Grim Reaping

Mikaela says:
Watching BBC last night, I was disturbed to hear about a typhoon now threatening Japan. This morning on NPR, they warned that the growing number of disasters around the world are part of a 20-year cycle just beginning. My first instinct is to be infuriated that we've let things get this bad and that we're so surprised that the seeds we've sewn are blossoming so terribly and with such destructive fruit.

But looking around and re-reading Robinson Jeffers, a California poet never very well known and now dead, I was reminded of the bigger picture that we must remember (perspective, people, perspective is everything!). Structural injustice or no, our civilization is locked into a relationship with nature that we cannot control. We can certainly do better than currently to achieve a balance that won't wipe us out.

The following is what Jeffers might have said about the Katrina and growing number of other disasters. I do not advocate his fatalism or pessimism, although I think his observation of our inextricable ecological tie to nature is correct.

What he doesn't discuss is that we feel the effects of our actions disproportionately. Some of us are still protected to a certain extent by wealth, power, education, and the opportunity to "choose" options that not all of us have. We saw that in the color and class of those affected more and less by the hurricanes in our country. Nature will come for us all, but some of us will last longer than others due to an unequal distribution of resources and options.

The lesson Jeffers offers is the terrible beauty of man as a natural part of the world, caught up in the net of our cities and destined to being periodically subject to nature's fearsome power. Even so, we can work toward doing our best to lessen the negative impact of our actions on our own environments and being sure that when the storm hits, we all have equal choices and chances for survival. At the very least, we can work toward having a community and a culture that can comfort each other as the worst comes and dance together as the rain falls. And in the end (feeling pessimistic today, I guess), perhaps we can pray together as we bury our dead and plant seeds for renewal.

The Purse-Seine
Robinson Jeffers
(please forgive the reformatting & punctuation -- Blogger is not well-suited for poetry!)

Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark of the moon; daylight or moonlight they could not tell where to spread the net, unable to see the phosphorescence of the shoals of fish.

The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color light on the sea's night-purple; he points, and the helmsman turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the gleaming shoal and drifts out her seine-net.

They close the circle and purse the bottom of the net, then with great labor haul it in.

I cannot tell you how beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible, then, when the crowded fish know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall to the other of their closing destiny the phosphorescent water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body sheeted with flame, like a live rocket, a comet's tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside the narrowing floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up to watch, sighing in the dark; the vast walls of night stand erect to the stars.

Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top on a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light: how could I help but recall the seine-net gathering the luminous fish?

I cannot tell you how beautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible. I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together into inter-dependence; we have built the great cities; now there is no escape.

We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival, insulated from the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent. The circle is closed, and the net is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they shine already.

The inevitable mass-disasters will not come in our time nor in our children's, but we and our children must watch the net draw narrower, government take all powers--or revolution, and the new government take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls--or anarchy, the mass-disasters.

These things are Progress ... but they are quite wrong. There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life's end is death.