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Katrina and the waves
Tuesday, August 30 2005
It's bigger in its own way than 9/11, the flooding of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Being a city below sea level, this was a disaster any rational, informed person knew was coming, and so here we are. It's possible New Orleans will never be restored. How could such a grand project even be attempted? Given the extent of necessary demolitions and the presence of water that will all need to be pumped out, it will be like building a city on the ocean floor, something that doesn't make any sense at all.
By the way, for those who don't know (and this is never mentioned in any of the news articles on the subject) New Orleans wasn't always below sea level. Cities are never deliberately placed in such peril. Instead, they are built above sea level and then, over the course of hundreds of years, they gradually sink as the sediment-burdened continental shelf flows like putty out from beneath them. All deltas sink because of the sediment accumulated on top of them, and the only way they can stay above the surface is from constant deposition of new sediments, something that never happens when you build levees and restrict the reach of a river.
Given all the marginal places people have decided to build cities, and given the increasing level of world oceans and increasing severity of global-warming-driven weather, this century might be characterized by a slow city-by-city apocalypse, or, as the Chinese might say, "interesting times." Other low, sinking cities to watch out for include Amsterdam, Venice, London, and Dhaka, Bangladesh. For the time being Manhattan is safe because it sits on a glacial-scoured chunk of granite and the continental shelf there may still be slowly rebounding in the aftermath of the melting of the continental glacier some thirteen thousand years ago.
I was out on housecalls for most of the day and only picked up snatches of information about the historic disaster slowly being revealed in New Orleans.
In the world of computers, I found myself being tortured by the installation of a Hewlett Packard printer to a Macintosh running OS9. The printer claimed to work with "OS 9" but when you went to install it, it didn't just demand an absurd amount of memory, like some sort of prima dona, it also demanded "OS 9.1," which the computer wasn't running. For Christ's sake, it was just a stupid printer, placed by its manufacturer on this planet solely for its ability to burn through overpriced proprietary cartridge ink. I tried "upgrading" by replacing all the OS 9 system files with OS 9.1 versions, and that seemed to work fine until I tried to go online with AOL. The result was maddening, and I've experienced it before: AOL worked fine, but it refused to allow access to the web. There's some special AOL-related mojo in the operating system that is easy to overlook when doing a simple upgrade-by-file-copy, but I've yet to figure out what it is.
This evening Gretchen and I watched Rivers and Tides, a documentary about the environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy. People are always telling me I need to either see this movie or visit the serpentine stone wall he built down at Storm King (an hour down the Hudson River). They say my stick trails and stone walls remind them of some of his works. So I've been eager to see it.
Goldworthy is based in Scotland, a place where he became familiar with stone walls and the techniques used to create them. Since then he has branched out to just about all forms natural media in the environments that serve as his canvases. Unlike most artists, he has little concern for the long term persistence of his works, and is as happy building serpentine accents on a rock from pieces of icicles or spiral stick piles on a tidal beach as he is a stone wall likely to last hundreds of years. Like his materials, his favorite forms are organic: tight curves or spirals. Goldsworthy appears to aspire to an ideal I often articulate: the desire to make something that looks as if it might have somehow occurred naturally. But in terms of his own articulation, Goldsworthy has considerable difficulty describing his motivations and desires. Often he retreats into saying that what he imagines or what he has done are impossible to put into words and the best he can do is show us a photograph. Or other times he makes vaguely new-agey but ultimately unhelpful uses of terms like "energy."
About three quarters of the way into this movie I realized what was going on in the head of this gentle visionary soul. He lives mostly in his right brain and treats his left brain like a cluttered office best avoided. The evidence is all there: Goldsworthy's difficulty with words, his insensitivity to time, his obsession with space, and his awesome patience. Here's a guy who spends hours grinding red rocks into powder so he can make a mud ball of it and then toss it into a river to watch the bloody color flow, swirl, and vanish. Repeatedly he's shown building some gorgeous structure that is as fragile as a house of cards. Then along comes a slight wind and it is completely ruined. He's momentarily disappointed because he "didn't yet fully understand" the materials, but then he begins again in hopes of an improved understanding. For him, time is not wasted if it has been spent doing and the artifact is only part of the point. That mindset is completely alien to me, but I have to say that it works wonders for Andy Goldsworthy, who puts the likes of (say) Christo to shame.
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