After Such Knowledge - Invincible Summer

Invincible Summer

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Invincible Summer

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Jun 27, 2026<br>environment, ethics, poetry, psychology, religion

After Such Knowledge

The British Psychoanalytic Association invited me to address its Poetic Mind seminar on Eliot, shame and environmentalism.

The lecture was recorded: Passcode 578*pL!L

Abstract Many writers have examined humankind’s remarkable failure to act to avert climate breakdown and social collapse, even as their likelihood becomes ever more evident. I want to approach the question not as a failure of information or of political will but as a failure of narrative: the absence, within our prevailing discourse, of any credible path to forgiveness. I begin with T.S. Eliot’s question from “Gerontion” – After such knowledge, what forgiveness? – and I take the poems as my chief instrument, because I do not have the authority to instruct this room on its own ground, and because I believe poetry reaches where argument cannot. I shall suggest that ecological knowledge is less a matter of guilt than of shame: not “I did a bad thing” but “I am a bad thing, and now it is known.” Shame, unlike guilt, cannot be repaired, only hidden – unless there is some way back into the moral community. Where no way back can be<br>imagined, defensive activity rushes into the gap. I want to give particular attention to one such defence: manic reparation, which repairs the object in phantasy while leaving it damaged in fact. And I want to end with a question that Eliot and the Buddha answer differently, and to wonder whether our thoroughly non-Buddhist civilisation may need the answer that Eliot, in the end, could not do without.

1. The poem and the question

I want to begin not with a thesis but with a poem, because the poems are what I have brought into this room, and because I suspect they know more about my subject than I do.

“Gerontion”, 1920

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

Guides us by vanities.

That is Gerontion – the name itself means little old man, “an old man in a dry month,” a consciousness that has accumulated knowledge but no grace, history but no redemption. He knows too much and can do nothing with it. I have come to think that he is the representative figure of our moment, and that his question is the one our whole civilisation is failing, at present, to answer.

Let me say at once what kind of person is asking. I am not an analyst, and I shall not presume to instruct you on Melanie Klein, whom you know far better than I do. I trained long ago as a Gestalt Therapist and never practised. I work as a software developer and a community organiser in North London. I am a Zen Buddhist, a performing poet, and a member of the Climate Psychology Alliance. I bring you, then, not clinical authority but the poems, and a particular angle of approach, and I hope that is enough, because it is what I have.

The question I want to explore is not why climate change is occurring, nor what can be done, but why human beings appear so unable to respond proportionately to what they already know. The difficulty is not ignorance. It is not lack of information, and I no longer think it is even, at bottom, lack of fear. The science was settled before many of us came of age. The projections have been refined, the graphs redrawn, the conferences convened, and still the line on the chart climbs. We hold the knowledge and we do not metabolise it. We carry it the way a patient carries an interpretation given too early – correct, perhaps, but unusable, set down somewhere out of sight.

A few years ago I thought, as many did, that the core problem was information: that if more people knew more, the right action would follow. I now think almost the reverse. We know as much as we can bear to know. Eliot put it in three words that I shall keep returning to:

“Burnt Norton”, 1935

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

That is the whole of my problem in a sentence, and a good deal of my argument is only an attempt to say why it should be so – why reality, here, is so peculiarly unbearable, and what the mind does instead of bearing it.

A colleague of yours, David Morgan, has written with great force about a neighbouring failure: the gap between seeing and witnessing. We see suffering on our screens in real time and we do not let it transform us; neutrality, he argues, is not objectivity but an active defence. His question is: we see – why do we not witness? Mine is close to his but not the same, and I want to be careful to keep them...