Thursday, June 3, 2010
I Hear The Mermaids Singing, Each To Each
Every now and then, once in a blue moon, I get the urge to, as Anne-Helene used to say, wash the floors.
I told Jessie on Monday that I thought I would be doing that on Thursday and guess what? I did.
Cleanliness is next to godliness, so they say. And for me, that's the truth.
Think about all the loveliness of a newly bathed baby. Think of the way you feel, clean and freshly toweled off, slipping into clean sheets. Think of the glory of a completely cleaned-up kitchen after a holiday meal or even just a night's supper. Think of how you feel after you swim in the ocean on a hot day and come out and towel off, as if your skin had been reborn.
Clean is just damn good.
And as I sit here smelling my clean floors I am thinking of the Gulf of Mexico and the way its clear, clean water has become fouled and polluted with the dark gushing plumes of oil and how that oil is spreading everywhere and how I don't think that in my lifetime it will ever be the way it was.
Instead of the sweet scent of salt and sun, the beach will now offer us the fumes of petroleum. Instead of the clean water which my grandfather (who lived into his nineties) always claimed was healing and who never washed off while he was on vacation at the beach because of its beneficial effects, we will have nastiness and poison.
Instead of sitting on the shore and looking out at the timeless and endless water as it rolls in and washes out, we will, if we sit on the shore at all, think of the way we have somehow ruined what we had always considered to be the boundless sea, and the mindfuck of that alone is more than I can contemplate.
Instead of the estuaries being a source of life for all living things in the sea, it will be a trap of death.
And just thinking of the impossibly clear water of the Mexican Caribbean being fouled by the oil makes me shudder.
My floors are clean but the sea is filthy.
Look: all oceans are one. If hallucinogenics taught me anything at all, it is that all is one.
My floors are connected to the earth which is connected to the oceans.
My life is connected to all life and the ocean is the mother of that life.
So is your life.
And just as my ocean is in the process of dying, so is yours. Just as my mother is dying, so is yours.
The day is coming to an end. I can take comfort in my clean floors and I do. But behind everything I do and think right now is a giant plume of crude oil, boiling and spreading out into the salt water which is the same as the water a mother's body forms around her baby when she grows it inside her body. And with that thought always with me, there is no real comfort at all.
I am sorry to keep talking about this. I know that there are people who come here from so far away they may not ever really see the effects of this befouling of my own personal ocean. But I think that although they may not ever see it, they can still feel it.
Because all is one.
And we are all connected.
I breathe in, you breathe out. I breathe out, you breathe in.
Look at our planet from space and you realize we should be called Planet Water.
If there is a miracle, it is water. And what have we done? We have shit in it and said, "Oh. Excuse me."
There is no excuse.
But for now, right now, I can go cook supper in my clean kitchen, my feet loving the feel of the clean boards beneath me.
I will take that and some day I will look back on this time before the oil got to my shore, to my water, and I will think of this time, perhaps even this day, as one of the best of my life because it happened before.
T.S. Elliott in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock said
And we will drown in the polluted waters of our own endeavor, our own human foolishness.
I do not think the mermaids will be singing for us unless it is a song of curses, unless it is a song of grief.
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I am so sad over this. I have just seen the oiled birds who are dying. It is such a sad thing. I feel as if all the work that we have done to save the oceans has just been erased.
ReplyDeleteI can't stop thinking about it either.
ReplyDeleteUgh. It sounded like, "Oh, excuse me" when the CEO of BP spoke on a PR ad/announcement I heard this morning. Just UGH! I am sorry for all of us. And, the oil flows and the water washes onshore, soon to hit Pensacola, or already did. Those are some of the most beautiful white sandy beaches in the world! And, some of the most beautiful creatures in the world that are getting destroyed--but you know that. I am still pretending it didn't really happen in the fantasy part of my mind. I just can't wrap my brain around it. I can't imagine what people near it or within close range of it, like you, are going through. It's sick.
ReplyDeleteSyd- I know your life is completely entangled and meshed with the sea. I know you get it.
ReplyDeleteSJ- Can any of us?
Nicol- I can't wrap my brain around it either. I just can not.
Take Owen to the beach soon, while you can. Take pictures of this. He should grow up knowing that he once played in the ocean.
ReplyDeleteI was reading an article, NY Times I think, on the effects on the clean up workers, and some locals from the fumes.
ReplyDeleteIt's all tragedy.
we are one, absolutely.
if there are positive things to come of the internet, then learning and knowing and becoming aware is certainly up there. I just learned that many Canadian municipalities have very little or no standards on waste water being pumped into local lakes and waterways. It blew me away. I mean. I don't think people know this. We assume .Damn.
I don't think one of those little germaphobic sanitizer using suburban kidlets at my daughter's school has any clue that say Montreal for example still allows almost raw sewage into the water systems.
breaks my heart.
It's so devastating, in so many ways. My heart breaks thinking about it.
ReplyDeleteIts a terrible tragedy. I live far far away in Australia, but everyone i know is talking about the horrifying disaster of it, from the sheer size of the spill to the terrible things it will do to the creatures and the environment.
ReplyDeleteMy thoughts are with you dear Ms Moon, and everyone in your area, and everyone in the world, because as you said, its all connected, and we all share the blame because of our collective addiction to oil.
ps...your floors look beautiful :)
There has not been a new drop of water created since the beginning of time. Nor will there ever be.
ReplyDelete(just a snippet I learned at Kennedy Space Center a few weeks ago)
It is horrifying and devastating. So, because I feel the same as you about cleanliness, I'm spending this weekend volunteering for BP. Yes, BP is supervising volunteers to clean a beach in NW Louisiana - due south of me. We will pick up trash and move organic material so the oil will not sully it, and I will wonder at our efforts and cursing BP in various languages, but I will enjoy this last glimpse of this beach before the oils come. I, like Owen, need a last picture of it.
ReplyDeleteLucy- He has been to the Atlantic and on Saturday we are taking him down to the river which meets the Gulf. And we'll take him to the island this month, I think.
ReplyDeletedeb- I know. And yet, in the end, we will all realize it all. Or at least, be aware of the results. BTW- I heard that all of that damn hand sanitizer we are using is contributing to the Dioxin in the water systems.
I KNEW that shit was going to backfire on us.
Corinne- The only true response any of us can have is broken hearts.
Donna- I hope you have no direct contact with it. I really do. And thank-you for saying that about my floors. They do feel good on my feet.
Laynie- That reality struck me at an early age. That I might be drinking the pee of Cleopatra, brushing my teeth with the tears of the Virgin.
NOLA- Bless you. Say a curse and a prayer for me.
ReplyDeleteI am clenching my jaw and teeth again. The stress and nerves are taking over, and I'm not sure how to stop them. The spill doesn't help.
ReplyDeleteSJ- Darling- are you on meds? I think we all need help if we are thinking people. This is not the world our brains are wired for. Love you.
ReplyDeleteI am so, so sad about this oil spill. When I first heard about it, I imagined it would be taken care of in a couple of days. I had no idea, and I'm shocked.
ReplyDeleteI am feeling very hopeless,as are you, Ms. Moon. To make matters worse, the same people who were saying, 7 weeks ago "it's not that big a deal, drill, baby, drill," are now saying "why did Obama let this go on for so long?" Hippocrits, all. No one who loves mother ocean can minimize this catastrophe.
ReplyDeleteWe are so fucked up
ReplyDeleteHell on earth.
ReplyDeleteBut our voices are tiny and inexhaustible, as Faulkner would say. Read his Nobel Prize speech -- when the big picture, things get hideous, I do and am comforted, strangely galvanized.
ReplyDeleteNo, even those far away share your pain....it could happen anywhere. And your place is our place too, in teh grander scheme of things.
ReplyDeleteI emailed a desperate stupid email last week to BP after seeing the webcam. I just felt so impotent annd angry...we don't get the ads from BP but you know what I think we should- they're fucking up everbody's planet after all...they should bloody say sorry to the entire world and Ive half a mind to sue them myself.
It has never affected me directly Ms Moon, but Australia has had its share of oil spills.
ReplyDeleteI looked up oil spills in Wikipedia and to my shock every single year since the early 1900's (when cars became popular) some place on our poor dear earth has been subjected to one or more oil spills of catastrophic proportions. Somehow us and most other creatures are surviving, but at what cost and what loss?
I don't have any answers, but I wish somebody did. I still drive the car around, and use all the other crap thats made from oil and it makes me sick to my stomach to think in my own way I'm adding to it all...but how can we stop?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills
ah...so sad..i can not speak about ..i told jo a while ago how it was when i helped cleaning oiled seabirds years and years ago at the north sea coast here in europe..:-(
ReplyDeletethis is all THE horror...the oil will go everywhere..has bp managed to sterilised the oceans in teh end and so start the end of the human race??..and how soon will the influence on the weather start? i mean..the oil covered water..a huge area of O2 evaporation surface is covered up..so i ms ure soon things will change..in what way we will see..:-(
Syd's comment breaks my heart. So does your post.
ReplyDeleteAs usual, I think of something Vonnegut said: "We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard ... and too damn cheap."
I love you.
I remember growing up near the beach and whenever we got hurt, my dad used to tell us to go jump in the ocean and the water would make it heal faster. He was right then, but if he was still alive today, he would be crying. My heart hurts for the poor little innocent creatures that are suffering because of us and for my grandchildren who will not be able to remember how it used to be.
ReplyDeleteThe future of our ruined planet is now, but I choose to escape the reality of it for a few minutes by catching up on reading about your birds and all. That was a nice respite. Thanks for saying all the feeling stuff so well for me.
ReplyDeleteAmen. We, the earth, the oceans, the skies are all connected. Everything and everyone. This tragedy will haunt the planet longer than any of us will live.
ReplyDeleteI want the entire going-to-space budget and personnel diverted to cleanup and restoration and then preservation and research, in perpetuity. We know less about our deep oceans than we do about the stars.
I want to see criminal prosecution of industry officers and regulators who did or didn't do the things that allowed this disaster to happen. I want the names of all the legislators who voted against regulation and safeguards to be emblazoned on a monumental sculpture of oil-soaked pelicans, read aloud every year over every airway, and shouted across the ether. Then I want to see those fat windbags personally spend the next year shoveling and degreasing and skimming, 8 hours a day every day until their characters are distilled to understand the difference between short-term profit and long-term investment and to know the place of man as caretaker not despoiler.
This is a catastrophic event. We are galvanized in grief. It is not going away.
ReplyDeleteWe must talk about it. We must do the small things at our fingertips which bring us comfort. These small things bring comfort far beyond our fingertips, because we are, truly, one.
I for one, appreciate you "bringing it up again."
I am so sad about the oil and I live in the middle of the continent. It doesn't matter where you live -- it is just despicable what is being done to the ocean and it's creatures. I really can't stand to think about it too much because it makes me ill.
ReplyDeleteYes. It hurts to my soul, and i grieve for all the creatures large and small...
ReplyDeleteAll I can think about is the trips A and I have taken along the beautiful Gulf coast of FL. It saddens me to think of those places and so many others I've not seen ruined by the oil. Such a waste!
ReplyDelete