Freighting the Whale II:Teeth of the Times

Teeth of the times: Labor Day, all thick and humid and drowsy and coolish from noctal rains which rose and fell against our tin roof in dreamy arpeggios, all night it seems. Of the lengthening dark composed, a dram of autumn in the still-burning forest of summer. I hear an older voice inside the familiar sounds of 5 a.m. -- whether hailing me from the past, or announcing my future, I cannot tell.

And the news from the ruins of New Awleans is just bad and worse, even as more are plucked from roofs, as food and water is plunked turdlike into the unmentionable waters, as an armada of busses empty the Dome and Civic Center -- still the tide of awfulness rises. The Sunday Orlando Sentinel called the city "a watery tomb," citing accounts of local police deserting or committing suicide or simply committing suicide. A local official on "Meet the Press" imploded with a story about a friend whose mamma called him every day from a nursing home that was slowly filling with water, each day asking, "son, are ya coming to get me?", the son desperately saying yes, mamma, I'm coming, the next day passing with no help arriving, the next, the next, till when finally a boat arrived all had drowned ... The man descending into his grief on-camera, crying uncontrollably; that image fading to the well-groomed Republican governor of Mississippi saying all would be well, all would be well. (My wife rages how all of the leaders look like they haven't broken a sweat through all of this, stayed away by miles.)

Catastrophe is a dread whale rising from the storm surge, hauling us back to the stone age, to scenes of awfulness we never meant to see again, never thought such a thing could happen in this flush-with-cash country, this regnant world player. How to look such events fully on? How to mix the stink of shit and rotting bodies in with this three-day weekend where my wife and I enjoy being at home, linger over the cats, work in the garden, go about our passionate though hardly lucrative interests? Is there any sane way? Is there a voice deep enough to articulate such awfulness? Voices of tragedy, eyeholes of the skull lamping up, deep sounds coming from the fissures ...