Rising Smoke

Memory, Molecules, and the Machinery of Purity

The Smoke of Torment: A Revelation in Two Directions

The biblical phrase, “and the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever," has unsettled the imagination for centuries. In Revelation, this apocalyptic image is not directed toward the innocent but toward the violent powers that oppress them. It is Rome—not the martyrs—whose downfall sends up smoke. And this smoke, in the prophetic imagination, is not merely the debris of destruction but the permanent testimony that oppressive systems do not get to vanish into silence.

Across the Hebrew prophets, “smoke rising forever” signifies irreversible judgment: the end of a regime, the collapse of a violent cosmology, the sealing of a wound so that it cannot be reopened. It is a refusal to let the machinery of dehumanization slip quietly back into the shadows.

Yet the image contains a paradox. It speaks of the end of violence, and yet the world continues to produce fresh plumes of rising smoke. Empires fall, but new empires rise; ideologies are buried, only to emerge again in different clothing. The prophetic image, meant to close a chapter of human cruelty, instead becomes a mirror held up to history’s recurring failures.

I find myself standing in the Killing Fields of Cambodia, where the smoke that now burns is incense in remembrance of the victims of the genocide that occured. Yet here, smoke does not mark the collapse of an evil empire but the ongoing grief of a people whose world was shattered by one. The rising incense is smoke of another kind—not torment, but witness. A soft and fragile cry that what happened must never be folded back into the forgetfulness of the world.

In this way the biblical image is transmuted. Smoke becomes a memorial of presence, not an emblem of punishment. It becomes a gesture of reverence, a visible act of remembrance, and a defiant refusal to allow the dead to be made silent again.

Transmutation: When Destructive Imagery Becomes a Symbol of Healing

Parabolic thinking always turns symbols on their side. A negative image becomes the seed of a restorative counterpart; the very thing that once represented devastation is recast as a path to healing. Smoke—originally the afterbirth of judgment—becomes the visible thread that ties memory to embodiment.

To transmute a symbol is to reveal its second life, reborn through new meaning.

Here the apocalyptic smoke becomes an invitation: not to contemplate endless torment but to take up the sacred work of never forgetting, never allowing the machinery of dehumanization to be crowned with innocence, never letting the perpetrators rewrite the story.

If the biblical image once announced the end of empire, the memorial smoke of Cambodia marks the resistance to forgetting. It transforms the apocalyptic into the ethical, turning a vision of cosmic judgment into a practice of restorative remembrance.

This inner transformation parallels the deeper work required of society. Symbols matter because they guide how we imagine the world. If torment can be transmuted into witness, then perhaps the cycles of destruction in human history can likewise be transmuted—not erased, but redirected toward life rather than death.

This transition becomes especially important when we consider how modern societies identify and scapegoat the sources of their anxiety. And nowhere is this clearer than in the strange cultural story we now tell about carbon—one of life’s essential molecules.

Year Zero and the Psychology of Purification

When the Khmer Rouge declared Year Zero, they sought nothing less than the annihilation of the past. It was an attempt to purify civilization by destroying everything that constituted human identity: religion, heritage, education, family, memory, language, culture.

Year Zero was not merely an event; it was a metaphysics—a violent cosmology in which purity could only be achieved through erasure.

This dynamic follows a predictable psychological descent:

First comes the binary division: us vs. them.
Then moral loading: they are impure, corrupt, poisonous.
Then dehumanization: they are parasites, insects, contaminants.
Then purification: the fantasy of a cleansed, reborn world.
Then violence: the machinery that enforces this imagined purity.

The Killing Fields are the graveyard of a purity myth unleashed into history.

When we juxtapose this with modern concepts like Net Zero, the distinctions are crucial. Net Zero is not an ideology of cultural erasure; it is not a call to destroy the past or purify humanity. But psychological parallels can, if unexamined, infiltrate any large-scale movement:

apocalyptic rhetoric
scapegoating
moral absolutism
technocratic control
purity language
the flattening of human complexity

The danger does not lie in climate science. It lies in the human psyche, which can—when anxious or idealistic—shift from seeking balance to seeking purity, from repairing relationships to eradicating perceived impurities.

This is where Year Zero acts as a cautionary mirror: not because Net Zero mirrors its goals, but because they operate within the same species, and thus within the same psychological vulnerabilities.

Carbon and the Paradox of Purity: When a Life-Molecule Becomes a Villain

There is profound irony in how contemporary culture has cast carbon dioxide—a molecule of reciprocity, breath, and growth—as the villain of our era. CO₂ is essential to photosynthesis, to plant vitality, to the stability of ecosystems, and even to the metabolic dance that keeps us alive. It is the molecular handshake between the plant world and the animal world. A chemical icon of mutuality.

And yet CO₂ for many has come to symbolize danger, impurity, and planetary threat.

This psychological pivot is not trivial. It demonstrates how societies often avoid wrestling with complex relational imbalances by scapegoating a single element—offloading collective guilt and fear onto a molecule rather than confronting the deeper story of overconsumption, industrial excess, and our fractured relationship with the natural world. When a society symbolically transforms a life-bearing molecule into a pollutant, it reveals something about its psychological state:

discomfort with interdependence
anxiety about growth and limits
guilt over exploitation
fear of consequences long deferred

And then, almost inevitably, the scapegoat grows. Symbols of imbalance become symbols of impurity. Impurity summons the desire for purification. And purification—when severed from wisdom—always courts violence.

Here we meet a subtle danger: the drift from balance to eradication, from relationship to control, from repair to purity.

Net Zero, at its best, is a vision of restored balance. But in its more radicalized cultural expressions, it can be co-opted by the same psychological machinery that once animated revolutions obsessed with purity, rebirth, and the elimination of perceived contaminants.

To see this dynamic clearly, we need to place Net Zero beside one of the darkest experiments in ideological purification the modern world has ever seen.

The Slide Into Atrocity: When Purity Outruns Wisdom

The psychology of genocide, whether in Cambodia or elsewhere, is shockingly consistent. It begins with categorization, moves through moralization, escalates into dehumanization, and eventually erupts into violence. Hannah Arendt called this “the banality of evil,” not because the consequences are banal but because the pathway is.bPurity movements, especially those that elevate an abstract ideal above the value of human life, are susceptible to certain distortions:

The belief that the world must be cleansed to be saved
The conviction that the ends justify extreme means
The view that dissent is contamination
The erasure of nuance in favour of absolutes
The fusion of identity with ideological compliance
The transformation of people into symbols or obstructions

Year Zero embodies this dynamic perfectly.

Net Zero, while born from ecological concern rather than revolutionary violence, must still guard itself against the psychological drift toward purity thinking—lest balance be replaced by coercion, and relationship be replaced by control. Because the same psychological machinery that once powered Year Zero exists in every society. It is not bound to time or culture. It is a latent human pattern that must be consciously disarmed.

Smoke as Witness, Smoke as Warning

Returning to the image that launched this reflection: the smoke that rises “forever.”

In the biblical imagination, this smoke testifies against empire. In Cambodia, incense rises for the victims. In environmental discourse, the “smoke” of carbon emissions becomes a symbol of the imbalance between humanity and the Earth.

Each form of smoke has a different voice:

Smoke of judgment (Revelation)
Smoke of memory (Killing Fields)
Smoke of warning (climate discourse)

And yet all three speak to the same truth:

When relationships collapse—between people, between nations, between humans and the natural world—smoke rises. Smoke is what remains when something has gone wrong. But smoke also marks the beginning of remembrance, of repentance, of reorientation. It is the place where destruction and healing meet.

If Revelation shows the end of empire, Cambodia shows the cost of its madness, and Net Zero reveals our longing for restored balance. The task now is to refuse the machinery of purity and take up the work of relationship, balance, and wisdom. Not to eliminate carbon, but to honour its cycle. Not to erase the past, but to remember it. Not to purify the world, but to heal it. Not to scapegoat molecules—or people—but to restore the bonds that hold life together.

The smoke rises still. But in its ascending spiral, it invites us to learn what earlier generations forgot: that life is not sustained by purity but by reciprocity, that balance is not achieved by erasure but by relationship, and that the world is not saved by burning out its impurities but by rebuilding its harmonies.