There is something sinister about our sun. It appears sick, its wattage disconcertingly reduced, its glory redacted and smeared. It is, in its infirmity, not itself. And from its lofty perch it broadcasts a mien of exasperation that is mirrored in the faces below. We, too, are not well. Our lungs are pierced by twin maladies, our hearts unsettled by portentous events. The whole ordeal reeks of a cosmic coup.
Yesterday was Sunday, the last day of summer—school, in some strange incarnation, begins today for the city’s children—and our second on a Jovian moon. The atmosphere—experts tell us, and our noses confirm—is hazardous, and so we have submitted to house arrest. Our villain, of course, is the smoke of wildfires, a herculean dose of it, which has settled like boiling water into a bowl on top of us. It is a deluge. Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the “greate fyshe.” Perhaps tomorrow God will take pity on us.
The defiant few who venture out into it look miserable, their movements conservative and deliberate, koi at the bottom of a frigid pond. The rest of us, in our own climatized fishbowls, must elicit a similar impression—one of not only tousles and stubble, but resignation. We have made a meal of it this year, haven’t we? Still, through plague and terrorism, acts of God (or misfortune, stupidity, astrological prophecy, have your pick) and the dissolution of normalcy into an off-piste Huxleyan parody—next stop, the Church of Belial!—we do sit-ups, send flowers, make the bed. “This is not panache,” C. S. Lewis rightly observed. “It is our nature.” We are always on the threshold of Thermopolis—only of late do we seem to notice the glow.
Widespread haze (and havoc) is forecast for the rest of the week (and the Anthropocene); there will be no imminent escape from our Monstro, after all. I think of the songbirds, without air conditioning, baffled and shushed by this poisonous brown fog. I think of the gardeners who cannot find respite, even in the shade. Every leaf is still. I pray for a little wind.
And I think of Christ’s triumph on the cross, presaging ours, with the help of a sonnet by Malcolm Guite:
And now he comes to breathe beneath the pall
Of our pollutions, draw our injured air
To cleanse it and renew. His final breath
Breathes us, and bears us through the gates of death. (11-14)
Note: Please visit malcolmguite.wordpress.com for more information on the poet and his work.
Impolitic 