Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes

by Natural Causes- The Nature Issue (retail) (epub)

  Since 1993 in Gakona, Alaska, the research station commonly acronymized as HAARP has been practicing ionospheric control.4 In this transitional space, the no-man’s-land between the atmosphere and the magnetosphere, HAARP blasts high-powered radio waves with 180 antennas in a single beam to take down aircraft and set off weather calamities, nature made-to-order for the security domains, as canards and conspiracy talk squall on other frequencies. This world is a testing ground. This world makes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim that Europe is stealing Iran’s rain, emptying its clouds before the clouds wind-travel to the East—reported widely in the conservative press in May 2011—seem not only feasible but probable. A gust of absolute conviction, prescient announcement, and paranoia sometimes all blow through the same moment.

  *

  At one point in Henry Darger’s Conflagration! the Vivian Girls find themselves trapped by a forest fire set by the Glandelinians: “It appeared to be a fire storm of a sixty-mile-an-hour velocity, by the way it swept the trees down in so great a number, the wind coming straight from the southwest raging with the most terrible fury.” But the wind eventually changes course and so changes the state of affairs, a fury turned back to where it began.

  *

  In Homer’s Odyssey, Aeolus, keeper of the winds, bestows Odysseus and his crew with a gift bag holding the four winds. However, while Odysseus sleeps, the sailors, looking for booty, open the bag and the resulting gale blows them off course.

  *

  In 1977, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution prohibiting the hostile use of environmental modification techniques. According to “Weather as a Force Multiplier,” though, the UN hasn’t stopped the research and technological development for weather modification in order to “enhance air superiority and provide new options for battlespace shaping.” We like theoretical wars as much as real ones. In the meantime, with DARPA’s new “One Shot,” snipers can take out an enemy at a distance of .7 miles in twenty-miles-per-hour wind. The One Shot sniper scope uses computer-run lasers to track not only distance but also the wind turbulence in the path of the bullet, and to correct for it. A wind might blow you off course, but a gun can correct for turbulence in the thoughts and feelings of others, in your life’s trajectory and in the system.

  *

  The parking lot is a habitat for unmoored shopping carts, water bottles, advertising fliers, and seagulls trolling for trash. Sleepless stones skim the open asphalt, each one its own double. A thing in wind is caffeinated, buzzing with aura. Wind rustles the tissue wrapped around each thing. Newspaper wraps around nothing. Wind animates last night’s empties. Loose plastic bags derange into amoeba puppets hopping around parked cars. Marks of visitation, marks of limbo. Have a nice day! A giddy piece of time translates you too. Whoever wants to inflate, to be carried away, to turn tail, to come skidding back, to change and exchange is susceptible to the wind: Take me with you, away from forsaken here.

  *

  As I walk out of a storm’s pivot, I wander into Aeria, the City of Air. The river moves. The city drifts, offers an ethereal escape, unlimited speculation and dream time. Disembodied radio voices fizz through the air like the apparition of migrating geese. The miasma of the city’s electric lights go only so far into the sky, this light fades into stars, which are like a roof shot with bullet holes or a cloud of fireflies. Aeria “gives the imagination a late place in which to muse, meditate, linger, if for no more—indeed—than a passing moment.”5 As misunderstandings hum through my mind, I catch wind of a popsicle wrapper darting all over the alley. I enter its orbit, as if watching a film made with a handheld camera, but air designs choppy rhythms faster than my eyes can follow. Slightly queasy, I keep watching from my window, now back in my parents’ apartment, remembering my dream of a skyscraper blown out to sea. Swallows then circle in the last light, in greater and greater gestures, emitting tiny cries that go straight to my gut. The birds make flight lines. They pull these lines tight. I feel in my body what my eyes cannot grasp, that those lines stretch away, accumulating speed until they move into the future. For now, they hold the world together. Until the light that touches them reaches us, they bind us to air. Here we are and here we are and here we are not. Wind lines are the hidden principle behind everything we don’t create.

  *

  At one time, only the boldest philosopher could have denied that a gust could knock up a virgin.6 Wind insemination explains “virgin births,” and their history of ending badly, at the same time it simplifies paternity. Firmly lodged in their mental map of the world as late as 1912, the Ainu in Northern Japan tell of an Island of Women in the Pacific Ocean. The women here lift their cunts to the east wind. Legs in the air or ass over a naked rock, they use air currents to fertilize themselves like flora. Wind blows off whatever the sun intensifies. The women of the Island of Women keep only their daughters, and kill their male offspring. Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, Greece, and China all have their legends of wind impregnating mammals and birds. This belief in anemophilous animals actually paves the way for the discovery of wind pollination in plants. The animal fantasy—involving mostly vultures, hens, mares, and humans—leads us directly into the vegetable fact. When Camerarius first breaks the news about pollination of flowering plants in 1694, he quotes a passage from Virgil’s Georgics detailing how west winds impregnate certain mares. He also props up his argument with Aristotle on the “wind-eggs” of birds impregnated by spring breezes. Today “wind egg” refers to a small, imperfect egg, usually lacking a yolk or a firm shell, or an empty argument. Dig into most words and you’ll turn over a metaphor, which in this case turns us back to the end, chased by its own head. Aristophanes’s play The Birds (414 BCE) choruses, “In the beginning Night laid a wind egg.” This night was full of hot air. That’s all we had in the beginning.

  *

  Open the door and start climbing. Lift yourself out of the nervous dynamics of New York City traffic. Your elevation transfigures you into a bird god looking down at your own maze. Climb ninety-one floors to find a way out. A thick, vertiginous curtain of glass shuts off the volume. You traded your hearing for a point of view. Look out the window at the visual vitality below—a technicolor, twitchy, kinetic cityscape so out of sync with its sonic deadness that it nauseates. In 1999, for his World Trade Center Recordings, Stephen Vitiello invited the eeriest waftings of sound inside. He stuck contact mics to the windows to convert one of the world’s tallest buildings into a monolithic microphone: air suddenly audible like a mystic thought thrashing around a steel brain.

  I duck into a dark museum room in 2002 where one piece from this series plays. Nothing in the room but white vinyl seats, a live man gripping the wall or leaning against it, and the sound of an end-of-the-century hurricane convulsing outside a building that no longer exists. This sound is what the new century remembers of the old. What the WTC offered us was a graphic majesty, an imaginary totality, two huge speakers that strangled all sound. It offered us a moat of dead birds, which crashed into it and fell to its streets, collected daily for the uncertain purposes of science. The birds were something to see, but could not be heard as they died or later. Now basking in the shadow of recently departed visuals, what we have is only aural memory if memory can be planted. No one remembers the sounds of Hurricane Floyd from within the towers because no one heard them there. But the everyday contains strangeness that surfaces in your ears. What is left of the WTC is the sound of its interference; a creaky, tiny resistance. Hear what no human had heard before, and hear it now, searingly clear. Another queasy disparity asserts itself: the sound of “nothing.” The winds surge and drone, no stories in sight.

  1 Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, S. A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and O. Berghof, trans. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2006), 3.35.

  2 This entire paragraph is indebted to Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran, trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 9–10, 2
5.

  3 Col. Tamzy J. House, Lt. Col. James B. Near Jr., LTC William B. Shields, Maj. Ronald J. Celentano, Maj. David M. Husband, Maj. Ann E. Mercer, Maj. James E. Pugh, presented August 1996, csat.au.af.mil/2025/volume3/vol3ch15.pdf.

  4 HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) is jointly funded by the US Air Force, the US Navy, the University of Alaska, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

  5 Gustaf Sobin, Luminous Debris: Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 173.

  6 Conway Zirkle, “Animals Impregnated by the Wind,” Isis 25.1 (May 1936), 95, 110, 122–27.

  The Dead Swan

  Lily Tuck

  It’s a cold, windy, early spring day and Sadie is walking by herself along the beach, not looking down or at where she is going so that she nearly trips over it—the dead swan—only she doesn’t right away recognize what it is. She stops and stares at it for a while and, typically, because she is unhappy and perverse, she thinks it is beautiful. She picks up the dead swan and walks home with it in her arms.

  What does a swan weigh—twenty? twenty-five pounds?

  Her husband, Mason, is away—actually, he is away in jail awaiting his trial—otherwise she would not have brought the swan home. Sadie can imagine what he would have said to her about it:

  Christ! Sadie, get that damn bird out of here.

  Or, more threatening,

  Get rid of that fucking bird before I—

  If he was high, which he usually was, he might have raised his hand at her. A couple of times already he had swung and missed. Mason is not as coordinated or as strong as he used to be. The drugs, Sadie guesses; part of the reason he is now in jail. The other part she tries not to think about.

  Mason has been diagnosed as bipolar and a bunch of other things and Sadie can’t remember what they all are offhand. But manic depressive was one of them. He was on meds but half the time he refused to take them. Mason said that the meds made him feel slow and stupid and gave him a dry mouth. I can’t even get it up anymore, Mason had complained, making a sound that was meant to be a laugh but wasn’t.

  Holding the swan like a baby, Sadie places it gently on the old-fashioned canvas swing chair in the screened-in porch, careful not to rock it. She spreads out one of his great wings—three feet?—then the other. She runs her hand down the swan’s gray legs. No breaks—last year she saw a one-legged seagull hopping pitifully on the beach—and no dried blood. She feels along his dark, rough, orange beak to the little black basal knob. The swan’s head and long neck are resting on his breast as if he were asleep and he appears perfect. Carefully, Sadie sits down next to him. He, she thinks, but perhaps the swan is female, and a she. Impossible to tell about birds unless she was to examine the vent area, which she is not going to do. In fact, Sadie is not sure what she will do with the dead swan.

  Sadie works as a substitute teacher at the local elementary school. From one day to the next, with no preparation until she arrives at the school and is assigned her class, she can be teaching third-graders about the Lewis and Clark expedition or sixth-graders algebra or—as she did last Monday—Greek myths to fifth-graders. They had discussed all the gods—Zeus, Athena, Apollo, Aphrodite—their traditional roles and their deeds but not, as she suddenly thinks now, their misdeeds—transmogrified into a swan, Zeus the rapist.

  At least, Sadie thinks, Mason couldn’t rape anyone.

  Instead he took off all his clothes in a playground full of children. Sadie does not want to imagine the scene, but can: terrified kids, screaming parents, a rush of security guards, then police. Fortunately—if there is anything fortunate about this—Mason’s disrobing occurred in a different state and, so far, the school where Sadie substitutes has not gotten wind of the incident. Otherwise—otherwise, she might be dismissed.

  Mason was not always crazy. Sadie remembers how a few days before the incident at the playground, they went to the local pound to adopt a dog. Immediately Sadie had fallen in love with a little brindle terrier mix but Mason, in his reasonable voice, said that a dog was a big responsibility and they should think it over some more. He also said that Sadie was too impetuous, too quick to form judgments. Afterward, they had gone to the only decent restaurant in town and she, Sadie remembers, had the swordfish and Mason had the hanger steak. They also drank a bottle of wine and he made her laugh by wiggling his ears—first the right one, then the left—and promising to show her how. Later that night, Mason tried to make love.

  Ha! Sadie now thinks.

  A month ago when Mason was first jailed, Sadie had gotten up at four in the morning in order to arrive at the detention center on time for visiting hours. Although she was early, the line of visitors—most of whom were either black or Hispanic—was already long and she had to wait, standing, for over an hour outside in the cold. First her purse was searched and her bottle of Valium was confiscated and thrown into a trash bin, then she was told to remove her shoes, her jewelry—a simple gold chain and her wedding ring—which along with her purse she had to put inside a locker for safekeeping. Sadie then went through a metal detector and was body-searched by a police woman. The police woman felt her bra for wire and put her hand inside Sadie’s underpants. Finally, she was taken to a large room where several prisoners and their families were already sitting around small tables and Mason was brought in. Mason had lost a lot of weight and his hair was cut very short. He had stitches over one eye and it took a moment for Sadie to know what to say to him.

  “What happened to your eye?” she finally asked.

  Mason shrugged as he sat down across from Sadie.

  No physical contact, the guard warned her.

  “Are you OK?” Sadie continued.

  Again, Mason said nothing.

  “Can you still wiggle your ears?” Sadie said in an effort to make him smile. “I’ve been practicing just the way you said by just going through the motions in my head, thinking what it would be like to—”

  Cutting her off, Mason stood up so abruptly that he knocked over his chair and yelled, “Jesus! I don’t believe you, Sadie!”

  A guard came over. “Keep it down,” he told Mason.

  “The hell I am going to keep it down.” Mason was still yelling as he pushed past the table between him and Sadie.

  The guard grabbed Mason just in time and started to take him away.

  “You know what,” Mason shouted back at Sadie before the door shut behind him, “you’re a fucking idiot and an evil cunt.”

  In front of the bathroom mirror that night, Sadie, in vain, tried to wiggle her ears; instead she burst into tears.

  The swan’s eyes are closed and Sadie is smoothing his feathers. She has heard that swans can be very aggressive, especially if they have a nest nearby. Flapping their huge wings and hissing, they will chase away predators—human predators as well. A Japanese photographer who wanted to take a picture of a nest and came too close to it was killed by a swan. How, Sadie can’t help but wonder. Was he beaten to death by the swan’s powerful wings? And how, she wonders, was his death explained to his wife and to his children? Killer swan. However, this swan, her swan, Sadie thinks, looks peaceful.

  Secretly, Sadie was relieved that Mason could not get it up anymore, although she would of course never have told Mason or anyone else, for that matter. Before sex had been rough and unsatisfying. Scary, really, and more like Mason was some stranger she had met on one of those Internet dating sites. A really crazy person who might defecate on her or hack her to pieces.

  She wonders what swan meat tastes like. Probably a lot like goose. Sadie once ate the goose Mason shot and cooked for Thanksgiving dinner and although she remembers telling him the goose was delicious, privately, she had disliked the tough texture and gamy taste. In the olden days, only kings and queens were allowed to eat the “royal dish”—a swan stuffed with a
goose that was stuffed with a duck that in turn was stuffed with a capon that was stuffed with a guinea hen that was stuffed with a woodcock. The woodcock, Sadie imagines, would be stuffed with a blue pigeon egg.

  The other fact Sadie knows about swans—a fact almost everyone knows—is that swans are monogamous and that they mate for life. Not so, she thinks, about herself and Mason. Unless he gets clean she will leave him.

  “In a heartbeat,” she bends her head to tell the swan.

  A couple of times now, Ron Shirer, the math teacher at the school, who seems like a nice guy and is single, has asked her out for a cup of coffee and as yet she hasn’t taken him up on it.

  “I’ll go for coffee,” she says to the swan. “Maybe I’ll go for more than coffee,” she says, giving a little laugh.

  When Sadie was a young girl she took ballet. For a while she fantasized that she would become a dancer—a principal dancer in a large company like the Bolshoi or the ABT. She would be famous and she would travel. For years, too, she was a good dancer. She had the body for it and a great turnout—Alicia, her teacher with the fake Russian name, had told her so.