There’s something about watching natural disasters take place on a computer screen from the relative safety of another continent that feels voyeuristic if not downright ghoulish. I hope the worst of the storm is over for people in Manhattan. And that those on the East Coast stay safe.
How do we get our mojo back when we’re in the grip of fear? Putting one foot in the front of the other, keeping on keeping on. The housemate still ill, rain falling, the housebound dogs restless. Sleepless and stressed, taking a deep breath and hoping this too will pass.
Wrote to a friend asking about hurricanes and their increasing severity and he wrote back with that directness and clarity of the trained scientist:
In general,more moisture in the air and higher ocean temperatures, both of which help hurricanes be more damaging, result from global warming. The reason Sandy was able to maintain hurricane force winds all up and down the East Coast is that the ocean off the northeast coast is unusually warm. In turn, elevated sea surface temperatures are linked to climate change. Likewise, sea rises because of global warming are not uniform around the world, and the US east coast has experienced more rising than most places, making storm surges more deadly.
Analysing stuff is one thing. Solving the problem is another, and that brings us back to greed and Rebecca Solnit is so good on this. She’s good on anything to do with the heart of social failure and why we are afraid of one another, why we let one another down, how wonderful it is when we come together (her work on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is a classic) and behave like caring, responsible human beings, not polarised nutcases.
And yes, the rest of us should do more, but what is the great obstacle those who have already tried to do so much invariably come up against? The oil corporations, the coal companies, the energy industry, its staggering financial clout, its swarms of lobbyists, and the politicians in its clutches. Those who benefit most from the status quo, I learned in studying disasters, are always the least willing to change.
Another writer who is much better than her press is Elizabeth Gilbert. Although I’d read her smart funny journalism for GQ and literary mags, I loathed Eat, Pray, Love. Not just because I thought of it as glib religiosity and self-centred chick-lit, but because her charm set my teeth on edge. She seemed to float through life charming everyone she met. But reading this revealing and honest interview, I’m now inclined to think the charm is real. And that makes all the difference. She’s humble too.
My work is incredibly important to me personally. It brings me joy and it brings me life and it brings me meaning. It doesn’t necessarily have to be important to the people who read it. It would be nice if it did bring them life and meaning, but it doesn’t have to. It’s not their fault that I wanted to be a writer. I just want to do it because I like doing it and it’s a pleasure. I always quote Tom Waits, because I had this amazing experience of getting to interview him and every single thing that he said was so Socratic—he’s just biblically wise about the arts—and he said something like, “You know, it’s not that important what I do. I’m just a guy that makes jewelry for the inside of people’s heads.”
And it’s lovely to have jewelry. It’s not food. It’s not difficult for me to come up with twenty careers right off the top of my head that are really much more important for the good of society than what I do. From kindergarten teacher to anyone who fixes a road or makes bridges or whatever. Anybody’s work is more important. I’m really lucky that I get to do this, and it’s a privilege to get to make jewelry for the inside of people’s heads. And it’s not a big deal. It’s just jewelry. That also helps you get through bad reviews or sort of critical artistic mental blocks because it’s like, we’re just playing. We’re just writing songs, we’re just writing poetry, it’s not that urgent. Just enjoy it.
Sandy came along at a time when it got a lot of energy from unusually warm sea surface temperatures off the East Coast which have been rising over the past several decades. That warm water fueled the storm as it moved north. Then other conditions came into play: instead of veering out to sea as many of these storms do, it ran into the jet stream which helped tug the storm west. And then there was the large high pressure system off western Greenland that stopped its movement to the east.
And your friend is so right about rising sea levels. In the Northeast, those levels are increasing three to four times faster than global rates and will bring more flooding and damaging storm surges that ride atop high seas. The result will be more large storms, more droughts and more heat waves.
Thanks so much for commenting Syd — my friend mentioned those particular circumstances behind Sandy as well — and I do wish politicians were listening more to credible scientists on these crises.
Tom Waits has written some of my favorite jewelry in my head.
I like his music too — and the lyrics.
I still have power, so I am on the computer to tell you that its a freak show in West Virginia.
Stay safe Kristin, the images are so disturbing
Mary, I love the quote from Elizabeth Gilbert (to whom I’ve had the same reaction in the past). I was just writing to a friend yesterday that one of the reasons I like blogging is it doesn’t have the onus of ‘serious’ writing–even though it often is. “Jewelry” for the mind makes it all much less intimidating.
I’ve felt the same voyeurism about watching the storm coverage, but do it anyway–buying right in to the media sensationalism–with the excuse to myself that I have friends back there. Of course if it hadn’t been for sensational media coverage of Hurricane Katrina, we might never have known about all those stranded and willfully neglected people in New Orleans and the disgraceful government negligence, so I’m of two minds about it, as I am so often.
The lack of response to Hurricane Katrina was so tragic and I don’t know that New Orleans will ever recover.
And I liked that interview so much, a reminder that just as we blog in different voices, we can write lighter or more serious books. I think blogging reminds me of the kind of diary envisaged by Virginia Woolf:
“What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.”
Wonderful! (Virginia Woolf on her diary) Everyone has a drawer like that, goes back years later, finds some scrap of memory that has become meaningful.
I love this: “The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.”
Thank you for pulling that gem of a quote out of your hold-all!