Ten minutes on June 12, 2008
Ten minutes on June 12, 2008
Fire, magical thinking, and art
Duncan Maxwell said from Redwoood Elementary School, a couple miles north of Boulder Creek, [the fire] “looks like a mushroom cloud.”
Santa Cruz Sentinel, Thursday, June 12, 2008.
I often read the newspaper, or consider the experience I am in the middle of, and think “In the movie…” As in, “In the movie about the end of the Bush administration, there are fires everywhere, and the people losing their homes to fifty foot high wildfires storming across fire lines drive to evacuation areas, passing on the way people who lost their homes to the invisible fires of late capitalism, the sub prime mortgage fiasco, the concentration of capital in the hands of fewer mammoth companies.” Cue music. More and more I feel myself slipping back into what I used to consider “floating poet” mode, in which reality keeps providing metaphors, synecdoche, narratives alive in contrast and image. And in fact that is what we are all faces with in late modernity, managing all this information coming at us from all angles as we also manage increasingly complex, even chaotic and frenetic lives. Which, if you think about it, is another one of those damn similes. Staying sane, imagining ways forward, is similar to gathering the fragments Picasso used in his collages, or seeing from the multiple perspectives of cubism or futurism, and finding a way to continue to make art, make lives, that never cease to question the inevitability of current evils, that continue to dare to believe in an unwritten future, that are always beginning to write that future with their largest and least actions.
I was driving a couple days ago listening to KPIG, the eclectic local radio station that specializes in hog noises, an often-irreverent DJ lineup, and songs not on the top forty, but more the back forty, of the musical ranch. An ad came on for a company that told me I had done it all, had the kids and house, had the sailboat, life was good, but what about my future? Would I continue to sail calmly, or…I was in stop and go traffic, and was clearly not the target demographic, but waited patiently through the metaphor to the end, where I was in a safe harbor with a bank that would take care of my retirement and investment needs, apparently while shining my shoes and serving me a tall cold drink with an umbrella in it every afternoon after fetching the paper. I punched the button and immediately listened to a story about Darfur, where a man had borrowed his relatives’ portion of food to tide him over, but was then stiffed with his ration of rice and now was caught between the demands of his hungry children and his relatives, themselves living one handout at a time. I looked up at the traffic, the cars in line, each one smoking a petroleum cigar, some with huge bodies in glistening red or black, tires the size of millstones. I blanked on the actual vision through the glass, and instead saw a series of images: corn made into biofuels, corn prices going up, food shortages and crises all over the globe, massive population destabilization, aid workers watching as a line forms, some refugees, some militiamen just back from machine gunning refugees and villagers across the border…the light changed and people turned left, right, turned in U’s back the direction they came, flowed forward toward the temples of consumption past the mostly invisible people and systems and structures that keep everything from completely going under.
We just had a huge fire here in Santa Cruz, three weeks ago. 4,270 acres off Summit Road, 35 homes burned. It was horrible, inevitable perhaps, fuel that had lain there for fifty, seventy-five, a hundred years went up, potential turned into thermal energy. For the people who suffered through it, it was an apocalypse; for others, it was a very interesting news item for some days, but less and less compelling perhaps unless you knew someone, knew some ones, who had experienced it first hand.
I was talking with my friend Kevin about the inability of the Santa Cruz city or county government to get on the same page with the fire department around fire abatement. Our little community of 60 brought the fire department in to look at our arroyo, which is considered a triple threat fire area, and then started doing what they recommended. For our efforts we were called in by a neighbor for cutting down eucalyptus trees, fined by the city, forced to do work to counter erosion (work we were going to do after we completed fire abatement work). Now, a year and a half later, we are clear of the city’s fines and censure. We did all the work they asked. And in turn, nothing has been done about fire abatement. Nothing. My house could burn up in fifteen minutes if a fire like the one now burning within sight of our land broke out in the arroyo. I said to him that it was the perfect time to mobilize our neighbors to get the city to do something besides impede and paralyze anyone’s efforts to prevent fire. The big Summit fire was warning enough. But was it? We pondered. Perhaps people needed even more of a wake up call, or, if you will, a fire lit under them.
About 12 hours later the Martin fire started.
Magical thinking is the notion that you can control certain things with your mind, or actions, things that are unlikely in actuality to be affected by your efforts. Sacrificing a goat or lamb, say, to appease the fire gods. Mentally imagining a hated politician caught in a scandal, and thinking it will happen because you imagined it so hard. I saw the fire and immediately thought, damn. Be careful what you wish for.
Then I turned my suddenly powerful mind to other projects. I could tell you what they are, but then I would have to reach out with my mind and kill you. Suffice to say, these projects are complex enough to involve the entire global economy and its networks, the ecosystems and their subsystems, the NBA playoffs, and, possibly, the uncanny return of Audrey Hepburn circa Roman Holiday to Northern California.
After a cup of coffee (once again sub par because my neighbors have suddenly stopped drinking half and half, while my son mixes it with nonfat milk when the 1% is gone, resulting in a rash of creamer shortages in my immediate vicinity) I tried to stop thinking magically (the wild fires strangely target only military contractors and weapons manufacturers, sparing the houses of the humble) and consider the bubble we all walk around in.
This fire that I can see with its massive plumes of smoke is the second one in my county in a month. And like the other, less visible fires of our economy, our political system, the more you look into it, the more it looks shaky. It turns out there are a bunch of wildfires going off in Northern California alone, way early for the fire season, and given that, we might move into August with no reserves left to fight the even more intense fires of that hot hot month. The firefighters are like our military, spread too thin over too vast an area, weakened by all the effort. Paul Van Gerwen, Bay Area spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said in an interview "The resources we have stationed around the state are all being tied up. When you have five or six fires going, you start to have things spread pretty thin . . .. Any new fires that occur, there's a risk of not being able to control them."
Afghanistan. Iraq. Darfur. Somalia. Yemen. All fires, burning on. Things spread pretty thin.
Other fires burning in Northern California on Wednesday included:
1. A 860-acre fire near Cloverdale in Sonoma County that was 80 percent contained.
2. A 1,200-acre fire near Highway 132 and Don Pedro Reservoir in Tuolumne County that was 30 percent contained.
3. A 4,200-acre fire in the Los Padres National Forest in Monterey County that was 10 percent contained. About 15 summer cabins in the Santa Lucia Tract remain evacuated as a precaution.
4. A 3,300-acre fire about 10 miles north of Fresno in Madera County that was 100 percent contained.
Major fires. All burning now. All taking resources to combat. All wearing thin the nerves of those battling them, some of whom are simply twenty somethings from places like the state correctional centre in nearby Ben Lomond.
Global warming, yes, but also simply drought, all this building in areas where fuel builds up and fires are prevented and suppressed for long periods of time.
Is fire like war? I don’t know. But they are on my radar at the same time.
According to globalsecurity.org,
The United Nations defines "major wars" as military conflicts inflicting 1,000 battlefield deaths per year. In 1965, there were 10 major wars under way. The new millennium began with much of the world consumed in armed conflict or cultivating an uncertain peace. As of mid-2005, there were eight Major Wars under way [down from 15 at the end of 2003], with as many as two dozen "lesser" conflicts ongoing with varying degrees of intensity.
So much of the violence in the world, it seems to me, is fallout from the kinds of war developed via modern technology married to large industrial states led by political parties keen to gain land and resources and labor and control over these things. So much of the fuel for fire was laid down by colonialism and imperialism. Yes, wars have plagued Africa for centuries, as they plagued other areas where aggressive humans lived and shaped cultures around patriarchy and authoritarian modes of control. But the current wars are much, much worse, like the current fires, because of the historic fuel that has never been properly cleared. So the fires, and wars, burn hotter, overwhelm things designed to withstand them, like certain trees or certain human capacities for empathy and peace.
I think most people in the world today desire a peaceful life. And a life that includes animals and habitat, farmland and clean air, cultural diversity and creativity. But it seems that more and more, in postmodern societies, they have given over practical control over most areas of life to those who promise to take care of these areas: political parties, corporate entities, national security and military structures. And these groups, living in their own bubbles, threatened by their shadows, the parallel structures in other nations and peoples, are massively out of touch with the feedback loops of the natural, social, and economic. Most people are kept busy, or distracted with entertainment, or controlled by fear and police, or all at once; most leaders are busy preparing the next fire, or selling countries and militaries the fuel and tinder with which to make an even hotter fire.
During World War I, civilians made up fewer than 5 percent of all casualties. Today, 75 percent or more of those killed or wounded in wars are non-combatants. The reward to civilians for giving over more control of these systems to our current leaders is an increasing share of the pie…of death.
Many brave people are right this minute working so that the fire I can see doesn’t come and burn down my house and leave me and my wife and son and neighbors homeless. If it came down to it, I’d be beside them, cutting trees so that the fire is less able to leap the road and hit Pete and Beth’s house, or the chicken coop, or Tycho and Kristina’s yard. In times like these, when disaster hits, people often cooperate and help each other and rise to the occasion.
And right this minute, many brave people are working so that these invisible fires which most of us can’t see don’t come and lay waste to our present and our future. They work to connect the visible to the invisible, the present to the future, the everyday to the epic. We have an idea, I think, of how to better prepare for fire in times of drought; it begins with knowing that droughts happen, and not making them worse.
And it begins, perhaps, with art. That is, with putting together the fragments of the present and past, and composing new narratives of the future that engage all of our abilities to create and to live out our creations. That is what I think we get, besides blessed escape, from good novels, short stories, essays, blogs, films, painting, what have you. Models for creating our own lives and stories, and collaborating with others as we join stories to create cultures and subcultures. We need the escape from the relentless repetition of the dismal story of What Is (appears to be) Real, in order to get the distance requisite to re-see, to revise; then we need models of alternatives, new narratives, to remind us of what is wrong with What Is and what seeds of the possible lie in what is wrong.
Every fairy tale has, at its core, a realistic story of human beings, psychology, what is involved in the quest for power and happiness. Every realistic novel, with its take on dysfunctional families, or every realist political analysis that feels compelling, has, at its core, a fairy tale that such writing can make a difference, that power and happiness and grace are possible. Even a fire can reveal human abilities of cooperation and competence that allow us to imagine putting out those other, invisible, conflagrations.
Fire, magical thinking, and art
Duncan Maxwell said from Redwoood Elementary School, a couple miles north of Boulder Creek, [the fire] “looks like a mushroom cloud.”
Santa Cruz Sentinel, Thursday, June 12, 2008.
I often read the newspaper, or consider the experience I am in the middle of, and think “In the movie…” As in, “In the movie about the end of the Bush administration, there are fires everywhere, and the people losing their homes to fifty foot high wildfires storming across fire lines drive to evacuation areas, passing on the way people who lost their homes to the invisible fires of late capitalism, the sub prime mortgage fiasco, the concentration of capital in the hands of fewer mammoth companies.” Cue music. More and more I feel myself slipping back into what I used to consider “floating poet” mode, in which reality keeps providing metaphors, synecdoche, narratives alive in contrast and image. And in fact that is what we are all faces with in late modernity, managing all this information coming at us from all angles as we also manage increasingly complex, even chaotic and frenetic lives. Which, if you think about it, is another one of those damn similes. Staying sane, imagining ways forward, is similar to gathering the fragments Picasso used in his collages, or seeing from the multiple perspectives of cubism or futurism, and finding a way to continue to make art, make lives, that never cease to question the inevitability of current evils, that continue to dare to believe in an unwritten future, that are always beginning to write that future with their largest and least actions.
I was driving a couple days ago listening to KPIG, the eclectic local radio station that specializes in hog noises, an often-irreverent DJ lineup, and songs not on the top forty, but more the back forty, of the musical ranch. An ad came on for a company that told me I had done it all, had the kids and house, had the sailboat, life was good, but what about my future? Would I continue to sail calmly, or…I was in stop and go traffic, and was clearly not the target demographic, but waited patiently through the metaphor to the end, where I was in a safe harbor with a bank that would take care of my retirement and investment needs, apparently while shining my shoes and serving me a tall cold drink with an umbrella in it every afternoon after fetching the paper. I punched the button and immediately listened to a story about Darfur, where a man had borrowed his relatives’ portion of food to tide him over, but was then stiffed with his ration of rice and now was caught between the demands of his hungry children and his relatives, themselves living one handout at a time. I looked up at the traffic, the cars in line, each one smoking a petroleum cigar, some with huge bodies in glistening red or black, tires the size of millstones. I blanked on the actual vision through the glass, and instead saw a series of images: corn made into biofuels, corn prices going up, food shortages and crises all over the globe, massive population destabilization, aid workers watching as a line forms, some refugees, some militiamen just back from machine gunning refugees and villagers across the border…the light changed and people turned left, right, turned in U’s back the direction they came, flowed forward toward the temples of consumption past the mostly invisible people and systems and structures that keep everything from completely going under.
We just had a huge fire here in Santa Cruz, three weeks ago. 4,270 acres off Summit Road, 35 homes burned. It was horrible, inevitable perhaps, fuel that had lain there for fifty, seventy-five, a hundred years went up, potential turned into thermal energy. For the people who suffered through it, it was an apocalypse; for others, it was a very interesting news item for some days, but less and less compelling perhaps unless you knew someone, knew some ones, who had experienced it first hand.
I was talking with my friend Kevin about the inability of the Santa Cruz city or county government to get on the same page with the fire department around fire abatement. Our little community of 60 brought the fire department in to look at our arroyo, which is considered a triple threat fire area, and then started doing what they recommended. For our efforts we were called in by a neighbor for cutting down eucalyptus trees, fined by the city, forced to do work to counter erosion (work we were going to do after we completed fire abatement work). Now, a year and a half later, we are clear of the city’s fines and censure. We did all the work they asked. And in turn, nothing has been done about fire abatement. Nothing. My house could burn up in fifteen minutes if a fire like the one now burning within sight of our land broke out in the arroyo. I said to him that it was the perfect time to mobilize our neighbors to get the city to do something besides impede and paralyze anyone’s efforts to prevent fire. The big Summit fire was warning enough. But was it? We pondered. Perhaps people needed even more of a wake up call, or, if you will, a fire lit under them.
About 12 hours later the Martin fire started.
Magical thinking is the notion that you can control certain things with your mind, or actions, things that are unlikely in actuality to be affected by your efforts. Sacrificing a goat or lamb, say, to appease the fire gods. Mentally imagining a hated politician caught in a scandal, and thinking it will happen because you imagined it so hard. I saw the fire and immediately thought, damn. Be careful what you wish for.
Then I turned my suddenly powerful mind to other projects. I could tell you what they are, but then I would have to reach out with my mind and kill you. Suffice to say, these projects are complex enough to involve the entire global economy and its networks, the ecosystems and their subsystems, the NBA playoffs, and, possibly, the uncanny return of Audrey Hepburn circa Roman Holiday to Northern California.
After a cup of coffee (once again sub par because my neighbors have suddenly stopped drinking half and half, while my son mixes it with nonfat milk when the 1% is gone, resulting in a rash of creamer shortages in my immediate vicinity) I tried to stop thinking magically (the wild fires strangely target only military contractors and weapons manufacturers, sparing the houses of the humble) and consider the bubble we all walk around in.
This fire that I can see with its massive plumes of smoke is the second one in my county in a month. And like the other, less visible fires of our economy, our political system, the more you look into it, the more it looks shaky. It turns out there are a bunch of wildfires going off in Northern California alone, way early for the fire season, and given that, we might move into August with no reserves left to fight the even more intense fires of that hot hot month. The firefighters are like our military, spread too thin over too vast an area, weakened by all the effort. Paul Van Gerwen, Bay Area spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said in an interview "The resources we have stationed around the state are all being tied up. When you have five or six fires going, you start to have things spread pretty thin . . .. Any new fires that occur, there's a risk of not being able to control them."
Afghanistan. Iraq. Darfur. Somalia. Yemen. All fires, burning on. Things spread pretty thin.
Other fires burning in Northern California on Wednesday included:
1. A 860-acre fire near Cloverdale in Sonoma County that was 80 percent contained.
2. A 1,200-acre fire near Highway 132 and Don Pedro Reservoir in Tuolumne County that was 30 percent contained.
3. A 4,200-acre fire in the Los Padres National Forest in Monterey County that was 10 percent contained. About 15 summer cabins in the Santa Lucia Tract remain evacuated as a precaution.
4. A 3,300-acre fire about 10 miles north of Fresno in Madera County that was 100 percent contained.
Major fires. All burning now. All taking resources to combat. All wearing thin the nerves of those battling them, some of whom are simply twenty somethings from places like the state correctional centre in nearby Ben Lomond.
Global warming, yes, but also simply drought, all this building in areas where fuel builds up and fires are prevented and suppressed for long periods of time.
Is fire like war? I don’t know. But they are on my radar at the same time.
According to globalsecurity.org,
The United Nations defines "major wars" as military conflicts inflicting 1,000 battlefield deaths per year. In 1965, there were 10 major wars under way. The new millennium began with much of the world consumed in armed conflict or cultivating an uncertain peace. As of mid-2005, there were eight Major Wars under way [down from 15 at the end of 2003], with as many as two dozen "lesser" conflicts ongoing with varying degrees of intensity.
So much of the violence in the world, it seems to me, is fallout from the kinds of war developed via modern technology married to large industrial states led by political parties keen to gain land and resources and labor and control over these things. So much of the fuel for fire was laid down by colonialism and imperialism. Yes, wars have plagued Africa for centuries, as they plagued other areas where aggressive humans lived and shaped cultures around patriarchy and authoritarian modes of control. But the current wars are much, much worse, like the current fires, because of the historic fuel that has never been properly cleared. So the fires, and wars, burn hotter, overwhelm things designed to withstand them, like certain trees or certain human capacities for empathy and peace.
I think most people in the world today desire a peaceful life. And a life that includes animals and habitat, farmland and clean air, cultural diversity and creativity. But it seems that more and more, in postmodern societies, they have given over practical control over most areas of life to those who promise to take care of these areas: political parties, corporate entities, national security and military structures. And these groups, living in their own bubbles, threatened by their shadows, the parallel structures in other nations and peoples, are massively out of touch with the feedback loops of the natural, social, and economic. Most people are kept busy, or distracted with entertainment, or controlled by fear and police, or all at once; most leaders are busy preparing the next fire, or selling countries and militaries the fuel and tinder with which to make an even hotter fire.
During World War I, civilians made up fewer than 5 percent of all casualties. Today, 75 percent or more of those killed or wounded in wars are non-combatants. The reward to civilians for giving over more control of these systems to our current leaders is an increasing share of the pie…of death.
Many brave people are right this minute working so that the fire I can see doesn’t come and burn down my house and leave me and my wife and son and neighbors homeless. If it came down to it, I’d be beside them, cutting trees so that the fire is less able to leap the road and hit Pete and Beth’s house, or the chicken coop, or Tycho and Kristina’s yard. In times like these, when disaster hits, people often cooperate and help each other and rise to the occasion.
And right this minute, many brave people are working so that these invisible fires which most of us can’t see don’t come and lay waste to our present and our future. They work to connect the visible to the invisible, the present to the future, the everyday to the epic. We have an idea, I think, of how to better prepare for fire in times of drought; it begins with knowing that droughts happen, and not making them worse.
And it begins, perhaps, with art. That is, with putting together the fragments of the present and past, and composing new narratives of the future that engage all of our abilities to create and to live out our creations. That is what I think we get, besides blessed escape, from good novels, short stories, essays, blogs, films, painting, what have you. Models for creating our own lives and stories, and collaborating with others as we join stories to create cultures and subcultures. We need the escape from the relentless repetition of the dismal story of What Is (appears to be) Real, in order to get the distance requisite to re-see, to revise; then we need models of alternatives, new narratives, to remind us of what is wrong with What Is and what seeds of the possible lie in what is wrong.
Every fairy tale has, at its core, a realistic story of human beings, psychology, what is involved in the quest for power and happiness. Every realistic novel, with its take on dysfunctional families, or every realist political analysis that feels compelling, has, at its core, a fairy tale that such writing can make a difference, that power and happiness and grace are possible. Even a fire can reveal human abilities of cooperation and competence that allow us to imagine putting out those other, invisible, conflagrations.
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