The wildfire (the ‘Mendocino Complex’ fire) currently burning in Shasta County, California is the largest wildfire in recorded California history. In spite of the tireless work of roughly 14,000 courageous firefighters, authorities say that the fire will not be reasonably contained until September. In counties close to the fire, and even in neighboring states, the hot air is tinged with smoke, but the smoke has spread all the way to New York City, almost 3000 miles away.
Be careful out there. Air full of knives. Taste of summer campfires gone way way wrong. Candles gone goblin, picking up their flaming skirts and running down the forest highways, eating everything. For even when he or she remains invisible, the old hobgoblin is always with us, but sometimes quits the hob for something else.
I’ll follow you, I’ll lead you about a round,
Through bog, through bush, through brake, through brier:
Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound,
A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire;
And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn,
Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn.
Fire may change shape and direction at a moment’s notice–part of which makes fighting the huge wildfires so dangerous. Brave men and women face those ever shifting, advancing walls of flame.
Bigotry does that too. Changes shape and direction like a fire. Prejudice. The mind slipping sideways into certain ways of thinking, usually in a fearful reaction to something unknown or misunderstood. ‘Keep them out’ or ‘let’s get ’em’ is never really policy, but people still attempt to legislate NIMBY (not in my back yard) not against false entities, the false gods of corporation and political posturing, but rather against individuals according to origin, faith, or sometimes racial characteristics.
All based in fear. The kind of fear that someone might take something away. That things might change. That our little corner of the world will not remain the same. (A news flash here: our corner of the world, no matter how changeless it may seem, will never remain the same. Remember how Dickens referred to us, as “fellow passengers to the grave”. When ‘we’ are gone, our little corner of the world will be different forever, perhaps even improved by our absence.) Here’s this now often discussed Shakespeare monologue from Sir Thomas More:
You’ll put down strangers,
Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses,
And lead the majesty of law in lyam
To slip him like a hound; alas, alas, say now the King,
As he is clement if th’offender mourn,
Should so much come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you: whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error,
Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, Spain or Portugal,
Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England,
Why, you must needs be strangers, would you be pleas’d
To find a nation of such barbarous temper
That breaking out in hideous violence
Would not afford you an abode on earth.
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you, not that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts,
But charter’d unto them? What would you think
To be us’d thus? This is the strangers’ case
And this your mountainish inhumanity.
These days, we throw people out. We don’t want them. We may justify their expulsion or their poor treatment with equivocations. “We want to help these people, but we want to help them in their own countries.” A difficult argument for those fleeing violence or death–women and children, and men too, with the ravening hounds of rape and murder squads at their heels. “We don’t have room. The health/social/civil/_____ system cannot sustain them.” A strange argument in a modern world where so many of our countries are comprised of former immigrants or their descendents. Might these systems improve with an influx of new blood/new workers/new ideas/new taxes? How well do these systems support everyone in a given country now? In the United States, how well is that IHS working for you? In the United Kingdom, does it seem reasonable to assume that more people paying into HMRC would somehow fail to provide more funding for the services that people use?
Simplifications, I know, but ideas worth considering nonetheless. We live in complicated times, and like the wildfires, it can be most difficult to change the course of certain ideas once they take hold. The idea that there is not enough to go around. Well, certainly if we don’t address population, there will not be enough someday. Yet, we neglect addressing the issue of population in our own back garden because we somehow feel insulated from the rest of the world. Still, we think that by barring people from our borders that our own garden will be okay. That we and ours can remain insulated from the greater world. That failing healthcare, fires, economic fluctuation, political unrest all will avoid coming to our little town. Our little changeless corner of the world.
Difficult to remember just how connected we are. This past week, the current U.S. administration lifted the ban on the use of neonicotinoids on federal wildlife refuges. (Neonicotinoids are a type of synthetic pesticide that have been demonstrably linked to the death of bees worldwide.) Brings to mind Wallace Stevens:
It is true that the rivers went nosing like swine,
Tugging at banks, until they seemed
Bland belly-sounds in somnolent troughs,
That the air was heavy with the breath of these swine,
The breath of turgid summer, and
Heavy with thunder’s rattapallax,
That the man who erected this cabin, planted
This field, and tended it awhile,
Knew not the quirks of imagery,
That the hours of his indolent, arid days,
Grotesque with this nosing in banks,
This somnolence and rattapallax,
Seemed to suckle themselves on his arid being,
As the swine-like rivers suckled themselves
While they went seaward to the sea-mouths.
We all go seaward, of course. Still, there seems little reason to hasten that, in most cases. And I believe we will not like the world without bees.
Strangely, the smoke in the air reflects that ideological civil war in the current United States. A ‘not quite yet hot’ civil war, albeit we have already had fatalities. A slow seeping war of attrition this current American Civil War, the walking corpse of the earlier American Civil War stemming largely from the English Civil War, still haunting us. Ancient ghost from 1642. Wandering lonely as a cloud? No. Such poison does not come by ones. When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions. Poison arrives in hosts, poisoners keeping company with the poisoned and poisoning themselves.
Some people sometimes think that Shakespeare’s Othello is about race, but it is really a distillation of poison. Poisoning of the human mind. After all, what is bigotry but the product of a poisoned mind? Being racist, or behaving in prejudicial ways, is to have already succumbed to poison. More so if such behaviors are cloaked beneath a guise of religion, righteousness, or some other bit of babbled mess that eats rational thought. By the time we do that, think that, suspect that–by the time we make ‘them’ into them, we have already become them too.
By the time Othello listens to Iago–conjured brilliantly in Orson Welles’ film where Iago (Micheál Mac Liammóir, or Alfred Wilmore) is so often pictured in multiple shots as if his character is perched on Othello’s shoulder, whispering into his ear. Pestilence into his ear indeed, introducing a fatal epidemic to Othello’s mind that has been and was. In these shots, Othello and Iago become almost a single character, with their onscreen presences sometimes melding into each other so that they become a single sort of being.
Of course, many things can poison us. Jealousy and rage, but also longing and loneliness. We can twist the woven scarf to pieces, letting it fall like dead autumn leaves at our feet. Or we can scour the sky for meaning, counting cold stars and looking askance at any food. We can chase golden gods that thrum like bees across the blonding fields of dry deep summer, or we can chase the owls through wet tall grass before the dawn. Until they’re gone.
Perhaps the Buddhists are right after all. Perhaps it is all in the wanting–the attachment. Ay, there’s the rub. Attachment the force that damns us to becoming foolish fond. Funny that people think the old hobgoblin can be outlined in some scripture when it’s here with us all along. Do we then become a headless bear? Is it best to let it go? Or fight on all fronts? Perhaps we become just ‘climate crazies’, the tree hugging dirt worshippers. Perhaps we should become that if we aren’t already. Or perhaps we should just let it go?