THE ART OF SEPARATION, or, NUMERIC MYTHS OF ASSEMBLY
ATMOSPHERE
Air cannot confine itself to one thing. Inclined to filigree, a multitude of dust and infinite particles of breath, air is difficult to substantiate through a singularity of number. Numbers are congruent and systematically arranged, the way words are by
dictionaries. Numbers are clustered by common denominators. What scintillates in dust and water drops is damp around the edges, more complicated than finger prints, and defies individuation.
COMING UNGLUED
Long Island Sound is 90 miles of waves extending the length of Connecticut. When I was five, I almost drowned in it. Going under was pure miscalculation on my part. I had been doggy paddling from shore to a rock on a sand bar, stopping mid-way to rest on the
way out and on the return trip. The sand bar had two rocks. One on its shallow end, the other, much further out. I lost the pattern, started for the wrong rock, stopped to rest, and couldn't. It is a strange thing to realize when the world falls away, nothing beneath to support standing up, and only waves above. A summer camp counselor saved my life. The moment her arms reached me through the water, I discovered what it was to be rescued, and then, to be lifted toward breath. That day, I became an anomaly. Many who start to drowned never make it back into the air alive. Decades later, now, when I swim, I know how, and I intentionally go far past the point where my feet can touch.
SEPARATION
Maybe a side effect of growing up along side water is a life-long fascination with waves. The human eye sees color waves as separate things, like the on-going yellows of street lights, the bright blue of the air. Atmosphere's quick change, separation is the optical illusion, not the singularity of a separate color. More than meets the eye, any color has to make its way through the invisible, become separated, bend its waves from the rest of light, to appear.
ATMOSPHERE
Weather is a question of heat. Like color, weather is made of the meeting of unlike things. Cold air tends to pass toward the tropics, warm air toward the north. Water is a consummate traveler; it tags along with both of them. Invisible boundaries, even hot and cold are designated by front and back. Like deferring convictions, place these unlike things together, and there will be conflict.
COMING UNGLUED
Studying this Wednesday rain, today doesn't feel like Wednesday, doesn't feel like any day, really. It feels cut away. I'm told this discombobulating of a calendar page is a symptom of a Post-Katrina Syndrome. Listening to the sound of the seagull across the
street, it could be any day I grew up along the water, hundreds of miles from here, from this edge of the Mississippi known as Memphis. A storm has disconnected the middle of me, sent it floating from New Orleans to here. Now the beginning's over, my home is a memory and who knows where I'll end up.
SEPARATION
Raindrops equalize. Raindrops bend sunlight, separate it until it scatters out its secrets. It isn't easy to fathom what is in the air. Sunlight is deceiving. It only appears to be one color. Raindrops are preoccupied with diversity. They hold a mirror to light until it lets go of convention and becomes spectrum, becomes rainbow. Rainbows bend the
rules--are always in opposition with the sun. They claim multiple ancestry, many waves moving together, and then, they display all of them. They don't care who's watching. Rainbows are reckless. Let the chips fall where they may, like the goddess named after them, Iris, they let reflection spill everything.
ATMOSPHERE
How do we measure water? The same way we search attitudes, by fathoming. At some point, waves became an instrument, a way to measure. We fathom our way through water the way we follow attitude, sounding it for depth. Filled with the distinct imprints of single-celled organisms, bodies of water are like people's attitudes, their tear drops, or their laughter; no two are the same. Now, as always, there have never been boarders for tears or barricades for laughter; nothing stops the water in them from traveling to the sky. Tears, when they travel, also carry lysozyme DNA. Air is invisible, and yet still
carries all these sequences, and a multitude of waves as well.
COMING UNGLUED
Pull water into pieces, and it goes back to invisible. The quicker vapor cools, the faster it becomes something clustered, seen, as rain or dew or fog. A new body with transplanted parts, each drop carries its own signature. To go from single to double is a big adjustment. Water readjusts all the time; all it requires is an exchange of heat.
SEPARATION
Enter the land of the molecule, and limited conclusions. In order for the molecules of an
individual color to be seen, in order for it to step out of the crowd, a water drop or a solid object must absorb all the tiny contortions to single out a color. Solid objects are about segregation. They hold a color still, stand it out from the crowd. Solid objects are like numbers, they bend colors to give them singular definitions, singular designations air
with its anatomy built from diversity will just let go. Segregation is an absurdity the sky has no time for.
ATMOSPHERE
Air can be measured. Atmosphere has identity; the quantities of drops and dust accumulated in cubic centimeters amass like family members. The closer to sea level, the more crowded the air. In New Orleans, people have long survived in this crowd, carrying the weight of the ocean on their bodies.
COMING UNGLUED
New England is land of altitude and ocean. It can be undone by ice or snow. I grew up along its edge. Not gulf but link, aligning the big body of the Atlantic back to itself, this edge was longer and wider than a channel. When I relocated to New Orleans, I went from the edge I knew all the way into the water. I came into a crowd of water, a foreign subject, with an understanding of storms--nor'easters, power outages in the winter, ice, how to layer clothes, and how to boil snow on a gas stove, because, without electricity,
there is no way water will follow pipes to the end of a faucet.
SEPARATION
The sky is prone to mixture. It is made up of many drops and more than two colors. New Orleans is prone, too. Water drops are permanent residents. They display color differently than in other parts of the south. New Orleans knows how to decorate. New Orleans' subtropical climate brings many rainy afternoons. Afternoon rains often give way to rainbows.
ATMOSPHERE
What is warmer will continue to rise, making a space for itself, spreading across the atmosphere's upper edge. Warmer air makes colder air move out of the
way. Displaced and unequal, segregation is the cause of storms. It is a classic case of instability. This disagreement between heat and cold, can be the beginning of a hurricane.
COMING UNGLUED
Once the move is made, the trouble with transplanting, is that you don't know if the transplant will take or not. There is a waiting period for the newly relocated when things adjust, a moment where the body will either embrace or reject the foreign, new
arrival. Sometimes, the transplanted becomes a biohazard in the eye of the beholder, an
unsatisfactory shift, viewed as an abscess by locals, rather than something to be held on to.
SEPARATION
A rainbows is the sky's tally sheet for all the clandestine comings and goings. We are always sharing sky with things vibrating through it. Light. A rainbow is a revelation. It unravels light like a DNA test exposes ancestry. Light is made of all colors. In order to understand blue sky, it is important to understand appearance. Large drops of water let more light through, smaller ones hold it. We normally see the world through large drops. And air is often made of drops too small to see. Small or not, there they are. These smaller drops, billions of them, bend air at about the same rate of vibration as blue. Looking at blue is like attempting to unravel ancestry using only surnames, certificates or licenses. How we picture color leaves a lot to be desired.
ATMOSPHERE
Hurricanes cannot exist without water. When there is no wind, there is no where for heat and water it carries to go but up. The higher up you go, the colder it gets. Hot and cold do not sit well together. They circle themselves into a knot, and the still air becomes a quarrel. Maybe it's the dead, carrying their convictions into the afterlife. Passing from flesh into vapor, the exhaled breath of many opinions might become a crucible, a turmoil of opposites turning round and round. Hurricanes let go the Latent Heat of Condensation, and the water it carried. The eye of any hurricane is the most heated spot of the storm.
COMING UNGLUED
At one point in history, we attempted to transplant water into the sky. The National Hurricane Center sent planes to scatter ice particles in the hopes that they would grow new eye walls, and reduce the intensity of hurricanes. The transplants were not successful. The National Hurricane Center found that there was already plenty of ice spinning around inside, no need for any more. There is so much we still do not understand about the fury of opposing convictions, or about storms.
SEPARATION
Only when colors lay side by side are they given the identity of rainbow. What if we could unbuttoned the sky's identity, the same way we sequence chromosomes?
We could sequester air's constant chemistry, cluster its stirred together particles. Then the sky would show us all the diversity that has always been there, apparent to waves, if not to our eyes. We could label what the sky has been gathering, label it like blood's
table of contents. Then we would know the identity of Texas dust from Louisiana dust, the identity of rain drops evaporated from Florida water from those evaporated in Mississippi, or water evaporated from the drops belonging to each person's tears, all these
risings going unnoticed, except for these brief times when we made time to take things apart.
ATMOSPHERE
There is a little sky inside of all of us. We are made of the stuff of storms. Air forced out a mouth moves faster, a rapid flow beyond the body. Reproaching the air with pointed fingers, exhale an angry word and create a tiny downburst. Rush out a not well-thought out plan, and watch how rapid the damage of a careless impulse. It is only by careful
inspection of pattern that the wind can be understood. Downbursts can often be mistaken for what they are not. One downburst in Wisconsin, July, 4th, 1977, was so powerful it pushed thousands of forest acres to the ground and then scattered them like matchsticks. The rapid cascade of the air inside thunderstorms can often be confused with a tornado. Both leave behind debris. One goes in all directions from a single point, the other spins things around. One of the levees in New Orleans, the 17th Street Canal, was
built on faulty interpretation. National Science Foundation investigators report an engineer misread a chart. The engineer then recommended construction of a barricade at a spot 17.5 feet below sea level, instead of the necessary 30. No one noticed, until the barricade broke at that particular spot.
COMING UNGLUED
Hurricanes transplant heat and humans to higher ground. Latitude and longitude have everything to do with transportation. On August 29, 2005, wind and water uncurved the crescent that was city, turned that particular bend of water into a scythe that unhinged
histories, unhinged a multitude of all the little things that fill out a life, unhinged them like things no longer wanted. Many a human being has been unbent by the moon, undone by a curve. Severed things, those that have been separated, can carry on for a long time, residual electrochemical activity. Birds and snakes will continue to scramble for reattachment for hours, as if somehow they could escape the loss. No longer able to
see or smell or taste, with the mouth gone, it is difficult to carry on a conversation. Lost is the piece that carries a conscience, that carries the source of thoughts, that carries conscious identity. Hearts, too, can beat long after separation. Divide a heart further, down to its smallest parts, and each cell itself will continue to vibrate a pulse. Life
has force that desires to regenerate. New Orleans is now Diaspora, tiny pieces of culture scattered across the United States. New Orleans is re-membering, struggling to adhere itself back together, to regain what the water took, and, adjust to the transplants, what is replacing the absent.
SEPARATION
Last summer, waves unpiled the levees of New Orleans. The thousands of swollen, agitated, newly visible bits of water that made the waves of Lake Pontchartrain and
the Mississippi River "ungated" levees like unwanted relatives barging in the door. The weight of so many small things surging at once over took story after story, and scattered them everywhere. Even though water has long been a city resident, there hasn't been
a place to swim. Lake Pontchartrain has been unsafe for decades. The churning curve of the Mississippi is more than risky because the cross-currants can pull a person under. Many of the public pools have not been open for years. Swimming wasn't something people learned how to do. Lakeview, Lower Nine, Gentilly, the East, many residents were like wayward scrabble pieces, and powerlessly in over their heads. It only
takes a few inches to go under. Arms that did come to rescue those who made it to the roof tops often came too late to rescue those whose feet could no longer touch. The drowned. The world fallen away and water above, they had never learned how to lift themselves as waves tumbled the dominoes of front doors and emancipated furniture, silverware, dishes. No where was safe. Never balanced to begin with, house frames
came apart like candy hearts. Some places were under 20 feet. Waves argued all the way, the act of moving and the curves themselves unhooking telephone poles, front porches, back stairs, power lines, mementos, and roots from the dirt beneath. Waves are of more than one mind. They question definition. Waves unhooked the divide that still existed in the city, a divide that has been in place since when it was still illegal for people to touch each other or sit together or share the same toilet. Waves unhooked that divide and left behind color lines of their own that crossed building after building in neighborhood after neighborhood. They scattered colors—scattered clothing from closets across the trees, scattered streets with houses pushed off their foundations, scattered people by the car load across state lines. This was not apocalypse because waves didn't lay bare. They pulled everything under instead, waves the color of brewed tea, the color of oil rainbows, the colors of all the things accumulated, a dark version of a river over running to fertilize the bank. Water has no color because it bends, or scatters, every wave
passing through it. It links all visible light, and, like visible light, only appears to be empty, a uniform clear. The water after the levees broke was full because of all the colors it collected. The water recognized mixed ancestry. Separation is not water's first tongue. Water knows many languages, slight of hand and connection among them. That next dawn, the day after the levee breaks, the edge of morning lifted itself out of the Mississippi in long red lines, lifted itself out of levee holes big enough to be birthed through. Water has a way of letting you look at the world upside down. It pictures the
opposite. Water's surface is reflection. Like the rainbows it creates, it is reflection's instrument, offering a view in waves, a view that is more than just one sided.
REASSEMBLY OF THE MASSES
Water in the sky owes its mixed ancestry to the Earth. Atmosphere transplants color, stashes their secrets like family skeletons, and those skeletons do not always rest easy. Atmosphere only seems to be an open space. Dust and water drops are common place as postage stamps. What the body releases--plot twists, like nucleotides and short tandem repeats revealing their stash of relatives--our laughter, our tear drops, our dust, all the little pieces of “us” will eventually share sky. Skin makes its own waves out of many small pieces. Chromosomes are assembled like comic strips, one sequence at a time. If we could list sky, one drop at a time, the same way we chase percentages of heritage, maybe then we could re-picture each other. Maybe the tangle of astronomy that is air would offer color a chance for reconciliation. Before categories were color coded and the colors coded into names, before forty acres and a mule, before the “three fifths” amendment, before the “one drop” rule, before Brown vs. the Board of Education, hurricanes were born, unharnessed by numbers. Single digits cannot sum them up. “Extensive,” “extreme” and “catastrophe” have no meaning when attempting to rate all that has been scattered into vapor. The loss will not be neatly parceled. Loss does not restrain itself into digits, into two or three syllable statements for damage, into names, or into the inscriptions of dictionaries. This is after, math. Multiply the lost by all of them. Multiply loss by every window, every echo of laughter, every floor board, every flood-damaged photo album (my own included,) every family heirloom, every piece of clothing, every sleepless night, every tear, every unaccounted for person. Millions have gone to a place damp around the edges, a place that I cannot reach, or a place that will be contained, by anything as common place as counting. |