I know we are dying. All my senses tell me it is true. And the truth of
it is terrifying. It is hard not to go back to sleep and never wake up.
Wake up, wake up and I will tell you a story.
There is a scene in the movie Diva, in which the hero, Jules stands in
telephone booth bleeding to death having run away from his attackers. He
calls Alba, on the phone, who arranges to have him rescued, and
persuades him to remain conscious while she tells Jules to imagine the
fun they will have together.
Take a deep breath. Exhale.
We know that the effect of igniting as much petrochemicals as we have in
the last hundred years is the equivalent to striking the earth with an
asteroid, or creating an explosion that has been going on the past 100
years and has still not finished.
Breathe.
Don't sleep yet, there is the tale of Sheharazad, the wife of the sultan
who beheaded all his wives the day after their marriage.
Sheharazad told 1001 tales, one per night, but would stop the tale for
the night just at the moment something was about to happen. One night
she told the tale of Sinbad the sailor. In the story a poor porter is
invited into Sinbad's house to hear the stories of how Sinbad acquired
his wealth traveling the seven seas and being shipwrecked on numerous
occasions and left to die.
But, now, the seas are rising, and we are shackled to the walls of our
prison and the water will rush down our lungs. Our cities, our homes can
not move, they fix us and becomes our prisons and our graves.
But it should come as no disaster. We can practice losing father and
losing faster. Elizabeth Bishop in One Art encourages us that losing
isn't hard to master. She lost two cities, two rivers and a continent.
I believe there is a passage in The Wars by Timothy Findley, or maybe it
is my invention, of the hero witnessing a soldier with half his head
blown of, fixated on finding his hat, that has myteriously gone missing.
Or is that the hero has been heroically carrying his fallen comrade to
safety only to discover that a stray piece of shrapnel had killed him?
There are more stories I can tell. Don't sleep just yet. The ice is
melting slowly. There is plenty of time, the hurricanes are still
gathering unto themselves.
There is a Wim Wenders movie Wings of Desire, which start "as das kint
kint va." Peter Falk is in it, but there are also angels. The angels go
to people who are in need and sit with them unseen. I am sure there must
be a scene in which an angel is cradling one of the dying, though the
dying man knows it not.
I am poisoning my children with lead and mercury, faster than my parents
ever poisoned me. I have already thrown away more computers than they
will ever own in their lifetime.
I can hear you yawning, your eyelids heavy.
Did you ever hear the opera Carmen by Bizet or read the poem by Oscar
Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol? We all kill the thing we love. Yes.
And so it is that we are killed by those who love us.
There is a legend about the last roman emperor, who played the violin
while Rome burned. Before I only saw the madness of it. The futility.
The response to something terrifying is to deny the reality of it.
Before I couldn't imagine how he could not be firefighting or saving
lives along with the others deperately trying to save what little they
could salvage.
Keep you eyes open, don't sleep yet.
But now I see something new. Now I see compassion and tenderness.
Dear Earth, dear city, dear life - find hope now in my song.
Swing low, swing chariot,
Coming for to carry me home.
I looked over jordan and what did I see
Coming for to carry me home?
A band of angels coming after me.
Coming for to carry me home.
