Palisades Fire, LA, Jan 2025
We are glued to the news of California, watching the Palisades fire become two, three, four, five, six, seven. My friends live in Santa Monica, one row of houses away from the evacuation zone. Their friends just down the street have just lost everything but their cat. They tell me the rental prices in the area, already high because it's not far from the beach, skyrocketed since the fires started, and my friends are getting calls from their real estate agent who is telling them it's a good time to sell. Climate refugees are, at this moment in time, buyers, with money to burn. My bones are rattled. Can't rest. I try to draw a mental map of all the people I know in the LA area. Too many. Are they safe? Check social media for calls for help. The thing about disasters is that they're localized. You can be one house away from a fire or flood zone, and if your home is fine, it's business as usual."We hold a species monopoly over fire. With fire we claim a unique ecological niche: this is what we do that no other creature does. Our possession is so fundamental to our understanding of the world that we cannot imagine a world without fire in our hands. Or to restate that point in more evolutionary terms, we cannot imagine another creature possessing it." (Pyne)
I was reading a website created by some conspiracy theorists who posit that the climate emergency is a hoax. Isn't it just too coincidental, they said, that C02 is invisible? And the so-called melting glaciers are always where nobody lives? If they can't see it, from wherever they're standing, it's just not real. But I think that kind of thinking is common amongst non-conspiracy theory people too. Ontarians have no idea how deep Western Canada is in the climate crisis. They can't imagine this world, just next door, where people need to plan their exercise routines in the middle of the night or the dead of winter because during "fire season" it's too dangerous to breathe outside.
We scour the literary tradition for wildfires. Fire appears as a symbol, a metaphor, a backdrop, often to romance novels, where "sparks fly." There seems to be no literature that acknowledges fire season, lines on the highway, evacuations to overpriced motels, starting over with just the shirt on your back because insurance companies won't or can't pay up.
In the Illiad, Hephaestus, the god who commands fires, torches a battlefield, destroying first the piles of corpses but then the landscape, until River must speak up, asking for help.
I'm watercoloring the apocalypse, pulling disaster images off X (Twitter) and trying to do something with them. Experience mastery. This is a kind of experimenting with what art can do to save us.against the River he turned his gleaming flame. [350] Burned were the elms and the willows and the tamarisks, burned the lotus and the rushes and the galingale, that round the fair streams of the river grew abundantly; tormented were the eels and the fishes in the eddies, and in the fair streams they plunged this way and that, [355] sore distressed by the blast of Hephaestus of many wiles. Burned too was the mighty River, and he spake and addressed the god:“Hephaestus, there is none of the gods that can vie with thee, nor will I fight thee, ablaze with fire as thou art. Cease thou from strife, and as touching the Trojans, let goodly Achilles forthwith [360] drive them forth from out their city; what part have I in strife or in bearing aid?”
Sources
Homer. The Iliad with an English Translation by A.T. Murray, Ph.D. in two volumes. Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1924. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0134%3Abook%3D21%3Acard%3D324