I can't sleep…
Insist on believing that good will prevail; that the work will get done; that there will again be love. We have to want to get up in the morning for the good mornings to arrive.
– Tennessee Williams, in Follies of God, June 29, 2023
Notes:
The first day in early June when my 5-year-old and I camped in Minnesota’s lake country was the usual heaven — perfect calm for canoeing, an osprey overhead as we braved a swim in the cold spring water and a clear blue sky.
But the second day the sky was smoke, the sun a ruby disc. I yearned for the blue and wondered how long the smoke would stay. The winds eventually shifted, but the smoke returned last week and the Twin Cities’ air quality index on Wednesday climbed high into the Environmental Protection Agency’s “very unhealthy” level. I worry about how often it will return this summer and fall…
New research suggests that wind patterns and cloud formation are growing increasingly erratic. In some places, we have too much rain, in others too little. Huge wildfire smoke events are becoming more common. The list of changes occurring above us, spurred on in part by burning fossil fuels, is long and getting longer. It means we must now contemplate the more frequent loss of our blue skies.
When the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term “solastalgia” about two decades ago to describe a form of grief he later defined as the “lived experience of the desolation of a much-loved landscape,” he wasn’t thinking specifically about the sky, but he might as well have been. Already many of us are experiencing something previously unimaginable: We are homesick for the sky…
About three decades ago, the environmental activist and author Joanna Macy argued that until the late 20th century, parents lived with “the tacit certainty” of something every previous generation had enjoyed. The certainty was that their “children and children’s children would walk the same Earth, under the same sky.” That certainty was now lost, she wrote, and that loss was “the pivotal psychological reality of our time.” …
It is yet another retrenchment of our experience on Earth, another instance of “it didn’t used to be this way.”
Are we supposed to just get used to more smoke in the sky? With so much climate change baked into the future, the answer is probably yes. But this new reality feels overwhelming, especially as I imagine the rest of my child’s life…
I hate this smoke for what it does to our present and what it says about her future… But I also have to find another way to feel. I have to find ways to hold joy alongside anger, hope alongside grief…
Maybe on mornings like this, rising to find the sky full of smoke, just enough people will decide: This burning world is not the world I have known, and it’s not the world I want my children to know.
Maybe losing our blue skies more often will be just what we need.
— Paul Bogard, from “I Am Homesick for the Sky” (NY Times, June 20, 2023). Bogard is author of The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light
DK Photo: June 8, 2023. Smoke from Canadian wild fires. More photos here.
Dawn. Manhattan. 6:10 a.m.
I exit an early morning train.
The Up escalator from the tunnel in Grand Central Station to Madison Ave., is down, again.
Commuters, a wolf pack building at the bottom of stairs, jostle for position before funneling into a single line formation up 70+ stairs.
My Apple Watch silently counts steps, counts heart beats.
I’m looking down, stepping deliberately, not wanting to take a header on the concrete steps. The alternatives (to a header) were awful: clipping the heal of the man in front, or flopping backward into the Pack, both scenarios setting off Dominos. Rubberneckers would pull out iPhones to catch the scene, photos later sold to the NY Post and run in the afternoon edition. “Dummy Triggers Dominos, Sends 20 to hospital. Grand Central exit to Madison closed for the morning as Paramedics clean up the carnage.”
A soft morning light beams ahead, a few more steps. I exit without incident, not without anxiety. What’s the bloody rush?
Winded. Continue reading “Walking Cross-Town. With Cigarette.”
Smoke: tobacco burning, coal smoke, wood-fire smoke, leaf smoke. Most of all, leaf smoke. This is the only odor I can will back to consciousness just by thinking about it. I can sit in a chair, thinking, and call up clearly to mind the smell of burning autumn leaves, coded and stored away somewhere in a temporal lobe, firing off explosive signals into every part of my right hemisphere. But nothing else: if I try to recall the thick smell of Edinburgh in winter, or the accidental burning of a plastic comb, or a rose, or a glass of wine, I cannot do this; I can get a clear picture of any face I feel like remembering, and I can hear whatever Beethoven quartet I want to recall, but except for the leaf bonfire I cannot really remember a smell in its absence. To be sure, I know the odor of cinnamon or juniper and can name such things with accuracy when they turn up in front of my nose, but I cannot imagine them into existence.
~ Lewis Thomas, A Long Line of Cells: Collected Essays
Notes:
Autumnal – nothing to do with leaves. It is to do with a certain brownness at the edges of the day… Brown is creeping up on us, take my word for it… Russets and tangerine shades of old gold flushing the very outside edge of the senses… deep shining ochres, burnt umber and parchments of baked earth — reflecting on itself and through itself, filtering the light. At such times, perhaps, coincidentally, the leaves might fall, somewhere, by repute. Yesterday was blue, like smoke.
~ Tom Stoppard
Notes: