the cassandra pages

Sad but not Despairing

I'm not going to write about the Israeli attack on the aid flotilla because I don't want to turn this space into a mini-warzone. Suffice it to say that I am deeply sad today. And heading out to draw. I refuse to allow the brutality of the world to suffocate my own soul.

And as for breathing: like thousands of other Montrealers, we woke in the night to the smell of smoke, blown into the city from the forest fires raging over thousands of hectares to the north, and today a smog alert has been declared as far south as Boston. So many of the earth's living things  struggling for the basic elements they need in order to live... may we all come to our senses while we still have them.

Letter from Reykjavik

 

(from a portfolio by Vilhelm Gunnarsson in the Icelandic press; see all here. )

As longtime readers may remember, during the last five or six years we lived in Vermont, our next-door neighbors were from Iceland. H. and E., and eventually their little daughter h., who came along in the middle of that time, became some of our closest and dearest friends.They've gone back home now, and are living in Reykjavik. We would have followed the news about Iceland's financial meltdown, and the astonishing eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, in any case. But knowing our friends on their small beloved island are trying to live, and bring up their daughter, with a sense of happiness, security, and normalcy in the midst of so much turmoil has given these events a much more personal and immediate dimension. Yesterday I asked H. if he'd write something about how things look in Iceland right now, from his perspective. Here is what he wrote, along with a link that he sent to these ominous and extraordinary photographs.

it's strange, we're in the middle of one disaster and another one strikes
but there is this huge difference
we know this one
we've been through it so many times before
we know all the rules
the mortal dangers
the stakes
the plot
we know it might go really really badly
but that most likely it will be over within weeks
and this we can handle
meanwhile
that other disaster keeps befuddling us
there was nothing natural about that one
how could our banks fail like that, all three?
it must have been that those running them caused it by acting criminally
they must have taken all the money and made away with it, somehow
money doesn't just disappear into thin air
and how did all the rules change so suddenly, literally overnight?
we had a banking system, privately owned, competing cut-throat with foreign banks, also privately owned
then all of a sudden, all these big, foreign banks had been usurped by their governments, their treasuries
and our huge banks turned around too crawl under the skirt of our little state treasury
was this supposed to be a competition on a "free" market?
our politicians should have seen all of this coming, somehow
they should have known the unwritten rules, somehow
so we made them all resign, and now we're going to prosecute them
that will keep at bay the ugly truth in the matter, at least for a while
it's musical chairs, and we're among those caught standing
because we did not know this one
our banks had only recently been privatized
they had never ventured abroad before
we did not know the unspoken rules
the mortal dangers
the stakes
the plot
we knew not that it might go really really badly
and we know not when it will be over
and this keeps us confounded

Note: please read the comments for some questions from readers and responses from H. In an email, E. also adds:

"It is like you said, we have been down-wind from the volcano, so our view has been the same as yours, on TV and in the media - although perhaps with more emotional involvement! it is weird to watch part of your country covered in ash, and see farms and animals under the black clouds, and watch the floods strip away roads like they were toys. The power of nature, of earth, is so breathtaking and makes you feel so small and insignificant. If this island cared, it could shrug us all off in one big blast. Once things calm down, we are hoping to take a trip out there, we will be sure to report back to you!"

Good Friday Moon

Good Friday moon

indifferent above a city morning

halal butchers cutting lamb

Hasidic bagel bakers

railroad tracks, graffiti

my quiet prayer

On Suffering (1)

We leave our warm beds, get dressed, and drive to our studio in the early, grey morning. It's as dark at 8:30 am as it will be in the late afternoon; this is the long dark trek through deep winter. Our boots clatter up the metal staircase and we unlock the loft; I make coffee and do some exercises and stretches, and then run up several flights of stairs, walking quickly down the long hallways. On the far end of the building a grimy window looks out over the city: white snow creating a rectangular patchwork of roofs; centre-ville in the distance; smoke billowing from industrial chimneys, and everywhere the tall verdegris spires puncturing the low grey sky, silent exclamation points rising from the hollow chambers of the enormous, nearly-abandoned churches that define each parish of the city of Montreal.

To the northeast of here, in a direction I can't see from the window, is a community of Haitians; I know one family, from the cathedral; the father is an Anglican priest, born in Haiti, who ministers to the French-speaking Anglicans in that part of the city. There are a lot of immigrants from the French West Indies here, and a number of them are Anglican. Today, looking out over these cold roofs in the opposite direction, away from the immigrant poor and toward the wealth of the city center and, further to the south, the United States, I feel their despair and sorrow like the brath of the incessant arctic wind on the back of my neck. I have read the deluge of predictable comments on Twitter and Facebook, tried to absorb the headlines and the awful pictures: "7,000 people have already been buried in a mass grave." I write a note to the person I know best in this family. Mostly, though, I'm numb.

People are asking why. They always do, when tragedy strikes, but it's a lot easier to package the story and wrap up our feelings when we read the biography of a deranged or angry killer and say to ourselves, "yes, I can sort of understand, he was traumatized, he was crazy, he went off his head because he lost his job and felt the world was against him" than when the perpetrator is the very earth under our feet.

Of course some have a ready answer. In Handel's Messiah, a few weeks back, I listened to the bass soloist singing words from the prophet Haggai, instructing the Jews to rebuild the temple after their return from captivity, and warning about the consequences of his wrath:

"Thus saith the Lord, the Lord of Hosts; Yet once a little while and I will shake the heav'ns and the earth, the sea and the dry land: And I will shake all nations; and the desire of all nations shall come."

The Book of Haggai was composed in 520 B.C.E., after King Cyrus of Persia had decreed that the Jews could be released from their captivity in Babylon and return to Judea. Handel, writing his oratorio in 1741 (the libretto was actually by Charles Jennens) knew little more than the ancients about the cause of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or violent storms; "Divine Providence" was to be thanked for safety and victory, and "Divine Retribution," meted out to nations in the form of natural punishment or defeat in war, was to be feared. Even though we know now that we sit on shifting geologic plates, whose movement causes these natural disasters, self-righteous preachers still claim God's wrath, prophesy the apocalypse, and infuse believers with a conviction that the victims somehow deserve their "punishment." It makes me crazy, especially so because the worst offenders are Christian fundamentalists, who have managed to tar the entire faith and, incredibly, still influence politics and education -- even in the supposedly fact-based, "modern," and developed world -- with their misguided, retrograde, unscientific and often hateful beliefs.

There is a clear scientific "why": it's because Haiti is located in a region of active tectonic activity that results in earthquakes, tsunamis, and violent volcanic eruptions. But the spiritual "whys" - "Why have so many people died there?" "Why have they died instead of me?" "What can I do to understand and respond to such human suffering?" -  which ought be at the heart of religious teaching and practice, have rarely been so since the time of Constantine, when the Church first became aligned with the power of the State.

More on both of these subjects in the following posts.

A Heavy Hoof on the Earth

This article at today's New York Times is mainly about the health cost of red meat consumption, but the statement in the second paragraph was a shock even to me:

Anyone who worries about global well-being has yet another reason to consume less red meat. Dr. Popkin, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina said that a reduced dependence on livestock for food could help to save the planet from the ravaging effects of environmental pollution, global warming and the depletion of potable water.

“In the United States,” Dr. Popkin wrote, “livestock production accounts for 55 percent of the erosion process, 37 percent of pesticides applied, 50 percent of antibiotics consumed, and a third of total discharge of nitrogen and phosphorus to surface water.”