in meltdown

This essay considers modes of engagement in contemporary times of ‘meltdown’. Written in 2022, prior to the recent escalation of Israel-Palestine-Lebanon conflict in the Middle East, it engages with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and varied threats of nuclear mobilization in this context: from damage to Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia power station, to launches of nuclear attack. In doing so, the lethal competitive links between fossil fuel and nuclear economies are foregrounded, reminding us of Cold War times when it was nuclear annihilation, rather than climate change, that threatened an unliveable planet. In engaging with these threatening dynamics, I also work with historical and present experiences and definitions of genocide and ‘theatres of war’, drawing on research regarding one of the first Indigenous ‘uprisings’ in Namibia – then German South West Africa; a context that also experienced one of the first modern genocides. In doing so, I raise the spectre of how it remains exceptionally difficult for legitimacy to be granted to the disruptive voices, experiences and perspectives of those beyond, and mostly written out of, the formal written historical record. Ultimately, the essay focuses on the following and increasingly pertinent questions. What transformational forces may turn around war’s worlding to mutate the experience, witnessing and haunting of terror into healing? And what practices may help us find paths of coherence amidst experiences of meltdown?