Hyperannotated Lear

"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drench'd our steeples, drowned the cocks!

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Smite flat the thick rotundity o' the world!

Crack nature's moulds , and germens spill at once,

That make ingrateful man!"

Hips Don't Fry

Storms don't only happen here on the earth. Jupiter's Great Red Spot, for example, is an anti-cyclonic storm (meaning it spins below the planet's equator in a counterclockwise direction) that has been raging, as far as astronomers can tell, since at least the time of Shakespeare's Tempest. It is large enough to engulf the earth three times over and yet, even with that, it is nothing compared to the storms that erupt on the sun.

Solar storms are among the most awesome events that are within the range of our concern. We see their effects mainly when their proton discharges interrupt out favorite radio programs but they are also responsible for the kalaidescopic Northern Lights. Solar storms or Coronal Mass Ejections as they are also known eject massive amounts of light matter into space and these displays have been recorded by instruments designed for this purpose:



But for all their beauty, they pose a real danger to astronauts. According to this article, if you encounter a solar flare while walking on the moon, the most vital body parts to protect are those that encase your bone marrow. And thus, if you get enough warning, in addition to your hips, you should shield (in no particular order) your "shoulders, spine, thighs, sternum and skull."

It seems weird to suggest that astronauts would be able to protect themselves and their body parts simply by crouching behind a moon unit or angling their bodies away from the radiant beams of the sun, but it makes sense in a way that this is how we would react, whether through instinct or according to NASA protocol. After all, that's what we do with earth-storms too, that is what we do. We duck, we shield ourselves with umbrellas or ponchos, we hide behind screens or doors, always crouching against the onslaught of matter that is hurling around the atmosphere, that is the atmosphere, that churns at great velocities, at killing vectors.

Daniel Paul Schreber once thought he detected in these killing, life-giving sun-beams something articulate speaking to the analogous rays that were bandying about the neural passageways of his brain exactly at the speed of thought, and he may have been right, if what he thought was being said was "shield yourself."

Here's a site for all of you earth bound readers who are interested in following these storms and who are fans of the Weather Channel:

Solar Storm Warning!

What Lies Beneath...

Here's an article from yesterday's New York Times (the Weekend Arts section) for those of you who are Discovering New York.

This paragraph struck me in particular:

We began in Tompkins Square Park, a focal point in the neighborhood’s history, which before the 1800s was soupy swampland and marshes. The East River shoreline was where Avenue C is now; everything east of that was built on progressive stages of landfill — including, amazingly, rubble from bombed London, shipped across the Atlantic after World War II to form part of the foundation for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive.

We tend to think of cityscapes as separated into grids, as mapped out onto neutral planes of land, or as encrusted onto the blank slate of the earth. We don't always see a living city as stratified, as something archaeologically interesting, and we don't always see archaeological digs as containing the histories of remote places.

When I showed this article to a friend he said that he'd always been interested in the similar plight of the tons of rubble from Ground Zero. We treat the emptiness of Ground Zero as something sacrosanct, and yet the tons of matter have seemingly dissipated without a word or a memory. It would be interesting to trace the mass migration (or forced exodus?) of rubble, any rubble, around the globe, and I wonder if we could detect any patterns the way we can with birds or humans.

And if we believe, along with Werner von Braun -- the father of the German rocket program who came to the United States right around the time that that section of the FDR drive was being built with the London rubble von Braun's rockets helped create -- that "Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation," then we might be tempted to wonder about the future transformations of all the rubble being created these days, in cities around the world...

Umbrellas Down Boerum Place

I had to cross Boerum place the other night in the wind and rain, right near where it widens as it approaches the Brooklyn Bridge. I was proud of myself because I didn't lose my umbrella. It didn't even blow inside out!

Boerum allows some freak intersection of winds that causes havoc with umbrellas. I've heard it described as a wind tunnel but it is not that. Wind tunnels channel the wind. This is like some kind of wind blender.

Most mornings when it has been raining and even a little bit windy, the broken skeletal remains of umbrellas can be seen sailing up or down the street. It looks like a rowing team trying awkwardly to play polo with their straight boats. The winds can gust so strongly and so suddenly that most people just give up trying to hold onto their umbrellas. Though I think that it's often not the force of the wind so much as the realization of a lost cause that causes this despair. It would take too much time and energy to try to restore the umbrella to its proper shape anyway, and the bodily contortions needed would be so publicly awkward that I suspect most people just "let go."

Mostly you see those 4 dollar short umbrellas with the retractable handles that won't work for long anyway; they're the first to go and they just look trashy tumbling up and down the street. But on really windy days, you can see those larger black umbrellas with the wooden handles, umbrellas with corporate logos on them, those clear umbrellas that are almost like hoods, those umbrellas with the bottle on top, even children's umbrellas that have either frog ears or cat ears on the top. Some of those boys glide.

It's probably not so bad for the young children who have lost their umbrellas (adults who frequent Boerum Place should know better anyway) since kids usually wear rain slickers in addition to the umbrellas they carry. I've always wondered why parents do that and I guess now I know. You never know what can happen and it's better to be safe than sorry. Though I also wonder if maybe that's the wrong message to send to kids. Am I going to be one of those parents? I'll probably just dress Lucy in a slicker as I implore her to "Simplify! Simplify!"

After I conquered Boerum I was feeling triumphant. I stopped in a deli to get some food and they had this empty white coleslaw bucket at the entrance where people could leave their umbrellas and there were cardboard boxes spread on the floor. I went to the back of the store to get what I needed, paid for it. But when I got to the door I saw that someone had walked off with my umbrella.

Brooklyn can do that to you.

The Eye of The Storm

In 1704, Daniel DeFoe, author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, published his first book, The Storm, a journalistic account of the Great Storm of 1703, which devastated lower England and the English Channel. It remains the largest most devastating storm ever to hit England and The Storm is a compiliation of eye-witness accounts of this meteorological anomoly. It is a book of anecdotes, fragmentary views, glimpses of an event distorted either by exaggeration or, in some cases, mitigation, since what people witnessed was never really clear to them.

DeFoe's book created for the public a large scale view, made up of detailed particulars, of an event that we now know to call a hurricane. Not that they didn't have the word "hurricane" to describe this event, or even more biblical terms such as "deluge." But it is striking the way that so many of the people Defoe gets his information from are describing an unprecedented event, not just in its scope but in its very existence. There is a letter, for example, from one man in Oxfordshire who describes what we soon recognize to be a tornado. His friend calls him to come see this great "pillar" descending from the sky. And when he gets to where his friend is he sees himself a "spout" dipping down from the heavens, like the trunk of an elephant, leaping across a field, carving a swath through woods and farms.

It is no wonder that we consistently seek in such terrible, large-scale events some larger meaning and that we arrive at that meaning by seeking out a similarly large perspective from which the event was authored; and that the wrath or will of God is the most frequent "source" of any natural disaster. Dies Irae.

The Storm was written during the rise of journalism as a profession, when broadsheets and newspapers were being distributed more frequently to greater numbers of people. Robinson Crusoe, a book often seen as the first novel, a book about one man's surviving a storm, was still 15 years in the future. It is perhaps no accident that DeFoe got his start writing a book about a storm in which the author/survivor gathered together all avaiailable empirical information and fused it together into one large perspective, giving the world a picture in words of a hurricane, something we can now in an instant see with great sharpness on any satellite image. The minute and subjective perceptions of people on the ground have their cosmological analogue in the great organized structure of a storm, whose eye passes over the earth like the gaze of God.

Francois Hartog in The Mirror of Herodotus has called for an archaeology of perception, a record of how people have seen throughout the ages. Because how you see changes what it is that you are seeing. One wonders what the residents of England in 1703 who survived the Great Storm would see in the radar image above of Katrina. Would it allow them to make sense of the turbulence that they survived and that many didn't?

The Night God of Thunder

In Book IV of The City of God, St Augustine tells of a Roman god who had fallen into obscurity. This deity was the nighttime equivalent of Jupiter or Jove, the king of the gods, and at one time, according to Augustine, Summanus (for that was this nighttime God's name) was more popular among the Romans than the now more familiar Jove. Jove was the god of daytime thunder, whereas Summanus rolled the night.

Eventually, somewhere down the years, through a process that even Augustine finds too obscure to comment on in any detail, Summanus became overshadowed by Jove, who pleased people with his daylight tricks and sunny manifestations of power and pyrotechnics by, among other things, building a "famous and conspicuous temple." Summanus was less willing to pander to the crowd, preferring the aural displays best possible at night when the other senses become all focused into this yearning ear.

The early books of The City of God are an overt attempt to prune the garden of the Roman gods, to try to whittle it down to just one, or, failing that, to condemn those he deems unworthy. For Augustine the paganism of the Romans was too prolific. It was too much, there were too many, it was too bureaucratic, there were too many names and attributes to remember, and you never quite knew (Augustine complains at one point) which god you were supposed to pray to as you walked through a door: the god of doors, the god of hinges, or the god of fair egress.

I'm actually not sure if Augustine is saying in this book that the god's name was Summanus. He says: "For, as we read in their own authors, the ancient Romans paid greater honours to I know not what Summanus, to whom they attributed nocturnal thunderbolts, than to Jupiter." "I know not what Summanus" is a locutaion I just don't follow. Augustine here seem to be piecing together the story of a God that exists by then only orally, who exists in the stories that people tell themselves and each other of the impact and severity of storms, storms that still exist in the public consciousness. There needed to be a God to manage all the storm-wrought damage and to tend to people's individual needs, and Summanus did just that; until, of course, Rome fell and the ominous signs of a decaying empire that gripped a people with a paranoia became nothing more than a passing thought...

But it's a shame that Augustine's pruning was so fervid and so complete, so monomaniacally monotheistic, though I think we can discern a hint of regret lingering through this passage. It's a shame that the god of nighttime thunder, whatever his name was or is, lost to us. Because there is nothing more fearful-divine than thunder at night, not in the distance, but right on top of you. There is something otherworldly about it.

It is, for example, a dark rolling thunder that awakes Dante from his swoon in "Canto IV" of the Inferno.

From the Longfellow translation...

Broke the deep lethargy within my head
A heavy thunder, so that I upstarted,
Like to a person who by force is wakened;
And round about I moved my rested eyes,
Uprisen erect, and steadfastly I gazed,
To recognise the place wherein I was.
True is it, that upon the verge I found me
Of the abysmal valley dolorous,
That gathers thunder of infinite ululations.
Obscure, profound it was, and nebulous,
So that by fixing on its depths my sight
Nothing whatever I discerned therein.