2010 in Review
The 1981 film science fiction film Escape from New York shows an entire city transformed into a maximum security prison from which no one can leave. Kurt Russell, of course, tries. The 1990 Bill Murray film Quick Change has three bank robbers successfully pulling off a heist in New York and then comically getting lost while they try to exit the city.
I thought of those two films when my son Darien and his wife Betsy tried to execute their own exit from the city during Sunday’s blizzard.
They had to wait until Sunday to leave because Betsy sings for St. Thomas More Catholic Church and was scheduled to sing six masses on Friday and Saturday and two more Sunday morning. The good news is that they and their two beagles made it out, inching through the snow in their rented car. The bad news is that, six hours later, they were still in New Jersey, alone on an unplowed interstate. Late Monday night, thankfully, they joined us in Tennessee and our entire family is united again.
We’ve had a fair amount of snow this past year. I wrote three consecutive posts on snow poems (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and two poems by Robert Frost) when our college was closed down for a week last February. If you are struggling with snow at the moment, feel free to go back and visit them, starting with this one.
It would be nice to believe, as some climate change deniers claim to believe, that the snow we’ve been having, here and in Europe, proves that the earth is not in fact warming up. Unfortunately, climate scientists note that the effect of carbon emissions is more apt to cause violent weather swings rather than gradual warming. We can expect more heavy snows along with more abnormally hot summers, more hurricanes and tornadoes along with more droughts. As the polar ice caps melt (there is little question that this is occurring), ocean currents are effected and this impacts everything.
In other words, we must be more attentive than ever before to our relationship with nature. I spent many posts this past year looking at that relationship.
The Gulf of Mexico oil spill especially caught my attention. I saw it through the lens of Hopi witchery (as described by Lelie Marmon Silko) and wondered why so-called conservatives didn’t have the same respect for the environment as did an archconservative like T. S. Eliot. I linked to an excellent New York Times article comparing our incessant quest for oil, and its ruinous consequences, to the drama in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. At one point I wondered whether Obama and Congress could play the role of Fortinbras and those other figures in Shakespeare’s tragedies who ride in and clean up the mess. I worried that the villains would emerge triumphant.
To inject a little humor, I posted a fantasy wish fulfillment written by my father: Dr. Doolittle to the rescue.
I also wrote that the situation was foreseen, or at least described, 2500 years ago by the Greek playwright Euripides. In the Bacchae he demonstrates that, if you arrogantly try to impose your will on Nature, Nature will make you pay.
I looked at Robinson Crusoe to better understand Puritans’, and Americans’, contorted relationship with the environment. I examined how Blake, witnessing the damage caused by capitalism, seeks a spiritual connection with nature. I showed how such a connection, as envisioned by the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, can help us handle death when it comes.
I myself was witness to nature’s healing powers. I drew on one nature poem by Mary Oliver when we observed the tenth anniversary of the death of my oldest son Justin. I turned to another when our 98-year-old friend Maurine Holbert Hogaboom died. I found consolation in the lines,
whatever
the secret, and the pain,
there’s a decision: to die,
or to live, to go on
caring about something.
As bleak as our climate future looks, the best way to bring about change may be not to frighten people with apocalyptic scenarios (people just go into resistance when that happens) but rather focus on nature’s ability to sustain and heal. Throughout the year I pointed to that dimension of nature. For instance, I posted uplifting poems on the birds of Afghanistan, on cherry trees, on egrets, on California redwoods, and on Yosemite National Park (here and here).
In one post I drew on a Vladimir Nabakov short story to describe a moment of perfect being that I discovered atop Tumbledown Mountain in Maine. Stay on the lookout for such moments in the upcoming year. They are there if you open yourself to them.
