The Utterances Of Storms

How terribly downright must be the utterances of storms and earthquakes to those accustomed to the soft hypocrisies of society. - John Muir

Storms make good metaphors. Everyone can relate to them. We all know what they look like, how they feel, how they sound. They’re loud. They’re frightening. They’re exciting. They get you wet. They blow roofs off of houses, topple cars, litter the streets with branches. Consequently, if, like Shakespeare, you were to say “why now, blow wind, swell billow, and swim bark! / The storm is up, and all is on the hazard,” we know what is meant: when there is agitation in the body politic, kings and queens may fall, new paradigms may emerge. Nothing is certain; everything is in a state of vacillation, precarious and indistinct.

Storms are signs of instability. Of disequilibrium.

They’re also great at revealing things. When people argue, confessions come out; feelings are declared, resentments divulged, secret histories exposed. Fists fly, plates break, shouts awaken the neighborhood. It’s not pretty, but there is something in the drama of it that immediately draws interest; nobody can avoid a good fight, or drive by a car accident without looking.

That’s why the theatre exists. It’s why people go on stage and yell at one another. We like to see ourselves upset from a distance. It gives us insight. It gives us entertainment.

Conflict and agitation are unavoidable in life. Life itself may have emerged from a condition of intense disquiet. A combination of desire and obstacle produced a chain of polymers to assume agency and movement. I’ve always like the term ‘primordial soup.’ But who, or what, stirred the soup? Who or what sequence of events caused an amalgam of inanimate substances to cohere into a body with a goal? Was that when eating was invented? Was eating the first motivating force? Or was it reproduction? Was the first internal directive one of procreation?

I wish I could’ve been there 3.9 billion years ago to see that occur. That little storm of amino acids stir into action.

3.9 billion years later I sit here typing words, amino acids in the shape of a human body, vertical, attentive, constrained by space and time to focus on enigmas of meaning and being, convulsions of thought in the form of words. Words are the convulsion. Words are the amalgam. Words are the amino acids cohering into a sentence which is probing for knowledge, indications of the external world that food may be found here, shelter found there, companionship found where you can find companionship.

Storms, as we move closer to the third decade of the twenty-first century, have grown more intense. Bubbles of air in glacial ice trap tiny samples of Earth’s atmosphere, giving scientists a history of greenhouse gases that stretches back more than 800,000 years. Our current atmosphere is highly unstable. On May 9^th, 2013, the global concentration of carbon dioxide hit 400 parts per million for the first time in recorded history, according to data from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. This isn’t good. It means our atmosphere is out of whack. Our species, and millions of other species, all depend on a certain temperature grade; disequilibrium in the climate translates into habitat loss. Survival becomes increasingly difficult, and finally -  if conditions worsen enough  - unsustainable.

The paleoclimate record reveals that the current climatic warming is occurring much more rapidly than past warming events. This is why our spate of hurricanes and tornados have been more intense than usual and will continue to become more intense. After the last ice age, it took 5,000 years for the global temperature to rise 4 to 7 degrees Celsius. In the past century alone, the temperature rose by 0.7 degrees Celsius, roughly ten times faster than the rate of ice-age warming.

What happens when metaphors become real? Zombies, for example. Why has the Zombie movie become so popular? Because we now live in a world full of zombies, the walking dead. Nobody in the public realm appears to be aware of anything, least of all themselves. They talk and move and behave as if they were completely void of life. Their speech and mannerisms have become dreary, lifeless, robotic. They seem even less alive than the zombies in the movies, that have a mania for eating human flesh, brains especially.

Zombies are peculiarly oblivious to storms. Of course, what I mean here by storm is the Sturm und Drang of German romanticism, emotional extremes and the torments of unrequited love.

And then there’s King Lear: this is a fusion of geriatric rage with a full-on storm of thunder, rain, and lightning.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!

You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world,

Crack Nature’s moulds, all germains spill at once,

That makes ingrateful man!

What’s a ‘germain’ you may wonder. Not a word you hear every day. A ‘germain’ is an obsolete form of ‘germane,’ whose obsolete meaning was “closely akin.” As in, relations, propinquity, kin, consanguinity. King Lear is pleading for chaos. Severed from meaning, he wants the entire universe to display its underlying pandemonium. He’s going down, and he wants to take everyone and everything down with him. His entire life has been revealed to be a nullity. He is beyond disillusionment. He is wallowing in nihilism.

Metaphors are language storms. Every language has within it the ingredients for semantic and syntactic upheaval. The metaphor, observed poet Hart Crane, “belongs to another order of experience than science, and is not to be limited by a scientific and arbitrary code of relationships either in verbal inflections or concepts…it often happens that images, themselves totally dissociated, when joined in the circuit of a particular emotion located with specific relation to both of them, conduce to great vividness and accuracy of statement in defining that emotion.”

So if the emotion is a storm, the images smash through the structures of time and become preposterous ribbons seething with grasshoppers.

Or not.

They might blow away in the wind. There might be a stream of consciousness nearby changing color with every Beatles song, or a Byzantine monkey growing thermometers in a vicissitude. I wish I knew the answer. The landscape evades my splurge. I splutter. I teem. I boil. The siege continues. The surge falls out of my jalopy. I’m getting sloppy. It’s another stormy Monday, and I have nothing to do but blow around the room like a voyage.