when hell freezes over
the aesthetics of disaster
The idea was snow, an excess of it. Snow as it fell here in New York at Christmastime, snow as it covers London in Orlando, and snow as it arrives in Mexico at the end of The Hearing Trumpet, which I read because I dreamed a friend had told me to. Winter in Paris is gray and placid and a little damp, and I was relieved to come home in December to the polar vortex or the arctic blast or whatever the name is and, in the sharp chill of it, to see the same wild familiar sliver of sky unfold its merciless blue over Central Park, all sun and light. Whenever the snow comes here—now there; I’m editing this back in Paris—I feel relieved we haven’t lost it yet for good. But unlike at home, where our cold is expected and even hoped for, the snow that descends on Woolf’s London and Carrington’s Mexico announces the supernatural, with its sheer blanket unexpected extremity that kills many and transforms the living remainder in the wreckage.
I originally wavered on the meaning of extreme cold because heat and its decorations carry such strong symbolism: the hell of the religious traditions in which I was not raised, and climate change in the philosophy I was, according to which rising global temperatures carry a sort of moral valence, as harbinger or unjust penance for the human acts, organized by colony and capital, of ecological violence that are ruining our planetary balance. But Dante, if I remember him right, understood the symbolic proximity of temperature’s poles when he condemned Satan not to hellfire but to be petrified waist-down in a lake of ice. Likewise, environmental science experts insist we not be fooled by cold weather into doubting global warming, as the disequilibrium of climate systems manifests in extremes on both ends of the temperature scale. So, comforted as I am by cold weather (such as it is in my neck of the woods) as a sign that the order of things as I know it remains, its depths remain a symptom, too, of an abiding threat to this peace.
This easy proximity I’ve located between Biblical apocalypse and my lefty climate ethics troubles me, even if only as metaphor. In today’s context of the climate crisis, even (and perhaps especially) in secular discourse, natural disasters sit in a strange place, neither destiny nor chance: explicable in part by an ill in human economic and cultural systems whose symptom and wound is often displaced from its capital nucleus. If the extreme weather events associated with climate change can be read as the result of population-scale trajectories “we” collectively must change, it would be unjust to understand them in a retributive framework as punishments for individual crimes. Indeed, often those most affected by climate disasters—so the now-widespread refrain goes—are least responsible for climate change.
I understand the move to derive from explicable catastrophe a call to collective action, and the imperative for commentators to metabolize the heartache into a political project, into fuel for the next push to motivate the reform—but there’s something inane and uneasy about the floating image of the wreck that belongs to someone, and to which someone belongs. For all the theorizing, religious or political, on extremes of weather as divine or planetary vengeance for human misdeeds, there is at the root of environmental catastrophe the living tragedy which has no sense, no aim. Abject loss, fear, valiance, rescue. And the emptiness.
Evading the classical dogma of retribution and apocalypse, I’m thinking about the image, the literary one, or the visual one, of these disasters as an instrument for transforming grief into some form of action. How many of them there are, how they proliferate, what they do, or they’re meant to, what they call on us to do, or to say, or to feel amid disasters not purely attributable to chance, disasters that fit within a hermeneutic of collective social failure but who often address the “wrong” target. Two images spring to mind, out of many, that have “worked” in the way I think they were intended to on me, that is to say, have excited me into to a kind of frenzy, an almost religious fervor of sadness and shame at other people’s suffering I understood myself or my society, somehow, to have caused. Both feature fire.
In Spring of 2021, it was the photograph of Kevin Cooley’s elementary school–aged son hunched on a ledge, his small, round face aglow in the light of an iPhone, his back turned to a blaze the caption indicates is the 2020 Bobcat fire, which devours the distant black hills. I remember sitting on my then-boyfriend’s big jersey-sheet bed in his large, expensive room on the fourth floor of his coed fraternity’s house on 116th Street, reading on my laptop the Harper’s essay that features it. I don’t remember a word of the piece (Greg Jackson’s “Prayer for a Just War”) but I remember that photograph, how it reduced me to a hysteria of tears, inconsolable, inconsolable, the thought of it, the child failed, the child betrayed, what he was looking at, what he was not.
This past November, it was the blurry video of Shaban al Dalu, hooked up to an IV in a hospital bed in Gaza, consumed with flames after a bombing in the night. Students at Sciences Po had taped stills from the video printed on A4 paper on the walls of the Péniche at Saint-Guillaume, and on the metro home from class I’d watched the video on Instagram, on my iPhone in my hand, riding the rattling 3 line to Gambetta, clinging a pole. I watched it, and I watched it, and by the time I had reached my little kitchen in the vingtième I was inconsolable again at the sight of his sublime melting body in the flames, flames paid for by my tax dollars, that short life taken in some way by myself.
What am I in these stories? What use my self-indulgent tears? The second boy is dead, the first, like me, inheriting a world, as the saying goes, “in flames.” There’s that Sontag essay I like, which everybody knows about, on war photography, how its meaning is contained to the rubrics we apply to it, how if we dislike war we will dislike it more, how if we like it we will be inspired to battle, and how in the final analysis we—we, safe viewers, we marketed-to audience—are visual participants in a pain we do not, cannot, understand. The camera rolls.
At best, these photographs exist to try to do to the viewer what these images did to me, that is, to move them to a height of emotion that inspires them—and herein lies the rub—to act, or protest, or somehow otherwise address the situation that allows for what is pictured; at worst, they’ll make a buck. I’m ambivalent, as many are, about the moral status of these images, and my moral status consuming them, and the moral status of media and culture as instruments for interpreting and reinterpreting suffering into some sort of engine of productive outrage.
The novels by Carrington and Woolf pick up on, even if they indulge, the tension between a life’s mayhem and the grand scheme, between grief and hermeneutics. In Orlando, at the dawn of the protagonist’s several-century, multi-gender life, the first great strangeness comes in the form of “The Great Frost,” whose wreckage is extreme:
Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground. . . . Corpses froze and could not be drawn from the sheets. It was no uncommon sight to come upon a whole herd of swine frozen immovable upon the road. The fields were full of shepherds, ploughmen, teams of horses, and little bird-scaring boys all struck stark in the act of the moment . . . The severity of the frost was so extraordinary that a kind of petrifaction sometimes ensued (34).
In Woolf’s imagined Elizabethan England, as in the real one, the greatest pain is confined to the quarters already, to use an anachronistic term, socially and economically marginalized: countrypeople, shepherds, ploughmen. But the Court in London revels in the change, as today’s corporate oligarchs capitalize on disaster to sell techno-fixes and insurance rip-offs.
But while the country people suffered the extremity of want, and the trade in the country was at a standstill, London enjoyed a carnival of the utmost brilliancy. The Court was at Greenwich, and the new King seized the / opportunity that his coronation gave him to curry favor with the citizens. He directed that the river, which was frozen to a depth of twenty feet and more for six or seven miles on either side, should be swept, decorated and given all the semblance of a park or pleasure ground, with arbours, mazes, alleys, drinking booths, etc., at his expense (34-5).
If the Frost exacerbates inequality within the world of the novel, on the level of the narrative itself it symbolically allows for gender uneasiness in Orlando’s blue-blooded life, which in turn signifies a broader disruption in the order of social relations. It’s after the Frost that Orlando falls for “a figure, which, whether boy’s or woman’s, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled him with the highest curiosity” (37). And when their love affair concludes—leading Orlando to travel to Constantinople where he will become a woman—so, too, the Frost. Meanwhile, on the ground, “All was riot and confusion”;
what was the most awful and inspiring of terror was the sight of the human creatures who had been trapped in the night and now paced their twisting and precarious islands in the utmost agony of spirit. Whether they jumped into the flood or stayed on the ice their doom was certain. … / As they swept out to sea, some could be heard crying vainly for help, making wild promises to amend their ways, confessing their sins and vowing altars and wealth if God would hear their prayers. Others were so dazed with terror that they sat immovable and silent looking steadfastly before them (62-3).
Just as the atmospheric changes around Woolf’s deadly supernatural Frost facilitate Orlando’s liberation from the confines of his social role, in The Hearing Trumpet, a new ice age helps precipitate the escape of the nonagenarian vegetarian narrator Mariam from the vindictive convent for old ladies in which she is held. We interpret the ice age via Carmella, the friend come to rescue her, who explains, “They say if the earth tilted the snow caps at the poles would melt and the equator would form new caps of snow, being in the place where the poles were before” (154). Mariam comes to worry about the “many inhabitants of the planet” who might be killed if the earth so tilted, not unlike the country people and river-goers of Orlando’s England. The situation sparks a conversation in which the two women question the whole ordering of human society as it stands. Carmella begins:
“I feel most upset about the animals. Happily most of them have fur that grows quickly, and carnivorous animals would have plenty of human beings to eat, all those people who had not foreseen what was coming and died of exposure. It is all the fault of that dreadful atom bomb they were so proud of.”
“You mean we are entering another ice age?” I asked, feeling far from happy.
“Why not? it happened before,” said Carmella logically. I must say that I do feel it is poetic justice if all those horrible governments are frozen stark in their respective governmental palaces or parliaments. … That would be a nice change, after pushing the poor nations to all-slaughter, ever since nineteen-fourteen.
“It is impossible to understand how millions and millions of people all obey a sickly collection of gentlemen that call themselves ‘Government’! The word, I expect, frightens people. It is a form of planetary hypnosis, and very unhealthy.”
“It has been going on for years,” I said. “And it only occurred to relatively few to disobey and make what they call revolutions. If they won their revolutions, which they occasionally did, they made more governments, sometimes more cruel and stupid than the last.”
“Men are very difficult to understand,” said Carmella. “Let’s hope they all freeze to death. I am sure it would be very pleasant and healthy for human beings to have no authority whatever. They would have to think for themselves, instead of always being told what to do and think by advertisements, cinemas, policemen and parliaments” (156-7).
Whether such liberated anarchy is the result remains to be seen, even at the novel’s end. What little we do know of the New Ice Age comes from a postman called Taliessin (for the Medieval Brittonic bard), who appears in the final sequence and describes the catastrophe—the earth, indeed, has shifted on its axis—to the surviving ladies in their secluded haunt.
“Herds of wild and domestic animals galloped through the cities, uttering their different cries all at once and seeking shelter from the heaving earth. In some places fire leapt out of the earth and strange sights were seen in the sky. The surviving humans were mostly overcome by panic and shock, although some were stalwart and tried to save the many million victims still alive under the fallen cities” (178).
Meanwhile, as in Orlando, the wealthy preserve themselves:
“Under the Bank of England the deep vaults served as a refuge for different powerful people such as men of state, wealthy businessmen, generals, and of course dignitaries of the church. During the last atomic war an underground town had been constructed to shelter lives considered precious by the government. The existence of this underground city was of course held secret, to prevent it being invaded by panic-stricken masses of common people” (180).
After the New Ice Age has begun in The Hearing Trumpet, unfolding like Woolf’s Great Frost a schism between the powerful and the poor, Mariam the narrator and a ragamuffin gang of animals human, non-, and half- nevertheless take the opportunity of climatic disruption to capture the Holy Grail from the “Revengeful Father God” and return it to the “Great Mother” goddess.
In both novels, then, an upset in balance in the natural world opens a rupture in the social order that allows a heroic protagonist to disrupt structures of power instantiated, in these two examples, under the patriarchy. On the level of the narrative, this is the purpose extreme weather serves, but within the world of the texts, as in the world in which we their readers live, these disasters—however resonant for the worker of the prose as device or metonym for transgressiveness—remain for many ordinary people the cause of widespread material destruction and arbitrary death.
In The Hearing Trumpet, catastrophe’s messenger the postman’s “mission through the ages has been to carry uncensored news to the people, without consideration of either rank or status,” he tells us. Taliessin must hide to escape persecution in a cavern in Hampstead Heath with a coven of witches concealing themselves from the police because his work “has made me unpopular with the authorities all over this planet. My object is to help human beings to realize their state of slavery and exploitation by power-seeking beings” (180). For Carrington, uncensored print culture threatens power and carries the (if unrealized) potential to awaken the people to their own subjection.
In what relation does this fictional postman stand to the novelist fashioning disaster into imaginative material, or to the victims whose deaths he reports, or to the characters who find means of escape from their own constrained circumstances in the altered atmosphere? (The same question can be asked of the two photographers whose images have stuck with me.) Beyond this diorama, observing and absorbing, is myself, the reader, who in “real” life sits on the other end of “real” pictures delivered by similar actors, interpreted by similar artists, fashioned into similar stories. Here on this plane I fit them into little narratives like this one to “make meaning” of them, to fashion them as cautionary tales or metaphors for injustice or hopeful symbols of resistance—to what sort of effect? Someone, somewhere is putting the fire out, and it is not myself. In Los Angeles, where, as of today, hundreds of thousands have been displaced from their homes by wildfires, many of those fighting the flames are incarcerated people, making no more than $10.24 per day.