Last
week I went out to our storage locker in the laundry room and got out a box of
old letters. Opening that box is always a little like opening a time capsule.
Many of the letters date back to the mid to late sixties, a time when people
took delight in writing actual letters. Many of the letters were from friends
my own age or younger, fifteen to twenty-one. In each case I was impressed with
the vigor and enjoyment with which they wrote, the fullness of expression, the
attention to clarity and grammar. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that
level of creativity and willingness to share shine so brightly through a body
of words. It testified instantly as to how much has been lost over the years
thanks, in large measure, to digital technology.
There
was a packet of letters from my first wife, most of them dating from the winter
of 1969, which she must’ve written when she was nineteen or twenty, in which
she declared, profusely and repeatedly, her love for me. There was also a large
envelope dating from a few years later, in 1975, from my closest friend at the
time. I opened it. It was divorce papers, and a note, unexpectedly warm and
friendly in tone, explaining that I didn’t need to do anything, unless I chose
to challenge it, which I hadn’t. Why she’d used my friend’s return address I
don’t know. Maybe she was between addresses. According to the dates, we hadn’t
been together for not quite three years. I had to wonder how I’d managed to
fuck that up so quickly.
I
rearranged everything so it would fit back in the box and returned the time
capsule to the storage bin.
Today
(Saturday) I watch a YouTube video by Canadian climate scientist Paul Beckwith
who discusses the disastrous condition of ice in the arctic. Beckwith’s right
hand rests on a black cat named Shackleton who is sleeping on a chair. Behind
Beckwith is a large fern and some other potted plants, a basket of woven
grasses, a large chart positioned on an easel illustrating the interconnection
of phenomena associated with abrupt climate change (greenhouse gases, fires,
extreme weather floods and droughts, crops fail, all hell breaks loose) and a
stack of books with titles like Fingerprints of the Gods, The Power of the Sea,
Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail And Why We Believe Them Anyway, and
Antarctica: The Global Warning by Sebastian Copeland and Leonardo Di Caprio.
Beckwith is wearing a blazer with a light blue shirt and a dark gray tie
imprinted with mathematical equations.
“We
know that the Arctic sea ice is rapidly vanishing,” Beckwith declares, “but the
big question is how long will this take? When will we have the first blue ocean
event? Is it going to happen this year? Is it going to happen next year? What
are the time frames?”
Beckwith
goes on to say that by 2022 or 2023 the likelihood of a blue ocean event is
extremely high. There are a lot of probabilities. It depends on regional
weather patterns in the Arctic. The melting of sea ice from above depends on
temperatures above the sea ice and melting from below which depends on the water
temperature below the ice, which are greatly influenced by the influx of water
from the Pacific through the Bering Strait and also through the Atlantic.
The
cyclone of 2012 did a lot of damage, chewing up sea ice through accelerated
wave action and by bringing warmer water up from the depths. Beckwith refers to
a number of charts and graphs at the online Polar Science Center recording the
health of sea ice, which has been steadily and rapidly declining since 1979.
What
will happen when the Arctic sea ice is gone? The albedo effect will be gone and
the ocean will begin absorbing much more solar energy, which will have a
dramatic impact on the jet stream and climate patterns. It will be pretty much
chaos. Extreme hurricanes and tornados and floods and draughts and vanishing
glaciers. Rivers in France have already dried up. Parts of the Doubs river,
whose source is in the western Jura Mountains and which runs through eastern
France, have dried up leaving behind rocks and hundreds of dead fish. Le Garde,
which runs past Nimes in the south of France, has also dried up. Fisherman have
been trying to save the fish dying in the Rhone, whose waters have been
deoxygenated due to the sever heat wave this summer. It was 108℉ in Paris
several days ago.
Sunday,
12:30 p.m. I go pick R up from work. A homeless man leans against the wall of
Bartell Drugstore, his backpack next to him. I pass a Hispanic man outside the
supermarket holding a sign that says he has four children and lost his job
because he lacked the right papers. I give him a dollar. He thanks me warmly.
We
go to the library atop Queen Anne hill. I pick up Retaking the Universe:
William Burroughs in the Age of Globalization which I got through the
interlibrary loan service and R picks up the DVD Can You Ever Forgive Me,
about the author Lee Israel and her attempt to revitalize her failing writing
career by forging letters from deceased authors and playwrights such as Dorothy
Parker and Noel Coward. Israel (played brilliantly by Melissa McCarthy) not
only mimics their sensibilities and personality, but improves on it. But that’s
really just the surface story. The real story is about how dumbed down our
society has become, a postliterate virtually illiterate society obsessed with
celebrity and the cult of personality. Israel is a truly gifted and disciplined
writer. She lives in poverty – unable to pay her vet bills for a very sick cat,
her closest companion – in an apartment riddled with flies while the author Tom
Clancy, a red-baiting blockbuster author catering to the audience with
high-testosterone action sequences and cheesy plot devices and making frequent
public appearances to market himself, makes three million a year.
Sunday,
7:30 p.m. I begin the first chapter in Retaking the Universe titled
“Shift Coordinate Points: William S. Burroughs and Contemporary Theory” by
Allen Hibbard and come across a paragraph I really like: “The image of
rhizomatic thinking is the bulb or tuber; the rhizome follows principles of
‘connection and heterogeneity,’ ‘multiplicity’ and ‘asignifying rupture’…
Burroughs’s own books have this rhizomatic quality. They are…
…arranged rather than
plotted. They do not operate according to the logic of conventional narratives
(though, as many critics have noted, the later works have more of a narrative
thread). There is always an element of spontaneity and surprise, with radical
shifts from one point to another, from one character to another, without
warning, thus challenging the simple notion of one singular ‘logic.’ What we
have, then, is simply juxtaposition: one element placed beside another, if not
randomly, at least not wholly and inviolably dependent on that which came
before: thus the potential for radical change.
9:15
p.m. I pop a beignet in my mouth and listen to Jimi Hendrix turn his guitar
into a machine gun.
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