Where the Sidewalk Ends
What does it mean to live at the edge of today and the cusp of tomorrow? The above poem and illustration by Shel Silverstein (1974) in figure 2 gives shape to this question by calling this edge, “The place where the sidewalk ends”. This poem is of particular interest in the discussion of possibility for two reasons: 1) the identification of a place beyond the edge of today, before “the street begins” or tomorrow begins, an unknown place where the sidewalk ends. 2) the recognition of ‘children’ as the primary, and sometimes the only, knower of this place. They mark a way to this place for others (non-children) to follow and arrive but the others lag tremendously behind. One is asked to keep away from the edge and yet we see two children at the edge peering down below with what seems to be their pet dog in tow. While the children seem almost abandoned with interest in their inquiry for what is beyond the edge, almost falling into the beyond, their dog hangs onto dear life on what's left of the sidewalk, safe behind the potential illustrated ‘break’ and hence the future falls into the unknown.
While living, “where the smoke blows black/ And the dark street winds and bends”, the question of a place where the sidewalk ends seems futile (Silverstein, 1974). The possible fissures for bridges between today and tomorrow are sonically and therefore operationally muted amidst the talk of what does it matter anyway as “a familiar image of nature as stable is now gone”, only to be replaced by “runaway nature” and a slew of disasters in its wake (Petryna, 2022). When nature is extended to include the umwelt, the question of metaphysical existence is inevitably tagged with the physical (for this project, the physical world extends to include the social and cultural), rendering the urgency of today’s living and aliveness as a philosophical matter on actuality and moreso, possibility.
Adriana Petryna identifies these temporal edges as the edges of (physical) knowledge, seeking the act of a knowledge reconfiguration in the face of runaway climate change. She names this process horizon work. While recognising Petryna’s remark that “horizons are not open-ended or metaphysical” (48), Horizon Work: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change, is ineluctably philosophically sensitive. The following movements seek to enhance and excavate this text's implicit philosophical sensitivities regarding the Possible, granting them visibility at “The place where the sidewalk ends” (Silverstein, 1974).
Petryna (2022) expounds that climate catastrophe is “pushing us towards some edge, some horizon beyond which existence ceases to be viable – call it extinction– without our even noticing” (17). When existence ceases to be viable, there is a certain finality of beings and entities upon the “end-state” (58) of death, where death and existence converge as a total absence of existence. Being then can only be known as a being in existence in this world. Martin Heidegger helps us focus philosophically on the phenomena of death, specifically, being’s death. In his magnum opus, Being and Time (2008), Heidegger delineates the phenomena of being’s ability to die at any given point of existence as a being-toward-death. This delineation is an important one as it perturbs an understanding of death in any linear fashion, nor as a pointillism, but just as a thereness: the moment one is born, one is old enough to die. He signifies being-toward-death as existence’s utmost possibility (Heidegger, 2008).
This oxymoron waives through Horizon Work. Death, the ceasing of existence, the edge of the horizon is a possibility of the absolute impossibility of humans as it is something that cannot be corrected, transcended, or escaped. For Heidegger (2008), death is the ultimate limit that one’s existential potentialities are restricted, making death the “possibility of impossibility”. Against that limit, death reveals itself as being-in-existence’s own most possibility and calls for its contemplation as a way to step out of an everydayness of living, step out of the historical and social subjectivities that inevitably conform existence to social conventions and consider the totality of existence against the horizon of time as an event of care that guides one to rechart living. For Heidegger, it is only when one is in this possibility (of ceasing to exist) that one can be concerned with existence as one is faced with one's own most potentiality of being. In Dasein’s everydayness, its inauthenticity seems inevitable as Dasein is permeated and kidnapped by the They, though as a willing participant, that seeks to advance Dasein’s fallenness, alienating Dasein from its potentiality for being as a being-toward-death, Dasein’s care. It is seen with Heidegger that this confrontation is grounded in anxiety, inducing fugitivity and hence falls into the issue of inauthenticity (Heidegger, 2008, p238). Petryna (2022) outlines this fleeing and falling into inauthenticity with 4 main characteristics on the first, though this is not what concerns her. She is concerned with those who venture to understand what it means to disclose to dasein, its potentiality-for-being and with that, dasein’s possibility for ‘authentic’ existence. Those who dare to grasp the audacity of the possible when faced with none. Authentic existence for Petryna can be interpreted as not resigning to the despair of “disaster…as fate” (151) but to “star[e] at the edge of what we can see and know” (2) and “cutting a different path, carving out the effective perceptual range and making futures less remote” (156). These activities define what Petryna calls horizoning as a way to think and respond to complex futures (17). Both Petryna and Heidegger see death, both phenomenologically and actually, not as a prognostication for a passive anticipation of ceasing to exist, but as the ultimate impossible possibility and call to recalibrate and construct new ways to horizon against the horizon of time.