I finished a painting yesterday, and was going to show it to you, but I don't have the heart for it after watching and reading about the destruction of New Orleans and the adjacent Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina. The places that are now heaps of wreckage sunk in polluted water are places that I marveled at just two years ago when I visited them on one of my road trips, in the summer of 2003. Ironically, I spent my only full day in New Orleans during a tropical storm, named "Bill," who I guess was Katrina's milder elder brother. I wandered through the streets of the French Quarter in heavy rain and blustering wind, swathed in rain gear, while tourists, hoping for sun but caught unguarded, wore what amounted to large colorful plastic trash bags printed with the name of their hotel or tour group.

I remember New Orleans, then, under heavy storm conditions, where some of the streets were already flooded and electric power was intermittent in many areas. Even so, I managed to shop, and dine in restaurants, and even draw a picture from inside a restaurant with an open side to the street, while the rain poured down. You can see how I tried to graphically convey the drenching rain with vertical pencil streaks. I remember begging the restaurant people not to close the panels that would wall off the interior space from the street, until I had finished, even though moist gusts of wind were wetting the tables. Now I wonder whether that restaurant even exists any more.

I had a "been there done that" feeling when later that year, my own neighborhood was struck by Tropical Storm Isabel, and we were without electric power for three days. Just yesterday, the outer remnants of Katrina passed over my area, dark low clouds racing quickly over the twilight earth, blustery winds agitating the late summer trees. There was lightning to the west, but no storm overhead; I heard later that there had been a tornado about thirty miles west of my location.

But any inconvenience I have experienced with tropical weather is nothing compared to the suffering of the residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast that I see on the TV news. And yet I guess it is evidence of my own insensitivity that I think less about human suffering than literary references. One of my favorite authors (at least with his early works) is the British science fiction/experimental fiction author J.G. Ballard. (I am purposely not including a link because some of my more sensitive readers may be disturbed by Ballard's language and more recent work.) During the 1960s Ballard wrote a series of "eco-disaster" science fiction novels, in which scientifically implausible but vividly described horrors are visited on our planet. His THE DROWNED WORLD, published in 1962, is set on an Earth where global warming has gone completely out of control, the temperate zones have become a tropical wasteland, the polar icecaps have all melted, and most of the world's coastal cities are under water. In 1966 he published THE WIND FROM NOWHERE, one of my favorite disaster books, in which a global hurricane of impossible speed and proportion grinds most of the civilized world into powder, while the pitiful survivors (if only short term, given the destruction of most of Earth's food-producing ability) huddle underground in subways, garages, and tunnels.

I thought of Ballard's disasters when I watched the wind from nowhere (well, not really nowhere) destroy the lush Gulf Coast. And now, the helicopters hover above the drowned world, and the salvage boats move through the waters of doom, trying to save the pitiful survivors. Ballard must be watching with great interest, as he is fascinated, even stimulated by horrific scenes like these. I am not so "experimental" (read: obsessed with destruction, mutilation, and monstrosity) as Ballard and other writers like him, so I will refrain from making any further comments and get back to the things which I can manage to do in my own little dry and orderly world. I'll show you my new painting in my next entry.

Posted at 3:47 am | link